u678u (u/u678u) - Readit News

u678u commented on Good Riddance, TurboTax. Americans Need a Real ‘Free File’ Program nytimes.com/2021/07/19/op... · Posted by u/abawany

warricksothr · 4 years ago

It absolutely is a problem of predatory companies spending money on lobbying against simpler tax code. An equal share of the blame is on the politicians accepting these “legal” bribes against the interests of their constituents.

Lobbyists were supposed to be for promoting the interests of small groups that might not have the representation among a politicians constituents to warrant paying attention to. Instead we have rampant and excessive spending by corporations that lobby to keep their monopolies over segments of the market that harm American citizens.

- https://www.nbcnews.com/business/taxes/turbotax-h-r-block-sp... - https://www.propublica.org/article/filing-taxes-could-be-fre... - https://abcnews.go.com/Business/turbotax-lobbies-lawmakers-t...

u678u · 4 years ago

> In 2016 alone, Intuit, the makers of TurboTax, spent $2 million on lobbying, ProPublica reports. H&R Block spent $3 million, some of it on the same efforts.

I'm not convinced $5m a year would make such a big impact.

u678u commented on Good Riddance, TurboTax. Americans Need a Real ‘Free File’ Program nytimes.com/2021/07/19/op... · Posted by u/abawany

rym_ · 4 years ago

In 2019 I filed my (Dutch) taxes on my phone, while I was on a bus somewhere in the north of Argentina after previously having traveled for 20 something hours. It took me about 15 minutes to check if the numbers from the government were correct (they were) and I was done. Americans are being duped by these predatory companies.

u678u · 4 years ago

Its not the predatory companies that are the problem its the US tax system. If it was possible for people to "check the numbers from the government" on an app, it would happen here too.

u678u commented on Thread Pools on the JVM gist.github.com/djspiewak... · Posted by u/ovis

u678u · 4 years ago

With Python at first I was scared of GIL being single threaded, now I'm used to it and it works great. Thousands of threads used to be normal for my old Java projects but seems crazy to me now.

u678u commented on My business might have 32 days before it's shut down by NYC [video] youtube.com/watch?v=5oDjS... · Posted by u/xbmcuser

ta1234567890 · 4 years ago

> c) You can't show up in person without an appointment.

> d) Appointments are only granted by means of contact that don't reply.

Similar thing happened to me recently with the IRS. Got a notice about them needing to verify my identity and gave me a number to call. Had been calling for months and would always get a message saying they were too busy and to try the following day. After trying a few other options to no avail, I decided to show up at my local IRS office without an appointment (which I couldn’t get anyway). They first turned me down, then told me that maybe if I waited for a few hours they might be able to see me at the end of the day, then after about 20min and them clearly not being busy, they talked to me and was able to resolve the issue within 15min.

So, even though I was told I couldn’t show up without an appointment, and they tried turning me down, just by being there they finally paid attention to me. Yes, it was uncomfortable and annoying to have to do that, but it worked.

u678u · 4 years ago

That's why I'll never use a virtual bank, I need one with branches just for that time something breaks.

u678u commented on A Twitter addict realizes she needs rehab theatlantic.com/ideas/arc... · Posted by u/DLay

u678u · 4 years ago

I've gone in a cycle through different Social Media sites, after a year or so I manage to get the strength to leave but usually end up on a different site.

One thing is I always delete my account after 3-6 months and create a new one, following different people/groups etc.

u678u commented on European Citizen's Initiative for UBI eci-ubi.eu/... · Posted by u/nemexis

u678u · 4 years ago

How does that work across the EU though? Eastern Europe has minimum wages of just a few EUR/hr.

u678u commented on Python Best Practices for a New Project in 2021 mitelman.engineering/blog... · Posted by u/jedwhite

zo1 · 4 years ago

Yeah, now all the "hip" devs are driving things towards "poetry".

It's very disillusioning to see how sheer twitter-followings and "popularity" type metrics drive development these days by forcing alternatives to be de-facto neglected. Everyone does what's "hot", so all the tutorials and bug reports and tests and SO questions and new libraries and and and all go towards that framework or language or tool or method. You can't even argue technical merits towards the neglected options because yes the popular tool is better, but only because we have a metric boat load (millions) of man-hours being pumped into making it better instead of all the alternatives. It's like the tech-equivalent of fashion fads in that it's self-reinforcing. Not to take away from some of the actual and technical achievements that some of these things have made, of course.

u678u · 4 years ago

You should see our k8s migration, its the biggest waste of time for everyone I've ever seen.

u678u commented on Python Best Practices for a New Project in 2021 mitelman.engineering/blog... · Posted by u/jedwhite

kuu · 4 years ago

I'm a bit surprised that conda is not mentioned anywhere (I'm not saying as best practice, but as an alternative or why envs are better)

u678u · 4 years ago

conda was necessarily 5 years ago but now pip seems a lot more reliable so I've given up using it.

u678u commented on Python Best Practices for a New Project in 2021 mitelman.engineering/blog... · Posted by u/jedwhite

Dunedan · 4 years ago

The headline is pretty misleading, as the mentioned "best practices" are highly opinionated, as the author also states:

> This is my very opinionated attempt to compile some of the best practices on setting up a new Python environment for local development.

u678u · 4 years ago

This is how the internet works now. If you ask a question its rare to get a good answer. If you post a faulty opinion as advice you're more likely get a good answer.

u678u commented on Bay Area cities want to end single-family home zoning sfchronicle.com/bayarea/a... · Posted by u/g8oz

Baeocystin · 4 years ago

They go in to further detail about that on https://missingmiddlehousing.com/about/how-to-enable .

u678u · 4 years ago

Interesting. It doesn't say they're illegal, it says they're illegal in Single Family suburbs. Its like they want the benefits of low density housing but somehow not do low density housing.