jmharvey

CPAs aren't cheap, and most people's tax situations really aren't that complicated. Even for high earners with lots of investments, it mostly comes down to collecting a bunch of forms and either doing manual data entry or sending the forms to the CPA to do a bunch of data entry. It's not particularly clear that the CPA's work will be more accurate.

In a situation where there's some complex tax issue, absolutely, go with the professional, but for most people, the CPA is mainly there to provide peace of mind.

Also, if you make a good faith effort to pay your taxes correctly, the potential legal trouble for getting it wrong is pretty minimal. You'll need to pay the correct amount plus interest and penalties, but "interest and penalties" are pretty light (effectively 14% simple interest on the amount of the underpayment). And since the IRS doesn't usually take more than a couple of months to say, "hey, you screwed up," interest and penalties usually add up to like 3% of your underpayment.

I've used TurboTax, H&R Block, and TaxAct software in the past, before switching to freetaxusa a few years ago. The major difference is that Freetaxusa isn't constantly trying to upsell you into different products, or starting you out on a "free" tier and then 80% of the way through saying actually, you need the paid version, or you need to pay extra to efile, or something like that.

Free Federal, $15 state, that's it.

There's a similar mechanism for most horse races in the US, though instead of it being just the winner's entry, all of the horses in the race are offered for sale at a certain "claiming" price just before the race starts.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claiming_race

I'm a fan of the workflow where the PR gets squashed in the upstream git repo, but the individual commits are preserved in the PR in the code review tool. I feel that Phabricator handles this well.

The DA treats anything less than automobile burglary as not worth their time. The way the law is written, smashing the window of a car and taking the contents is simple vandalism and theft (not as serious as burglary) unless there's evidence the car is locked.

If the car owner testifies at trial that the car was locked, then that's evidence. But ~no one visiting SF is going to come to town to testify at a trial, especially when trial dates can move around somewhat unpredictably. So a criminal can operate with relative impunity if they only ever break into tourist cars.

So, how do they identify tourists? Apparently they look for wheels that aren't curbed properly. Curbing your wheels is one of those things most people learn for their driver's test and never think about again, but if you live in a place where you're frequently parallel parking on steep hills, it becomes second nature. (Also, it's one of the few things SFMTA will issue a parking ticket for.) So thieves target cars that are parked on a hill but don't have their wheels curbed.

I'm guessing you curb your wheels, and your friend doesn't.

It's not like that at all. The sunglasses aren't that expensive.

It depends on what you're trying to optimize for, and how much you're trying to optimize it.

If what you're concerned about is maximizing the odds of getting a jackpot, all you need to do is pick 27 different numbers. Say, 1-2-3-4-5-6 through 1-2-3-4-5-32.

If what you're concerned about is maximizing the odds of getting a jackpot that you don't need to share with anyone else, you shouldn't play any numbers that you think anyone else is likely to play, such as the numbers in this paper, six numbers that form a straght line on the play slip (vertical, horizontal, or diagonal), any six consecutive numbers, the winning numbers from any recent drawing[1], or famous lottery numbers like 4-8-15-16-23-42 (the mystical numbers from the TV show "Lost.")

If what you're concerned about is guaranteeing a small win of some kind, then use some rotation of the numbers in this paper.

If what you're concerned about is minimizing the variance in the outcomes you achieve, then you'll want a more complicated formula for picking tickets, taking into account the values of the prizes for matching 2, 3, 4, 5, or 6 winning numbers. And if you're specifically looking for a set of tickets that's robust to operational interruptions in your ticket purchasing (what happens if the lottery system goes offline when you've bought ten of your 27 tickets, and you can't buy the last 17!?)[2].

But if one of the things you care about is the fully-loaded cost of buying 27 tickets, you'll almost certainly want to buy 27 random tickets, because picking specific numbers takes mental and physical effort, and 27 random tickets are unlikely to have enough overlap that it will have a significant impact on your likelihood of winning a large prize. The main downside of buying 27 random tickets is that it makes checking whether you won take more effort than if you already had your list of numbers.

And on that note, if what you care about is the fully-loaded cost of buying and redeeming your tickets, one of the best things you can do is the opposite of what this paper is about: you want to MINIMIZE the likelihood of winning a prize. Going to the store to cash a ticket takes effort, but it isn't much more effort to claim 27 prizes vs one single prize. So if you have a choice between a 1-in-27 chance of collecting 27 $2 prizes vs a 100% chance of collecting one $2 prize, you're better off with the former, simply because you can probably avoid an extra trip to the store.

[1] Unless you think there's a problem with the RNG system. IIRC about 15 years ago there was a state that drew the same lottery numbers 3 days in a row because they introduced a new computer PRNG and part of their runbook introduced the same seed for every draw; after the third consecutive draw they fixed the issue.

[2] I've had this happen to me, though the problem was that my bank froze my account partway through buying tickets, and I was buying a lot more than 27 tickets. The most famous/infamous lottery syndicate in modern history, a group from Australia that tried to buy every combination in the Virginia lottery in the early 1990s, also ran into logistical issues and was unable to finish buying their complete set of tickets, but they got lucky and hit the jackpot anyway.

Afaik (and I watch this fairly closely) there hasn't been a study. There are a lot of anecdotes, typically of the form "a person won a few million but spent like they had an income of a few million per year," sometimes of the form "a person won a huge amount of money but it turns out money doesn't solve all problems," and sometimes of the form "a person won a huge amount of money and invested it poorly." But most people who win a big lottery are still rich a decade or two later.

One thing I appreciated about Anchor was that, unlike most California breweries, it didn't focus on highly-hopped, high ABV beers. I'll miss it.

As I recall, back in the day (90s) my family subscribed to a regional daily paper, a local weekly paper, National Geographic, Newsweek, Sports Illustrated, Reader's Digest, Smithsonian magazine, various kids magazines depending on age (e.g. Highlights, Boys Life, etc), MIT Technology Review, and a few industry-specific publications.

In addition to that, we'd frequently stop by a newsstand or bookstore to pick up other periodicals if there was an article we were interested in, or if we had extra time to read that week.

The idea of halcyon days when all you needed was a single subscription is a myth. If you wanted regional news plus some pool reports from Washington, Wall Street, and somewhere in Europe, then sure, a single subscription would do. But if you liked to read several different news sources, you paid for several different news sources.

$100+ monthly phone bills often include the cost of the device, not just the service.

Watts are a rate. Joules per second.

The extra B is for BYOBB.

It sounds both somewhat difficult (the typical galaga player doesn't exactly aim carefully) and extremely tedious, both for players and for spectators. It reminds me a bit of the (possibly apocryphal) story that casinos promote tales of card counters cleaning up because the average attempted card counter doesn't know what he's doing, and will gamble more (and lose more) than someone who knows he's playing a game where the odds are against him.

If anything, Buffett/Munger proves the rule: on the org chart, there's no question that Munger reports to Buffett. In practice Buffett isn't trying to call shots day to day, so Munger is functionally in charge of the org, and when he succeeds to the Chairman & CEO title, nothing will really change, but the fact that he's not fighting for a Co-CEO title is a positive sign.

Another common geographic mental misplacement is the degree to which the east coast of the United States runs northeast/southwest. The closest US state to Africa is Maine.

Somewhat counterintuitively, the billion-dollar jackpot lotteries' expected values often shrink as the jackpots grow, because the media circus pulls in a lot of players and increase the likelihood of a split jackpot.

It's not that uncommon for a smaller lottery to have a positive expected value. I think the logistics of buying every combination in a pick-6 lottery (on the order of 10 million combinations) would be rather unwieldy, but a pick-5 (on the order of a few hundred thousand combos) could be doable with a small team.

I've bought the number 1,2,3,4,5,6 on numerous occasions, but my lottery play isn't really representative of the typical player.

A few years back, the Quebec Lottery published its most frequently played numbers. It seems the original press release has been lost to the sands of time, but IIRC 1,2,3,4,5,6; 1,7,13,19,25,31; and 4,8,15,16,23,42 were the most common sequences (corresponding to the top row of the play slip, the first column of the play slip, and the mystical numbers from the TV show Lost, respectively).

Oh, and if you're interested in digging more, in my experience, the Texas lottery is quite forthcoming with their open records; you could probably find out what's popular in 2022.

In my experience, the mom and pop outfits usually have a reasonably modern system from verifone/square/etc that accepts tap to pay; it's the giant behemoths (e.g. USPS or Lowe's) where I'm more likely to encounter antiquated payment tech.

> Our stronger engineers work much more efficiently at home

That depends on how you measure efficiency. On many teams, the strongest engineers maximize their impact by helping other people.

0.0008%

A banana's mass is on the order of 100g, so it's 20x as radioactive in terms of mBq/g, not 2000x

Out of curiosity, when was that? The last time I was in a place with 25c beers, I was watching the 2001 Daytona 500.

This reminds me of a startup CFO I worked with, who could see the big picture. In the early days of the company, they worked in an office that shared a bathroom with a half dozen other companies. And the toilet paper in said bathroom was terrible. Like, not just standard-office-building terrible. Really, really bad. So CFO takes it upon himself to rectify the situation. He orders a couple dozen rolls of standard-issue "premium" office toilet paper (still not that great relative to home-use TP, but good by office standards) and leaves it in the bathroom. Two days later, it's gone: someone (not clear whether it was someone at the startup or one of the neighboring companies) decided to take it home with them. Everyone in the office starts grumbling about the state of the TP situation again.

Not to be outdone, CFO places another order; several cases this time. And it takes a few more days, but sure enough, it all disappears.

At this point, CFO is fed up. He orders two full pallets of TP. After lunch one day, several volunteers unload the toilet paper. Multiple stacks, floor to ceiling, in the bathroom. More stacks in the supply closet. Stacks in the hallway. Stacks in the lobby. Everywhere you look, there's toilet paper. And if people were stealing TP after that, it wasn't at a rate that anyone could notice.

Including the ongoing costs for the subsequent 18 months until they moved out of that building, the "unlimited TP" policy might have cost the company $10k. But it bought a lot more than that in terms of employee goodwill. Knowing that the bean counters are focusing on "our employees are producing a product worth $x; let's figure out how to have them do more of that" makes a big difference.

Are there recruiters out there who pitch based on hours and money? Every pitch I get is all about the vision/team/prospects for success. And, yes, "prospects for success" in some ways means "money" but they're never so explicit about it.

> First this is just inherently wrong. You’ve been able to call and schedule a cab, even in the burbs, since before the internet was a thing.

And maybe the driver would show up on time, or maybe they'd see a street hail en route to picking you up and decide to make you wait an extra 40 minutes. Uber drivers cancel, too, of course, but "automatically fall back to a different driver after a cancellation" is a meaningfully different experience.

ESPN+ doesn't include most ESPN/ESPN2 programming. There are other "non-cable" packages that do include that programming, but they have a price point that resembles cable.

Earlier today I mentioned to my first grader that when I was a kid we didn't have an ice maker in our freezer, and we just used ice cube trays, instead. He sat there for a minute, stumped, and finally asked, "so what made the freezer cold?"

It took me a minute to figure out what he meant, but finally I realized that he thought the way our freezer worked was that we had a machine that made ice, and the freezer was cold because it was full of ice. It's really easy to reverse cause and effect when you can't see what's happening.

Yes, this is inflation adjusted.

> The average price of American homes, in real terms, is now the highest it's ever been

No. The first paragraph of the article states that these are inflation-adjusted prices.

> The average price of American homes, in real terms, is now the highest it's ever been