Viewing profile — motbob

I shouldn't have called the home energy thing a "deduction." It is a credit. And in 2021, some amount of charitable contributions could be claimed on top of the standard deduction.…

Looking at other countries is unproductive, since their tax laws and tax credit systems are completely different. For example, in the UK, I believe where a child is living is track…

"Something like 80%+ of tax payers could have their 1040s automatically generated by the government[.] The proposal was just to have the government send these taxpayers a summary t…

This pessimism is pretty popular, and it's just wrong. It's not about whether the U.S. government will "displace existing corporations." It's about whether a publicly funded and de…

Battleships are pretty intimidating too. Still obsolete.

Amazon is buying land piecemeal, lot by lot—probably roughly at market value, then. I don't think it's really comparable to someone buying Sears because they think Sears's land hol…

Yeah, once you get above a basic level of filter complexity, Vapoursynth/Avisynth become much easier to script. The problem is that it's hard to do the initial setup of *synth.

To be clear, there is currently no good alternative to this. The way I see it, the IRS can switch to an invasive "selfie + utility bill" system, or it can remove self-service from …

That's a great achievement. It also illustrates why these long bike races are run in stages. A multi-day race where riders can disregard stages will turn into a nightmarish competi…

Not a good analogy, for two reasons. First, workers who don't have equity in a company don't really have a gun to their head even if the existence of the company is at risk. The re…

If you look at nominal interest rates, yeah. Real interest rates haven't been particularly lower post-1980 than pre-1980. Sure, high interest rates pre-1980 built wealth passively,…

If the problem still exists, it's way less noticeable than it was in 2010.

I agree that removing public dislikes is a pretty bad idea, but it's not that important of a tool in fighting misleading videos. I mean, there was once a HUGE glut of videos with m…

True. But I think progress over the years is a better metric for whether things are in a good place, policy-wise, than "some other country does things better." So I'm not grumpy ab…

Well, if you are a simple family where everyone is biologically related and living together, then things are pretty simple in the end. The issues come up with mixed families, divor…

Maybe it's "bull pucky" to you, but I have vivid memories of my parents agonizing over taxes as a child. The agony they went through is much ameliorated now due to advances in tech…

I agree with the basic premise that the IRS is nothing to be afraid of if you make a simple mistake. Though if you make a $5,000 error (which is getting out of "simple mistake" ter…

The IRS can simplify the process, sure. And if you are living alone, have no children, and don't care about taking advantage of any special credits or deductions, then a "file for …

Fwiw, there have been instances of Google straight up not being able to restore deleted content. When you go to delete videos, you do get warnings that deletion cannot be undone. I…

The most popular subtitling software has a script/plugin to export video, which can then be used in a motion tracking program, the data from which can be fed back into the subtitli…

No, that's the median cases age.

For chunked encoding and distribution on a massive scale (Netflix/Youtube), AV1 is the clear choice today. For making encodes for personal use, HEVC/x265 is the clear choice today,…