Turbotax offers free service to low-to-moderate income people as part of an agreement it has made with the IRS. In return for this, the IRS doesn't provide free electronic tax preparation services like most other advanced countries do. For most consumers, the IRS could in fact automatically fill out their returns and the consumer could simply check it by answering a few simple questions rather than puzzling over instructions written for professional accountants.

If you've always wondered why filing your taxes couldn't be simpler, a bit part of this is marketing from companies like Intuit that make a lot of money out of simplifying the process for taxpayers.

The free tier service is something Intuit is contractually obligated to provide. Upselling low-income people to a paid service that wouldn't benefit them in any way is morally dubious at best.

I'd make it more like Asian karaoke rooms. Give me a setup I can't afford at home, but not nearly the cost of a full theatre setup. Like a screen that's 32:9 superwide. Studio monitor speakers setup for surround. Have lots of rooms on hand that can accomidate 4-6 people, and fewer rooms for larger parties. To prevent shennanigans, all rooms have CCTV cameras. Give me a touch screen to order food or whatever. Flat price per 2 hour block, watch whatever I want. New stuff, old stuff, etc. Take it a bit beyond movies though. Earlier I said model it after karaoke rooms, so add karaoke. Add video games. It's been a long time since I've been to the theatre and seen it packed to the point people were sitting on the steps (Jurrasic Park comes to mind) but those days are over. People can get a passable quality at home, without all the annoyance. So cater to that, cater to the fact that people no longer want to be in a huge auditorium with strangers doing strange things.

He mentions why it looks old on the home page, point number 12.

Remembering that in the business world, "unsupported" can translate to "legally liable" in the event something goes seriously wrong.

I have a houseful of PCs, but only one will officially run Win11 -- a low-powered netbook that ironically is the least competent hardware I own (its horsepower is on par with my laptop from 2003). I'll give it this -- Win11 does a good job of downshifting to match the environment it finds itself in; Win10 would struggle on that netbook.

Which desktops did you try, and what issues blew it for you?

I had a hard time finding a linux I could live with, and I first started looking over 25 years ago. It's only been about six years now since it's become sufficiently stable and complete. And implementations vary wildly. I prefer the KDE desktop as being the most functional (and least annoying), but KDE on Kubuntu is not nearly as slick as KDE on PCLinuxOS.

But at the far end, IMO current Gnome makes Win10 look stellar.... good gods, who thought a cellphone makes a good desktop??

Yes, that's not surprising that there's nuance that does beyond the headline. There always is.

At least you can get unaffordable insurance. State Farm is dropping people here in the SF Bay area and refusing to renew in many zip codes. https://www.sfchronicle.com/pr...

It's more than just taxes and regulations. Quality of life for employees. Being able to actually afford a house. I just peeked on Zillow, the neighborhood Apple is going into has 1.6 to 2million dollar homes, but within biking distance are plenty of 900k and under homes. By comparison the 1960's cookie cutter house I live in is about 12 miles to the spaceship, and is worth 1.7m. It takes over an hour to traverse that distance by car during commute hours. In order for a company to function you need all levels of housing, not just for the high salaried engineers and C level staff, but for your cooks and cleaners too. I hope other FAANG companies start following suit and spread the wealth around.

I'm curious, why have the Mac Mini at all? You can plug the laptop into a dock and use the same monitor and keyboard, then take it with you.

Ironically, it's is more of an argument for them. They were not saying there would be no more updates, be them major or minor to windows, but rather than they wouldn't have "numbers" and transition into more of an OS as a service model.

The market doesn't like the sound of that. That's fine, but it's not like if Microsoft stopped numbering their releases they wouldn't be doing the exact same thing: sunsetting older versions of windows and pushing users towards newer supported versions.

I know some people think they should be able to "buy" an OS and stay on it forever, but the internet has rendered that largely impossible. If you want to air-gap your PC and stay on whatever version of Windows you want, go for it, but as soon as you're connected to the internet, they're doing the right thing trying to push people off of codebases that no longer support an economic case for security updates.

You want a pre-WW2 suburb.

I was visiting Oxford UK on business and I stayed at a colleague's house which dated from the1800s. I was shocked that the front door of her house was right at the sidewalk, you could look right into her front room. But it turned out that by giving up privacy in that front room, she got an enormous and very private back yard. The arrangement was something like this. That's just a street in the area I randomly picked off of Google Maps satellite view, but I checked it for walkability: it's less than one minute's walk from the local boozer, and on the way back you can get a takeaway curry.

I'll quote from the Wikipedia Article: "In urban planning, walkability is the accessibility of amenities by foot." It is important to contrast this with the practices it was intended to counter (again from the same article): "... urban spaces should be more than just transport corridors designed for maximum vehicle throughput."

Transit is an integral part of walkable planning simply because it gets people *into* neighborhoods so they can do things on foot. But cars are a way to get people into an area too, so cars can and should be part of *walkability* planning. For example there's a main street area near me with maybe 50-70 stores. When I visit I contribute to congestion by driving around looking for a parking spot. A carefully placed parking lot could reduce car congestion on the street while increasing foot traffic and boosting both business and town tax revenues.

I'm an anglophone. I lived in Quebec for 8 years. I work for a company that is headquartered there. I go there all the time.

This is nothing like what Quebec is doing. Don't be a fucking moron.