I've been self-employed (and now my wife is), I have investment income, and doing taxes myself takes me maybe an hour or two, once a year. It would be silly to get outside help for that.

If I was in a truly difficult tax situation, sure. But especially Schedule D, what the heck? I imagine it's a very common form, and it's trivial to do oneself.

The paper is essentially a racist rag where old white men push the buttons of minorities. Of course the bombing was wrong, and I support the paper's right to say what I disagree with, just as I support the right of Neo-Nazis to hold parades down Peoria, Illinois. However, having the government/Google go further and give public funds towards a racist paper is a step too far.

It'd be nice to see a lot of the people who would really *like* to go be able to go... again. "Again", because the GOP has been hacking at the Pell grants for decades. When I worked for a major city community college in the early eighties as a programmer, one of my jobs was the tape exchange with the feds, part of the grant process. Therefore, I knew from direct data that better than 80% of the students were there on Pell grants.

These days, from what I read, it's a fraction of that.

We keep hearing how education is the key to a better job... but the folks who don't have it can't afford it, because all they can get are part-time jobs flipping burgers and working in big box stores (while the owners of them, the Waltons, etc, are seeing increased billions of dollars for the few of them). More people with better jobs means a bigger economy... but the GOP and the billionaires paying them are running on two rules: 1, if you're not a billionaire, you're not working hard enough, and c) he who dies with the most money wins.

                mark

This doesn't prove it at all. You shouldn't have been modified +5 Insightful. Over the course of a game, luck is very important. Like you get dealt the card you already have, or you get dealt crap.

Blackjack also has a perfect strategy, and of course blackjack has a great amount of luck.

I guess if you planned on playing an infinite amount of games, luck wouldn't be a part of Texas Hold Em. For somebody playing a finite amount, luck is key.

I consider them unAmerican, at least. And btw, when I was looking for my current house, I told my agent that if there was an HOA, I wouldn't even look at it.

Had a friend whose carriage lamp on the front of her house, which was really *cheap* aluminum, died, she had it replaced with a better one... and the HOA demanded she replace that with another cheap one. And then there was the time that someone from the HOA got her given a ticket for dogshit in her back yard (the one with the 5'+ high fence around it, and it was a bit after a snowstorm, and it was all melting. (The judge tore up the complaint).

No, they all are run by tin-plated petty dictators, with delusions of godhood. Unfuck 'em (no fucks for any of 'em).

                          mark

Like I believe the FBI, that the hackers "got sloppy". They did that good a job, *then* got sloppy? There's no chance, of course, that whoever actually did it *delberately* put those false trails in, no, no....

                mark

How 'bout a civilization that disassembles a solar system and rebuilds it into a Dyson sphere? Doesn't that count?

              mark "I won't say 'bigger than Galactus, I won't...."

To be fair, most grandparents are going to be less than 100 years old (the youngest you would be to have money on deposit before the government started backing bank deposits). Great or great-great parents is more likely (and they're likely dead). The banking system is fundamentally different, it was a stupid point.

Three points!

              mark

In addition to your own link disputing what you say, open-air burials are a part of Tibetan Buddhism, which wasn't really a part of Genghis Khan's cultural heritage (he was a Shamanist with a lot of Nestorian Christian family members). Lama Buddhism became the religion of Mongols only 400 years later. So I imagine open-air burials got adapted after they got Tibetan Buddhism but before the Commies.

Not. I'm probably old enough to be your grandfather, or at least your father, and I never heard that from my folks.

The "just work" crap is true, along with the "sealed for our lawyers' protection" attitude in the US. As an example, a few years back I picked up a cheap multimeter. Several years later, it wouldn't turn on one day. I flipped it over to find the hatch for the battery... and found "No user serviceable parts inside" embossed on the yellow plastic case, along with "DANGER: electric shock!". I pulled out a small Phillips head, opened the stupid thing up, swapped out the 9V battery, and closed it up, thereby voiding any warranty, I assume, as well as nearly getting myself electrocuted (NOT).

*Maybe* half of slashdotters would do that... but would your friends? Or would they go buy another? For that matter, how many of you do any work on your car, even just change the oil? (And yes, I've done it on the street.) Change the filters? Or do you take it to the dealer for crap like that, and massively overpay?

              mark

Because basically all the top tech firms are either based in SV or have a very large presence there? And in a industry where changing jobs and job instability is just the name of the game, having the ability to easily find other work opportunities is basically a necessity?

While we're at it, why not make your film studio in Montana? Why not open a car factory in Bora Bora?

We went to see Interstallar in IMAX a month+ ago. $60 for the three of us, and that was *just* the tickets. All of that goes for the theatre and the producers - they still pay the staff on receipts from the popcorn. Tell me why it cost as much as some live concerts.... and then, think about the 50% of the population's weekly income.

Can't *imagine* why they wouldn't want to go tot he movies.... rather, than, say, paying their rent or putting food on the table.

                  mark

Old Dilbert cartoon: http:/// dilbert.com/strips/comic/1991-06-17/
It's way cheaper than cubes, and OFFICES? The mushrooms want OFFICES?

In 1987, I was working at the Scummy Mortgage Co in Austin, TX (real name available upon request). I shared a wedge-shaped room with four others, no cube, just deskdeskdesk (other side) deskdeskdesk. Two of the folks were the sr. programmer and the systems analyst, and they were on the phones about 50% of the time. At one point, I was listening to some training tapes on a portable tape player; after a couple of days, having gotten through the tapes, I brought in some music. A day or two later, my boss walked by, and asked me if I'd finished the training. I told him I had, and that I'd brought music, to increase my productivity. He told me to take off the headphones and increase my productivity.

This is after the old VP of DP reitred. Before he did, he'd walk into the room occasionally, and stare at us. I asked another programmer, and she told me he used to do that when they'd had keypunchers, to make sure they were working, and seemed to expect us to be the same.

When I first started college, lo, these many years ago, at an orientation, one of the first things they told us was to find somewhere QUIET to do homework and studying.

It's cheap bullshit, all of it. And the managers, who mostly don't have a freakin' clue what we do, or even how to do their own jobs, want to stare at you to make sure you're working.

But us computer folks don't need a union to stop this sh*t, we'll put up with anything. As mushrooms, all they need to do is feed us bullshit, and keep us in the dark....

                  mark

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