Gotta catch 'em all!

Well, maybe not all, every trainer knows you can't catch humans. Why bother trying?

I'm gonna go out on a limb here and assert that actual expats know more about the process than the average US-only citizen.

But if you'd prefer, here's WaPo saying the same damned thing. Happy?

Yep, we 100% agree that's how to report realized gains or losses. Now name another capital asset (HUD forms and excise tax notwithstanding, obviously) that you're taxed on receipt rather than just on disposition.

I have no idea how that's even supposed to work, and I'm seriously trying to stay legal (a few grand a year isn't worth prison time). Neither Schedule D nor 8949 make a lick of sense unless you have a value for the "Proceeds" column - Which you don't have unless you've sold something. And sure, go ahead and put a huge unsubstantiated number on your schedule 1 line 8 and see how well that goes for you.

Pretty much the only way I've figured out to comply with that ridiculous requirement is to make a semi-fake wash "sale" of each new year's new mining payouts every December 31st - Which itself is a grey area but since it would always be a gain, never a loss, it's technically kosher; so at least if I get a CP2501 or similar I'll have paid "enough" taxes already and any penalties would be $0.

The IRS is, bluntly, trying to play both sides of the fence on this one. They're treating crypto as money on receipt, and as property on disposition. And have given us no reasonable way to reconcile that discrepancy.

That's not possible to do at the moment.

And it was fairly difficult even before the pandemic. It's like getting divorced from the judge overseeing the divorce itself, and goes down pretty much exactly the way you'd expect.

Taxes on what, exactly?

As the haters are so quick to point out, crypto isn't money. Until an exchange occurs between crypto and fiat (or something meaningfully measurable in fiat), Uncle Sam has absolutely no say in the matter.

Or to put that another way, taxing bitcoin is the single most legitimizing action the government could take as regards crypto. And if crypto is legit, fiat... Isn't.

And yes, for the record I fully realize we technically owe taxes even on bartered goods and services. Unless you're eBay, though, the way the IRS measures that simply doesn't work. If I buy a car with bitcoin, sure, FMV is easy. If I exchange two thinly-traded altcoins... It's a complete farce to say that either side should pay taxes, and even the IRS can't tell you how to measure the FMV of that transaction (go ahead, call their help line - I did in 2019, and the response was crickets).

You're missing the point, but so is the SEC.

My company recently switched from using totally unlogged Skype to fully logged Teams. Take a wild guess what percent of casual conversations between coworkers now occur via secure 3rd party channels that HR (or PHBs) can't intimidate IT into turning over. I'll give you a hint - I don't even know if my Teams client is still working since we got 21H2.

The problem here isn't a technical or legal problem, it's a human one. Until someone can guarantee me that my chat transcripts can't be touched without my knowledge and a court order... Sorry, but the likelihood of getting caught using my own personal phone to chat with coworkers doing the same is simply much, much lower than the likelihood of having HR use those exact transcripts to go fishing during the next "right-sizing".

Is there a streaming service out there like YouTubeTV, circa 2-3 years ago?

Love the service, and it used to be $35 a month. It had everything I wanted, including all the locals.

Then they decided to jack up the price to $50 and add a bunch of stupid channels I don't care about. Then they went ahead and hiked it up to $65 and added even more marginal channels I don't care about.

Hey, I get it, not everyone has my taste in channels. Feel free to add higher tiers at higher prices, and throw in the dumb NFL channel. Knock yourself out. But instead, they've chosen to become The Cable Company II

Look, the whole point of WSL2 is to let people run a fully-functional Linux environment without mucking around with VM systems or dual-booting. If you're going to set up VMware, just create a virtual machine and install Linux on that. You are not the target audience.

They were so close to naming it the Fuselage Upright Build Automated Robot...

I think you missed the meaning of the GP.

You can turn them off. Completely. It's really that simple.

There are exactly zero websites I want to be able to "push" content to me. I thought we had gotten over that entire model when broadcast TV died? Why are we now revisiting a battle we won, in a medium that's essentially "pull" from the ground up?

A few people have answered this from the employees' perspective, but there's a much more obvious answer...

My projects at work are almost always multi-week, sometimes even taking the better part of a year. Just getting familiar with the systems my employer uses took me over a year, and that's already having been completely competent in the base platform and proficient at the tools and languages involved in doing the actual work.

The "gig" economy is great for situations where "probably" is good enough and the work is low-to-no-skill. If one Uber driver doesn't show up, it just means you wait two extra minutes for the next one. If one day-laborer is sick today, there's 20 others to pick from in the Home Depot parking lot. And even then, that doesn't always work - If the ship or railcar doesn't get unloaded, you're paying demurrage. If the checkout lines aren't adequately staffed, people start abandoning full carts and walking out.

Not everything can be a "gig". If an employer needs either highly skilled labor, or a guaranteed minimum number of bodies present - Not a gig.

Leaving aside the argument about the credit monitoring services themselves for a moment..

Freeze your credit record, if you haven't already. I did this years ago and it works really well. You give them a 6 digit PIN and without that PIN it's impossible to get so much as a cell phone much less open a line of credit. When you want to refi your home or some such, you just thaw it for a 10 day period and it re-freezes automatically.

"I shouldn't have to do that" is not going to much comfort if someone steals your identity.

Blah blah blah ..Good idea!,, blah blah ..Bad Idea!.. blah blah...

Could someone just post a link where I can sign up to get $1,000 a month?

I already make good money, but an extra grand would certainly help.

I've had no problem spending BTC. Just buy from abroad and have it imported (and as long as they call it a "promotional" item - They all do - it doesn't even cost you any more anyway).

All the responses to you so far have bragged about Androids... And make no mistake, I use both Android and iOS and am by *no* stretch of the imagination an Apple fanboy...

But...

I have owned my current iPhone for roughly 3 years. And in that time, I have rebooted it exactly once, for an OS upgrade. I force-shut it down one other time only because I was in the middle of nowhere, basically lost, and wanted to save the last 5% of battery for a 911 call if it became necessary.

Put bluntly, it has never crashed. Ever. Period.