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Comment I suspect Intuit doesn't have to worry... (Score 1) 195

...for a long time. I say this as a long time user of Turbotax who would very much like to stop paying for tax prep. Turbotax is fairly easy to use for my tax situation and has continued to improve year over year. It's not a bad product for me. It's just really annoying having to pay extra just to figure out how much to send the government each year.

Freakonomics had an episode a few weeks ago in which they discussed the tax gap, the gap between what's owed and what's collected. IRS estimates the gap for the last decade at 16-20%, about $450 billion (with a "B") per year. (https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/the-tax-gap)

The IRS is understaffed, and despite a recent budget increase in 2019 it's still well below 2010 levels (https://www.irs.gov/statistics/irs-budget-and-workforce). They can't afford to go after the rich people who hide the most money because the rich also have the best lawyers and accountants to protect that money. So their auditors are going over lower-income filers, proverbially attempting to extract blood from stones.

While the IRS *could* divert their resources to developing tax prep software, I think it's unlikely they'll prioritize it and even if they did it will be a long time before it can catch up to Turbotax in flexibility and ease of use. Today, free file is only available if you make less than $69k.

Until some politician gets it into their head that increasing the budget to the IRS allows them to increase revenue *without* new taxes, a rule change that allows the IRS to upgrade their technology provides no assurance that they will actually do so.

I'll get ready to fork over $$ to Turbotax again this year.

Comment Re:Marriage is its own worst enemy (Score 2) 366

Marriage guarantees nothing. Avoiding marriage guarantees a (very) few things, but some of which have real value, such as never being the victim of a divorce lawyer. Some of the things marriage brings are not consequences of the marriage, but of despicable, coercive force: if you aren't married, you may not be allowed to see someone you care about who is in extremis. You may not be allowed to take care of their obligations for them if they are sick.

1) depending on the relationship, you might still wind up needing to see a lawyer. I can imagine an unmarried man in this environment having zero presumed(?) rights to his own children in the eyes of a judge. How do you split a house or other large, shared assets? A smart couple will set these things in writing before things go bad, but not everyone has the foresight.

2) Not having visitation/decision-making authority is a real problem for non-married couples and can't be overstated enough. Before gay marriage was legal, a friend of ours had emergency surgery and his boyfriend was not allowed to visit him in the hospital. So my girlfriend and I got the paperwork taken care of. It was expensive, but worth it. For anyone interested, visitation and decision-making do not have to go hand-in hand. One feature about being unmarried is that you have to specify exactly what rights your significant other should have and under what conditions. Marriage basically grants root access by default :-)

I strongly encourage anyone in a positive, long-term relationship who isn't planning on marriage to see a family lawyer and get the right paperwork in place (advanced health care directive, wills, trusts, etc). If you have any meaningful assets (house, retirement account, rainy-day fund, etc), maybe talk to an accountant about minimizing tax burden on your significant other after your death. But a little bit of paperwork and morbid thinking now will save you or your partner a lot of pain later.

Submission + - San Bernardino's district attorney claims "cyber pathogen" on shooter's iPhone. (theguardian.com) 1

Mr.Intel writes: Michael Ramos claims a ‘lying dormant cyber pathogen’ on mass killer Syed Rizwan Farook’s iPhone still poses a threat.

The questionable claim comes from Ramos’s amicus brief in the case, filed with the US District Court on Thursday afternoon. In it, Ramos supports the FBI’s argument that Apple should be compelled to build a one-use version of its operating system to load on to the seized phone – used by the mass-murderer, but still technically property of his employer, San Bernardino county – in order to weaken the security and allow the Government to brute-force the shooter’s passcode.

Ramos gives a lot of evidence to back up his argument, but one claim in particular has been raising eyebrows. Ramos said: “The iPhone is a county owned telephone that may have connected to the San Bernardino County computer network. The seized iPhone may contain evidence that can only be found on the seized phone that it was used as a weapon to introduce a lying dormant cyber pathogen that endangers San Bernardino County’s infrastructure and poses a continuing threat to the citizens of San Bernardino County”.

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