He was in Goblet of Fire. Showed up briefly at the beginning and end of the movie, certainly easy to miss. More of a cameo appearance for David Tennant fans.

Was about to ask what one does with dual Titan Xs, but the obvious answer is whatever the hell one wants.

One of these guys walked up and gave me a handful of birdseed, prompting a flock of pigeons to come perch on my arms. I most certainly did not hand over the money they wanted for the experience I didn’t ask for and was somewhat disgusted by.

Every Chic-fil-A I’ve been to has had at least one person working there who dropped a Gucci bag out of their mouth when speaking. This company really confuses me.

Requiring at least 50GBs of free space! Yeah, Microsoft’s spyware is exactly what I want to spend my storage on.

Round abouts are showing up in US cities. Unfortunately we’re too dumb to know how to drive in a circle, so they just end up causing confusion.

Ah, I gotcha. Thanks for clearing that up for me.

So how does Steam tell their own users’ usernames apart if they’re mostly duplicates? Something smells like bullshit.

I’m thinking Crouzon Syndrome.

Tell me you only read news headlines without telling me you only read the headlines.

Flying cars seem like a great idea, but considering how shit everyone seems to be at driving in 2 dimensions I’m very nervous about the idea of giving them a 3rd.

The main point I think is that American taxes aren’t typically difficult, but rather inconvenient - by design of the tax prep companies lobbying to keep it that way.

I used CashApp’s new tax service to file this year. Federal and State were free, took all but a few minutes to complete. Being a new service, they still have filing situations that aren’t covered though - for example, the non-resident status that I mentioned above where you work and live in different states.

The actually free services are out there, they just don’t have the advertising budgets that TurboTax and H&R Block have.

The legal requirement for tax prep services like turbo tax to offer free filling is, in true capitalist style, a qualified one. All they’re really required to offer for free is the basic tax return form - Form 1040. Even with a typical W-2 job, you may have additional non-standard forms to fill out, particularly relating to healthcare coverage since here in America, of course that’s tied to your employment.

When you start getting those non-standard forms, tax prep services can start charging you to upgrade to the premium tier that handles those forms for you - your alternative being to file online what you can for free and doing the rest by hand, but being non-standard forms they of course read like stereo instructions so good luck with that.

At first it doesn’t seem that bad - you sigh and say, “Fine, it’s only $32.” But then you get to the last page and find out it’s $32 for each return filed - most Americans file at least 2, federal and state. So now it’s $64. And say you’re in my situation where you live in a city that straddles a state line - many here work in one state but live in another, so that a federal and two state returns. Now we’re up to $96. You want your returns direct deposited to your bank instead of a paper check? Another fee, because fuck trees. So by the time it’s over you’re paying over $100 in essentially convenience fees for the very companies that make tax prep miserable to do it all for you. To make you feel better about it the services will say you’re also getting stuff like audit protection and various other fluff, nothing that really costs them anything to provide.

For many Americans it’s actually pretty simple as long as they’re working with a standard W-2 (form you get from your employer with the year’s wages and taxes and stuff filled out). Many tax prep services will even import these numbers automatically and all you have to do is click through the questions and optional things like if you want to donate your returns to anything or pay estimated taxes for the next year - mostly stuff that most people aren’t concerned with anyway.

Taxes here start getting complicated when you are an independent contractor (you’re responsible for holding out taxes from your income since you don’t have an employer to do it for you) and/or have non-standard sources of income like stocks, shares, real estate holdings, etc. which the IRS may or may not have information on, thus why you need to provide the info.

Most of what has made calculating taxes and paying/getting returns a pain in the ass is tax prep companies like TurboTax lobbying to make and keep the tax filing process a confusing one, with the goal of steering you into paying for the non-free filing options.

That bird has giant feet.

I like the implication that freely expressing myself involves flames.

Yeah! I mean, if things were shit it in the past it seems silly to do anything to fix it now! Duh! 🤪

/s, obviously…

I was so happy when I was able to tell Comcast/Xfinity to suck toads after moving to an area with Google Fiber. Google may be a shit company, but I gotta admit I really love symmetrical gigabit service for $70/month.

Turns out you can download that codec pack as a torrent.