throw678937's comments

throw678937 | 9 months ago | on: IRS Direct File on GitHub

"A Fact Graph is a DAG, just like Excel." [1] A DAG won't work for everything! For example, the advance premium tax credit (i.e., the means-tested Obamacare health premium subsidy) has a circular relationship with the above-the-line deduction that self-employed people can take for healthcare costs. The IRS says you can iterate until you get stable values. [2]

[1] https://github.com/IRS-Public/direct-file/blob/main/direct-f... [2] https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-drop/rp-14-41.pdf

throw678937 | 9 months ago | on: IRS Direct File on GitHub

Even if you're pulling in 100% of your income through a W-2 job and you're sure you're not itemizing, you have to consider excluded income, above-the-line deductions, and refundable and non-refundable credits. Oh, and do you live alone or might you claim a dependent,[1] and on and on and on. People spend their whole lives on this stuff and still don't understand the half of it.

[1] https://drive.google.com/file/d/1xtyyMPczy6nuj_QR4Jy4J8sf8f3...

throw678937 | 9 months ago | on: IRS Direct File on GitHub

They probably know less than you think. (Are you selling stuff at the farmer's market for cash? Did you gift your coin collection to your grandkids?) Making everyone file reduces fraud somewhat – but whether that's worth the country's time and effort is a different story.

throw678937 | 9 months ago | on: Moody’s strips U.S. of triple-A credit rating

I give it even odds that they'll be taxing at least some Roth distributions by the time I retire.

throw678937 | 10 months ago | on: Assignment 5: Cars and Key Fobs (2021)

Used to be, you could get a seedy OBD cable off Amazon and it came with instructions on how to "acquire" the dealer software, which let you reprogram the car to accept any fob. Not sure if things have changed in the last 5 years.

throw678937 | 11 months ago | on: Here are the Attack Plans That Trump's Advisers Shared on Signal

You set your own display name on Signal. You can also set "nicknames" for each of your contacts, but they're local to your account. If a nickname is set, it overrides the display name in most places in the UI.

throw678937 | 1 year ago | on: Analysis of 2024 election results in Clark County indicates manipulation

I wouldn't know where I was supposed to draw that dotted line if it weren't already there. And I'd expect there to be less variance in vote percentages among machines that processed many votes than those that only processed a couple. But okay, that picture shows that Trump overperformed in the early vote among machines in Clark County that processed many votes (and that Harris overperformed among those that processed few.) Couldn't this effect emerge from the geographic distribution of voting locations? The points at the right of the scatterplot would tend to represent red rural precincts serving many early voters, while those on the left would represent urban areas denser with machines than they are with early voters. (And there are other considerations, such as that Trump voters may have been more likely to show up in person to early vote than to mail in votes. The vote totals by voting method would seem to show this—but, fine, they're under dispute here.)

These analysts acknowledge the "deep red areas" explanation in their pdf, but they handwave it away in an unconvincing way: they say that the same effect doesn't occur for election day voting, only the early vote. But most voting in Nevada doesn't happen on Election Day. According to the data they present, every single voting machine in Clark County processed less than 150 election-day votes, with most well under 100. That is, they'd all be well to the left of the dotted line. So even in the vote-manipulation scenario, these analysts should expect to be seeing no separation effect for the election-day vote. Its absence tells us nothing.

throw678937 | 1 year ago | on: US pauses all federal aid and grants

This is not a direct response, but as an aside, defense spending really has fallen in recent decades. It's not the War on Terror days anymore: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/MS.MIL.XPND.GD.ZS?locat...

throw678937 | 1 year ago | on: Musk Vaulted to the Top of Diablo IV. Everyone's Asking Where He Found the Time

That brings up a more literal question: Is Diablo IV pay-to-win? (Can people pay to skip grinding and speed to the top?)

throw678937 | 1 year ago | on: Olympians turn to OnlyFans to fund dreams due to 'broken' finance system (2024)

To me there's something more than just entertainment in the idea of sport, of finding the limits of the human body and will. It's almost like art—it's evidence of human flourishing and it should appear as one of the final products of a successful society.

throw678937 | 1 year ago | on: What Happens When a Whole Generation Never Grows Up?

Unfortunately this is yet another article on this subject where the author can only offer head scratching. I'd like to see some more international reporting done. We know that fertility is dropping worldwide; we've been told about "lying flat" in China and about Korea's gender wars. What about Latin America? What about Africa? Are young people giving up there, or do they feel ascendant even as they decide not to start families as often?