MIT Tuition is $62k/yr (Source: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fnews.mit.edu%2F2024%2Ffina...). Going from $85k (tuition + housing + food, etc, MIT's own estimate from the same website) down to $23k is HUGE.

I think their app being a disaster for checking bandwidth is by design, it certainly helped motivate me to shell out the extra $$ for unlimited.

We could call it twitter...

I'm not much of an audiophile - what is the current latency performance and what would acceptable?

The reason I ask is that the new airpods have improved bluetooth latency, so I'm curious what the threshold is (assuming its never as good as wired, what's good enough?).

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fstephencoyle.net%2Fairpo...

...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://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.irs.gov%2Fnewsroom%2Fthe-tax-gap)

The IRS is understaffed, and despite a recent budget increase in 2019 it's still well below 2010 levels (https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.irs.gov%2Fstatistics%2Firs-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.

I'm fairly tech-savvy but I don't know how to do any of this. Can it be done with my airport extreme base station? If not, what do I need? Any links with a step-by-step set of instructions for doing this?

A great debater, even.

Perhaps a master-level debater.

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.

That would be silly. I'm going to vote for one of the worst two candidates ever just because of the other candidate's party affiliation! :-)

You must construct additional pylons.

This is the first time I've ever seen one of these forms that didn't check the "asshats" box. Asshats *always* screw things up.

Did you hear about the toddler that found his parent's encryption in the closet and encrypted himself? Did you hear about Dick Cheney "accidentally" encrypting his friend in the face?

Neither did I. That's the difference.

I took a real, proctored IQ test when I was applying to a highly selective middle/high school. I remember two of the questions specifically, one where I was read a set of directions and asked how far I wound up from the starting point, and another where I was asked to rattle off as many nouns as I could in 60 seconds. How these measure IQ, I couldn't say (but I suppose they are better than SAT-style arithmetic & vocabulary questions, which only measure how much time you've spent studying).

I also remember my mother wouldn't tell me how I did because she knew that I was not likely to be a sportsmanlike about it (good result or bad). But the score isn't relevant to this discussion of whether or not IQ tests are real. They're real and I've taken one.