Now having used Windows at work for three years, I begrudgingly concede that NTFS is actually fairly competent for a last-gen file system. Windows Explorer’s UI on top of it is horrible, lacking proper symlink support, completely falling over on certain file names (create “COM1” and watch it suffer), struggling with even modestly large directories. But that’s not NTFS. NTFS does all of these things relatively well. That’s just Explorer.
Of course then there’s the global file system lock on Windows, and the horrible sluggishness when dealing with small files. These might be NTFS, I’m not sure.
Hm, I also use rsync for backup, but I cannot find any option --no-delete (I am using Linux Mint). Rsync by default does not delete unless you add an option, like e.g. --delete. And on my system, the update of changed files seems to work, also without the deletion of missing files.
Is it different on Mac?
So I was on a trip today, on a parking lot, getting ready to go home. There was a kitten walking around and about, very cute and playful looking. First, she walked in circles around me about 1m away. Then it was 0.5m… then she came close, did a belly flop and let me pet her… She did NOT want the petting to end. Then she invited herself into the car. As cute as she was, the adoption offer had to be declined.
I was just at a neighborhood food distribution thing, and there was a small white kitten around being friendly with everyone. One of the volunteers eventually relented and took him home. So the cat distribution system is 1-1 today!
So I read a text on my grocery bag the other day and it says something along the lines of “I will carry your next purchase too!”
Uhh… huh? Are there people getting new bags for each time they go shopping or what? Like what did inspire this text… I use mine till they almost fall apart and are no longer worth being patched with tape.
Oh yeah, there were some super thin bags back in the day, any heavier load would stretch them beyond use. Nowadays they’re mostly long gone and the current normal bags last me like 6+ months. The heavy duty ones are near indestructible
I spent the last two days doing our taxes. Half a day scanning and labeling the last year’s worth of paper to PDFs. Then another half day sorting through it all, and assembling everything into the appropriate forms in my tax program. Like every year, it was painful.
How do taxes work where you live? Here in Germany, it’s a huge bureaucratic mess, and always takes me at least a full day. Granted, my family’s tax setup is somewhat unusually complex. But still.
Taxes are a pain to prepare here, too. Here’s what I really hate: We spend hours proving all of our potential tax deductions. Then our accountant dutifully enters everything to the appropriate forms, pretty much charging us by the form. Then, when all is said and done, it works out better to take the standard deduction, and he does so. All of the forms and 95% of the stuff we gathered were just exercises that made no difference in the end.
That sounds like a lot of work. In Portugal you access the web page and everything is already filled in, since all receipts (when you provide your tax id at the shop) are automatically attributed to you and put on the correct category. If you forget to give your id when you pay your item, groceries, food, etc, the receipt comes with a QR code which you can scan and it ads the receipt to your tax id as well.
When you need to do the tax form itself, it comes mostly pre-filled. For a normal person you can deliver as is, if you have investments you need to declare your investment account IBAN and also any movements that might’ve given you capital gains. That’s mostly it for a “regular” person.
Wait, your groceries are taxed after the fact? In .nl, you pay sales tax as acual part of the sale (and prices for consumers are always given/displayed including tax, mandatory). When it’s time to do taxes, I log into the tax agency’s web app thingy (with the national digital ID thingy that’s used for all govt stuff, some on the EU level as well), confirm that they got the numbers right (income and whatever is deductible) which it usually is, sign with the digital ID thingy again, done.
On a good day, it takes less than five minutes. If your situation is Complicated, it could be more, but I’d expect it to become a questionnaire-like thing, which it used to be in the past.
Here is what I believe about the income tax situation in the USA. The legislature has built a complex taxation structure. Any time they work “to simplify” it, it becomes more complicated. Compliance is left up to the taxpayer.
Everyone has to report their income, and it really, really needs to match what the income providers have reported. This not only includes wages, but investment income, gambling income (for those who gamble), and non-reported income for those in the “gig” economy (freelancers of all kinds). And many other potential sources.
So, people who have more than just reported wages have to meet stringent tax filing requirements. Thus, many people need tax preparers or accountants to help them navigate their compliance. These have become multi-billion dollar industries. If the government actually simplified taxes, it would wipe out a significant portion of the economy. So it continues as an ever-worsening mess.
But are the employers / gig providers not required to provide numbers to the IRS? They should be able to know what’s what, especially if they expect you to get the numbers right — that’d mean they can check, and that would require knowledge of the numbers.
