With your nose? (Or maybe your toes!)

Oh agreed. And programming is not a prerequisite ability, rather it is a demonstrative ability for being able to wade through the instructions.

(Written with help from O.M.)

I'm wondering, where do you(/does her) start with this?

You start by evaluating your situation. Do you have taxable income beyond your w2s? Do you have enough deductions to make itemizing worthwhile? Do you have children and make some, but not a lot, of money? Are you easily intimidated by long instructions? If the answers are all no, then grab a copy of the year 2024 1040 and look it over - they are grouped into sections, and the most important ones to look over now are income, taxes and credits, and payments. If at least half of it makes sense and it doesn’t make your head spin just trying to read it, download the 1040 instructions pdf and read the line by line instructions. Most of it won’t apply to you, but you need to at least read each line’s instructions well enough to feel confident about that.

If you have questions use google (with the usual caveats about checking your source). And don’t be afraid to ask people for help. ☺️. Finally, if after all that you aren’t confident - don’t. Stick with your usual method of filing, but when you’re done, really look it over. See if that gives you any insight to your questions, and try again next year.

By the way, you can still do this even if you have a more complicated tax situation, and a lot of 1099 income isn’t much harder to file than w2 income. But it does get more complicated the further away from basic w2 you get. As for itemized deductions….

Is the result something you can feel confident that you won't be audited for?

Well, on a personal note yes. But my confidence comes from having helped a close friend who had let things get so out of hand she was actually getting her wages garnished by the IRS. Not only did I help her get them to stop with the wage garnishment, we got those wages refunded back to her - with interest at that (it took a while). I’m not an accountant or a tax professional but I enjoy rule lawyering and it turns out they have a similar skill set 😂

But putting personal confidence aside, it’s a complicated question, but mostly because people tend to misunderstand how IRS audits end up working for most people. First off, realize that in most cases the IRS already has all the information you are sending them - you are simply supposed to add any information that they do not have. If you don’t provide anything novel in your filing then all they are really doing is checking your math. And they consider most w2 filers to be “unsophisticated tax filers” - if the only errors in your tax filing amount to math errors or other obvious flubs, they just fix the error, notify you and send you a check/bill depending. 🤦‍♀️but also NBD.

On the other hand, if you fail to report income they know you have, or you claim unusual or questionable expenses/deductions, that is more likely to get you an actual audit. This is a serious oversimplification but it helps here if you think about audits in terms of burdens of proof. If your taxes are in dispute, the IRS holds the burden of proof for your income, but you hold the burden of proof for your expenses and deductions. Thanks to robust reporting requirements they generally know about above-board income with any businesses, and failure to file for that income can result in the “unfriendly” version of what I described above - basically, a letter with corrected taxes and a demand for payment with interest. Or it can trigger a full audit. It’s much the same with expenses, except you have to be able to justify every expense and deduction you took. So if in doubt, consult with someone, or don’t take the expense deduction.

That said, penalties and interest are based on the taxes you should have paid. If the IRS finds a $10 error in your taxes they will send you a bill but it’s just not going to be that big. If you are reporting all of the income you are aware of and not claiming a ton of bad deductions there just isn’t that much potential tax to underpay. 🤷‍♀️

Oh, and that close friend with the messed up taxes? A well known national tax prep firm did her taxes the years that caused the problems. But since they werent simple w2 taxes hers were excluded from their guarantee. 🤬

tl;dr: If you only have w2 and/or 1099 income with no expenses and you have basic math and logic skills you’re probably pretty safe doing your own taxes - you will probably just get it right and any mistakes you make are unlikely to be tragic.

Strictly speaking, I don’t. Taxes are Other Me’s problem.

That said, she always does taxes by hand on printable forms.

The 1040ez was retired in 2018 when they redid the 1040.

That said, for most people in the usa: if you can program you should be able to do your taxes. It gets more complicated if you are self employed or have investment income, etc., but if you just have w2 income it’s actually pretty easy - just read and follow the instructions.

I’m convinced most don’t like the taste of Evian nearly so much as they like the taste of conspicuous consumption.

One of my driving motivations to go get new glasses is it has become to difficult to read for pleasure. Reading is one of the things that makes life worth living.

$200 is peanuts to a gambling addict. I remember back in the 80s I had a relative who bought $100 in lotto tickets every week. It’s scary to think how much she would have spent in a casino.

I upvoted you because in general I agree.

If I did do it, it would be with the intent of doing a write up on the experience. Probably won’t because I have more than enough on my plate right now, but if I had the extra free time it would make an interesting post.

I have no idea what you are talking about, but I’m curious.

I was figuring something like this would be the case. I wonder if I could find paired hedge bets that would let me get at least a hundred out of those bets.

If I try there are a few self imposed rules…

Rule 1) no extra money loaded - no matter what it looks like on paper if I can’t do it solely off of the initial deposit then the whole thing needs to be abandoned.

Rule 2) Just as soon as I can get the money out, pull it and never use their site again

What do y’all think, should I try? Fair disclosure: even if everyone says yes I may decide not to

Now you have me seriously thinking about signing go to a gambling site with the intent of taking their promo and running - mostly to write up the experience. But I just had a $250 car repair bill I need to pay for. Maybe this is the way to do it lol

The only reason I’m inclined to believe the number is the specificity of it. Despite it being “worse” if he had said a million, or one and a half million, I’d believe a round number was made up. 1.8m is a little to specific. I think he heard that number from someone in a briefing and liked it so it stuck.

I remember your PIN. I remember everyone’s PIN.

I just can’t remember who’s is who’s.

dances
falls down
gets up
poses dramatically

Tada!

Goes hand in hand with the ai. I mean, someone has to pay to keep all those servers available to… consults notes set the thermostat on your bed?

I think it shows your name and profile picture, but not your phone number.

Correct; it’s actually best to think of the name field as “displayname”. If that’s not what you want you can change it.

Interestingly, it also doesn’t reveal your username, and allows you to change usernames without losing already existing chats. So a trick I’ve used is to change my username to something random, give it to someone in order to establish a conversation then change my username back. Now I have a conversation where neither of us can see the phone # or username of the other.

I think if they have your phone number in their contacts, Signal will add that to the Signal contact, and so someone can find your phone number by adding every phone number to their contacts

Yes, but I handle this by not allowing signal to access my contacts. It’s worth checking out your various ai and assistant settings on your phone as well but that’s a bit of another topic.

Edit: I just realized in the final paragraph the concern was other people finding out you were on signal by them giving signal access to their contact book. As I understand it, if you were trying to hide that you have a signal account from people who would have your phone number this would be genuine concern. Personally I don’t use my primary phone number for signal which makes this a non-issue. If you don’t want your normal contacts knowing you use signal then you should get a second number and register signal to it instead.

Anything good you're doing is probably illegal, so only talk about it if you have to.

Even if it’s not illegal loose operational security can compromise the whole point of your action. Some things need saying out loud, somethings need to be kept quiet. Think before you speak, and if in doubt, shut the fuck up.

Public sites like this one are archived by the feds - and everyone else. Discord works with cops. A dozen or more companies know every place your phone has physically been used since you got it, and will sell this information for virtual peanuts to anyone who asks for it. VPNs have been caught logging ips. Your data is not safe, and in a time of fascism, that means you are not safe.

Communication may be critical to our success in the upcoming years, but it can just easily be our undoing. Learn to secure your phone, disable biometrics and use end to end encrypted messaging. Don’t take your daily phone to sensitive locations, and be prepared to wipe and abandon any device you do carry with you.

And seriously, like OP says, practice just not talking about some things.

That was my kitty years ago. He was an absolute cutie who loved nothing more than being social and hanging out with his people.

Miss you little one.

I’m just tired of talking people off of metaphorical ledges when I’m not really convinced myself. Panic isn’t helping people cope, but damn it - it’s justified. And I wish it were even possible to convince me otherwise.

I talked with two more people wanting to pull their queer/trans kids out of school yesterday. Had a good friend in tears out of fear for her godchild. Pretty much everyone with trans kids is in a near panic and I’m pretty damn scared too.

I’ve hit that point in life where I want a smaller phone so I can use it easily in one hand, but need a larger phone so I can see the screen.

There is no winning answer lol