Whatever indicators they use to select audit recipients may correlate with under-payers, but it's not a guarantee. I'm sure there's some fraction of those they audit that turn out to have paid too much.
They have some data on this (https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/p55b.pdf, pages 33-35). Out of 509,917 examinations, 18,988 resulted in a refund. There was $7.0 billion of tax refunded in 2020. For comparison, there was $17.2 billion of additional tax generated with additional recommended and unagreed amounts.
I am finding it hard to believe that you are getting so much even during election season.
How many candidates could possibly be running in your district? You got Congress, Senate, Presidential and possibly low level positions (typically most of those are so unorganized/poor that they usually don't even have a website, just a facebook post).
A candidate has to pay money to acquire a list of contacts from their party. Most smaller upstart campaigns are operating on almost no money. (For example AOC had a ~300k budget her first run vs her opponents 3 million. Most of that 300k arrived in the last month or so after she started getting momentum in activist circles). Most candidates are operating on FAR less than that throughout the whole campaign.
So I was a volunteer on multiple campaigns (some in NJ). The participation rate in primaries before texting was abysmal (like upper single digits) texting and other GOTV efforts have brought up the rate to double digits (12-15%). Thats enough to swing some elections but it is still terrible participation.
All this crap is a result of people not caring whatsoever who gets elected. Something has to be done to try and enact change in this damn country. If you really hate it then remove your party registration/don't donate. Im a registered Democrat and have never once received Republican inquiries and for Democrats reaching out, texting STOP reduces the rate until I receive at most one or two new inquiry per election cycle(essentially 0).
Honestly, no, I haven't tried "STOP" out of fear that any response will be taken as a confirmation that a human reads the messages, worsening the spam. That's what happens w/ email and phone spam and its impossible to know if this one is different.
I don't think I registered a party affiliation, so it's not exactly like I opted in to this.
I appreciate that this is an effective way to get people to vote, and more voters is a good thing. I vote. Unfortunately it's hard to sympathize with a party when the message is delivered as an unsolicited faux-personalized distraction in a way that I can't easily block.
I don't think any political entity wants to mess with the FCC.
>I don't think I registered a party affiliation, so it's not exactly like I opted in to this.
Possible that the list is derived from state databases indicating that you are registered to vote. This is separate from party databases. Just throwing out that possibility as well.
>I appreciate that this is an effective way to get people to vote, and more voters is a good thing. I vote. Unfortunately it's hard to sympathize with a party when the message is delivered as an unsolicited faux-personalized distraction in a way that I can't easily block.
Well now you know that they are being sent by a human being and how to stop them for a campaign so hopefully they won't be such a nuisance in the next election cycle.
Was wondering if I could get your opinion on some of these things.
I have been thinking of ways to increase voter turnout. Currently the three ways are
1. Go door to door and have a friendly chat with people. (The most effective way bar none)
2. Send out a handwritten letter to people across the country. This is something that seems to get less likely voters to be more likely to come out, a handwritten letter discussing how the election matters to the person writing it. I guess it humanizes the election and helps some people understand that these election helps/hurt their fellow citizens. (kind of effective)
3. Send out text message/phone call to get a conversation going. There is someone on the other side and you can text/converse with them. (least effective)
What do you think should be done to change the needle? Which ones of the above would you respond to positively?
Presumably a hybrid of #1, #2, #3 is most effective - there are audiences that will respond best to each. I assume the targeting data is out there.
Personally, though, I find the handwritten aspect of the letter, and the from a human being part of the text messages, to be the awkward parts. I've never met the folks texting me, yet they know my name and want to convince me of things. Its advertising, it feels pushy. Being channeled through a real human (even if they truly align with the message) doesn't change that. I might agree with the message, but I still don't want it to barge into my day like that.
>Personally, though, I find the handwritten aspect of the letter, and the from a human being part of the text messages, to be the awkward parts. I've never met the folks texting me, yet they know my name and want to convince me of things. Its advertising, it feels pushy. Being channeled through a real human (even if they truly align with the message) doesn't change that. I might agree with the message, but I still don't want it to barge into my day like that.
Honestly though then it seems like there is no effective way to really reach you then?
I like to think there aren't many of you out there since Americans are typically personable and are very open to talking. But the numbers show that participation is still very low...just not as low when no outreach was done. It is a depressing state of affairs.
The question, though: is that to avoid more targeted attacks against you (like not telling people you own gold or bitcoin) or to avoid your bank becoming so successful that they can use their market position to become abusive to customers (like not telling people where you get your news on the off chance that you have a trustworthy source of news)?
Then why even bother? Really? You bank with some one that you feel like is good, but you won't tell people the name? Fine, you think that reveals TMI. Then don't tell us who you bank with, but tell us what bank you feel is good and the maybe some supporting reasons. You could do that without, "that's who I bank with".
Otherwise, this was a completely wasted/pointless use of electrons.
Yes, and that’s more a commentary on GitHub Pages also being a tracking service, not disproving anything about Google Fonts. Surely Microsoft doesn’t let those access logs just sit around collecting dust.
For the same reason you chose to use a CDN instead of self-hosting in the first place. It takes away a lot of the complexity.
I'm not proxy'ing and HTTP caching typefaces but I used to URL-import JavaScript packages from a CDN. Availability as well as response latency at times were abysmal. I didn't want to give up on the comfort though. Now I'm just routing and HTTP caching requests to cdn.my-website.com to cdn.that-popular-provider.com
Availability is tied to the my-website.com's availability - which is great. And response latency went way down. And I didn't have to compromise on just dropping arbitrary JavaScript with arbitrary dependencies on the server without going through all the node and npm hassle first.
