Yes but the experience of listening to music is nothing like the experience of someone vibrating your chest. Our brains treat those sensations as very different things.
Our brains and other sensory apparatus are extremely adaptable. If one doesn't know anything about the sensation of sound, they can learn to substitute it without it actually being a substitute to them.
I have had exposure to ABA but mostly through the lens of the parents with children using ABA and it was mostly positive. Being able to take their kids out and put them in the car for the first time without a breakdown after starting therapy was a major achievement in their eyes.
I am just curious though about what you limits are? Isn't everyone being put into a box? Isn't that just being part of society? I don't know what your experiences are, but probably isn't there a spectrum of ABA from good to bad just like there is a spectrum of all types of interventions and parenting from being overbearing to too lenient?
Just genuinely interested in that it seems like being part of society unless you are part of the 1% has a big aspect of conformity and "fitting in" to society even if that isn't what you want to do. That historically to me has just been known as growing up.
I think a lot of traits or experiences of autistic people are found in many neurotypicals as well, but the levels/intensity actually make it completely different. I definitely see your society box, but it can be quite different experience when the things you're hiding are main part of your being, brain and thoughts, for all your childhood.
I only have my experience - it made me extremely stressed for over a decade. It felt like anything I wanted to be or do was probably wrong in some way that I could never predict, as often things I thought would be perfectly fine turned out to be wrong, often for reasons that I really couldn't understand why or base general rules on. I was basically scared around the clock that somebody catches me behaving in wrong way, and I was always prepared to stop everything and start masking - looking like and doing things my peers expect me to. I went from talkative happy kid to extremely quiet person who probably always looked like I'm ready to soil my pants. I spoke really little for a ~decade, feeling like every time I'd open my mouth I'll say something wrong and it can be used against me. Later on I stayed the nights awake quiet in a dark room and slept when other people were home and awake, because then I could maximize the time being just myself without worrying about who I was expected to be. I pretty much still don't have a good relationship with my parents, they've never known who I am as I just learnt to hide myself. I think they're good parents, they just didn't know what to do with different kind of kid and made some terrible choices in a conservative time and place where having a "non-normal" kid was not acceptable outcome. And I wasn't really good at communicating what I was feeling or the kind of damage it was doing to me.
I know I took it in a really hard way, I knew even then. As autistic person I can have quite intense feelings. Like I said I'm sure there's autistic people who have the opposite opinion and experience. But I know I'm wasn't some special case, I'm quite sure there's a lot of trauma associated with a lot of ABA'd children. I can definitely understand the parent's viewpoint and also that there's wide spectrum of completely different cases, but I really don't think this should be ABA-parents vs autistic kids disagreement, we both would have a better life if we'd have some better therapies for autistic people - I just think the best starting point would be understanding what causes the stress/anxiety/discomfort/meltdowns and trying to fix the underlying issues, not from trying to hide the symptoms like we're praying gay away. The goal should be a child with as good, healthy life as possible, not some expected behavior. Maybe ABA style therapy is good for some and I expressed myself in kinda extreme way - there's some history behind that, that I really haven't fully processed in a healthy way yet - but parents should understand when it's used in the wrong way or wrong cases it can go really bad, it's not something that should be just done because good options are lacking.
There is a lot of money from Silicon Valley rushing into ABA treatment and having seen the results I can't help but think we do better.
Current systems of ABA rely on billing the therapy to insurance and thus most of these ABA "mills" just throw inexperienced college kids who haven't graduated yet at the problem on a session by session basis paid at minimum wage.
These college-aged therapists have no interaction with each other since they go directly to the session at the client's house, leave and go home to take notes. Sometimes they switch patients quite regularly so there is never a chance for a comprehensive plan to emerge.
The insurance only pays for treating the patient and thus no space is available for training the parents. If we want to do better, we have to start with the parents and develop therapies that last the whole week not just 2 hours a week.
Theres a lot of potential for improving the system, but the current ABA system that SV is taking over focuses on extremely short sighted "box checking" and does nothing to develop a long term approach for the family.
We may have the tools to manage it, but we are losing the ability to understand it.
AI writing software will be a exponential explosion in software complexity.
AI would very well create its own programming language to be more efficient for the AI to code in that we have no hopes of understanding. Imagine that AI started to output a large SaaS app written today in Python in Assembly because for the AI the extra cognitive overhead of using Assembly doesn't exist. At first we might resist and tell it to use a language we understand, but then as time goes on we grow more comfortable that it does the "right" thing and down the road people are just generated raw Assembly using AI without really understanding what the code is doing, only looking to see if the code behaves the way they expect.
Imagine entire codebases spun up in seconds with so many lines of code, a single person would never have hopes of understanding everything, needing to rely on AI to summarize and explain the code for them. Now imagine that massive code base being iterated and worked on for a decade over the life of a company.
AI could bring Terabyte sized code bases in a decade or so.
What you are describing is an traceable transformation of code in which there are several intermediate layers that people can inspect and understand. They can inspect the exact rules for that transformation. The process is repeatable and verifiable.
What I am describing is a black-box stochastic generation of low level code in which there is no higher level representation anymore. AI generating Assembly not by a set of rules, but using statistics. There will be no individual layers to unwind or inspect, because for AI it doesn't need them. Our separation of concerns was built for our human brains and limiting complexity of projects to our understanding.
If you have an AI capable of writing machine code based on natural language you likely also have an AI that can translate that machine code to any other language you would like. You could then use a normal compiler to verify if it is correct and then read the code yourself. Or you could just get good at reading and writing assembly.
Yes, that is exactly my point. You will have to rely on AI to translate it back out, but that translation is built on probabilities not machine rule-based translation. So you can ask and have the AI explain everything to you, but you are still trusting the "black box" to tell you what is happening. Very different from today.
Also, you can "get good" at reading assembly, but that doesn't matter if the AI can output a custom OS from scratch and a custom VM to execute the program it wrote to solve your use case. It will be so impossibly complex that it would be the equivalent studying protein folding.
Instead people will just trust the AI.
It also won't help you if the code base the AI produces for a SaaS app is a million lines of assembly.
Instead of having different layers of OS, compiler, high level language, an AI will just be able to produce one layer. because after decades of trusting the AI to write our code, why wouldn't it?
The current gen of AI outputting code that in human-centric programming languages will be a blip in the history of AI. As it advances, it can just skip that step.
Its will be orders of magnitude more complex and opaque than anything we have today.
I think it's an apt analogy, though I disagree about the implication.
If I use ChatGPT to create a work, and that work is "close enough" to an existing copyrighted work, then it seems like I am guilty of copyright violation, not ChatGPT.
It's not an analogy. This is actually what is done with ML. It is literally a best fit curve problem.
Or maybe it is actually an analogy, but then if this was the case the entire field of ML is capable of only understanding the intricacies of ML through the analogy of curve fitting and what's actually going on underneath the analogy remains elusive.
True, but most points on the curve aren't close to Any data point. That means most of the output of ML is completely original. Let's use a simplified example of a straight line between two datapoints. Example:
Point A ------|----------------------------------------|------Point B
For a line segment (above) between two points, most of the line does not approach the vicinity of Either point (the boundary of closeness for points A and B is demarcated figuratively with a pipe "|" if the line segment is between the pipe and the point it is too close, if it is not then it is an original work). This intuition still applies even if the line only moves close to the point and does not touch either point. Basically the output of ML is by majority not even close to a copy as most of the curve is far from any point.
The only way for most of the line to be a copy is if the data cluster is so close and similar that the data itself is mostly a chain of "similar" copies. Not sure if you're catching my meaning here. Example:
Point A --|--|-- Point B
Above A and B cross their own thresholds and are essentially "close enough" copied data points. The left Pipe is the threshold for B and the right pipe is the threshold for A. As a result the entire line between the two points must be a an illegal "close enough" copy as well.
If such data is used it means existing data is in violation of copywrite law already. The logical implication is this:
For most of the results of ML to be a technical "close enough" copy of the datapoints, you must also admit that most of your data contained "close enough" copies as well.
As a side note this kind of thing can be useful for defining a quantitative measure of what close enough even means as we can certainly define a numeric threshold between close enough and not close enough for copywrite law.
Because music has a lot of additional law written giving additional protections to song-writers independent of performers and recordings. That gives the abstract tonal sequence it's own copyright.
Of course there is fair use, etc etc. But modern copyright was a reaction to the printing press so that people were motivated to still create content in the face of new technology.
If current copyright laws do not protect people from creating something new because of fear that they will be ripped off, then new copyright laws need to come.
One thing I wondered about how arguments from one side of the issue say that AI copying and extracting information for free isn't stealing, but what if you use their argument against things that aren't copyright like secrets, military, corporate, trade secrets.
Like can if an LLM saw the coca-cola forumla and the weights are released, what are the consequences? If it ingested top secret confidential information and released the weights, I assume that counts as stealing something and distributing it.
Seems like the Moat they might have is licensing is if they start getting celebrities or studios to license their tech. Very big market for animation studios to have this tech.
If they were the shop where you go to get a famous person's or character's voice I could see it reaching this valuation.
But as a pure tech play, seems likely that in 2-3 years the open source models will be good enough to not need an established player.
If you go on Fiverr and ask for a text narration, most of the people on there just use elevenlabs or a similar service and aren't actually doing the narration themselves but essentially just licensing their voice.
I just saw an TurboTax Ad where a guy was like "I Like free stuff" and then it said he was "happy to read the disclaimer" on TurboTax and see that "Roughly 37% of taxpayers qualify" which he looks thoughtfully in the distance and says "Thats me!"
I thought it was a funny commercial because 37% doesn't seem like a lot and Turbotax is portraying it as the average person will identify themselves as part of that 37% even though that is not too far off form just 1/3 people so a minority of people.
It was one of the few times I saw a company blatantly lean into the negatives in their fine print and just outright tell you its good.
I agree on every level, but I'm compelled to remind you this is the America where wendy's (?) had to revert to a 1/4 pounder from a 1/3 pounder bc people thought they were getting less meat. And let's not forget the ever-present anti-education cohort that can't be convinced math is good even when you tell them it's how you calculate discounts or tips.
This story has to be apocryphal, as fractions aren't _that_ rare, especially in the U.S. with its imperial system and third of a cup measurements or quarter inches or half miles and so on.
It's not that they're rare, it's that it legitimately is an easy error to make even if you understand it to be an error. Even people who work with equations every day will occasionally make careless mistakes like this. That's why mathematicians joke about how it's important to make an even number of sign errors.
To not make this mistake, you have to be able to call to mind that the map x -> 1/x reverses the inequality sign. That's a fairly abstract thing to remember especially if you haven't taken math for years. Yes you could draw it or write down the equation, or convert to decimal... But it's enough of a cognitive barrier that it doesn't surprise me that it would impact the behavior even of people who would answer correctly on a test.
Where it does get easy is if you work with the same set of fractions every day. For example, if you work in construction in the US you can probably quickly order the fractions commonly used for measurement, e.g. 1/4, 1/8, 1/16, 3/4 etc. But 1/3 isn't one of these. Now that I think about it, they probably should have just chosen a fraction that you can find on a tape measure, like 3/8.
3/8ths is 0.375 while 1/3rd is 0.333~ so it's even bigger while still larger than 1/4th (0.250), without being that much bigger.
3/8ths is a pretty good marketing point since all the numbers are bigger and it should be intuitive, plus you can more easily see that it's also 50% bigger than 1/4th => 2/8ths. The harder sell is the 'double whatever' being equal to 3 patties of the competitor.
I do not really like the term "common sense" as it is more like common experience. It is not hard to learn what fractions are but I do not think it is something that any one is born with and there is other notation to deal with fractions that work differently.
I speak, and thus think, in both English and Japanese.
English says "1/4", or "1 over 4", or "1 quarter".
Japanese says "4 bun no 1", or the practical equivalent of saying "4 under 1" in English.
I consequently routinely say the numbers in reverse, confounding both myself and anyone around me before I realize my brain engaged in furious tentacle sex with the numbers.
> I speak, and thus think, in both English and Japanese.
The vast majority of processing is happening outside language-related areas of the brain. There's certainly leaky interfaces between areas of the brain, but if you literally thought in a language, and that distinction persisted throughout the brain, that would seem to imply that speaking 3 languages would require 3x the number of connections in the brain.
The strong Sapir-Whorf hypothesis would presumably be true if we literally thought in a language, but the strong form of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis has been thoroughly discredited.
In other words, "thinking in a language" is an illusion.
I think this is partially correct. Inner monologue is not an illusion, and choosing a wrong linguistic construct for your audience (sometimes from another language) through temporarily forgetting to context switch does happen. However, thinking something without ever having done so in words does seem to strongly correlate with your assertion.
Tangentially, I realised in high school that I was doing almost all math operations as word transformations. I reasoned this was why even familiar procedures for which I confidently & consistently got correct results were taking substantially longer than everybody else. I was translating everything twice.
> To not make this mistake, you have to be able to call to mind that the map x -> 1/x reverses the inequality sign. That's a fairly abstract thing to remember especially if you haven't taken math for years. Yes you could draw it or write down the equation, or convert to decimal...
You absolutely don't have to remember that x |-> 1/x is order reversing, and, for most people, shouldn't—you immediately give two or three other methods (I don't understand what "write down the equation" means) that are a much better way for the average person to check this.
Yes, but I was also speaking generally about fractions since that was the context of the comment I was responding to.
For example, consider: 1/1123 < 1/1092. Is that inequality true? The fastest way to check is to compare the denominators and adjust for the way division interacts with the inequality.
You can't really draw that pie chart quickly. You could write the equation down and multiply both sides though.
For 1/3 vs 1/4 yes you could draw it quickly. Or you could fill a glass 1/3 full of water and one 1/4 and compare them. But that's a pretty special case for small enough denominators.
Forty years ago we learned fractions with chocolate bars. A trustworthy child would be chosen to walk from the primary school to the local store (about 5 minutes walk for an adult, probably about two minutes for a child who was just given money by a responsible adult to buy chocolate) and bring back some chocolate, and then kids who raise their hand and give the correct answer to fraction questions get the fraction in its physical form as chocolate. What's half of this third of the bar? A sixth, and now because I knew that I get to eat 1/6 of a bar of chocolate, whereas the kid who enthusiastically answered that it's a quarter does not because that's wrong.
One third times one fifth loses a lot of folks. As does addition and subtraction of fractions that don’t start with the same denominator, for that matter. They might figure out what to do to pass the test, but they may not get it.
Fractions are just division. When kids learn division, it's about splitting into equal groups.
Fractions are a bit different though - you're splitting a single thing into equal chunks. Hence, slices of pie.
Multiplying by 1/5 is really dividing by 5. Introduce that first. We already know how to do this. You split your 1/3 slice into 5 equal slices.
Do the same to the other 2/3 slices, count all the slices, and you have 15. Hence, 1/15.
As an aside, common core math is amazing. They gave my daughter a model for the distributive property that can be used to show how to do long multiplication.
There's a difference in type of thinking in moving from operations on numbers (basic whole number math) to operations-on-operations-on-numbers (anything with fractions).
Suddenly, you need to begin to understand the rules around operators, sequencing, and what operations are legal and illegal.
Absent that understanding, even...
1/4 x 2/5
... gets very complicated trying to reason with physical analogs.
So it's the point at which math becomes "pure" rather than strictly physically-mapped.
IDK, I did fine with them and find thinking in them natural (I think of fractional division as division, in fact, though I certainly understand the multiplication analogy); I’ve just known enough people who lost track of math at fractions that I doubt it’s coincidence.
I’m not saying I don’t get it, I’m saying others have told me that they found the explanations and instructions they were given nonsensical.
Have you tried dumping all the sockets out of a socket set and putting them back in order? Do you find it's easier to order the metric ones than the imperial ones which have a lot of different denominators on adjacent sizes? I certainly do but I'm not American so maybe it's my background limiting me.
Just to save you some time: the numbers written on the sockets indicate the size of the socket. So you don't even need to read them, just put them in order of size and you'll have them in order of number automatically.
Can confirm - While I was decent at math up to a point, fractions and long division in 4th Grade sent me down a hole that took me years to get out of...until Algebra II as a junior in HS crushed me.
I blame this on my Chemistry teacher - a class which I was also taking at the time - who spoke little English and had never taught in the United States until the year I landed in her class. I actually did reasonably well in Algebra for the first quarter or so until it all fell apart.
I re-invented what turned out to be short division (no joke! I wouldn’t learn it had a name until I was in my late 20s) because I hated long division so much, same year we started doing long division in school (4th grade? 3rd? IDK).
Fits in about the same space as the original problem unless it’s printed so small that you have to rewrite it, and way less room for transcription errors. I also find it clearer but that may just be me (fwiw I’m “bad at math”—I find it incredibly boring and basically can’t follow proof- and equation/identity-based stuff, I have to turn it all into algorithmic thinking to have a prayer of understanding it; i.e. my opinion on the superiority of short division is that of a mathematical imbecile, so, grain of salt)
> I blame this on my Chemistry teacher - a class which I was also taking at the time - who spoke little English and had never taught in the United States until the year I landed in her class.
It doesn’t help that in chemistry, 1 + 1 may be 1. Or 3. :-)
Under the “example” section, the little superscripts are what you write in by hand on the problem as you work it, at least as I did it. 9/4 in the hundreds place is 2 with 1 remainder, so write 2 up above as part of the solution and a 1 superscript next to the 5 in the problem itself (tens place), now that’s 15, divide that, 3 goes in the tens place of the solution, write the remainder (3) next to the digit in the ones place as a superscript and do it again, if you need to keep going just add a decimal point and zeroes as required.
Way faster than working long division, takes up less space, and less error prone (imo). What’s actually going on is clearer (again, imo)
I'm ok with fractions, but fractional and/or negative exponents always give me problems. I suspect it might be something to do with being taught that "multiplication is repeated addition, exponentiation is repeated multiplication". The model doesn't extend properly.
I’ve seen a later fall-off point at factoring. Feels pointless (the motivations are… distant at best), tedious as hell, lots of guessing involved. “So much for math making sense, fuck this, guess I’m out.”
It actually doesn't shock me that many people would be confused, especially if they didn't work with fractional quantities--e.g. for cooking--on a regular basis. Maybe it's a myth but it wouldn't surprise me if it weren't. And even if they've sort of internalized 1/4, 1/2, 3/4 without necessarily fully getting fractions--1/3 is something people encounter a lot less day to day.
I did teacher's college in Canada and the teacher who taught math said his biggest surprise when he moved from Europe to Canada is how terrible people were with fraction. I think he asked a barista to fill his cup to 2/3 and they couldn't do it because they didn't know what 2/3 was.
> This story has to be apocryphal, as fractions aren't _that_ rare, especially in the U.S. with its imperial system and third of a cup measurements or quarter inches or half miles and so on.
I literally had an argument with a room full of US university professors about whether or not 30% and 1/3 were the same thing.
Or perhaps all those people on here who defend US Standard measurements over metric and quote the fractions they know over decimals as an advantage are a minority?
Perhaps the average Joe would be better off with mm rather than 1/16" increments.
Based on a "focus group" discussion which are well known for selecting the brightest bunch of people who have nothing better to do than answer questions for 2 hours and get a coupon for free fries.
VINCENT: And in Paris, you can buy a beer at McDonald's. And you know what they call a Quarter Pounder with Cheese in Paris?
JULES: They don't call it a Quarter Pounder with Cheese?
VINCENT: No, they got the metric system there, they wouldn't know what the f*** a Quarter Pounder is.
JULES: Then what do they call it?
VINCENT: They call it Royale with Cheese.
JULES: Royale with Cheese. What do they call a Big Mac?
VINCENT: Big Mac's a Big Mac, but they call it Le Big Mac.
Aside: a lot of tax preparation services, or their services that let you upload your data - the privacy policy says they can all "use" your financial info.
It's also important to take any corporation's explanation for increasing their own margins with an extremely large grain of salt. I'm not doubting in the slightest that consumers had some confusion around the fractions, but all it would take for the company to revert their campaign is for the increase in sales to insufficiently offset the increase in their own costs. Blaming it on consumer stupidity afterwards washes their hands of any responsibility for backpedaling, and makes for a memorable and repeatable story that increases brand recognition while simultaneously painting them as heroically trying to offer more value for the same cost.
You say “this is America”, but my mother (who grew up in USSR/Russia and was in her mid 30s at the time) was seriously asking middle-schooled me on multiple occasions whether 0.7 liters of milk was less than 0.55 liters. I don’t remember the exact numbers, i just remember that the smaller volume one had 2 digits past the decimal, and the larger one just had 1 digit.
And no, she wasn’t testing my knowledge, she was seriously confused, as she would ask me that even later in life. Mind you, she has a masters degree. She is in her early 50s right now, and she is fully of sound mind to this day, not senile or anything like that.
Imo, this type of silliness is rather common across many different places, but Americans just tend to own it and not be afraid of coming off silly (if that’s how they genuinely end up behaving in a given situation).
Are they leaning in to it or are they forced to fit in the disclaimer?
Seems like the strategy of the ad is to repeat the word "Free" so much people don't remember the rest and to make it seem like the disclaimer is meaningless. Even with it, it's still free.
Probably a bit of both. What the commenter is describing is a textbook social proof tactic. "Hey, I like free stuff and taxes make me feel like a bit of a doofus, just like that guy. And like that guy, I see myself as the clever sort of person that isn't fooled by fine print. That free Turbo Tax program sounds awfully useful and free for people like me!" And Intuit can also point to that commercial and say "how is this trying to disguise the proof?" and they'd be right. They're just also trying to make it feel free still by making it free for a relatable character.
Sounds hokey but that sort of shit has been the bread and butter of advertising since forever. A vanishingly small percentage of people are anywhere close to as rational as they think they are when buying things. Many of the most self-assuredly "skeptical, rational, well-researched consumer" types get totally snowed by the simplest marketing ideas because they're looking for sales bullshit they can empirically disprove, and most marketing is influencing people in a way that makes them think they came to the conclusion independently.
TurboTax is marketing to the kind of people who think getting big refunds is a good thing. That's generally people with lower incomes, so this fits that target.
It is generally a good thing for folks who live paycheck to paycheck. Higher withholding forces more budgeting, and then they get a big paycheck once a year to pay off whatever
People who live paycheck to paycheck are very good at budgeting because they have to do it to survive, they don't need any more pressure. If anything it's richer people that could use a little prodding, but either way we don't need the government to be withholding extra money from people it thinks might have bad habits.
> they get a big paycheck once a year to pay off whatever
If you have something big to pay off, you usually need to do it right away. You probably can't afford to wait however many months until you get your refund.
> Whatever is left over after expenses is fun to be had as soon as possible.
When income is 80% of the minimal bills, which dollars are the fun ones?
> But anyone who has actually dealt with poor people who live paycheck to paycheck knows they are not good at budgeting and planning.
You may not know that assertion is uneducated nonsense. The nonsensical part is the inference that better budgeting is all that stands between 80% of minimal bills and 105%.
Past that, an extended time in hunger-level poverty tends to lead to some hyper-focused money management. As in being intimately aware of each penny that hopefully will add up to this weeks bag of white rice.
Some of the "better at planning" poor people have built up crude math to make it all makes sense, but seems overly complicated for someone like me. The one I noticed: "oh, I got $85 for selling that pot I made, I'll use that for the fridge repair." - Which is totally different to "oh I got $85, I'll just put it in the pool of my bank balance because I already budgeted for that fridge repair which costs $60". I tried asking this person, but you also needed an extra $10 for that McDonald's lunch you wanted to buy but they insisted "nope, that's my fridge-repair money, can't spend that"
Not sure I'm explaining that properly, but it was the sort of math I encountered dealing with such individuals.
One I've encountered is putting any surplus money into tattoos because they can't be stolen, repossessed or otherwise lost, thus making them a savvy place to put money.
They were completely earnest. The joke followed that they can't take money with them when they die, but they can take tattoos. Pharaohs still have their tattoos, they point out.
There is also a general pattern of spending "extra" money on things like parties, experiences, consumables, etc. Better to spend the money on a pizza party and gocart trip for their kids than to stash it away in a savings account. Better to spend the money on beer for a party than even to hide it under their mattress.
As far as I can be bothered to care, schemes involving having other people store your money such as tax withholdings and insurance policies exist primarily to save people from themselves and their lack of budgeting capabilities.
Most people can't budget, poor people especially so (it's among the biggest and most likely reasons why they are poor). They see money, they spend it all immediately. Saving? Investing? "roflmao" or "I can't.", they will say. The only way to address this so certain, specific, important payments are made absolutely is to literally take and keep the money out of the person's hands until the payment is made.
In addition, I wouldn't be surprised to find that many of the people who are in the target demographic for this feature don't itemize - and never have a need for such practices.
A 1040 + W2 might the only equation these people need to solve for.
It’s almost certainly a bad thing to get a big refund because small budgetary changes can result in being unable to make ends meet which is extremely expensive in terms of fines
If they were budgeting, they wouldn't be living paycheck to paycheck. It makes the budgeting more challenging to give the government and interest free loan.
However, giving the government an automatic loan means that a land lord cannot charge that much more in rent, and the owner does get to spend it eventually, rather than throwing it into a rent pit
That left me with $325/month to pay for gas (luckily I loved only ~3 miles from work, so that didn't cost me much), food, and entertainment. $10/day for food wasn't terrible, but it's not exactly steak and seafood, either. And remember, that $10/day is supposed to include entertainment as well. Honestly, it wasn't really THAT bad. Buuuuut....
Minimum wage increases have happened, but rent has gone up too. That job would now pay $15/hr, ($2280 for 38 hours pretax, ~$1710 post-tax), but the rent on that exact same unit is now $1,200/month.
Assuming all other bills remained the same (they wouldn't), I'd now be left with only $285/month for food. And with over 15 years of inflation, that $285 is worth significantly less.
At that point, even with budgeting, I'd still be living paycheck-to-paycheck. When wages don't keep up with the cost of living, you can't budget your way out of it.
To make it worse, that kind of living starts to take its toll on mental health. You feel like you're constantly drowning. That $4 coffee or the meal at Taco Bell will be your only source of real joy between each paycheck.
If they were budgeting, they wouldn't be living paycheck to paycheck.
This is false. You simply aren't going to be able to budget your way into riches if you don't have enough money to go around. If you don't believe me, limit yourself to a minimum wage budget with no startup savings (and no borrowing off of others) and tell me how you are doing in a year... and then tell me how you'd survive the next few years on this. If minimum wage is too little, try setting the income at just over the mark you'd have for assistance.
Alternatively, if you have enough money to cover reasonable expenses, some fun, and have a little leftover, you don't really have to budget if you don't tend to spend lots. If I have enough money, I don't really have to budget.
Other replies are going hard on the initial assertion but missing the point, on which you're totally right. There is no reason where it's theoretically advantageous to give the government an interest free loan (overpay on your taxes) and get it back later in refund form, than to simply not do that and have the money in the meantime. Take the money you were giving to the government and put it in a savings account instead, and now you at least have minimal interest. (Hell, take it and put it in a safe and at least the government doesn't get to spend it on $thing-you-disagree-with-ideologically.) There's no difference in what you can do with untouchable money in the government's pocket vs. untouchable money in yours.
Whether you have the willpower to not touch it instead of increasing your food budget from $10 to $11 or whatever is a different story, and speaks to the mentality: if you never got the money in the first place, you can't be tempted to spend it.
I think there's some segment of folks that get snatched up into the weird false pretense that a modern day turbotax filing is less than (at worst, once one factors personal time cost in) a decent tax person even at one of the, shall we say, 'established turn and burns'[0]
That said, TurboTax did hit a specific level of 'eww' when I started seeing the refund option of a debit card (of course for some stupid fee that, if nothing else, provides some transparency to their kickback from the issuer).
I'm going to be doing what might be my last filing with them this year; it's easier for the purposes of history/other events but after that, it's gonna be my Fiancee's CPA.
Originally, I got 'started' when it was a desktop app only, and the user limit was very graceful, my parents and all of my siblings could benefit from that one yearly purchase...
Come to think of it, we should probably capture that date in the historical timeline of Enshittification.
And, yaknow, I'll ask my dad this weekend how he's doing his taxes this year. I'm honestly curious if he's finally fed up with their antics too... (It's a high bar; in the past he learned the basics of virtual machines to use some of his old-school software/tools, it's a beautiful level of curmudgeonry. OTOH my siblings have good CPAs.)
[0] - Not to be confused with some of the weird 'chop shop' Tax places I have seen around me in the past, sort of 'pop-ups' with a statue of liberty wearing person or 'wacky inflatable arm-flailing tube-man' to help drive business in.
Not shady, neither is it free, but about as close as you can get AFAIK for online filing. For what it is (a web forms app, with careful explainers), it's pretty good!
I've used tax pros and honestly, my finances are not complex enough to get a good benefit off the extra cost. I used H&R block one year, and really didn't think they knew any more about tax filing than I did. They got confused at all the same line items I did.
> I used H&R block one year, and really didn't think they knew any more about tax filing than I did. They got confused at all the same line items I did.
I mean... H&R Block is in some ways the Firestone of accounting. Sometimes there's a diamond in the rough of their 'regular' workers [0] but you never know what you're gonna get unless you happen to wind up in the right circumstances where you can build trust with one of their people that happens to stick [1]
[0] - Had a friend who could get one of H&R Block's folks to do the whole deed for 'non complicated'[2] starting with a pile of receipts/medical bills/etc and 90$ for people they liked, and yes they'd do their proper professional duty in the process. Frankly given the time investment that's a steal.
[1] - In my case, it was a guy at a local shop who had his WRX parked outside every time that was some level of manager. Always happy to give proper treatment, never afraid to say 'take it to the dealer' (i.e. more qualified people) if it was out of their comfort zone. Compare and contrast to a different shop, where after some 'changes' managed to mess up an oil change, and the 'fix' for the bad oil change... [3]
[2] - I want to be clear that non-complicated is not the trivial 'oh sure okay' here, they may or may not have had a hand in pointing out said friend's parent was doing some... 'minor some student loan fraud'. But if you had additional properties or other weird situations... If I remember they had their own sort of menu and everything. Very smartly done.
[3] - I had to re-replace a <6 month old timing belt in the process, but frankly the engine needs a rebuild now, it lost 2-5MPG from that one incident.
I was pretty sure when first seeing it that they'd already gotten in trouble for their last ads that used the word "free" a lot, and this was a very direct response to that... I guess that's just the final decision that's being reported on here.
How this ad got green lit, distributed to various mediums (tv ads, yt channel, social media), and nobody saying “wait, this is terrible” is unfathomable to me.
Well, I mean, that extends to pretty much all advertising nowadays. It's all completely awful. A while back I saw a CGI cookie hop up on a table and twerk its animated cookie ass at the camera to rap music, on public television, in order to sell cookies. How many people were involved in making something like that, and all agreed that this was how they wanted to sell cookies. The same mentalities are built in to most companies now, it's all downhill from here.
This is distressingly common in marketing. "0% APR financing for well qualified buyers." Where well qualified means 720 FICO score, lower debt to income, and lower payment to income ratios. These details are not even in the fine print of the ad. Then there's ads that show a picture of the high end version of a product with text "starting from <low price>!" (that corresponds to the base model).
Less than a 720 FICO score is “fair” with 720 being “good”. I’m sorry but “fair” doesn’t make you a well-qualified buyer IMO, so I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make.
Ever since I was a little kid I was always hearing those inspirational stories about how someone would get into an accident and then "The doctor told me I would never walk again" or "I wouldn't make it to my next birthday" and then the person made a miraculous recovery and "proved them wrong" or something along those lines.
It always seemed like an attention bias to me. Because for sure there are many more stories about the doctor being right and the person did never actually walk again. And we don't really pay attention to the stories about the doctor saying they would walk again. Those aren't interesting.
It can also be a bias with the triumphant person overestimating the negativity of the past. Like did the doctor really say you will never walk again, or that it will be tremendously difficult and unlikely?
People like an underdog story and will hold it with more attention than other stories in which the expectations met reality.
Is there anything to translate? Music is vibrations to begin with.