deathmtn

Finished the taxes! I have to say, they're not really much more work for me to do "by hand" (using the IRS's Free Fillable Forms, which does math for you) than to do with TurboTax.

Mostly, it's gathering documents that's the hard part, and most of the document gathering is necessary for deductions. However, if you are not a home owner or a really massive philanthropist, your itemized deductions are really unlikely to total higher than your standard deduction, so you can just skip all of that.

If you are comfortable with numbers, and you have a little breathing room in your life, doing taxes without tax software might be worth trying! When you do, you get to understand the structure of taxes a little better, and you don't give money to Intuit, which uses that money to lobby politicians to keep taxes as complicated and onerous as they can make it.

18 checks today.

I absolutely hate that you have to go to YouTube for certain things. Refusing to do so means basically not participating in sharing videos on the Internet. All the more reason that its really dangerous recommendation system should be regulated.

A work colleague posted this saxophone cover of Decisive Battle II from Octopath Traveler. It's really good! And I have never played Octopath Traveler.

I always think Decisive Battle as being the name of this song from Final Fantasy VI, but as he pointed out, there turn out to be many decisive battle themes in JRPGs. And they all have a certain tempo and up-front bass line and arpeggios kind of thing going.

Facebook employees ’embedded’ in Trump campaign digital media operation

I actually didn't know this; I always want to remember this.

John Naughton on YouTube recommendations favoring extremist propaganda.

What’s going on? How did many Germans become so worked up about a street brawl? This question intrigued Ray Serrato, a Berlin-based digital researcher who first noticed it when his wife’s uncle showed him a YouTube video that claimed the rioters had been Muslim refugees. The video was cheaply produced and uploaded by an obscure fringe group and yet it had had nearly half-a-million views – far more than any legitimate news video of the riots. How was this possible?

So Serrato started digging, looking for information on every Chemnitz-related video published on YouTube this year. What he found, according to a New York Times report, is that the platform’s recommendation system consistently directed people toward extremist videos on the riots — then on to far-right videos on other subjects. “Users searching for news on Chemnitz would be sent down a rabbit hole of misinformation and hate. And as interest in Chemnitz grew, it appears, YouTube funnelled many Germans to extremist pages, whose view-counts skyrocketed.”

On the Ezra Klein podcast, Zeynep Tufekci, about 12 minutes in, has the best explanation about why "but if people are consuming it, then that's what they want" is wrong. Basically, there's things our "rat brains" (my phrasing) desire that aren't what we want as a whole. For example, people that can't stop playing a slot machine do not necessarily want to spend their time that way.

The grim consistency of Bolt Thrower is what I need when I feel like we are approaching a cascade of misfortune, due to age and politics.

Back in a doctor’s office in mid-July, she laid out everything she was feeling, and everything she knew. Becky had a kinesiology degree. She never went to an appointment unprepared. She wrote everything down, she asked lots of questions.

That day, she met with a radiologist. She was not due for a scan, and she was not given one. Instead, she received the vague assurance that they were going to “keep an eye” on her. The doctor said there was “nothing suspicious,” and her regular oncologists refused to see her because they deemed it unnecessary. A few months later she was able to see her chart. Of that visit, someone had written: “Rebecca continues to be paranoid.”

Kate Beaton writes about doctors not listening to her sister, who died of cancer. These doctors seem lazy and arrogant, which is common. It is horrific to see the effects of that attitude in a life-or-death situation and with women — who we are taught are more dismissible.

Oh, yeah, zero social media checks today! I just have to be doing engaging stuff all day. So simple amirite

Post-apple-picking, we met up with some friends who have a tall two-year-old. Our guy is a short four-year-old. So, they looked roughly the same height. There's a lot of development difference between a four- and two-year-old. Speech complexity and toilet training come to mind.

But not a lot of it has much bearing on short-term hangouts! They pointed at planes and ponds, climbed onto things, did some jumps, and just ran together. I was mildly surprised by how compatible they were, but if you think about it, you do a lot of the same stuff outdoors with your friends for fairly extended periods as kids.

We went apple picking. I never really understood why people went apple picking; there couldn't really be that many apple connoisseurs that cannot be appeased by a grocery store.

Farms that offer apple picking are more like agriculture theme parks. They offer several attractions, one of which is picking apples off of trees. The others are things like:

- Tractors rebuilt into playground structures
- Goats, alpacas, donkeys, and sheep
- Cider donuts
- Grilled foods
- Pumpkin zones to walk through
- Hay bale pyramids
- Tractor-shaped pedal carts
- Hay rides (rides on carts with a few bales of hay in them pulled by tractors)

14 social media checks total today. I think that's decent. One way to cut down is to absorb the idea that I only need to check one account at a time, instead of being like, hey, it's checking stuff time, let's go nuts!

The guy asked why I put mango in the fridge, and I said that it would go bad and referred back to our previous experiences with mold.

The guy mentioned that if you left ice cream out for a hundred years, that mold would grow on it, and we'd have to throw it out.

I agreed, but much like in our talks about bacteria, I wanted to push back from an absolutist view of mold, so I threw in, but some mold is good. Then, I gave the example of penicillin, the only good mold I know of.

And followed up with, but most molds are bad. The guy agreed and said that the police would catch them because they're bad.

I felt I had to throw in, but some police are bad. He replied, why are they bad?

Oh, man.

I came up with something like, some of them think that anything they do is not bad because no one ever tells them that it is bad. Then, he thought about it and said, the good police have to catch those police!

Indeed, they should. I didn't bring up their mafia-like code that prevents that.

I really do think that early heroizing of police does cause some problems (and creates work for parents). The guy is currently really into Paw Patrol. The leader, of course, is a police dog. (Also, as leader on a kid hero team, he has the least personality.)

Once in a while, we go into open houses just to see what the insides of other people's houses look like. I passed one on the way back from getting a coffee on North Cambridge, so I popped in. It was an apartment building. Another guy came in with me.

As we got to the unit, the other guy walked past a bit to look down the hallway. The real estate agent, this elderly White lady said, "Excuse me, sir! Are you here for the open house? That is not the seller's property!"

I looked around, whoa, it was a tiny place. About 500 square feet, according to the info sheet, which had no price. It was clean; it was in good condition, but about what you could expect for 500 square feet.

The only price in the info sheet was the assessed value, which was somewhere around $268K, I think? Which seemed reasonable for the area, sadly.

I asked the real estate agent if that was the asking price, and she indignantly stated, "It never is!"

OK, guy.

The actual price was $449,000. For 500 square feet. That is fucked up. This is the point we've gotten to here. We really need to make other places more desirable to live by getting public transportation out there. (I also have other rants about this, but I'll save it because I've taken an overly long break from taxes at this point.)

Charming real estate agent asked, "Do you have any questions?" I started "Yes—" but then she hushed me and said, "No, you" pointing to the other guy that came in with me.

Then, I just left since really, this was all I needed to know, and possibly more than I needed to know.

She followed me down the hall to apologize and explained that she didn't mean to be rude, but that other guy made her nervous earlier.

That other guy, incidentally, had dark skin, and was possibly Middle Eastern or South Asian. He was a mild regular dude behaving like any other open house visitor.

She also clutched my arm while explaining this, which was weird. Was it some kind of power move?

Anyway, maybe there were other factors that could explain her behavior, but mostly likely, she's just another racist. It sucks to be treated suspiciously when you're just doing what everyone else does.