For almost 70% of US taxpayers this is the case. Free of charge tax payment. You literally type in your address and other info along with your w2(these days many w2s have codes where you only have to type in a number and it fills the whole thing in).
Otherwise we're just talking about state taxes which the federal government has no control over.
I expect to see this on some Facebook/reddit post, but on HN it is depressing to see how many people don't realize that what this comment describes has existed for decades.
On the contrary. Free-file does not let you "literally type in your address and other into along with your w2." You have to first choose a third-party tax preparer based on your qualifications (it's not the same across the board). Then you have to remember your password, or create an account. Then you have to hope the preparer's service puts you in the free package, while navigating through a site designed to get you to pay more for things you don't need. Often, you'll have to decline to upgrade multiple times, and it is downright annoying, if not confusing, as to how to do that. And if you do choose the free option, the preparer will not pull in your wages automatically, despite Intuit and others building systems that could (but don't) do this. No, the proposed system has not existed for decades. It has never existed. And as long as we keep listening to Intuit and the like, it will never exist.
Generally employers figure out who left the bad review and threaten legal action to the person who made the review. It isn't Glassdoor that removes the review but the person who wrote it.
If anything your comment speaks to the weird paradox of who is responsible for a corporation's actions. Is it the shareholders? Is it the CEO? Is it the employees? Is it the board? Is it the customers?
It almost ends up that there are so many people with a thread of responsibility that everyone involved has someone else to blame. Resulting in there being no one to blame.
> It almost ends up that there are so many people with a thread of responsibility that everyone involved has someone else to blame. Resulting in there being no one to blame.
They can claim this, but if everyone is responsible, everyone is responsible. If this structure is the case, everyone shares in a little bit of the claim. And then you get into collective action ideas, like recycling persay, where only by many people doing it is there an impact. Except in this case, everyone being complicit means a large negative impact.
I do also think that regardless, the people that allowed such a system of non-responsibility to exist, by whatever means, are inherently more responsible. Especially when they have the power still to change the system and choose not to. This then points to Zuck and other higher ups who kept steering the ship forward and refused to change course. No, Zuck's "omg I like privacy now" PR show does not count as changing course.
Tobacco and Facebook really are a good parallel. The top level leadership knows what they are doing. The rank and file employees take orders but are responsible still to an extent, particularly if they have other employment options. The shareholders are simply greedy investors who value profit over societal effects.
It's all subjective in that most people who want to draw or paint, likely have completely different ideas of what being good at that is.
"Drawing from the right side of the brain" is basically just a brain hack to allow a person to essentially trace what is in front of them. To some people that might be the goal. To make a reasonably accurate copy of what is in front of them. For others they may want to be able to draw an accurate picture of something from their head. Others may want to create wild stylistic abstractions. The original post referenced impressionism. In that case a more informed knowledge of color and composition might be more helpful.
Personally, as someone who has spent my entire life drawing(and a chunk of it painting) I cringe at that advice to learn from that book. I have read it and it will definitely help someone to render and accurate version of a photograph or object in front of them. But it really boils down to a shortcut as opposed to fundamental learning. Its like teaching math with just a series of steps to get the answer without teaching the underlying fundamentals of what is happening. In the short term you'll test well, but in the long term your growth will be stunted if you do not also learn the concepts involved.
Hope that is a bit more clarification. And with all that said, for some people that book might be wonderful. I do think it is well written and I did enjoy it and I imagine others will as well. Its a fun read and set of exercises. Just wanted to give you a bit more perspective on the opinions presented.
With that said, the general advice given in what you are replying to is way over the top. No one needs to spend 6 months drawing cones in space. That smells like your typical exaggerated internet advice that tends to prevent people from taking the first steps.
>"Drawing from the right side of the brain" is basically just a brain hack to allow a person to essentially trace what is in front of them.
I really don't agree with this sentiment mostly due to the way it is voiced. Yes, the core of "drawing on the right side of the brain" is learning to see objectively and draw what you see. I wouldn't call that a "brain hack" or say that is "essentially tracing" what's in front of them (since "tracing" is kind of a dirty word in art context). Even if it were, that by itself is a very valuable thing to a lot of people, since a lot of styles of drawing and painting boil down to essentially just that, whether it's drawings of nature, portraits, or still lives.
I would say that learning to see is a fundamental drawing skill and this book teaches you valuable things by forcing you to stop and consider what things actually look like.
Of course, that by itself isn't sufficient, but it doesn't need to be. Nobody is suggesting that someone use this book as their only resource. But I do think it's a good introductory book for people who have very little to no experience drawing.
Agreed. I'm a pretty solid artist who doesn't learn well from others, and I'll still praise the book. It had another lesson in it that I never see mentioned, one that was expanded on in Drawing on the Artist Within. Our mind has task managers that constantly assess what we're doing. They do scheduling, handle cost benefit analysis, etc. For someone who doesn't already have the right aptitudes, this can lead to a nagging voice in the back of your mind telling you that you aren't doing a good job, this is boring, you're wasting your time. Getting people to use some simple brain hacks to stop listening to their preconceptions and just draw what they see can bypass these issues long enough for some people to see that they're being their own worst enemy. It isn't a good book to teach you how to draw. It's there to help make sure you don't give up the moment you start.
I wonder if you can help me understand this better. Why does a specific private university need let in the smartest or most capable students? What does that have to be their goal or they are unjust? Why can't they have different reasons and goals when building their student body? I understand things like racism and other forms of bigotry. But what's wrong with adding some students that will bring in the perspective of the super wealthy? Not to mention the significant additional funds it will provide for everyone else?
It feels like having a purely merit based population of students would create a very stagnant and dull environment.
Well, they don't - but then they'll eventually get the reputation of being a party school rather than the prestige that goes with outstanding academics.
It feels like having a purely merit based population of students would create a very stagnant and dull environment.
'This university sucks! Everyone here is a nerd.'
OK, you probably did not mean it that way but I can't resist having a little fun with this. If all you want to do is shake things up, why not just draft random working class people via lottery? For extra amusement, make them go even if they don't want to. True, we would not learn anything about the perspective of the super wealthy, but they already have billboards and TV stations to inform us of their opinions.
No, it's just typical Twitter/Facebook era reactionary writing. The author is likely in some type of bubble, probably behavioral science, possibily behavior nutrition, and feels an artificial need to right the wrongs of an algorithmically generated appearance of a wrong on the world. In this case, that people are not as aware of behavioral science as the author and others in the bubble the author consumes their media in.
I typically don't like to read into the motivations of articles (or people's actions for that matter) and I take their words as an independent object. Given the article has a logical flow with plenty of high quality citations, I'd say his thesis of "willpower is ill-defined" is a valid statement.
EDIT: The author is an Assistant Professor of Clinical Psychiatry at Columbia University, whether or not that affects your view of the article is your prerogative.
My rule has always been: "write down the entire manual process". Follow the steps and do a deployment and time it. Do you have that much time? Are you likely to make an error? If not, just do it manually. If so, break out the easiest parts and automate that. Then reassess.
Automation should follow the same rule as other things in a business. Only automate when it becomes painful not to. Or if it is trivially simple to.
Reminds me of an article I saw sometime back on HN: "Manual work is a bug" (https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3197520). Just like you, the author's advice is to go iteratively, with the first step being documentation. As documentation improves you act more as a cpu running instructions, at which points automation becomes clearer, and so on. Not everything can or should be automated, but we definitely could do more.
I find it interesting that in other building projects, like in construction, almost all of the pressure and responsibility for meeting deadlines is placed upon the project management. Not the ones doing the direct labor.
The reason for deadlines in software, they way they are used today, is simply to get more hours out of a week from a software developer. Unlike in construction, software developers do not get paid hourly, nor do they get overtime pay. Abitrary micro deadlines coerce developers to work extra hours which makes their cost per week for amount of work to go down.
In construction, if they made up an arbirary micro deadline that was too short, the workers would get overtime pay at 1.5x their normal rate. Plus the additional hours. So for them, a too short deadline makes their cost per week for amount of work to go up.
We debate endlessly about all these estimates becase we're all pretending its about things that its not. Its almost completely based upon getting more hours per week per developer, as it makes the labor less expensive.
I'd also be curious about the criteria for "abuse" and "bullying". I imagine there are technical definitions but I did not see any in the abstract.
I've found there is massive deviation between what co-workers I've worked with define those personally as. To the level where one might consider a behavior helpful and uplifting and another would consider that identical behavior abusive and emotionally crushing.
Hint: if a worker perceives it as bullying, it probably is. It’s the responsibility of those in charge not to behave that way. The fact that people exhibit variance is part of the job of being a good manager.
Bottom line: if you’re being described as an abusive boss, you’re bad at your job. And you don’t get to take credit for the amazing work that may be being done below you by people who are professionals despite your behaviour.
Yeah, that Wolfram clip sounds like an exasperated boss dealing with some people who aren't 100% aware of his expectations.
Wolfram doesn't at any point (at least while recording) make it about the team members themselves, just the work they've done.
I've had a bunch of conversations like these with a boss of some kind, so I know how awkward and unpleasant it is, but it's also an opportunity to learn a bunch of stuff.
> Some people are a whole lot more fragile than others.
A slightly more charitable way to phrase this might be “Some people prefer to be treated as professionals, with dignity and respect.”
I think what the poster above you was trying to get across is, part of a leaders role is to distinguish what works best for their different team members. While some people may enjoy being treated less than respectful, others may not.
> A slightly more charitable way to phrase this might be “Some people prefer to be treated as professionals, with dignity and respect.”
You've just proved my point - what I might consider "handling a fragile ego with kid-gloves", you would consider to be "handling professionally with dignity and respect". It's all very subjective.
I think we would agree that a company's leaders need to be consistent and clear where they think the line is, and keep an eye on performance levels to determine if they've made a mistake.
Here are my scribbled notes while listening to this just now
* wolfram sounds reasonable - a bit of a disconnect (lack of structure/procedure) between boss & employees.
* Lack of high-level process. (for documenting)
* Employees should have done the docs as part of the deliverable - and may have needed more support/training/guidance, and not have realised the extent this was required - maybe a managerial failure?
* Docs were a mess - should ... lack of workflow to produce the docs - managerial failure?
* Employees seem a bit clueless.
* doing docs at all - fucking genius idea! and they have a docs team.
By 'managerial failure' I mean wolfram's.
So, assuming this review was typical, not a carefully chosen one designed to give a good impression, then given the bosses I've had to work for I'd say anyone who thinks that was 'bullying' needs some serious fucking life experience. I would be really grateful to have someone who didn't explode into anger, patronise, shout, ask for far too much (mucho free overtime Edit: entirely unpaid), disregard advice based on my 20 years experience in DBs because boss read a book and misunderstood it, expected (gasp!) actual documentation to be part of the deliverable...
Fuck, I'm seriously angry that anyone could consider this unreasonable. He was anything but. How could anyone think that?
disclaimer, I've no link to wolfram or any of his products or companies or affiliates.
I'd be extremely happy to work for him after this.
(further disclaimer, I'm not the easiest/brightest person to work with so I don't mind getting yelled at when I deserve it, but very often I don't)
A lot of people commenting about this are talking about sensitive people. Although I would never admit to this publicly I am a sensitive person. Getting chewed out in an aggressive tone, getting yelled at, or chewed out for extended periods of time can significantly impact my productivity in spite of my efforts to toughen up. In the workplace I would be that guy after 24:00 who is still diligently accepting feedback but who you can detect the stress levels of due to the length of the feedback and Wolfram's increasing irritation.
Holy shit though people calling the above video bullying have no idea. There's no hint of sadism. There's no hint of using aggression as a persuasive tool. No hint of coercion. He's just irritated and there are visible signs of restraint and attempts to mediate this irritation.
> Although I would never admit to this publicly I am a sensitive person
you say it as if it's a weakness but why? Rhetorical question, but a valid one.
> Getting chewed out in an aggressive tone, getting yelled at, or chewed out for extended periods of time can significantly impact my productivity
Mine too! That stuff can cut deeply; don't imagine it washes off me just because I can usually handle it. I've been left literally shaking after someone's had a go at me, and it has added to my long-term mental health problems. It affects my work very negatively - it deteriorates. I remember wanting to punch myself in the face on the train on the way home I was so upset, less than a year ago. It should not happen.
> in spite of my efforts to toughen up
I really do not know if that's something a person can do to themselves. Or should? I don't mind if I fuck up and get it in the neck but if I get it in the neck cos someone's rowed with their BF last night then I shouldn't have to deal with it at all. But that's life I suppose.
There is such a thing as oversensitivity. Something that makes me persue the mildest workplaces working mostly with a small familiar team. If I get tougher I get more oppertunities. So I work to get tougher so I can get what I want.
> if a worker perceives it as bullying, it probably is
I think it's actually dangerous to automatically judge yourself based on how individual people perceive you without further discussion or investigation.
If your peer group or your friends or people you respect enough that they can tell you the truth are fairly consistent in their analysis of the situation, then yes, listen.
If an individual thinks you're bullying them, it's certainly appropriate to inquire and empathize and agree with them if you choose.
But to default to the assumption that someone else's judgement of you is correct is a quick way to lose touch with your own beliefs.
> Bottom line: if you’re being described as an abusive boss, you’re bad at your job.
There is such a thing as highly over-sensitive people. There are people who suffer from things like high paranoia, and their paranoia will often be directed at any authority figures in their life. I think you should have left things at "probably".
This is likely true, but it does not negate the notion that some people are very sensitive.
For example, you've ever played on a competitive sports team, or were in the military, you may be desensitized to some things that some may consider aggressive.
Cultural issues are important as well: some cultures argue, others do not. Some cultures vocalize objections, some do not. Some are direct, some indirect.
Germans and Dutch are really direct - their candor may be perceived as harsh by some. That said, they're also very emotionally calm.
I grew up 1/2 Irish/Scottish in a big family, my god man did we argue (and still do). But it's just arguing, it doesn't mean much. I'd call it 'emotive verbalization' and there's no name calling or anything.
Often someone can be loud and direct, and it seems terse, but if you actually listen, they might not be condescending, name calling or anything. It just feels that way.
Some people are also simply not used to actually being held accountable. A boss who suddenly draws some hard lines ... this may make some feel uncomfortable.
Some people confuse negative articulation of work as an insult i.e. "this is sht" might be interpreted as "you are sht" when it's not.
None of this remotely excuses actual bullying - I'm just saying there's a lot of grey and context.
So if someone is constantly threatening, name calling, publicly admonishing, being unfair, demeaning, inconsistent, derogatory, digging into personal issues - this is bullying.
But being demanding, loud, assertive, and sometimes being angry (so long as it's not directed at anyone) - this may or may not be bullying.
More poignantly - the article does woefully lack information about specific kinds of bullying behaviour, that's in fact the very first thing on my mind as I read it. This is really subjective stuff, it needs to be spelled out.
Bullying isn't that difficult. It has a definition. It's not momentary anger or a general outburst or even a persistent bad temper. Bullying is a persistent pattern of behavior directed at a specific person for the purpose of intimidation or coercion or establishing power over the person.
A supervisor can be generally unpleasant, impatient, lacking empathy, and demanding and not be a bully.
I think the word "bullying" is too amorphous to be useful. It would be more helpful to break down specific behaviors that describe the interactions between bosses and employees using those words. Accessible? Transparent? Consistent? Those a just a few that spring to mind.
If you are being literal when you say "a worker" then that is an outrageous claim. Workers aren't magically better than managers at managing relationships, they misread situations as well.
If you mean "[the workforce as a whole] perceives bullying" then yeah, probably. If two+ people quit citing "bullying" then there is possibly a problem. Three+ and it is likely.
https://www.irs.gov/filing/free-file-do-your-federal-taxes-f...
Otherwise we're just talking about state taxes which the federal government has no control over.
I expect to see this on some Facebook/reddit post, but on HN it is depressing to see how many people don't realize that what this comment describes has existed for decades.