Death and taxes
Apr. 27th, 2007 10:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
altivoWell, in a rather loose sense.
Death: I killed off Windows ME today. It had been lurking on the sole laptop the library owns, and causing endless problems. To the point where the boss wanted to buy a new laptop "because that one is broken." No, it wasn't. The software was broken, very badly. I had to try to use it for something today, and reached the final straw. So, no more Windows ME. It's a Dell Inspiron with an 800 MHz processor and 256 Meg of RAM, so it's a bit marginal for XP, but it does work. And XP works much better on it than ME ever did, so it's an improvement. Oh, and all the things that seemed "broken" about it are gone. (Except, of course, for the fact that it runs Windows. I'd much rather put Linux on it, but the primary task it performs does require Windows since it involves a vendor who only supports Windows.)
Taxes: Well, census actually. We were "selected" to fill out the "American Communities Survey" from the Census Bureau. The questions were irritating in that you had to dig out your bills and tax forms from 2006 in order to answer some of them. Not answering is not an option. It's marked all over with statements that you are required by law to answer all questions, and that if you don't return the thing they will first call you on the phone, and failing that, send a federal agent to squeeze the answers out of you.
They claim to protect your privacy, yet they make you give your name and birthdate. I'm sure they'd ask for social security number except that would now be blatantly illegal. Some of the actual questions missed the mark. They wanted to know how we heat our home, but neither "geothermal" nor "other" was an option. We had to answer "electricity". I'm sure they'll freak when they see the amount of last month's electric bill ($166) because that isn't near high enough for electric heat. They want to know how many rooms are in your house, then give a long list of things not to count, including "half-rooms" whatever those are. Depending on how you look at it, our family room/dining room/kitchen could be all one room or two, or three. We called it two, though I'm inclined to call it either three or one.
They ask the market value of your home and land. No way am I answering that honestly. I gave them the assessed valuation from last year's tax bill. They want to know how much your taxes were last year. They also want to know a lot of nosy stuff about each resident of the house, including age, birthdate, full name, place of birth, citizenship, military service, income (in great detail, very hard to satisfy), languages spoken, nationality of descent, employment (or not, and if not why not, you lazy bastard) etc.
It obviously included enough information to lead agents directly to illegal aliens. It also asked enough questions to identify unmarried gay couples living together. The detailed income questions were inappropriate and unnecessary to the stated purpose of the survey. A general, single number would have sufficed. Names and birthdates are NOT needed in any way for statistical purposes, which is supposedly what this is for. Just age in years as of the date of the survey, gender, and marital status is more than enough.
Much of this could be compiled from IRS figures, actually, without violating any privacy issues. None of it, nor any of their stated purposes, justifies the threats for non-compliance or the demand for names and birthdates.
Death: I killed off Windows ME today. It had been lurking on the sole laptop the library owns, and causing endless problems. To the point where the boss wanted to buy a new laptop "because that one is broken." No, it wasn't. The software was broken, very badly. I had to try to use it for something today, and reached the final straw. So, no more Windows ME. It's a Dell Inspiron with an 800 MHz processor and 256 Meg of RAM, so it's a bit marginal for XP, but it does work. And XP works much better on it than ME ever did, so it's an improvement. Oh, and all the things that seemed "broken" about it are gone. (Except, of course, for the fact that it runs Windows. I'd much rather put Linux on it, but the primary task it performs does require Windows since it involves a vendor who only supports Windows.)
Taxes: Well, census actually. We were "selected" to fill out the "American Communities Survey" from the Census Bureau. The questions were irritating in that you had to dig out your bills and tax forms from 2006 in order to answer some of them. Not answering is not an option. It's marked all over with statements that you are required by law to answer all questions, and that if you don't return the thing they will first call you on the phone, and failing that, send a federal agent to squeeze the answers out of you.
They claim to protect your privacy, yet they make you give your name and birthdate. I'm sure they'd ask for social security number except that would now be blatantly illegal. Some of the actual questions missed the mark. They wanted to know how we heat our home, but neither "geothermal" nor "other" was an option. We had to answer "electricity". I'm sure they'll freak when they see the amount of last month's electric bill ($166) because that isn't near high enough for electric heat. They want to know how many rooms are in your house, then give a long list of things not to count, including "half-rooms" whatever those are. Depending on how you look at it, our family room/dining room/kitchen could be all one room or two, or three. We called it two, though I'm inclined to call it either three or one.
They ask the market value of your home and land. No way am I answering that honestly. I gave them the assessed valuation from last year's tax bill. They want to know how much your taxes were last year. They also want to know a lot of nosy stuff about each resident of the house, including age, birthdate, full name, place of birth, citizenship, military service, income (in great detail, very hard to satisfy), languages spoken, nationality of descent, employment (or not, and if not why not, you lazy bastard) etc.
It obviously included enough information to lead agents directly to illegal aliens. It also asked enough questions to identify unmarried gay couples living together. The detailed income questions were inappropriate and unnecessary to the stated purpose of the survey. A general, single number would have sufficed. Names and birthdates are NOT needed in any way for statistical purposes, which is supposedly what this is for. Just age in years as of the date of the survey, gender, and marital status is more than enough.
Much of this could be compiled from IRS figures, actually, without violating any privacy issues. None of it, nor any of their stated purposes, justifies the threats for non-compliance or the demand for names and birthdates.
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Death to ME
Date: 2007-04-28 04:36 am (UTC)Re: Death to ME
Date: 2007-04-28 10:59 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-04-28 12:51 pm (UTC)RE the census form: I'm wondering if I got one of these if I could shred it thoroughly and tell them we never got it. That happens enough in real life that they couldn't actually prove it wasn't true. Then I'd just not answer the phone--I do that already if I don't recognize the incoming number. I *heart* caller ID!
no subject
Date: 2007-04-28 01:44 pm (UTC)If you don't return the paper form, they call you by telephone. If they can't reach you by telephone, they start sending people to bang on your door. That's what it said in the letter I received last week "advising" me that the form was coming, and in the letter enclosed with the form. At least they did pay the postage to return the thing.
The questions about income were as bad as doing your taxes. They want all your income categorized by source, broken down into a dozen different types. The problem is, their descriptions are not good and Gary's in particular didn't fit any of their definitions. There was nothing about where you go for medical care or what it costs, of course, because the Bush administration doesn't care about that. The focus is entirely on issues that could be related to law breaking or business economics.
no subject
Date: 2007-04-28 08:30 pm (UTC)And you don't want to install Vista, aka ME2, on the machines? ;-)
I'm not a huge fan of Linux, but it has it's uses. When I build a new machine soon I intend to put XP on it though.
no subject
Date: 2007-04-28 11:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-04-28 08:51 pm (UTC)years. One reason I'm not exactly rushing to
jump into Vista. Though I've got some Linux
things lined up for the lappy. Ubuntu being
first.
As for the survey, we got that a few years ago,
and I answered with complete candor.
Hey, they know where you live, might as well
tell them how *coughs* poor you are in such a
*coughs* bad neighborhood.
no subject
Date: 2007-04-28 11:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-04-30 02:17 pm (UTC)Big Government colluding with Big Business.
*Pschyo Strings*
@.@
no subject
Date: 2007-04-30 02:22 pm (UTC)Supreme Court upholds right of city to take land by eminent domain to build a shopping mall.
Justice Department backs down on Microsoft settlement, lets Gates' company do whatever it wants because it's good for business.
All environmental protections repealed wherever they bother the energy industry or the timber industry.
And so forth. Some of these things are actually called "Making big government smaller." Now that's what I call @.@
no subject
Date: 2007-04-30 02:44 pm (UTC)us out for cheap labor in foriegn countries
for his own profits!
@.@
no subject
Date: 2007-04-30 03:36 pm (UTC)