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.
