Satellite phone subscriptions aren't cheap, but chucking a Baofeng in the car pre-programmed with some repeaters along your route (CHIRP can do this) is free.
This articulates something that feels quite truthful, but one has to take care not to assume that every sexual phenomenon is biological.
For example in the States, in matching tools like group dating events and dating apps, men typically outnumber women by a sizeable margin. One could ascribe this to biology (with women as the choosing sex, like we see in a lot of primates and other species). I had to reconsider this when I saw some pictures from a group dating event among Chinese international students at my university, in which the women outnumbered the men! I was told by a Chinese person this wasn't uncommon for such events in China. I found out later that group dating events in Japan are similar in terms of gender balance as well.
I would very much like to hear some hypotheses for the reasons for what seems to be a pretty big cultural difference. To me it casts a bit of doubt on the author's narrative of "women have it and men want it" -- in some cultures, it seems like women want it too.
A small gender imbalance can become greatly magnified. For example, in a hypothetical town of 100 hetero adults comprised of 55 men and 45 women, perhaps 40 women will decide to settle down with the best 40 men into happy committed relationships. The 15 remaining single men will be left to compete for the 5 remaining women. Here, a population-wide gender ratio of 55:45 turns into a dating-pool gender ratio of 3:1.
Blink 182 snuck a lyric into one of their songs that I think describes what's been happening in the American dating scene: "Nobody likes you when you're 23." People in college generally like dating other people in college, but after graduating, women tend to prefer to date someone a few years older than them who has their life a bit more together, an established career, might be a notch more mature, etc.
This leaves a permanent glut of guys in their early-to-mid twenties who nobody really wants to date, so they clog up all the dating apps and throw off the gender ratios. These guys should probably be pairing up with older women (where a similar glut exists), but for whatever reason, I suspect most younger men and older women aren't much interested in each other.
Have you tried this? Obviously, law of small numbers and whatnot, but as an early-20s male who's gone on multiple dates with older women, I repeatedly felt disrespected or ignored in conversation. It's as if I bored them. Some outright told me they prefer to date men older than them.
And maybe I'm boring! But when I date younger women this doesn't happen. So, in my experience, this does not work and I won't be trying again soon.
As I mentioned before, the dynamics can get weird. Things that someone in their early 20s occupy their thoughts with are often very different than someone in their 30s.
That said, we all figured out how to make the most of our time together, and the sex was really good. I’m not going to pretend like these were deep relationships — that was not what I was looking for, and I don’t think that was their focus either. The focus was mostly companionship and intimacy, and I think that we accomplished our goals on that front.
> but after graduating, women tend to prefer to date someone a few years older than them who has their life a bit more together, an established career, might be a notch more mature, etc.
This is one those things that's important to keep in mind. If we compared like for like a 20-something and a 40-something man, the 20-something many would probably do very well.
But a 40-something man have had 20 extra years to learn how to interact with women, gain experiences, gain education, advance a career, so it's rarely a like for like comparison.
I mean, I personally can't blame the women who rejected me when I was younger. I know exactly what I was like.
Of course some will have physically decayed, but the spread of womens physical preferences for men is pretty wide, and many men still look more attractive to a large proportion of women in their 40's than their 20's.
> This leaves a permanent glut of guys in their early-to-mid twenties who nobody really wants to date, so they clog up all the dating apps and throw off the gender ratios. These guys should probably be pairing up with older women (where a similar glut exists), but for whatever reason, I suspect most younger men and older women aren't much interested in each other.
This is also massively exacerbated by dating apps that have no interest in redressing the issue, by allowing womens match queues to build up to the point that most of the women you swipe on will never see your profile, and allowing people to keep swiping on huge number of people in one go.
E.g. my ex wife told me at one point that she'd once signed up for Tinder's premium service out of curiosity and found she had several thousand matches outstanding. It's in Tinders interest to keep showing women who keep getting swiped even as their queues grow large enough that they'll never work their way through those queues.
At the same time this number is massively artificially inflated also because those most struggling to get a match are incentivised to keep trying to match with a huge number of people.
If these apps cared about their users and only showed profiles to other users that didn't have a huge queue of outstanding matches, and also put caps on the number of outstanding/unseen swipes, it wouldn't improve the number of matches much, but it would likely increase the proportion of swipes that leads to matches by drastically reducing the number of swipes.It would also show users who are actually realistically available. Maybe it'd make more people widen their search criteria.
Of course the problem with this is that it runs completely counter to the interests of dating apps, which are best served by encouraging desperation to get people to pay for premium services.
I am building a dating app that prioritizes UX over short-term profitability. The roadmap includes this feature, matching users with people who are likely to respond and preventing users from getting too many or too few connections.
Good luck to you with that. I hope you succeed, but I also fear that it's a really tough one because the lifetime value of a dating app user is pretty low to start with (most people are only active for a few months, and many never come back - you can see this in the pricing structures for these apps where the per-month fees for premium services drop off drastically with longer periods, and where some offer lifetime memberships that cost only a few months worth of individual upgrades). On the upside, if you manage the PR well, pushing the angle that it's quality and connections that matters and that your competition are all borderline scams in how they pretend you have a chance with far more people than will ever see your profile might well get you enough attention to keep user acquisition costs low.
Just don't sell out to Match like everyone else seems to be doing...
Well, but that clears up for that cohort of guys, doesn't it? They get older (and hopefully get their act somewhat more together), and then the younger women are interested in them.
Yes, exactly - it's just an explanation for why it seems like there is a big pool of not-yet-married men chasing a small pool of not-yet-married women on dating apps. It's literally what's happening: as long as older men prefer to date women younger than themselves, and younger women prefer to date men a bit older than themselves, and there is a hard divide between the college and post-college dating worlds, single men will outnumber single women, and the dating app experience will be vastly different between genders.
Article author here (also I wrote that article a while ago and I don't remember if it's good or not)
In the China example, I'd guess there's other factors. Women do tend to compete and men tend to be choosers in some circumstances; the 'women as selectors' thing is a result of certain conditions that are super common, but not absolutely true always.
My dominant hypothesis here is maybe that "dating" in asian cultures is a prerequisite to something that benefits the woman over the man (e.g., more likely to end in marriage than sex). It's common to see this in very conservative cultures where sex before marriage is strictly forbidden; what a guy can look forward to going on a date is finding a woman to settle down with, which is less advantageous to him than in western cultures where he can have sex without commitment.
> It's common to see this in very conservative cultures where sex before marriage is strictly forbidden; what a guy can look forward to going on a date is finding a woman to settle down with, which is less advantageous to him than in western cultures where he can have sex without commitment.
Hmmm… interesting hypothesis, possibly directionally correct, but the details are off by quite a bit imho.
1. Neither China nor Japan are particularly conservative about sex, specifically in terms of sex before marriage.
2. The issue about what the hoped for outcome with dating is closer to accurate, but with caveats. If people, especially relatives, know about the date, then there will be non-stop pressure about marriage. Sometimes that pressure is hopeful and positive, and sometimes it is critical and negative. If it’s more of an anonymous date (in that family are in the dark), very common in the larger cities like Tokyo or Osaka, then there is much less pressure from family and (sometimes) friends.
3. Sex without commitment is trivially easy in both Japan and China, especially in cities. One has to pass the relatively low threshold of the woman’s anti-slut defense (hate to use this “red pill” term, but this is exactly what it is), which is usually as simple as treating the woman with at least a modicum of respect.
4. A lot of single women in Japan and China have two goals in dating. The first is the potential to meet someone who will provide them with equal or greater status than they currently have. Often time this is a very high barrier, since being an office worker or business owner while having minimal living expenses while living at home can be a pretty posh life. Second, when they realize that the pool of well-off, nice, fun men is relatively small, they start seeking sex dates more aggressively (and sometimes surreptitiously due to family).
5. From the guy’s side, dating can be tricky. Dating that leads to a path of marriage can get very expensive very quickly (courting, weddings, marriage, and kids can all be very expensive). Dating for sex/companionship is doable for the guys who are good at it, but there is that small issue of where. Again, casual dating can get expensive quickly. People get creative, and if you’ve lived in Japan or China you probably know what I’m talking about, but there’s nothing easy about it. Rarely as easy as bringing a woman back to your place, which is very common in the US.
I definitely think you are on to something. However, while I don't know about China, in Japan I do know that premarital sex is not stigmatized and even first-date sex is not unheard of. It's true that marriage is seen as a benefit to women in Japanese society (women face severe career barriers in Japan), however I am hesitant to paint it in terms of "women date/provide sex just so they can get married," given not only their attendance at matching events, but also the prevalence of host clubs, yumejoshi, and other symbols of female sexuality that don't seem to be as common in the West. Women don't get anything out of that type of thing other than fun.
Just looking at number of people from each sex in a group date scenario most certainly doesn't tell you much about the big picture in a culture.
In east asian cultures, there's a very strong pressure for females to get married and have children. In China, there's also cultural desire to have male children - to the point people will abort girls enough to make a lopsided distribution of 51.3% males vs 48.7% females (by comparison, US has 49.2% males vs 50.8% females). Coupled with increased female participation in the work force over the past few decades, this leads to many females having unrealistically high expectations for romantic partners, or rebelling against the notion of being involved in a romantic relationship at all. Another thing worth mentioning is that in east asian cultures, femininity is also greatly associated with homemaking skills like cooking. See for example the concept of Yamato Nadeshiko in Japan.
So for females there, there's a really complex dynamic of parents pressuring young women to marry (either because of old fashioned marital values or because they selfishly want grandchildren, or both), ideologies that men are the head of the household and/or the carriers of family legacy and conversely the idea that ideal women are good homemakers, contrasted with an unprecedented level of financial freedom and choice of partners for females.
If anything, I think looking at east easian cultures only reinforces the OP's argument that there is inherent lopsidedness in cultural values and that men and women behave in a myriad of ways that can be explained well by cultural perception of gender roles.
I’d compare birth rates of men to women. Comparing number of men and women existing isn’t super great. The number of women grows with age because men die younger for various reasons. In the USA, men outnumber women until age 40. Guess what ages men and women tend to look for relationships? Below 40.
Men are birthed more than women just naturally and exist in greater numbers in the world until about age 40. (Many men dying due to suicide and suicide related incidents which don’t get labeled as suicide)
You can look up the age breakdown[0]. For ages 20-30, there's over 110 males for every 100 females in China. That's 1 in 10 males that cannot physically get a female partner of similar age (and recall, we're talking about one of the most populous countries in the world). Point being: anecdata about group date events is dwarfed by population statistics.
Yeah, that's also a fair way to go. I suggested birth rates because it's easier to go with for people rather than qualifying everything but a bunch of adjectives.
It can be worse for individual cities as well - such as San Francisco - where the ratio is supposedly closer to 115-130:100 depending on how you slice the population. (e.g. if you select only for single people between 18-35 rather than including married couples in the stats)
If women in east Asia actively seek out partners because they feel pressured to get married, could it also be said that men in the West actively seek out partners because being a single man is seen as loserish or otherwise low-status? I'd buy this being a part of it. I also don't want to discount more intrinsic motivations too. Most people have a sex drive regardless of any obligations felt from society -- that is an undoubtedly biological component.
As someone who has lived in Japan and China, I can say that I have seen this happen.
I have also seen a similar phenomenon at Ivies (at the undergrad level) if you exclude the athletes, so it’s not even a race or national culture thing.
Imho, the short answer is that it is the way a large portion of that sub-population is raised - lots of study, very limited socialization (esp. wrt the males), very few positive male role models who are like them in home life or in popular culture.
Men do outnumber women on apps but I think you'll find it's actually very difficult these days to get men to attend dating events like speed dating even in western countries.
This article answers its own question in the rather insulting tone it takes. Why would men go to these events if the women who go there are dismissing most men as not "eligible"? Maybe it's true, but when that is the impression, it helps cement the stigma she describes.
It also, I think gets to the point that where women as described in the article often see thing like speed dating as a "girls' night out", to quote the article, to most men these kinds of events are purely functional. I would have considered going to speed dating events if I didn't find dates in other ways. But it's far down my list of things I'd consider, because it constrains the number of people I can interact with to a set of people where only a small number is likely to interest me from the outset. If your goal is to have a "night out" it might well be productive. If your goal is to meet someone to date, it's only productive if you struggle to introduce yourself and need a crutch to do so. And so you get the guys the article writer describes who have done this because introducing themselves is far out of their comfort zone.
I have no data to back this up beyond the anecdotal (ex. "Christmas cake" women stigma in Japan), but a possible explanation is ageism differences between the cultures. E.g. American men may be less age-selective than their Chinese or Japanese counterparts, which would naturally lead to gender composition changes in dating events that target people in demographics older than early 20s.
No, but I think what they're getting at is that since these events are usually over 30 anywhere, you will see a lot more women show up in cultures that consider that age "undateable".
The student dating event I described was among university students, so 18-22 age range. Japanese goukon are usually among the working crowd, but they're not exclusively for >30.
The Theory of the Disposable Male is central to any discussion on gender politics, the sex/reproduction marketplace, and practical feminism/tolerance in society. It almost never is considered because it is somewhat sympathetic to the male gender.
The theory is most applicable to animal populations, but researchers in this field do think the human race was subjected to the same phenomenon so our instinctive social behavior is still subject to it, and of course the biological economy/energy of male sperm and female eggs/wombs is the same as most mammals.
Online dating matches the tenets/predictions. My only complaint with it is that it doesn't really address societal structure in humans once they are raising children. It's mostly a theory that explains "single culture" and animals with shorter lifespans or less shared rearing of offspring.
So for this group meetup, let's look at whether men or women decide it's worth it to go to it.
In this group meetup situation, men and women will immediately "rank" their opposing peer group. Everyone does this.
Of course certain members of the opposite sex will often quickly be apparent at the tops of the rankings, the (yes, tiresome) "alphas". The difference comes down to how men and women act on those rankings.
The women know they can find a man if they settle. Disposable Male theory states that basically 70-80% of women successfully procreate. But they will "hold out" for a higher value male since they can always walk down their ranking and find someone to fertilize them.
The ratio of successful male procreation per the Disposable Male is in the 20-30% range. So 70-80% of males in biological times were "dead ends".
Women operate with a 50% "desperation differential". And the only way the numbers line up, is that the high value men are procreating multiple times. Thus lower value women will have the opportunity to procreate with "higher value" men, or can walk down their choice list until they find someone.
In a group dating situation, this will probably lend to 30-60% of men realizing quickly that none of the women are interested in them. At all. They'll all wait out for a higher value, or go somewhere else to try to find another high value.
The lower value men know that less numbers / options / context / immediate ranking will benefit their chances. So don't show up to group events where you'll be stack ranked immediately, or there's no point in investing the time.
Now, modern (mostly) monogamy really messes with the instinctual behavior. Men likely have a much better shot at procreating, and women need to compromise a bit more to find a mate.
But man, when it comes to Tinder and the like, it is full one alpha males attracting most of the interest from women, and women ignoring men at their level. The old okcupid pre-match data seems to corroborate this quite well.
This seems backwards -- anecdotally, it feels like the most politically active people I know are doing quite well for themselves. In contrast, those who are working harder to make ends meet seem more likely to be apolitical.
I was under the impression that spending your crypto required you to file and pay capital gains tax. If this is true, won't you have to have a line item for every single purchase you made with this card for the whole year on your schedule D?
Co-Founder of CoinTracker (https://www.cointracker.io) (YC W18) here. You're exactly right. We built software to specifically automate this crypto tracking and tax compliance process. We've partnered with Coinbase and TurboTax to specifically solve this pain point.
Makes me sad that they are further entrenching their tentacles in our tax system which further discourages the government from simplifying this process.
It's pretty well known that they lobby congress to keep the tax laws complicated to ensure their business.
The solution is less government and simpler taxes.
> But the success of TurboTax rests on a shaky foundation, one that could collapse overnight if the U.S. government did what most wealthy countries did long ago and made tax filing simple and free for most citizens.
If the system is vulnerable to exploitation, that’s not the fault of Intuit. They’re fixing inefficiencies in the market, and adding upsells (common for many companies in tech), is part of their business model.
I don’t get the hate of TurboTax if you’ve actually used it, since it’s incredibly simple and saves time and money (from my experience).
>If the system is vulnerable to exploitation, that’s not the fault of Intuit.
Sure, the vulnerability isn't Intuit's problem. But exploiting it is Intuit's problem.
>They’re fixing inefficiencies in the market, and adding upsells (common for many companies in tech), is part of their business model.
How are they fixing inefficiencies? If they simply wrote software I could see that. But they're lobbying for increasing inefficiencies. That's the opposite of fixing.
>I don’t get the hate of TurboTax if you’ve actually used it, since it’s incredibly simple and saves time and money (from my experience).
TurboTax has many dark paths and misleading sales pitches to bring people in with impression of free and prevent checkout without collecting money. Aside from that, their lobbying has created the mess that essentially requires 3rd party support to file your taxes.
It's not a game and a matter of hate, it's just a fact that filing your taxes is complicated because of Intuit.
Are they looking at solving the fact that spending appreciated "assets" will lead to a tax bill at the end of the year? Do they plan to sell extra to cover the gains, and then withhold them? If they don't and crypto collapses again, people might actually be out money at the end of the year for using their card right?
We support positions across exchanges, wallets, DeFi, and derivatives. Depending on your straddle situation, reach out and we'll find a solution for you. https://www.cointracker.io/contact-us
Most crypto users have custodial assets (e.g. those held on an exchange) which don't have a unique address. Therefore we need some identity layer to tie together a specific users transactions for tax purposes. That can be Google sign-in, Coinbase sign-in, throwaway email + password
I asked if I could pay with BTC and my bank passed it up until they got word back from Fanny Mae that it was okay so long as you can demonstrate X years of ownership. I think they made a public announcement about it. It was shortly after BTC hit its peak a couple years ago. Coinbase let me export something that satisfied the bank and government that I wasn't money laundering (I'd bought the BTC many years before for less than $10k with money for a bank account I still owned, so I could show the transactions there too).
For my taxes, Coinbase has a tool for exporting that calculates that sort of thing. You just select the time range and it gives you all the transactions and how much they appreciated from when you last bought that much.
It seems like most people go with a simple FIFO or LIFO strategy, and crypto transaction tools support usually one or the other or both. Tracking cost basis for specific coins is considerably less common and I'm not sure what tools off hand even support that - none of the major exchanges that I'm aware of.
Reporting a few thousand small capital gains transactions on a US Tax Return is feasible. If you exceed the import transaction limits in, say, TurboTax, you can enter and e-file the summary of your transactions, and print out and snail mail the 50 pages of the statement itself.
(I've done this before with Betterment, when a bunch of $10 deposits each turned into like 7-8 small lots that were a few dollars each.)
I did this with the Shift Card way back, which was the original card for Coinbase spending. It was a massive pain in the ass to explain the transaction history. I wouldn't be surprised if Coinbase has improved upon that experience, but to what degree I'd be curious about.
I don't particularly understand why everyone's happy to gloss over tax implications being undiscussed on things like this. Whether or not it's right (I don't believe it is), the fact remains that the average new user is not aware of this quirk of Crypto.
The taxable event occurs because the IRS sees crypto as property rather than a currency. Let's say you buy $100 worth of Bitcoin in the past. Now the value of your coins is $120.
If you decide to send $5 worth of bitcoin as payment for something, they consider that a taxable event. You sold X amount of bitcoin, which appreciated 20% value from when you bought it. That X amount was worth $4, now it is worth $5, so you would owe a tiny amount in capital gains tax on $1 you gained.
Edit: This exact same scenario happens for Foreign Exchange, but the government excludes most transactions under a certain amount because it's too complicated for travelers. Also, the rate of USD to EURO doesn't fluctuate as wildly as crypto can, so the gains are minimal anyways.
> The taxable event occurs because the IRS sees crypto as property rather than a currency.
The IRS doesn't make the tax law. How cryptocurrency transactions get taxed is a matter for legislatures and the courts.
Obviously, not everyone has the resources to fight the IRS, and your life will go much easier if your interpretation of the tax code matches that of the IRS. But the way you explain it here puts the cart before the horse.
IRS guidance aren't laws but they detail how the IRS is going to treat tax collection based on current law. At some point in the future Congress may classify crypto currencies as actual currencies such as the Yen, Euro, etc. at which point the tax laws about currency exchange would apply instead of capital gains on property.
The IRS doesn't make the tax law, true, but they are behaving consistently with the relevant laws; putting "currency" in the name of something doesn't define it as a currency.
Legislative action could of course change this, but until then you are probably tilting at windmills.
IANAL but tax is also levied on fiat currencies where similar profit/loss occurs. In that sense, the IRS is treating crypto like it treats other currencies.
Congress addressed this in 1986, the IRS is just administering duly enacted tax law:
You have to pay capital gains on bitcoin if you spend it, even if you don't convert it to fiat first.
e.g. buy $10 of coins, use same coins to buy a meal later, if the value of the meal is $20 (whether denominated in fiat or the equivalent bitcoin), you have a $10 capital gain.
Maybe Coinbase sets things up in such a way that the cap gains event is triggered only when the balance is paid off?
E.g. imagine I incur $10 USD on the card. From Coinbase's perspective, I just owe them $10 USD + maybe interest at the end of some fixed time period. I could pay them in USD or I could pay them in crypto. Since it's not mandated I pay in crypto, you can't really say I've "spent" my crypto until I use it to pay off my balance. In which case you only end up with 12 taxable events per year.
I'm sure there's some arbitrage opportunity I'm not accounting for, but it seems like this might work?
I wonder how smart this system is going to be — it’d be wise to have the rewards & purchasing happen on a stablecoin to avoid this. Then make users have to choose to then stash it somewhere they won’t draw from and trigger these events, if they want to “invest in a crypto”. It’d also be wise because coinbase can then charge their fees as they so do.
This is also fundamentally not so different from e.g. having spend vehicles with your brokerage. But the addressable market may be higher / different for coinbase which could cause a lot of headaches, like this one, if not carefully managed.
The transaction in the back end probably is just an internal transfer. You do a one off transaction say 1000 and you spend from that. So you only did a single asset sale
It's one of those things that gets complicated pretty quickly. Essentially, for every transaction you make you have to determine if you made a profit or a loss with your crypto. The purchase date of the crypto you're converting into USD matters because you need that for short-term vs long-term capital gains. This problem also gets worse if you buy crypto at regular intervals, like I often do, because now you have different gain/loss potentials in the same transaction.
Sure, a program can calculate this for you, but it does make filing more complicated. You'll probably have a very long list of items on your 1099.
I day traded for a while, and got an IRS fine.
If you simply accept they are right, then pay nothing will happen.
Their fines aren’t extra ordinary, and they are very much willing to help you come into compliance.
For example, if you do have software that can output all your crypto trades, they will accept that in an audit, and likely only fine you for what you got wrong and not merely not following procedure.
They take the interpretation of tax laws and your personal situation that is most favorable to the IRS, though. This can amount to tens of thousands of dollars that you pay them needlessly.
I missed the back of a capital gains worksheet once when reporting my taxes. Got a bill for $11,000+, between the missing stock sales and an education credit my wife took that the IRS was suspicious of. After actually tracking down the stock sales in question, reporting their cost basis (the IRS had assumed $0, because they don't have it so why not assume the value most favorable to them?), and refiguring the taxes, the ~$7K in tax liability had declined to $60. Then because that was so low, I got the ~$2K penalty waived. Then I produced documentation to show my wife was eligible for the education tax credit, and there went another $2K. By the time I had a full amended 1040, the $11K was down to $60, so I sent them a check for $60 along with all my documentation and got back a nice letter saying the matter was closed and no further tax was due.
Also be very wary of the CA FTB. They don't send you notices if you owe money; instead, they just record it as a debt, charge interest and penalties on it, and then send you a bill for the full total when the statute of limitations is about to expire. If you're aware of any problems in your federal tax return and you owe anything to California (which may occur even if you're not a CA resident - they tax stock granted at a CA job even if you later move out of state), make sure to pro-actively get in touch with them with an amended return and any money owed.
> They take the interpretation of tax laws and your personal situation that is most favorable to the IRS, though. This can amount to tens of thousands of dollars that you pay them needlessly.
I agree 100%.
Though, I think that most people hear stories about a multi-thousand dollar tax notice, and become terrified that the IRS will force them to pay that money.
However, as your story illustrates, the notice they give is the worst case scenario. If you have any kind of documentation, you can add that amend your return and it'll be accepted by the IRS drastically reducing your tax bill.
This is made easier, because you're working with a real live human being on the other end---one who at least in my case, I could call and ask questions like 'what do documentation do you specifically need to see for X?' instead of guessing as is the norm for non accountants working within the complex tax code.
But if they find posts like this, they won't be as kind. They care a lot about intent. And intent to flaunt rules is quite different than accidental noncompliance.
I think they are lenient if you try to comply, but fail because of the complexity of the rules. Even if you make a post that essentially says "I won't try harder, because the rules are difficult to understand" isn't Mal intent; but an admission that your actions weren't accidental.
This is actually reassuring, even if from a rando internet commenter. I have tens of thousands of crypto trades from the last few years, most of which are legs of complicated straddle positions. Spent dozens of hours trying to get the data straight for reporting but in the end I just put a single line item on my Form 6781 which captured the correct PnL (which was a very, very modest number). If I do get audited I can produce all of the trade data, so I’m thinking I’ll be okay.
For a few thousand bucks, they're not going to make an example of you. It's not worth it to them. If you're cashing in 6 figures to buy luxury cars, they might, I agree. You go after the big fish, not the small fries.
It’s actually the other way around surprisingly. The big fish tend to have resources to fight the IRS in court; which becomes expensive for the IRS. Hence the IRS goes after the not so rich since they rarely put up a fight.
That article describes lower income people taking an earned income tax credit. That sort of thing sounds very simple to find and is low hanging fruit. Most of it is probably a simple mismatch.
Your casual bitcoin spender is not going to be like that at all. Their under reported transactions will be difficult to even find. If you do find them, their true cost basis will be difficult to determine.
To my understanding, the GPL does not require acknowledging the original author's contributions any more publicly than the Apache license (used by the project). The Apache license already requires preserving the copyright notice, which AWS did. I think the issue is the author wanted a more public acknowledgement of his work, which is a very fair ask. As far as I know, no license requires this (and, I believe such a license would be GPL-incompatible).
In my view, no license can enforce being a good citizen of the open source community. In the embedded space, I've seen vendors bound by the GPL follow it in letter but not in spirit (ie, delivering unusable code with a ridiculous toolchain), or just straight up ignore it (what are we going to do, sue?). On the flipside, good citizen vendors frequently contribute upstream even when they don't have to.
My understanding is that GPL doesn't force the user to do _anything_ except license any derived work under GPL. It specifically doesn't put _any_ limits on what someone can do with that code precisely because doing so would limit your freedom (with the exception of the licensing issue which is required so as to not deprive _other_ people of the freedom to do what they want with the code.)
It specifically does not require you to pay homage to the original author. The point is to ensure that the code remains free, the original author has no say over what happens to it.
That's true, but wanting acknowledgement in some specific way is pretty frivolous compared to wanting changes made to be available under the same license so the fork doesn't maintain an incompatibility/add-on advantage that can't be fixed.
Whether the GPL is good enough for that depends on whether end users are recipients of binaries and therefore would be entitled to the source under GPL.
> On the flipside, good citizen vendors frequently contribute upstream even when they don't have to.
I once discussed that with my employer and they agreed: it's almost never a good idea to fork a product in order to fix bugs, since you will have to continouiusly maintain the fork. If you get the fix upstream, you'll get the maintenance for free. So this often is not out of generosity, but rather in their own interests.
BSD and MIT licenses can be used with the advertising clause, and you can add anything you want. Similarly, you can add clauses to the GPL if you want.
Licenses are contracts. You can add to the contract that people who fork must do star-jumps every morning, if you feel like; but you have to state it upfront.
AFAIK, the related question of whether an OSS license for a scientific software can require that people using the software cite the paper(s) describing the software, has been answered in the negative. You can ask nicely, but you cannot demand it under any of the existing OSS licenses.
I'd like to see the p-value on states' political lean vs the size of their economy. Looking at the top 10 state economies on your list, 3 are swing states and 3 are red states, leaving only 4 (far from "pretty much all") as blue states. Even looking 10 states further down, into the top 20, adds 5 red states, 3 swing states, and only 2 blue states.
Your framing of the list is more than a bit disingenuous. 4/5 of the top economies are blue. 6/10 are blue, 1/10 is a swing state, and 3/10 are red (1). When you dive a bit deeper, you can also see that all 3 red states border much bigger and richer blue states (Utah -> Colorado, Idaho -> Washington/Oregon, Arizona -> California). Perhaps a better way is to break it down by district (2). If you look at the house of representatives and sum up the GDP by party, democrats account for ~$10T and republicans account for ~$6T.
If you look at quality of life indicators instead of economic strength, California certainly falls more than a bit but the red/blue divide grows even larger (1). From purely a quality of life standpoint, 8 of the best 10 are blue and 8 out of the worst 10 are red.
Washington has a similar law, and a referendum to repeal it was on the ballot last year (I-1000/R-88). It was narrowly defeated (ie, the law was not repealed). Interestingly, according to Ballotpedia, there were many newspaper editorials in favor of repealing the anti-discrimination law, but only one against (in the WSJ [1]), and it also makes mention of the issue of Ivy League admissions.
Sadly, I think you are right. All reasoning starts with postulates that you cannot prove. For ethics and politics, these axioms are our emotions and values. Two people who have a different set of values can't have a logical argument because they're using entirely different systems of reason.
