Doing the next step of the root cause analysis leads to "Intuit lobbied Congress and the IRS hard enough that they passed a law, and the IRS conspired to change their procedures".
Except Intuit hasn't paid anywhere near enough in lobbying money to have that kind of effect. Grover Norquist is the last step in your root cause analysis.
Your situation sounds like one that a CPA would be perfect for - especially with business taxes involved.
Our household has just the basic salaries / expenses / 401k / IRAs. THe year I received some temporary additional benefits, Intuit decided that I had to pay premium in order to enter that single additional 1099.
I left, found a much simpler, straightforward service with which I filed legitimately free, and have never looked back.
Plus, I've read about Intuit's history with the whole market, and I will never willingly give them a damn cent.
> I left, found a much simpler, straightforward service with which I filed legitimately free, and have never looked back.
Which service is that? I haven't filed my taxes this year and am willing to spend some time switching to an app that's less scummy than Intuit's offerings.
Not GP but I've been using TaxHawk/FreeTaxUSA (same company runs both sites) for more than a decade with no problems, no upsells, and no dark patterns. Filing federal taxes is completely free with them for everyone, so there's no harm in giving them a shot. If you want to add your state tax filing in at the end (if applicable) it will only cost $15. There's no obligation to buy anything, you can file your federal taxes for free without purchasing the state tax filing option.
Let's end the debate, assuage the farmers who opposed time changes from the beginning, and honor every other timekeeping system in our earlier history:
From now on, sunrise is 0700. The clock runs from 0700 sunrise to whatever time necessary overnight to arrive at sunrise again, at which point the time becomes 0700. For the part of the year where that duration is greater than 24 hours, the time past 06:59 simply counts up extra seconds until reset.
Now we can have computers and every other carefully regulated timekeeping system on milliseconds since an epoch timestamp, and regular old clock time fits everyone's schedules regardless of time of year, and never needs 'adjusting' again, since its sun-synchronized.
And people said Y2K and the Year 2038 issues were hard...
I recommend you read time keeping on the computer systems. Without NTP and some atomic clocks on the network, computers can't keep accurate time themselves.
And using a moving window / sun synchronization like that is just brave to put it mildly.
Until some overly agressive anti-cheat that has kernel level access, decides to blacklist your machine, and because of whatever black boxed bugs, blocks your machine's Ethernet connections, all of them, and now you're stuck until you reimage and remove that borked kernel, except that they implemented an IME level code chunk that immediately downloads the anti-cheat code on the IME channel, and now your machine can never connect to the internet again until you replace the motherboard.
It sounds like you know more about how these work than I do so I'll assume it can happen. It's a risk to consider for sure. I obviously don't want this to happen to me, but I'll still take this major inconvenience that a few individuals might suffer from over cheaters in game that everyone playing the game suffers from. I'm talking cheating in multiplayer games to be clear.
I guess I'll get downvoted again, but I'll take those downvotes in stride.
Every activity has its own popularity, and number of fans of various seriousness... Cat and dog shows, caber toss, curling, singing competitions, on and on and on, the list is about infinite, since it encompasses everything within which someone could potentially be more skilled.
Singling out video games among all the other things humans do competitively feels like a personal bias.
I personally don't care about probably 99% of the 'competitions' out there, but I don't give anyone crap for being obsessed about their own thing.
(I don't play games online multiplayer style, so I'm not in the target group anyway.)
I don't think there's such a thing as "gaming", as you use the word... everyone involved does their own thing, in infinite variety as well.
It looks to me like GP may have commented without reading the article. "Mergers ruin everything" could be misread as "Merges ruin everything". Just reading the title could lead someone to think this was a discussion about git best-practices.
The difference of course being, is that they don't want to shut them down during a time of relative peace. Getting them to harden their presence now is strategically a waste.
In the extremis they can always bring in the orbital cannons and overwhelm them of course.
I'm in the US, so see this from a bit more abstract point of view, but I understand the insanity of being just over a border and not being able to watch/listen to media in the same language.
This is an awesome idea, I just wish I wasn't so cynical about the likelihood of any success... cash flow is jut a very big motivator.
Until we as a species grow past the greed that drives too many of us, I fear these fights will be long, slow, and provide little gain.
I applaud everyone working for that first inch, though, and maybe this is the first step in breaking down these systems.
It sounds like you're happy to hand control of your browser away for free. I've been writing code for a few decades, I don't know everything but I don't need someone to decide for me what's too dangerous for me to have access to.
If I was truly insane I'd go the Steve Gibson route and write a completely different browser from scratch. I'm aware it would take the rest of my life (or longer) at this point but the engine options are so few, and the ability to avoid the owners' restrictive BS limited enough, that I'd be happy as a clam to see a whole new reboot.
I'd jump onto even an alpha of that, just to bump numbers out of hope that ANY group could get together and get out from under the advertising trap.
A lot of places would see someone not following development guidelines, doing something unsanctioned, or otherwise not fitting in to the expected culture.
That can be far more toxic pushback to any attempted improvement.
