Jump to content

Paper_jam

Legacy Members
  • Posts

    716
  • Joined

  • Last visited

Posts posted by Paper_jam

  1. FWIW, I was a Freshman in Fall of '89 and I think my initial registration was done on scantron bubble forms at FAC. And I know I had to do adds and drops at the Erwin Center once. I dont' remember using TEX until maybe Spring of '90? Maybe TEX was online before then but not mandatory? 

  2. To follow up my last post, I did a quick and dirty comparison with my 2017 taxes and it looks like even considering the $3k reduction in my deductions/exemption, I owe about $500 less this year.  So yay, I guess.

     

  3. I have about $11,000 in potential itemized deductions this year, and until this year I could have taken a 4k personal exemption. (For a total of about ~$15k in deductions).  But since they eliminated the personal exemption, now the best I can do is to take the $12k standard deduction. So the the change results in me paying taxes on an additional $3k that I would have previously deducted. This is at least partially offset by the changes to tax rates/tables but I'd have to actually do some calculations to see if I recover it all.

     

     

     

  4. One thing that makes me surly is public bathroom stalls (and sink areas) that don't have anyplace to put your shit. If I designed any bathroom, each stall would have a coathook and a fold-down shelf to put your briefcase or other objects on. And there would be shelves or storage options near the sink area. So you don't have to just dump your stuff all over the piss-soaked floor, or put clean items down on the wet sink counter. Why doesn't anyone think of these little details? I'm not that smart so the lack of these extremely basic amenities must be intentional.

     

     

     

     

    • Like 2
  5. I'm single with no dependents. Typically I have ~ $9 or 10k in itemized deductions (combination of property tax, mortgage interest, and sales tax) plus my $4k (or so) personal exemption. So effectively that was a ~ $14k deduction.

    This year, I can't seem to get my itemized deductions above the new 12k standard deduction, and there's no more personal exemption. So the bottom line is it looks like my taxes are actually going up. I did buy a new car this year; is there any way to claim the sales tax on that as a deduction outside the normal itemized deduction process?

     

  6. I gotta go with sudden failure of elevator, elevator controls, or horizontal stabilizer.

    Although I'm interested in the sequence of events...were the engines pushed to full power before the nose pitched down? Because that'd be weird.

     

  7. The website and billing has been a clownshow forever. And now SH130 is all bumpy and under construction so I can't even fully enjoy the 85 MPH speed limit I'm paying for.

    On the other hand, huge props to the TxTag roadside assistance guy who helped me out when I had a blowout.

    (Not quite as many props to whoever is supposed to clean the debris off the road which caused said blowout.)

     

  8. As a slight tangent, I'd be more interested in renewing if the audio quality over satellite didn't sound like I was listening to it using two cans and a string. Is there any hope of them either upgrading their bandwidth or improving their compression method? I guess anything they do has to be backwards compatible with the population of satellite receivers already out there, and hardware limitations in the satellites themselves...

     

  9. 36 minutes ago, GoldAppleCorps said:

    Don't rush an ms paint man. Rush an ms paint man, ya get rotten ms paint.

    This^^^.  You don't rush genius. 

  10. One trivial thing that makes me surly is major, brick-and-mortar retailers which have a website that can't even tell me if a specific product is in stock at a given physical store location. Why would you not use your website to leverage and support sales at your own stores? If I wanted to order online and wait, I'd use Amazon. Sometimes I need something FAST and I just need to know, before I drive all over town, whether or not it's in stock. Yet (some) companies still make it a total pain in the ass to find this out.  I swear, some companies have their online shit set up like it's designed to compete with their own brick and mortar assets, rather than complement them.

     

     

     

    • Like 4
  11. When replacing an old water heater In the Austin city limits, do they make you also put in an expansion tank now?

    I'm looking at reviews on new water heaters and it seems like the modern computer-controlled valves/burners are a PITA that shut everything down if there's so much as a mousefart of a problem or variable out of range...

     

     

     

×
×
  • Create New...