Favorites April 2nd 2022

Alec Stapp @AlecStapp

Never forget that TurboTax is the worst:

propublica.orgInside TurboTax’s 20-Year Fight to Stop Americans From Filing Their Taxes for FreeUsing lobbying, the revolving door and “dark pattern” customer tricks, Intuit fended off the government’s attempts to make tax filing free and easy, and created its multi-billion-dollar franchise.

They've stopped the IRS from using *scanners*. They've stopped the IRS from offering a simpler filing system based on your income, which the IRS already knows anyway! When you talk about evil tech companies, personally, I put Intuit (owners of TurboTax) pretty high on the list. I’m not sure any other tech company is lobbying for such obvious economic deadweight loss, of both money and time.

Eric Levitz @EricLevitz

Some of New York's premier environmental groups succeeded in shuttering the state's primary source of carbon-free electricity last year. Now, they're fighting to ensure that NYC replaces that lost energy with natural gas instead of hydropower. nymag.com/intelligencer/…

Batteries and solar+wind will work eventually, but shutting down working zero carbon nuclear is absolutely idiotic.

Alan Cole @AlanMCole

This is a good meme but it also contains a useful point about why rising home prices don't really build real wealth. The need to house your body makes you "short" a house, and in some ways buying one only covers the short, doesn't make you net long.

Ryan Avent @ryanavent

The sowing-reaping meme, but for selling a house and buying another in this market

The idea of being 'short' housing by default is absolutely terrific, and really highlights why 'improvements' in home prices should probably not be thought of as good for society.

Timothy B. Lee @binarybits

Something that I think trips people up a lot about COVID is that the magnitude of risk changes a lot. With COVID cases down 95 percent since mid-January, every activity has a 20x lower COVID risk now than it did then.

He goes on: "Most other risks don't change like this... we make a one-time decision about whether an activity is "safe" and rarely revisit it." I absolutely have felt the difficulty of readjusting up and down how I think about the risk of various activities due to COVID.

AFP News Agency @AFP

#UPDATE Bucha's mayor, Anatoly Fedoruk, told @AFP by phone that they "have already buried 280 people in mass graves," since the Ukrainian army retook control of the key town outside Kyiv As witnessed by @AFP, he said the heavily destroyed town's streets are littered with corpses

There are a lot of photos of bodies of civilians executed by Russian troops, and even more gruesome stuff.

Louise Callaghan @louiseelisabet

In the woods outside Bucha today we met Maria, 80, who hadn't minded the Russian soldiers so much when they turned up at her house. It was only after they withdrew that she found out they had tied up and executed her neighbours.

thetimes.co.ukBodies of mutilated children among horrors the Russians left behindDeep in the forest outside Kyiv, where the mushroom-pickers used to roam and rich city folk built their palatial dachas, Maria Dabizhe, 80, sat sifting through

Accounts from survivors are also pretty horrific.

• Short thread covering the evidence that Russia appears to have been preparing for mass executions if they hadn't been stopped by Ukraine unexpectedly putting up a fight. People so anti-war that they oppose helping Ukraine are looking pretty dumb. Paradox of Tolerance, just between nations instead of people.

May 2018, Kyoto