It's Raining Rants (Hallelujah) - April mini-rants

[LSLGuy]

@digs

And, your accountant’s name is Viola?

I always spell it that way deliberately. It’s my little rebellion; me Stickin’ it to the Man.

@slalexan

I think I have a UTI. That’s it. That’s the whole post.

It doesn’t need to be any longer. Ouch! Good luck.

@kayaker

He told his tax guy (a neighbor) who pulled his copy and realized the IRS had misread a number.

I have quite a tale of me and the IRS bickering for over two years over exactly $55.44. That we both agreed I owed them. See here for the short version of some Kafkaesque entertainment:

The IRS lost my payment

About 15 years ago I paid my quarterly FUTA payment of $56.00 Their bank mis-deposited my check as $0.56, meaning I had underpaid by $55.44. Over two years later we finally got it straight, sorta. From their first request I sent them the missing $55.44 because they truly were short the money. At first they wanted to charge interest and penalties, then after much fussing by me they waived that since they agreed it was their bank which FUBARed my check. Everybody was real nice to deal with, j…

@kaylasdad99

@LSLGuy

If Emancipation Day is a permanent DC holiday on the 17th, which I think it is, that suggests that in future years, we’ll have Tax Day on the 15th five years of every seven, the 17th one year of every seven, and the 18th one year of every seven. Such fun.

Gotta consider leap years, so twenty years out of every twenty-eight will be the 15th.

Since I wasn’t considering their sequence, just the number of each, the result is the same, and my numbers are simpler and easier. 5/7 vs 20/28 are the same value. If we were talking about the repeating sequence of which date follows which, then yes, you’re spot on that the sequence is 28 years long before it repeats.

@Dr.Drake

You would be surprised at the number of banking issues where the ZIP code is an issue. I often can’t use my American credit cards for online purchase because an American bank card with a Canadian address cannot go through

You can blame the very US-centric VISA & Mastercard for that stupidity.

Back before all the cards had that 3-digit “secret” number on the back that we have to tell everyone every time we buy something, they had the bright idea to reduce online fraud from stolen physical cards and stolen databases. But mostly it was stopping stolen physical cards and to a lesser extent “skimmed” card numbers being used online. Back then mass database theft was still mostly in the future as the mass-use internet was just getting underway.

Anyhow, they had the bright idea that if they asked the person presenting the card number what the billing zip code was, nobody but the real cardholder could possibly know that! Fraud would be totally averted. Brilliant!

That was 1960’s small town-level naiveté applied to a late '90s exploding fraud problem. And now, almost 30 years later, VISA/MC still demands a US zip code when buying from a US merchant online or in high-fraud places like gas stations. Since then they have added CVV, insert the chip, and tap to pay to ordinary US credit cards. And various website lockbox gizmos where the merchant never directly handles the credit card info at all.

All of which are vastly more secure than asking for a stupid postal code. But security can never be relaxed, only added to. So here we are and here we shall remain.

Idjits.