Herbie?

One of your questions I didn’t see answered:

And after doing my research I found out americans file taxes every year. I haven’t done it the last 18 years of working. Should I just not file?

You have two choices:

1. Full Disclosure : you tell the IRS, you haven’t filled and ask them to help you rectify the situation. This could mean penalties and fines for filing late or based on your situation, they might let is slide (as it was an honest oversight). Once you’ve gone through this, then your back in the IRS’ good graces (assuming you still file your taxes and fbar annually)

2. A “stealth” disclosure : (there’s a better name but I forgot was it’s called) basically, you just start to file your 2023 taxes and pretend that nothing has happened during the last 18 years… if you do this for the next 5 years (or 7 years?) and the IRS does not say anything, then you’re back in the IRS good graces (they can only penalize you for x number of years) . But if the IRS decides to contact you, then they could throw the book at you (more than if you went with option 1).

Ultimately, it’s a gamble with a risk. However, if you’ve recently learned of your citizenship and got a passport. I think it’s quite plausible to get some lienency, both for the full disclosure and the stealth disclosure.

Well… there is also Eritrea, a small country in West Africa.

The U. S. Taxes is based on the country you’re living in. If there are double taxation treaties between the two countries (ie: Europe and the U. S.), then the IRS would tax you on the amount you’ve earned over a certain limit (it was 100k usd, but I think was increased). Meaning, if you earned 110k usd, you’d be taxes on the 10k. If you earn less then 100k, you’d pay no U. S. Taxes.

If there isn’t a treaty, which is often the case in countries that tax their citizens less than the U. S. , then you’d basically be charged taxes in the U. S. (based on your worldwide income) minus whatever you paid the country you’re living in.

OP read this, they’re absolutely right - lawyer up!

Cause in the U. S. if you want to renounce your U. S. citizenship, you must settle your debts - which includes filing your U. S. Taxes.

… and yes, as a U. S. Citizen you need to file U. S. Taxes *even if you’ve never set foot in the U. S. *.

Note: there are double taxation laws between the U. S. and Germany, which prevent you from needing to pay taxes in U. S. (up to 100k / year or so), but you still must file them.

Also, as a U. S. Citizen, you’ll need to file annually a FBAR with the IRS. This is basically a disclosure to the IRS that you have non-u.s. bank accounts (that exceed, in total, 20k usd / year).

The point being is that, in theory, there could be fines for not doing this, which (in theory) you would have to pay before being allowed to renounce your citizenship.

In practice, the IRS is pretty approachable - so you probably won’t have an issue, but you’ll definitely want decide if you want to keep the U. S. Citizenship (and the work associated with it: annual taxes and fbar) or renounce it.

The (only) upshot of filing U. S. taxes abroad if you have kids is that you qualify for a Child Tax Credit. Which amounts to 1000 usd / kid / year (I don’t know if the kids need to have U. S. Citizenship or not)

Ah, I see this is the predecessor to the Blue Shell in Mario Kart

Thanks for the write-up. I think Santa will be bringing me a Firestick Max for Xmas… and I’ve already got a real-Debrid subscription (which I highly recommend). I look forward in trying to plug them together.

I expect to have some website compatibility issues with Firefox/librewolf, as it does have a 3% share of the global browser market - so, website development energy is focused on the chrome/safari experience. However, 8+ years ago I felt I needed to use chrome at least every other day to view certain websites - it was frustrating.

I’m hoping (and willing to try it out) to see if this has improved.

Neato, I’ll check it out. I’m also trying out mull for android (as I’d like to keep my desktop/cellphone bookmarks/browser-history in sync)

Thanks for the comprehensive write-up. It convinced me to migrate back to Firefox.

I was on Firefox (8 years ago), moved to Chrome (I liked the non-admin/transparent update feature and Websites didn’t break like they did with ff), then moved to brave (basically chrome + more privacy), and now I’ll go back the Firefox (I hope I won’t encounter too many non-FF websites)

Microsoft creates thousands of tons of ewaste for no reason…

Of course there’s a reason, you said it yourself: TPM.

With TPM, Software will be able to cryptographically verify that the OS and Hardware are all unmodified. This’ll be an end to piracy and end to unauthorized modifications to your PC (“We’ve detected that you’ve installed an Ad Blocker, please remove it before accessing your banking website”)

This won’t happen overnight, but the forced hardware upgrade is all about control (Microsoft over you) and creating a walled garden to drive profits (like Apple).

You can take a look at Android’s attestation and how it prevents running your banking apps on a rooted cellphone as an example of things to come.

You have a valid point, and if your using this service to download dark web “illegal to possess” content (like CP) - then, yeah, you probably don’t want to use it.

However, if you “find” the random movie/tv-show: The copyright holders are usually chasing people who are distributing content (like you do with torrents) as opposed to the people who may accidentally consume the content. … but IANAL

… or you could pay approx $2.70 / month for real Debrid. Replace jellyfin with stremio + torrentio and your family can immediately stream whatever shows they want w/o asking you and without needing to wait for the torrent to download.

Well Beehaw’s rational is explained in this thread.

The reason I wanted to downvote was because Reddit communities like GameDeals is one of the new equalization I cannot easily find on Lemmy.

Thus, I found !gamedeals@lemmit.online / https://lemmit.online/c/gamedeals. It uses a bot to scrape the content from Reddit, but the scoring and popularity is missing.

When I joined there were only 13 people subscribed (now it’s 150+). If I’m limited to upvotes, it was difficult to “vote for the threads I liked” vs “vote for the shovelware” that appears in that channel.

With downvote, I was able to downvote shovelware and upvote threads I thought others would be interested. Everything else would be left as neutral.

I was on Beehaw and they block downvotes. I didn’t think much of it until I went to a federated channel with low participation (it was a new channel) and I wanted to downvote some bot-spam… but couldn’t cause Beehaw didn’t allow it.

I understand (but don’t agree with) the site operators intention, but their rational breaks down if you view the fediverse as something more than the single instance you’re registered with.

Fortunately, it’s easy to “vote with your feet”.

Thank you for the link. I’m looking forward to hearing about their “improved version” in 8 months.

Sounds interesting. Is there a non-paywall link available?

Oh my favorite is Crystal. It’s a statically compiled dialect of ruby.

It supports:

• Most of the ruby goodness: custom DSLs, patching classes/mixins (monkey patching instances is not supported)
• Compile time type checking (but it also uses duck typing)
• Coroutines / fibers that work across multiple threads (multi-thread support is still experimental, but from my experience works well)
• Possible to create small self-contained binaries (like go-Lang apps).

As much as I love the expressiveness of crystal, there are a few cons:

• It’s slow to compile. Due to the dynamic nature of the language, the compiler needs to parse a lot of files (think C/C++) before it creates a binary.
• The number of libraries is very immature at the moment. Crystal is a young language and is missing support for things like aws.
• The library management mechism (called “shards” akin to ruby gems) is not great (in my opinion). There are helpful tools to create the scaffolding, but if you’re pretty much stuck with the defined structure. For example you cannot have a single git repo that provides a library and an application that uses it.

Other than that, the type checking but with ruby-like syntax is awesome!

edit: fixed formatting

Others have given a good description of what a launcher is.

But my reason for why I use a custom launcher is simple : I want a consistent UI experience, regardless of whether my current (or future) android phone is a Google, Samsung, OnePlus, ect.

For me a phone is tool, nothing more. I don’t have the time or interest to “explore” the difference in UI’s. In fact, Samsung’s Launcher (Bixby?) inferriates me the most as the default “back” and “apps” Buttons are inverted compared to many other launchers… so it messes with my muscle memory.

With a custom launcher (I use Nova), I can restore/import my settings on any device (or custom version of android like lineage) and I’ve got the same familiar interface. Actually, Nova is quiet nice as it’ll also show you greyed-out Icons for all the apps you has on your home screen. As the apps are installed, you can start to use them. This (for me) makes moving to a new phone much easier.

In the US, they’re the same.

Are you sure?

I’ve always thought of universities as educational institutions funded (in part) by the state. So, tuition for “The University of Colorado” is partially subsided by the taxes people pay to the state of Colorado.

Colleges are not funded by the state, therefore have a higher tuition than universities.

At least that’s the theory. However, both universities and colleges have become so profit focused, I don’t know how much cheaper universities are now-a-days.

I’d also argue that a university in the U.S. is more prestigious than many colleges (the exception being Ivy league schools), because universities being cheaper means a high demand for being accepted, which means applicant need “be better” to gain admittance.

In the job market, however, you are absolutely right: college VS university - it doesn’t matter.

Basically, my company is tightly wed to using outlook and exchange.

We would have liked to have kept all this “on-prem”. Meaning, we have physical machines running in our company network that has paid licenses for exchange.

The “force” that Microsoft has applied, is that we will not be allowed to purchase licenses for exchange (disclaimer: I don’t know if the licenses are not available/discontinued or if it’s not cost effective - I wasn’t involved in those conversations). Long story short: If we want Outlook/Exchange we must use MS Cloud solution. Depending on your organization’s size - this cost us an ungodly amount of money but (and here is where the anti-trust is) you get Office 356, Teams, and the rest of the MS eccosystem “for free” (or at a deep, deep discount).

This means the cost of Cloud Exchange (which includes Teams, O365, etc) . Was about the same (maybe a little less) than what we paid for “on-prem” exchange, plus Google docs, plus slack, plus Zoom. However, since “on-prem” exchange isn’t available - our only other option would be to ditch exchange for Google (which costs a lot more) or some open-source solution (which probably won’t integrate seamlessly into outlook).