hiroo916

The way that I've heard it explained is, the unspoken motivation, particularly from the conservative/Republican point of view, is that making people manually do their taxes, makes them more aware of what they are paying to the government and thus more amenable to "small government" type of philosophy. And it would make it more apparent to the taxpayer when the government raises taxes.

Whether you agree with it or not, it's probably true that, if we did have the free online self-filing with all the numbers already filled in and all we had to do was approve, the vast majority of people would click through click through the default agree agree agree and have zero awareness of what is going on. Frankly, that's mostly the situation right now since folks just dump their paperwork to an tax preparer and sign whatever comes back. So same end result of ignorance, but they get to pay for the privilege.

The "pay extra" part is incorrect. You have the free option of turning off transcoding in your account, and then video will count against your data allotment.

You could argue that they should have made it opt-in rather than opt-out but I think most people care more about conserving data rather than the higher res. Frankly, watching 480p video isn't bad on a 5" screen. Geez, we were all watching 480p on 36" tube TVs before.

The implementation of T-Mobile's zero rating system is about as neutral as it could be. They don't charge audio or video streaming providers to be in the zero-rating program and any provider can apply to be in the program. This focuses the benefits of the zero-rating on their customers and uses it as a competitive tool against other mobile service providers, rather than as a way to milk more money from streaming providers.

The only net neutrality downside from the way they did it is that it is not neutral to any non-streaming applications that might come around, since perhaps their customers will be so busy streaming audio/video on their zero-rated data that they don't play games or check out whatever radical new app comes along.

EDIT: I updated my first sentence to clarify which part was incorrect. It's the "pay extra" part that is not correct. It's free to turn off the video transcoding for consumers and also free for providers to participate in zero-rating.

What do you do for the rest of the week?

Net Neutrality is not a burdensome regulation; instead, it is a anti-regulation regulation. It says the government will not regulate Internet traffic, and neither will the ISPs. Without Net Neutrality, the ISPs will regulate Internet traffic any way they please.

i tried credit karma this year and only after entering a ton of stuff, found out I couldn't finish because they didn't support something I needed. (sorry, I'm blanking out on what it was because I tried it with both mine and my sisters, both failed, might have been foreign tax paid, because I have some mutual fund that has something overseas)

My impression was that if you tax situation is super vanilla, it might work ok. But almost anything slightly off the well-trodden path, they will either kick you directly into the forms or just not support it.