Category Archives: Ramblings

Miscellaneous thoughts.

Intuit’s sloth

Hall of Shame, Ramblings

Just say ‘No’ to TurboTax.

For an index of all my Mac Pro articles, click here.

Like many readers of this journal I have been using TurboTax for Mac for aeons to prepare my taxes. The system works well in as much as anything can work well with the mess that is the Internal Revenue Code of the United States.

Now it so happens that I am happily running OS X High Sierra (10.13) on my 2010 Mac Pro, and Intuit, the maker of TurboTax has been making noises for a couple of years that I will soon have to upgrade to OS X Mojave (10.14) for their software to work. Intuit would have you believe that this is a change dictated by Apple and that no backward compatibility for TurboTax 2020 exists.


What Intuit demands for TT 2020..

But the snag is that I cannot run Mojave without tossing out my excellent Nvidia GTX980 graphics card, replacing it with an ATI Radeon offering, as Mojave will not run on Nvidia GPUs. And I do not wish to make that change as the GTX980 remains as capable today as it was 5 years ago when installed.

So I shopped around and determined that it’s Intuit’s sloth, not Apple’s requirements, which is the cause of TT 2020 not running on my High Sierra/GTX980 setup. HR Block is the other leading vendor of US tax preparation software and here are their system requirements:


HR Block’s 2020 tax prep software requirements.

So I spent $37.79 which got me the application, by download from Amazon, and this includes one State tax application. Intuit is asking much the same for their basic software version. Well, that and a new $250 GPU.

And guess what? I asked the HRB app to find my 2019 TT return and it was imported in seconds, and all numbers match. So now I’m ready to prepare my 2020 taxes using HRB’s software and the costly GTX980 can remain in place.

Sure, you say. You could always use Intuit’s online tax prep software which is machine independent. And you expect me to trust these people with my data? Uh huh.

Vote!

Ramblings

Time to clean the Augean Stables of Republicans.



Send Pig home.

Four years ago – goodness, it seems like 400 – I warned of the coming catastrophe which would result from electing Pig to the White House. It gives me no pleasure to see that I was right and it is a source of eternal shame that 60 million American morons were wrong. They have got what they deserve which includes:

  • 200,000 American murdered by an uncaring Pig
  • Millions more infected with the coronavirus
  • Record unemployment
  • Destruction of our system of laws
  • Destruction of the Unites States Supreme Court and of the judiciary
  • Criminality of mind bending proportions in the Pig family
  • Rule by American ‘Christians’ whose expertise is in looking the other way
  • Destruction of the USPS
  • An existential threat to affordable health care

It bears repeating what I wrote on April 14, 2020 when comparing Pig with Richard III:

A note to Pig voters: This blog is about Photographs, Photographers and Photography. It ordinarily eschews politics. However, at this time of national tragedy, a tragedy whose number of deaths has been compounded by a psychopath masquerading as President, it is every American’s duty to protest loudly and to work for regime change. If you voted for Pig last time and have come around to seeing the error of your ways, all well and good. We all make mistakes. However, if you still fall in the trap of believing that Pig is making America great again and propose voting for him again, not only are you emphatically not welcome here, your very presence disgusts me. Do the right thing. Go elsewhere with your stupidity, your ignorance and your bigotry.

* * * * *

Now we are all voting early as the US Postal Service cannot be depended on to deliver our ballots on time. And yes, I do still believe that, as Churchill once put it, “Americans will always do the right thing, having first tried all the alternatives”. So it’s not enough to vote. It’s the right thing to vote Blue up and down the ballot. Put aside partisan differences and minor quibbles. Forget nonsense about abortion and gun rights. Noise. These have nothing to do with the peaceful governance of a great nation.

Yes, your choice is between a murderous criminal grifter and his enablers or a 77 year old with a GPA of 2.9 who has accomplished nothing in his life other than being on the taxpayers’ payroll for 47 years. But there’s a key distinction. One is a Pig. The other is a decent man, mediocre as he is. Today decent mediocrity is what America needs. Kick Pig and his Slovenian Slut and their many anchor babies out of the sty in which they reside.

Bourke-White redux

Photographs, Ramblings

MAGA.

Morons Are Governing America.




Bourke-White by Annie Telnaes

Annie Telnaes, the WaPo cartoonist, does Pig best. That means she shows him red faced, bloated and ready to blow, like the pig he is.

For the story of the original image by Margaret Bourke-White, last referenced here when yet another moron was in the Oval Office melting down the economy, click here.