Just need to vent...

Internment is spoz to be temporary. when interrment is ...
Zombie time

 

It's not every day I get to see the same malapropism in two different places, one in each direction.

 

Oh, now you are invading the joy of malapropisms. Don't do that.

 

"out of pocket" meaning - Google Search

The only meaning I have ever known or used is the one for an expense I had to cover myself.

Guess I've been out of touch ....

 

Often misused word "orientated" meaning oriented. Orientated actually means pointing to or associated with the orient

JeffD

 

'gots'


oh .... and another word spoken out of ignorance - when people refer to different Asian people as 'orientals'. It gets exhausting telling the one mis- speaking that Oriental is furniture, or architecture, or restaurants/cuisine or art.

 

And how often does anybody call us Westerners 'Occidentals', anyway?

 

I haven't heard that one in a long time. Is it now a regional thing?

 

Perhaps it's vestiges of racism, as it seemed to be from my hearing, mostly from Vietnam era veterans - as well as those areas of the nation with the least exposure to Asian cultures.

 

Some article in "moneywise" got included in my news feed, and the article contains this gem:

Now, manage your tax bracket wisely. Go one dollar in income above $182,100 (based on 2023 IRS numbers) and you’ll pass from 24% to 32%. In other words, that single buck could mean the difference between paying the IRS $43,700 and $58,300 — a sizable difference.​

How do people get this stuff published? The US income tax brackets apply to the amount exceeding the lower brackets. You pay 32% on that single buck—32 cents—and the lower rates on the rest.

The math is built into the "Tax Computation Worksheet" (for filers with taxable income $100k or more). There is a "multiplication amount" and then a "subtraction amount" that accounts for the portion taxed at lower rates.



So first off, if the taxable income is $182,100, the tax isn't $43,700, it's $37,104 ($182,100✕ 0.24 − $6,600). The writer ignored the − $6,600 part, which accounts for the first $99,999 being taxed at rates lower than 24%.

Then, when you add that "extra buck", the tax goes to $37,104.32 ($182,101✕ 0.32 − $21,168). Exactly the same as before, plus 32 cents for the one buck that fell in the 32% bracket.

I get that maybe a lot of people are unclear on how that works. But how does an article unclear on how that works get published on a financial-advice site?

 

When I was young, I worked at a job that was best described as manually making phone calls for customers. Over 100 women worked the antiquated switchboard with me. We made barely more than minimum wage. Even so, virtually every one of them misunderstood the idea of tax brackets. They were afraid to work overtime because they thought that their taxes would double if they made an extra $30 on their weekly paycheck. This was not helped by the fact that our company chose to use the tax worksheets that calculated taxes as if the added hours were part of the norm. In reality, at the end of the year you'd get the extra withheld money back when the taxes were calculated.

I snapped up the extra hours and gladly added the extra hours to my paycheck.

My first successful computer program was one that computed all the fields on the paycheck if it was given the year to date totals. I kind of shafted myself when I shared it with my co-workers, as it allowed people to not only calculate their paycheck but it also allowed them to determine amount of the withheld earnings that would be returned.

 

Yeah, if the company did paychecks that way, that could be something real for the workers to worry about. If the extra $30 meant a lot more was withheld from the paycheck, and then you got it back at refund time, it's easy to say it all works out in the end, but not so much if you needed that money in that check.

But the article I saw today was for an audience of retirees or near-retirees with plenty of retirement savings, who would be worried about the bracket difference between $182,100 and $182,101. That audience presumably hasn't got the paycheck-to-paycheck worries that might distract from how the brackets work.

 

Word origins are fascinating. My favorite, and often personally exhibited, is disgruntled. I always assumed that disgruntled was a further development of someone becoming gruntled. Little did I know that gruntled is used in a humorous way to mean happy or contented.

 

It's preferable to be combobulated versus gruntled

 

All I want in life is a little quiet and gruntleness.

 

I think they're sort of orthogonal concepts rather than either/or—it's possible to be both.

Most of the time I manage to be fairly gruntled despite rather a lot of discombobulation. I'd probably be in a pretty sorry state if I couldn't.

 

Our Prius have been the smartest vehicles we've ever owned YET when you turn on the Auto climate control, both act differently. In the 2017, it automatically starts up the A/C but in the 2021 it never does. In fact, with the A/C off, you can turn the air temp all the way down to LO yet the stupid thing will NEVER turn on the A/C compressor! (Both do this.)
To quote Biden, "Come on, man!!"

 

Maybe configurable in Techstream, the way it is in gen 3?