Marquis Center for Oral Surgery | Digital Marketing Manager | TX & CA | Remote | Full-time
We are one of the few Oral Surgery groups in the US that are qualified to offer full-mouth teeth replacement. The service that we provide for our patients changes everything about the quality of their daily lives. Most are unaware that there are treatment options available to reduce their suffering. We need a marketer that can help us spread the word to the proportion of the 22M people that live near our centers and can benefit from this procedure.
Great pay, flexibility, and benefits - including reimbursement for a co-working space. No resume or cover letter required, just an informal email with details about how your skills & passion match the job description. Relaxed work culture and friendly team. Check it out:
It seems like the incentive structure is broken here because the tax software companies have the wrong customer.
Their customer should be the IRS. These are the options asI see them:
1) Have the government “make” their own version. There would be little attention paid to user experience, since there’s no competition and the bureaucracy has no incentive to create good products.
2) Have the government hire a company - which is really the same as “making it” since I’m assuming government employees aren’t the ones writing the code. However, if structured properly, the outsourced company could be compensated based on user experience metrics. I see the likelihood of this happening as low.
3) Arbitrarily complicate the tax return policy. Put the burden of understanding on the citizen. Let the “free” (contrived by government intervention in this case) market fulfill the artificial need in the market. This seems to be the way things are being done now.
Trouble is, our democracy doesn’t seem to be effective at solving problems like this. It appears that we don’t have the ability to actually have a direct impact on this policy change. Only if the majority party happens to have the political willpower to work on this, and only if that party holds a majority in the house and the senate.
Couple that with a $100M+ annual investment (institutionalized bribery from my perspective) from these tax software companies to ensure that elected officials don’t unwind the artificial demand that’s been created, and you have the situation that we are in right now.
Let me know if I’ve missed anything or have been unfair. If anyone has any ideas about how an average citizen can affect this policy, I’d love to know.
> Have the government “make” their own version. There would be little attention paid to user experience, since there’s no competition and the bureaucracy has no incentive to create good products.
Empirically, the place I live in (Zürich, Switzerland) has offered excellent government created tax filing software for several years (used to be somewhat monstrous Java apps, but nowadays the software is web based and really convenient to use), for ALL taxpayers, as far as I can tell.
I would argue that there IS an incentive to the government to make tax compliance simple, and keep grumbling to a minimum.
How does the Swiss tax system work? How are taxes added and/or removed? Do you have tax deductions or other incentives?
The truly weird thing about the American tax system is the way it handles deductions and other incentives. You can't take advantage of them unless you know they're available and request them specifically. This gives the government a real incentive to make the tax code as complicated as possible. If you don't know what deductions are available to you, then you'll probably miss some or all of them and end up paying a lot more money than you would have if the process was more straight forward.
There are all sorts of deductions, and there are also anti-deductions, e.g. imputed rent for homeowners. The more common deductions are enumerated in separate fields, the others you can itemize on more free form input.
It's not like all of those deductions are obvious here either. When we moved back to Switzerland, I had an accountant do my taxes once or twice, but after that, I knew what kinds of deductions I could claim.
Switzerland has no AMT, which is one of the more painful parts of the US filing process in my experience.
Most people use very few deductions, and most people use the same credits it deductions. Tax software shows that's it's trivially simple for the vast majority of of people. Where tax law gets complicated is high net worth, self employment, or business ownership. If love for taxes for these people to be simpler, but realistically if you need these deductions that aren't already captured by the IRS you should be hiring a competent tax professional. There's no reason the vast majority of Americans need to file except that it's intentionally painful to make people hate taxes, the IRS knows how much you make and what you owe because they already receive your tax documents from the organizations that provide them to you.
As I see it, the right solution is for the IRS to publish machine-readable, complete descriptions of all tax forms and all formulas along with a format for filled in forms. And they should publish software to take a filled in form set and make PDFs and/or submit electronically. Let other people compete to make nice UIs.
Unfortunately it's not only tax businesses that have incentives against making filing taxes easier. Americans for Tax Reform treats bills that make filing taxes easier as a tax increase. Any Republican that supports these types of measures can expect a swift and strong response Americans for Tax Reform.
A few personal usage tactics I’ve been experimenting with, since I’ve been dealing with smartphone overuse since 2005:
1) No social media apps.
2) Four icons on the home screen (for iPhone, go to this site: https://david-smith.org/blank.html click share button and add to home screen. Change wallpaper to black. Each black icon you add to the home screen will take up a space where an app would have been, helping you focus on apps that you find most important)
3) Airplane mode when I’m on vacation (so I can still use the camera but won’t be tempted to reply to a text).
4) Few notifications other than calendar, phone, and text. Absolutely no email notifications. Selective and timed Slack notifications since I’m often mobile and don’t want to be the bottleneck at work.
5) No games.
6) Limited video use. Overuse hasn’t been a problem, so I don’t set hard guidelines on this.
7) Leave phone in car [clearly I don’t live in SF] or at home during scheduled time with loved ones.
8) Wear cellular Apple Watch and carry AirPods in pocket when leaving phone at home - if there may be an important call coming in while I’m intentionally preventing myself from working while mobile.
9) Keep phone charging at night in bathroom on do not disturb. No checking during middle of the night bathroom usage.
10) Limit non-essential apps to informational apps - like HN.
Smartphones are tools first or they can be toys first. That depends on the goals and discipline level of the user.
It is. Then again, whenever I feel like it's just entertainment, I open up my Facebook feed and find that it's two orders of magnitude dumber. When I see what my family has on their feeds, it's an extra order of magnitude dumber still. Of all the places I could waste time on-line, HN really is one of the better ones. It's probably also why I find it so sticky - it's intermittent reward, where reward can be - and was in the past - enlightening or career-changing.
> Of all the places I could waste time on-line, HN really is one of the better ones
That's the main problem with it. Other places are obviously such nonsense that I'm not even tempted. HN has this quality where it tricks you into thinking (feeling?) that it might be worthwhile. And the worst thing is - it might be true. I have no idea, but I do know that it's by far my biggest time sink.
If I were being truthful, I might say that I get maybe one actually helpful morsel every few days, some of which end up on a reading/reference queue that I might not actually get to but I think might indeed come in handy sometime in the future. The rest is essentially intellectual puffcorn.
That’s true, but I personally have read a bunch of things of big value to me here. Just yesterday, somebody commented that there will likely be a big increase in taxation for UK contractors in April 2020 - and I was just offered a long term contract position in London... Now I know that it will be worth much less than I thought.
Thanks for sharing. Lots of good insights here! Just yesterday I've been wondering if there was a single e-mail in the past year that I needed to immediately reply to and the answer was no. I think having a dedicated time of day for handling e-mail could be an interesting approach.
For me the biggest issue when it comes to wasting time on my phone are the websites like reddit that I constantly go back to.
So far what kind of works for me is LeechBlock add-on where I blacklist time wasting websites and if I ever want to view them I can override the block for 5 minutes. I think the reason it works is that I need to consciously allocate those 5 minutes to waste (with this setup I can't just drift away for 1 hour looking through a subreddit).
I'd very welcome any other tips similar to the OP's.
I've had only one email in the last year that needed a response ASAP, and that was an invite to go see a giraffe at the zoo behind the scene.
I've tempted to start running my own email server again, and then develop a super simple UI where I organize email by sender and then convert important emails to a SMS message.
Great list. I go a little further on notifications: Do Not Disturb (DnD) mode 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, which inhibits all calls, texts, messages, E-mails, and most importantly notifications. This allows you to use the phone on your own terms and schedule, not on someone else's, including app developers desperate to prod you into their apps. A big part of the smartphone problem, in my view, is how we have all become slaves to them--using them when they demand to be used, rather than when we choose to use them.
If it's important, they'll leave a message or E-mail, which you can check on your own schedule.
Hopefully your father / brother / SO / whoever doesn't need urgent help from you, ever.
I used to always power off my phone at night, until one day at 2am I was in the middle of nowhere needing help from a friend, and he did actually answer the phone. He told me: "if it was the other way around, you wouldn't have helped me". For me it was a life saver, and I could totally see how harder would everything have been if he did like me every night (no one else to call at that moment, before that's asked).
Since then, my phone is kept on and unsilenced at night. If anyone important to me needs my help, I want to be there for them. Not that it's happened ever once in the last 10 years, though :)
> If it's important, they'll leave a message or E-mail, which you can check on your own schedule.
Depends on your use-case. I use my phone to support my hobby, the Mode-s receiver in my attic sends an e-mail when an interesting aircraft arrives at the local airport.
So for me it's a notification tool that requires timely attention.
On the other hand it's not a toy, I don't have any games installed.
I guess it might be a great tactic depending on your culture. I tried going with 24/7 silent mode, and then with no phone at all, but had to give in after being repeatedly badgered first by my coworkers, and then by my boss. They expect everyone to be available all the time, in every single company I know of (from friends/acquaintances). I still ignore most emails and phone calls outside of working hours though.
I like that you mentioned the Apple Watch because I personally found that the Apple Watch totally changed my relationship with my phone.
I can't say I use the full potential of the watch at all, but for the first time, notifications were what I feel like they should have always been - glanceable. When wearing the Apple Watch, the phone practically never vibrates or makes a sound, unless for an incoming call. I get a haptic "tap" on the wrist if a notification comes through (although I did stop a few apps from being able to send notifications) and it's enough to just look at the watch to bring it up.
If it's interesting, I can tell there and then. I can get my phone out or respond to it.
If it's not interesting, I can literally take no further action and just stop looking at the watch and after a few seconds the notification goes away.
It'll still be on my phone later if/when I want to go back to it, but I find myself looking at my phone a lot less often as a result. I can often go for hours without even taking it out of my pocket now.
3) With Airplane mode on while on vacation to take pictures, none of your pictures are getting sync’d. I have sync set up to iCloud, OneDrive, and Google Photos. If something happens to my phone, I’m SOL.
9) For that I would just use Do Not Disturb. If anyone is calling me in the middle of the night, it must be an emergency. In my case, as an only child, I only have three people that I’m concerned about enough to hear from in the middle of the night who don’t live with me - an older daughter, and my parents.
Thanks for sharing. I wish Apple would make it easier to outright block websites/apps system-wide. The “time limit” on categories of apps is weak and easily dismissible. The user should have to dive through settings to temporarily enable an app.
Before jumping to the conclusion that the author is hoping you jump to, question: is it possible that he, you, and I don’t have a full view of the rare personality traits and skills that are required to be an effective Fortune 50 CEO?
I assume most of us here are in favor for exchanging money for value (versus time contributed)? Correct? Otherwise, how is a $200k SW engineer’s salary justifiable compared to a $30k fast food worker’s? In the same 40 hour work week?
I do take issue with non-founding CEOs [sometimes] having no skin in the game. I saw this when I was at BlackBerry. Win or lose, the CEO that replaced the founders would win. BlackBerry lost, he didn’t. This seems like a misalignment of incentives, but that’s up to the company to address, not me, and hopefully not the government. If the company gets the incentives wrong, they lose, and hopefully we learn.
Back to the point: if a company has an impact on billions of dollars and millions of lives, I’d prefer their leader be paid well. But my preference is irrelevant here because a company can and should decide how to value that person’s role. In contrast, I certainly wouldn’t want a government policy (and it’s guaranteed slew of unintended consequences) regulating how much a chief executive is paid.
Being an effective CEO is anything but easy. And the combination of an effective CEO’s skills and experience are extraordinarily rare. It’s not a surprise that the market prices their value accordingly.
Efficiency is not everything when it comes to nutrition.
Once someone is beyond being able to procure enough food to survive, utility is important to quality of life and long term health.
What sort of utility?
1) Total caloric intake depending on if the goal is maintenance, weight loss, or weight gain.
2) Macronutrient split depending on specific health and/or performance goals. E.G. high protein for strength trainees.
3) Micronutrient split and density for general health and/or to correct deficiencies. For example, many people are Vitamin D deficient.
4) Mental health. An extreme approach to diet can create eating disorders and may lead to social isolation.
As with most things in life, there is a cost/benefit equation associated with nutrition choices, and focusing purely on efficiency most certainly has its costs - some of which are not obvious. Those costs can have a negative impact on short-term and long-term health. Health is easy to take for granted - until there’s an issue.
The point of my post? I hope that the takeaway from this article isn’t: “make cost efficiency your primary goal in food selection,” but rather, “carefully evaluate your specific situation, establish nutrition goals, and treat food intake like a solution to a problem - just make sure the problem(s) are very well defined.”
This advice applies to those that have the discretionary funds to facilitate this level of selectiveness, which I’m guessing applies to most people reading this.
I'm a big fan of HN and happy to have a reason to create an account and comment after all of these years. I thoroughly enjoy the intelligent conversation here.
As a Starting Strength Coach (there are around 130 of us), I I can confirm that a few of the comments accurately sum up the objections (rather misunderstandings) of the program that H1Supreme highlighted.
The powerclean is an important part of the novice program to build explosive power - the ability to display strength, quickly. It can be substituted by another lift, or a light deadlift day, if the trainee's injury status or age make it an unwise cost/benefit equation. But this is considered a trade-off and isn't ideal.
Yes, the powerclean is technical. So is the squat. And the press. And the bench, to a much lesser degree. Which segues into the issue mentioned in the second point. Elbow pain in the squat. As accurately described by "yepguy," this is indeed a technical error. Here's how to fix it: https://startingstrength.com/training/preventing-elbow-pain-...
A few other thoughts: pwthornton, kettle-bell cleans and snatches are not a substitute for barbell cleans and snatches. What we're chasing is adequate training stress to facilitate an adaptation. One of the primary drivers of that stress is load - weight on the bar. Kettle-bells are too light (comparatively) to create meaningful enough stress to facilitate the stress, recovery, adaptation cycle in the context of training (goal oriented exercise). More reading on the topic: https://startingstrength.com/article/training_vs_exercise
anarchodev, Rippetoe and Starting Strength are more interested in getting regular, everyday people strong than high school football players. Yes, it's a great way for getting young men big and strong (I gained 65lbs), but it's also a way to improve quality of life for octogenarians, for example. The low-bar squat is in the program versus the high bar squat because it uses more muscle mass, which means more weight on the bar can be used. Weight on the bar is the primary consideration in strength training - more of it is what's needed to get stronger. Here is a piece that analyzes the squat in detail: https://startingstrength.com/article/analysis_of_the_squat
ubercore and DataWorker, for the purposes of strength training - low bar works better. It can be applied to any body type. Shorter torso = more horizontal back angle at the bottom of the squat, and vice versa. Goal is to load the hips, which are a more robust joint than the knees and are surrounded by more muscle mass. Low-bar is not one-size-fits-all, its a model for the squat that can be applied to nearly anyone, with rare exception.
michaelgrafl the nature of goblet squats and front squats require a sub-maximal load when compared to the low bar back squat. They may be suitable for an exercise program, but they are not suitable for an efficient strength training program, and most certainly not for a novice. See comment above about training stress.
I have a ton of respect for this community and would love to interact with you guys. Let me know if I can be helpful in any way.
We are one of the few Oral Surgery groups in the US that are qualified to offer full-mouth teeth replacement. The service that we provide for our patients changes everything about the quality of their daily lives. Most are unaware that there are treatment options available to reduce their suffering. We need a marketer that can help us spread the word to the proportion of the 22M people that live near our centers and can benefit from this procedure.
Great pay, flexibility, and benefits - including reimbursement for a co-working space. No resume or cover letter required, just an informal email with details about how your skills & passion match the job description. Relaxed work culture and friendly team. Check it out:
http://bit.ly/2IGYv68