Return-free tax filing

Imagine filing your income taxes in five minutes—and for free. You'd open up a pre-filled return, see what the government thinks you owe, make any needed changes, and be done. The miserable annual IRS shuffle, gone.

It's already a reality in Denmark, Sweden and Spain. The government-prepared return would estimate your taxes using information your employer and bank already send it. Advocates say tens of millions of taxpayers could use such a system each year, saving them a collective $2 billion and 225 million hours in prep costs and time, according to one estimate.

The idea, known as "return-free filing," would be a voluntary alternative to hiring a tax preparer or using commercial tax software. The concept has been around for decades and has been endorsed by both President Ronald Reagan and a campaigning President Obama.

"This is not some pie-in-the-sky that's never been done before," said William Gale, co-director of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center. "It's doable, feasible, implementable, and at a relatively low cost."

So why hasn't it become a reality?

Well, for one thing, it doesn't help that it's been opposed for years by the company behind the most popular consumer tax software—Intuit, maker of TurboTax. Conservative tax activist Grover Norquist and an influential computer industry group also have fought return-free filing.

Timely, from Mother Jones.​ Opponents to return-free filing say it's a conflict of interest for the same entity that collects taxes to calculate your taxes, but essentially they have to do the work every year anyway, they'd just be sharing their calculations ahead of time. And of course you wouldn't have to accept their calculation, you could amend or reject it. Given the immense national suffering imposed by tax day each year, a shift like this could turn it into a national holiday.

​Not surprising for special interests to spend millions of dollars lobbying to protect their revenue stream, our government structure practically invites it, but it's still disappointing to see Intuit acting this way. TurboTax has always been a brand people view positively, but this is like discovering your caretaker has been shielding you from a better life in order to protect a paycheck.

If we could just collect a fraction of the tax preparation fees spent each year we could out-lobby Intuit and its partners here easily. That's the power of a motivated minority, though.

A complex turnaround job

For some reason, Downcast wasn't automatically grabbing new episodes of Planet Money for me the past two months, so I'm just catching up on a long list of episodes.​ The good episodes have a long shelf life, though.

I enjoyed this episode compiling advice from consultants about a massive global institution in need of a turnaround. It's an institution started with just 11 members and has grown to have more members than Facebook, over 1.2 billion.

A ​Fortune 500 corporation? ​A Chinese social network?

Not exactly.

The Catholic Church.​

​Structurally, though, the Catholic Church is very much like a business, so analyzing it as such might reveal possible solutions to its current crisis. The consultants identified several problems.

For one thing, key employees aren't in key growth markets — only half of priests are in countries with the most Catholics and the highest growth rates. The church also fails to leverage its membership to drive down its procurement expenses. I chuckled at the idea of carrying an official Catholicism membership card and using it to get 10% off at Jamba Juice.

I was amused by discussion of Jesus as more of the visionary founder and Peter as the operational CEO he brought in to lead the Church to global expansion. Much like Facebook, the Catholic Church used a free model to achieve hypergrowth, only monetizing after it achieved scale.

2,000 years. Just think how much more quickly the Catholic Church could have reached that scale had they had cloud infrastructure and the internet.

The invisible bike helmet

Watch to the end of the video to see just how they made it invisible.​ Very clever.

After you've watched the video, you can go to the online shop if you're interested in purchasing one. It's not cheap, but I was shocked that it's actually purchasable already. I just assumed it was just an industrial design concept.​

Unfortunately it doesn't look like you can ship it to outside of Europe yet (once you've seen how it works you'll understand why). Also, should you need it to save your head during a fall, you won't be able to use it again. It's a one-time insurance policy.

That's not too different from most bike helmets, however. I had a serious bike accident once and my helmet cracked, and even if it hadn't, it's not recommended to keep using a helmet that's been in a fall. The structural integrity might be compromised.​

I wish I had been wearing one of these invisible bike helmets when I had that accident, actually. It would have saved me some face on gravel contact that left me, for a period, looking like that guy from Boardwalk Empire with the half face mask.​

​This helmet addresses one of the problems with laws requiring bike helmets: many people hate wearing bike helmets and so they just don't bother cycling at all. I completely understand the statistics supporting the idea of not requiring bike helmets in order to spur more cycling instead of driving. However, having been in that one bad accident, one that had the hospital suspecting for a while that I had broken my neck, I have a mental block against riding without a helmet, invisible or not.

The latest NBA strategic battle

"A lot of the defensive strategies you see now are a natural evolution from rule changes," says Houston GM Daryl Morey, in reference to the league's decision a decade ago to abandon illegal defense rules and essentially allow zone defenses. "First the defense evolved by overloading the strong side, and now the offenses are evolving to beat that."

The Heat are the most obvious example of a team that has torn down and rebuilt its entire offense over 18 months to counter defenses committed to clogging the lane, sending an extra defender toward the ball, and forcing offenses into second, third, and fourth options. It's no coincidence Miami plays in the same conference as Boston and Chicago — the two teams most associated, via Tom Thibodeau, with that strangling defense. Thibodeau didn't invent this system, and he's loath to take any public credit for it, but coaches, scouts, and executives all over the league agree he was the first coach to stretch the limits of the NBA's newish defensive three-second rule and flood the strong side with hybrid man/zone defenses. Other coaches have copied that style, and smart offenses over the last two seasons — and especially this season — have had to adapt. The evolution will have long-lasting consequences on multiple fronts — on the league's entertainment value, the importance of smart coaching, and the sorts of players that GMs seek out in the draft and via free agency.

Zach Lowe on how NBA offenses are evolving to counter the trendy Thibodeau-style defenses which have become so popular and effective. Smart throughout.

Lowe notes that a key in countering these types of defenses is being able to pass the ball well. This matches what I've seen with offenses that have given the Bulls problems in the past. Because the Bulls attack the strong side so aggressively, a team that can quickly swing the ball all the way back to the other side of the court quickly often gets open 3-pointers against the Bulls.

​To beat a team like Miami, with its habit of sending a whole series of fast, good defenders at the ball from among Lebron, Wade, Battier, Chalmers, Cole, and Anthony, quick passing is the only way to win. You can't expect to beat them off the dribble which is one reason the Bulls struggled so much in their last playoff meeting. Once they put Lebron on Derrick Rose and neutralized Rose's dribble penetration, the Bulls offense choked. When the Bulls have had success against the heat, it is with quick passing, not dribble penetration.

Just as football has gone through a series of back and forth chess moves between offenses and defenses (Buddy Ryan 4-6, West Coast offense, Cover 2, spread offense, option read), basketball is in the midst an inflection point too. 

The fairly rapid transitions in these cycles make sports an underrated way to study evolutionary systems.

Summer nostalgia

One of the biggest adjustments of moving from Los Angeles up to San Francisco has been the drastic climate change. In LA it was an apocalyptic outlier when it was cold or rainy; in San Francisco, a warm, sunny day like today is so rare it is like a spontaneous holiday.​

Whenever warm weather returns after a long cold spell, I'm noticeably more cheerful. One of the most important reasons is that smell travels more readily on warm air. Through my bedroom window this morning I could smell a mixture of flowers, trees, grass, and just the slightest hint of ocean, and smell is so closely tied to memory that I'm immediately plunged into nostalgic reverie.

In the winter, I can't smell anything. The air is chilly, both literally and figuratively, and since it's chilly about ten and a half months out of twelve in San Francisco, my nose goes numb.

It's a mixed blessing depending on where you live, of course. Walking by a pile of trash on the sidewalk in NYC on a sweltering summer day is like a drive-by assault on the nose, and San Francisco has no shortage of unpleasantly familiar odors lurking on the wrong sidewalks.

Right at this moment, though, I can smell just a hit of wildflower through the window as I sit typing at my kitchen table and part of me is eight years old again, at a kitchen table in a townhouse in Palatine, waiting for my mother to bring me a tuna sandwich for lunch.