Good point. Cars will still be valuable for road trips, but lots and lots of people will choose to skip car ownership and just settle for local, self-driving travel.
Maybe there will be a stratified market for rental self-driving cars; one for "just this trip" and another for "five days of exclusive use for a road trip."
I remember building a hackintosh about 6 years ago, has much changed since then? It was a lot of fun and a lot more challenging than a regular Windows PC build.
I think a faxed signature counts as a "wet" signature. Also it's easier to sign then feed into a fax machine than:
- sign
- scan (usually sent as a weird filename to your corporate email)
- save the attachment, rename the file, create a new email, attach the file, send
Could you elaborate on the "not so much"? A lot of companies (including law firms and Fortune 100 corps) have had me sign documents with DocuSign/HelloSign with no reservation. What would be the potential legal differences compared to an actual signature?
I'm working on the California death certificate automation system. DocuSign is not legally accepted for a doctor to sign off on cause of death for a decedent.
Laws for your use case will be different. That's mine.
47 states (New York, Washington and Illinois the outliers) have passed an Uniform Electronic Transaction Act that confers electronic signatures with equal weight. A federal law has existed since 2000. Unfortunately a self-fulfilling prophecy of people not accepting the validity of electronic agreements because no one else does has kept usage low. Even faxed contracts are often followed up with Fedex delivered versions. The only electronic agreement I've done is FAFSA's PIN blessed submission. The recent high profile payment card breaches and politician email doxxing have further decreased public confidence in all things computerized.
Doesn't Dropbox run on S3? Or is that the company that recently moved off AWS into their own datacenters? If so that was a good case study. (I'm an all 5 certified AWS guy and while I love it, I like seeing the counterexamples to keep my Kool-Aid ingestion in check).
They used to. They migrated off of it because cloud is too expensive. 2 big components to that :
1) traffic to the rest of the internet from the cloud is "wtf" expensive compared to the alternatives. If you can do your own peering (like dropbox does), this goes double.
2) Actual disk storage is too expensive as well. It doesn't compare favorably with what you can get by building a blackblaze pod [1] (just an example).
3) Cloud does not match their usecase. They are write-heavy instead of read-heavy. So as the cloud optimizes for internet serving, it actually moves further away from their optimal price point.
There's an episode of software engineering radio that has a lot of details from the horse's mouth:
Tax filing opened this year on January 23, 2017. This is the first day you can submit your return to the IRS. The IRS aims to process refunds for 90% of returns in 21 days.
In order to pre-fill a tax return (and, incidentally, to validate that your tax return is correct), the IRS needs information. You're familiar with the acronyms: W-2, 1099, etc. These are called Information Returns (IRs). Depending on the type of IR, these are due to the IRS (from your employer or bank, e.g.) by January 31, February 28, or March 31. I didn't get my 1099-INT from my bank until late-February, for example.
Now, do the math.
The IRS cannot pre-fill a return until March 31 at the absolute earliest. That ignores further processing, mailing, approval, etc. time. But for those taxpayers who filed on January 23, most had their refunds processed by February 15.
So pre-filling tax returns delays the process by 2 months.
There's a very "strange" circular logic here, too. In today's system, you shouldn't file your tax return until you have all your IRs. But you might know that you're not expecting anything in February or March, so you can file "early". But the IRS doesn't know that. They only know that you don't have that associated income when they don't receive anything by the deadline.
Incidentally, this is how fraud happens. I file a fraudulent return on 1/23. The IRS doesn't have the information to validate whether I'm lying or not: they won't receive that information for another 2 months. So the run some basic risk algorithms, then shrug and assume I'm telling the truth and pay me my refund (probably in the form of an untraceable debit card). This happens all the time, usually in the form of filing returns in the names of other people, often dead people or Puerto Rico residents (due to some arcane rules relating to income tax immunity given that PR is a territory).
(People make "mistakes" all the time. Small amounts are waived, and the IRS sends collection letters to the rest. The collection rate of those letters is very, very good. Though I have some good stories about government [in]efficiency. Those letters are not "audits", by the way, but friendly reminders. Audits are really rare, despite our fears.)
The other answer is "move up the deadlines". Make employers and banks file everything by January 15 or something. Good luck with going up against every single large employer and financial institution in the States!
Also nice is the in-service rollover, so you can roll funds directly from the company's 401(k) plan into your self-directed IRA or whatever multiple times per year, instead of when you leave.
Good point. Another nice option is the ability to roll over an existing roll over IRA into a 401(k) -- not all plans have this option. This is important because having basis in an IRA negates a lot of the advantage of doing a backdoor Roth IRA, but if you can move all of those IRA funds into your 401(k) without any tax consequences, then you're golden.
Note that 401(k)-to-401(k) rollovers are generally always allowed.
