In case you missed it, John Oliver had some thoughts on branding… 

On a completely different subject, I filed my income taxes, the federal a little over a week ago and the state yesterday. Each of them went fairly smoothly as for once I don’t have anything complicating the process, just my pension, Social Security, some interest, and dividends. 

And there’s the rub. I really should not have to file, as the government knows all of this stuff because everything’s already been reported to them. They could just send me a bill, or in this case, the IRS could just send me a refund. But no, we can’t have it that simple because of the special interests that depend on their income from getting folks to pay them to file their taxes for them, so they pay politicians to keep the laws as they are.

At least I can file for free. But the service that I used to file my federal tax wanted me to pay 44 bucks to also file my state tax, which is outrageous. I declined.

So I spent half an hour on the Pennsylvania site filling in all the same information, which they already have or could get from the IRS. There was another annoyance at the state site. I ended up owing a small amount to the state, as I knew I would, so I filled in my bank information by copying and pasting the routing and account numbers.

But there was a kicker. I had to verify the checking account number but it wouldn’t let me paste it in the second time. I had to manually type it in. It seems to me there is a greater chance of mistyping manually than there is by pasting, so I don’t know what the point of that is. Moreover, I copied it from the number that I had just pasted in the previous field; so really what was the point?

I come across these web sites every now and then that prevent pasting into a field and I can never figure out what the purpose is other than for the programmer to show off that he could make the field un-paste-able.

Anyway, taxes are done for another year.