Comments | ekorber: stamps and inefficiency

ekorber

stamps and inefficiency

Apr 14, 2006 19:00

I went to the post office to get $.02 stamps today, since I still have a bunch of $.37 stamps, as it takes me about 2 years to go through a book of stamps. The machine only sold them in lots of 40, however, and it was not worth $.70 or so to wait in line and get them from a person, so now I have waaaaaaay more $.02 stamps than I can reasonably use ( Read more... )

Comments 9

To be fair... cdbarker April 15 2006, 03:42:38 UTC

If you were still in Pittsburgh, you'd be much closer to the leading edge of the coming robot invasion.

Re: To be fair... ekorber April 15 2006, 03:52:14 UTC

Don't remind me.

Re: To be fair... cdbarker April 16 2006, 03:23:15 UTC

The really wacky part of this whole thing. I didn't need a CSN, because even though I had to file in California, it was not my primary residence last year, so I do feel for your California wackiness.

Re: To be fair... ekorber April 16 2006, 08:13:48 UTC

Weird.

Did you file on paper or e-file?

roofpig13 April 15 2006, 04:51:56 UTC

CA has such weird laws and crap. We actually had our taxes done by the same guy who did them for us in NY, and it was his first time doing CA taxes, and he even said CA was f-ed up (my words, not his, but you get the gist).

ekorber April 15 2006, 04:54:13 UTC

Yeah, it was annoying. The actual tax return was trivial (my taxes are really simple, it took less than an hour for me to do federal + 2 states), but the random-id-number thing was ridiculous.

quale April 17 2006, 01:05:49 UTC

Can you use the CSN for anything fraudulent/moneymaking?

I mean sometimes they staff these things by people just to prevent people from trying to brute force the system.

Alright that seems a bit of a stretch in this case. More likely it is just stupidity.

ekorber April 17 2006, 02:00:29 UTC

As far as I can tell you can only use it for filing taxes, and only for 1 year (you get a new one every year). Also, it can't possibly be unique as it's only 4 digits.

easwaran April 19 2006, 03:34:43 UTC

And it's ridiculous! I had trouble two years in a row, because the number they had on file didn't match the supposed place on the previous year's form where it was supposed to come from.

Anyway, in order to get the robot efficiency, they need to get the robots. It's often easier to just hire low-paid employees to staff these things than get someone to make sure the robots work and stay working.