Backdoor Roth in Turbotax 2021
This is how to report a backdoor Roth IRA contribution in Turbotax for 2021.
Portland’s Daily Stolen Car Count
Property crime – including car thefts and break-ins – have become the new pandemic in Portland for both 2021 and 2022. In 2021 we reached a 25 year high in car thefts with over 1000 car thefts per month. 2022 is shaping up to be the same or worse.
It’s not uncommon to see vehicles without license plates driving around city streets and even randomly crashed into buildings. Since last year, Portland police can no longer pull cars over for traffic infractions, missing tags, expired registration, etc. It may soon be Oregon state law that police cannot pull anyone over for minor infractions.
Much like the old Portland Stabtown counter, there is now a new PDXStolenCars.com that keeps tally on the location and stolen vehicle count each day. They also list the most common open-air chop shops and dumping locations for boosted cars since local police no longer pursue such cases.
Luga Luga Cat gets the internet treatment
The Luga Luga cat meme gets joined by a bunch of talented musicians and they make a great little song.
Those Million Dollar Retro video games auctions are a scam
Karl Jobst does a lot of great videos on retro gaming and speed running, but this is one of his best. He pulls back the covers on how and why we now see retro video games selling for hundreds of thousands (now millions) of dollars – seemingly overnight – and why they are part of a massive (but largely legal) scam.
Update: Wired has done an article on this, as has Kotaku who follows up Jobst’s claims with the auction houses – who did everything they could to avoid admitting to the scheme.
We’ve all seen record breaking and very high profile sales of retro video games. In investigating these sales, Jobst finds some absolutely fascinating information. There is very good evidence of a massively collusive industry (i.e. one guy that owns all of these sites) that involves grading agencies, auction houses, and fractional hedge investing houses who are all owned by the same people. Even worse, they have been doing this same scheme from the coin collector bubbles in the 80’s to comic book sales and other collectibles.
The short story? You first recognize an market with collectors and buy up a number of rare games in excellent condition for a few thousand dollars on the open market. After you quietly get a collection of the highest quality items, you then set up your own specialty auction site and grading system for those games. You start selling them on your own auction site and manipulate and pumping the bids to around 2x-5x original prices using accounts you control. This ensures that you have bought the items back yourself. It doesn’t matter what others bid so long as you win your own auction with one of your fake accounts. This creates a history of massively increasing prices and sense of scarcity without actually costing you anything. You’re selling them to yourself on your own auction site so there are no fees or overhead other than running a simple website. This part is easy, because the money you ‘paid’ just comes right back to yourself since you are both the buyer, seller, and own the auction house. You then repeat this process every 6-12 months per game – raising the price higher and higher. As sales break every record, you contact industry news sites that report on these nitch areas (like retro gaming) and off-handedly mention your auction and show the package in your grading services package during the interview.
Eventually you need someone else’s money to make a living at this. As prices rise and publicity spreads of exploding prices, you can then create fractional ownership shares of an item – and sell those to the open market. With the increasing cash inflow, you can then continue to sell the same game again and again at higher and higher prices. You use fractional share owners to compete against fractional share bidders. Again, since you are always the winning bidder (along with the collection of fractional sales customers) this is all profit. The fractional owners walk away with some small amount of money on the gains, you as the auction house take a 15-20% cut, and 5% seller’s cut. Even better – the game never leaves your possession. You then put it back on the fractional sales site under the winner’s account – and sell shares at the newer, higher price – and repeat as long as you like. Each time you turn it over, you make 20-25% of the new, inflated sale price.
How did he figure this all out? By researching and finding out the same guys in the news with these winning bids just happen to be the same folks that own and run the auction houses and grading companies. He also finds they were the key players in previous collector run-ups like the 80’s coin bubble, the comic collection bubbles, and many others.
Definitely worth a watch and as a serious cautionary tale – because like the coin collector scams they ran like this in the 80’s and 90’s the market eventually collapsed.
Eye Tracking Mask
Clever mask that tracks the wearer’s eyes and updates the led displays.
Video game developers leave the industry at a steady rate after 3-6 years of work.
This article from Game Developer gives a pretty accurate description of working in the game industry in the 2010-20’s. They share a very common story of Frank D’Angelo who got into games, but ultimate left by late 20’s. Long term game careers are rare, with the latest numbers showing only 17% of 30,000 attendees at the Game Developers Conference having worked in the industry for seven to ten years. Why? It’s a number of factors, but common are: high stress and long hours, constant need to move for the next game job, unstable work with frequent layoffs, and unhealthy life and family balance. As someone that also felt themselves move away from games in my graphics career, I can echo much of what he experienced.
Jason Schreier also writes about these factors in his book “Blood, Sweat, and Pixels” and more recent follow up “Press Reset“.
Dealing with Time Zones in Code
The real answer is to always use seconds since an epoch for logging – like the Unix epoch – with 64 bit integer representation (signed, if you want to allow stamps before the epoch). Any real-world time system has some non-linear, non-monotonic behaviour like leap hours or daylight savings.
Waaaay back in 2007
I remember seeing this originally way back in the day – and I’m still a little baffled why this hasn’t caught on in the age of gigantic TV’s. Probably because head tracking isn’t exactly perfect just yet? While not as immersive as a full VR headset, this does provide a full vr experience without the headset, glasses, or any other intrusive headgear.
Johnny Chung Lee (at Carnegie Mellon at the time, now at Google) used the infrared camera in the Wii remote and a head mounted sensor bar (two IR LEDs), to accurately track the location of your head and render view dependent images on the screen. This effectively transforms your display into a portal to a virtual environment. The display properly reacts to head and body movement as if it were a real window creating a realistic illusion of depth and space. By Johnny Chung Lee, Carnegie Mellon University. For more information and software visit http://johnnylee.net
Window to the World
Very clever idea – and I like the use of head-tracking parallax to add more interactivity.
For more details on the build, visit https://alexshakespeare.com.
All code for this project is at https://github.com/shakso/WorldWindow/
Just a reminder that the parallax technique has been around since 2007 – and even long before that.
Price is Right Memories
If you grew up in the last 30 years, you’re familiar with the Price Is Right. One of my many favorites as a kid was the game Cliff Hangers in which a little swiss climber would move his way up the mountain while yodeling music played.
It turns out, the name of the song is called “On the Franches Mountains” from the album “Swiss Mountain Music“. The magical clip used on air with the yodeling starts at 0:52 and 2:22.