idle thoughts from spending too much time looking at IRS tax forms

[desh]

I love that the PDFs printed on the IRS's website all have the "Printed on recycled paper" logo at the bottom.

A significant chunk of a page on every tax form instructions has a "Paperwork Reduction Act Notice", detailing some information about the act, how long it will take to fill out the associated form, and what to do if you have questions or comments along those lines. Hey, I have a novel idea on how to create a reduction in the amount of paper needed for this paperwork...

And for about an hour just now, I was 90% sure I found a bug, repeated several times, in the instructions for a federal tax form. (It turns out not to be a bug, but I'd call it bad documentation any time you're asked to divide by a percentage without the rules explicitly explaining why. People in general are really really bad at dividing by numbers between 0 and 1.)

Comments

[sleepsong.livejournal.com]

I love how, on one of the forms I received in the mail, I can fill in that the reason I'm not paying taxes this year is that I'm deceased. That's pretty hilarious.

[marnanel.livejournal.com]

NAME: ________

[sleepsong.livejournal.com]

Huh?

[marnanel.livejournal.com]

Involved and rambling joke. Hotblack Desiato is a chain of London estate agents. Douglas Adams (as noted on their "About Us" page) stole the name for a character in the Hitchhiker's Guide who was a rock star. The character spent much of his life dead for tax reasons, being carried to parties and communicating telepathically.

[sleepsong.livejournal.com]

LOL, wow, I'm doing too much at once. I just looked at the link, saw "Hot Black..." and stopped reading at once, wondering why somebody was sending me something so blatantly NSFW, before getting back to filling out paperwork.

Win.

[marnanel.livejournal.com]

A percentage? not a ratio?

[desh]

Yes. Are you referring to the difference of a factor of 100? Yeah, they're not so clear about that either. But I do think percentage is a better term here, since you're trying to get from your share of something to the total share of something by dividing by the percentage share you have.

[marnanel.livejournal.com]

I was referring to the two-orders-of-magnitude thing, yeah. If someone gave me a number and told me it was a percentage I'd assume 0 was none and 100 was all of it. At least in my head, "percentage" has to include the idea of a hundred somewhere.

[desh]

Maybe "fraction" would be best. Though I guess most people think of a fraction as necessarily having the top number and the bottom number and the line between them, not just as a generic name for a quantity less than 1.

Man, this stuff is hard.

[marnanel.livejournal.com]

Well, at least you have the top number and the bottom number and they're aware that there is a question going on about how many of the one go into the other.

Do people not know the word "ratio"?

[desh]

I don't think ratio works here. To me, a ratio always relates one part of the whole to another part of the whole, and never relates a part of the whole to the whole. If you have 40% or 2/5 of the whole, then the ratio of what you have to what you don't have is 2:3 or 2/3.

I wonder if that's a regional difference.

[marnanel.livejournal.com]

Oh, I don't know... maybe it is (well, what's important is how J. Random User understands it). I think of "ratio" as "a pair of numbers divided to give another number", hence the term "rational number", but I may have spent too much of my life going drinking with maths graduates.

[fweebles.livejournal.com]

People always informally referred to ".79" as compared to 79% as "the decimal equivalent of 79%", or "fraction expressed as a decimal".

Wikipedia calls this the decimal fraction, which is also a term several of my math profs at school had, so that might be the actual right term to go with.