IL have the gas tax like MI? We're paying 6% on goods and services, but also add on 6% to fuel along with the current 19 cents per gallon national.

Oh, Illinois has gas tax for sure. It just won't be as much of an issue for a guy who doesn't drive much. It's about 18% on top of the Federal excise tax (for Cook County). I found a website that helps you compute your overall tax burden (sales tax, property tax, etc) and I plugged my income level in to both new york city and my home zip code and found they were off by only about $500/yr. Very interesting...
https://smartasset.com/taxes/income-taxes if you want to check it out for yourself.

Fucking hell.
I'm at 34%
Higher than both. * for my filing status and annual income.

Permanent-ish.

Yeah, overall the income tax rate in Chicago winds up being a *lot* less than NYC, especially since there's no city income tax. IL marginal income tax is flat at 3.75%. NY State was about 6.5%, plus an additional 3.5% city tax, so roughly 10% overall income tax. The locals here have nothing to complain about.


As compared to Manhattan, rent is about 2/3 of what I was paying (for a lot bigger and nicer space), food is cheaper, gas isn't very expensive, etc.

The public transit system here is a bit of a let-down, but I guess that's to be expected. And all of the things are further apart.

Right there with you, loosing ~35% of my income to state/federal and local taxes... hip hip fucking Illinois.

Phoenix, AZ, filling jointly: 18%

You can keep your winters too.

No state or local income tax here but they pay you back in humidity for that luxury. I pay much less in taxes than for the house in rural Georgia but lots more in homeowners insurance because hurry canes.

I was told in fl its nice in spring, fall and winter and just the summers are nasty. True? Or is it humid all year around?

I can't really speak for Florida, but I can for the SC coast. It is humid all year long, but really the summer is the only time that it is really nasty out. May through mid September is the worst. I think last year I had about 3 weeks spread out in the winter where it was below freezing. It is great at Christmas time to be driving around in the miata with the top down.

every location i put in on that calculator came out between 19 and 22% but then many places I would not be deducting quite so much mortgage interest because houses are silly expensive here.

Pretty much true here. Further south it stays warmer and humid longer. It's pretty darn good here from late October through April usually. North Florida gets hard freezes but we don't usually have but a couple of nights below freezing some years.

Taxes?

A prominent businessman (construction) owed $130 million in taxes over here, Turkish IRS just gave him a piece of paper with 3 signatures on it and said his debt was "forgiven".
He's known to be pretty damn close to the ruling party.

We pay up the nose, that's a whole different story.

Ramble time:

So I ordered a set of gaskets and rings for my car, and gave them my friend's address.
He would be staying at a hotel in LA this week, and then fly back with my parts.

Parts were shipped to the hotel, and he decided he did not like the place and walked out, to find another hotel.

There are 2 packages, from different vendors.

One was accepted, and they kept it at a separate facility outside the hotel. Locating that package was hell.
They, however, decided to refuse the second one.
Fedex took it back to their center. I called, they said it would be sent back to the shipper (vendor), and that only the shipper could do something about it.
So, I called the vendor. They were cool, said they took care of it, and the package would be kept at Fedex so my friend could pick it up.
They even gave me a Fedex Req #, confirming the package would not be returned to the vendor.

My friend went to Fedex this morning, and he was told the package was returned. Sorry, nothing we can do.

I looked at the Fedex website and realized they had only generated a return tracking number. That's it.

I called Fedex again, demandedd to speak with a supervisor, and told her the whole story.
She got a hold of actual people over at Fedex center, made them find the package, got the employee's name and told her to hold on to it.

I then called my friend, gave him the details, and he is driving to Sun Valley, Ca from Malibu, to pick my 84 mm piston rings in person.

Never a dull moment. Fuck.

Props for managing to get all that done from a different continent!

Thanks, you should have seen me pacing up and down in the living room and talking on the phone...

There was a time, not so long ago, when smartphones were nonexistent and Wi-Fi was new.

During this primitive and brutal time, what passed for wireless security tended to come disabled by default on home wireless routers, and few were those with the knowledge and motivation to plumb the (shallow) depths of WEP.

For those traveling some distance from home, on business, let us say, who happened also to be carrying a laptop and a WiFi card, apartment buildings were an oasis in the information desert. Lost and in need of access to Mapquest, or merely in search of connectivity for more ordinary purposes, one could simply pull into the nearest apartment complex, fire up the laptop, and within a minute of driving at the most, find an open access point. Thusly were emails answered, hotels booked, airline reservations changed, and directions found.

Life is easier now, and access to data nearly ubiquitous. I am rarely without a computer on my belt whose computational power and network throughput handily exceed that of my desktop machine in days gone by. It can pinpoint my location to within a few meters anywhere on the surface of the earth, and can instantaneously access the entire repository of human knowledge. It is a high-definition camera, a game console, a portable editing studio, a music library, a radio with an infinitely wide dial, a filing cabinet of infinite depth, and, by a seemingly implacable coincidence, is also capable of placing and receiving telephone calls, albeit badly and unreliably.

And yet I can't help think that some intangible elegance, some sense of achievement in victory, has been lost.

^^ Uh oh, looks like Joe's on the bottle again.
(moving can be tough) :giggle:

Lets have a quiet moment for our Russians.

Pornhub and YouPorn adult websites blocked in Russia, as authorities tell citizens to ‘meet people in real life’


Pornhub and YouPorn adult websites blocked in Russia, as authorities tell citizens to ?meet people in real life? | The Independent

Ugh. If it was that easy, I wouldn't need the porn.

Uh, I mean them. They wouldn't need the porn. :inout: