Daily Tech News Show is made possible by you listening right now. Thanks to all of you, including Tim Deputy, Brandon Brooks, Hector Bones, new patrons, Allison, Tony Adorno, and Katlo 54. Welcome everybody. We love new patrons. Also, Bramerica, your shout out was sponsored by Matt Zaglin. On this episode of DTNS, why UK banks object to the Apple Card, the top payment processor in Nigeria isn't somebody you've heard of worldwide, and why AI is so misunderstood. No one, seriously, nobody could understand what makes AI work. This is the Daily Tech News for Monday, March 4th, 2024 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. From the suburbs of Atlanta, I'm Nika Montport. And finally under sunny skies on the show's producer, Roger Chang. Oh, my friends, it's good to be back for another week of technology news. And we got some good stuff for you today. Let's start with the quick hits. The European Commission fined Apple 1.8 billion euros Monday for abusing its dominant market position in the distribution of music streaming apps. Basically, Spotify complained. Apple got in trouble for restricting app developers like Spotify from informing users about or providing instructions for finding cheaper ways to pay for a subscription outside the app. Apple doesn't like to let people do this. They say, look, you use our in-app payment system or you shut up about other places where you could pay for a subscription. Spotify filed a complaint about the practice in 2019. The EC investigated and has now ordered Apple to remove the provisions prohibiting such restrictions for music apps. But it's kind of a moot decision in a way because starting March 8th, Europe's Digital Markets Act will prohibit Apple from placing such restrictions on any app, at least in Europe. Google modified how to select filters from file search and Google Drive for iOS. You can now filter by file type, opened, and last modified from a drop down menu. The feature will come to Google Drive for Android very soon. Google feature coming to iOS first. You don't see that every day. Interesting. No, not at all. A large language model maker Anthropic released Claude 3, Opus, Sonnet, and Haiku, all versions of Claude 3. They came out Monday. And of course, Anthropic says they're faster and more powerful than the previous models. Opus is the most powerful. That's that's your GPT for equivalent. It's also the most expensive if you want to use it. Sonnet is more compact and Haiku is even more compact and coming soon. Claude 3 Chatbot can summarize up to 200,000 words that's compared to Chat GPT's 3000. Anthropic will also let Claude 3 users upload images and documents for analysis. In AI ethics news, open AI, Salesforce, hugging face scale AI, and a few dozen other companies signed a pledge to build AI for good for the good of humanity. Meanwhile, India's Ministry of Electronics and IT issued an advisory Friday requiring significant tech companies to make sure their services and or products do not permit any bias or discrimination or threaten the integrity of the electoral process. This is largely focused on AI models. And Microsoft announced it's going to show off new games coming to the Xbox in a partner preview event starting at 1pm Eastern Wednesday, March 6. This time the announcement is going to feature around a dozen new trailers from Capcom, EA, Nexon, and a few others. And that is a look at our quick hits. Another big announcement today. Apple announced you can now order the 13 and 15 inch MacBook Air laptops with the M3 chip inside. Those will start shipping on March 18th. Bloomberg's Mark Gurman indicates this is the first of a couple of months worth of new product announcements that Apple is going to make on the web without holding events. Among the announcements Gurman expects to follow are two new iPad Pro models with the M3 chip, new iPad Air models, one of which is a 12.9 inch size, biggest iPad Air they've ever released, if that ends up being the case. A new Apple pencil and a few other things. That's not all the new products Apple might have in store that are making news, though, right, Nika? Right. Another Apple product, another product Apple might want to roll out is its credit card but in the UK. UK banks don't like that idea very much and have called for an investigation into what data Apple collects about spending habits and how it uses that data. UK users can already link their bank accounts to the Apple wallet to monitor recent transactions and Apple balances, as well as use the card for Apple Pay. The banks are concerned, however, that Apple could collect that data and use it to inform their competing products. Apple says all information for Apple Pay users profiles is stored locally but does not specifically comment on data brought into the Apple wallet when users connect third-party banking accounts. I don't know about you, Nika, but it sounds like the banks protest too much here. Yeah, I agree. I don't think that the issue is what they make it seem. It sounds to me is that they are a little bit jealous that they don't get their hands on all of that wonderful, wonderful data that Apple has collected and they want access to that so that they can, in the words that I just said, inform their competing products. So they want to be able to use that data, I think, to upsell their current customers and see what the trends and what the habits are to see what more can we get from these customers in that way. Yeah, I think it's fair to investigate, honestly. I think that's good due diligence before launching into market, asking the government to say, hey, make sure that's staying on device. They say most of the info stays on the device. Let's just make sure of it. I'm into that. I would like that to be proven. But the banks aren't asking this out of concern for you or me, are they? They are asking. They were having a conversation in Discord, the DTNS Discord earlier today, about the fact that your credit card companies will share information about your purchases with other advertisers. That's what these banks are concerned about, is that their monopoly over that charge information will be taken away because they don't protect the privacy of this information as much as a lot of people assume Apple does. Right. And one of the biggest selling points of Apple is that the way that they care and handle for their users' data, it's usually locally encrypted on the device, so that even Apple doesn't have access to some of that data. And it's one of those things where it's like, well, the other guys are giving it to us. Why won't you allow us to have access to this as well? So I think the crux of this is just that they want access to that data to be able to use it, however they see fit. And they're just using this lawsuit and this new launch as a way to say, hey, let's see if there's anything we can do to get that data for ourselves. Not so much that Apple cards a competitor, right? Absolutely. They don't want another competitor there. If I try to think about this from the other side, what is legitimate is that Apple has been getting more and more into advertising, as have all technology companies through the App Store mostly and placing advertisements for app developers within the App Store so that they can collect a little money from them, show you some promoted apps and such. That's going to introduce a little conflict of interest where it would be tempting for Apple to say, well, gosh, we do have all of this purchase information from people. If we anonymized that and then linked it, we could target ads more effectively. So that's why I'm like making sure they're not doing that, that they're not giving into the temptation is fair because that is something that would improve Apple's advertising. Yeah, it would give them an unfair advantage. Yeah, yeah. Completely agree. Yeah. But I think, you know, time will tell to see how this kind of all pans out. But I think there are some conflicting motives here on either side. Again, we live in a capitalistic society. So everybody is trying to find the edge on how they can increase the revenue and the market cap for their companies. Yeah, I guess where I end up coming down is just because it might be a selfish motivation on the credit card company's part doesn't mean it's not a fair question. Absolutely. So yeah, let's investigate and find out. And Apple can be a little bit reticent to be transparent at times. So sometimes you got to push them a little and I'm good with that as well. Yeah. Keeping on the the payment technology side of things in Nigeria, which many of you may not know is the largest economy on the continent of Africa. Stores may have as many as 10 payment machines to accommodate the many different bank cards issued on different payment systems. But restofworld.org reports that a lot of people are starting to ask for their cards to be read by the money point terminal instead of the one from their bank because money point works with multiple cards. As of January, 2.3 million businesses in Nigeria use money point, and it is considered widely to be the most reliable of the payment systems in the country. Customers say it has lower decline rates. Even when you're using your own bank's terminal, sometimes cards will be declined when they shouldn't be. It also instantly reverses a transaction if a payment fails, which is better for the businesses. Some of the other terminals will have a delay and that means customers could walk out thinking the payment succeeded only to have it reversed later. And then the merchants left going, oh, well, now I don't have their money, but they have the stuff and they already left. Right. The company makes most of its money on transaction charges, but also offers business loans. Its biggest competitor is China's OPE, which has a 37% market share to money points only 20%. But a money point has banking licenses that OPE just doesn't have, and which lets money point offer services like collecting deposits and offering its own POS terminals. Money puns business managers also are well-known members of the community, of the communities that they serve. The managers get paid commissions for every new customer sign up as well as ongoing payments based on those terminals transactions as well. Yeah, I thought this was fascinating. And it's another example of restofworld.org doing great work to spotlight this because money point is doing a similar thing to another rest of world article we talked about recently where a streaming service was being, was a subsidiary of a traditional cable broadcast, cable and broadcast company, was using its relationships that it's developed over the years while giving people the room to innovate to dominate streaming in the region. Money point was founded in 2015 as a company called TeamAppt providing software to financial industries and then got a banking license in 2019 so that it could start acting as an intermediary between banks and customers. And that's when it was able to get the point of sale license, make its own machine, be able to take multiple bank cards and realized, well, wait, we're a local company. OPEI is coming from China. They don't know people around here. We know people around here. So they did another great example of how you succeed as a startup, work within the community you're from. And I thought it was really interesting with that what you were saying about the business managers, they're finding people in the community be like, you know, folks, you go to church with folks, you hang out at the market with folks. So you're going to have a better chance to convince merchants and convince people that money point is a good bet. And it turns out it looks like it's working. Yeah.  If you get some information on a product or a service from someone that you know and trust, you're more likely to be open to going with that particular service or product, especially if it's, you know, quote unquote homegrown and it's from your region is from your area. And it gives you a little bit more comfort when it comes to making those making those decisions, especially when it comes to finances, when it comes to your money, when it comes to your bank, it gives you a certain level of comfort and assurance in how you go about your everyday life when you're making purchases for, you know, just being able to live and move throughout your own community. One of the reasons I like stories like this is I think we tend to assume that the big companies, you know, the Amazons and the Microsofts and the even the Walmarts of the world are the ones who are going to provide the services everywhere eventually that sure, there might be a local company. They'll get run out of business when the big folks come in and it's not always true. And granted, you probably aren't familiar with OPEI if you're not in China, but that's the heavyweight, right? That's the one from overseas that has the big backing and all the money behind it. And a local business is showing, no, if you want to be from out of market and succeed, you have to act like you're from the market or you have to hire people that have relationships within the market and you have to empower local control because that's how MoneyPoint is doing it. And once again, it is interesting to see the innovation that you get in places like Nigeria, Kenya, where Mpesa came from, you know, back of the day and revolutionized payments. So I would keep an eye on what MoneyPoint does next. They solved a problem that is very specific to Nigeria in this case, but they seem to be very efficient and very good. And I'm curious if they start expanding outside of Nigeria, what we see. Right. And if you think about it, everything is cyclical. If you think about small towns, when the big box stores came in, when you got a Walmart, when you got, you know, a Publix or a Kroger, it was like, oh, wow, this is great. We have so much access, so much more. But on the flip side of that, when you have large companies come in, as you mentioned, they don't know the community as well. They don't know the way that people move throughout that community. And it can be a negative.  And sometimes they don't necessarily treat the local economy, the local environment, the best. And people notice that and they say, hey, now we have this option of something that's a little bit closer to who we are, to what we're used to. And we're going to support that. Yeah. And David Grizzly-Smith in our chat brings up a good question. He's a little snarky about it. He's like, how long until there's a security breach from MoneyPoint as it gets big? Because the bigger you get, the bigger of a target you are. So that is a question.  And I'm not going to jump to the conclusion that it's not good, because I don't know. But that is something that these companies also have to pay attention to. And I'd be interested to see what their strategy is there as well. Yeah. It's a valid point. But at the same time, there have been some pretty large companies that have had data breaches as well. So you can't always necessarily pin it on a smaller company, not quite having security. Even though that is a great point to bring up that you would hope that they have locked down on their security and ensure that their customer data is safe and protected before they become the big company. Well, folks, Apple has lots of power users and hipster users. But what about the rest of us? Sarah Lane and Eileen Rivera do Apple vision show every week on Mondays to talk about whether Apple's vision matches what they want. You probably have checked it out. But if you haven't yet joined in on the fun, you can watch it live at our YouTube and Twitch channels or you can enjoy it at your leisure. Get subscribed right now at Apple vision show dot com. Check it out. MIT technology review has an excellent article by Will Douglas heaven called large and language models can do jaw dropping things, but nobody knows exactly why. As as always, you recommend you read the whole thing. But let's talk a little bit about what's in the article. Tom, the underlying puzzle is that we know what large language models do, but we don't know why. Yeah, no, I think it's something that some people are aware of. But but not everybody advances in AI haven't come from a grand design of the internals, but from trial and error. You try stuff out, and you see if it works. And if it works, then all the other scientists with permission because it's the way science works copies that and then tries other things that they think might improve stuff. The ideas that don't work, you never hear about those get discarded, but the ones that do work are kept. It's it's an experimental approach. It's not a theoretical approach. Large language models train on data and somehow have been able to generalize from that data to other data. They're really complex versions of what's called a Markov chain. That's something that's just really good at predicting what comes next. A Markov chain could maybe be trained to do something like understand English, but the large language models can understand French, even when they're only trained on English, that's the generalization that we're talking about. And we don't know why we just know that it happens. And the longer you train on data, the better these things get up to a point because of a statistical principle called overfitting. Now, I've heard of overfitting, but let's explain what that means. Sure. Overfitting, it's when a model is too precise, it's it's got too much data, and it can't generalize from that. So I was trying to think of a good example of this. Let's say you're plotting out temperature and the day. So you've got days along the bottom access and temperature. If you do that, spaced out across a year, you could draw a curve, right? And you would see hotter temperatures in the summer and you'd see colder ones in the winter.  But if you have lots of data, let's say for every hour, and you look closely at that data, now you'd have a wiggly line that goes up and down every day, right? And so unless you back out and view less of that data, you won't be able to see the trend of the months because you're confused by the trends of the days. Now I'm mixing a lot of metaphors here, so statisticians don't get too upset with me. But in general, that's overfitting. You have too much data. And so you see the wiggly line, you can't see the trend. And up until you have too much data, the model can't predict outside the confines of the data it has. Except large language models have beaten overfitting, right? Yeah, they have. Scientists appear to be wrong about overfitting. Or at least when they were thinking about it in the wrong way, there's a little bit of debate about that. Heaven opens up his article from Technology Review with an example of folks at Open AI trying to teach a model years ago to do basic addition to just add two numbers. And the model could do anything it was trained on. You trained it on two plus two, it could do four. Even three plus two, it could do five. But if you hadn't trained it on three plus three, it couldn't generalize to new addition until one day they forgot to turn off the model's training run. Usually it got to that overfitting limit. And they're like, okay, it's actually getting worse. Turn it off, right? Makes sense. They forgot to turn it off, left it training, and it figured it out and started to generalize. It started getting better again after a certain point. It got worked past the overfitting. Other scientists have reported similar situations. They call it grokking. But it's similar to another phenomenon called double descent. That's when a model's size instead of the time that it's trained shows it reducing errors, then increasing errors because it's getting too big, then reducing them again. And some folks are working on trying to uncover what's going on inside of these models, right? Inside of what's going on in the black box. Yeah, yeah. So they're taking an experimental approach, trying to do smaller, sometimes older models, more specific things under controlled conditions that you can vary and see like, okay, if I change this condition, what happens to the model? This is like doing an experiment in physics, right? Like let's collide these two particles and see what comes out of it, except it's weirder because in this case, we created it. We didn't create physics, but we created the large language models. We just don't know how it works. So you've worked with this stuff, right, Nika? Yeah, I have not on the large language model side, but I have created algorithms before I have implemented algorithms before. But I think it's one thing to note in the beginning of the article, when they realized that they left it running for a longer amount of time and they talked about how it was like a light bulb went off. And I was, as I was reading it, I was like, you know, this is kind of what people think AI is, right? It's going to become sentient. And I was like, is it, is there any more sentient behavior than if you think of a three-year-old, a four-year-old, a five-year-old learning addition and they have the simple model two plus two is four. And it just doesn't make sense. The child just can't get it, can't get it. And then one day the light bulb just goes off over the course of time. And I, I had a little chuckle because I was like, this is probably the closest sentient behavior that we've seen, you know, from a model because again, we have our thoughts on what a model should do, how long it should take. You have these, these, these HPC's that are just churning out data just left and right.  And what they realized the longer time you give it, the, the better it becomes. And sometimes if you just kind of step outside of, of what you assume should happen and a mistake or a lack of, I guess, focus or whatever you want to call it, that led them to the point where, oh, we just forgot because we were doing something else and the model continued to run and they saw that it corrected itself. And that is, you know, just one of the things of science. This is all, you know, we're creating all these new things. And this is just sometimes how it happens.  Yeah. And I think it does make me understand a little more why some very respected scientists in this field are concerned about artificial generalized intelligence working faster than we expect, right? Most of the scientists working in this field say there are limits to how good these things are. You can see those limits in your daily life. And we're not going to get to, you know, the, the sentient AI that goes rogue anytime soon. But like you said, when you see it do this, and you're like, okay, but I didn't expect that. What else do I not expect it to do that it's going to do? It does kind of creep in, you know, emotionally make you go, well, but I don't know. I can't guarantee it will display any kind of behavior because I'm actually not able to tell how it works. So that's why the experimental approach that's trying to understand why it does things the way it does is, I think, really important because the more we can understand how it works, the less, you know, the less uncertainty we have that it might just go rogue someday. Right. It's all, again, when you're entering a new frontier, it's one of those things where it's just like, I thought I knew what it was. I had a certain, you know, reasonable expectation of what it would do and how it would turn out. And then it completely goes in the opposite direction. It's like, oh, I didn't expect that that one kind of caught me off guard. Yeah. And this is, you know, the big, the big thing that I keep trying to explain to people is that the copyright issues with training are real, but they aren't what a lot of people think they are. And I think this is another way of understanding that is there's not a database of the books it was trained on in there. There's, and someone wrote in and was like, yeah, but it had to make a copy to train on it. So there is a copy involved. And that, that's right. That's where the discussion should be focused. But when the model works, I think a lot of people think, well, it's got a copy of, you know, the New York Times in there and it looks at it. So that's, that's infringement. It doesn't. It's, it's a big Markov chain. It doesn't even know what the New York Times is.  And we don't even know how it does it. We just know that it does. And it works better than it ought to. So it's, it's kind of freaky. Yeah, let's check out the mailbag. There's lots of AI stuff in our mailbag. But let's start with giving you a break from AI. Robert wrote in in response to Spotify, adding an audio book only option to its subscription. We talked about that last week. Robert says, this Spotify deal is tempting. I have an audible account. However, some of my favorite authors are intentionally not releasing on audible due to their prohibitive revenue share drop off when not exclusive to audible. Brandon Sanderson is one such author. So the Spotify deal would be tempting if it has the books I can't get on audible. However, a lot of the books I listen to are towards the 20 hour mark. So would I need to time my listening to the end of the month so it rolls over into the next month because they they only give you 15 hours for free on Spotify. Yeah, that's I don't know. That's it's it's strange. I'm not a Spotify user. I used to be I dropped the service a while back. But it's interesting. I have an audible account. And I personally like reading the books better. I can kind of use my own imagination in in in what's being what's on the page. But I get a lot of people love to listen to books. So yeah, then Pepe Kevin pointed out that the Doctor Who audiobooks are only on Spotify in the United States anyway. This plan change makes him think more seriously about adding a Spotify plan, even if it's not just the audio plan. Interesting. Yeah, thank you for that. Yeah. And back on the AI front, we have Martin who wanted to add to our discussions last week regarding Google AI. Google was not ready for Gen AI to take off the way it did. And it has not the types of AI that they had been perfecting. The recent updates to Google Maps, for example, walking directions, painting the camera and being able to figure out your position and direction in unique AI, but it's not Gen AI. Text to speech, even chat GPT uses Google's AI service. Second, is that Google can't be the best at providing a responses from searching until someone else does it first. Otherwise, every government is going to pass laws, stopping them from doing it. It's multiple countries had also had so much problems with Google news. Gen AI is an actual threat. Keep up the good work. Yeah. Open AI is going to start having those same problems. But yeah, the bigger you are, the more scrutiny on everything that you do. Absolutely. That's why we're small. And we're happy to say that. Thank you, Nika Monford, for being with us today. As always, where can folks go to find more of what you do? You can find me at TechSavidiva pretty much everywhere on the internet. You can also find me on Snobo West podcast, which is a podcast that I co-host with Terence Gaines, who was also a contributor to DTNS. And it's an Apple focused podcast where we talk all things Apple and then some. So definitely check us out over there. Yeah. End your week with Snobo Westcast. And then you could begin your week with Apple Vision Show, but, you know, get the multiple perspectives. Indeed. Special shout out to the Colchester Little League 2023 team and a big thanks to Margo, who dropped this plaque by our house.  So we took a bump on it. And it was really nice. It says, well, thanks to our sponsor Daily Tech News Show, Colchester Little League 2023. So, so thank you, Matt. Thank you, Colchester Little League. Thank you, Margo, for the plaque. That's very nice. Patrons, stick around for the extended show, Good Day Internet. Nika and I are going to talk about Apple's increasing habit of just announcing stuff on the web instead of holding an event. We just talked about the M3 MacBooks. That's an example. Do we like that better? Stick around. We'll discuss. You can also catch the show live Monday through Friday, 4 p.m. Eastern 2100 UTC. Find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. We'll be back tomorrow. Talk to you then.


Welcome to the After Hours podcast, hosted by Harry Haas and James Friedlender, presented by My Investing Club. What's going on guys? We're back with another episode of the After Hours podcast. Today we're gonna kind of do something similar to what we did last week, get more of like a free talk. No real set topics, just kind of gonna see how it flows. So we'll go from there. So Harry, what are you doing this weekend? Well, I was gonna go out tonight because I never really got to celebrate my girlfriends, or not my girlfriends. I'd never got to celebrate my birthday. So I was gonna go out tonight, and get a nice steak, but she's sick, maybe with like COVID or something like that, like Ram too, I don't really know. So probably just gonna chill. Everyone I know has gotten COVID now like two or three times. It's insane.  I just feel like at this point, it's like, again, it's like most people, or some people don't even have symptoms.  Like my parents got pretty sick. You know, they were down and out for a bit. Dude, I don't know what's going on in Canada, but I feel like you guys have also just had it so much. Yeah, I got it. Like I thought I had it a couple of times, but I didn't and then I got it and then I kind of got it again. Like, so I've had it like almost two times because a guy who lived with my girlfriend's family, he got it and gave it to us, but my girlfriend's family didn't get it. My girlfriend's family got it from someone else and then we got that again.  It's kind of funny.  Now it's kind of like COVID's like the forgotten, the stepchild, like no one even talks about it anymore in the news.  That's like, I don't know, but I don't know. I know we were talking a little bit the other day. Like you kind of have started to feel like we found at least a short-term bottom. Yeah, I think so. Yeah, what makes you think that? I mean, for me, just like, I've been like, I had a bunch of, I've been kind of like feeling it for a while because like we've gotten like massive, massive kind of panic, Bitcoin, 20K couldn't really break below that kind of 20K number. So I was like, all right. And then also with the overall markets, I found like the markets are really kind of forward looking and you know, I just feel like everyone kind of knows what's going on now. Everyone knows that the rates are going to be like rising. Everyone kind of understands what's kind of going to happen. Like everyone in their mom is yelling recession.   Yeah, when the masses think one thing's going to happen all at once, usually the opposite happens. So that's the only thing saving this. It's funny, like I was kind of for a long time, I think everybody was expecting that one like capitulation day or like some crazy sell-off day, you know, like a 10% day or something nuts. And that would probably, you know, maybe be the bottom, but I almost feel like kind of what you're saying, like everyone was so scared of a potential recession or of the market crashing that all like the weaker participants like kind of sold already. And we just started to like slowly bleed down. I mean, it doesn't mean that we can't go a hell of a lot lower, but like at least in my long-term stuff, like I've slowly started scaling in. I at least started to, you know, yeah, at least get involved a little bit. I mean, out of my like 100% allocation of cash that I want to use for this, I've only like gone in like 10%. And it's just like small, but and then I want to start seeing us actually get some strength and like holding. Me too, yeah. You know, I think the only thing that concerns me now, mostly it's just that like, honestly, like being a barber, like in talk to people all the time is very interesting. To be depressing, because you hear all the panic and people, but it's interesting, but there's a lot of concern. I mean, there's a lot of people now that kind of feel like this just might be the life we're in for a while. And I think that's the case. I mean, gas isn't going anywhere. The cost of oil is not going down. The food thing, good people. And like, I come from a pretty like nice area, you know, like it's very affluent and such, it's very nice, I enjoy it. But, you know, a lot of people out here are even complaining about the cost of food going on to dinner, the cost is doubled. Going to the grocery store, they call Whole Foods, Whole Check.  And those are the only things that worry me. Now, does that, now obviously the confusion that people have is the economy is not the stock market. So that doesn't necessarily mean we're heading a lot lower. You know, but I do think like kind of slowly you're going to start seeing less money flow into like more public names. Like I think people are going to slow down their spending because of they're trying to save. And when you see your 401K put in half, you kind of start pulling back. Maybe you don't buy that boat or maybe you don't buy the nice clothes for a season or something like that. So I do think we're going to slowly see it. Yeah, and well, it's funny that you mentioned that because where I live in Canada, what you could do is that when you went to school, you could work and if you put so many hours in, you could basically get EI, which is like Employment Insurance in Canada. I don't know what you guys have there. Yeah, we have unemployment insurance, yeah. So anyway, when you were a student, you could put in all this work and they would pay you out your EI for like 30 weeks or so when you're going to school. So like my girlfriend got like, she was getting like close to like 20 grand Oh wow. when she was going to school and like EI basically, because like you pay into it when you're working and then they kind of like pay you out. But now what they've done is they've canceled that for the students in Canada. Wow.  Like, I mean, and they have a right to be panicked, right?   Supreme leader Trudeau. Yeah, yeah. Well, Supreme leader Trudeau was the one who ended up canceling it. Yeah. But you know, our basically, our premier came out and said, well, we have a lot of great jobs here. So kind of get to work. And you know, it's interesting, you know, those kind of comments from the older people, you know, where it's like, oh, we have a lot of great jobs here, get to work.   Especially, I mean, where I'm living right now, like the cost of an apartment is like 2K, if you want something like half decent, if you want to live in a shack, sure, we're 100 bucks. But I mean, no one, I wouldn't even feel comfortable living in those types of places.  So like, yeah, that's definitely, definitely a problem. And you just, you know, struggle.   And same thing here. First of all, most of that money has run out due to COVID. And I think that now, like I'm noticing it with people I know that, I mean, it's a slow kind of bleed into everyday life. You know, when gas, instead of being $50 a week is now $150 a week. Or, you know, when your cost of living has gone up so significantly, a lot of like people I surround myself with, they're getting anxious and they're not really, they don't want to go out. They don't want to do anything. Because again, you know, when you're made, it's not like our salaries went up, right? It's not like the people that have jobs like that are making 50 grand now make 65 grand to make up for this. And the problem is like, that's not changing. You know, I think what I've learned over time is, you know, we've been talking about this for a while that during COVID, there were so many jobs available.  And now larger companies, like Tesla just had basically like a 10% layoff. Amazon's doing the same, you know, there's companies doing this all over.  And like that to me is the only the last domino that I worry about with like the stock market itself. Yeah, I definitely agree. Yeah.  And that's why like where I live, like those lower paying jobs, which we need like burger paying gas station, they need workers. Of course. No one wants to do these jobs because they're like, oh, I'm better than that. And influencer on social media, I can't do that or this or that. So that puts a strain on the lower paying jobs. And also people are saying, oh, well, I can get money from the government or whatever for a little bit going unemployment. I don't need to appear, you know, but that's the problem is like the lower paying jobs aren't getting filled. And the higher paying jobs are getting cut. So like, where does that leave people, you know? Yeah.   It's crazy. Then you're right. And honestly, like I feel like, if I could, if I could, I would nuke all social media. I can't stand it. I think it's doing a lot of harm and like damage to people's like understanding of like what life actually is, you know, and it's exactly what you said.   And like, you know, the people we follow, like the traders who do make a lot of money.  And it's like, sometimes I think people see that and they're like, well, I'm not going to be able to do that working at, you know, Dunkin's or working here.  But, you know, they're just, they'll do whatever they have to kind of get by. But that's a very large trickle down effect for the next 30 years. Because if you're not saving now, like if you're in your 20s or even early 30s and, you know, you're not putting money away, let alone investing that money. But if you're not putting money away, that's a, that's a trouble because we're also running in the States, you know, we have, what's it called?  And you know, when you get to a certain age, you know, you kind of get paid out from that. And you get paid out from like your investments, your retirement and all that. But most of the people I know, they're not able now because of the cost, put money away, they can't save. And then if you can't save, you're not putting money into the stock market to eventually work for you and grow. So I don't know where we go from here, you know, I don't even know how they fix that. Yeah, that is definitely a big, big problem. Yeah. And I also think like for me, my mindset's always been like, I do not, like, and I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but I would never want to rely on the government at all. Like social security, you know, any of those, any of those programs, I would never want to rely on the government because what was that thing that we saw the other day? Like social security, like could run out by 20, 30 or something like that in the States. Yeah. Then what? That happens, yeah. I know it's bad.  That's what I worry about with crypto. Like I feel like a lot of people were using crypto as like their lifeline, like their, their retirement. I mean, I just, I've talked to a lot of people that treat it that way.  And then, and then look at it now, you know? I mean, I don't, dude, I don't know. I think all those NFL players like I'll pay them crypto or whatever. And it's worth like 50% less. Yeah, like OBJ got paid out, like a million, whatever it was, his bonus in crypto. And it's like, like, was that smart? Like who told them that that was like a good idea, you know? And they're still pumping it, dude. Like you see Brady, like came out with an NFT yesterday and it's like, I don't know, man. Like I, I know, I, we talked to like Tosh a lot about this, but I just, I'm the understanding and I have the belief that like 99% of crypto goes to zero or like practically nothing. I think so too.  Bitcoin won't happen overnight. But I think Bitcoin's the biggest Ponzi scheme in history. I really do. I think it will eventually be shown. Of course it will take a long time, but I don't know, man.  Like when the NFTs were coming around and people were like, oh, you know, the technology, like eventually they'll be used as concert tickets. I'm like, but why?   It's on my email, you know, I'm fine. You know, and when we're seeing it now with like guys, like a lot of those like esports guys and stuff like that, you know, like they, they invested millions and millions of dollars and that was money that they could afford. And now they're down huge.  It's, it's awful. Yeah. And I also think that like, I think with Bitcoin, like, it's just like the head of the snake, right? It's, it's going to be that, I really do think that so many institutions have now kind of like bought into this and have their clients in it that they're not just going to let Bitcoin die. But it's going to be the same thing with NFTs too, right? There's going to be a couple of main collections that stick around and hold their value, just kind of like Bitcoin. And like, like what are the big names that we all know? Like it's just like in small caps too, like when I'm looking to long something, I'm like, okay, what are the tickers that everyone's paying attention to? Right? Like RDBX, like that was a big runner. People were paying attention to, people kind of love that one. So that was one that I would keep on watch a little bit longer as far as like multi-day stuff because, you know, everyone is paying attention to it. Like what are the tickers that are not dying and just sticking around? Like almost like V-root too. Like that's the name that we can both roll off or comes. And as for a long trader, like that stuff that I like because it has that kind of cult following, that staying power, those V-root homies, just like GME and AMC, right? So I think Bitcoin has that kind of cult. I think a lot of people underestimate the Bitcoin cult, you know, and it's just the same thing as stock trading, right? People believe in this cult, they make friends in this cult and they're willing to put every last diamond in it. So that is something good that like Bitcoin and Ethereum and a couple of tickers have. But as far as the ones that are not that popular, like people are messaging me these random tokens, like even Doge, like Doge is going to have some type of staying power. It's going to stick around. It may not go to 50, but it's going to stick around, right? No, these people have lifelines. Yeah, it's the stuff that people know about that I think will stick around and not die completely and go to zero.  Oh, it hurts. It's easy. Yeah, like once you get these cult mentalities, anything can happen. So I think that is something good that that has gone for it as well.  Even in COVID, everyone was saying that we were entering a crazy depression. I feel like what people thought we were going to enter into in COVID is like kind of happening now. So like it took a while and a couple quarters to kind of develop because obviously you can't get away with printing that much money and not having some inflation. And obviously there's the oil situation. Like everything's just kind of happening at once, which is really hitting people. But also I think that like, you know, I think like it'll be a domino effect. First thing to go is going to be the stock market then we're probably gonna see housing prices, you know, take a bit of a hit and then, you know, we'll see a couple other assets and then it'll just go one by one cycling through. But I don't know if we're gonna get a full on recession where everything happens at once. Like if we had right now the market crashing, housing prices crashing, everything just crashing, everyone's assets crashing. It'd be a depression. That would be really, really bad. But I think if we can kind of get away with, okay, the market crashed but now the market's starting to go up. Okay, but housing is crashing now. Okay, well the market's starting to kind of go up. It's giving people a bit of like relief. And that's kind of like, if we could kind of run that type of cycle I think everyone will be okay. But if we all go at once, you know, that would really make trouble. That would crush it, but I guess my big, I have like two kind of like, I have my bear case for Bitcoin in general is, you know, when you talk to people about it, a lot of them, they're treating it like they're treating the indexes. Like people, like most people I know who aren't into stock picking, right? They invest most of their money into indexes, boo, spy, whatever. And you know as boo and spy are coming down, you could pretty much auto buy and this is just historically, you could auto buy for the rest of your life and come out okay.   But Bitcoin, people are treating it that way when they're like, oh, we're buying the dip. We're buying the dip. How much can you average down before you're like, it's nothing.  Yeah, what? We've had a couple little crypto winters they call it and sure it's bounced back, but what's gonna happen at the time? It just doesn't, you know? There's no history to prove it. And that's why I've kind of stayed clear of investing in it myself because I'm like- Yeah, me too. There's just not, it's not there. And to kind of touch on your, like with session point, I think the biggest thing, and I guess this is where I guess one benefit maybe the internet and social media it might be, the only reason that we haven't gone into like full on crisis panic mode sometimes I feel like is because there is social media and people can see, you know, like others and like what's going on in the world. Whereas like, you know, if you think about the past, like in, oh wait, like after everything went, like the normal people were like the last to figure out about it. You know what I mean? Like no one found out about like stocks crashing until it just happened. Banks and all this kind of new before us. But now it's like, now we have so much access to financial knowledge like through Twitter, through whatever that we know when things are coming. We know how bad things can get. So I think like even the average person can kind of like take control of their own like destiny here with like the retirements and all that. And that's why I think we had this little downturn. And again, I know, I know a lot of people who think we're going to have this like a depression. And I just think it's, in my opinion is that it's going to just be a long time shitty economy, like for a bit. Yeah, I think so too. Yeah, I mean, we'll see, we'll see come winter how things change. I think people aren't really talking about yet how, you know, there's going to be people having to choose between putting oil into their house to heat it versus buying food.  That's another thing, like food also. Yeah. If food skyrockets, that will be definitely a problem. It'll crush people, you know, but we'll see. I guess I want to, I like timestamping these and seeing where we are. And then that way we can come back and listen. We're either going to be, we're either going to be right or it's, you know, going to go in the complete opposite way.  And I don't know if that's from Bitcoin collapsing and like a lot of the crypto guys are like, shit, I'm not making money. There's no momentum in crypto. Let's go back to small caps. Like, I don't know what it is. Like, what do you think? Well, I think, I saw a tweet about this the other night. Like people know that their brokerage accounts are not, that like you can always take money in and out of your brokerage account. There's never going to be a broker that just flips the switch, not now anyway. I think there has been one in the past that did a little bit. Sure, trader. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But yeah, I didn't want to go ahead and say that one, but I think people are realizing that there is a little bit more security. Well, there's a lot more security as far as like stocks go. Like, sure, we had a day where Robinhood halted trading for one day.  You can't withdraw any money or the end of time till we feel like it's getting better. Right? Like we're not here in that. So I think that gives a little bit of security too. Also, you know, stocks are on fire, but I also feel like once we see small caps running like this again, we have found a bit of a bottom as far as the overall market, right? I mean, to me, that's a good sign, right? It's just like in COVID when we were going up and up and up and up and up, right? Now that we're starting to kind of get that bottom, I feel like we're going to, you know, be back up again.   Like if you are like a data person, there's like maybe three people that make really big money from it. And then there's some other guys who like do okay in the middle, but like a lot of new traders, if you're just thinking that you're going to have this like magic system or whatever, I think that that's pretty naive.  There's no need for me to want that extra security. I feel like the system people just can't accept the risk yet that trading has.  And I'm going to, you know, I'm going to say, okay, like this is where I should be buying on these certain types of stocks. This is where I should be selling on these certain types of stocks. You will be okay, but some people who are emotional get chopped up in the middle that really kind of take a beating. And that's why like, you know, a lot of those people end up not doing so well just because like they're not patient enough to wait for the right entries. They're not patient enough to wait for the right exits. And, you know, so I think like definitely a lot of those system guys that just can't accept the risk yet, which, you know, it will come eventually, but now I think those guys are going to have a really, really hard time going forward. Like people are like, oh, it's winter for our system traders, like not a brawl. Like this is just how it is. Like, you know, like not every stock fades every single day. Yep. Well, I think the problem with like system traders you've been doing a lot of like that type of stuff too.  No, no, no, I'll kind of explain. But like, you know, I think there's a difference between, the problem is this idea of system trading has gotten lumped in. It's like a giant category because of like Twitter, right? Like you see the guys who like, they claim they have this like system that they enter and they hold for a fade or it's going to do this, it's going to do that. And I just find that 99% of those guys, then because I've talked to a lot of them, it's just bullshit. And a lot of them are just products of like a really lucky market, you know, and that's the thing.  Like, and like we're taking in like plays and stuff. And like we've developed like a system that works for us as far as like the changing markets and stuff. But the problem is with these system guys is they refuse to change. And if you don't change, like I personally think that a lot of people thought that the COVID market was like, that's just, because stocks, stocks ran like crazy, right? Maybe you take a few cuts on the way up, but they were up like multiple dollars. And then you could just kind of, you get in a good entry and you hold all day.  I mean, we see it, we see guys making good money. But nowadays, dude, we've had to adapt so much because if that, dude, the market is not the same way.  You know, they do this, they do that.  And I think that 99% of the system guys, probably blew up, you know, or are in a significant drawdown, which again, I've experienced drawdowns because if you have a system, it's not gonna work every single day. And it might not work every single month. And that's like a lesson that people have to learn is that sometimes you just have to either not trade or develop other strategies to work while that time isn't, you know, like we do swing trading as well. It just so happened that our swings started to correlate with the bear market, you know?  I know.  I know, and the guys live in the life and we're like, didn't that just start signal? You know, it's like, we can't do that right now. We can't do it right now. But normal market times, sure, maybe our strategy isn't really working that great. Now we can focus on swings or we can focus on this or that, whatever. And that's the reality, dude. But a lot of these guys, I got a DM the other day, it's guys like, oh, how do you handle a drawdown?   You know, like we do, you know, as our P&L goes up, we risk more as our P&L goes down, we risk less.  Like I don't know. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, we never really talked much about it, I suppose. Yeah, like, I guess like, see, it's never been like too, too bad, that's the thing. The only losing period that I can really remember was when I tweeted, like, I mean, like actual bad losing period was when I transitioned from first bounce to kind of what I'm doing now.  Because first bounces didn't really work that well. So I had to transition. And you like, I didn't take big losses because I like to manage it super well where I'm like, okay, I'm gonna risk 10 cents, 20 cents at the set plan.  And so I was wrong a lot when I started first kind of transitioning into what I'm kind of doing now with just kind of trying to get a good average on a lot of these hot checks, you know, set the rip, whatever. But yeah, and I remember I was also with that because I saw Dom's podcast on Be the Story or whatever when he was transitioning to Listed and he mentioned me too. Like where, you know, I was in kind of like a drawdown period of like coming in, like taking some Ls but it takes time to learn, you know? Going from first bounce to like a long type of, not necessarily system but like a long just trading listed loans is very, very difficult, right? You have everything coming at you.  You have access to trade every single ticker on the long side. So how do you differentiate between tickers that run and tickers that don't, right? And also, how do you manage your expectations for yourselves, right? And a lot of it comes down to what you say.  Are we in a fading market, right? Are we in a type of situation where it should just fades every day, right? You know, you cannot always automatically assume that we're going to be in a strong market. And that's what I was talking about. Like now we're in a stronger market. Like I don't know if you've seen my cells recently but like, you know, on BHAT, I was like, okay, I can hold this a little bit longer past the 50s, right?  And it still went past your cell and you usually sell tops pretty well. Yeah, I usually sell tops pretty well. Like I've been, the last two days I've been like, you know, well obviously on TBLT or whatever, you know, I just sold highs because it was really starting to struggle up there. It ended up going to four. Four was my target on it. But, you know, I sold like up in 350, 360. That's fine. You know, same with the BHAT, about 112 sold into 70. You're not gonna nail every top. Yeah. No, exactly. How do you adjust yourself on a losing period?  So how do you change that? When you notice something's not working, you know, how do you adjust yourself personally? Well, for me, I'm just saying, okay, like a lot of the times I'm kind of like using set size per market conditions. So if I feel the market hasn't been that great, I will size down significantly. If I feel the market's hot, then I'm gonna start to like size up and get super, super aggressive. Because like as a long crater, you have to cause you never know when shit's gonna start dying again.  And also as far as just like day to day targets, like obviously this was a really strong week. So I'm going to push myself to hold a bit past high of day, right? And maybe as far as like lines go, maybe I can get away with taking some inner lines rather than like every lines. And as far as kind of fades go, it's really saying, okay, you know, like I took a small cut on bad yesterday that I posted. You know, it was 20 cent loss or whatever, 15 or so cent loss. But I thought like after I looked at it, I was like, okay, this was day two, probably shouldn't have taken it, whatever. But day twos had kind of been decently hot. That was your thing. That was your thing for like three months. Yeah, like day two gap ups had been like decently hot. So I think I was right to take that trade, just didn't work, ended up fading, which is fine. Every system trader on Twitter is like, perfect executing this thing, bro.  Free money set up, bro.  See, that's why I thought like again, and this is someone who traded it the day before.   I know, it's like, again, and this is what I think is so hilarious also about like the idea of system trading. And like, so if anyone's ever interested in that concept, like this is very important.  Because like your wins, yes, when it happens, great money, it like supersedes the loss, it's huge and like X, Y, Z, blah, blah. But you lose a lot. Like BHAT, I'm pretty sure, faded most of the day and then just ripped out of nowhere. Or something like that was day one. That could have been another one of the other tickers, but like that happens all the time.   So it's not as easy as people make it out to be. And honestly, I think it's, that's why people mess with me all the time.  I'm like, dude, probably not. Like it's fucking, it's terrible. You know, it can be terrible. So it's just funny, but I'm glad to see a small capture like starting to come back. I'm glad to see, we're actually starting to like see momentum shifts and there's place for both longs and shorts, whereas like a month ago, we were talking, dude, the market was terrible. It was like, there was barely any opportunity. Like, I feel like you were barely even wanting to show up and nature was high.  I wasn't going to go out. Yeah, we went through a small period where I wasn't really winning big. You know, I was making money every day, but I wasn't necessarily winning big. I wasn't losing big either. It was kind of like a little bit of a chop. Now I feel like this type of market is where I excel and going to size up completely until the market tells me otherwise. Like, we haven't seen a stock open up and just fade all day for a while. No, no, it's been a bit. I mean, that's why I think a lot of short sellers have to kind of adjust to that because these stocks aren't weak right now.  You know, I, yeah. I think the summer could have the potential to be hot because crypto's down.  I'm gonna try and make money at small caps.   Yeah, oh, for sure. You know, so I'm definitely, and I hope they're all small cap shorts, you know? Hopefully. Yeah. I mean, you need the guys, man.  Yeah, exactly. It's funny, but yeah. I mean, it's quite a good time to see where we're at. What'd you think of the live trading on Wednesday? No, it was sick. Yeah, I think I was, it's funny, I was actually working, but I like put an air pod in and was like watching and listening at the same time, which is probably not great, but I just wanted to watch this shit, but I think a lot of people, the best part about it was the amount of like trolls and stuff that were like trolling Alex and Bob and like, well, like they were a little red and like shit was going on.  Everyone's like, I thought, you know, it's like, it's over, you know, and it's something that I took away from that. And this is something that as like someone who is discretion like Alex, like that trading style, people need to understand, like you have to be comfortable with the, I don't want to say P&L swings because that's not what it is. Like Alex, the way people just see the big numbers and they get flustered.   So it's like in terms of your own account, like he said it, he's like, I'm playing the chart. I'm not playing my P&L. He's like, my P&L could be down this step. The other thing is like, if the chart tells me I'm wrong, then I'm wrong and I'll get out. If it tells me I'm right, I look and I'm green. You know, so I think people need to take that away and just start stopping so like tight with everything. There stops, there's something about the money aspect as much as possible. And then you realize trading goes a lot easier. It was interesting because I was along that ticker actually in the morning that Alex was trading and I was listening to him and I was like, like it wasn't that I disagreed with anything. It was just for me, I was like, okay, I'm gonna hold to my target, right? You know, so it was interesting cause like obviously I sold into nine and I never thought that he was wrong either. Like that was what was interesting. I was like, yeah, I see that, but I just held to my target because that was kind of what I had planned for. And I was like, I told myself going into it, like I wanted to listen to the webinar, but I was going to stick to my own plan because a lot of people like I didn't want like, cause Alex was like, you know, don't follow me, don't whatever. So I was like, you know what? I think that this can hit nine today, which they all warned for as well. They're all warned that that could hit nine, right? So I was like, okay, like I even wrote in the chat, like I think this can hit nine, that's my plan. That's how I kind of see it. It hit nine, it ended up going a little bit higher, but I sold into nine cause that was my plan, that was my target, right? But it was interesting, you know, kind of seeing the way that they think. And I never disagreed with anything. I was just like, oh, I'm going to hold to my target. You know, if they end up stuffing me, if this ends up going completely lower, I knew it was like highly, highly manipulated.  So I just held to my target. And the thing is was like, like, I never really thought it was very, very interesting for me cause I was like, he's right, you know? Like he's like, there's stuff there. I'm like, yep, he's definitely right.  Did we go close to like nine, 50 and then nine? Yeah, nine, 40 or something was the top, I think. Yeah, they just ended up blowing everyone out. But Alex, I thought what was smart for Alex was he was like, okay, I'm going to use the set size. I have set risk. I have set, you know, everything.   Everyone was focused on the object, you know? Go figure, right? I mean- Dude, there's two sides to every trade. And I think that that shows a lot of trade or maturity in you is that like, you know, if there's someone who's as smart and like talented as Alex and Bao and you're still able to stick to your plan and like, dude, that's 99% of people's problems is they listen to others and they get influenced by others and then they stick to that, they don't stick to their plan that would have worked originally. Like imagine if you bailed on that. I would have been so pissed. Of course, you know, if you were like, oh, Alex is short, I got to get out. Like just because someone is short doesn't mean that his trade's not going to work. It doesn't mean that a long trader is not going to work. You know, it's just, that's impressive that you can do that because it's hard. I was trying to like, I always, because when I'm in a trade, I always try to understand like what someone else's thesis would be. Like if I be like, and I was looking to short, like what would my thesis be, right? If we're at fucking, you know, high a day, right? What would my thesis be to short there, right? What would I be wanting to see for me to get in short there, right? If we're at, you know, above high a day, if we're going into 950 and we don't clearly break above 950, okay. Well, that is something that I would look for as well. So I never really thought Alex was wrong. I was like, he's right here, right? You know, like, I'm like, okay, like, yes, that's valid. Yes, that's valid. That's what I was thinking in my head too. I just had that nine target. So I was willing to kind of sit through that to let things kind of play out, right?  It may fade from here, but I had accepted my risk. And that was the crucial thing that I had done was I was listening to him and I was like, if he's right in a tax, that is great for him. You know, I had accepted my loss early on on that type of thicker. And it's funny when we see these whole numbers looming above the top of the chart.  Yup, 100%.  It was just like Jan that day.  So I went, I got a very, very good average on Jan. Dinged around in between, got to five, I sold out and do you remember that day? It just stopped all the way down. It was just looming up there. It was just chilling. I was like, okay, this is potential for five, high day, whatever, we got the volume and it worked.  Like people are like, man, like what, what did you see down there? What did you see down there?  I don't know how.  Yup. I'm gonna hold. And when things don't go my way, I'm gonna cut immediately. Yup, that's, that's trading in a nutshell, right? It's like, it's so funny.  Like, I don't need to sit there because I don't want to watch it because it's like the same thing as like getting lost in like tape, right?  Like the amount of times I see a massive buyer pop up just to like be fake or just so whatever. It's like, if I changed my plan, according to every time I saw a buyer or a seller, honestly, I'd be, I would have no success with trading. I would literally be fucked. Everybody. How many times do you see a buyer drop lower, lower, lower?  Probably towards covering. Yeah, 100% dude, 100%.   Oh yeah. So if any guests ever do wanna come on, you know, DM, Harry or I, we can set something up if you wanna come learn. If you have questions, if you wanna just talk about, you know, market and stuff going on, please let us know. I feel like everyone feels like they have to be like this system millionaire and whatever. But like for us, like it's fine.  We talk to everyone every single day.  Like we're just trying to, we're just trying to make things as like entertaining but also educational, like to try to find that balance, something that you can, you know, chill and listen to in the car. But like we're not like pull up chart to ABCD here at section one dash two. Like we do it. Nothing like that, you know? 100%. So, all right, cool. Well, thank you guys. We will be back with another episode soon and we'll see you then. All right, see ya.


Income tax 2022-2023, section 179, deduction tax software examples. Let's do some wealth preservation with some tax preparation. Here we are in our example Form 1040 populated using LASERT tax software. You don't need tax software to follow along, but it's a great tool to run scenarios with. You can also get access to the Form 1040 related forms and schedules at the IRS website, irs.gov, irs.gov. Support accounting instruction by clicking the link below, giving you a free month membership to all of the content on our website, broken out by category, further broken out by course. Each course then organized in a logical, reasonable fashion, making it much more easy to find what you need than can be done on a YouTube page. We also include added resources such as Excel practice problems, PDF files and more, like QuickBooks backup files, when applicable. So once again, click the link below for a free month membership to our website and all the content on it. Starting point here, single filer Mr. Anderson living in Beverly Hills 90210. No W-2 income, we're talking Schedule C flowing into line number eight. Recapping that flow, we've got the Schedule C over here, profit or loss from business income statement format, income minus the expenses, the net income then in essence rolling in to Schedule 1. And that rolls in then to the Form 1040 line number eight. We also have self-employment tax, which is happening from the Schedule C. The net income in essence rolling into the Schedule SE. And that's the self-employment tax, bottom line of it, the 14129 Social Security and Medicare flows into Schedule 2. There it is there, that flows into the Form 1040 page number two. And there it is right here. Half of that is deductible as an above the line deduction on page number one. So recapping that flow through, it goes from the Schedule C, net income, calculating the self-employment tax on the Schedule SE. And so there it is. And then half of that deductible, the 7065, which flows into Schedule number two. And there's, I'm sorry, that's flows into Schedule number one, page number two. There's the 7065, that flows into the Form 1040 page number one. So now we've got the 100,000 minus the 7065 gets us the 92936 standard deduction, 12,950. In this case, we've got also the qualified business income deduction using the system to calculate that at this point. 63988, page then number two. Tax at the 9,692 plus the 14129 of the self-employment tax gets us the 23821. We're going to say that we put in 30,000 to get to the 6179. We are of course focused now on the Schedule C. So let's go to the Schedule C. We're focused on the depreciation. So in prior presentations, we looked a little bit at the makers and note when you're thinking about depreciation, that's how I would kind of think of these things. The makers depreciation, well first straight line depreciation conceptual concept of what it is. And then the makers depreciation rules are the underlying rules that you would expect to continue forward, no matter what else happens with the weird stuff. And then the weird stuff is the 179 and special or bonus depreciations, basically kind of overlapping on each other at the current point in time. And we'll see what happens in the future because right now it seems like the economy is overheating, which is usually when they would pull back theoretically from special and 179 depreciations. But that's an unpopular thing to do, so we'll see what happens going forward. Now I would kind of layer my thought process on what's happening so you can kind of keep up with things from year to year. So now that we have a general makers understanding, let's focus more specifically on the 179. So just to recap, if I was to just enter something into tax software, let's say it was machinery, and I'm being generic again, maybe even misspelling it. But the idea being in practice, you would want it to be more specific, of course, so you can determine exactly what machinery you have. I'm being vague here so we can practice just the concept. Let's say we put it on 011522 and let's say that the cost is once again 10,000, let's say, and the method, let's say this is going to be the five year makers method. And so there we have it. Now if I don't do anything else, if I don't restrict the system from putting in like the special depreciation or bonus depreciation, it's going to put the full thing on there because it's assuming that it's going to default to the full special depreciation. And I'm going to go to the regulars table so we've got the cost, we've got the special depreciation categorized in our worksheet here and that then reduces the basis. So that's what the full thing is being taken. Now 179 works kind of in a similar way and these two things are basically overlapping at this point in time. Now there could be specific reasons why you might use one or the other, but for now we want to focus mainly on the 179 and analyze them in essence separately. So I'm going to suppress the special depreciation and then we'll look at the normal makers and then we'll add the 179. Okay, so now I have removed the special depreciation and we have not yet added the 179. So now we just have the normal makers depreciation, which is a double declining half year convention, which we saw in prior presentations would basically be the 10,000 in the first year divided by let's do a straight line first. So if it was divided by five years, it would be 2000 a year. If I divide that by the 10,000, the rate is 0.2 or you could do that by one divided by five. The number of years 0.2 times two, that would be 40%. So 40% is the double declining rate times 10,000 would be 4,000 in the first year. And then if I divide that by two, that's how we get that 2000. It looks like the straight line rate, but it's really the double declining with that half year convention. Here's what it is in year number two. So now let's basically go back on over here and add the 179 to it. So now if I add the 179, I've got the 10,000 and the 179 current 179 bonus here. And so now my depreciation has basically been consumed in the first year in a similar fashion as we saw with the special. If I go back on up to the schedule C, that knows the 179. One of the differences between the two is it's a little bit more flexible sometimes, but the bottom line is the 10,000 is applied again. So if you're a small business, it may be likely that your thought process goes like this. Is this something that I have to put on the books as supplies or something like that? Or do I have to put it on the books as an asset? You might have to put it on the books as an asset if it's a long term depreciable property. Then you put it on the books as an asset, but and you go through all the trouble of doing this depreciation schedule. But then they give you a 179 or special depreciation, which means you basically get to expense it just like if you were on a cash basis in the first place, which is kind of a tedious kind of thing. But that's because the tax code is keeps changing when they're trying to stimulate the economy and whatnot. And so they go from a makers to these to these kind of stimulative policies of the 179 and the specials. Now you can also see this going through the form 4562. So now we have the form 4562 part one election to expense certain property under the 179. So you can see the 179 has a bit of flexibility in making the election possibly more so than the special or bonus depreciation. So maximum maximum amount is the 1,080. Quite a high limit for many small businesses, larger companies can clearly hit that fairly easy total. And then the threshold is 2,070. So meaning it could we talked about these rules when we went to prior presentations. If you go over the two 2,070 can affect how much you can deduct dollar limitation and then the five year machinery and so on. And then then the 10,000 being in essence taken. So if I substantially increase my income limit over here, let's say my income was let's say my income was like 2 million. Then and I go to my 179 deduction. And I say that I had my property up top where's my property. Let's say let's say I put this on the let's say this was 1,500,000. Then I try to take the whole thing 1,500,000 of 179 and I go back to my forms and it basically limits it to the 1,080 because that's basically the cap.  So there's the amount. Notice if I go to my depreciation schedules then here, then let's see the regular depreciation. Now we've got the 179 is that the 108 now the depreciation basis has been adjusted. So now the depreciation basis is going to be the new basis that's going to be used to calculate the normal makers. That's why I would think of the 179 is kind of layered on top of the makers. So I've got the 1,500,000 minus the 108,000,000 and that's the 420 which is basically your basis now to do the double declining half your convention. So if I take that times the double declining rate which is 0.4, 1 divided by 5 is 0.2 times 2.4 or 40% times 0.4. That's going to be the 168 here. And then if I take that half your convention divided by 2, I've got the 84,000. So the 84,000 is the normal makers depreciation plus the 108,000,000. That's where we get the 116400 that's over here on the schedule C. Now you could also have a situation where the property is split for example between business use or personal use. So let's say it was like 80% of business and if I go back on over now I've got the 8,000 if I go down to my depreciation. They depreciate the moment you drive them off the lot. I can see okay, let's do not the AMT. Let's say now we've got the 10,000. I put it on the books for what it cost but then 80% is the depreciable portion and then I told it to depreciate the whole thing, the 10,000. But obviously it limited it to 8,000 because 8,000 is the portion that would be business related that I would get a deduction for. Now if this drops below 50%, let's say that I have this and it's only 40% for business, then I go back on over. Notice no 179 deduction is populated because I went under the threshold of 50% business use versus personal use. So therefore it defaulted to the 4,000 meaning the 40% business and using just the makers depreciation to get to the 800 of depreciation. Let's do another example with a cap here on the limit and show the flexibility possibly with the 179. So in 2022 you bought and placed in service 1,080,000 in machinery. That's the cap we can't go over that and 25,000 circular saw for your business. You selected deduct 1,055,000 for the machinery and the entire 25,000 for the saw a total of 1,080,000. So let's see what that does on the election. So let's mirror that we're going to say that we had machinery and I'm going to say that this was put on the books for 1,008,000. But we're not going to take the whole thing. That's too many zeros. That's one too many zeros. We're going to take the deduction of 1,055,000 and let's say this was a five year property. Let's say and then the second piece I'm going to say add was a saw to let's say what this was on 0,31522 and that was for 25,000. So I'm going to deduct the whole 25,000 here and let's say this was 53 as well and we're not going to deal with the special depreciation. So notice the total down here is 108. That's the cap. So notice what I could try to do is I might I might say, hey, look, I'm going to try it. Let's do this again. This should be 1,080,000. That's what it should be. I'm going to try to take the whole thing. Right? What if I did this 1,080,000 and 25,000 I'm over the cap. It won't let me deduct all of that. So if I go back on over to the forums notice what it did. It basically said the first thing I entered the machinery at the 1,080,000. It basically applied the 179 to that to that line. Let's look it over here. 179 applied there and now the basis is at zero. So I can't deduct anything going forward and then for the saw it used the normal depreciation of the 25,000. So it applied it just kind of in order and didn't allow me to take all the 179 that I put into the data input. But I have flexibility here because I could say, well, what if I wanted to apply it in a different way? Because maybe these two things have different classes. Maybe this is like seven year property or something like that. And for whatever reason, I want to have the 179 applied more to the seven year property because possibly the five year property. I'll be able to recover sooner than the seven year property or something like that. So I could say, well, I know the cap is at the 1,080,000. So let me do this then. I'm going to say I want to take the full 25,000. I'm going to take the 108,000 minus the 25,000 and say that means that I can take up here only 105,000. And so there's how I want to allocate it. So there's how I want to allocate the cap. There's the flexibility. So now I can go back on over and now this machine, which is a different five year property instead of seven years has the 105 allocated. So that means the depreciation still outstanding for future periods is 25,000. Now on the depreciable property that's going to get depreciated sooner because it's five year property as opposed to the other property, which is seven year property. So I'd rather have the 25 possibly in that case up here if I'm going to be capped at the 108,000 for the 1,080,000 for the 179 deduction. So that just kind of shows some flexibility and some of the concept of the 179, how it affects the basis so that you then apply the maker's depreciation after it's been reduced for the 179. Now the other weird thing is if we go way over, then we have this reduction of the cap. So for example on this one in 2022 Jane Ash placed in service machinery costing 2,750,000. This cost is 50,000 over 50,000 more than the 2,700,000. So Jane must reduce the dollar limit to 1,030,000. So let's do that. I'm going to go back on over and check that out. So let's say my schedule C income is like five million. So I have income here and then I'm going to say on my deductions, let's say that I'm going to say this is all of them. And let's just do one at a time. So I'm going to delete the second one and we're going to put this piece of on the books for it. What's going on the books for 2,750,000. And then I'll try to take the whole thing at 179,270,000. But it's going to be capped, of course, to do that. And I think that the method will just keep the same method and check it out. So if I see what it does here, we're going to say the cost is at the 2,750,000. Notice the cap then got adjusted to 1,030,000 because I was $70,000 over the threshold. I put it on the books at 2,750,000. And this cost is $50,000 over that threshold of the 2,070,000. So instead of getting a cap of 1,080,000, I had to subtract out 50,000 from it to get to the 1,030,000. So when you get into that range, the upper range, then you've got to obviously take that into consideration as well. And then, of course, you need to layer what's going to happen here with what would happen with the special or bonus depreciation as you go forward. But keep that adjustment in mind. Now, we also might be limited to the amount of income we have. So let's go back on over here and let's bring our deduction back to 100,000, 100,000. And then let's go to my Schedule C and say the Schedule C is, let's say, 60,000. So now I'm going to have less income on the Schedule C. So if I go back on over to the Schedule C, 60 minus the 20 advertising that we had is bringing us down to basically income of zero down below, right? Because I'm being limited on the 179. So if I go back on over then and I look at the regular, so now I've got the cost and the 179 of the 100,000 here. If I go on over to the form 4562, we're looking at part one, election to expense certain property. So we've got the, there's the threshold. I didn't hit that threshold. I had the 100,000. So we could see down here, we're pulling that in. And then it's going to basically cap it at the 40,000, which is the type is the amount of income I have. And so carry over of disallow deduction to 2023 is the 60,000. You can see how basically that's playing out. We may still get a benefit from it, but it may be rolling forward to future periods. Now you'll note that if I go back on over to the form 1040, I didn't have any other income here like W2 income. So I only had basically the business income, which it in essence took down to zero because I had a loss which it basically limited the loss on. So let's say what if I added like income for W2 income? So I'm going to say I have, I have earned income. It's W2 income of let's say, let's say 40,000 W2 income. If I go back on over to the forms now. So now I've got income. Notice what is happening here. Now I've got the 40,000 that's being pulled in netting out. So I've got the 40,000 from the W2 income. And it's basically then netting out on the schedule C. In other words, if I go to my depreciation now, I've got the 100,000 here. If I pull into the 4562, then it's now capping it at 80,000 and the carryover disallowed into dis disallowed to 2023 is 20,000. If I then go to the schedule one, I've got the 4000 of the schedule C income pulling in now a loss that it's netting out against the income of the 40,000 here. So that's an, you know, so when you get, I obviously when you get into losses, then you want to be careful, you know, you got to be careful on what the iris is going to allow because remember the iris may limit the amount of losses. So anytime you're in a situation with losses, you've got to think what's the best, what's the best thing to do with regards to the losses because the iris is often going to be skeptical of the losses and being able to take them against other income. For example, now the other thing just to keep in mind is that if if we take the 179 deduction and then as we saw before the property when we saw it fall below the threshold of 50% for business use and then it and then it falls below 50% for business use after you took the deduction, then you might have to recap some of the 179 deduction. In other words, if I was able to take the 100,179 deduction, front loading the deduction here, and then next year, I no longer use this piece of machinery for business but converted to personal bringing it below the 50% threshold personal and business. Then, you know, business versus personal, then then I might have to have a recap kind of situation on the 179. So a little bit more rare of a situation. So I'm not going to go into it in detail here, but that's just, you know, the idea, the idea of that as well that could come into play if something is transferring from a business property that was depreciable and took the 179 to something that's going to personal use in a latter year.


harder than the 90s. When fighting games in the 90s, seemingly every developer had to try and put their spin on things outside of Street Fighter 2 and Mortal Kombat. We had everything from Clay Fighter which featured some prettyastern claymation, although the combat itself wasn't great. We had Killer Instinct, which had state of the art graphics and sound while requiring absolutely precise controls to execute insane combos.  The Super Famicom also had its share of games that put their own spin on the genre, games that never made it to the US, like this absolutely bizarre Shouniki game, but on the other end of the spectrum is the relatively simple title Taekwondo, made by Human Entertainment. And yeah, that's the same Human Entertainment that made lots of unique games in the 90s, like the Firemen, SOS, and Clock Tower, and sure enough Taekwondo is unique in that it seems to be somewhat true to the Taekwondo fighting style. Gone is all the cartoony stuff from the games that I listed earlier. This game is very bare bones by comparison, although make no mistake, each of the 19 playable characters all feature anime-styled portraits that almost make them look like something out of Breath of Fire. Still, the combat here is different than what you'd be used to, compared to just about any other 16-bit fighting game, and I really dig it. The structure is different, too. There's a point system that will reward you one point for a body hit, two points for a head hit, three points if you land a jump kick, five points for a knockdown, and five points for forcing your opponent off the map. There's a two-minute time limit, and if you end up with more points than your opponent, then a winner is you. You can also beat your opponent by knocking them down five times, or if you just knock them out cold. Now, the combat here does do the typical fighting move stuff. For instance, down to forward and B does a quick head kick, down to forward, then back and B will do a special move, and that depends on the type of fighter you've chosen, and that's where this game stands out. There's six different fighter types. There's the speed type who has weaker attacks, but can evade really well. There's the jump type who relies on jumping to evade, but is otherwise a balanced fighter. There's the defense type who's privy to block attacks rather than evade, and they also absorb less damage. The skill type has a wider variety of different attacks that you can do. The power type is the strongest, but also the most reckless who doesn't evade or block much, and the all-around type is, of course, the most balanced of all the skills. What's really cool here is that there's an edit mode that allows you to create your own fighter and set up your own skills however you want. You have nine points to allocate between attack, defense, speed, stamina, balance, and technique. To elaborate on those last three, stamina is indeed a thing in this game. It's kind of the game's way of preventing you from button mashing.  Balance is also a thing here, and a low balance makes you susceptible for easy knockdowns. Technique is pretty simple, the higher your technique, the better your attack skills. I should also mention that you start out with nine points, but after each tournament you can increase your level and get more points to distribute, so that's cool. Of course, the problem with this mode, and the entire game for that matter, is that it's all either in Japanese or all in Korean, whichever language you pick to start the game. There's no English patch available yet, as far as I know, so there is some trial and error here. But for the game modes, there's a tournament mode, that's the top option, a versus mode, against either a second player or the computer, a three on three battle mode that's kind of structured like what you'd see in King of Fighters, and there's a training mode. The nuanced controls here are what really give this game its appeal. For instance, you can press the R button to change having your left foot or right foot forward, but if you hold the R button down and press up or down you can move up and down the mat fatal fury style, that is really cool. Certain computer opponents exploit this by moving out of the way of a kick, only for you to be vulnerable for a knockdown. As far as attacking goes, there's quite a bit that goes into it, like if you press the Y button, that will activate an attack sequence, which will allow you to do a series of different kicks in a row, but it definitely takes some practice to get the hang of, but once you get a feel for it, it's pretty dang cool. So yeah, Taekwondo is an interesting fighting game that I've really learned to enjoy. There's tons of variety here, considering there's 19 fighters, six styles, and an edit feature to create your own fighter. I do have to point out a couple of other things though. Number one is that there is a fact on Gamefacts.com written all the way back in 1998, and it helps you go into a little more detail about the combat, and I found it to be extremely useful. Number two is that there's no battery save on this game, only a password system, and that's hard to use if you're not a native Japanese or Korean speaker. This game really needs an English patch, because apparently the password system does in fact allow you to keep your own created character, which is really cool. So yeah, if you want a different spin on the usual 16-bit one-on-one fighting games, then check out Taekwondo. Alright, I want to thank you for watching, and I hope you have a great rest of your day.