things i did today

[zwol]

• Planted seeds.
  
• Stumped an IRS help desk person.
  
• Extracted graphs from the 2000 US Census tables. (They have fairly nice web-based interactive map generation utilities — except that they give you broken PDFs — but they don't do beans for you if you want histograms, despite histograms being the most sensible way to present an awful lot of the data.)
  
• Walked 1.1 miles. (Because I cleverly got on a bus going in the wrong direction when it was time to go home, and then it was faster to walk home than wait half an hour for the bus going in the correct direction.)
  

Comments

[vvvexation.livejournal.com]

What'd you stump 'em with?

[zwol.livejournal.com]

Apparently the instructions for claiming nonbusiness bad debt are no clearer to them than they are to me. :-P

[vvvexation.livejournal.com]

What is "bad debt"? I mean, I wasn't aware there was a non-bad kind.

[zwol.livejournal.com]

In tax language (actually I think in accounting language generally), a bad debt is money someone owes you, which you have no reasonable prospect ever of collecting. You can write one off as a capital loss on Schedule D, but the IRS wants you to have evidence that (a) it was actually a loan, not a gift, and (b) there really is no way of ever getting the money back.