Hiring Household Employees Legally Is Ridiculously Complicated

I believe in paying household workers, like nannies, on the books. Paying them off the books, like other forms of tax evasion, seems to me like stealing from the public. It feels morally similar to breaking into a library and taking cash from the register.

Being paid on the books also has several benefits for the worker. A history of income will help them qualify for a loan and ensure that they get financial protections, like social security and unemployment benefits.

This isn't cheap though. I saw articles advocating for it that said it'd cost about 10% more, and I have no idea how they got that. In my case, my wife and I are going to be spending about 30% more than we would have, once we tally up federal tax, state tax, social security, medicare, unemployment, disability, and workers comp (we "grossed up": increased the gross pay so the net is our nanny's usual rate).

I wish this number was lower. Some of it seems pretty bizarre, like paying about $740 a year for workers comp (the rates are state regulated). How much risk is there really for a nanny to severely injure themselves while nannying? But qualitatively, I'm ok with spending extra money on this. "Taxes are what we pay for civilized society."

But holy shit, the federal government, and especially New York State, make it a nightmare to deal with! It's this totally frustrating inefficient omg-so-many-steps-this-is-insane process. Many of the forms don't even perfectly fit the process of hiring a nanny. According to http://www.parkslopeparents.com/Nanny-101/babysitter-on-the-books-52435.html and my own research, people need to do something [1] like:

When hiring:

1. Get an EIN
2. Verify work eligibility
3. Get a W4 from the employee
4. Register with NYS as an employer
5. Buy disability and workers comp insurance
6. Notify NYS of the hire
7. Figure out payroll (gross pay - ss, medicare, fed & state unemployment and/or disability tax, income tax withholding. this assumes pay is the same each week. if you eg want to pay the nanny more one week to stay late one night, you've got to do this again.)
8. Annual pay notice (get signed, keep for 6 yrs)

Weekly:

1. Pay employee (keep record for 7 yrs)

Quarterly:

1. NYS income tax withholding
2. NYS unemployment tax
3. social security, medicare, and federal withholding filing

Annually:

1. Disability and workers comp insurance
2. Annual pay notice (get signed, keep for 6 yrs)
3. Schedule H with 1040 (SS, medicare, federal unemployment taxes)
4. State unemployment taxes (is there a state equivalent to schedule H?)
5. W2 to employee
6. W2 to social security admin
7. W3 to social security admin

And then people in government get upset when everyone breaks the law...


[1] This list may not be 100% right; please don't use it for anything serious without checking its accuracy.

Smarter Grocery Shopping

My latest little project is Shopping Brain. It's a mobile (web) app to make frugal grocery shopping easy, based on Mr Money Mustache's strategies for shopping.

It's very new and very rough. I recommend waiting until I iron out a few more kinks before you use it but if you're feeling adventurous and want to give it a shot, I'd love to hear what you think! You can see my to do list here.

I reused some of the code and architecture from my to do list program, Do Me, although I got to fix all the things I did wrong there :-) Since I had a pretty good handle on angular.js before starting this, the code is very nice and was a breeze to write!

It's open source for maximum goodness.

Enjoy!

Are Big Cars Safer Than Small Cars?

I just did some investigating and the short answer seems to be "generally, yes."

My findings are at http://www.benamy.info/correct-opinions/safe-cars.

Adding a second shower head to your shower

I just wrote a new guide: Installing a Second Shower Head in Your Shower

You are 8 times more likely to be killed by a police officer than by a terrorist

I just had to link to this great article. It's backed up by real data and someone who's actually using their brain.

The article includes the quote:
“Terrorism is the best political weapon for nothing drives people harder than a fear of sudden death”.
- Adolph Hitler

Our government is certainly following that advice!

Contextual Bandits

I read http://synference.blogspot.com/2013/12/multi-armed-contextual-bandits.html and thought I could write a more concise version. I also had some questions.

Intro

A/b testing is great! Wikipedia uses it every year to pick the best fundraising banner and a/b testing makes them millions of dollars more.

The contextual bandits algorithm can do even better.

2 improvements over traditional a/b testing

1. The algorithm doesn't have to have a single winner. It will try to show the most effective version for each user.
2. The algorithm automatically optimizes. If it has a good guess at which version a user will prefer, it uses that. If not, it picks randomly to collect more data.

How to Use It

There's a paid service at http://www.synference.com/ with a free beta.

My Questions After Reading

1. How do we generate the versions to use for contextual bandits?
2. Does the algorithm support adding new versions later?
3. Does the algorithm support removing poorly performing versions?

My latest little project: backup.js

I just created and released backup.js. It's a library to make it easy for html apps to make backups in local storage.

I've been working on and off on my own to do list app. It makes periodic backups of the data in case I accidentally erase something (there's no undo) and in case there's a bug which clobbers data. The backup functionality has been very simple: it makes copies of data in local storage but never cleans them up. Eventually it hits the browser's local storage space limit and I have to dig in and delete some old backups to make the app start working again.

I finally got sick of this situation and decided to implement backups in a smarter way. backup.js is a standalone library to do this. I easily plugged it into my to do list app, but it's perfectly usable for any future projects of mine or anyone else who wants to use it.

It's been a fun little side project for a few days!

You Are The Average of Your 5 Closest Friends

I just started a new (minimal) "correct opinion" page on the effect the people we spend time with have on us- http://www.benamy.info/correct-opinions/you-are-the-average-of-your-5-closest-friends

A picture of forming habits

I've started using Beeminder to track new habits I'm forming with my newly upgraded habit formation system. Here's this month's habit. Each dot is me using my new habit.

Yeah baby!!

Shrinking a Bike Tube

For example, this lets you fit a 29" tube in a 26" tire. Here's a video tutorial. What a clever hack!

Solving My Oldest Technical Problem

One of the first unsolved problems I can remember, is probably from when I was about 10. I wanted to connect loose wires to a headphone plug. I don't exactly remember why. Maybe I was splitting a signal to 2 headphones. Anyway, I remember it being a complete pain in the ass. I'd try to twist the wires onto the 3 contacts on the plug in various ways and they'd always slip to one side and short across contacts.

Eventually I grew up, bought splitters, learned to solder, and otherwise moved past this problem.

On a recent flight, I had this classic situation again: the stupid plane had the weird old headphone jacks which have 2 mono 1/8" jacks instead of the standard single stereo jack. This means you can't plug normal headphones into them and hear sound in both ears. Of course the headphones they gave out which plug into these jacks sounded like crap. Unacceptable.

I ripped apart the plane headphones and tried to figure out how to connect them to my nice ones in a way that wouldn't screw up 10 minutes into my movie. Low and behold, I came up with a pretty damn good solution! I used pieces of insulation to tie bands around the connector in a way that both held the wires in place, and prevented them from shorting!

You may notice that the tip doesn't need a band to keep the wire from falling off because it narrows at the end away from the tip so the wire stays in that indented area.

It was so satisfying to be able to use my upgraded problem solving skills to solve the oldest technical problem I can remember having!

Life is good.

OSE: Ironworker disassembly and documentation

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b3_jD-qhGWM

OSE: What I've been up to recently

First off, an amazing video of me testing the backhoe in the shop and Marcin discussing our outdoor testing.

Then a series of short, not-quite-as-exciting videos from today of us disassembling the ironworker so we can reassemble it with thicker metal to try to fix the bending problem, and creating detailed assembly instructions as we went:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4Zuy5Ui2-Y
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9pdjwSPdfE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-l7tdodFF8A
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MLJfQ55sd6Q
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBEdTFFWETA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKhnzTJInF8

And here's a quick summary of all the stuff I've been doing out here over the month:

I worked on the backhoe 3 for a couple of weeks, redesigning a bunch of it and building it. Now I'm finishing up the ironworker 3. If I have time after that before I leave on Wed, I'd really like to take a quick pass at getting the torch table up and running. I'm also cleaning up the wiki, helping with assembly guides, and trying to improve various tools and processes (eg using github for issue tracking). And I've spent a bit of time working on the microhouse and fixing odds and ends at the hablab. Holy shit that's a lot of stuff!!!

OSE: Raising the Roof

http://youtu.be/jbdcsVYxn10

OSE: Microhouse Overview

Here's a post on the OSE blog with an overview of the Microhouse project and what I was doing for most of last week.

Open Source Ecology Work Log

If you're interested in the details of what I'm working on at Factor E Farm, keep an eye on http://opensourceecology.org/wiki/Dan_Log. I'll still try to post interesting pictures here though.

OSE: Plastering the Microhouse

http://vimeo.com/76072697

Happiness Habits, review

I got too busy and distracted to do constant updates but I did keep the plan in mind. I didn't do each thing every day though.

Weekends continued to be a challenge for remembering the experiment.

I missed exercising many days although now that it's getting warm and I fixed my flat, I'll be biking to the office many days, so my exercise will happen automatically.

I feel like I did ok and continue to do ok at trying to be in the moment semi-regularly.

I probably need to step up my random acts of kindness. They're fast and easy and make me and the recipient feel great right away. I'll put a daily reminder on my calendar to do them!

I think I feel happier overall although there's so many variables it's hard to know if this is why. It can't hurt though and I feel really good about doing this and trying to keep these habits in my life.

Good experiment!

Next experiment- I'm trying to see if I can get some partners to do HIIT workouts for 3 weeks.

Happiness Habits, day 7

The past few days haven't been good. I'm been tired, which makes me grumpy, and I haven't been keeping up with these habits. On the up side, I had a really fun hackathon with my friend on Saturday and went for a jog!! Amazing!

The weekends tend to be hard for me to keep up with any kind of regularly scheduled thing because I have a random schedule and often don't look at my computer for a day or 2. I think I'll try setting a daily alarm for this coming weekend to help myself stay on track.

I'll try to resume my normally scheduled happiness routine today. Here I go!

Happiness Habit, Day 3

I got distracted last night and didn't do everything. I did get in some exercise biking home from work and had a few nice moments of mindfulness and presence. I also got in an act of kindness. So still a good day.

I want to incorporate my gratitudes and journaling into my schedule earlier than I've been doing it. I've been getting to the end of the day and going "Oh shit, I need to do that." I thought about doing it when I woke up yesterday but I was too groggy and not in the right frame of mind. I'll try linking the behavior to lunch. That's not always the same time, but I'll try to remember that right after I eat lunch, I should do those things.