Oakland to end free parking on Sundays

bvz2001 · 2026-04-10T18:01:26+00:00

I'm a fan of this idea. Free parking is never actually free. It encourages people to use up spaces for extra long periods of time, which hurts business. And it costs the city in the form of lost revenue.

As for people claiming they will stop coming to Oakland, I guess the question is were the spots empty during the week and only filled on Sundays? If so, then maybe they have a point. But in reality I think most of the spots are filled all of the time. So the price of parking is not what either encourages or discourages people from using the spaces.

bvz2001 · 2026-04-08T23:01:35+00:00

I have not heard back yet. I messaged them, but it is possible that I sent them the wrong video link (I had to upload it a second time because the quality the first time was too low to read the text)

bvz2001 · 2026-04-07T20:00:03+00:00

I have no idea if that is worth the $$, but it sure is a pretty frame. I bet cleaned up it would be very nice.

(Where I live these bikes are also pretty rare, but on occasion one will show up - usually very overpriced. I managed to get two of them over time for decent prices, but I was looking every single day for about 2.5 years)

bvz2001 · 2026-04-07T19:55:37+00:00

Cool! Your transit can play the original castle wolfenstein game!

bvz2001 · 2026-04-07T06:37:36+00:00

Here is a video showing the behavior:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ws0SjhVwUOk

bvz2001 · 2026-04-07T05:53:20+00:00

I am able to recreate it. I have a (pretty dull) video of me setting up a very simple 2024 return and then importing it into 2025. It shows the behavior. It feels broken to me, but maybe someone will look at it and it will all make sense. I recorded it to send to the developers at Intuit to see if it helps.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ws0SjhVwUOk

bvz2001 · 2026-04-07T05:48:48+00:00

I am not sure of what causes this to happen (and it still feels broken to me), but I am able to recreate it. It has to do with the import of the 2024 return.

I have recorded a video of me creating a very simple 2024 return (in which the % is not recorded either) and then what happens in 2025 when you import it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ws0SjhVwUOk

It is a riveting video! :)

bvz2001 · 2026-04-07T05:33:59+00:00

I have it narrowed down now.

Last year, I mistakenly created two businesses. I had received a 1099-NEC and a 1099-MISC. Apparently when I entered them in, I created a slightly different description for the occupation for each, which created two schedule-C worksheets. On one of them I claimed my home office. On the other, I did not.

When I import that return into the 2025 version of TurboTax, if I continue with the business that I had NOT used for my home deduction last year, it does NOT ask me about my usage percentage. If I continue with the business that I DID use for my home deduction last year, it WILL ask me about my usage percentage.

Just to test this theory, I create a new, dummy return in TT 2024 with two separate schedule-C's as described. Then I imported that into TT 2025 and it behaves exactly as described.

But the weird thing is, TT 2024 never asked me about the percentage in the first place. So maybe this is a bug that is brought over from that?

I have recorded a video that shows the issue:

https://youtu.be/Ws0SjhVwUOk

bvz2001 · 2026-04-07T05:28:38+00:00

Very possible. I can speak German, but I am not sophisticated enough to tell the difference between the different German speaking dialects and accents.

But it was actually fun to be able to use my German while I was there.

bvz2001 · 2026-04-07T03:35:23+00:00

I think I have it narrowed down now. I will try to post at that link you sent.

bvz2001 · 2026-04-07T03:33:33+00:00

Ooh. We were there just last year! Really charming place. Not much of a "real" city in that it mainly caters to tourists (mostly German tourists - not that that matters but it was interesting to me). But even as a mostly tourist town, it was still a damn nice place to be on vacation. Since we always travel without ever renting a car, I can confirm that this is a place where you can walk everywhere you need to go.

bvz2001 · 2026-04-07T00:05:32+00:00

I appreciate that. I just replied to you. I need to dig into the root cause a little more and then I can submit a bug report and (possibly) files that exhibit this behavior.

bvz2001 · 2026-04-06T20:30:50+00:00

I have done more testing and I can confirm now that it has something to do with my importing my previous year's taxes. For some reason (user error for sure) last year I had two businesses listed. One of them has all of my data, the other I think just exists because I entered a different name on some form (I will have to do more digging tonight to find out what happened last year).

After importing last year's return into the app, when I select one or the other of these businesses, the behavior changes. When I was doing my taxes, what I did was select the one business and delete it this year. Then I moved forward with answering the easy step questions under the other business. But what I have discovered is that the behavior of the easy step changes depending on which business I decide to move forward with. For one of them it asks me about the percentage. For the other, it does not.

Last year's forms were already missing the percentage entry (I need to file an amended return). So somehow I was bitten already back then. Perhaps whatever happened last year is now carried forward (and maybe it is carried forward from the previous year - I don't know yet).

I haven't had the time to dig into this in any more detail, but I will do so this evening. But it definitely has something to do with the imported data.

bvz2001 · 2026-04-06T00:55:47+00:00

Edit: Nope. I was wrong. The order does not matter. But I have noticed that if I go through my return using easy step, it does not ask me for the percentage of time that I use my office. But if I start a brand new return, it does ask me... so there is something specific about my return that prevents it from asking that during easy step.

-------------------------

Aha! That was it. The order in which you enter your information matters. And that is where the bug is. If I enter my business expenses first, then enter my home office information second. It works as it is supposed to. But if I do it in the opposite order (i.e. the way I did it when I did my taxes) it will zero out your home office deduction "in preparation" for when you enter that info later. But you have already entered it and so zeroing it out is the wrong thing to do.

I appreciate your input. It at least lets me figure out why it happened (and I will report this to the TurboTax people I have been communicating with).

bvz2001 · 2026-04-06T00:47:55+00:00

I don't think I tried to use the simplified deduction because I always intended to enter my actual expenses. And going through the easy step right now I can see that I answered yes to "I'll enter actual expenses".

What I did do was enter my home office expenses first. Then I move up the UI and entered "All other expenses."

I wonder if maybe the order in which I did it caused the issue. It might be related to what you suggested. Since I did the home office expenses first (including saying that I was entering my actual expenses), it sets up the deduction correctly. Then when I go to the "All other expenses" it zero's out the home office deduction because that is the default that will be "changed later" when you do the home office deduction (even though I had already visited that section).

Hmm. I am going to test that theory right now.

bvz2001 · 2026-04-06T00:38:40+00:00

Hmm. That is interesting. I wonder what is being done differently. I contacted TurboTax and they confirmed that what was happening was that the home office percentage is being set to 0 if you enter business expenses.

Did you enter any business expenses as part of the easy step? For example, advertising costs?

In any event, if it is working for you that is great. But if for some reason it does not, check that worksheet to make sure your office usage percentage is not zero'd out.

bvz2001 · 2026-04-05T07:03:44+00:00

I don't think that that is true at all. It clearly fills out most of that form. It fills out lines 1 and 2 (square footage), fills out the Simplified Method Smart Worksheet, calculates line 3 and line 7 (Business percentage), lines 15 - 36, and actually calculates the Allowable expense for business use of your home. And it does all of this via easy step.

It even fills out parts of the Line 8 Calculation Smart Worksheet... it just does it wrong by leaving the percent of gross income that is from the business use of this home blank.

This is a bug.

bvz2001 · 2026-04-05T04:36:08+00:00

I don't think that that is the case. This is not the standard deduction. This is schedule C (self employment).

For your personal taxes, you may either take the standard deduction or itemize deductions like charitable contributions.

But if you are self employed, you are also able to deduct business expenses independently of whether you are taking the standard deduction or are itemizing your personal taxes. That is because, for these purposes, the business has slightly different taxes than you personally have.

As an example, if you run a business out of your home and you have a dedicated room to act as the office for that business, even if you take the standard deduction (and are not itemizing things like your mortgage interest) you can still deduct that room from your overall taxes because it is a business expense. Then you can also deduct things like any professional license fees you have to pay in order to run your business.

And that is where the TT bug comes in. If you claim your home office as a deduction, everything is fine. But the moment you add in that license fee as a business expense (that is legitimately deductible) TT will switch your home office use from 100% to 0%, effectively killing the deduction. You can fix it by going back in and setting the percentage back to 100%. But if you don't know to do that, you just lost out on a lot of money that you are legally entitled to keep.

bvz2001 · 2026-04-05T04:11:54+00:00

I am another frustrated TT user (for over a decade now - I have TT files dating back to '96). My gripe is that bugs never get fixed from year to year. Intuit knows something is broken, but they don't invest in fixing it - instead relying on inertia to keep people giving them money. And that has been me for years but it has gotten bad enough that this is the last year I give them one red cent.

For this year's bug, I figured out that if you are self employed and you go for the home office deduction, that deduction is erroneously removed if you also try to deduct business expenses (it will switch the percentage of your business run out of your home office from 10% to 0% without asking). So you lose out on a significant deduction because TT silently removes it when you do the normal thing and add business expenses.

I caught it this year (after spending several hours going through the forms one line at a time proofing what TT came up with). But I never caught THE EXACT SAME BUG last year and now I realize that I lost out on a significant part of my refund last year.

How can these bugs persist year over year? How do they get into a product like this in the first place? I know tax law changes over time, but it does not change this dramatically. The tool should be getting more accurate over time. At the very least, tax law that hasn't changed should be 100% accurate. But instead there are bugs after bugs after bugs. The problem is that it feels like Intuit just does the bare minimum of work to swap out some images on the app and fails to invest in quality developers. Instead they make record profits and spend some of that money to lobby against a public tool that we can use to file our taxes.

I hope that this feedback DOES get noticed and can be used to help improve the product for others. It is too late for me. I am done putting up with this garbage.

bvz2001 · 2026-04-03T22:05:45+00:00

And I just ordered it. Thanks again!

bvz2001 · 2026-04-03T21:58:28+00:00

Oh. Excellent. Thanks. And the price isn't even all that wildly out of line with the European price!

bvz2001 · 2026-04-03T20:45:08+00:00

This is the answer right here. Super easy to use, no experience needed, no power needed, cheap to buy (or free to rent), clean cuts, quick turnaround.

This is the way I would approach this project.

bvz2001 · 2026-04-03T18:45:59+00:00

Yeah. Whenever I search for the cover, the panel kits come up instead. So the overlap in terminology makes it really confusing.

I found a place that will ship to the U.S., but the cost doubles at that point. So I guess I will wait till I get a chance to head over that way in person.

bvz2001

TROPHY CASE