Mortality, Irrelevance, and the Deaths of Celebrities

The recent deaths of celebrities from the 1980s are making me re-evaluate my life, but in a very particular way:  I want to know how long I will be relevant to students.  Right now, I can drop references to things in pop culture (well, more precisely, to things in nerd culture), and most students understand the reference.  I can name-drop Buffy episodes, or rant about the Star Wars movies (both the ones that happened and the ones that didn't happen), or talk about how I don't watch Dr Who, but of course I know what it is and have seen a few episodes.  Somehow everyone loves Dr Who; go figure.

Now, I know that eventually I'll fall behind on my pop culture.  I mean, the freshman this year had yet to hit puberty when 9/11 happened; as far as they are concerned, we've had troops in Afghanistan forever, just like I grew up thinking we'd had troops in Germany and Japan forever.  How can I keep up?  Our school just got rid of phone service in the dorm rooms because only 3 students out of 1400 have voice mail boxes.  Everyone has a cell phone these days.  Of course I remember the August ritual back in the day of ordering phone service for your dorm room.  I can joke about these sorts of "back in the day" moments, but

What is terrifying is not that I cannot keep up with the pop culture of the youth these days.  I can try, and Wikipedia, Google, Youtube, and Netflix make it easy to scour the landscape for interesting shows.  We plow through TV shows and books at home anyway, and once we have kids, we'll start acquiring the cultural signposts of the next generation.  I don't think I'll be an old fuddy-duddy who sprays down kids who need to stay the hell off my lawn.

What shocked me is that world I know, and all of the people in it, will die, and the next generation will never know them as anything but history.  It's not that I can't experience the future; it's that my students can never experience the past.

This hit me when MCA died.  The Beastie Boys meant something to me; I had fond memories about them that related to my personal history (riding the bus to and from the accelerated learning class the sent the smart kids to, the soundtrack to a number of college parties, and so on), and they were influential in the music industry in a number of ways.  So long as they were still releasing albums and playing gigs, they would be discussed, remembered, and evaluated.  Even if their heyday was 20 years in the past, like a ghost they could still project their image into the present, and force us to re-tell their story.

For a mainstream public figure like Michael Jackson, for a decade or two there will be opportunities to discuss his legacy, even with him gone.  Every time someone does the moonwalk, or does the Thriller dance, or opens a ridiculous ranch, or burns through millions of dollars in studio time to produce a terrible album (too soon?)...  There are videos and songs and sordid court cases and single-gloved 80s fashion trends based on the Michael Jackson juggernaut.  The young may know know Michael Jackson, but they at least know his caricature, and that is a point of connection.

But for a niche act like the Beastie Boys...  Without them on tour to remind the public about their influence, and to trigger a flood of memories from older fans like myself, what do they become?  How long until they are effectively gone, until there are no more triggers to make people re-tell the story of the Beastie Boys?

Probably because I haven't lost my parents, I haven't really thought about what it's like to carry the full burden of telling someone's story, of keeping them alive in words and spirit and stories when they are fully gone.

To keep the Beastie Boys alive, I would have to re-tell their story, and try to find some way to make relevant to students a niche group that they have never heard of.  The big-picture, broad-stroke personalities like Michael Jackson will be much easier, at least for a while.  But the Beastie Boys are already gone.  To re-tell their story in a compelling way to the 18-year-olds of 2019 is re-tell my own story, because I cannot hope to untangle what happened to the Beastie Boys in 1985 from what happened to me in 1985.  Every gaze backwards is tinged with nostalgia, and the youth of tomorrow won't want to replace their generations' Beastie Boys with my generations' Beastie Boys, any more than I wanted to replace Ad-Rock, MCA and Mike D with their 1959 equivalent (a Skiffle group I've never heard of?)

What frightens me, of course, has nothing to do with music.  It's that someday I will lose my parents, and then the task of keeping my parents' stories and memories alive will fall to me.  I will tell their stories, and almost by definition, it will be irrelevant to my children, who are looking to the future.  Every special memory, every family story, every experience with my parents from my past that to me is not a moment, but a moment, will be no easier to explain to my (future) children than explaining the significance of the Beastie Boys to an 18 year old in 2019.  There are stories and expressions we have that will not be easy to translate.  My parents are both rock stars, and so I assume it will be like talking about Michael Jackson to people born in 1991, which is easier.  But even with the King of Pop, there are moments that don't translate,  just as there will be bits of my history with my parents that I can never fully explain.

It's not that I can't stay relevant to the next generation; it's that they cannot be relevant to me.  For some reason I didn't figure that out until MCA died.  I could probably understand what matters to my students, but they can't understand what mattered to me.  Because the things I know are just ghosts that I can see but the students cannot, and I would have to tell the stories of all of these ghosts.  But then I'd just be telling my own story.  And that's what old fuddy-duddies do, which I was trying to avoid in the first place!

The US Tax Code should be written more like software!

After wasting our 2nd straight weekend working on our taxes, I've come to two conclusions:

1)  The US Tax code is too complex, but I don't think it will ever be greatly simplified since it gives people with money ways to pay less in taxes

2)  If the US Tax code needs to so complex, it should be written more like software and less like a legal code.

Think about it:  All of the rules are basically an algorithm.  In fact, a lot of the rules say things like "Subtract line 34 from line 30 and write the result in line 35".  That's not even sophisticated enough to be called an algorithm!  It's just describing a basic spreadsheet operation.

Many states, as well the IRS, provide PDFs with editable cells.  But, these editable PDF cells don't update one another like a spreadsheet (i.e. if Line 7 is an input into a calculation that produces Line 10, changing Line 7 doesn't affect Line 10; you have to re-do the math yourself).  And there's no way for these PDFs to reference one another.  So, if the state tax code requires the adjusted gross income (AGI) from the federal 1040, there's no way to tell the state income tax PDF, "go get Line 37 from the federal 1040".

I really think that we need a richer format for PDFs that the IRS and the states should use to write their tax forms.  This format (Tax-PDF?  ePDF?  tPDF?  TDF?) should have the following properties:

1. It's basically a spreadsheet with a bunch of text next to each line, so that it can carry its logic around very easily
2. Each Line can be named (Line 37, Line 4, etc) and lines can be exposed for export into other forms
3. You can import Lines from other documents, i.e. "import Line37 from US-1040-2011-v1;" or something like that
4. Each cell knows if it's been imported from another document, entered into this form but could have been imported, calculated based on other values in this document, or entered into the current form because it cannot be imported from elsewhere.
5. There can be a standard "interface" of lines to be exported can be used by brokerage houses and banks for 1099-INT and 1099-DIV forms to make importing these forms into other documents very easy
6. If you put a bunch of these files into one folder, you can weave them together to get them to import information from each other
7. As many common situations as possible are encoded in these documents as sub-modules.  There should be a set of standard situations (marriage, divorce, birth, death, moving between states, etc) that all state documents are required to implement, and they have to document them in the same order, using the same FAQ.  It should be clear where a state's formulas deviate from the standards of other states.
8. The format should be "patchable", so that bugs can be fixed by having a new version of the document update or patch a faulty older version.
9. Any box should serve up useful meta-information if you ask it, such as what other boxes contributed to it, and what situations that box is relevant for (i.e. does it matter if you're married filing separately?  is it relevant if you were a part-time resident?  What if you were in the military?)
10. All of the worksheets (Schedule A, Schedule D, etc) can also be written in this format, and then imported by the 1040. 
11. You can convert the document into a web form (javascript or whatever)

Basically, this would be a different way to write tax documents.  Instead of writing the tax code as words and then sticking boxes at the end of the words, you write the code like it's a spreadsheet, and then label the cells of the spreadsheet.  If you're careful it can still be printed out and used by hand, but it doesn't have to be.

I assume that turbotax already does a lot of this, but turbotax is constantly faced with converting a textual tax code into fancy spreadsheets.  I want the tax code itself to be written as a spreadsheet first, using a flexible standard that states, banks, and brokerages can all use.  The spreadsheet can still look like a PDF, but the entire logic of the tax code is inside it.

In fact, it might be possible to write a fancy PDF parser that converts a lot of the tax code into a spreadsheet.