The Skeptics Guide #928 - Apr 22 2023
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Who are the hosts and what is the episode overview?
You're listening to The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality. Hello and welcome to The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe. Today is Tuesday, April 18th, 2023, and this is your host, Stephen Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella. Hey, everybody. Cara Santa Maria. Howdy. Jay Novella. Hey, guys. And Evan Bernstein.
Good evening, everyone.
Happy Tax Day, Evan.
Oh, thank you. Yes. Tax day. End of the first part of the crazy tax season for me. So Yahoo.
Yes. And the crazy craziness. Now you just go like normal craziness for a while. Right.
Yeah, that's right. It's all crammed into this, you know, early sort of early in the year deadline in which everything I mean, everything has to be addressed. Now some things are on extension, and I have many more months to complete that difficult work. So it stretches out. So it's the first major hurdle of the year for me for my work season. And, yeah, I came through, I think, none the worse for wear.
Congratulations.
Thanks. Thanks.
Is that weird having such an unbalanced schedule throughout the year?
It is in some ways, but in another way, because you know exactly what your schedule is going to be for the years, you really plan for it accordingly. You gear yourself up for it. So there's a lot of structure to it, and that's a good part. So there are some advantages to that, but it is strange. It's a lot of work. I put in about between February 1st and April 15th each year. It's a Almost 1,000 hours of work. So that's about 80 to 90 hours a day every day. I mean really including weekends is what it takes to get my workload done.
80 to 90 hours a week. I think you mean that day.
80 to 90 hours a day I meant. Yeah.
Yes, you're right. See? Well, to put that into perspective, a full-time job by American standards, I know this because of my internship, a full-time job 40 hours a week, so that's eight hours a day, with two weeks off is 2,000 hours. So that would be six months of work in a kind of standard setting.
In three months. Yeah, because you're working double full-time basically.
Basically, yep. Oh, and on weekends. I mean my weekends are shot.
Evan, how can you possibly have all that work and you like finish on tax day? Why can't you easily be two days over with your estimate?
Well, again, it comes down to planning. So I don't have to get so crunched really in these last few days in April if I do a good job of organizing my time well in February. And so I've learned to do that, and I've learned to also coax certain clients that I have to get me their stuff early enough. so that I don't have this log jam later. The more you can spread it out, really, the more manageable it is. So that's what a lot of my prep work comes down to, is managing that aspect of the work to make sure I don't get bottlenecked and crunched all in April, and that I get a bunch of my clients to come to me in February. And you'd be surprised, perhaps, a lot of clients just aren't ready to have all their tax work done in February.
They don't have all their forms or they're just procrastinators because let's face it, tax preparation in America and tax day, it's not a great thing. It's kind of like a dentist appointment. It's a necessary sort of thing. And some people have a genuine phobia. I mean, a real... I've seen panic and come... in the eyes of people who have come into the office and sit down with me, they hate it. I mean, they get real anxiety out of it. So some people will tend to put it off for as long as they possibly can. But again, part of the work I do is trying to convince people to come in early enough, makes it easier on me. And it works to a certain degree.
Speaking of taxes, this doesn't have anything to do with taxes, but Elizabeth Holmes, you know Elizabeth Holmes, she's going to prison.
Theranos founder. God, that took a long time. Yeah.
Now, Steve, she tried because I guess she just had a baby. She tried to have the court let her stay home with the baby and they said no. Yeah. Yep. They said no. That's that is basically how bad of a thing that she did.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
Who are the hosts and what is the episode overview?
0:03–12:57
2
What was the Elizabeth Holmes / Theranos verdict and why does it matter?
12:57–50:59
3
Why was SpaceX’s Starship first launch scrubbed and what are the technical challenges?
50:59–1:24:08
4
How can magnets destroy palaeomagnetic information in Martian meteorites?
1:24:08–1:39:22