I was watching TV and TurboTax has a new ad out. In it a guy walks into the waiting room of a auto-repair shop is greeted by greenish actors that are look-alikes of currency effigies. He describes the stuff that went wrong with the car and the money-faces say that what he needs is a big tax refund. They go ahead and say TurboTax is the best software to get big refunds and everyone in the room agrees. Then the actor portraying Jefferson (I think) goes ahead and says he must also add a hula dancer to his dashboard. So, is the quality of advice about TurboTax the same as the quality of advice about the hula dancer?

Burger King has a new campaign out, the "Whooper virgins". They travelled the globe and offered a Big Mac and a Whopper to people that never ate a burger before. They choose the Whooper 75% of the time. Then they go ahead and take a poke at the people they just interviewed. They ask one of them what they really like and the guy replies "seal meat". They insist and he says "seal meat is best". So, in the opinion of someone that thinks seal meat is the best food around, the Whooper is superior. All of sudden I cannot connect with the "expert".

I have heard arguments like this all my life. I once made the point that the current American generation is the first that will be less educated than his parents (check http://www.acenet.edu for data). I also made a comment back in Brazil that the current Brazilian generation is poorly educated and have no respect. In both cases the reply was something like "you're old" and "I bet someone said the same about the Romans, Greeks and Egyptians". It would have helped if the person had picked civilizations that were not dead (with due respect to the Italians and modern Greeks that have both great modern societies).

On a side note, I do prepare my taxes using TurboTax and it is the best software for tax preparation I've found in the US. Vastly superior to the bone-headed support I got with human tax advisors from Arthur Andersen (good riddance) and HR Block, something a couple of friends corroborate with their own horror stories. Despite being the best one, it still sucks. The auto-import absolutely never works and almost gave me a hard attack a couple of times. In 2007 for instance, it filled in a form saying I sold 20061123 shares of a given stock, data it got from my broker. It took me a couple of hours in manual edit mode to fix the problem - if you didn't notice, let me re-write that number on a different format: 2006/11/23 or, even better, 11/23/2006 (the sale date). It offers no look-up service for fair market price for cost basis analysis, it does not handle well selling mixed lots of a given stock despite trying really hard this year they seem to be rounding up cents instead of truncating. 

The Brazilian government gives away a tax software that is much superior (yes, paid with tax-payer money). The people that write it are federal employees with less training I care mentioning, crappy work environment and very little motivation other than trying to do their best without monetary reward for it. Yet, they manage to produce something that is going for about 20 years without a major glitch or bug. The additional benefit is that they cannot complain if the software is out of data and cannot change the rules after the software is out, something that happens all the time in the US.