Fortnite, one of the world's most popular FPS games, has the notion of stamina. In my opinion it has been poorly implemented and it's incredibly frustrating at the best of times.
Maybe we're all doing it wrong. Americans could instead be making "donations" to get the legal outcomes they want under this regime. We're not accustomed to the 3rd wold paradigm though it's well established elsewhere.
It's a free market. Just pool some money on kickstarter and bribe the dude to make him do whatever you want. It's the new way to petition. Pool the money, buy his tokens. Make a smart contract that transfers a few mil once the law takes effect.
Do you seriously need a Ukrainian to tell you how to do corruption in the year 2025 of our Lord? In US? In this economy?
Don't be cheap. You can get Roe v Wade back and Kavanaught's head on a pike if you bid high enough. Independent prosecutors will for sure find a pdf file one him somewhere.
I use Firefox and I like Firefox, but it feels like they refreshed the logo not all that long ago, and in the time between then and now I can't really think of anything they added to the browser that improved it. I just feel like Firefox is slowly dying, and a fresh coat of paint every few years isn't going to turn things around.
When you look at the donations politicians receive and the ROI they produce you quickly realize that they are way too cheap. Politicians should ask for way more money so lobbying is not that incredibly profitable.
> Politicians should ask for way more money so lobbying is not that incredibly profitable.
Except those corrupt politicians want lobbying to be profitable, so they can profit from it too. And if they ask for too much, they’ll just bribe the next guy or may even try to put their own in office. Can’t have that!
I'm surprised that politicians haven't established burdensome and expensive professional compliance and licensure requirements for their own trade to restrict upstart competition. Every other trade pays them to implement the same so it's not like they're not familiar with how to do it.
The individual bribes aren't the whole picture. The bribes are statements of loyalty. If I am reliably donating to your campaign every couple of years, then I am probably not donating to your opponents' campaigns.
And loyalty seems particularly important with the current administration, because they have an agenda full of things that are illegal or otherwise unsavory and un-American, so they need a nation run by loyal henchmen if the agenda is to succeed.
Lobbyists aren't the problem. They are doing what they are paid to do.
If you donate to a large charity, there is a good chance some of that $ goes to lobbying, as it should. (Presumably you want the issues goy care about to be fixed!)
If you work at a large company, 100% chance it lobbies, for good reason. Large employers lobby for better mass transit (because parking garages are expensive), more housing (because it is cheaper to lobby than pay employees more so they can afford $$$$ houses), or friendlier business laws (no one likes paying more taxes).
Lobbying is everything from "help us use orphans as a source of cheap protein!" To "keep the national parks funded".
"Keep the national parks funded" sounds like a good use case for lobbying, until you realize it's only needed as a counterweight because lobbying diminishes the relative role of the democratic process itself in meeting needs.
We recently made a fairly large donation to a children’s hospital to support a specific research program. They directly told us that the highest-impact way to deploy the funds would be to pay lobbyists to try to get earmarks injected into federal bills. Like, >10x expected ROI.
Not all lobbying is straight-up mustache twirling. But it definitely left a bad taste in our mouths.
That kind of is mustache twirling. Instead of spending your donation on research, they would use it to divert money from some other cause to their own. Your donation may harm a different - and possibly more deserving - research program.
This would all be fine if the lobbying $ was only being paid to the lobbyists. The moment the $ flows to the politicians, it is what other countries would call a bribe.
This is a misleading characterization of the issue here. Let me pull up another very relevant analogy here. Let's say that you visit a government office for a driving license. Should you pay a bribe to the official? You are a responsible adult, after all. Bribes are needed for everything from housing permits to your kids' food assistance. How is it bad when it gets good things done?
Is this how you reason about corruption in government service? Unlike your argument about about lobbying, the problem is very conspicuous here - you're supposed to get those services without paying anything beyond the nominal service charges. They're your rights in an society where you already pay taxes to fund them. The government officials are already being paid with your tax money to do this job. What's even worse? If such loose and open-ended bargaining is permitted for basic essential services, then the only ones who will get those services will be the ones with money, not the ones who need it. Your housing permits and your kids' food assistance will become increasingly costlier and harder goals to achieve. That's why bribes are illegal.
If you look at this scenario carefully, it isn't much of an analogy. It's exactly the same situation, but with different players! When politicians debate public policy, the only criterion should be the public interests - because the public are the primary stakeholders in a democracy, and it's the utilization of their tax payments that these politicians are debating. Those politicians are supposed to be the people's 'representatives' who are elected and paid to listen to their constituents and lobby on their behalf. The public shouldn't have to 'lobby' with them too, especially for basic essentials like nutrition, national parks or tax filing!
What you call 'lobbying' in the US is known as 'political corruption' in most of the rest of the world. It's just a weasel word used to underplay the seriousness of such corruption. And as I pointed out earlier in my analogy, the rich ones outcompete the majority public here too. It's abundantly clear that even town councils favor big corpos even in the face of loud vocal opposition from the majority of their constituents. It's clear how much special treatment these professional grifters called 'lobbyists' get when they walk into the town hall just minutes before the discussion of a topic, while the town's people have to wait there for one and a half days without proper food, water or sleep in order to speak a few words in opposition. This is what happens when you legitimize corruption with cute terms like 'lobbying'.
> Let's say that you visit a government office for a driving license. Should you pay a bribe to the official?
We formalized it! It is called an application fee, and it is set high enough so they the government employee doesn't need to take bribes outside of their salary.
Other countries set application fees so low that government employees barely earn enough money to eat, so they take bribes.
NYC solves a huge part of their police corruption problem by just paying officers more.
> When politicians debate public policy, the only criterion should be the public interests
I agree much of lobbying is corrupt, but the concept is that lobbying is how politicians discover the public interest. It is also how they get input on the effects of proposed laws. I want my local small business lobbying group to let my city know if a proposed tax increase will bankrupt my favorite local stores!
The fact is, what the EFF and ACLU do to protect our rights is also a form of lobbying.
> I agree much of lobbying is corrupt, but the concept is that lobbying is how politicians discover the public interest. It is also how they get input on the effects of proposed laws. I want my local small business lobbying group to let my city know if a proposed tax increase will bankrupt my favorite local stores!
I touched this point in my previous reply. But let me reiterate it again. Those politicians are supposed to just talk to their constituents and represent their interests. That's their job description. If the voters who sent them to the legislatures have to lobby them afterwards, what is the purpose of these politicians anyway? Is their job to con the public into choosing them, so that they can leech the same public? Evidently so, and that's the fundamental problem with democracy in US these days.
> The fact is, what the EFF and ACLU do to protect our rights is also a form of lobbying.
While EFF and ACLU do a commendable job, their existence don't justify lobbying. It's the other way around. Lobbying make them a necessity to regain some semblance of balance and fairness. They wouldn't be needed if the politicians were doing their job in the first place.
Or voters should take some civic responsibility and stop voting for corrupt politicians. Americans seem to be either unable to make their own decisions without paid advertising to direct them or they're afraid of "wasting" their vote on candidates that didn't spend enough on advertising.
Or “politics” are too much of their identity and they always vote for “their guy” regardless of the merits. Education does not matter when the vote has nothing to so with rationality and is only rooting for a team.
Corruption will never be solved. It could possibly be reduced if there was less ROI. I expect that would require shrinking the government so there is less centralized power. A limited federal government and more administrative power handed back to the states (within reason) would be interesting.
Too many people treat politics like sports fandom. I know people whose political views are the exact opposite of Party X, but if you ask them, they will tell you they will always vote for Party X, because they were born and raised an X, and stick by their team no matter what they do. They're like fucking Eagles fans. They have this weird "team loyalty" that I just don't get.
> Too many people treat politics like sports fandom. I know people whose political views are the exact opposite of Party X, but if you ask them, they will tell you they will always vote for Party X, because they were born and raised an X, and stick by their team no matter what they do.
This part makes enough sense.
> They're like fucking Eagles fans.
Now you've gone and implied 95% of sports fans aren't that way?? I don't understand your argument any more.
this is just a more abstract "bootstraps" argument. schooling in this country has been systematically attacked and deconstructed, and as the burger reich's leader says, "i love the poorly educated". this is not "dum timmy votes for dum thing" it's "countless $ and effort and man hours have been devoted to making the american populace dumber"
Why? look at any polling breakdown for how the educated vote vs the uneducated.
Try telling people you voted third party because of a deeply held conviction about not electing corrupt politicians. You will be told you are evil, that you've got an unreasonable/impossible purity bar, that you don't really believe in that deeply held moral conviction actually, that you are worse than the people who voted for the other guy, that you are a utopian idealist, etc etc.
Don't get me wrong, I did vote third party and I will continue to do so if the Dems put up candidates like Harris and Biden. But don't expect most people to be willing to weather the storm of vitriol they'll receive for holding a high bar for their politicians.
What I said is factually true, neither mocking, judging nor telling you off. If you believe saying something like, don't look at the sun or you'll hurt your eyes (and then you look at the sun and say that your eyes are burnt) is telling you off, then we have different definitions of the phrase.
This problem is only magnified when you consider our voting system. Any ranked voting system inherently runs into Arrow's Impossibility Theorem, which makes what we have right now not exactly democratic. The solution would be to switch to something like approval voting but good luck getting that going.
It's been a while since I've studied the details of voting systems, but it seems like Approval voting just moves the spoiler effect into how people vote - ie strategic voting. Personally I think the possibilities of circular ties under Ranked Pairs is oversold.
Society is well acquainted with the concept of a tie, and whatever tiebreaker procedure we define probably won't factor into voter strategy all that much (that is, it will be less of an effect than the people who don't understand they can vote for more than one candidate)
> it seems like Approval voting just moves the spoiler effect into how people vote
that's orthogonal. ranked voting methods already have (arguably more severe) response to strategic voting AND ALSO can fail IIA even with no strategy applied, just by changing an irrelevant alternative.
> Personally I think the possibilities of circular ties under Ranked Pairs is oversold.
what does that even mean? we have VSE figures that measure the combined effect of all failures, including when the Condorcet winner isn't the favorite candidate of the electorate (not the social utility maximizer).
https://electionscience.github.io/vse-sim/vse-graph.html
that's not under or oversold, it's just measured performance.
Restating my disclaimer of "It's been a while since I've studied the details of voting systems"...
> ranked voting methods ... can fail IIA even with no strategy applied, just by changing an irrelevant alternative.
Can you clarify whether you're referring to some ranked methods (eg IRV), or all ranked methods (ie including ranked pairs) ?
> that's not under or oversold, it's just measured performance.
Isn't this due to defining "performance" in a way that is congruent with Approval (/ Score) ? A quick skim of that VSE page has it talking about "utility", which I would imagine is a scalar per candidate representing "happiness" ?
The problem I have with Approval is that coming from our two-terrible-party system - do I Approve my latent terrible party or not? That choice seems purely down to strategy, compared to being able to rank them to say I completely prefer the new party/candidate over my latent terrible party, and my latent terrible party over the other latent terrible party. The dynamic also seems exacerbated knowing there will be a lot of people who continue to vote exactly as they did under plurality.
it's mathematically proven that all ranked methods can fail IIA. see arrow's theorem.
> Isn't this due to defining "performance" in a way that is congruent with Approval (/ Score)
1. i did not define performance in a way that is congruent with approval/score. scores are not utilities. they are the modification of utilities via ignorance, normalization, and strategy.
2. that the correct social welfare function is just the sum of all voter utilities (the definition of "performance") is mathematically proven.
https://www.rangevoting.org/UtilFoundns
approval voting obliterates IRV ("RCV") with any mixture of strategic or honest voters, so i'm not sure why you're bringing up strategy.
https://www.rangevoting.org/StratHonMix
i had a chance to visit arrow at his palo alto condo circa 2014. his theorem is nice and all, but it only makes sense to apply it to social welfare functions, not voting methods. yes, the correct social welfare function is just the utilitarian sum of all voters' individual utilities.
once you know that, that's the function you use in your VSE metrics. then the performance of the voting method is measurable without having to think about any specific criteria.
> I am surprised no one has started a go fund me to make a fund just to bribe politicians to fix tax filing.
>
> It would be cost effective VS paying for tax prep!
It will not work, part of compensation is being hired as lobbyist after you "retire" from public office. So either go fund me will do the same or it will fail.
> It will not work, part of compensation is being hired as lobbyist after you "retire" from public office. So either go fund me will do the same or it will fail.
This is a bit reductive. Not everyone member of Congress goes to work for TurboTax after they retire!
However I imagine Inuit is a reliable source of campaign contributions every year. The simple solution is to get enough funding that the campaign can promise 3 or 4 election cycles of support for any politicians that vote in favor of tax filing reform.
There are limits to corporate donations and lobbying, which is why the price of lobbying seems so low (see the linked blog post in the comments here!)
SuperPACs get around that, but there is a chance a large company like Inuit isn't agile enough to defend against a well organized political attack.
Ultimately career politicians care about being elected. Even corrupt ones need to stay in office and they'll happily sacrifice one small donor to keep the gravy train coming with all their other connections.
If an independently funded lobbying group walks into DC and tells a senator they just raised 30M dollars and 80k residents in their state donated as part of that, I bet people will start to listen.
The average HNer, who is fairly literate and well-informed about tax-prep, tends to misunderstand the situation.
Using tax preparation software is the cheap (or free!) alternative to what millions of Americans are doing. It was a change for the better for people who didn't do their own taxes. A regular person's taxes can always be done electronically for free, or if they really want, for $20-$100 through tax prep software.
What millions of Americans do is pay a local accountant hundreds of dollars. The accountant pays himself out of their refund. He is "their guy" who is going to find all the "loopholes" to get them the biggest possible refund. He is also a shield between them and the vengeful and anal IRS that will garnish their paychecks or possibly even imprison them for making mistakes. (This is how the accountants market things, not reality.)
The masses generally don't want to "fix" e-filing/tax prep because a) you can already do it for free if you want to, it just requires a third-party which may be dumb but isn't getting most people fired up or b) they don't care about tax prep software at all because they're using an accountant.
There are 800k people out there with Preparer Tax Identification Numbers(PTINs) being paid to file other people's taxes. Looking around for the estimates for the actual stats of the percentages of people supposed to use these preparers varies from 25-55%.
> The average HNer, who is fairly literate and well-informed about tax-prep, tends to misunderstand the situation.
The fact that TurboTax is cheaper than a local CPA does not change the fact that Intuit actively lobbies to prevent free tax filing.
In a sane world the IRS should send a letter to every tax-paying household in February that says “we owe you X”, “you owe us X”, or “your taxes are complex, please work with a tax specialist”. Also in a sane world this would be free and the government would be incentivized to simplify the tax code so that as many people as possible were in one of the first buckets. In our world the government is aggressively lobbied for complex tax codes and prevention of free tax filing.
> A regular person's taxes can always be done electronically for free, or if they really want, for $20-$100 through tax prep software.
Define “regular”. Per TurboTax, only 37% of people qualify for free filing.
I have never tried to go through the TurboTax free file route but based on my experience with the paid service, I imagine they aggressively upsell free filers with the exact same scare tactics you associate with CPAs.
I suspect GP is simply misinformed about the reality of the situation. They also explicitly state “you can already do it for free if you want to, it just requires a third-party”.
They are missing the context that only a fraction of filers are eligible to use free filing and that TurboTax paid something like 140 million to settle claims that they are misleading filers. That suit is why they now admit only 37% of people are even eligible to file for free.
Free Fillable Forms is free for everyone. It is technically a third party. It’s very simple if you have the average tax filing situation.
There are also other services that provide free efiling regardless of income, it’s not just TurboTax.
At the end of the day, you can always do the paperwork if you really don’t want anyone seeing your taxes and mail it. Could it be better? Oh sure, but it’s difficult for me to feel very passionate about it.
> In a sane world the IRS should send a letter to every tax-paying household in February that says “we owe you X”, “you owe us X”, or
As mentioned in sibling posts, the IRS does NOT have the information it needs to get even close on your taxes. They know your reported income. They do not know your marital status, how you’re going to file, if or how many kids you have and will be filing for, and many other things. These all have MAJOR tax impacts.
An additional factor is state taxes really need to be packaged together with the actual solution.
> Oh sure, but it’s difficult for me to feel very passionate about it.
Just passionate enough to say that everyone unhappy with Intuit lobbying against free tax filing and simplified tax codes doesn’t understand?
> As mentioned in sibling posts, the IRS does NOT have the information it needs to get even close on your taxes. They know your reported income. They do not know your marital status, how you’re going to file, if or how many kids you have and will be filing for, and many other things. These all have MAJOR tax impacts.
This is misleading. The IRS does have this because for most people it does not change year to year. It would also be trivial for them to provide a way to input this data if/when it does change.
I’m not entirely sure what your point is. You say you don’t care about this but seem very invested in defending Intuit’s lobbying.
You also seem to be simultaneously claiming that the US tax system is too complex for the government to feasibly automate and that filing taxes is trivial.
Either you hold contradictory viewpoints here or you have some undisclosed interest in this area.
I'd like to defend the notion of using a CPA a bit. I started using one when I became a partner in a passthrough LLC. I was now self-employed and was responsible for paying taxes on the businesses income as well as my own personal income. Filing that first year was incredibly stressful and time consuming, and I came to the conclusion that sometimes the right thing to do is to hire someone who knows what theyre doing.
Your post paints accountants as con-men, swindling people and promising "loopholes". Maybe some are, but they do provide a valuable service, especially if your tax situation is non-trivial.
I would love for the tax code to be simplified enough that I don't feel compelled to hire someone who put in the work to understand it, but that's simply not the case right now.
I think GP’s point was that the vast majority of individuals have taxes that look like “one W2, maybe a couple 1099s, and standard deduction.” Many of these people have been scared into using a CPA when they really just need to plug-and-chug a few numbers into tax software.
As soon as the words “passthrough LLC” (or “farm” or “S-corp” or “itemize”) are on the table, it’s usually worth it to pay $1,000 for a professional, assuming your time is worth something.
Exactly. Tax complexity drives the CPA / tax prep need.
That said, there is a huge swath of America that's being preyed on by strip-mall tax prep, who derive zero benefit from it. (And an industry whose profits ultimately trickle up to the tax prep software companies)
I was blown away when I learned one of my wife's friends, who has a single W2 and some bank interest, pays H&R Block every year to file her taxes! No stocks or rental income or IRAs or anything else that could complicate things. But still she, and millions of Americans, pay these companies to fill out what amounts to a single form. Eye opening.
Entering a 1099-B for stocks is dead simple, you enter in a few numbers (cumulative buys, sells, and wash sales) and you’re done. You transmit your trade history to the IRS digitally.
It takes me about 20-30 minutes to enter a W2, 1099-INT, 1099-B, 1099-B (futures) and a 1256 (straddles and index options) into FreeTaxUSA every spring.
Just like every other company, HR block sells emotions, not a product. The two emotions are: not getting in trouble with the IRS, and getting a good deal (with whatever advantage the HR block employee can find applies to you). Maybe also not having the stress of having to learn how to do your taxes. (WTF is an AMT?)
I will even pay so my computers never ever connected MS servers! Just no idea who to pay or how technically accomplish such stunt :) And yes, I use not-a-Windows os'es everywhere, just one comp for gaming :)
Use windows build in firewall, or if you are intimidated by its bad UI install Windows Firewall Control https://www.binisoft.org/wfc.php and set Outbound connections to blocked. Then you can punch holes on a program by program basis starting with DNS/DHCP.
I seriously doubt one computer firewall can give complete protection to that same computer os.
And black lists are uncomplete lists not to mention changes in dns and not to mention possible hardcoded unknown addresses. And white listing game or two and yt and netflix etc
is a lot of work, probably with temporal success...
Windows just is not open source... Without NDA. And even with it - is it possible to compile your own Windows binaries and install it ?
1 if windows firewall had hardcoded gaps it would fail DOD and government requiems
2 no lists. You set it to DENY ALL and then punch holes just for your own programs. One caveat is disabling DNS Cache service so that you can granularly control which apps can have dns access.
Kids these days can't even shoot heroin before going to work in the factories and mines. Liberty is threatened! What's next? Standards for safe food, drugs, and cosmetics?/s
There's been a bug in Windows 10 for the last six months or so whereby the taskbar randomly stops showing icons for your apps on your secondary monitor.
It makes me feel like Windows has entered its true enshittification era.
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