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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • That’s certainly a start but only 1.7 billion of that is listed as explicitly “high-income” unpaid debt. Even if you were to assume the 4.7 billion was entirely from high income, which I doubt, it’s still dwarfed by estimates of the missing taxes from the 1%. Per this fast co article an estimate of 168 billion per year is evaded by the top 1%. That’s 28% of the total evaded tax revenue estimate of 600billion. I’d speculate that if you included grey area practices for sheltering and hiding money, that liability would grow substantially.

    I fully understand the IRS is understaffed and has been choked for funding, my general point is that this is deliberate, and meant to force them to focus on recoverable things like gig workers as opposed to the very wealthy who can hold them off with lawyers and clever accountants. If it were possible for them to go after these people, that would be the most rational use of their time—when I need to free up space on a hard drive or email acct, I target the largest files and attachments first.



  • I know they’ve said they don’t have the capacity to take on the really big tax cheats (ie the same people that pay lobbyists and gift politicians with trips and gifts), but recovering one or two of their dodged taxes alone would probably cover every gig worker who’s ever underpaid taxes.

    Of course, that would only make sense if you thought the IRS’ primary function was to fairly enforce taxation and mutual support of our shared govt—whereas the older I get, the more it seems to me that it serves as a social disciplining function and a lever to adjust social mobility. If your have enough money, you never have to worry about them.


  • I haven’t used competing apps to know, but as a forced teams user it is very sluggish, seems to break other ms apps half the time and has some strange and persistent design choices that irk me. It also crashes on its own, when I’m not using it 2-3 times a day.

    It has improved in terms of features lately, but still feels very bloated and WIP most of the time. It still won’t let me control where video windows are, and I’ll never understand this.

    This is our replacement for Skype, which was obviously feature deficient and getting old, but does what it’s supposed to do and doesn’t cause problems.

    Not sure if there’s a good competing app in terms of video and slack functionality, integration into outlook and onedrive (both of which also annoy me and seem to be performing worse-over-time, but are unavoidable and sometimes useful.)






  • Everything about this screams fake. It also all sounds like a horrible idea. They’re basically discussing traumatizing inmates at 10x speed. Given that a lot of criminals come from a background of trauma, I’d wonder here if you’d be doing more harm than good. There’s claims in this article that are absurd, without some form of clarification. What the hell is a “creative scientist” as a title—I’m not familiar with that discipline. Also, let’s uhh say am that all this was real, and possible. This tech would be a net evil in the world. If you can use it to brainwash inmates into cringing when they think about doing crime, you can also use it to torture dissenters into conformists. Given that the tech is already aimed at an element of the state security apparatus, there’s like no chance this wouldn’t get used for much worse purposes. I think they’re also misunderstanding how prison is used in many places. In NA, prison does not seem to be about rehabilitation, but just punishment and getting free labor.