Taxact.com, like Turbotax, provides an online "interview" that guides you through the process, makes complying with the law much easier, and finds deductions that you might otherwise overlook. I am glad that a third party is providing that service. And I'm glad that multiple third parties are doing this, and making continuous improvements because they are competing with each other on the basis of ease-of-use and correctness-of-calculations.

If the IRS had a monopoly on providing this service, and developed it in-house, you can bet it would be as user-friendly as waiting in line at the DMV. I'm not so naive as to claim that the third-party efforts are bug-free, but they're better than the IRS would do, because what motivation would a faceless IRS bureaucrat have to fix bugs in the software?

There's also a motivation to be secure: Third-party sites can be sued if your private data leaks out, but the IRS cannot be sued.

I once read that the amount of resources expended to simply comply with the IRS is equal to the gross state product of Iowa.

Think about it -- the entire output of a fairly prosperous state, wiped out by the overly-complex tax code!

(And that was about 20 years ago, when the tax code was less complex than it is now.)

Sure, tax simplification would be disruptive to Intuit (and also to firms that act less like vampires, like H&R Block). But no more disruptive than any other awesome efficiency-boosting development, like the invention of the LED.

Joe Public: Yay, Ima gonna get a big check from the IRS!

Me: Wouldn't you have rather gotten that money sooner, rather than later, by reducing the amount withheld from your pay?

Joe: Huh?

Go to Taxact.com. You can e-file your federal return for free, no strings attached.

The e-filing of state returns is where they attempt to make revenue, but you're under no obligation to buy that service.

Think about this: thanks to incomes growing faster than the rate of inflation, basic commodities, like a gallon of milk, consume a significantly smaller fraction of a family's income than they did a generation ago. And that effect is orders-of-magnitude larger for technological commodities, like a gigaflop of computing power.

Government services, too, ought to be costing a smaller fraction of a family's income. (Especially because government uses technology to provide its services. Most government workers sit in front of a computer all day.) But government services are about the only thing that is bucking the trend, and consuming a larger fraction of a family's income!

The laws can be for sale, only to the extent that the lawmakers are selling!

Every special interest should be free to lobby. The real trick is electing representatives who understand that catering to a special interest is, by definition, detrimental to the general interest. (If something is in the general interest, it's by definition not a special interest.)

weev is fortunate that, for once, a court gives a damn about what was important to the founding generation.

Do you think that one of these days, a mistake like this will have catastrophic consequences?

If yes, should I lay in a supply of freeze-dried food and shotgun shells?

The fix has the sum 1 + 2 + 16 hardcoded into it. Twice. Why not speed things up by replacing that with a hardcoded 19? (If the sum has significance to a human reading the code, that could be explained in a comment.)

Fact: There are more unskilled humans employed today than at any other time in history.

Why? Because, as you pointed out, everyone has benefited from productivity improvements; those improvements increase the demand for all types of labor, even unskilled labor.

Fortunately, the vast majority of jobs do not require coding ability. So, while it may be true that you can't teach 'X' to code, there's really no need to teach 'X' to code.

Are you 100% committed to that view? I think Thomas Jefferson was a pretty great guy, despite the fact that he was a slaveowner. In 2014, he'd be arrested for that. In 1770, the feedback he was getting from most of his peers was, "you're doing it right." Do you cut T.J. any slack at all for being "a product of his times"?

Resources are finite. If the availability of resources is increased a million-fold, they will still be finite.

We all know the Dijkstra quote... "It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration."

Enough bashing then... what is an *excellent* choice of language to teach to beginners?