Privacy concerns aside, I think this may affect poorer people more than the affluent.

I base my opinion on some of the places I use to work. The offices, which were usually HQ or some other large corporate office, were always in very affluent areas. Great for professionals but not affordable for the laborers who worked in the restaurants and malls and such surrounding the offices. The affordable housing was further away, and if this kind of tax is passed it is going to affect the people who cannot afford to move closer to their job, or do not have the ability to get a job closer to where they live (low income areas usually have much less opportunity for employment).

There are a lot of people who don't really have many good options for living close to their place of employment. This kind of tax would unfairly impact them while sparing those who can afford to uproot and live closer to their place of employment.

In other news, I did a study on the finance sector and determined that since the guy who works at the local Chase branch is in highschool that everyone in finance doesn't have a finance degree. I also found that I am also an expert statistician.

Nothing is unprecedented. The government has been collecting all of your data for years, regardless of if the President has a (R) or a (D) next to his name. Bringing Obama into the discussion distracts from the fact that it doesn't matter who the president is, the government will continue being the government and continue doing whatever it wants.

Yes I do, and in that discussion everyone whined about Obama and missed the opportunity to discuss the fact that the government and corporations have always acted as if you "have no expectation of privacy". Hence the fucking story we should be talking about here.

Yeah totally, that's why I never blamed the problems on the project being "government run" and instead said this is the first (in my memory) case in the government of a large organization failing at rolling out a software solution.

What I was trying to say is that the government is now experiencing the same challenges a lot of companies and other large organizations deal with. The government is just doing it on a national stage, while also forcing millions of people to use the site.

Brining Obama into it frames the discussion on partisan politics. The discussion becomes "Obama and the democrats are corrupt, look at this no bid contract" instead of "The entire goverment, regardless of political party, is corrupt; no bid contracts have been part of the goverment bidding process for years and we need to reform it now".

We get nowhere when we fight about one party over another. But thats how all the debates are framed, and partisan drones are programmed to jump all over the opportunity to blame opposing party while ignoring the same transgressions when it is their party being bad.

I think this might be the first goverment case of a large organization trying to execute a publicly facing software project and failing. For decades the goverment didn't do public facing benefit projects. If this all happened in the 90s you would have to sign up using paper forms and although it may have been slow and inconvenient by today's standards that's what the goverment had experience in doing, it probably would have worked just fine.

I think software/web centric failures like this are going to keep happening. Few organizations, especially those whose primary business isn't software, are good at implementing huge software projects. Most management doesn't know how to run software projects, budget departments dont know how to account for software projects. If the Social Security administration has a huge backlog of applications they just add more people to the workforce until they work through it. Now everything is different, it doesn't matter how many people and how much money you throw at it, it's going to talk a while to fix. Very few people in goverment, and very few members of the electorate understand how a software project is run, hence a "surge" to fix the problem. People understand that concept, they imagine tons of nerdy looking guys flowing into some building and typing furiously at a keyboard until the problems go away. Good imagery, not really accurate.

I'm actually really amused by all this, it's my job playing out on a national stage. Terrible software estimates, contractors failing to live up to contracts, unrealistic timelines, poorly understood requirements, angry management demanding all hands on deck, and unhappy users. Maybe now software management will become an academic subject and mandatory study for MBAs and such.

Just because I recognize the way it is doesn't mean I support it. I'm not a 1%er, I'm a 9 to 5 firmware engineer. I'm just not naive about how the game is being played. The sooner we accept that these are the rules governing corporations the sooner we as a society can have a constructive conversation about how to change it.

Attributing this behavior to greed is ignoring the problem. It's way beyond greed. Its systemic, the entire modern western way of life is based on exploiting someone or something for the gain of material wealth.

Then there are a lot of people who are immoral, because anyone who has a 401k is probably invested in mutual funds, and those funds are usually invested in at least Walmart or McDonalds.

Morals aren't real, their just things created to keep us in line.

I don't think that anyone sees the point. The corporate behavior doesn't seem legitimate. It is legitimate. It is law. It is how corporations have operated for over 100 years. It's the american way. We're all part of it.

We can't change something we are all perpetuating.

I think ideally that's what the government is for. I don't know if you are American or not, because it is laughable to think that the American government would punish "bad" corporations if anyone could even agree on what that means. The American government exists to preserve corporations. Why do you think they got the bailout.

And yeah the 401k isn't terrible. I have one, I like it and I decide generally where the investment goes. However most people dont look at their 401k, and usually just use the default fund, which is usually a broad based fund chasing the top stocks. AAPL is part of most people's 401k and most public retirement funds.

You know I bet a lot of people do think I'm trolling. That didn't even occur to me.

I'm trying to get people to move past the "fuck management" circlejerk and start talking about how America built, and is now built upon, the corporate capitalist system. If we wan't shit to change we have to look at our own spending habits and who we vote for (if we vote) and stop blaming people for doing their job.

I'm an engineer, I have worked for corporations who have laid my colleagues off. I have been threatened that my job would be outsourced. I don't think what Broadcom did was cool, but we can't all sit here an whine about Broadcom being dicks while were also gleefully watching our 401k (which Broadcom is probably a part of in some small part) go up in value. not trying to rant at you as Im sure you see this contradiction

The only problem, and it's a slight problem, is that mass murder is illegal and corporations maximizing shareholder value is actually the law. I know I shouldn't feed the trolls but if you don't like the game change the rules, don't be angry at people who play by them. (I know it's impossible to change the rules because the corporations own congress...)