Since taxes are required by the government, and go to fund the government, the government should be doing everything it can to make filing easy and accurate.

A good tax filing platform, like a road, is a public good. However, private companies also make tax filing platforms, and one provided by the government is competition to them, and reduces profit. So, it makes sense they would try to eliminate the government option. They can privatize and profit from this public good.

Government is influenced by everyone from individual citizens to large corporations, via money. I have found this page, at Open Secrets, to be very useful in understanding all the ways that legal constructs (businesses, unions, etc) and people can direct money to the government: https://www.opensecrets.org/resources/learn/glossary

They have all the solutions to hard lessons learned written in C for reference, so if they aren't lazy, this shouldn't be too bad.

Reading existing code is hard. Editing it without introducing regressions is harder. That's why IMO there's always a desire to sweep the board clean and start anew. That is more fun, and easier, than figuring out the nuances of the existing code. Programmers often don't want to be maintenance programmers. If you apply this analogy to buildings, it's the desire to raze and rebuild, rather than enhance existing structures.

I can't even opt-out. When I renewed my lease last year they added an addendum that they had the right to charge fees for included utilities. Guess what's a "utility" now? Internet.

All these costs have always been paid in rent. Landlords came up with some kind of a narrative to convince state legislatures to let them add additional ad hoc fees on top of the advertised rent, which they call utility fees (or "RUBS" fees), which are completely unrelated to any tenant's usage of any utility. Despite any narrative, these are just additional fees on top of rent, and are collected as rent. The purpose is to hide the true cost of rent (these fees aren't revealed till it's time to pay, per the narrative). Tenants now and have always paid every landlord expense plus profit. It's corrupt legislatures that are to credit for this. Not every state allows it - some have always banned it (e.g. North Carolina), some have recently outlawed it, and others have had it outlawed.

The problem is the legislatures legalize these fees as the law of the land. So if one is position that they must rent, they are stuck with it, unless they want to commute from another state. And many state legislatures have legalized these fees, so even that's not an option.

Concentration on things you don't want to concentrate on, requires effort. Concentration on an engrossing fiction novel is effortless. Reading through the latest draft Policies and Procedures manual requires effort. Phones totally remove the requirement to concentrate - just flipping the channels and content as soon as you get the slightest bit bored.

I think phones do increase literacy and information dissemination, but they reduce the ability to concentrate. And concentration-with-effort is a requirement for academics.

This is bog standard Bait and Switch: advertise a lower price, charge a higher one, with fees.

In this case, the government is merely explicitly legalizing it.

Personal note: I had my preference in the presidential campaign but also realized each side would come with its own costs and benefits. One cost of the current administration is they seem exceptionally partial to white collar crime and shady business behavior.
 

Why is the landlord getting their counterparty financial information in a negotiation at all? The landlord is often a rapacious counterparty trying to negotiate the best deal that they can, and they have iron control over many state legislatures. You, as a tenant, have no ability to view their proprietary information like vacancy rate and rents. Yet they are able to give the prospective tenant a financial proctosigmoidoscopy? That's not fair.

The landlord lobby is well organized and well financed, and includes the following:

National Multi Housing Council
National Apartment Association
Builders Owners and Managers Association International
Institute of Real Estate Management
National Association of Industrial and Office Properties
National Association of Real Estate Investment Trusts
National Association of Realtors
National Leased Housing Association
The Real Estate Roundtable
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce

This does not include the highly organized and well-financed local and regional lobbies, who exert yet more control over state legislatures.

Being required to give the landlord your financial information should be banned. Credit rating is probably the best way to find out if a tenant will likely pay. Income should be off limits - unless maybe if the state requires the landlord provide a legally binding fact sheet about their finances and vacancy rates and actual rents, to level the playing field. And of course, bank accounts and employer login details should be completely illegal to demand.

Product evolution is good.

Microsoft is in a special position of having a de facto monopoly on the desktop and with productivity software.

Using that to, at their discretion, create a tsunami of electronic waste is bad.
Using that to, at their discretion, extract more time and money from people, is bad.

It's like a tax increase, but paid to private companies.

Here's a breakdown of what Cash For Clunkers scrapped: https://www.thedrive.com/news/heres-the-full-list-of-all-677081-cars-killed-in-cash-for-clunkers

Oh give me a break. For starters, nobody's PC is going to stop working. Every Windows 10 PC out there will operate exactly the same on October 15th as they did the day before.

The problem is not that they will "stop working", the problem is that they cannot be upgraded to the next version of Windows, due to a Microsoft decree. If they wish to receive security patches, they are out of luck if they decide to continue using the hardware.

Anyone throwing their PC in the trash to upgrade to Windows 11 (or 12) is the person generating the waste. Those PCs could be repurposed to run Linux quite easily. Just wipe 'em and toss 'em on Ebay. Nobody has to throw their machine in the garbage. That's a conscious decision on the part of the user / owner.

The problem is also that Microsoft is decreeing those PC's can no longer be used securely.

The "just wipe and install Linux" or "toss 'em on Ebay" again underscores the fact that the devices cannot be upgraded and must be junked in some way, due to a Microsoft decree.

It's astonishing one company could generate this amount of electronic waste.

But, if you have a de facto monopoly on the desktop and the the productivity software (i.e. Office), it's basically like a government decree stating you have to trash those PCs.

It's like the "Cash For Clunkers" program, where the government destroyed 10s of thousands of perfectly usable vehicles (driving up the cost of used vehicles), except there's no cash being given to the affected people, and the computers aren't going to be recycled.

This phrase from the summary caught my eye: "Studies indicate generative AI could automate 30-40% of junior developer and tester tasks." This society better start developing young people and the lower skill tiers if they want that cream that it yields, the cream that drives technology and society. Cream does not automatically appear without regular milk.

If a society decides to prey on its young people instead of developing them, it is setting itself up for decline. The education bubble is a big deal. I remember watching the costs of books and classes skyrocket after the year 2000. The first housing bubble was starting around that time. These are two things that disproportionately harm young people.

The phrase "eating your seed corn" refers to farmers consuming corn seed instead of saving it to plant for next year. That appears to be what's happening over the past 20-some years. Consolidating wealth in the already successful, making it harder for lower skill and financial tiers to build themselves up.

I think it explains the whipsaw politics as well, as people cast votes for more and more nontraditional candidates.