Buy indie games.

It's only the big players who have these delusions.

I'm not saying the right answer is to get a refund. The right answer is to not make the license revokable.

For the theater comparison: If the theatre would invalidate my ticket and throw me out mid-movie, you can be sure that I'd ask for a refund. And in any sane jurisdiction, I'd get it.

Mostly, the difference is some legales, but the kicker is: "revocable". That is an insane difference. I'm quite sure it doesn't say you get a refund if they revoke your license.

It's more than just the right of first sale; with software that is licensed via server-side communication, nothing prevents the company from terminating your authorization for any reason, and you have basically no recourse at that point, other than to sue.

There's a lot wrong with software in the modern era.

Because they don't know where the small sources of waste are, and it takes time to fix them. If you need an immediate reduction right this second, the only thing you can do is surgical cuts, which means laying people off. Fixing the small sources of waste has to be an ongoing process that continues forever, and most of the interesting fixes actually cost *more* money in the short term to save money in the long term.

They might, if it happens to be at the end of the year when they do the cuts, and if that spending happens to be enough, but most of the time when this happens, they're looking for 30% cuts, not 1%. And finding thousands of fractional-percent cuts takes too long.

Not really, no. Inflation changes the value of the dollar. That means the government's debt also becomes less expensive every year, assuming all else is equal. And inflation causes increases in income, both for businesses and individuals, which means revenue should be increasing roughly proportionally. If it isn't, then that means the tax code is failing to properly capture percentages of actual gains, and this is something that needs to be fixed structurally.

In inflation-adjusted dollars, treasury revenue is going up, at least on average. From 2015 to 2025, tax revenue increased by 18.3%. Meanwhile, assuming Gemini isn't gaslighting me, the U.S. population increased by only about 6.6% in that time. So not only is revenue increasing after adjusting for inflation, it is also increasing relative to the population size after adjusting for inflation.

I can't tell you why service seems to always be getting worse. Maybe it is because we're spending rapidly increasing amounts of money on the most inefficient healthcare system in the first world, driven by a combination of lack of a public option or single payer system, poor auditing of payments, massively delayed payments that cause small healthcare providers to struggle to survive and force consolidation into giant regional monopolies, and probably a lot of other things that I don't know about because I don't work in that field.

When you end up having hyperinflation of your medical insurance costs, it eats a bigger and bigger piece of every other part of the budget. And the federal government is not immune to that.

There are probably other reasons as well. That's just the first one that comes to mind.

This is moot, because as you can see from the chart, inflation-adjusted revenue increased rather rapidly during that same period.

Maybe a percent or two, but with a budget is big enough, that's still a lot of money that could be used for something else.

The point is not that any of these things individually will result in big gains. The point is that there are a lot of different small inefficiencies that add up to a bigger inefficiency.

For example, for some reason, when the IRS sent out their findings for tax exempt status, a group that I work with never got the determination letter. And the IRS had no straightforward mechanism to resend the letter. Fixing it involved hundreds of phone calls before we reached a person who could help, and then waiting for someone to print it and mail it to us. All of this stuff should be in electronic records, and it should have been trivial for us to directly get a new copy electronically from their computer systems without requiring a person at the IRS to intervene.

Every time a person has to do something because a computer lacks code to do it, that is an example of government waste. It probably isn't worth fixing all of them, because sufficiently rare things could take decades to recover the cost of coding them, but that doesn't mean that someone shouldn't triage them, catalog them, prioritize them so that the scope is fully understood, because when you do that, you may find other people coming in later and saying, "If you do that, it will save me time on related task [x]," and that might then turn out to push it into "implement this ASAP" territory. Without documenting the state of things, those discoveries won't ever get made, and nothing will improve.

And the IRS has multiple incompatible login systems that use different credentials, multiple sites that expose different parts of the same access to information about your business/charity, etc. all of which have to be maintained, resulting in massive levels of redundancy, not to mention causing massive confusion for anyone who ever has to access them, wondering why it says they don't have an account even though they had to have one to fill out previous IRS paperwork. Replacing them with different views into the same data (with access right limits, presumably) in the same online system would likely save significant money, both in terms of software maintenance costs and server operation costs.

And how much auditor time could be saved if they trained AI models on previous audits and used that as a starting point for flagging suspicious returns and/or filtering suspicious returns flagged by existing automation? I don't have any idea, but I would not be surprised if that approach eventually produced meaningful long-term savings.

And every time they send out tax forms, what manual processes have to happen to distribute advance copies to companies like TurboTax, and how much time would be saved if we had a centralized, modern electronic version of all of the forms, rather than PDFs, with an open source implementation, complete with code to populate one form from another, etc.? Maybe it would cost more initially, but would save money in some other areas, like making it easier for auditors to recompute the taxes after fixing errors in data entry. I'm not sure, but these are the sorts of efficiency wins that should be looked at.

So in that one division alone, there are glaringly obvious inefficiencies that, if fixed, could result in considerable cost reduction. Similarly, every time you deal with someone at the Social Security Administration or (at the state level) the DMV and they tell you that the computer system is down and they'll try again in a minute, that's an example of government waste. It's a system that isn't working correctly, which as a result, wastes the time of hundreds, thousands, even tens of thousands of government workers on an ongoing basis.

There's no reason to believe any other part of the government is any better. Government IT is known for being disastrously slow at modernization, and it costs taxpayers a lot of money because our government doesn't spend the money to bring those systems up to date in a timely manner.

These are just some examples that are obvious from the outside looking in; there are probably many less obvious examples that would be obvious to someone who works there every day. And that's the point. The people at the top can't see what wastes the time of the people at the bottom, because they don't have visibility into their minute-by-minute activities (and even if they could, they would have a hard time filtering the flood of data into something useful). So you have to drive efficiency from the bottom up, and our government does not do this, so we can never really know whether that inefficiency adds up to half a percent or ten percent.

We can't get a complete picture without going to the people at the bottom of the org chart and asking them what could be done to make them more efficient, what could reduce waste, etc. It's a relatively easy low-hanging-fruit task, so we should do this. :-)

I hope that makes my position clearer.

Most businesses over a certain size also waste a f**kton of money. The larger the organization, the harder it is to avoid doing so.

I told you exactly how this practice creates waste. At the end of the year, unspent budget goes away, so the people to whom the budget was assigned look for ways to spend it. Most of that spending was not specifically budgeted for, or else the stuff would have been bought earlier in the cycle. And if it were strictly necessary, it would have been explicitly budgeted, rather than being bought because there just happened to be money left over.

What percentage of that spending provides a real benefit? There's no way to know, because they didn't have to provide a formal justification and ask for more funding to cover it, since there was money left over from something else that didn't cost as much as expected.

The fact that you can't see government waste tells me that either you're not looking closely enough to see the problems or you're benefitting from the waste.

One of the core problems with government waste comes from the budgeting process itself, wherein money that is not spent a the end of a budget year must be given back, and your next year's budget will likely be cut based on the fact that you didn't use your entire budget that year. This sounds like a good idea in theory, until you realize that managers see that as a risk to them being able to do what they need to do the next year, which means they will find ways to spend any unused budget at the end of the year (or worse, the quarter), even if it is for things that could easily be deferred until a later year, or for things that they don't strictly require. And this is how budgets bloat.

To be fair, the same thing happens in businesses, academia, etc.; it is not specific to government. But it is very, very common in government. And while those expenses might not look like a lot at an individual team level, they add up to a lot by the time you look at the organization as a whole.

But no, the hilarious thing is that you're telling me I'm wrong without actually rebutting a single point that I've made, which means you're likely arguing based on blind faith in an ideology or political group, rather than based on an actual understanding of how government budgeting works, which makes your opinion largely irrelevant in practice.

Just saying.

Real property tax. This is about other types of property, and Prop 13 would not necessarily apply.

The hilarious part is where you actually think I'm on the right. The right thinks that government waste comes from abuse, which really translates "things we don't like". Then, they try to cut out all the things that they don't like, and make a mess of it, because those things exist for a reason, and the result is predictable.

I'm pretty squarely in the center ideologically. I am fiscally conservative, in that I believe governments should tax enough to pay their bills. Such a statement would piss off both the right and the left in the United States right now, because neither side wants to do that. They'd rather use bond measures as credit cards and run up a lot of debt for the next generation to pay.

But saying that there is very little abuse or fraud is not the same thing as saying that there is no waste. The government wastes colossal amounts of money because of not modernizing their tech. The government wastes colossal amounts of money by pinching pennies in ways that come back to bite them in the a**. And so on. And if you don't believe this, you've never worked in any government, public school, or public university.

Case in point, every paved road is likely to be a mistake. Concrete costs only marginally more, but lasts a lot longer and requires less maintenance on average. We have between 2 and 2.5 million miles of these "cost savings" in the United States. If governments had just spent just a bit more when they built the roads, by my very, very rough math, the U.S. would probably save about $10 billion dollars annually. That's $10 billion dollars of government waste that nobody is doing anything about, because fixing the problem costs money, and there's no actual money being allocated for reducing government waste.

The government also wastes colossal amounts of money on social programs that don't work. Once a program exists, it's impossible to kill it, even if it isn't actually achieving the desired goals. Instead, they pour good money after bad. Case in point, we dump huge amounts of taxpayer dollars into a public transit system that nobody uses, all to lower the fares so that poor people can take it. Yet when I put a pencil to it a couple of years ago, I calculated that it would actually be cheaper to give everyone living below the poverty line a monthly gift card with enough Uber credit for their average daily commute. And more of the working poor would be better able to hold down jobs by wasting far less time commuting, too. And some of those buses on some routes have so few people that single-occupancy cars would actually be more efficient, so it isn't even necessarily bad from an environmental perspective, either. Mind you, this is just back-of-the-envelope math, and a more detailed study could come to different conclusions, but I don't see anyone even asking the questions. They just seem to assume that doing it the way it has always been done is the right way to do things, and don't even consider that the right answer might be to scrap it and start over from scratch.

This is not to say that the ideas I'm suggesting here are necessarily 100% correct, nor that there aren't even better approaches. This is also not to say that government is inherently less efficient than business. All things being equal, it should be more efficient on average, because it isn't trying to make a profit. But there's a lot of waste in most businesses, too, so that's not really an argument that government isn't wasteful, just that we shouldn't automatically assume that it is more wasteful than for-profit companies trying to do the same thing. :-)

Private partnerships are relatively easy to evaluate. They have assets and liabilities. Privately held stock in a non-public corporation is harder, but arguably, the value is zero until the company IPOs, at which point it suddenly is worth the market price on the date that you evaluate it. And art can be appraised.

Either way, perfect is the enemy of the good. You don't have to solve any of those problems. Just make the law cover only publicly held stock, cash, and real property (land, buildings, and improvements thereto). This will still cover 95% of the value, but with negligible effort.

Depends? Are you a sociopath or a decent person?

Decent people will realize that from those to whom much is given, much is expected. Decent people will realize that they didn't get there on their own; they got there with the support of the state where they live. They got there because of the police, the fire, the medical services, the education system, etc. And they owe a lot to the fact that they lived and ran their businesses in a safe place, where their employees were safe, where warlord weren't breaking in and stealing equipment, where they weren't being held for ransom by privateers, etc.

And those same decent people will realize that they can't realistically spend all that money anyway, and that they don't even have the ability to give it away benevolently at a rate fast enough to keep up with the investment income. So why not pay their fair share in taxes and give back to the state that supported them?

Sociopaths? Take, take, take, and give back nothing.

Nit: The limit is 10% of their tax revenue. It's a set percent, not a set amount. They're talking about raising that limit. I would argue that the limit should be eliminated entirely. If at some point in the future, California ends up with too much surplus for too many years, then Californians can pass another proposition to cap tax revenue or send out an annual surplus dividend check to every person living in the state for at least 9 of the last 12 months.

Prop 13 was one of the most poorly thought out laws in California's history, and its effects have been largely negative. Because of prop 13, taxes on property owned by business don't increase over time.

This artificially decreases rents and makes it more expensive to buy property, which decreases the incentive to build housing that is sold, rather than rented, which increases the cost of buying a house and makes more and more Californians dependent on perpetually paying rent for the rest of their lives.

This artificially decreases the portion of state revenue paid by businesses and increases the percentage paid by individuals.

This artificially decreases city and county tax revenue in cities that have a large commercial footprint or large amounts of rental property, again shifting the burden for schools, libraries, and other local services to individuals and away from the wealthy businesses that call those cities home.

This massively discourages people from selling their homes and moving closer to where they work which not only decreases supply and effectively drives up the cost of home sales, but also massively increases the amount of traffic on our highways.

Everything about Prop 13 was wrong. It was a stupid law passed by people who did not think through the consequences. Contrast with Tennessee's property tax freeze program, which allows anyone who is disabled or over 65 and meets certain income limits to freeze their property taxes at the current level. It still has the same intended effect — ensuring that people don't lose their homes when they retire — but without all of the negative side effects. With the level of income inequality in California, the age limit part might not be the right thing to do, but limiting it to your primary residence, excluding commercial and rental property, and possibly even an upper income threshold should be on the table.

Unwinding it safely will have to be done carefully, though. The potential exists for absolute carnage if the exemption gets removed for rent-controlled apartments, or worse, for rent-controlled mobile home parks. So there would still have to be a limited set of exemptions for certain qualifying business property for a period of time, then gradually shift to a less exempt rate. And maybe that would need to happen for all commercial property. Hard to say.

But either way, it needs to be completely rethought.

Blackout periods exist for all stocks owned by employees, thanks to insider trading rules. They're not limited to IPOs.

This is, of course, utterly irrelevant. When I get a property tax bill on my house (in California), I get the property tax assessment in June. The *bill* comes in October. The first half is ostensibly due in November, with penalties if it is not received by mid-December. The second half is due in February, with penalties if it is not paid by mid-April. So after the assessment, there's a six-month grace period for the first half of the money owned, and a ten-month grace period for the second half.

And government isn't going to be able to tax the value of IPO stock instantly anyway. They'll know what the value was on a particular date. So unless your stock IPOs exactly on that date and you have a 180-day blackout period (really freaking unlikely), that blackout period will be over before the first half of your payment is due.

And if that's not good enough, just write the law so that employee stocks and options do not get taxed until after the one-year anniversary of their vest date or after any post-vest/post-IPO blackout period, whichever is later. And you're done.

And what happens is that in the next budget cycle, they say, "Hey, there's all this money over here. We don't need to fund that anymore. And now there's a shortfall again.

Things like this have been tried. Repeatedly. They create a little temporary relief, and then things go back to the way they were.

Absent actual, careful reduction of wasteful spending, what is needed is a real increase in revenue on an ongoing basis.