The broader corollary to that is "Why not extract a toll on every single transaction or interaction between the citizens and the bureaucracy whose thumb they're under?"
This literally happens every time most people use "tap to pay" instead of cash. The difference is the toll goes to the banks, and not to the government, who might at least spend a few of the dollars on schools and hospitals.
Unless your tax situation is extremely simple, it is nearly impossible to do them correctly on paper without current expert-level knowledge of the tax code. One W2 job? No problem. If you're a consultant, and/or have investments (which have capital gains, dividends and other tax considerations) it's basically impossible not to overpay without the assistance of software. The stamp is cheap, missing deductions is expensive. Most paper returns are generated by software and printed to be mailed in, usually in edge cases such as amended returns where e file isn't available.
Sure, but these could be baked into an electronic form or a spreadsheet that you can fill in, then print and mail the output (or copy the relevant boxes into a paper form by hand)
I file my taxes on paper, and this is how I do it. I made a little spreadsheet to do the maths for me, and I write its outputs into the paper form. If I ever get audited, I can show my calculations to the tax man.
> Where I live all I need is a web browser to file my taxes.
Same here, in Australia the ATO (the tax ofice) has for many years had an online tax filing web portal. Is this not offered by the IRS in the USA?
The standalone ETax software was great. The ATO's new online version is incredibly invasive. I'm not going to give ANY website permission to access my bank account, it's just not secure. This is the same Australian Tax Office that still claims a "voice print" is adequate security for tax enquiries by phone, here in 2025. No way would I trust those clowns to run a secure website with access to my bank details.
Since ETax went away I have gone back to filing tax returns on paper. Paper filing is still free too.
The step of proactively submitting 9 million lines of code and getting a bunch of text that has mostly has avery high chance of never being referenced smells of management doing something to look impressive at significant cost to highlight how "in tune" they are with the AI hype in the face of a broader reluctant organization that wants to keep them from doing anything that might carry a whiff of actual risk.
They probably also spent a pile of money on their "AI" tools and need to justify the expense. Hell, some of the management probably have a stake in the "AI" company that supplied the tools. An endorsement from a big company like Morgan Stanley would increase the "value" of those tools, netting even more money for management.
I am not a gamer. I am a nerd. My idea of a relaxing evening is laying out a PCB with KiCAD or posting here on
Lol, me too. Not sure if it's because I'm "a nerd" or just that TV is so so rubbish these days
And if all you have is one partition with your data and OS, and don't think to back things up or split the drive and move things around? None of that is obvious to non-technical users who will be mighty pissed when all of their files disappear.
The average user can't do any of that when installing Windows either.
Everything you need has been out there for a long time. The reason we're not drowning in a sea of drone-based terror attacks is that most people just want to live and aren't actually interested in killing anyone until they get motivated to do so.
The same could be said for airline-based terror attacks, but we spend billions of dollars a year to confiscate bottled water, grope people and march them through nudie scanners.
Software and Network Engineering doesn't seem that awful to me, but its hiring pool is definitely slanted toward bullshit artists with paper.
The 15% or so that end up being keepers are indeed really good. The others are just getting better at fooling you into thinking they're a keeper.
That's a shame... I've been reading articles about IT jobs here on Slashdot for almost a quarter century now, and every time the subject comes up, industry veterans chime in with good advice and anecdotes. I hoped it would be a solved problem by now. Maybe recruiters need a slashdot-related flter question...
Hiring is like dating, if you're paying an agent to do it for you, it will be inefficient. People lie on CVs and they lie on dating apps.
To find a date, go and do stuff you like, talk to the other people there, get contacts, then ask for a date. (I'll grant that if your hobby is stomping puppies or something, it might be a struggle)
Hiring is the same. Go to events in your field (e.g conferences, industry awards) talk to the other people there, get contacts then inform them that you're hiring. Just like my absurd "stomping puppies" example above, if you are in an awful industry, you will probably experience a recruitment pool of awful people.
Yeah, in the USA these work pretenders are called civil servants.
There are plenty of "Wallys" in private enterprise too, as many other posters have noted.
I confess I have never used Instragram (they demanded my phone number in order to sign up, screw that) but isn't it a photo sharing site? Why would anyone use a photo sharing site that arbitrary crops their photos?
How is this insightful? If they don't like it don't buy a iphone.
I don't live in the US (an am not the original poster) and I will continue to never buy an iphone. I don't care if the tariffs are 0% or 1000%, if they apply in the USA, globally, or on Pluto. The iphone costs 5X what I'd be willing to pay for a phone.
Knock down kits* have been used for over a century to side-step various tariff and "local manufacturing" regulations: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F...
Machines do a lot of things faster than humans; that's kind of the point. Should we make cars illegal because no human can run that fast?
No, but we have very strong restrictions on their use. Try driving your car at its top speed on a public road.
Or even if we ignore top speed, in England there are loads of urban areas with a 20mph speed limit - about as fast as a normal human can run.
"would be a third core device a person would put on their desk after a MacBook Pro and an iPhone"
Sounds like a third device that I would never buy.
"From there to here, from here to there, funny things are everywhere." -- Dr. Seuss
