A few weeks back I was complaining about this meme and we had a good discussion about it on here.
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You were on LJ back in the day? Explaining taxes.
wrote 11 days ago last edited by@sepdroid @mattmcirvin There are a lot of former #LiveJournal folk on here. Iâm one. Although I donât want to be judged by my early 20s âthoughtsâ good lord no.
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at every job I've ever had, someone would bring up all the bad-faith right-wing lies about taxes every time taxes were discussed in converastions at work. I encountered this at dishwashing jobs and software development jobs, at postal service jobs and community college computer lab jobs; "every job" is not hyperbolic. (I don't know if it varied regionally, but I encountered it just as often in the Puget Sound area of Washington as I did in Utah.) Everyone gets exposed.
wrote 11 days ago last edited byâItâs so stupid, they have it set up to incentivize it so if you do better you end up doing worse! Itâs all a racket.â
Oh yes please tell me about it, brother! (its not like I can stop you from running your mouth) Itâs all such a racket you donât even know that the real âracketâ is how you are repeating this nonsenseâ all while acting like Iâm the one who doesnât understand math.
I have been there.
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@futurebird The thing is, I remember people getting this wrong even in the days when most people filled out a paper 1040 by hand. So they had actually gone through the calculation and they still didn't understand it. Now, most of them probably did this crucial step with a table lookup. But you *can* look at that table in the 1040 and see that it's a function that doesn't have gigantic steps in it. And if I recall correctly, if your income is too high for the table there's a bit where they actually explain the formula, which is piecewise linear.
wrote 11 days ago last edited by@mattmcirvin @futurebird
For some reason I always disliked piecewise linear functions. I wanted to implement some kind of power-law function, ideally including a negative income tax. Something like âyou get to keep sqrt(ax+c)/x of your moneyâ so that doubling your take-home means quadrupling your income if you make a lot more than a median income.
Silly, I know. -
@sepdroid @mattmcirvin There are a lot of former #LiveJournal folk on here. Iâm one. Although I donât want to be judged by my early 20s âthoughtsâ good lord no.
wrote 11 days ago last edited by@futurebird @sepdroid @mattmcirvin
I was an on-again-off-again livejournal reader, but I never kept a regular "journal" there, because honestly I was always kind of terrified of the idea. (I didn't know it would get bought up by a russian crime lord, but I was worried just the same.)
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@futurebird @sepdroid @mattmcirvin
I was an on-again-off-again livejournal reader, but I never kept a regular "journal" there, because honestly I was always kind of terrified of the idea. (I didn't know it would get bought up by a russian crime lord, but I was worried just the same.)
wrote 11 days ago last edited by@llewelly @futurebird @mattmcirvin
It was a kinder internet where we were only worried about getting fired for complaining about our coworkers on the internet.
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@llewelly @futurebird @mattmcirvin
It was a kinder internet where we were only worried about getting fired for complaining about our coworkers on the internet.
wrote 11 days ago last edited by@sepdroid @futurebird @mattmcirvin
I definitely had some tense conversations in that era, with employers about my politics, or, more frequently, their perception of my politics. But not for things I said online; usually for answering honestly when asked why I didn't drive. Did it play a role in me losing jobs? Probably, but so many of those companies were so badly run the company fell apart first. -
@sepdroid @futurebird @mattmcirvin
I definitely had some tense conversations in that era, with employers about my politics, or, more frequently, their perception of my politics. But not for things I said online; usually for answering honestly when asked why I didn't drive. Did it play a role in me losing jobs? Probably, but so many of those companies were so badly run the company fell apart first.wrote 11 days ago last edited by@llewelly @sepdroid @mattmcirvin
âanswering honestly when asked why I didn't driveâ donât know what your reasons are but this is ⌠relatable. Although I do sugar it a little, âitâs the whole reason I live in a big cityâ â seems harsh to just say I think many people who drive are a menace to human life âŚ
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@llewelly @sepdroid @mattmcirvin
âanswering honestly when asked why I didn't driveâ donât know what your reasons are but this is ⌠relatable. Although I do sugar it a little, âitâs the whole reason I live in a big cityâ â seems harsh to just say I think many people who drive are a menace to human life âŚ
wrote 11 days ago last edited by@futurebird @sepdroid @mattmcirvin
Agreed, but for so much of my life I lived in utah, where big cities are not a thing, at least not on a scale anything like NYC (NYC has something like 2.5 times the population of the entire state of utah), and most utahns would rather believe the cities they live in are much smaller than they actually are, so saying âitâs the whole reason I live in a big cityâ didn't help.
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@mattmcirvin @futurebird
For some reason I always disliked piecewise linear functions. I wanted to implement some kind of power-law function, ideally including a negative income tax. Something like âyou get to keep sqrt(ax+c)/x of your moneyâ so that doubling your take-home means quadrupling your income if you make a lot more than a median income.
Silly, I know.wrote 10 days ago last edited by@ThreeSigma @futurebird That's a very math-knower type of a reaction. I kind of feel the same way but I think it's already beyond the point where many policy people will find it comprehensible, let alone the general public.
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@ThreeSigma @futurebird That's a very math-knower type of a reaction. I kind of feel the same way but I think it's already beyond the point where many policy people will find it comprehensible, let alone the general public.
wrote 10 days ago last edited by@mattmcirvin @ThreeSigma Face it piece-wise functions are tacky. Linear functions are basic.
Piece-wise linear functions are crimes against all things elegant.