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Maybe I'm just getting old but I dislike these implicit call to destructive action articles, even if I don't like the surveillance. It is not incumbent upon the public to destroy surveillance cameras, and it's probably a bad sign for society if they are. If you destroy one of these cameras you will probably be arrested, and it will ruin your life. We can elect officials who oppose these cameras, and encouraging people to destroy city property is not the move.

A lot of the people doing it would probably agree that it's a bad sign that it's necessary. And further that most elections have become a false choice, and aren't effective, as they're so far removed from the changes necessary.

I feel like this is common in most (at least western) empires. Vikings from Sweden would take over territory as far as Poland or even Italy and recruit new soldiers. Eventually some of them would end up in warrior style graves. What's actually more interesting in my mind is that they didn't bring people back, and so the gene pool in Sweden remained more or less unchanged

The slave trade only went south.

Well he's also argued that just using CV reduces sensor contention and he claims it improves performance and release velocity, which is why they also got rid of radar and ultrasonic sensors. I am doubtful although it'll be interesting to see regardless

Well it's a retort on the 2022 IRA bill, which increased the IRS budget by 80 billion over 10 years, and paved the way to hire 87,000 people. There has been a lot of hiring recently so it's hard to tell one thing from another but this isn't so much of mass layoff as an attempt at returning to normal.

Please provide evidence for what you considered to be normal to be an effective workforce for the ongoing task at hand (nation state tax collection).

We had an exceptional increase in funding, followed by an attempt to curb that increase in funding. The size of the IRS is not just a financial exercise but a moral one, and I believe the prior budget increases as part of the 2022 IRA provides important context to staffing in the IRS.

I think we should first agree on what “normal” means.

I personally view our IRS head count as being at historical lows by raw headcount; and even lower by population size if we look at the last 40 years (would love data that goes back further).


The evidence was the baseline before the increase

The baseline was there was significant tax evasion by high net worth individuals. The staff up was to counter that, staffing down puts us back at reduced enforcement.

Someone has to pay to operate a nation state, you can’t borrow forever to fill the gap and there’s nothing left to cut. Roughly the bottom 60% of Americans do not make enough to have a federal income tax liability. So, we can kick the can on the top 40% paying until the bond vigilantes make the decision for the US.


> The staff up was to counter that

Stated reasons may or may not be actual.

If you recall these were not just accountants but agents who carry guns etc.

I see this as very similar to the ICE situation. Biden has loyalty and power in IRS and so gave it money to help him police. As the government gets more corrupted I think we’ll find more agencies weaponized like this.


Can you provide proof of this “loyalty and power” at the IRS to Biden mentioned? Because without proof, it sounds like a “deep state” conspiracy theory without evidence.

I can provide evidence that the IRS and the majority of its employees have good relationships with democrats.

The equivalent question is can you provide proof that ICE provides power and is loyal to Trump?

I don’t think you would say that’s a deep state conspiracy.


OP talks about policing high net-worth individuals and organizations, causing most of the taxation headaches.

You’re shifting the discussion to organizations being political, hoping it becomes a divisive topic.

A well-worn and sleazy playbook to dodge any discussion of a problem that has exceeded the tipping point.


I'm not the guy you replied to but the idea that "high-net worth individuals" (I assume you mean hundred-millionaires+) are skimping out on a meaningful amount of taxes is political. Most of these IRS agents will end up going after normal people, which is where most tax revenue comes from and where most of the fraud is. Billionaires have entire teams who do nothing but make sure their taxes are in order, a small business owner is more liable to make mistakes or try to commit fraud, which is who they will have to go after if they want to increase revenue. I think there's merit to his point, that the IRS has a history of targeting conservative organizations (https://grokipedia.com/page/IRS_targeting_controversy), and this has lead to their funding being a political issue.

I wouldn't call is comment sleazy I think he's just trying to discuss the topic at hand.


> Most of these IRS agents will end up going after normal people,

Normal people are the easiest to chase; the cut backs have made this a foregone conclusion.

> which is where most tax revenue comes

Because normal people can’t afford transnational accounting shenanigans.

> from and where most of the fraud is.

The Panama papers prove deliberate tax dodges are not by “normal people”.

> I wouldn't call is comment sleazy I think he's just trying to discuss the topic at hand.

Injecting and steering a discussion towards party and identity politics a where there was none is a sure fire way to shutdown a discourse.

Deliberate or not, the method involved is sleazy.

By the way: Given that your definition of normal in your heavily downvoted comment, I’m not surprised you’re defending the comment.

Dig deeper and look back over decades. The 2022 bill and headcount to 100k was a push BACK to normal.


[flagged]


> Actually no. Did you notice I’m criticizing both administrations? The similarity to ICE funding is about the misuse of agencies as places to stock resources for your party.

You and only you brought party politics into a discussion about the wealthy needing a disproportionate amount of tax policing and oversight, yet getting policed less and less as the years and decades to by.

Irrelevant, bad-faith tactics and playbook.


Normal?

The 100k headcount and bill doesn’t cover what we in the US used to enjoy, with a smaller population: - https://taxpolicycenter.org/sites/default/files/2025-04/IRS%...

- https://www.washingtonpost.com/documents/5856e771-dd09-4517-...


I think the point of the article is that on sites like HN, people used to need domain expertise to answer questions. Their answer was based on unique experience, and even if maybe it wasn't optimal it was unique. Now a lot of people just check chatgpt and answer the question without actually knowing what they're talking about. Worse the bar to submit something to Show HN has gotten lower, and people are vibe coding projects in an afternoon nobody wants or cares about. I don't think the article is really about writing style

It looked to me like it was just due to recurring build issues. Lots of "swift can't import these conflicting C++ versioned libraries concurrently" and "can't use some operator due to versioning or build conflicts". Basically it sounds like trying to add swift to the project was breaking too many things, and they decided it wasn't worth it.

It's a shame, I think swift is an underappreciated language, however I understand their reasoning. I think if they tried to just use swift from the beginning it would have been too ambitious, and trying to add swift to a fragile, massive project was probably too complex.


Looking at their integration, with cmake, they definitely took the hardmode approach to adoption.

The list of issues does not seem to stem from whether they had used this build tool (CMake) nor others (nor official build environments).

I have the same thought, my X algo has become less political than HackerNews. I suppose it depends on how you use it but my feed is entirely technical blogs, memes, and city planning/construction content

I mean if I want two day/fast shipping, it's still the only place that can do it without costing me $45, and even then a lot of places won't get it in the mail that fast. They also have a much more reliable and robust return policy, which is a headache for other sites. While I agree the experience has worsened it's still the best online store as far as I'm aware

This is something Electrek does regularly and isn't unique to this article but I don't like how they suggests the Tesla crash reports are doing something shady by following the reporting guidelines. Tesla is reporting things by the books, and when Electrek doesn't like how the laws are laid out they blame Tesla. Electrek wants Tesla to publish separate press notes, and since they don't they take their frustration out on the integrity of the article, which is worse for everyone.

According to the OP, all other autonomous driving companies publish complete accident reports.

This is (one of) my point(s), Tesla does publish accident reports to all the major government agencies, and then those agencies make them public. Electrek wants a press packet, which Tesla isn't doing for them. In response, they try to make it sound like Tesla is shady and hiding things, or otherwise acting in some nefarious manor nobody else could think to act in. It feels disingenuous and will only serve to hurt autonomous driving optics for all companies

> Tesla does publish accident reports to all the major government agencies, and then those agencies make them public.

Electrek says they aren't made public, if I understand correctly (?). Do you know where the public can access them - do you have any links?


My thought too, HR’s only care so far as they have a range they need to stick to. I don’t like to be too specific but I usually suggest my salary, possibly higher, as a minimum

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