> Next week, DOGE and IRS leadership are expected to host dozens of engineers in DC so they can begin “ripping up the old systems” and building the API, an IRS engineering source tells WIRED. The goal is to have this task completed within 30 days. Sources say there have been multiple discussions about involving third-party cloud and software providers like Palantir in the implementation.
Well yeah, obviously bring in Palantir. 10x the headcount so they can have the task completed in 3 days.
I think the group of people that work on this should petition for their tax data to be the first to be used. Seems to align the incentives on internal controls of PPI.
Then those who vote for higher public services should be the ones to pay.
Which, if they did, would solve the left/right dichotomy. But no, those who want the public services want the money taken from the other half.
Here’s what I always remind myself about this current government: It is really the worst ideas conflated together, but it was that, or elect leftists in power.
At the thought of leftists in power, I think open data day at the IRS is really not bad.
Worse: I think the leftists are the firsts to be afraid of having the tax data spilled in public. We’d Trump’s records, but we’d also see the Dems’ records. And that’s something they’re afraid of.
> Here’s what I always remind myself about this current government: It is really the worst ideas conflated together, but it was that, or elect leftists in power.
"We destroyed the economy for a generation, but at least we stopped people from making us put pronouns in our bio."
It‘s the worst ideas together, but the alternative is even worse? That does not make any sense, logically. But I guess this summarizes the current situation quite nicely.
> Here’s what I always remind myself about this current government: It is really the worst ideas conflated together, but it was that, or elect leftists in power.
There were basically no leftists running under any major party banner for any federal office in the US, and the small number of arguable center-leftists doing so in the general election were mostly incumbents, and mostly reelected.
It was not, in fact, a choice between leftists and what we got, it was a choice between the center-right corporate capitalist wing of the Democratic Party and what is, at best, lawless kleptocracy and at worst outright fascism.
> At the thought of leftists in power, I think open data day at the IRS is really not bad.
LOL. You're not even an American. He's a tip: U.S. states with the highest GDP per capita are mostly run by Democrats[1] (who, by the way, aren't leftists).
> Information wants to be free in the same sense that hot air wants to be rising
Except information left alone doesn’t become free, it degrades. It takes energy to preserve it in an accessible form. That, in turn, tends towards making it very much not free.
That was an analogy to explain the simile. Homily? Anyhow, we're personifying information to make a statement on how people communicate. People naturally want to share information. We self-organize around the idea.
> People naturally want to share information. We self-organize around the idea.
Except we don’t. We heavily filter and censor what we share for a variety of reasons. When people freely share their every thought you get Twitter, not civilisation.
"We love disruption and whatever is good for America will be good for Americans and very good for Palantir,” Palantir CEO Alex Karp said in a February earnings call. “Disruption at the end of the day exposes things that aren't working. There will be ups and downs. This is a revolution, some people are going to get their heads cut off."
I can confidently say I, and pretty much every other engineer I know would have been categorically opposed to having a hackathon to rip out and replace IRS systems no matter who was doing it.
Techies like those of us on HN understand the difference between safety critical systems and throwing ideas at the wall in a startup.
If this was being done in a careful methodical fashion, with deep care given to data integrity and security I'd support it regardless of whose doing it. This 30 day move fast and break things would be bad from Biden, Obama, or in a better timeline Bernie.
They might be flying too close to the sun on this one. A lot of the IRS' "inefficiency" is intentional, so it can be abused by moneyed interests to evade tax without anyone noticing.
Fixing those inefficiencies would bring this problem to light and force them to deal with it. While it's not past the current administration to formally legalize it, it's still "stirring shit" for no good reason and worse than leaving things as-is where the evasion falls through the cracks.
Well yeah, obviously bring in Palantir. 10x the headcount so they can have the task completed in 3 days.
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