And 2 is.

I understood that reference.

There is a kernal of validity to your point, but let’s not pretend like those things are at all the same. The difference between copyright violation for personal use and copyright violation for commercialization is many orders of magnitude.

Those are all fair points too. You can pretty much boil the problems with communism down to that it basically requires idealism and passion/buy-in from almost everyone, especially those who stand to lose the most advantage over others.

Well maybe they are slightly more informed now.

Real communism doesn’t need a single leader to maintain control or tonact altruistically. Real communism doesn’t have a single leader at all. Resources and control are shared by the citizenry, decentralized to the community, thus the name. I’m by no means an expert on the ideal workings of a national scale communist control structure, but the point would be to form a stateless nation without any bourgeoisie in control anymore, but rather everyone would be of the proletariat and the proletariat would share control.

But you have hit the nail on the head of the problem with the transition to communism that I was alluding to. Normally it requires a populist party to overthrow or fundamentally reform a national system of governance. They take total control of the government and then total control of the nation’s resources, factories, properties… the “means of production”… from the bourgeoisie. That part has happened several times in history. It is the rest of the transition that has failed to occur every time. What is meant to happen next is that they then relinquish those means of production back to the proletariat, set up the means of self-governance, and then dissolve themselves and the central government. That has never happened.

The problem is that, once the nation falls under the control of one party, it does require the leader(s) of that party to act, as you said, with pure altruism and willingly give up absolute power. And typically people that become party leaders are the kind of people that seek power and that do not like others having control. The problem is that the process as described requires people that are driven and insentivized to lead a major national reform. And then it needs those same people to act against their own nature and self-interest for ideology and the greater good. This is why that power had never been decentralized in any real world example of a transition to communism. That is what is meant when we say that there has never been a real communist country. There has never been one without a single party/dictator is control. There has never been a decentralized control of resources and power on a national scale. Those things have only ever been achieved on a community level to this date, and those communities struggle as they still must function under and within a capitalist system.

They really really don’t like the fact that a real communist state has never existed. They don’t like that they have to understand what communism (or any unfamiliar concept to them) actually is, and they can’t just point at a failure of a state and use it to paint the entire concept with that failure brush. There is a fundamental flaw with the prescribed process of transitioning to a communist state that makes creating an authoritarian dictatorship that prevents the final transition almost an inevitably. That flaw is real and has been demonstrated many times. But that doesn’t mean that the basic concept of a communist state is bad, just that the process that’s been attempted is. I’m not even in favor of communism, myself, but I do find it annoying when my father-in-law uses it like a slur when he doesnt even know what it really means, and reduces it down to stealing from the rich like this guy. Communism is actually a lovely idea on paper, and a true communist state, should one ever arise, would likely be a nice place to live. But I don’t know for sure because a real communist state has never been formed.

Most have more. Like 3 guys just learned it as a prank last year for the first time in generations, which kind of threw off the curve. Every other COBOL programmer is technically old enough to retire, but they are contractually required to continue working until the heat death of the universe.

When a piece of software does a very limited set of tasks that cannot be meaningfully improved, and when minor mistakes can equate to millions in cash or even lives lost or ruined, the name of the game is maintain, maintain, maintain. It ain’t broke, leave it the hell alone, because updating, upgrading or porting your system will inevitably lead to some sort of mistake.

Supply and demand.

COBOL programmers have some of the highest salaries of any other languages specialized programmers, but I don’t know if that is due to rarity of COBOL programmers, the fact that those jobs are all government or financial institution employed, or because the average experience for them is 58 years?

Well, yeah. If you’re self employed, you have to report yourself too.

A flat tax is a poor tax. 5% of your income means WAAAAY more to someone working minimum wage with two kids than someone who has a second home, even if dollars and cents it’s way less. And the wealthy will evade a flat tax as much as they already do a progressive tax.

?

It should also be noted that if the vast majority of people do nothing special on their taxes and just accept the government’s assessment, then that leaves a much smaller group of people to be audited. And a much larger portion of those people will be those who are trying to weasel their way out of paying their share. Right now, with the IRS being criminally underfunded, they only focus on low hanging fruit, the small fries. With those people being boiler plater auto-accepting tax payers, that would mean the IRS has no reason to audit them and can focus on the big boys where the real cheats are. That’s another big reason we do not have that sort of system and why the IRS is currently so underfunded (despite every dollar spent on the IRS generating between 5 and 9 dollars in revenue from tax fraud/evasion). Those kinds of people pay to make sure it doesn’t happen.

They should (and do?) have the same information your employer, bank, or brokerage files. i.e. the same forms you use to fill out your taxes now. They know what you contributed to you 401k and your other retirement accounts.

Right. Filing taxes should only be necessary if you have itemized writeoffs or wish to contest the IRS’s statement of your tax liability. They already know what you earned their your employer, what’s been paid in taxes, what basic credits your qualify for, etc. They know what you owe so long as you didn’t have expenses to apply for that they couldn’t assume or know about. The only reason they don’t already do that or, at least until now, have a free public system for filing, it’s because tax companies have lobbied for decades to be able to milk the public for cash to help them file and navigate their tax liability.

I took a principles of programming languages course a while back and got to touch on a lot of these old languages. My professor had huge hard-on for Lisp. Don’t get me wrong. The simplicity of the language is admirable. But reading and parsing that shit gave me headaches. No me gusta.

Yup yup.

🏴‍☠️🏴‍☠️🏴‍☠️😎