They have worked recently to implement a self-hosted tax submission system and given their rate of return while there may be some mismanagement it is one of the most provably efficient organizations in the government netting 415$ for every dollar of funding in 2024.
Isn’t that a completely bizarre metric though in this instance??! It is specifically the revenue generating arm of the government. If it wasn’t running at a “surplus” that would be very concerning indeed.
Most law enforcement related entities end up being a money sink while enforcing our laws - the IRS actually runs a substantial profit while enforcing laws and additional funding would increase that funding. This also isn't a case like asset forfeiture where the money being collected is arguably unwarranted and shouldn't be taken from citizens. The IRS's "profit" ends up coming purely from catching people trying to commit fraud and enforcing the laws as written.
I did no verification on whether that metric is correct or not, but I would suspect the metric would be only measuring the amount of revenue the IRS "generated" from doing manual work like audits. The regular, I owe 1,000 in taxes, and I paid 1,000 in taxes. Wouldn't be considered +1,000 in that case, it would be excluded from the metric altogether. Only the additional "findings" from audits would be counted.
No the point is that if the IRS was at maximum efficiency, more funding wouldn't increase revenues because tax law is tax law: you can't market it or expand the customer base.
But if every new dollar currently produces much more then a dollar in returns, it means it's underfunded because taxes that should be collected, that by legal analysis would be planned for in budgeting, aren't.
And that matters for a great many things, but one reason is that if you pay taxes and want a tax cut then one reason you're not getting it is because actual revenues are lower then they should be due to uncollected taxes.
I'm not saying we shouldn't have an IRS, and I think IRS agents are probably one of the best ROI gov't employees possible, but 8,500 IT engineers and managers (who I have heard literally didn't even know how to code) makes no sense at all
I don't work in the IRS so I'm not certain what all of that is doing - but here we've got an organization that is highly efficient that's being targeted and downsized for political reasons. If we want to discuss wasteful government spending we need look no further than the DoD which still hasn't passed an internal audit for the past eight consecutive years. I don't know how the DoD is spending its money - that's fair, I'm just a rando... but the DoD doesn't know how the DoD is spending its money and that's purely absurd. The scales of budgets are also astronomically different - the DoD has a projected budget of 961 billion this year while the IRS has a projected budget of 11.9 billion - and that 11.9 billion ends up producing a large amount of excess revenue for the government.
I'm sure there's waste in the IRS - but these budget cuts are not being done in good faith.
The tax code is complex and Direct File isnt the only IRS digital service. It was built by F18 and USDS. You should inform yourself instead of being hysterical about numbers. If you inform yourself the numbers aren’t so scary.
I'd be more impressed we got rid of income tax on salaried people entirely, or permit families the same type of deductions that businesses get, and only tax my actual profit - I can't deduct my overpriced housing, or my utilities unless I have a home office for ny own business.
It's not the IT department's fault, but it makes one wonder if the IT department needs to actually be that large, since customers need to do so much on their own.
Per capita the UK has 2.5x the IT workers in tax collection compared to the US (~25 IT per million vs 65 IT per million). But, those tax collection IT workers help create a system which means UK citizens don't spend hundreds of billions of dollars every year just to file their taxes.
And yet all countries with socialized systems pay less per capita for healthcare than we do and pretty much all have better health outcomes. Further privatizing our system will only make it more dis-functional. Healthcare isn't a normal marketplace. * When you really need it, you can't shop around. * There is a knowledge asymmetry built in. * A civilized society can't just let poor children die of preventable causes.
I’m going to drop my doctor this year because he abuses appointments. I call in about an issue and he charges me $75 for telehealth. Then he wants me to come in to run labs for the telehealth call. Another $75 at least. Then another telehealth call for the results. And another one for the results from the radiology department. I told him I have a high out of pocket and he says “I’m sorry to hear that.” Then books me for a follow up.
Doctors do not care about the healthcare system one bit.
> I call in about an issue and he charges me $75 for telehealth. Then he wants me to come in to run labs for the telehealth call. Another $75 at least.
I live in EU country with public universal healthcare and healthcare over here looks exactly the same. These cunts travel to US on holidays and as kickbacks, and salivate at how the American healthcare is "organized".
Is that very different from what Joe Gebbia is doing now as chief design officer? Seems to be largely a rebranding of 18F's mission with different people and prioritization
I don't know how into building organizations you are, but 18f succeeded. they had a small footprint, and outsized impact, and really good relationships with the rest of the government. That kind of effectiveness is really difficult to grow in a massive bureaucracy. If your goal is efficiency you try to nurture that success.
throwing it away and starting over for purely political reasons is a completely negative outcome. the best you could hope for is to replicate what it was, but odds are against you.
I am so confused when I read things like this because my Tesla model 3 is effectively self driving for me for months now. Hundreds of miles without intervention. No other car I can buy can do this yet
That’s irresponsible at best give it doesn’t support full self driving. I never understood why end users are allowed to just beta test a car on public roads.
Is it responsible to let users do auto speed and auto lane on a high speed highway without other autopilot features ?
Rollout both technologies at scale , and try to guess with one will cause more harm giving th fact there will be users in both cars trying to put legs on a steering wheel :
A stupid tech that will not even try to do safe things
Or software that is let’s say 4x less safe vs avg human but still very capable of doing maneuvering without hitting obvious walls etc ?
Giving people more ways to shut themselves in the foot does not improve the safety.
I find the entire thing a kind of dark pattern as the system along with misleading marketing makes you lax over time just to catch you off guard.
You get used with the system to work correctly and then when you expect less it does the unthinkable and the whole world blames you for not supervising a beta software product on the road on day 300 with the same rigour you did on day one.
I can see a very direct correlation with LLM systems. Claude has been working great for me until one day when it git reset the entire repo and I’ve lost two days work because it couldn’t revert a file it corrupted . This happened because I just supervised it just like you would supervise a FSD car with “bypass” mode. Fortunately it didn’t kill anyone , just two days of work lost. If there was the risk of someone being killed I would never allow a bypass /fsd/supervise mode regardless of how unlikely this is to happen.
they have very good guardrails to prevent you that, unlike autolane etc.
Teslas has sensors , eye trackers etc is it possible to shoot yourself in the leg, sure. But not in any different way vs human doing irrational things in the car, make up, arguing , love etc.
Human-being is an irrational create that should not drive except for fun in isolated environment. Tesla or Waymo or anyone else.... It is good to remove human from the road, the faster the better.
>> It is good to remove human from the road, the faster the better.
I’m all for this but not to replace dumb people with dumb software. I think the FSD should be treated more like the airplane safety. We have the opportunity to do this right not just what’s the cheapest way we can get away with it.
well, if you don't read news that try to panic about everything new, that's +- exactly how people currently use FSD.
When I'm driving FSD If i want to drink, eat, etc, instead of doing weird one hand tricks every driver did, i just turn FSD and let it drive. When I'm tired , I'm doing the same. Again , attention control works really good, it doesn't let you sit on the phone etc. unlike many other cars with less advanced features. You can't be on FSD + Phone but you can easily be on the phone + lane control in other car.
Phone is by far the biggest real killer of people, and no body is trying to create a campaign against phone mounts, etc.
Based on the self driving trials in my Model Y, I find it terrifying that anyone trusts it to drive them around. It required multiple interventions in a single 10-minute drive last time I tried it.
I'm using FSD for 100% of my driving and only need to intervene maybe once a week. It's usually because the car is not confident of too slow, not because it's doing something dangerous. Two years ago it was very different where almost every trip I needed to intervene to avoid crash. The progress they have made is truly amazing.
This exact sentence (minus the specific version) is claimed every single week.
No, you do not "become scary good" every single week the past 10 years and yet still not be able to drive coast to coast all by itself (which Elon promised it would do a decade ago)
You are just human and bad at evaluating it. You might even be experiencing literal statistical noise.
I have not been proclaiming scary good every week for the last 10 years. In fact, I have cancelled my subscription at least two times, once on v13 and once on v14, with the reason ‘not good enough yet.’ I am telling you that for me personally it has crossed a threshold very recently.
It certainly wasn't in the past few weeks, but I've been hearing about how good it's gotten for years. Certainly not planning to pay to find out if it's true now, but I'll give it another try next free trial!
Make sure you are on AI4 hardware when you do. If you buy FSD on AI3 you’ll be limited to v13, which is is terrible. I have used both and they are in different leagues altogether.
You need only look at Tesla's attempts to compete with Waymo to see that you are just wrong. They tried to actually deploy fully autonomous Teslas, and it doesn't really work, it requires a human supervisor per car.
They are behind Waymo but they are getting there. They started giving fully autonomous drives since last month without safety driver in Austin. Tesla chose a harder camera-only approach but it's more scalable once it works.
Clearly at this point the camera-only thing is the ego of Musk getting in the way of the business, because any rational executive would have slapped a LIDAR there long ago.
> Mr Keegan said he was “pretty confident” that in “the next five to 10 years” driverless vehicles would “make a major contribution in terms of sustainable transport” on Dublin’s streets.
As always, people were overoptimistic back then, too. There are currently no driverless vehicles in Dublin at all, with none expected anytime soon unless you count the metro system (strictly speaking driverless, but clearly not what he was talking about).
Ask Musk why he refuses to provide details of accidents so we can make a judgment.
Tesla’s own Vehicle Safety Report claims that the average US driver experiences a minor collision every 229,000 miles, meaning the robotaxi fleet is crashing four times more often even by the company’s own benchmark.
I don't see how we could know the rate of US driver minor collisions like that. No way most people reporting 1-4mph "collisions" with things like this.
You don't have to know. You can fully remove the few "minor" accidents (that a self driving car shouldn't be doing ever anyway) and the Tesla still comes out worse than a statistical bucket that includes a staggering number of people who are currently driving drunk or high or reading a book
The car cannot be drunk or high. It can't be sleepy. It can't be distracted. It can't be worse at driving than any of the other cars. It can't get road rage. So why is it running into a stationary object at 17mph?
Worse, it's very very easy to take a human that crashes a lot and say "You actually shouldn't be on the road anymore" or at least their insurance becomes expensive. The system in all of these cars is identical. If one is hitting parked objects at 17mph, they would almost all do it.
Even on highways I've had to intervene maybe once every 50 miles as it will often miss exits for me. This is a 2025 Model 3 with the latest 14.2 update in a major US metro.
The data from their self driving pilots disagrees even if it works for you. Its simply not read to be a taxi that makes money by itself.
It might a nice feature for your car to have. But most people aren't paying for it, the conversion rate is very low.
So they are not making money from taxis and not making much money from software sales.
So does it matter that for you personally it drives you around sometimes?
Even if you price in a 4x increase in FSD buy conversion ratio, you can't explain the stock price.
And I say this as a former Tesla investor who assumed that conversion ratio would be better then it is. But for that reason (and many others) I couldn't justify the valuation and dropped the stock.
Because if you get in an accident you personally not Tesla are liable. Soon as I’m not liable for an accident when the computer is driving I’d sell my other cars and put my family in pink PT Cruisers if those were the only cars offering that
I am confused as to why you think no interventions in "hundreds of miles" is good enough. It has to be no interventions for hundreds of thousands of miles WITH THE CAR BEING EMPTY to be good enough.
Months where you’re still required to be paying attention. Meanwhile 2 years ago Mercedes-Benz Drive Pilot a level 3 system let you sit and watch a movie without paying attention to the road.
Personally that’s way more useful for me even if they didn’t let you turn it on at highway speeds.
They canceled it because of poor adoption rather than any technical issues.
Which if anything looks worse for Tesla long term. If luxury car owners aren’t willing to pay 200$/month for self driving then trying to up charge people buying used model 3 and Y’s after canceling the S and X looks dubious. Which means that 100$/month subscription likely loses them money vs an 8k purchase.
Mercedes system was pretty useless because you could only use it in very limited conditions (specific freeways, only following another car). Nobody wants to pay $200/month to use it for 5% of their driving. Tesla FSD drives for you end-to-end.
Most people have a rather consistent commute, so the Mercedes was a more like a 0% or 80% kind of thing. The issue was adding more roads wasn’t going to help, the underlying benefit to attention free driving just wasn’t that valuable even to customers who could use the system regularly.
They are looking to reintroduce it with a much higher top of 81MPH which might help, but agin my issue isn’t with the particular system but the underlying assumption of how much people value attention free driving.
The new robot demos from Unitree make me wonder how many classes of unskilled labor are about to be automated (garbage collection, laundry & dishes, pothole repairs, last mile delivery, simple food preparation…)
There are already human-operated robots that collect garbage. Things like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9pl9vRCC6V0. If the automated robots end up being anything like that, I wouldn't expect them to be silent.
Is it? Do you include everyone that’s died or lost a loved one due to personal automobiles in that assessment?
We are so far post automobile that it’s hard to compare, but many of the benefits are illusionary when you consider how society has evolved with them as commutes for example used to be shorter. Similarly the air used to be far cleaner and that’s after we got rid of leaded gas and required catalytic converters decades ago.
How many people have lived or had a loved one saved due to automobiles?
We have the benefit of hindsight but we're also making judgment calls looking back on fuzzy recollections, forgetting just how the past used to be before an innovation came along.
I agree it’s difficult to do these calculations as society evolves with technology. Trains enable long distance evacuation from hurricanes. Street cars and subways allow for medical transportation but it looks very different than an ambulance. Similarly do we exclude helicopters assuming cars were simply banned rather than our failing to design IC engines or whatever.
That said, there are modern enclaves without cars mostly on islands or in very remote locations. They make due just fine without cars, it’s the low population density that’s at issue for medical care.
The automobile on its own was actually far less polluting than the horse wrt. air quality. It's just that there's a whole lot more of the former than there ever was of the latter. Even wrt. climate change, it turns out that horses produce methane emissions which are far worse for the climate than carbon dioxide.
That reason is along the lines of, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
Coal miners will fight for coal mines, the oil industry will fight for dependence on oil, and so on. Sometimes they’re aware of what they’re doing, but in the case of a comment like the above, apparently not so much.
Well you could not sue the video-editing software for someone making child pornography with it. You would, quite sanely, go after the pedophiles themselves.
This might be a good time to recommend you all read the first 5 pages of East of Eden by George Steinbeck. It’s about how the Salinas valley goes through flood and draught cycles, and how every time they’re in one cycle they forget the other one ever happened
Have you been in a Waymo recently or used Tesla FSD 14.2? I live in Austin and my Model 3 is basically autonomous - regularly going for hours from parking space to destination parking space without my touching the steering wheel, navigating really complex situations including construction workers using hand motions to signal the car.
They barely have any products, and they contract externally for so much other work
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