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A taxing algorithm

bit-player.org

53 pointsbreadbox11 comments

Accountancy is largely (to paraphrase Keynes) moving rocks from one place to another. He was right Keynes, essentially for economies to continue growing indefinitely most jobs have to be bullshit jobs.

I only agree with the first sentence. The economy can grow significantly by discovering new things to do, and by discovering new ways to do old things.

And to think, we threw the tea in the harbor for a mere stamp tax.

When the primary way politicians reward or punish groups is the tax system, you get foolish stuff like this.

The extra accounting work required in order to deal with taxes actually forms a significant deterrent to doing freelance work on the side. Every time someone asks if I'd be interested in a project, I have to stop and think: is this worth dealing with Form 1099 and Schedule C and keeping track of business expenses and all that bullshit? Generally the answer is no: a job big enough that I can charge enough to justify the extra hassle is generally too big to fit in the amount of free time I'm willing to divert from travel and hobby projects.

Of course doing just one contract project in a given year means I'm screwed come next April 15th, and knowing that drops the cost of entry for other projects; but I do wonder how much extra liquidity there might be in the market for programming services if the IRS didn't demand such a hefty commitment to paperwork.

This is really more of a graphical representation of a formula. It contains conditionals of sorts (in the form of the min operator), but no recursion, iteration or other sort of control structure.

"In mathematics and computer science, an algorithm [...] is a self-contained step-by-step set of operations to be performed." -Wikipedia

It's a detailed recipe to perform a task, so it's an algorithm.

>What this meant was the wording of the instructions would be procedural rather than declarative. Instead of “Your tax is 15 percent of the amount on line 42,” we had “Multiply the amount on line 42 by 0.15 and write the result on line 43.”

Yes, it's an expression. The algorithm is evaluating that expression. However, algorithms also evaluate algorithms, and a better example would have been an actual algorithm that needs to be interpreted.

I think the diagram must be slightly incorrect, else there are some odd bits.

* 20 is copied into 22 unchanged * 20 = min(min(14, 15), 14) - min(14, 15), which all simplifies to 0

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