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Comment by lliiffee | Hacker News Reader

I urge everyone not to read this. We should not reward murderers (or attempted murderers) with out attention.

Fortunately - and not surprisingly - it's barely readable anyways. I read most of it and I still don't have a clear picture of what made this guy so mad.

[Edit: While I don't agree with lliiffee, I think it's a valid point of view and I wouldn't vote it down. I wavered between wanting to understand this person's state of mind, and not wanting to "reward" him with attention. But even if he were alive I don't think he'd get any satisfaction from people's reactions to this meaningless, incoherent screed.]

It sounded to me like he made a lot of really stupid money choices in his life and blamed all his losses on the IRS, the government, and anyone else of "power" that happened to be nearby at the time rather than taking personal responsibility and manning up.

I think his distaste was that when he made some mistakes, he got caught and shafted by arcane laws, yet when some richer folks deliberately committed fraud, the government barely did anything about it or rejigged the laws for them.

I'm in no way condoning fraud or corruption or entitlement or whatever, but I think the reason "the rich" often appear to get away with a lot more stuff than "the rest of us" is because, in some sense, as much as you might not like to admit it, they did somehow became rich - and that usually involves years of work and contributions to society either by the person him/herself or their family. So, in some small sense, being rich is a sign of having done something significantly important or useful at some point in their history, and so maybe they are worthy of more benefit of the doubt because of that? Maybe being rich is like a credit against future mistakes? Maybe it shouldn't be that way - but it seems kind of like it is. Perhaps this is some second order effect of humanity itself.

I agree. Life isn't fair. That doesn't stop us from seeing a small percentage of people who believe everything should be fair and just going postal, though.

they can also have more money to buy off and strong arm irs agents.

government employees are just people.

here's a book about this:

http://www.amazon.com/Perfectly-Legal-Campaign-Rich-Everybod...

Did he not hear about Bernie Madoff?

The concern is in setting a precedent that anyone can have a wide hearing of their ideas by killing people, which creates copycats in the future. (We have seen this happen with, e.g., school shootings.)

Well the fact is that every time something like this happens there's a huge media splash about it, it's analyzed to pieces, and (as far as I'm aware) there's almost never copycats of the same magnitude or scope.

If you're looking to take some kind of memorable action to get people to notice you, probably the least effective way is to do the same thing someone else just did.

did you actually read it or just skim it?

It made perfect sense to me. I see exactly where he is coming from, and why he did what he did. I have been wondering how long until someone did something like this. I would bet this will be the first of many things similar, where people start to rebel against the government. The less violent the better however.

It made perfect sense to you? Did we read a different note or something? The one I read seemed to ramble and drift and eventually lose the thread of logic by the end. I saw no great injustice perpetrated that necessitated the need to fly a plane into a building.

It did ramble and drift a bit but it all added to his story.. just very slowly. I don't think he should have flown a plane into the building. However I believe he did it because he tried the proper way spending over $5k of his own money and months of his time to change it. No one listened/cared (which is the main problem) about his problem. So when push came to shove and the government and businesses took everything he had by taking advantage of him, he had to finally stand up and say no more. Thus we have this event today, which is his way of raising enough commotion about the problem to hopefully get them changed. Honestly I cannot believe its not more common (not the plane part but the people rebelling part).

But what, really, was his problem that no one was listening to? I couldn't really figure that part out. It seemed to me that he was just pissed off the government wanted to collect taxes and annoyed that some people were a lot richer than he was.

It looked to me like he was complaining specifically about sec. 1706 forcing independent contractors to go through body shops.

He spent $5000 lobbying dozens of government officials, but what was he trying to change? Does it really all come down to the rule determining whether programming consultants are treated as employees for tax purposes? Was he even able to explain his case to them coherently, without using phrases like "declared me a criminal and non-citizen slave"? And then he makes ludicrous choices like taking an IRA distribution (which in most cases results in taxable income and/or early distribution penalties) without reporting it or paying taxes on it:

"I filed no return that year thinking that because I didn’t have any income there was no need. The sleazy government decided that they disagreed..."

Why is he just assuming that there's no need to file, rather than looking it up himself or asking someone for advice? Oh yeah:

"After my experience with the CPA world, following the business crash I swore that I’d never enter another accountant’s office again."

...because he once had a bad experience with accounting (which as far as I can tell he never actually describes), he decided that all accountants are frauds and there is no way to find an honest person to help him. It sounds like he was an antisocial crank long before flew a plane into a building.

Yes, and after he expresses his reluctance to ever enter an accountant's office again, he says that he did, out of desperation, and then got screwed again.

I disagree, it is information (although poor quality information tbf) about what motivated this guy to do this. The information should be public so people can come to their own conclusions about the event, otherwise the story is one sided.

HOWEVER due to copycats and the general suggestability of the public, organisations who broadcast should think twice before broadcasting this text. This is because it provides a "reward" for people contemplating doing this kind of thing, fifteen minutes of fame. Unfortunately this is exactly what news channels typically fail to do. E.G. High school shootings

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