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Comment by haikurion | Hacker News Reader

If I didn’t know better I would think this is a parody of morally bankrupt technologists. But it’s not a parody, it’s an obscene reality.

- They have constructed a (rather impressive) mass deception machine, and put it to work.

- They have convinced themselves that the mass deception is worthwhile because their clients can’t lose money.

- When challenged, they seem to believe that the ends justifies the means, and that it is just marketing.

The only constructive thing I can think of is that those of us who have the ability to build these kinds of things should take this as another case study of what not to do, and how not to respond to criticism.

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This was interesting too. Since he posted pictures of envelopes with people's names and addresses on Twitter, he was asked:

>are these fake addresses or?

His reply was:

>All names and addresses are public data in Texas!

Ugh.

I see marketing as a giant black hole of ingenuity and talent (that pays well). That being said, it's difficult to see the difference here from ingenuity in say SEO.

> But it’s not a parody, it’s an obscene reality.

Yes and: They're using spiffy tech to further accelerate inequity. aka Pay to play.

"Property taxes represent the single largest source of own-source revenue for America’s local governments. Cities, counties, school districts, and special districts raise roughly $500 billion per year in property taxes, roughly 70 percent of local taxes. Whether residents rent or own, property taxes impact everyone.

In many cities, however, property taxes are also inequitable: low-value properties face higher tax assessments, relative to their actual market values, than do high-value properties. This tax regressivity disproportionately burdens lower-income residents.

To better understand these issues the Center for Municipal finance has reviewed millions of sales records for properties throughout the country. This site presents the results of these evaluations."

https://propertytaxproject.uchicago.edu

"When’s the last time you thought about property taxes? We mostly accept them as a part of society, and assume that they’re being calculated fairly. But a leading University of Chicago scholar says that assumption is wrong.

A breakthrough study from Prof. Christopher Berry has shown that, on average, homeowners in the bottom 10% of a jurisdiction pay an effective tax rate that is double of what’s paid by the top 10%. Essentially, the poorest homeowners are subsidizing the richest, with disproportion effects on people of color who own property. We talk with Berry about why this happening, how it’s affecting communities—and what we can do about it."

https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/big-brains/why-youre-li...

"How Lower-Income Americans Get Cheated on Property Taxes -- Many homeowners are paying a total of billions of dollars extra because of inequities in assessing property values."

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/03/opinion/sunday/property-t...

This is a weird stretch, I think. By this definition, all paid services are villainous. Maybe by your metric that's true, but then don't pretend this company is any more special than a taxi company or a baker in their evil.

Any citizen of Texas can partake in this process themselves. Their cost is time. If the value of your time is greater than the cost of the service, great! Use the service! If not, take an afternoon and do it yourself. Thus is the nature of services.

In fact, these companies only serve to punish governments for poor taxation practices, as they get more people to dispute their taxes than normally would have. Hurray!

Automating work that should not be done is immoral.

Per the adage that everything taken to its logical extreme becomes its own opposite: the only potential virtue of such work is that gaming the system may expedite reform (cycle of death & rebirth).

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