Seems like what you said can be summed up as:
- Yes, the privacy infractions listed by esbranson are accurate.
- But we don't have an alternative right now.
- But something better is coming! It's totally right around the corner!
- Yes, the privacy infractions listed by esbranson are accurate.
- But we don't have an alternative right now.
- But something better is coming! It's totally right around the corner!
I'm very pleased to see dissatisfaction of the form "this isn't good enough; here are ideas for incremental improvements to it", but have totally lost my patience with the far more common "this isn't good enough; we should do nothing instead".
I've noticed as well, it's quite common that when a well-constructed solution takes much more time (and may be harder to identify) than an quick fix, proponents of the quick fix will claim that the 'do it right' folks are actually saying we should do nothing.
In my view, "partial solutions piled on partial solutions" is just life as a human being, where the alternative to that is not perfect solutions with no piling required, but rather no solutions. And yes, it is just like software, where incrementalism is also the better approach, in my view.
> proponents of the quick fix will claim that the 'do it right' folks are actually saying we should do nothing.
We don't think you're actually saying we should do nothing, just that it's the common end result, despite your best intentions.
And in the sphere of politics in particular, I think well-meaning people who really do want better solutions are often used by more cynical people who really do want to do nothing, for their own ends. Like the tax software industry lobbyists, in this case. Or like how old school environmentalists often find themselves aligned with fossil fuel industry lobbyists when it comes to building renewable or nuclear power generation, or transmission lines.
I don't begrudge people their dislike of partial solutions, I just don't subscribe to the same strategy.
I don't think the person you're responding to is a perfectionist. He just has a different view on how to improve things.
These aren't intractable, or even difficult, problems to resolve. Literally the only thing you have to change is some text.
The corollary to this is that the text is difficult to change for precisely the same reason that people dislike it: it holds legal baggage. If it were "just" some text, you could ignore it. But it's text that is related to contracts and agreements that would need to be renegotiated and audited and more I'm not thinking of.
Progress must include work: otherwise it is no longer progress.
My objection isn't to your opinion that we should make progress or change, it is to trivializing the complexity of that change.
Don't make perfect the enemy of good. The rent-seeking of tax preparation businesses is a bigger problem than these privacy issues. That doesn't mean those aren't also a problem. (And I'd be shocked if Intuit has a less problematic set of terms with respect to privacy...)
But what the IRS is doing here is the correct prioritization of problems to attack.
> But what the IRS is doing here is the correct prioritization
I read this as: "saving money, and keeping it out of unscrupulous hands, is more important than preserving our privacy and freedom". I don't agree with that, and you shouldn't assume that others agree with your take.
Indeed, I assume my take on that trade-off is the less popular one amongst the commenters, and perhaps also the readers, of this thread. But I do think it is the far more popular view among the population at large. And part of the reason I'm commenting here is to point that out.
The government saying "we are being more scrupulous than TurboTax" from the start, with a clear plan to improve is really only net gains. And the normal objections about things being worse because government don't really apply, since the IRS ultimately needs and has this information anyway, the risk is just them sharing it.
There's no justification for the IRS needing higher security than free fillable forms or normal turbo tax to deliver a similar self prepared efiling, so they are repeating the same crime the next level down, choosing a private system to provide something that benefits the IRS and is of negative value to the tax payer themself.
They literally have an alternative that they've already rolled out. And they've stated the reasons they can't use the more modern IDP yet. What's so hard to understand about a v1?