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Comment by agwa | Hacker News Reader

As a small software business owner, I have to agree with Michele Hansen (who spent 2 years advocating on behalf of small software businesses for this very change): "we’re finally going to get Section 174 relief, and I couldn’t be angrier" https://www.linkedin.com/posts/mjwhansen_it-looks-like-were-...

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Yeah. This is a tough one. Its a really bad bill that happens to also be the best thing that could happen in the economic life of most any programmer.

This is going to make a lot of people's lives a lot worse and I'm against it even though it's an absurd windfall for me and people like me.

Not sure if this is an absurd windfall... It aligns software developers with the guild professionals, like dentists and lawyers, who had an economically equivalent benefit via S corp distributions. Except to get this one, you have to pay a royalty to someone to write your technical narrative.

I got more inbound recruiter email in the last week than in the two years up until last week.

Everyone's BATNA just skyrocketed. What you choose to do with a huge surge in your pricing power is up to you, but you have it.

Yeah. Not gonna lie it's a bit obscene watching people in this thread revelling that their absurdly highly paid jobs will become even more highly paid, given what's at stake.

When the hammer fell in late 2022 / early 2023 I was out of work for the first time in 20 years of uninterrupted employment without one day of unemployment. Having just carried my family (financially) through a bereavement that left people effectively unable to work (there are a zillion expenses you don't think about) I was also running on fumes myself, and I very rapidly surmised that I was going bankrupt : I had a cost structure that takes a minimum of a year to change and I had just gotten done telling the Valley where to stick their millions a few years earlier.

So for me this is like, the end of a period where contrarian hackers can be passed on at arbitrary ability in a way that has no lower limit: there is no bottom now and there is no safety net.

But I had about a decade of just never having to care about money at all before that, so maybe there's some karma in it too.

For me this is like, OK I'm definitely not going to get frozen out of work with no place to live anymore, and I'd be lying if I said I didn't sleep easier last night than I have in a while.

But even from that vantage point, I oppose the passage of this bill and will argue to see it overturmed: the people who it hurts are more vulnerable still.

Is the girl in the picture going to lose coverage? If yes, what part of the OBBB is going to remove her coverage? If not, then why go into all this detail about her if she's going to keep her coverage?

Nobody can answer any of these questions because they've been misled by misinformation which has ironically been promoted by the same people who bleat about misinformation on a daily basis.

I disagree, every rider was independently lobbied for and the outcome would be the same if passed separately by Congress or as a rider in a larger bill like it was.

There is no reason to have cognitive dissonance over it.

It proves they never actually cared in the first place, it’s just arguments as soldiers.

If every rider was independently proposed the outcome wouldn't be the same, reconciliation wouldn't apply and 60 Senate votes would be required to pass them.

decent point

two counteracting forces:

The senate parliamentarian decided they could be in the reconciliation bill

and outside of the reconciliation bill, believe it or not, Congress does pass other bills over the 60 senate vote threshold

This R&D one would be a decent candidate

If you have a huge omnibus bill that has a good thing that the representative's constituents want, and then a mountain of burning trash attached to it, and the representative votes for the bill, they can defend the vote as getting the thing their constituents wanted.

If you make them each a different bill and then the constituents want to know why they voted in favor of the hot garbage by itself, how can they answer?

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