According to that tweet they were apparently “far left” because they also worked on Direct File, which sought to cut out the middleman (TurboTax et al.) and let Americans file taxes directly. Regardless of where you stand on the political spectrum, unless you're in bed with Intuit, this seems pretty hard to argue against!
Removing consumer protection would be something hard to argue against too, but yet, here we are: https://news.bloomberglaw.com/banking-law/bessent-pauses-cfp...
"Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has shut down a wide variety of operations inside the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in his new role as acting director."
Nothing of this makes sense in that all these actions don't seem to make life easier or better for citizens in particular or the world in general.
A major difference between the US and EU is what the TikTok nonsense proved: the US is happy for a US company, aligned to Trump's authority, to track, influence and commodify its users at will; whereas the EU doesn't want any company to have that power regardless of location.
But in case anyone thinks this is a dunk on the EU: this is still not as invasive as the US law enforcement's powers of warrantless surveillance which have repeatedly blown up the EU-US frameworks for data sharing (Privacy Shield and its other iterations, which Mr Schrems seems to have personally made a sport of shooting down faster than they get implemented). It's also not entirely contradictory as the focus here is on protecting the rights of people against corporations while still providing means for the state to violate those rights when necessary (similarly to how the state can violate your right to free movement through incarceration or your right to bodily autonomy by shooting you, neither of which seem to upset the people who'd think this one is a gotcha).
Considering the EU's main function is being a transnational economic region (if you ignore all the fluff about shared values and history and instead follow the definition of "a system's function is what it does"), it's absolutely true that the EU is remarkably restrictive on what corporations can do compared to the US - even before Trump.
EDIT: The two sibling comments prove my point: while EU member states have been pushing for legislation like providing backdoors to encrypted communication, this is neither unique to the EU nor a contradiction and the US already has far wider reaching measures in place.
Consider for example the Switzerland-based CIA and BND (Germany) shell company that distributed backdoored encryption to hostile nations which Germany backed out of when the CIA defended distributing the same technology to friendlies without informing them or their intelligence agencies. Or literally any of the Snowden leaks, which described not only mass surveillance of US citizens but also espionage against US allies (infamously including wiretapping then-chancellor Angela Merkel's mobile phone) to a degree none of the EU member states have ever done anything comparable to - and which those mostly didn't act on because of the importance of maintaining good terms with the US. Or the post-9/11 legislation which not only allowed warrantless surveillance with gag orders (which is why "canaries" became popular in cryptography communities) but even literally killing or abducting and indefinitely incarcerating US citizens without a trial - not to mention torture.
You can criticize the EU for state overreach. You can't do so by using the US for grounds of moral superiority - not even moral equivalence. You can argue about different attitudes to free speech, gun ownership or the right to self-defense (e.g. castle doctrine), sure. All of these are valid grounds for debate. But the US government can (according to its own jurisdiction) legally do so many more things to both its own citizens and non-citizens both within and outside its borders that trying to use it for a libertarian "win" against the EU seems farcical at best.
Oh, ok.
Hopefully it's obvious at this point: Musk and friends not there to do anything but enrich themselves, and destroy.
I suspect 18F would have been adopted by USDS, if it had been less overtly partisan in its hiring practices.
People with that kind of wealth have transcended humanity. Not towards greatness but towards total indifference.
18F might also be "far-left" cause it was created by Obama folks. I also wonder if it is also bad in his mind cause conflicts with taken over Digital Service.
>Obama folks
Obama was not in any way "far left"
The same would apply to the right too, except that the right tends to shut down agencies, not create them.
The big hubbub on X was about the Slack bot that recommends inclusive language. https://github.com/18F/charlie/blob/main/CHANGELOG.inclusion...
There is a hit piece article not worth linking that calls out some of the devs who worked there. The comment section of that page is very hateful. As an American it’s shameful to see that level of hate for anything to do with policies of inclusiveness.
The company looks like they hire regular people of all types. A few of the adults are trans or identify as queer and they are acknowledged as equal coworkers. Fairly representative of the tech industry I’d say. What is so bad about that? They seem to write some excellent code and have a good company culture akin to a lot of SV tech companies.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/19/us/alabama-senate-roy-jon...
That's just plain stupid. Taxes are already annoying enough.
In New Zealand the government makes it really really simple to pay your taxes (automated tax returns for the majority). You can call our tax department on the phone and they answer and they are helpful and they don't seem to screw you. The idea is to make it simple for people and businesses to pay their taxes so that they pay. The IRD is run like a smart business.
It's not taxes that are the problem per se it's fuckwits like Boris Johnson's cronies that think taxes are theirs to garnish and use any chance, even a global pandemic, to steal every dime they can lay their hands on.
No, but paying an exorbitant amount, but seeing few things being improved around you, but endless wars funded and cronies getting richer, and useless bureucracy enlarged and making your life or business more difficult, is.
Bit of a stretch to call them a low cost outsourcer. They seem pretty legitimate.
The biggest mistake the dems can make is to come in and do clean up. This would be paying the bills of the abusive member in a relationship.
The Democratic Party is the conservative one.
It still might happen that there won't be any further elections in which anyone but trumpists can actually win.
He doesn't.
