>And every country does it differently

Seems like the real world is just choc-full of Liskov Substitution Principle violations :P

The US tax system is the legislative equivalent of spaghetti code / big ball of mud.

Every tax system is. Because the experts who help to develop it are the same people who get paid to help you file your taxes. Making it easier would lose them income.

Nah it’s not a US thing; tax codes are the same most everywhere.

It is a combinatorial explosion problem. Each taxing authority probably isn't too different from the norm, but in the US you are more likely to encounter many different taxing authorities that overlap.

Some are worse than others mind you, at least for certain consumer facing things that most are discussing here.

I have never seen one quite as byzantine as the USA.

Come to Brazil, we have taxes on products 'circulating', moving your products between logistic centers is OK, but if the product is lost or stolen, taxes are due (as if it was a sale).

Some tax regulations were considered illegal by higher authorities, but that won't stop a tax auditor in a local level charging them and potentially closing down your business.

>And in a world where we're unable to continue exploiting fossil fuels, whether due to the environmental impacts of their waste, or the lack of future supplies, the present mode of operation will end. What that means in terms of the set of factors affecting human impacts on the planet --- per-capita wealth and total population --- one or both factors must move.

Thanks for the book recommendation. Over time digging through history books and trying to wrap my head around how supply chains and agriculture work I've come to more or less the same conclusion. I feel so alone a lot of the time in understanding this stuff and it's refreshing to know that I'm not the only one who takes a look at things and goes... wait a minute...

This has been my line of thinking too.

You just actually quit if they refuse your hard 'no'. I was asked to be a team lead and turned it down as I know it's not right for me. I left my last company after they asked me to do a project in a similar way to an already disastrous one I was on previously. I said no, and left when it was clear that was the way they wanted the project done.

Well I just do it by putting the laptop on my chest and using an external keyboard that also contains one of those touchpad mice like laptops have. Works like a charm and costs way less time / effort. The chest gets a little sore if you use it for too long or too many days in a row, so lately I've been thinking maybe I need to elevate the laptop off my chest a little with a C-shaped table of sorts that the laptop can sit on can sit it on. I get into flow so easily working in such a setup, and wish I could do it more often. I'm considering investing more in my work from bed setup.

Comments like this are why I find reading HN to be both depressing and cathartic at the same time. That's quite an achievement.

Sounds exactly like my current job.

Perfectly describes my last job.

>In my mind, it happens when autonomous systems optimizing reward functions to "stay alive" (by ordering fuel, making payments, investments etc) fail because of problems described above in (a) -- the inability to have deterministic rules baked into them to avoid global fail states in order to achieve local success states. (Eg, autonomous power plant increases output to solve for energy needs -> autonomous dam messes up something structural -> cascade effect into large swathes of arable land and homes destroyed).

And for this to develop in machines, machines would have to be subject to many mistakes along the way leading to all kinds of outcomes that we hold humans accountable for by fining them, sending them to jail, some of them dying etc. I think that would be so wholly unpalatable to man kind they'd cut that experiment short before it ever reached any sort of scale.

I agree with your conclusion that enough of the rules can't be encoded by us as we don't even know them and for machines to acquire them the traditional way is, I believe, fundamentally disagreeable to humans.