> Please don't insinuate that someone hasn't read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that."
Not only are you being rude by implying the article went unread, you’re also showing an astounding lack of imagination (perhaps stifled by a need to point out the errors of others). Parent is saying that despite whatever parts of the law you care to snarkily quote, government employees will find a way to screw it up.
This policy exists in many states. But plenty of local reporters have tales about how officials respond with PDFs because they either don't realize that the PDFs are generated from a (legacy) system that could output XLS/CSV, or because they fear that Excel sheets/text files are alterable. The benefit of having the law, though, makes it easier to convince officials to tell their IT people to get it right, under threat of lawsuit.
I'm pretty sure that isn't what machine-readable means, especially in this context. But this kind of obtuse reading seems like it would be exactly how the concern of the parent comment would come into being.
If you have this kind of standard then literally everything is machine-readable, even handwriting with proper machine learning models. That's quite clearly not the spirit of the wording.
I’ll defend this practice. It’s the only way of knowing for sure that you’re transmitting exactly the information you intend to send. Even copy/paste often picks up other stuff you don’t intend.
It's more of a way to prevent transmitting any easily accessible data at all. Using a human-auditable but still machine-readable format like CSV is what should be done.
Having a data review process with automated integrity, confidentiality, and quality checks is not terribly difficult.
But having a prototocol to export the pdf to csv is also dead easy for confirming only the data relevant is included. ASCII is just as “easy” as scan, but it requires training clerks to be data-oriented rather than document.
_ugh_ if only CSVs were standardized sooner and more completely. There are many encoding, delimiter, escaping and truncation conventions to deal with in real world data.
There are other ways to ensure this. Even with your own logic, it would make sense then to send both the Excel sheets and scanned PDFs of the Excel sheets, isn't it? It would be super comical though
I don't think this would prevent you from using a CPA or Itemizing your return. However, this system could be very beneficial for the 68.5% of the population that doesn't itemize[1].
I think it would still happen with standard/non-itemized deductions. This particular case was mis-reported income. But agreed that my case (and really any cases that involve capital-gains) are probably in the vast minority.
I never itemized and I’m pretty sure the IRS could never do my tax forms while I was in China...heck, they never even asked for anything like a W2 since my income was all foreign.
I get it, but anyone making more than $100k probably has investments Schedule Ds and all that other crap to worry about. And anyone else can file a 1040EZ anyways. Not ideal for sure, but the hard case remains the hard case.
Right, I was just pointing out that OPs case is in the minority of tax filers and that making this option available would benefit a lot of tax-filers and wouldn't prevent OP from filing their taxes as they normally would.
If you enjoyed this, please do read Nikolai Novikov's (then Soviet Ambassador to the US) analysis of US Foreign Policy in a similar fashion, but from the perspective of the USSR. The Novikov Telegram (1946) is considered the soviet equivalent of George Kennan's Long Telegram.
Kennan stressed the paranoia of the Soviet leadership. In the telegram you linked, you read things like:
"All these facts clearly show that their armed forces are designed to play a decisive role in the realization of plans to establish American world domination."
If viewed slantwise, this has a nugget of truth, i.e., the U.S. is establishing forward military bases partly to protect free trade and enable capitalism.
But these bases proved to be almost entirely defensive and were not really used for "world domination" in the sense meant by the Soviet ambassador.
The document vindicates a lot of the analysis that Kennan makes in his article. However, we do have to acknowledge the outlook that drove the party line. Among the recipients of this telegram were Stalin and Molotov (then Minister of Foreign Affairs), which I think would explain some of the extreme rhetoric here. Also note, that unlike the Kennan Telegram (which was published in Foreign Affairs under the pseudonym "Mr. X") the Novikov telegram wasn't meant for public consumption. It was part of the Glasnost files which came out in the 90s.
That being said, from the Soviet perspective, the United States -- during "peace time", had rapidly increased military spending and presence around the world. This only goes in to feed the "neurotic" world view that Kennan cited in his article.
"At bottom of Kremlin's neurotic view of world affairs is traditional and instinctive Russian sense of insecurity. Originally, this was insecurity of a peaceful agricultural people trying to live on vast exposed plain in neighborhood of fierce nomadic peoples. To this was added, as Russia came into contact with economically advanced West, fear of more competent, more powerful, more highly organized societies in that area. But this latter type of insecurity was one which afflicted rather Russian rulers than Russian people; for Russian rulers have invariably sensed that their rule was relatively archaic in form fragile and artificial in its psychological foundation, unable to stand comparison or contact with political systems of Western countries. For this reason they have always feared foreign penetration, feared direct contact between Western world and their own, feared what would happen if Russians learned truth about world without or if foreigners learned truth about world within. And they have learned to seek security only in patient but deadly struggle for total destruction of rival power, never in compacts and compromises with it."
Kennan's telegram wasn't published. It was written by Kennan to impress his understanding on Truman as he took office. The X article was a separate piece of writing.
One striking thing to me there is the consistent use of "democratic" and "democratization" to refer to governments that the U.S. referred to as "communist". (For example, Novikov says that an important outcome of the Soviet military role in Eastern Europe was the creation of democratic regimes friendly to the USSR, and complains that the U.S. will not agree to the democratization of postwar Germany.)
I was brought up in the U.S. in the Cold War and regularly heard that several states Novikov mentions became "democratic" and underwent "democratization" in the 1990s because of the fall of the Soviet Union. It was striking to me that he used precisely the same word and concept to refer to the creation of the states that fell at that time, so that it was used unironically and even routinely to refer both to establishing and destroying them.
You have to remember that there was an internal narrative to communism. These people didn't sit on their chairs stroking white cats, thinking about how evil they were being. Many of them were opportunists, but there were also true believers.
And everyone used the language of true believers to justify why things were the way they were.
The idea was that most people in capitalist countries were oppressed by the economic system, and that in the people's democracies they finally had a chance to have a say in how the country was governed, through workers' councils, a Party that represented them, and various forms of collective rule.
The difference was that one is real democracy, and the other a sham. But notice how even the most authoritarian states go to great lengths to pretend they have broad social support. Everyone loves democracy!
"As a result of their reorganization on democratic principles, in such former enemy countries as Bulgaria, Finland, Hungary, and Romania regimes have been created which have set themselves the task of strengthening and maintaining friendly relations with the Soviet Union. In the Slavic countries - Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia - liberated by the Red Army or with its help, democratic regimes have also been created and are consolidating which maintain relations with the Soviet Union on the basis of friendship and mutual aid agreements."
In Romania the "democratic regime" had received something like 3% of the votes at its inter-war peak and had later been banned for subversive activities sponsored by the Soviets.
There were solid reasons those "former enemies" were enemies.
TSA spends most of it's budget through a provision called "Other Transaction Authority" which is essentially a vehicle to make purchases with barely any oversight from congress. http://time.com/4134368/tsa-price-of-security/ (Paywall)
I'm glad you brought this up, because this comment represents a misunderstanding in how government contracting is typically done. My previous job was working for a government contractor, and we did multiple discrete contracts for several branches of the government. However, every single one of them would have shown up exactly like this, all bundled under one contract.
Why? Because writing and signing a contract is expensive, for both the contractor and the government. So contracts are typically written in a way to make them very easy to extend, and existing contracts are often used as vehicles to tack on additional funding for new contracts. The original contracting agency would also usually charge a fee to the other agencies for use of their contract in this way.
So, this kind of glance at individual awards under a single contract is really too simple a view. A lot of these funds could be (and from my guess, probably are) going to completely independent projects from the randomizer.
TL;DR: Having multiple awards under a single contract is typically a sign of the government working around bureaucracy and attempting to save costs.
TSA later reported that the actual cost of the randomizer was around $47k. The total figure I had mentioned earlier was part of a larger contract with IBM. I saw the generic "IGF::CT::IGF MOBILE APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT" note on the award and assumed it was all for the same project.
It's also weird that TSA's response to OP's FOIA request cited a different and higher figure (~$340k) for the randomizer app -- I'm guessing they were grouping in other projects under the same award here too?
Besides, $47k seems like a reasonable amount if that figure includes training and deployment costs.
