Comment by rbultje

Comment by rbultje 7 days ago

The opposite of what you're saying is "perfection is the enemy of progress", so let's move past them. I'm asking for more than "this is not the way". What is the way? How will we do this? This is critical, and we've failed to do anything since early 2022. Democrats are clearly not at all interested. My (Dem) congressman responded directly to my enquiry with "fixing section174 just wouldn't be good optics". I agree republicans can't be taken very seriously either if OB3 is the highest of highs. But we all want this fixed. So: how?

throwanem 7 days ago

Not in a way that makes us even easier to hate, for a start. You really want a big noisy political carveout in what is already being called the largest upward wealth transfer in history? You want to find out what it's like to be in a line of work that has the reputation for having to steal from the American people to survive? We have enough of that reputation already.

If you want a better answer, tell me who our friends are in Congress this decade, and how much it matters. From what I see, the answers are "few" and "little." The Americans who don't blame us for giving Trump the country blame us for not giving him enough of a platform. The appearance of demanding favor on our part at such a moment seems unwise, but that moment does sufficiently explain why we find ourselves facing the aforementioned paucity of well-wishers.

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kortilla 7 days ago

>Not in a way that makes us even easier to hate, for a start. You really want a big noisy political carveout in what is already being called the largest upward wealth transfer in history? You want to find out what it's like to be in a line of work that has the reputation for having to steal from the American people to survive? We have enough of that reputation already.
This is bullshit. The carveout already exists and it's designed to attack software engineering specifically.

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- throwanem 7 days ago
  
  This is politics. Perceptions matter. Changing the status quo is more difficult because it is the status quo, and that also matters.
  If you want to sell this change, the way to do it is to hammer on the fact that it was Trump's own TCJA that created the current situation, or that it was the machinations of a hostile Congress that so perverted the original intent of the TCJA, depending on audience. But even that is not likely to work, not in a post-"Twitter Files," post-Careless People world.
  I don't know what kind of bubble you live in but if I were working this year I wouldn't be super comfortable talking about it, the same way if I had previously made the mistake of buying a Tesla I would by now have unloaded the damned eyesore even at a loss.
  No one is upset to see us suffer. If you think that should change, fine. Complaining at me about it won't achieve that. I did not ask how you think things should be. I'm telling you how things are.
  
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  kortilla 7 days ago
  
  I don’t know what bubble you’re living in but the “narrative” here is easily defensible. “The software engineering profession has been gutted by layoffs that explicitly make them 5x more expensive to startups than lawyers, electrical engineers, and doctors. This hurts both workers and employers while benefiting nobody other than foreign firms.”
  Nobody of relevance is mad people in tech get paid well. The only slice who are is a small percentage of people in housing constrained areas who attribute the housing failures of California to 5% of the SF workforce.
  > I'm telling you how things are.
  Claiming something is “how things are” is just assuming the conclusion and is one of the dumbest ways to engage in discussion. It’s literally, “I’m just telling you how I’m right.”
  
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  throwanem 7 days ago
  
  Okay, now I know what kind of bubble you live in.
  
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