🔗 Intuit, Owner of TurboTax, Wins Battle Against America’s Taxpayers - The American Prospect:

According to a report by the Associated Press this week, the IRS is moving to shut down its free tax filing program known as Direct File, with employees working on the program told to stall work on future iterations. The news comes after Intuit, the maker of TurboTax and the biggest player in tax preparation software, spent years tirelessly fighting any attempt by the government to bring the nightmarish American system of tax collection into line with European nations that have streamlined most citizens’ filing process down to the click of a button.

After seeing a few references to it (and against my better judgement), I listened to the latest episode of the NYT’s Hard Fork podcast, in which Casey Newton and Kevin Roose talk to one of the guys behind this new “A.I. 2027” thing. My main takeaways are:

1. Hard Fork is an extraordinarily dumb podcast.
2. There is a group of people who will fall for almost anything if you dress it up with the trappings of high-concept science fiction.

Have we forgotten that Roose is the person who, on his first interaction with Microsoft’s shitty Bing chatbot, managed to convince himself it was conscious and had fallen in love with him?

I was just reading a think piece of modest length about how Millenials are finding themselves aging out of cultural influence/relevance and are now surrounded by the detritus of their peak years. The piece placed these struggles between the Boomers who own all the real estate and the Gen Z/Alpha crowds that now occupy the in-demand demographics.

Meanwhile, I feel like I am still fetching the key from under the doormat and letting myself into the empty house, left to look after myself because no one else is going to.

I am sure a relatively small group of already very people who happened to be in the right place at the right time—it’s called “insider trading” for a reason—made a bunch of money off of this whole on-again/off-again tariff nonsense.

But I remain convinced that there is no grand plan to any of this, and that we do ourselves no favors by imagining that there is.

It will always be true that it is easier to destroy things than to create them, and any bunch of clowns can knock things over.