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I saw y’all raise $2mil for Team Trees, now let me see some of that love towards Make Rojava Green Again’s reforestation campaign (currently 82% of the way to its goal!). It is a fair bit more expensive than $1 per tree, but that’s because this is a self-directed effort by the independent Kurds towards reforestation (which is more than just “planting trees!”)
Rojava is an autonomous area in Western Kurdistan, within what is called Northern Syria. They have maintained independence since their revolution in 2012, and have been the main driving force for completely eliminating ISIS from Syria. Rojava embodies direct democracy, anticapitalism, self-determination, feminism, and environmentalism, built on the philosophy of Murray Bookchin. They have been facing attacks from the fascist, genocidal Turkish state since the Trump regime pulled troops out of the region and implicitly invited Erdoğan to slaughter the Kurdish people
Please give them your support! If you can’t contribute, signal boost!
One of the unexpected benefits of being in software development is that I’m basically immune to imposter syndrome on account of it being painfully obvious that nobody else in my field has the slightest idea what they’re doing, either.
it’s wild that people think k-12 schools could actually teach you how to do your taxes when they fucking change literally every single year which is why when you have money you generally pay someone to do them for you?
otherwise you just go on turbotax or something which also varies so greatly between people and the change of times that telling you to go to turbotax could be a grave mistake??? depending on your income or what decade it is.
teachers dont even know how to do their own fucking taxes they get software or pay people for it. taxes are intentionally so convoluted theres no way our piece of shit education system could teach yall how to do it
especially when folks crying about being incapable of doing their taxes also are here whining about learning basic algebra which shocker you need to know in order to do your taxes ... hell you need calculus to do your taxes
you need a shitton of math and financial knowledge and legal knowledge to do taxes to a point where people get degrees and yearly certifications to do them.
basically idk how some of yall think our garbage public education system could teach you to navigate shit that takes masters degrees worth of knowledge and regular recertifications every single year to do
... when yall think learning algebra wont help you because our school system cant even teach you that adequately.
I am a tax economist and I cant do my own taxes. People ask me to do their taxes, I cant help. Every year i use software and i think I've done it right, i only have simple returns to do (employment income from 1 source, basic credits/deductibles nothing fancy) AND YET I get mail from the Revenue Agency every year saying "yeah you did it wrong it should look like this," and this is in Canada where the tax code is way simpler than in the US! I am a tax economist and my mom still does my US taxes because I can't figure that shit out.
The dumbest thing is, the government (US, Canada, any major developed government) has all the information it needs to treat taxes for 95% of the population because 95% of us have what we refer to as simple returns. Some countries have gotten keen and will mail out prefiled tax declarations- basically sheets of paper with all of your tax information i.e. this is how much the government has recorded you've earned, this much has been deducted from paychecks for state taxes etc, therefore we have calculated that you owe xxx$. And if the info is correct you do nothing and if its incorrect you fix it and mail it back. This hasn't taken off in the US because of lobbyists. They want taxes to be complicated, if taxes are complicated then you hate them. If you hate them, you won't vote for tax increases and will lean towards conservative fiscal policy. All this despite the fact that over time these prefiled declarations save money in administration costs, increase government revenue from having more returns and fewer mistakes, and help prevent tax evasion. They can even increase tax returns. But we dont have it because of conservative lobbyists. Great.
It's also easier to argue for and hide loopholes in a massively convoluted system.