I've been assembling commercial ratepayer data across the UK quarterly for the last three years. While WeWork is certainly not alone, what is remarkable is the explosion in micro-hereditaments over the past year. We're talking median office sizes at 4-6m2,where some of the more established services are significantly larger. And the approach of fragmenting offices into ever-tinier spaces is accelerating.
I provided some of the data used in this article (via FOI-request, used at sqwyre.com).
The scale of the number of the hereditaments (taxable units) is remarkable and overloads local tax authorities. We're talking thousands, with regular tenant changes. Even in central London, there are only a handful of municipal staff to deal with all businesses.
What you end up with is equivalent to a denial-of-service attack against rates authority staff. They're overwhelmed.
That's the real risk to communities. If tax relief claims are industrialised, it puts endless pressure on the services those taxes were supposed to pay for. These are local taxes, so that's libraries, community centres, road maintenance, etc.
WeWork may not be a tech company when it comes to what they're selling, but it is when it comes to how they deal with tax.
> If tax relief claims are industrialised, it puts endless pressure on the services those taxes were supposed to pay for. These are local taxes, so that's libraries, community centres, road maintenance, etc.
I can understand how the existing system may have issues with this - but the total presence of WeWork definitely doesn't qualify for a rebate... and if the filing rate of the company seems absurd then the government should reject all the filings by that company and fine the company trying to abuse the system.
Unlike computer logic where weird edge cases can be exploited due to the speed and complexity of the system... when it comes to taxes this stuff is going in front of human beings and the government can always bring a hammer down.
Government works on law not on what makes sense, if the punishment you are describing is not in the law. they can't do it! and have to process all the filings.
Government works on law not on what makes sense, if the punishment you are describing is not in the law. they can't do it! and have to process all the filings.
I think just about all legal systems have catch-all regulations that allow for fines for abuse.
Moreover, law isn't actually mechanical rules like computer science - people who skirt the law systematically often find themselves facing serious legal problems and intention is a big consideration in some (but not all) regulations. "Obstruction of justice", "contempt of court" and so-forth are broad statutes that let courts lean on those abusing the system. etc.
The actual problem, I'd note, is that courts and cities are much more hesitant to go after large, monied interests as compared small interests. A local crank doing what Uber, Airbnb or others do could go to jail, these companies just count their money.
> This massive shipment was noteworthy not only for its size, but also because it destroyed one of the Uintah Railway Company's trucks. The truck's brakes failed and it started coasting backwards after breaking a drive chain while struggling uphill, loaded with several thousand bricks. The truck then turned over and caught fire. The driver was not injured, but most of the bricks were lost.
I imagine USPS pricing didn't account for that incident!
That one's completely the company's fault. If anything bricks should be much easier to balance across trucks than other collections of shipments, because the shipper knows they all weigh the same.
That is a very American sentiment, most governments doesn't consist of ~50% lawyers.
For example in Sweden the government is full of union members from the working class, they have very different view of what role the government should have with respect to company abuse. The result is that basically all laws are worded in such a way that if any ambiguity exists it will disfavor private companies.
> when it comes to taxes this stuff is going in front of human beings and the government can always bring a hammer down.
I cannot believe these kinds of policies are even being entertained. The government should decidedly not be able to 'bring a hammer down' based on their feeling about a company. That's totalitarianism.
In a civilized society with limited government, the most important thing about a government is that it follows the law and that the law is applied equally. By all means, the government should follow its procedures for changing the regulations to achieve the desired policy. But under no circumstance should it arbitrarily go after companies it deems to be 'immoral'. Moreover, if the company has followed law at the time, then there is nothing the government should be able to do to retroactively make what was legal, illegal.
These basics of civilization are encoded in our constitution as prohibitions on both bills of attainder as well as ex post facto laws.
Your proposal to pursue lawlessness reminds me of this dialogue from the play 'A man for all seasons', about St Thomas More, English lawyer, philosopher, and martyr. In the dialogue, Thomas More, who is the current prosecutor, is being asked by his son-in-law and daughters to arrest someone for speech which More and the son-in-law find repugnant. Moreover, the speech in question is what is going to lead to More's own execution, which More could have prevented by arresting him illegally. More rebukes all of them:
More: Why, what has he done?
Margaret More: He's bad!
More: There is no law against that.
Will Roper: There is! God's law!
More: Then God can arrest him.
Alice: While you talk, he's gone!
More: And go he should, if he was the Devil himself, until he broke the law!
Roper: So now you'd give the Devil benefit of law!
More: Yes. What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?
Roper: I'd cut down every law in England to do that!
More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country's planted thick with laws from coast to coast– man's laws, not God's– and if you cut them down—and you're just the man to do it—do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law for my own safety's sake.
This is why the real world runs on reasonable people, backed up with lawyers and judges to interpret laws and the mis-use of them either through badly written laws or unexpected consequences of reasonable intent - and why even people strongly publicly opposed to that end up reinventing it and forking Etherium when someone read "the code that is the law" more carefully than the people who wrote it.
A judge will (sometimes) look at a nov el abuse of the details of a law as its written, and make a determination based on the clear intent of the lawmakers even if it's not specifically covered by the written embodiment of thew law.
Anyone who thinks that's bad idea needs to get out more. (I'm not saying it always works out "best", but not having the ability for someone to say "Hang on, that's not the _intent_ of this tax rebate. You can no longer abuse it this way." is critically important, for a species that cannot write bug-free code in the super-restricted space of computer languages, never mind in the vastly more complex and error-prone space of human languages for laws and legal contracts.
Abd startups/kickstarters/people set prices "which should allow them to scale" - but they are always based on assumptions which sometimes turn out to be incorrect is that scale happens to be several orders of magnitude larger that the people who made those assumptions.
We don't want government departments to be setting fees based on worst case upper bounds of processes with poor Big O performance. Nobody wants to fund through fees or taxes, say, a DMV who are perfectly set up to reissue every single driver's license every day. There's a very reasonable assumption that driver's licenses are lost/stolen at a fairly consistent rate and to size the department and processes to perform "well enough" at that replacement rate. If a startup found a way to monetise revoked driver's licences, and started offering to buy them off people for $50 resulting in thousands of extra license replacement requests - the DMV would be perfectly entitled to change their rules and say "you only get one inexpensive license replacement every 3 years. Additional replacement license will now cost $1500 each". (Not a _super great example, because there's presumably laws against selling your driver's license, but ignoring that - I think this argument stands...)
From a sibling comment group it sounds like this issue actually is a problem of the government lacking the hammer due to an extreme effort from lobbying... so hopefully WeWork abusing this system is the straw that breaks the camel's back and forces all the faux-small business real estate dealers to pay appropriate taxes.
This tax, which appears to be an effort to provide some relief to the victims of real estate owners that are gouging small business, is actually just benefiting those owners.
Doesn’t it stand to reason that the taxation authority should scale or become more efficient like any business when there is an increased demand for services?
We have here in Australia a perfect example of why this is an awful idea.
Our social security department equivalent is issuing "robo-debts" to people who've previously received various forms of social security payments, based of flawed algorithms using data of insufficient resolution to actually determine what somebody owed (or did not owe). They were matching tax office records of annual income, and foolishly assuming that figure could be accurately just divided by 26 to get an accurate fortnightly figure - then claiming people who'd been paid social security which would have been incorrect based on that flawed average owed the money back. And forcing the recipient to proved that debt was incorrect. Even when the recipients had provided fortnightly earnings reports already. And with the obvious-to-just-about-anyone reality that people on welfare do not in general have regular and secure salaries over the timeframe of years. If you are out of work for 3 months and claiming welfare, then stop claiming it when you get a job again - it's insane to send you a debt notice for the 3 months worth of welfare you claimed and were perfectly entitled to, just because the other 9 month of the year you were gainfully employed.
To me, this is exactly what I expect to happen when government "scales or becomes more efficient like any business". You get MBAs running projects like this, you get consultants bidding on the work, you get underpaid and over burdened developers writing code with poorly written requirements just deciding "I don't have a list of fortnightly income figures. Fuck it, I'll just divide this yearly figure by 26 and close this ticket."
This is the awful reality of the sort of perverse incentives that result from trying to run welafare or taxation "like any business". We (as society) need to be better than this.
> What you end up with is equivalent to a denial-of-service attack against rates authority staff. They're overwhelmed.
On the other side it provides pressure on tax authorities to finally digitize their processes and automate what's possible. Ideally, an application review should not be more than 10 or 15 minutes - clerk opens digital file, reviews attached floor plannings and previous tax filings/business plans (or the system automatically has the flag "this is a small business" attached), clicks on either approve or deny button, system automatically sends paperwork to the applicant.
The only way that forces authorities to modernize their processes is when the demand grows large enough that the ROI calculation proves it.
"clerk opens digital file, reviews attached floor plannings and previous tax filings/business plans (or the system automatically has the flag "this is a small business" attached), clicks on either approve or deny button, system automatically sends paperwork to the applicant."
Sounds almost exactly like the sort of comment that will emerge from a PHB when it is suggested that a proper business requirement spec and functional spec is needed.
I imagine the number of edge cases involved in"reviews attached floor plannings and previous tax filings/business plans" could be rather terrifying.
They also have to check what's happening in other authorities. From experience, there is no standardisation of anything, not of definitions, data structure, methods of data management. Government data systems are archaic, so doing those cross-authority tests to see whether business qualify for reliefs is real slow.
I'd love to see a standard schema for rates data, but that's unlikely.
The other day on software architecture thread someone mentioned how to solve a part of this problem: requirements on software architecture, which get used in bidding. Software companies are very unhappy about it, because it means they won't get to charge the government several hundred times for the same solution, but the result has a good chance to be interoperable with other systems under similar requirements.
A data scientist is a researcher who answers a research question using data, and can lead the development of the research process. They may design the methods to acquire primary or secondary sources of data that inform the research process, monitor and ensure ethical responsibilities, curate the research data and results, or communicate the process and results to stakeholders. Coding is incidental to that process, and it is possible to be a data scientist without programming at all.
The openness to the truth of a research answer is what is often lacking in much of tech-driven data science. Mostly, it sounds more like a statistician who codes, than a researcher who focuses on data-as-source.
Anyhow, the first module is complete, and I still have the rest of the 20-module course outline - which was aimed at public health professionals - and was thinking of crowd-funding each module, if anyone is interested? It's based on the Sloyd model of teaching, so each module is discrete, building on the previous module, and provides a functional and holistic understanding of the scientific method as it applies to data.
I'm curious about your opposition to paywalls. With journalists losing their jobs, and quality newspapers closing, what would your ideal means of both reading these stories, and funding the production of them, look like?
You've hit on a question that is extremely interesting and quite philosophical. Fundamentally - are professional journalists a good idea or a bad idea? Note that Hacker News is basically volunteer run with a thin layer of corporate control and good moderation, so in principle we might all be happy to live without articles by formal journalists appearing on the site - making do with blogs and suchlike.
It isn't at all obvious that the large centralised news media companies are a good idea; there aren't a lot of them (the Murdoch press owns a big chunk of the public discourse). I'd be happy to see them go mainly on political grounds.
There is a suspicion that the quality of information in news media articles is higher than word of mouth; but that is balanced by the knowledge that a lot of the information is manipulative by inclusion and omission [0]. There is no question that the media edifice supports the major political parties, so the demise of traditional news media might also destabilise the strong two-party-system that exists in America (and practically in my native Australia) by reducing the ability of different political groups to coordinate. People voting on issues that affect them rather than issues that the media think is important could very easily be a net gain.
As the internet became pervasive we discovered as a society how often the news media was just making up stories, and there is a lingering suspicion that most of the important issues aren't actually being covered. I rate the top issue facing society as energy security, and it doesn't get a lot of press in that form (it is tangentially covered under environmental politics).
The clearest negative is we benefit from having a mechanism to communicate political scandals to the voters. I have a lot of faith that an alternative that is as good as a media company exists, but I dunno what it would look like.
> Do you seriously think the thing keeping you from paying for this article is lack of anonymity?
First: I wrote about "a way to do micropayments completely anonymously" which is actually two things:
1. a way to do micropayments (this is currently quite hard)
2. a way to do this anonymoysly
And yes, I find it very alarming that there is no way to pay in the internet really anonymoysly (I come from Germany, where people still love to pay with cash also because cash is hard to track) - this is really an important reason I am rather hesitant to pay in the internet.
e.g. Some poor kid in Kenya googles info that could have life changing impact...and hits a paywall that demands more than he earns in a year.
The internet became great exactly because it's the wild west where crazy things like community driven wikipedia thrive.
It's not that I oppose the whole pay for quality directly (family members are journalists)...but rather that the internet has become a bit of a core pillar of human knowledge & we really can't afford that to end in a maze of corporate walled gardens - it'll crush the thing that makes it great.
>what would your ideal means of both reading these stories,
The internet was fine before paywalls - in fact it grew & thrived. The whole you have to pay or there is no quality content seems quite false to me.
This isn’t how it works though. I was in India recently and i found that NYT or WSJ didn’t have the 10 article limit that I’m usually accustomed to seeing.
>the internet was fine before paywalls
That is because people used to pay for quality content and the internet was just a medium to get more exposure. Now since the internet has matured and there is an abundance of information available for free, people have stopped paying for quality content.
I've filed over 1,600 FOI requests for commercial ratepayer data in the UK over the last 4 years, and I've seen some truly pathetic reasons for rejection of my requests. The worst are the ones claiming that such data would cause terrorism.
Usually, mentally ill people are outpatients of medical facilities. However, if they're not a danger to themselves or society, it's difficult to make a case that they should be imprisoned against their will (which is what it would amount to if one institutionalised a person indefinitely).
I'm not saying I know what the answer should be, and this sits on legally and ethically tricky ground all over the world. The mentally ill have been treated pretty badly through history, and I'm not sure that benign neglect is the worst of these options but I do think there should be some formal system of checking on them (informally, there are any number of NGOs and religious groups who tend to keep tabs on the homeless, funding permitting).
There's an idea by the writer, almost lost in the article, that I thought is brilliant:
"When he was in hospital without any documents or ID I came up with the idea of medical bracelets for homeless people. I bought about 100 waterproof USB wristbands which can hold important information and I've given away about 60 so far."
There are any number of people made homeless through mental illness. They are often lost in the system when they become critically ill, and such an identifier would help medical professionals to reunite these people with their families.
Couldn't the same thing be done by a wristband with just a shortened weblink. The advantage is you could update the website and the link could be engraved on the wristband.
I'd have thought a wristband would be too easy to damage/remove - especially if they become indicators of people in that kind of situation. Similarly I think things like tattoos or embedded chips are spectacularly bad ideas - for all manner of reasons.
You could make the wristband hard to accidentally remove, but if it is made out of a decent metal and engraved then it would not be hard to ensure that it survived.
Something like this needs to be voluntary - we really don’t want to be forcing vulnerable people to start wearing something they don’t want to.
I work with homeless people, people in precarious situations, people without ID, immigrants without papers, etc.
I've discussed this very concept multiple times, from multiple angles, with a few organisations.
This issue becomes a real issue of when the person becomes gravely ill, or dies. Most of the time, it's impossible to trace the person's history - contacting next of kin, working out their path until their demise.
This is a real problem to solve.
However, the practical aspects are that this device needs to be non-identifying, and needs also to be non-exploitable by third parties (in particular: police).
Many people without papers are already in a situation that's difficult enough as it is, but this would be made even more difficult by giving police / other authorities a tool to trace, track, and punish.
Likewise, many people in these situations do not WANT to be found, or do not WANT to carry papers.
The conclusion that I had come to would be that these devices are completely encrypted, and provide no form of external data (ID, etc); and a 'read only' industry facing interface would be exposed.
Services, such as hospitals, or indeed police, etc - could lodge requests to a system with this data. The system would register this information, but give nothing back.
The organisation trusted with this information (could be a recognised charity that works with homeless etc) - would be able to, if requested, or required, or at the person's death, be able to access this information.
The end result being, a person holding one of these cards would be able to have a medical history, and be able to build up a map of their lives.
Such things already exist: social security card, etc.
It's a tough problem to crack, once you start to consider the human element.
These are very real and very serious concerns for some homeless individuals. For others, not so much. I think it would be great if the system you describe were available. But I also see nothing wrong with trying to find something simple and easy that works in the here and now for some portion of the homeless population.
I was about to comment about the same thing, it's really brilliant since the medical professionals could also access their medical history in case they land up at a hospital, so that could potentially save lives for a few dollars.
My grandmother was an actress in the 1940s and we still have hers from then. They're genuinely hideous and terrifying-looking.
The long-term effect on her was that her tear-ducts stopped working. Many things back then, as now, that public figures had to do to remain employable had these horrible health effects.
Still, we get a cool souvenir and I'm genuinely pleased to see this clip of the things being made.
