

A taxing algorithm - breadbox
http://bit-player.org/2015/a-taxing-algorithm

======
andy_ppp
Accountancy is largely (to paraphrase Keynes) moving rocks from one place to
another. He was right Keynes, essentially for economies to continue growing
indefinitely most jobs have to be bullshit jobs.

~~~
danuker
I only agree with the first sentence. The economy can grow significantly by
discovering new things to do, and by discovering new ways to do old things.

------
transfire
And to think, we threw the tea in the harbor for a mere stamp tax.

~~~
protomyth
When the primary way politicians reward or punish groups is the tax system,
you get foolish stuff like this.

------
marssaxman
The extra accounting work required in order to deal with taxes actually forms
a significant deterrent to doing freelance work on the side. Every time
someone asks if I'd be interested in a project, I have to stop and think: is
this worth dealing with Form 1099 and Schedule C and keeping track of business
expenses and all that bullshit? Generally the answer is no: a job big enough
that I can charge enough to justify the extra hassle is generally too big to
fit in the amount of free time I'm willing to divert from travel and hobby
projects.

Of course doing just one contract project in a given year means I'm screwed
come next April 15th, and knowing that drops the cost of entry for other
projects; but I do wonder how much extra liquidity there might be in the
market for programming services if the IRS didn't demand such a hefty
commitment to paperwork.

------
phreeza
This is really more of a graphical representation of a formula. It contains
conditionals of sorts (in the form of the min operator), but no recursion,
iteration or other sort of control structure.

~~~
andrepd
"In mathematics and computer science, an algorithm [...] is a self-contained
step-by-step set of operations to be performed." -Wikipedia

It's a detailed recipe to perform a task, so it's an algorithm.

------
ajanuary
I think the diagram must be slightly incorrect, else there are some odd bits.

* 20 is copied into 22 unchanged * 20 = min(min(14, 15), 14) - min(14, 15), which all simplifies to 0

------
xpan
Page not found

