Irish engineer living in the US, by way of France. Former RedBrick, ILUG, ALDIL, GNOME Foundation, Red Hat. Currently Developer Relations at Ampere Computing.
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Published at
2026-08-04T02:28:17Z Event JSON
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Last Notes npub1er670duvd3spx2hy6xuxp0lfrmeucmfeaq8gqrcf8rf4ec0peelqm5n092 Dave Neary I don't think it will happen - I'm expecting a prominent South Carolinian to become a candidate and win handily - I thought maybe Nikki Haley, but she has apparently ruled herself out. npub1er670duvd3spx2hy6xuxp0lfrmeucmfeaq8gqrcf8rf4ec0peelqm5n092 Dave Neary I think this is where you're going, but it's striking that through successive governments since 1980, freedom and justice have been diminishing in this country. npub1er670duvd3spx2hy6xuxp0lfrmeucmfeaq8gqrcf8rf4ec0peelqm5n092 Dave Neary You're arguing that creating a tax system that increases the costs of running a taxi and makes taxis more expensive will discourage cars and encourage the use of public transport. You might be right - but if public transport does not fill the need (eg. if the quantity/quality/reliability of public transport is poor), all you will do is deprive people who would otherwise do that job of a livelihood and create a shortage of taxis. npub1er670duvd3spx2hy6xuxp0lfrmeucmfeaq8gqrcf8rf4ec0peelqm5n092 Dave Neary 3. Creation of incentives/expression of values - this is what you're alluding to. We tax tobacco and alcohol sales because as a society we see those as bad and want to discourage them. We subsidize behaviour that we want to encourage (spending on energy efficient homes or EVs over ICE vehicles). npub1er670duvd3spx2hy6xuxp0lfrmeucmfeaq8gqrcf8rf4ec0peelqm5n092 Dave Neary We hit on a key point - fiscal policy is about a few different things: npub1er670duvd3spx2hy6xuxp0lfrmeucmfeaq8gqrcf8rf4ec0peelqm5n092 Dave Neary So people driving taxis, small coaches (under 15 people), Uber Eats/Door dash vehicles cannot deduct the costs of running their vehicles or the acquisition cost? Seems wrong. npub1er670duvd3spx2hy6xuxp0lfrmeucmfeaq8gqrcf8rf4ec0peelqm5n092 Dave Neary The IRS could behave like health insurance companies and set limits on how much you can deduct for different things - so much for vehicle leasing or purchase, so much per mile for gas, etc. But that becomes an anto-business tax policy very quickly & easily and adds massive filing burdens for SMBs. npub1er670duvd3spx2hy6xuxp0lfrmeucmfeaq8gqrcf8rf4ec0peelqm5n092 Dave Neary Every country has rules about what you can claim as legitimate business expenses - clearly gas and diesel for delivery vehicles and work vans is a legitimate business expense, but things like nice trucks, computers, etc. are often fully deduced from the gross while the company could fulfill the functional need with something cheaper. npub1er670duvd3spx2hy6xuxp0lfrmeucmfeaq8gqrcf8rf4ec0peelqm5n092 Dave Neary Businesses have costs, and those costs of doing business are deduced from gross revenue - taxes are paid on profits, not revenues. Business owners sometimes spend money from their profits on nice things that they don't strictly need, in order to reduce taxable profits, as long as they can claim the nice things as legitimate business expenses. npub1er670duvd3spx2hy6xuxp0lfrmeucmfeaq8gqrcf8rf4ec0peelqm5n092 Dave Neary I think they're legal in the EU. Expensive to fill up, heavily taxed, difficult to park, a bit wide for the roads, but street legal. npub1er670duvd3spx2hy6xuxp0lfrmeucmfeaq8gqrcf8rf4ec0peelqm5n092 Dave Neary I miss the decentralized world. We used to have individual WordPress powered blogs, with aggregators of our favorite content allowing us to filter. Now we have Medium, LinkedIn, and Facebook posts that get lost in a flood of algorithm-dominated posts. I've debated restarting a personal blog. But I don't know how I would get people to read it. Are RSS, Atom, and aggregators still a thing? npub1er670duvd3spx2hy6xuxp0lfrmeucmfeaq8gqrcf8rf4ec0peelqm5n092 Dave Neary That said, the Irish government seems to have fully embraced a corporatocracy identity at this point, and has too much to lose in changing it. The election of people like Mary Robinson, Michel D, and Catherine Connolly as President in our only nationwide election, and the steady state of 10-20 independent TDA over the past 20 years, suggests that the Irish public is not aligned with that. npub1er670duvd3spx2hy6xuxp0lfrmeucmfeaq8gqrcf8rf4ec0peelqm5n092 Dave Neary You're not wrong. At the time it felt like the EU dictating domestic policy - the kind of thing Farage and his ilk take as evidence of EU intrusion on national sovereignty. npub1er670duvd3spx2hy6xuxp0lfrmeucmfeaq8gqrcf8rf4ec0peelqm5n092 Dave Neary That's not how the Irish government would characterize it - the EU found that Ireland's tax code was in breach of EU competition rules, and their treaty commitments. They were ordered to collect taxes that they had not asked for. npub1er670duvd3spx2hy6xuxp0lfrmeucmfeaq8gqrcf8rf4ec0peelqm5n092 Dave Neary This wasn't the only thing they did. They made college free to ensure a well educated young professional class, and invested in fiber optics for telecommunications backbone. They were also getting a lot of EU Development Funds to build roads, ports, and airports, and renovate inner cities. And Michael D. Higgins, as Minister for Culture and the Gaeltacht gave sweetheart deals to movie studios for movies like Braveheart and Saving Private Ryan to raise Ireland's profile. npub1er670duvd3spx2hy6xuxp0lfrmeucmfeaq8gqrcf8rf4ec0peelqm5n092 Dave Neary What did I miss? Who called attention to something they would rather have kept quiet? npub1er670duvd3spx2hy6xuxp0lfrmeucmfeaq8gqrcf8rf4ec0peelqm5n092 Dave Neary The 2017 paper @npub1fdr…lvhs refers to, I believe, was also cited in @npub1pfd…9dtt's book "They Do Not Represent Us" - this is a pretty widely studied thing! We should be more outraged about this, but the outrage is starting to show. https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/28/mamdani/ npub1er670duvd3spx2hy6xuxp0lfrmeucmfeaq8gqrcf8rf4ec0peelqm5n092 Dave Neary Would you recommend it? I quite liked "The Obstacle is the Way", which refers to it extensively. npub1er670duvd3spx2hy6xuxp0lfrmeucmfeaq8gqrcf8rf4ec0peelqm5n092 Dave Neary Do you still have the hat too? npub1er670duvd3spx2hy6xuxp0lfrmeucmfeaq8gqrcf8rf4ec0peelqm5n092 Dave Neary @npub1m7m…2e7k I came across this photo of you from a couple of years ago! (Linuxdays.ch 2007) npub1er670duvd3spx2hy6xuxp0lfrmeucmfeaq8gqrcf8rf4ec0peelqm5n092 Dave Neary Michelle Obama is killing it. "Who's going to tell him, maybe this job he is trying to get is one of those Black jobs?" Oh. My. God. 👏
