Lawrence Lessig (Harvard law professor famous for fighting for sane copyright law) does a great presentation on the root cause of Americas problems. He also ran for president in 2016.

It can be watched here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJy8vTu66tE

The short version is that to win primaries you need money. Money mainly comes from corporations and rich people. Taking money from corporations and rich people creates a relationship where you have some loyalty to them or they can punish you if you don't act how they want. Thus the primary corrupting force in America is pro-corruption campaign finance laws.

The test for democracy is whether elected politicians pass legislation that the public at large wishes to be passed. Our very own Princeton did a study to answer this question.

The key finding: “The preferences of the average American appear to have only a miniscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.”[1]

In a very real, non hyperbolic sense we are in a plutocracy where money rules. We are not a democracy due chiefly to our campaign finance laws.

Here is a campaign that aims to work on this: https://act.represent.us/sign/problempoll-fba/

[1] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...

I have grown to hate edgy comments that are like "Well actually now it is just a state's issue and Roe v Wade was poorly decided!".

You're not edgy & insightful. The impact of this decision isn't just pushing pieces around a chess board. It's scared women & girls around the country, it's women dying who wouldn't have otherwise.

Free speech for me but not for thee.

That's one reason for sure, but even if my house was a 10 minute walk from the office, I'd still rather only go in for meetings. At home I have my own private office with a nice view. I have a nice set of speakers and can play any music I like. If I want to go for a walk, I'm in a quiet suburban neighborhood with hiking trails nearby. The kitchen is always stocked with snacks I like plus freshly prepared healthy lunches (prepared either by myself or my wife). My dog spends most of the day in the office with me.

At the "new" office, no one has an assigned desk, so I have to take everything I need with me to my desk and pack it up at the end of the day. My company is distributed so I spend half the day on zoom meetings with people in other offices... and even with relatively few people in the office it's already hard to book a room for a meeting. There's enough background noise in the open office that I keep headphones on most of the time while I'm at my desk. We do get free lunches at the office which is a nice perk, but food is prepared off-site, so menus tend to be designed around food that stands up to this model of food that can be prepared hours ahead of time.

My commute is less than 30 minutes (one-way) and is a pretty pleasant drive.... it takes an hour out of my day, but it's not the primary reason I don't want to go to the office.

I think a lot of people give to philanthropy just purely for recognition that philanthropy unique provides.

I think it'd be an interesting experiment to celebrate the highest tax payers the same way we celebrate those in the Forbes 500 with magazine covers and the way non-profits celebrate their biggest donors with gala dinners.

Celebrating tax contributions and rewarding the contributor (on an opt in basis) could be hugely beneficial for certain types of wealthy individuals. Often times wealthy people enjoy being on these lists as it helps their business, PR, etc. in addition to recognition.

I think it would lead to healthier discourse as the tax contributor would be effectively be saying - of all the philanthropic causes I could support, I am purposely choosing to give up that right and instead contribute it via taxes to my country because I believe in its people to vote intelligently and the elected politicians to act in the best interests of those people.

Those people have to be (labelled) smart, don’t they?

I’ve noticed this as a very American thing to say on the lines of “I’m super excited to be here” :-)

One of my concerns as someone who is part of the tech community is the innovation delusion. Many of us are focused on "magic pill" technology solutions to get us out of this. Things like fusion, carbon capture, electric cars, etc... As someone with an engineering background, I've been guilty of this type of thinking too. Whenever I encounter a problem I think about how I could apply technology to solve it. However, I think it's a bad idea to gamble our future on the hope that unproven technologies will save us from this disaster. We consume so much more than we need to have a good life. I believe we should drastically cut back consumption now and then let the technologies that may allow us to consume more prove themselves before we scale back up. But like many things, it's easy to pander with innovating our way out of this problem. It's more convenient for people to not have to change when they can buy into greenwashed technology ideas. The saddest part to me is that much of our excess consumption isn't even making us happier. Seems to be making us unhappy, really.

So many people offering explanations, and yet not a single one of them answers the OP's question. If you're upset that Intuit is engaging in lobbying (as you should be!), that might be an appropriate answer for a different question (eg: why doesn't the IRS just send us their own reports for us to approve?). Again, I am not defending Intuit's involvement in politics, but that's not the answer to the dark patterns question - let me try to answer that specific question:

For years, I kept experimenting with different approaches to filing my taxes. I started out with TurboTax, and being so painfully aware of their bad reputation, I kept trying out every alternative I could think of - including their biggest competitor TaxAct and three different tax firms. After all that work, I am back to using TurboTax. Obviously, it was not an easy decision given how hard I tried to avoid that path, and no, I didn't return to TurboTax because I got tricked by one of their dark patterns.

The simple answer for why the tax firms didn't work out is that the work they required in their onboarding equaled or exceeded the amount of work it would have taken me to do the whole thing in TurboTax myself. Mind you, this is just the onboarding piece - not including the emails and calls leading up to the onboarding and following the onboarding.

The least sophisticated firm just said: send us everything in a zip file. That sounded appealing until they started following up with a million questions. The medium-sophisticated firm (which was the most painful of all of them) asked me to use their web app which was essentially TurboTax except that the questions were incredibly confusing so that I had to look up a ton of stuff just to make sure I was submitting the right thing. The third firm used a better web app, but it was still the same thing - the onboarding was essentially the same as just using TurboTax.

The obvious added value with tax firms is that they might catch something that you would have done wrong without their assistance, but these days TurboTax does offer the same service as well (and no, I never received some valuable piece of advice that justified the additional time and effort of working with a tax firm).

TaxAct is not bad, and would be my close second preference. In fact, they actually cover more niche cases (eg: filing certain types of corporate taxes). Even so, their UI/UX is only almost as good as TurboTax but not quite. As unpopular as TurboTax might be in this community, I think we can take a moment and appreciate their PM+UI/UX team, who used some pretty delightful copy and super slick design to turn an awful task into a rather pleasant experience.

And that's the ultimate answer to the OP's question as I see it... most people who are aware of the dark patterns in TurboTax know that it is not the cheapest way to file, but it's certainly not the most expensive either - and if you're looking for the easiest-to-use and fastest method to get the tax report checked off your list, then it's hard to find a better solution (granted, partially because they are helping create the world we live in).