Werd I/O

It turns out that Cheltenham Township, the municipality where I live across the northern Philadelphia border, incurs an extra earned income tax on top of the state and federal taxes that I’m used to paying. This would have been fine if I’d had any idea that such a tax existed, or if it had been automatically deducted from my payroll (everyone I got a paycheck from in 2022 used Justworks), or if Turbotax had let me know that this was something I needed to do. As it turned out, I didn’t have any idea until I got a letter in the mail this morning, it wasn’t deducted from my payroll, and Turbotax gave me the impression that I was done with my taxes, so I was inadvertently delinquent on my taxes until I paid them and the associated late fees tonight.

This isn’t, by the way, a post about being mad about paying tax! I like taxes. I want to pay for great community infrastructure like public schools, community fire departments, integrated public transit, and so on. I want those things to work when I pay for them, but I’m delighted to do so. (Please also let me pay for single-payer healthcare. I’m begging you.)

Also worth saying: I work in a well-paying industry and should pay tax at a higher rate than people who earn less than me. I welcome this with open arms. Tax me well! And then use that money to pay for vital infrastructure for my whole community.

Here’s what I don’t want: to not pay my taxes because I didn’t know they existed and didn’t know to look for extra earned income taxes. That doesn’t feel good.

What also doesn’t feel good: tax collection in Cheltenham has, for some reason, been outsourced to a private company called Berkheimer Tax Innovations, which has a website that looks like it was built in Microsoft Frontpage in 1998, which you appear to be forced to use to file those taxes if you want to do it online. They also have an app — Berkapp — which lets you e-file by writing out your tax return by hand and then taking a picture of it.

It’s baffling to me that a local government should outsource its tax collection to a private company in this way — particularly one that provides such a bad service at the taxpayer side. Presumably they have a hefty contract with the township, or perhaps even a cut of transmitted funds, which could have been better used on a more open system. Again, I’m not objecting to the taxes themselves, but I’m extremely grumpy about how I was notified, how I had to file them, and the arrangement underlying how they are collected and paid. (I’ve come to understand that the county chooses this arrangement, even though the county itself does not levy these taxes. What?!)

What I’d love to see: a well-designed local government portal that lets me log in, see all my local services and responsibilities, and notifies me of everything I need to know about living here as it comes up. I’d love the software and infrastructure to be owned and developed by the township, or more likely as an open source endeavor by an alliance of townships, rather than outsourced. Give me some Code for America-influenced 21st century public service web software. Let me pay any fees — earned income taxes, trash pickup, whatever — straight from the portal. Let me volunteer from there, too. A real community hub.

Done well, this could be less expensive than private contracts to weird third-party companies with terrible websites. It could be more open and participative, and actually involve civic participation in its code from people who live here. It could drive awareness and ownership and help build local skills.

Instead, we got … whatever the hell this is. It’s incredibly broken. And surely someone at the township has got to know how terrible it is.

Today was my best writing day in a while. I’m in awe of writers like Lancali who blithely post about hitting nearly 6000 words in a day. That is not me. That is very far from being me.

If I can hit a four figure word count, I consider it a pretty good writing day. I don’t do it every day. Some days, I stare at the screen and make a bit of a sad face and write 250 at best. But the upshot is that there is forward motion, and I haven’t set the whole thing on fire yet, and those two things are all I really want out of the project right now. All else being equal, I will have produced a full-length manuscript this year — a full-length story — and I can’t ask for more than that.

I don’t have an editor, or an agent, or a publisher, or a publicist, or any of those things. But those aren’t what I need right now. Those things are like drawing the logo before you’ve written the software. The main thing is to write. And that’s what I’m doing.

One day, I hope you’ll read it. But right now, it’s all for me.

Update: Zoom has clarified its position in a new blog post which makes it clear that AI features are, in fact, opt-in.

Zoom’s terms of service now allow meeting content to be used to train AI, without opt-out:

What raises alarm is the explicit mention of the company's right to use this data for machine learning and artificial intelligence, including training and tuning of algorithms and models. This effectively allows Zoom to train its AI on customer content without providing an opt-out option, a decision that is likely to spark significant debate about user privacy and consent.

Google Meet also appears to train AI on meeting content. I would guess that virtually every newsroom in the country uses a videoconferencing solution that allows the content of customer calls to be used to train AI.

This blanket approval also means that this customer data may be available within a model somewhere (albeit not publicly) to be perused, including sensitive information about ongoing investigations and reporting on abuse of power.

Platforms like Wire may be more secure. At any rate, anyone discussing sensitive information may wish to find a solution beyond the usual suspects.