Damian Kimmelman

Solving your own problem is a tried and true formula underneath the origin of many successful companies / ideas.

The IRS already has every number it needs to file your taxes for you. It has your W-2. It has your 1099s. It has your bank interest. It has your mortgage interest. It has everything. In most developed countries, the government fills out your tax return and sends it to you for review. You confirm or adjust. It takes minutes. It costs nothing. In the United States, you are required to calculate numbers the government already knows, report them back to the government on forms the government designed, using software sold to you by private companies that spent decades lobbying to keep it this way. Intuit, the company that makes TurboTax, spent $3.72 million on federal lobbying in 2024, a record for the company. In the first quarter of 2025, they spent another $1.2 million, their largest quarterly spend ever. They also donated $1 million to Trump's inauguration. Their target: killing the IRS Direct File program, a free tool that launched in 2024 and allowed millions of Americans in 25 states to file directly with the IRS at zero cost. It worked. The program is being shut down. For more than 20 years, Intuit has waged what ProPublica described as a "sophisticated, sometimes covert war" to prevent the government from making tax filing free. Internal company presentations used the term "encroachment" to describe any government initiative that would make filing easier. The IRS once agreed not to develop its own filing system as long as private companies offered a free option for simple returns. Intuit then hid its free filing page from search engines using HTML code that blocked Google from indexing it. The FTC sued Intuit for this practice. Intuit settled with 50 state attorneys general for $141 million after being found to have steered eligible taxpayers away from free options and into paid products. A simulated filing by Senator Warren's office found that a taxpayer who qualified for free filing would end up paying $128 through TurboTax after being upsold multiple times during the process. The same filing through Direct File: $0. Americans spend approximately $35 billion per year on tax preparation services. Intuit alone generates over $16 billion in annual revenue, with its consumer tax division representing the largest segment. Intuit (INTU) trades at roughly 35x forward earnings with 80%+ gross margins on its consumer tax products. Revenue has grown at approximately 13% annually. The tax prep business is a recurring annual obligation that every American adult must fulfill. The addressable market doesn't shrink. Complexity in the tax code creates demand. Lobbying against simplification protects the moat. The stock has compounded at approximately 20% annually over the past decade. I'm not recommending Intuit as an investment. I'm pointing out that the system you find frustrating every April exists because it's extraordinarily profitable for the companies that maintain it. And they've been paying to keep it that way for twenty years. I'm hosting a once in a lifetime webinar where I go over the exact things I know as a former banker and world class investor. It's 100% free to join, sign up with the link in my bio.

@nnnnicholas @Noahbolanowski You made my day

@Noahbolanowski pretentious, tired, and painfully self-serious how many times must artists recycle the same boring moralism and vapid existentialism?

Does a virtual dog 'feel' the same affective gesture — regardless if provided by human or machine? In recreating this action mechanically, the artist forces the viewer to consider the breadth of our capacity to project what we desire, onto lines of code.

@a16z meanwhile half the builders are still stuck in planning mode

.@gabriel1 learned to code on chatgpt and then became a researcher at OpenAI. Seriously one of the best interviews on how to learn.

New Yorkers need affordable, reliable, clean energy. Nuclear is how we make that happen.

the conspiracy theory I most strongly believe is that rentech discovered LLMs in the 90s and used them to dominate markets for 20 years+ before everyone else stumbled onto them for language generation Peter Brown and Ilya both had Geoff Hinton as their PhD advisor.

🤣🤣🤣

It’s almost as if Gerard Schroeder was being paid by the Russians for this to happen.

What @Tim_Walz did was most likely not fraud, it’s something more pervasive: incompetence. Our representative system has a core fundamental problem that we need to fix which is negative selection bias. We elect people who are great at getting elected not at governing.

What nobody seems to be talking about: our political system has massive adverse selection bias. The people who rise to the top are great at getting elected, great at fundraising, great at speaking to the fringe, but generally miserable at actually running the country.

This is perhaps the best produce YouTube video I have ever seen $6 Michelin Stock in 60 Minutes (Costco Hack) youtu.be/3k20zFlbFfE?si… via @YouTube

ChatGPT: “Based on what you know about me, make a website with @Replit”

If you believe free speech is for you but not your political opponents, you're illiberal. If no contrary evidence could change your beliefs, you're a fundamentalist. If you believe the state should punish those with contrary views, you're a totalitarian. If you believe political opponents should be punished with violence or death, you're a terrorist.

This is a great step forward in the right direction. We need abundant cheap baseload energy to fix the economy

Why is this warmonger being platformed John Bolton: “Trump is on a downhill slope” youtube.com/shorts/-VUmPlT… via @YouTub

If the UK is to thrive in the era of AI, we need to fix two things; housing and energy. Nuclear must play a big part in that.

Globalization is so beautiful