Disclaimer: I've grown tomatoes, strawberries and weed indoors with artificial lighting.
As long as there is no shocking event like global drought or famine I do not think vertical farming or indoor farming will be a norm anytime soon as it takes massive, massive amount of energy/capital.
That being said, the moment we figure out using fusion energy, conventional farming will most probably vanish.
Also R&D on agriculture robots is a nice side perk, there is only so much to automate in agriculture & horticulture.
I can't listen to your podcast right now, but solar panels are more efficient than photosynthesis, and you can produce the wavelength of light needed for plants by LEDs using a fraction of that power, so what makes you say that the solar farm that powers a vertical farm will always take up more space than the vertical farm saves?
You're right, I was generalising a bit in my above comment. The wavelength - focusing argument actually comes up in the podcast and we agree it might possibly offer a way out of the energy trap.
Someone claimed a while back most of these vertical farms would switch to growing weed once it became legal in the state(s) they have farms.
I’m not sure if any other crop beside weed would turn a significant profit. You might be able to get a government contract to grow some other controlled substance and turn a small profit.
The only other way it would work would be if it was a co-op owned by residents or subsidized by the local government.
The only pressure to grow weed inside is quality but premium flower is losing market share quickly. Every extracted product (vapes, edibles, drinks, topicals) is created from biomass which is best grown outdoors for the cheapest price.
There also isn't really that much weed needed as people think. Outdoors you can get roughly ~1,500lbs per acre of dried flower. In Colorado 2017, roughly 20,000lbs of cannabis was consumed per month. If you project based on population, the whole USA only needs about 7,000 acres harvested, annually. Maybe they'll be some loss so let's say 15,000 acres would safely cover it. In the USA, there's over 90,000,000 acres of corn grown a year. Cannabis is actually a very small market from the farming side and the indoor grows will very much be a niche market.
As for the general economics, vertical farming will never make sense until either the underlying economics of farming change (maybe from climate change) or energy becomes free.
Presumably the demand for weed is already being met (legally or not). Is there evidence that legalization prompts a large increase in demand? Just thinking about myself, I did not use weed when it was illegal, and legalization has not changed that.
Just 2 hours ago I tried Nvidia's Geforce Now on a high end PC with 50 Mbit internet (wifi). Terrible, terrible experience. There many things for them to figure out if they want my money.
There are "tax help" open source programs out there, but online filing (which is the main goal here) is impossible without a corporation working with the IRS to set up access, negotiate protocols, and such.
There's no open standard/API/infrastructure or protocol for online filing, so the only option for an open source program to help with that is "print out the whole thing and send it in" which is usually a lot more trouble (more expensive in time and money) than just paying Turbotax or similar services.
Turbotax and the rest of the tax prep industry have lobbied for years to prevent easy/free options for citizens to file taxes... it isn't just them preventing other companies from building products to do it, they're suppressing all competition and modernization, basically anything that would threaten the money they get from charging people to prep taxes.
At this point the entire system is set up with high barriers to entry, and open source solutions/free software don't typically work well in that kind of setting.
Essentially, no open source program has any chance of facilitating online filing in the US because of corruption in the US government.
> There's no open standard/API/infrastructure or protocol for online filing, so the only option for an open source program to help with that is "print out the whole thing and send it in" which is usually a lot more trouble (more expensive in time and money) than just paying Turbotax or similar services.
That is the least burdensome part of the process, to me. In fact I used to do that from H&R Block Tax Cut back when there was an additional charge for e-file.
Typically open source projects come from two places; a company needs software, or an individual thinks writing it would be fun or at least save them time. Preparing individual tax returns falls into neither category; companies have no interest in individual tax returns (they don't pay that kind of tax), and individuals only have to do it once a year so it's not time-efficient to write a program to do it.
The project is not easy. It requires carefully reading tax codes and implementing them, handling presumably thousands of explicit legal requirements plus whatever edge cases exist that may or may not be explicit in the law. Not to mention keeping up with annual changes. If you screw it up, whether or not you are legally liable, people are probably coming after you anyway. And the support nightmare...
That said, I think a programming-languages approach might be a good one to try to execute on this. Keeping the source code as close to the tax code as possible seems the only way to stay sane with respect to long-term maintenance.
It isn't the software that is complicated, it's the intricate knowledge of the tax laws at the Federal and state level that goes behind building it. If you can find a team of lawyers and tax accountants willing to work on it for free (and update it every year) then building something like TurboTax wouldn't be too difficult.
Open source software can be paid for. With a bit of funding, I bet an OSS-clone of TT could be produced and the organization can host and offer e-filing for a nominal fee.
I think the IRS will actually pay a service fee to small companies that file the free federal returns for individuals.
The exact conditions that would enable a simple FOSS tax software or portal is what TurboTax has been lobbying to make sure stays broken and can't easily exist.
Also, taxes in the US are really complicated, and while our governments know how much we owe, the burden of determination and filing is placed wholly on the citizen.
Should we be able to log in to our IRS profile page and track and manage our taxes ourselves throughout the year? Yes. Is this techically possible today? Also yes. Would this make TurboTax and some other bloodsucking middlemen less TurboRich?
I'm a TurboTax user myself (b/c I almost always procrastinate to the last day/week), but my guess is because tax forms and rules change every year. Maybe the general situation for free filers is easy enough to code for, though? Though one of Turbotax's purported features is that it'll tell you how easy/complex your taxes can or should be, depending on your situation.
Also, one of TurboTax's features is e-filing. Maybe there are free e-file alternatives (as in free, with no upsell or strings-attached whatsoever), but it seems you have to be an "authorized IRS e-file provider" to do this, i.e. there's not a developer API: https://www.irs.gov/filing/e-file-options
There are dozens of alternatives. However, tax prep software needs to be certified for correctness, and that's expensive and onerous. This is made harder due to the many many different tax jurisdictions in the US.
There are...you can download any tax form for free and fill it in by hand or in a PDF program.
You will see articles regularly attacking TurboTax because SV has been wildly unsuccessful in producing a startup that can compete with TurboTax, so instead a lot of effort is spent attacking them in the media.
Google, Microsoft, Facebook all spend significantly more on lobbying to ensure market hegemony. Don't be surprised at the pattern, attack TurboTax in the media, then up pops a new startup that will disrupt the industry. Rinse and repeat.
I disagree with this simply because the idea that competition exists or could exist is not an excuse for the system to function the way it does.
There are new players in the space, like CreditKarma. Many competitors offer more features for free than Intuit as well. But that doesn’t mean we should have to rely on private companies (who are data hoarding) to file our taxes. That doesn’t mean that free fillable forms need to be unnecessarily more difficult to use than commercial solutions.
In reality, the IRS already has all the relevant forms reported to them. For most people the IRS could send a tax form already filed out to read, verify, and return. For business owners and other more complex situations, these are still the same people who are already hiring a tax accountant and are probably skipping TurboTax as it is.
In other words, commercial tax preparation software for most users is filling an artificial need that only exists because the government has been lobbied not to provide the (basic) service itself.
> That doesn’t mean that free fillable forms need to be unnecessarily more difficult to use than commercial solutions.
They aren't. The IRS form is the exact for completed by TurboTax or any other accountant/service provider. The IRS only accepts their own forms.
>For most people the IRS could send a tax form already filed out to read, verify, and return.
Thats what is really being asked...the Government to do tax returns for you for free. Even if TurboTax and accountants weren't lobbying the Government not to do taxpayers tax returns for them for free, its a major jump to say the government/IRS would unilaterally begin doing this for taxpayers as a free service.
Telling us that the end result of the form is the same is meaningless. You don’t fill out the form manually on TurboTax. It automatically imports W2 information, it asks layperson’s questions, and generates the final form.
If you do this yourself, it’s far more time consuming.
I don’t understand why you think it’s a major jump for the IRS to provide this service. Other countries already do this. Other federal agencies also provide complex web services like My Social Security and Healthcare.gov.
The IRS already has your W2 and 1099 data. The IRS already knows when you make a mistake, automatically, often live as you e-file. I have had e-files rejected instantly due to mistakes. They clearly already know how much I’m supposed to owe them.
Well, the government was clearly interested in providing free online filing, back around 2002. But they were lobbied out of the idea by Intuit and a few other companies in the tax prep space.
I can just imagine the YouTube advertising campaign...
> Do you hate doing you taxes? Try Simple, we made it easy! Just put in a few personal details and we'll take care of all the rest. We'll download your W2 information from your employer and send it to the IRS. With our Simple Guarantee, you can feel confident that your return will be correct.
Or maybe we could call it Tophat. That's a good tax software name.
I was at the bottom of Africa last month with unstable internet connection barely faster than dial-up. HN was the only site I could connect before getting timeouts and bs.
I get one of your points, that some sites should work in the bottom of Africa. But there is a counter-point here, no? Why should a site be developed for the worst of connections out there? Is there a middle point here?
