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You have no idea what you are talking about. Won’t be much burden on business? If you have physical shipping addresses, it is a bit easier, but what if you sell

You have no idea what you are talking about. Won’t be much burden on business? If you have physical shipping addresses, it is a bit easier, but what if you sell virtual goods/services? Billing address? But that doesn’t actually have anything to do where the person is actually buying the product. If I go to a masseuse in California but my credit card has a Texas billing address, I am still charged California taxes. So the precedent of using billing address for tax calculation is a bit ridiculous and innaccurate. What if I have a foreign billing address? So do we use IP address? My IP address routinely has me in the wrong city and sometimes wrong region. When I lived near Avignon, France, my IP would always show me as being in Corsica. Then there is VPN that could make us all in Oregon and avoid taxes completely. Oregon-as-a-Service. Engineers are clever. Sure that might be true, but now that cleverness is going to be wasted building tax compliance solutions which aren’t even close to being “not much of a burden.”

seibelj 8y ago
If the purchaser has an address in an area with taxes, you then pay it. If they do some weird VPN workaround and billing address in the Cayman Islands, then you don't pay the taxes. It's self compliance. We sent men on the moon in 1969, this isn't rocket science to calculate a tax bill.
- throwawayjava 8y ago
  It's really interesting to think about this. Very different types of complexity. The smallest possible correct program implementing a tax calculator is going to be a LOT bigger than the smallest possible correct program for controlling a 60's era manned flight to the moon. The latter is more complex in other ways, of course. Complexity can be "deep" or "wide". software for rockets is "deep and thin complexity", but calculating hyper-local minimal tax bills is extreme "wide and shallow complexity".
msbarnett 8y ago
> Engineers are clever. Sure that might be true, but now that cleverness is going to be wasted building tax compliance solutions which aren’t even close to being “not much of a burden. Orrrrr a couple of companies will step into this problem space, solve it, and everyone will offload their tax compliance to those companies, in exactly the same way that we don't all waste 1,000,000 engineering hours on the arcana of banking and credit card networks and just offload that concern to payment gateways with nice APIs. This is already the way it works in most of the world. HN is showing its provincialism by convincing themselves this is some kind of impossible-to-solve problem.

seibelj 8y ago

If the purchaser has an address in an area with taxes, you then pay it. If they do some weird VPN workaround and billing address in the Cayman Islands, then you don't pay the taxes. It's self compliance. We sent men on the moon in 1969, this isn't rocket science to calculate a tax bill.

throwawayjava 8y ago
It's really interesting to think about this. Very different types of complexity. The smallest possible correct program implementing a tax calculator is going to be a LOT bigger than the smallest possible correct program for controlling a 60's era manned flight to the moon. The latter is more complex in other ways, of course. Complexity can be "deep" or "wide". software for rockets is "deep and thin complexity", but calculating hyper-local minimal tax bills is extreme "wide and shallow complexity".

msbarnett 8y ago

> Engineers are clever. Sure that might be true, but now that cleverness is going to be wasted building tax compliance solutions which aren’t even close to being “not much of a burden. Orrrrr a couple of companies will step into this problem space, solve it, and everyone will offload their tax compliance to those companies, in exactly the same way that we don't all waste 1,000,000 engineering hours on the arcana of banking and credit card networks and just offload that concern to payment gateways with nice APIs. This is already the way it works in most of the world. HN is showing its provincialism by convincing themselves this is some kind of impossible-to-solve problem.