3 ms·

It's not lost. Since it is legal to begin with then the government cannot lay claim to it anyways.

• sophacles 16y ago
  Thought experiment time: Say you have created a site -- one that sells goods and services. You have written a bunch of code, and leveraged libraries and other components for the rest. Now, say, if I put certain values into the forms on your site, I get your services and goods for free or extremely reduced costs. Say that value looked something like this: sophacles'; insert into discounts (code, percent_off) values ("sophaclesmagic", 100); for my name, and I put sophaclesmagic as my discount code. Do you consider this acceptable? Your code allowed it. It's not like I would be doing anything so crass as stealing, you can't claim I broke rules. I just did something you allowed. Or perhaps would you try to get "your lost money" anyway, as the code that allowed it "wasn't perfect, but obviously not what you intended". How is this not basically the same thing as the laws?
  • hackinthebochs 16y ago
    Exactly. Lawyering around paying your intended tax rate is no different than hacking a system. You're using the rules of the system to circumvent "intent" of it. Yet hacking is seen as morally wrong and dodging taxes is perfectly fine. Maybe we should just make a law making it illegal to dodge your intended tax rate, just as there are laws against circumventing the intent of a computer system.