Dave Neary

Irish engineer living in the US, by way of France. Former RedBrick, ILUG, ALDIL, GNOME Foundation, Red Hat. Currently Developer Relations at Ampere Computing.

Location: Near Boston, MA
Pronouns: He/him/his

Public Key

npub1er670duvd3spx2hy6xuxp0lfrmeucmfeaq8gqrcf8rf4ec0peelqm5n092

NIP-05 Address

dneary_at_mastodon.ie@momostr.pink

Profile Code

nprofile1qqsv3a08k7xxccqn9tjdrwrqhl53au7vd5u7sr5qpuyn356uu8suulspz3mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduqs6amnwvaz7tmwdaejumr0ds7j6hnp

Publishing to

relay.snort.social

relay.damus.io

nos.lol

Author Public Key

npub1er670duvd3spx2hy6xuxp0lfrmeucmfeaq8gqrcf8rf4ec0peelqm5n092

Show more details

Last Notes

2026-03-28 14:33:09 UTC

- reply

You're arguing that creating a tax system that increases the costs of running a taxi and makes taxis more expensive will discourage cars and encourage the use of public transport. You might be right - but if public transport does not fill the need (eg. if the quantity/quality/reliability of public transport is poor), all you will do is deprive people who would otherwise do that job of a livelihood and create a shortage of taxis.

2026-03-28 14:30:36 UTC

- reply

3. Creation of incentives/expression of values - this is what you're alluding to. We tax tobacco and alcohol sales because as a society we see those as bad and want to discourage them. We subsidize behaviour that we want to encourage (spending on energy efficient homes or EVs over ICE vehicles).

2026-03-28 14:24:56 UTC

- reply

We hit on a key point - fiscal policy is about a few different things:
1. Managing inflation - taxing people takes money out of the economy, Government spending puts money into the economy. Tax policy's first job is to prevent the economy from overheating.
2. Wealth redistribution - in the absence of intervention, wealth floats to the top. Progressive fiscal policy takes more from the wealthy and subsidizes the poor, for the good of society (1/2)

2026-03-28 12:46:08 UTC

- reply

So people driving taxis, small coaches (under 15 people), Uber Eats/Door dash vehicles cannot deduct the costs of running their vehicles or the acquisition cost? Seems wrong.

2026-03-27 20:32:40 UTC

- reply

The IRS could behave like health insurance companies and set limits on how much you can deduct for different things - so much for vehicle leasing or purchase, so much per mile for gas, etc. But that becomes an anto-business tax policy very quickly & easily and adds massive filing burdens for SMBs.

2026-03-27 17:29:22 UTC

- reply

Every country has rules about what you can claim as legitimate business expenses - clearly gas and diesel for delivery vehicles and work vans is a legitimate business expense, but things like nice trucks, computers, etc. are often fully deduced from the gross while the company could fulfill the functional need with something cheaper.

2026-03-27 17:13:23 UTC

- reply

Businesses have costs, and those costs of doing business are deduced from gross revenue - taxes are paid on profits, not revenues. Business owners sometimes spend money from their profits on nice things that they don't strictly need, in order to reduce taxable profits, as long as they can claim the nice things as legitimate business expenses.

2026-03-27 08:03:22 UTC

- reply

I think they're legal in the EU. Expensive to fill up, heavily taxed, difficult to park, a bit wide for the roads, but street legal.

2026-02-07 15:08:46 UTC

I miss the decentralized world. We used to have individual WordPress powered blogs, with aggregators of our favorite content allowing us to filter. Now we have Medium, LinkedIn, and Facebook posts that get lost in a flood of algorithm-dominated posts. I've debated restarting a personal blog. But I don't know how I would get people to read it. Are RSS, Atom, and aggregators still a thing?

2026-01-17 21:48:10 UTC

- reply

That said, the Irish government seems to have fully embraced a corporatocracy identity at this point, and has too much to lose in changing it. The election of people like Mary Robinson, Michel D, and Catherine Connolly as President in our only nationwide election, and the steady state of 10-20 independent TDA over the past 20 years, suggests that the Irish public is not aligned with that.

2026-01-17 21:40:09 UTC

- reply

You're not wrong. At the time it felt like the EU dictating domestic policy - the kind of thing Farage and his ilk take as evidence of EU intrusion on national sovereignty.

2026-01-17 17:30:47 UTC

- reply

That's not how the Irish government would characterize it - the EU found that Ireland's tax code was in breach of EU competition rules, and their treaty commitments. They were ordered to collect taxes that they had not asked for.

2026-01-17 15:37:19 UTC

- reply

This wasn't the only thing they did. They made college free to ensure a well educated young professional class, and invested in fiber optics for telecommunications backbone. They were also getting a lot of EU Development Funds to build roads, ports, and airports, and renovate inner cities. And Michael D. Higgins, as Minister for Culture and the Gaeltacht gave sweetheart deals to movie studios for movies like Braveheart and Saving Private Ryan to raise Ireland's profile.

2025-10-24 13:42:42 UTC

- reply

What did I miss? Who called attention to something they would rather have kept quiet?

2025-06-29 20:59:25 UTC

The 2017 paper @npub1fdr…lvhs refers to, I believe, was also cited in @npub1pfd…9dtt's book "They Do Not Represent Us" - this is a pretty widely studied thing! We should be more outraged about this, but the outrage is starting to show. https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/28/mamdani/

2025-06-14 01:20:25 UTC

- reply

Would you recommend it? I quite liked "The Obstacle is the Way", which refers to it extensively.

2024-09-08 01:13:55 UTC

- reply

Do you still have the hat too?

2024-09-07 21:27:31 UTC

@npub1m7m…2e7k I came across this photo of you from a couple of years ago! (Linuxdays.ch 2007)
https://cdn.masto.host/mastodonie/media_attachments/files/113/098/388/145/700/214/original/2b58c0ede109bdcf.jpg

2024-08-21 02:54:54 UTC

Michelle Obama is killing it. "Who's going to tell him, maybe this job he is trying to get is one of those Black jobs?" Oh. My. God. 👏