Imagine an AI that instead finds potential infrastructure problems riddled across the country. Buildings, bridges, roads, you name it. Then the AI priorities them into a queue and generates cost/resource estimates for repairs. Thereby helping the government improve the livelihood of its constituents!
Or wait, imagine if the AI were finding all the rivers and lakes that corporations are dumping trash, chemicals, and other waste products into!
Right? Right? Surely they'd do that with this great technology!
Who is this "they" you're talking about? Lots of people and lots of groups are trying to use AI in different ways. So yes, obviously people are looking into that too.
These are all things the state used to do without AI - people did it perfectly well. Regrettably it isn't a matter of technology that prevents this sort of thing. It is the hollowing out of the public sphere, the shrinking of state workforces, and the diminishing horizons of what is considered to be 'feasible' - where feasibility is often determined by consultants.
> Imagine an AI that instead finds potential infrastructure problems riddled across the country.
Well you need tax payer money to finance the AI that find potential infrastructure problems... So an AI that find tax avoiders might bring more tax payer money to fix other problems.
This is actually really important! Both statements.
It would be amazing when the planning dept just has you upload a BIM an an AI not only devours the BIM model -- but this is how we are going to get to the sci-fi version of "Pull up a blueprint of downtown and show me all the air-ducts where John McClain is hiding!" and "There is a door on your left"
--
But the rivers and lakes thing should be readily doable right now - based on media reports of spills - then geo locating them on a map, then pulling in studies based on toxicity and soluability of stated chemicals in the spills - then pull the environmental reports from planning agencies for 'environmental impact reports' which would have a composition of the soil, then compare the chemical lliterature to its permeability to the soil conditions in the area, with the water precipitation records - and you can see where a chemical is going to leech - and what waterways it will affect... and the environmental impact report will tell you all the critters that live in that type of habitat... and if the chemical is egregeous to amphibians, and that marsh is home to a lot of frogs....
you get the idea - but this could be done right now with autoGPT with some effort...
(I cant get autoGPT to write out files though - even though I can get it to do the work... What I think Ill do is have it write python scripts for me to scrape the data I need? Any thoughts on some approches? There is historical data trapped in ChatGPT till 2021 that can be useful for the framework, and then auto GPT to get some current data to populate with?
Probably worth mentioning that governments already have backlogs of infrastructure which is broken and can’t be fixed for a variety of reasons. Plenty of journalism about it. Making the discovery aspect “perfect” with AI won’t necessarily lead to improvements although I respect the passion.
You can without a doubt take this even further and train it to detect all sorts felonies. The felonies will mainly be simple ones that perpetrated by the lower and middle class. Builder working without a bill? Crosscheck income with an country wide average and their spending history. Nailed. Waitresses working without paying tax? Crosscheck size of establishment with formally employees. Nailed.
Of course, this not only has privacy issues but also one of social justice. Illegal employment, or what is called "sort arbejde" in Danish or Schwarzarbeit in German if want a compounded word, allows builders en masse to make a decent wage and is widespread, in Denmark at least.
This degenerates into worse subjective and discriminatory systems
Just think of traffic cops on the highway in the US. If you have big tits and a pretty smile you get off with a warning, but if you're black with resting bitch face then you'll get a ticket or maybe even some K9 action
Either enforce laws or get rid of the laws. If you don't have a system to track swimming pools then don't tax swimming pools.
In the worse dystopian case (see Russia and a lot of the third world) the endless unenforced laws become a means for the govt to harass people they don't like
2) getting a wrong conclusion of the AI turned back is a 2-year kafkaieske nightmare where you have to front all the money, and even after they admit they're wrong it takes 5 years to get your money back. And then next year you get another tax bill for the nonexistent pool and we start from scratch?
That doesn't sound like French government at all. Plus that'd be monumentally impractical for them (have you seen how big France is -and how inaccessible parts of it can be?). The reputation of the tax office is that the tiniest of inconveniences is more than enough to prevent them from doing something.
Oh and there's the surprisingly little known fact that French citizens torched most of the cars and half of the government departments, including Police stations, in Paris (and Marseille, and Lille, and Toulouse, and ...) on a regular basis for 5 years now. And I bet the recent pension reform is going to make that worse, not better.
Government employees physically inspecting anything will result in large scale battles with the public these days. So I would like to add: they won't physically inspect these pools for the simple reason that nobody wants to get killed working for the tax agency in France, and that's exactly what will happen if they go out and physically check.
> The reputation of the tax office is that the tiniest of inconveniences is more than enough to prevent them from doing something.
The reputation of the French tax office is that it is the sole branch of the administration which is actually run correctly. This is not far from the truth imho.
> Oh and there's the surprisingly little known fact that French citizens torched most of the cars and half of the government departments, including Police stations, in Paris (and Marseille, and Lille, and Toulouse, and ...) on a regular basis for 5 years now.
That’s a funny one. My advise is to stop watching Fox News and actually spend some time in France.
> That doesn't sound like French government at all.
They don’t need to go there physically. They just need to review satellite pictures, do some background work, and send letters. The point is, the AI surfaces dubious cases but in the end it’s a human making the decision.
> The reputation of the tax office is that the tiniest of inconveniences is more than enough to prevent them from doing something.
That might be the reputation amongst people who’ve never been audited. They might be too lenient by default, but they will bite you if they have to.
> Oh and there's the surprisingly little known fact that French citizens torched most of the cars and half of the government departments, including Police stations, in Paris (and Marseille, and Lille, and Toulouse, and ...) on a regular basis for 5 years now. And I bet the recent pension reform is going to make that worse, not better.
It’s difficult to see exactly what you are trying to say here. Maybe try in French, with some sources?
> So I would like to add: they won't physically inspect these pools for the simple reason that nobody wants to get killed working for the tax agency in France, and that's exactly what will happen if they go out and physically check.
You are out of your bloody mind. They already do audits in person and they will come and check if they suspect some of your declarations are not truthful. Nobody will kill a taxman over something like that. I mean, now you’ve killed a civil servant to avoid paying taxes you should have paid, so you are going to jail, pay a fine, and still pay the taxes. On what planet are you living?
> [getting killed is] exactly what will happen if they go out and physically check.
Come on. The average tax plus penalty here was 500 Euros. No one is throwing their life away over a 500 Euro tax bill that any simpleton could plainly judge whether a pool does or does not exist at the address.
Thanks! Didn't think it was a new idea, but I didn't know the concept's name
"Therefore, the mere fact that a law is selectively enforced against one person and not against another, absent bias or pattern of enforcement against a constitutionally-protected class, is not illegal."
I don't think breast size is a protected class - so please carry on officers
Selective enforcement is one thing, but even perfectly enforced laws can be downright discriminatory. As someone once said: in its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread.
> the worse dystopian case (see Russia and a lot of the third world)
> a pretty smile you get off with a warning, but if you're black with resting bitch face then you'll get a ticket or maybe even some K9 action
Per your own example, America currently belongs in the "wors[t] dystopian case... [including] a lot of the third world" where laws are being used to harass those the state does not like.
I agree, to an extent, I just don't think the average American sees how far they have to go in terms of equality.
>but also one of social justice. Illegal employment, or what is called "sort arbejde" in Danish or Schwarzarbeit in German if want a compounded word, allows builders en masse to make a decent wage and is widespread, in Denmark at least.
Illegal employment also goes hand in hand with exploitation.
>(2019) The greenhouses of Almeria grow much of Europe's fruits and vegetables. The region's dark secret: Tens of thousands of migrants are apparently taken advantage of to fill supermarket produce sections.
>Hundreds of North Korean workers are believed to be toiling in Poland under degrading conditions.
It's worth remembering that there are more people in slavery than there have ever been. I think we're "blind" to it much the same people must have been at the height of the transatlantic slave trade. It's normal.
People are more interested in cheaper products and not paying their tax.
On the other hand freedom can't exist without the possibility of crime.
The main reason I'm ok to have low/middle class pay their fair share of taxes and not have "Schwartzarbeit" is that that's not fair to other low/middle class workers who cannot as easily avoid paying their taxes
A lot of this is already done (incl. IRS in the US) and you don't need "AI" for it, though it is the current buzzword
I'll abstain from discussing the legal and societal aspects of such tighter enforcement though I might say every enforcement needs some kind of "wiggle room"
Why shouldn't crimes perpetrated by lower and middle class be persecuted? The rich already pay a disproportionately large amount of taxes and then society excuses lower and middle class persons from paying their small share of taxes.
>The rich already pay a disproportionately large amount of taxes
How do people come up with these ideas?
Related to their income and overall wealth they pay disproportionate embarassingly little.
The "disrpoportionate" also includes well paid employees in the top 10%, but not the real 0.1% "owning" class. And above a few million worth, the actual money earned per year is usually obscured by all kinds of schemes, of which only the salary and capital gains tax ends up taxed (if that).
And that's without even considering the millions (pun intended) of ways they have to avoid being taxed but still have access to their money, from estates and "charity" foundations they control, to offshores, passing spending as expenses to their companies, special tax cuts, the ease of moving abroad for "tax reasons" at will (no biggie if you have the power to be accepted whether you go, the ability to pay the set amounts to acquire a foreign passport/nationality, to move with trivial for you costs, and so on), and of course access to teams of much better accountants...
Assuming US: Tax is based on income. If you find a way to avoid income, you don't have any income to be taxed. There are certainly ways to game the system, but those ways mean one isn't realizing income. Seems relatively fair to me. After all, the gov isn't supposed to be a welfare machine,and stealing from others is generally regarded as theft.
It's legal. It's hardly fair. It means the working/middle class masses get to pay the burden of taxes (including sales taxes, and others) disproportionately to their income and wealth - and of course, the money taken from them is orders of magnitude more impactful on their everyday life than if we half of Bezos income (or even half his total wealth) was taxed away.
>and stealing from others is generally regarded as theft.
Only as long as you're not rich. If you're its normalized and has lots of legal avenues available to you to do that, same how unfairness is codified in laws like the above, in which "if you find a way to avoid income, you don't have any income to be taxed", which was made the case precisely because the rich have ample easy means to "avoid income".
Apart from being illegal constitutionally at the federal level, what does a wealth tax truly do?
1. Forces wealthy to liquidate assets. Impact: stock prices go down, real estate markets get excess supply floods, etc.
2. Forces income through taxable sales.
3. Theft
I fail to understand how taxing wealth is not stealing. Any time a wealthy person wants to utilize wealth to consume a product, someone somewhere is paying taxes on it. The closest that gets to not being true is when wealthy use their stock as collateral for loans and then get to take interest write offs, but the bank is still going to pay income tax on the interest income they receive.
Wealth means nothing until it is utilized, and all ways in which it's utilized are taxed.
Rich optimize taxes due to many loopholes in tax system using insanely well paid consultants specializing exactly in that. While middle class gives at least 2/3 of the pre-tax money for taxes, so called insurances and weird things like petrol tax in Germany.
I don't want to be snark about it, but why not make a SAAS or product out of such loopholes? Commoditize them, and have economies of scale work.
Of course, my first thought as to why that hasn't been possible is because there is a "lower bound" cost to such things that on a meta-level only really works if the rich do it. E.g. the $5k cost and $100k minimum bank balance to have a bank account in tax haven country X, and the $1600 yearly company registration fees to maintain a shell company in country Y.
I guess client group is rather limited. Salaried employees have to pay taxes. There is no other way. Small businesses can deduct cars and iPhones as expenses and are happy. It gets interesting reaching mid 7 digit revenue zone. But on other hand it is also matter of trust. I have classmates advising about these things, very interesting stuff. Exclusively for real riches.
Billionaires' effective tax rate in France is 26%. _I_ pay more than that just in revenue tax, not to mention value added tax, etc. People making over 627000€ per month have a 46% effective tax rate.
The rich do not pay their fair share, and benefit disproportionately from the taxes that I pay. It's not my trucks destroying public infrastructure, or polluting the atmosphere.
> The rich already pay a disproportionately large amount of taxes
INCOME taxes.
Which is NOT the same as WEALTH.
If you're going to talk about "the rich" then you need to differentiate between the wealthy ownership class (the people who own things like the debt for our 20 trillion dollar illegal wars, or your mortgage), and the software engineers and doctors who get spooked by any talk of raising taxes.
In the US a wealth tax is unconstitutional at the federal level. So we can only measure disproportionate income taxes by using income as a qualifier for rich.
Heritage isn’t a reliable service and you appear to keep linking to them. It says a bunch of weird words and terms and obfuscates all the issues while making America sound amazing.
Disproportionate can have different meanings. I think that the rich pay most of the income/wealth tax [0], but that’s because that’s where the income/wealth is.
It’s disproportionate by number of persons, but arguably proportionate by income.
That source demonstrates that it’s definitely not proportionate by income.
> the top 1 percent paid 42.3 percent of the total federal income tax in 2020 while receiving 22.2 percent of total adjusted gross income
We have a progressive taxation system on income (for good reason), which causes the high-income to pay far more than their proportional share of income.
Some will argue that they should be paying an even more disproportionate amount, which is fine and we can have that discussion, but it is an absolutely truthful claim that they are already paying a higher than proportionate share now.
Keep in mind that marginal tax rate is not equal to effective tax rate. Also keep in mind that companies also pay tax on profit - which means that dividends get taxed at company level only to get taxed again at personal level.
Working class and even middle class people in France (and most of the world) definitely don't have swimming pools. No doubt you're right about the general case, though.
At the lower end all you need is a tarp, shovel, a hose, and probably a pump to filter the water. You can also build one out of wood (we did this when I was with the scouts, and the biggest cost concern was the price of the water).
It doesn't need to be expensive; not every swimming pool has to be a large and fancy.
On the other hand, as more law is written in code, the more easier any deviances or unlawful privileges could be detected - including when someone goes around the (open source) algo-based result. Maybe it's naive, but this could also lead to more transparency.
It’s interesting they have time for this, but going after the big fish is too much. In the Netherlands we lack the capacity to go after tax evasion using non profits. Untold millions go to waste every year, but they have enough capacity to go after small fish and their “fraud”. (https://nl.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toeslagenaffaire, this is a big one where thousands of families were sent into 30k-150k debt for a “mistake”. People’s children were taken from their families because this pushed them over the edge. I know this case is complex but it’s not hard to see who is at fault.)
They set up non profits and get rid of their taxable assets. This is well known, in my opinion not hard to get into court, but nobody “cares”. Of course we all know what is holding them back.
Color me unimpressed by fining some middle class people out of their pools.
Also: how much did this system cost to build? There's a real chance it was more than the €10 million it brought up in revenue thus far, and total revenue is expected to be "up to €40 million" once it's rolled out nation-wide. Even without taking in to account the costs, €40 million is basically nothing considering total taxation revenue is in the hundreds of billions.
At some point "fighting fraud" just becomes a cost-ineffective jihad rather than something meaningful.
"Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect."
The only interesting thing here is how this rule was simply not being enforced by anyone. Happens a lot with tax rules in many countries. Having rules is one thing, doing the leg work to enforce them is another thing. And tax systems tend to be extremely complicated.
Of course, tax auditors could just open any popular online map for a particular area, look at satellite view and do a quick count and then look up the addresses for that area. Diff that with the list of properties that do pay their taxes and job done, Tedious work and AI speeds that up. But it's not hard and the revenue is probably worth it. Also, from an AI point of view pool detection this isn't exactly rocket science.
And of course, a lot of these pools are actually mapped in open street map. I just checked this in a random part of France: 43.99847,4.92940 and compared with the satellite view in Google Maps. Lots of nice little pools that look like they are correctly mapped. An enterprising tax auditor might just export a list with a simple overpass query and them geocode them with nominatim to get the address.
> The only interesting thing here is how this rule was simply not being enforced by anyone.
Turns out that not even the notary, whose job is to check these things when a property changes hands, does it. I am in a local Facebook group and there are multiple folks saying they got a bill from the tax office for an undeclared pool. They bought the house recently and thought that everything was fine and now surprise.
Even worse, some of them don't even have permits, so on top of the extra taxes they have to go through the town permitting process from scratch.
It seems that the program mentioned in the article, which is from 2022, has now expanded nationwide. Would be nice if the French govt would publish some stats once they are done with it.
The world depends on all the dumb little rules someone put in place for dumb little reasons not being adequately enforced. Imagine automatically getting a speeding ticket every single time you went over the speed limit by one mile an hour. Take a moment and mentally inventory all the code violations in your house right now. Look hard enough and everybody is breaking the rules every day, but we muddle through because it doesn't matter 99% of the time.
If all these rules were actually enforced — let's even assume impartially and perfectly — we would be overwhelmed by them. Maybe the consequence would be that we would refine some of the dumb little rules, and remove others. But maybe we would just be overwhelmed.
Imagine being charged 24 million euros (https://www.01net.com/actualites/piscines-non-declarees-la-t...) by Capgemini, known for having fucked up every single public -private partnership in France so they can just run OpenCV on satellite pictures, while being paid for a THIRTY PERCENT ERROR RATE
It's not only Capgemini. Most of French digitalization is horrendous.
We have a Social Security card (Carte Vitale) that you show when doing medical activities (so to speak). It could have been a great driver for centralized patient documentation (results, prescriptions, ...). What they did instead - a totally fucked up system nobody uses (including doctors and pharmacies) which was architected and coded by an intern with a liberal art diploma.
Not only logging in is a shitshow but then you cannot add ANYTHING useful inside. Nothing.
OK, this failed so now the govt decided to launch a new program (for the same thing) and nobody understands what this is is how it is supposed to work.
At the same time, in Poland, I saw a perfectly well working system that centraizes everything (the public medical world sucks there but that's not the point). Why not reusing this instead of inventing a merdouille again?
When COVID blew up, we had the luck to have a brand new exchange platform for schools. When I had to use it, my children said "oh, I did not know that word" when i started to yell on the screen. It is so bad that by just typing here I risk to break my keyboard.
We have idiots in digitalization in France. I am sure other countries are the same but here this is a tradition since after the Minitel. If you can fuck it up, they will - with our taxes.
don't think you'll find anything explicit. but these big french contracting companies are very well known for their technical incompetence. they are not tech companies, their number one priority is to land lucrative contracts and keep renewing them and growing them, executing them or worrying about the quality of the end product is an afterthought.
the compensation in these companies is all the proof you need, most of the money is spent on 'business guys' and whole big ladder of them, projects on the technical side get staffed by who can accept the least pay regardless of skill. failed to get your diploma, great they can hire you for a big discount, have an art degree or anything else but know how to argue in a interview great you're hired.
they hire such people by the shovel everywhere. they are not the only company that does it almost all the big and smaller ones. here are some example of job offers that you can translate, and keep in mind that even is you don't meet almost any criteria they can still hire you if you accept a small enough price. I know a few of them in person.
It was ran in the nine departments where there's the biggest concentration and likelihood of pools. Additionally, these 10m in receipts include fines for not declaring the pools. The actual yearly returns are much lower. Looking for swimming pools in the Creuse is not going to bring in a lot of cash.
The DGFiP is hit or miss with these projects, and they rarely hit well.
lol, I whipped up the exact same computer vision thing to detect faded road markings in satellite images, in under a week. Including a horrible day of labeling images for training.
But the thing is... look at their share price. Capgemini is doing something right because their market cap is going up all the time.
Their consultants are relatively expensive to hire, and they themselves get paid relatively little.
They (and firms like them) spend a ridiculous, soul-crushing amount on sales. Building relationships with the people that matter, to then cut deals that, on the face of it, just don't make any sense. Delivering what you promise is entirely optional in this business model. (So in a nice symmetrical way their underpaid consultants are also often undertrained, because who cares)
Capgemini and Atos are the worst that happened to French tech. Atos managed to turn me from liberal to communist when in comes to public services and general interest. I would rather deal with slow, 'lazy' bureaucrats than greedy little shit who can't own their mistakes. At least, when the corruption is within the government, it can't be that huge and blatant. A state secretary can say 'it would be easier to get that subvention if you used Atos Bullion' and fear nothing.
By the way, Bullion software support is them emailing redhat support, but more expensive.
Why? Taxes is what sends children to school, pays for hospitals and funds the infrastructure everyone uses. People love to hear about AI breakthroughs that could transform education or health, why should they not be happy about this?
I have many doubts about the actual technical solution, but I wouldn't discard the work because it's for taxation purpose.
Taxes are pissed away in France in gigantic useless bureaucracies, useless projects and vote-buying redistribution, to the point that core state functions (police/justice, army, education or healthcare system) are paradoxically starved of funds and dysfunctional. Sadly the only way to curb this spending incontinence seems to starve the state of revenues.
You forgot jet flights because, you understand, there were no business class seat available on commercial flights at the right time. I thought it was an isolated incident (the random undersecretary who otherwise couldn’t have made it on time for the government’s school book picture), but it appears to not be so isolated [1] [2].
On some random weird "missions" [3] paid €9.000 a month, or life-long supposed "postings", granted at the discretion of the government, such as our dear ambassador to the penguins [4] [5] (lovingly called "ambassador to the poles", although the previous one, "Michel Rocard", a life-long politician, was apparently also known as "Rocky the Penguin").
And that’s just off the top of my head.
If we were to focus less on the rather questionable spending, and more on the doubtfully useful, we could cite the public health system, where it seems that more than a third of the money goes to the administrative side, and not actual healthcare workers [6], with a significantly bigger share of bureaucratic employees than most European countries.
And I’m pretty sure starving the state of revenue will not curb any of this. It’s not like they’ve shown they were sensible, or acting in good faith.
The state only has as much power as it can wield and as what the people will take. Individuality the way you’re implying does not exist in societies where not even food, shelter, and basic dignity is guaranteed and provided to all.
The article says "The public finance authority DGFiP said the AI programme would now be rolled out nationwide, potentially leading to €40m in new taxes on private pools in 2023".
So total revenue is not that significantly higher than €10m.
Another commenter pointed out that having a pool influences the property value and thereby tax, so they should be able to collect the tax yearly, not just once.
The power balance between state and individual is quite delicate and everything that changes it makes people uneasy. Most people want a situation where law and order is more or less upheld, but the state is otherwise unable to precisely know or control how people live.
It's people that can afford pools on their property. They can afford to own property. I'm not shedding many tears here.
If even a tiny amount of the money recovered improves the lot of the vulnerable then I find it hard to put this at the top of my "this year's dystopian" list.
Your comment however might go on my own "most unimaginative definition of dystopian" list.
The problem with unaffordable housing all over europe should be solved with massive amounts public housing.
Pools should be taxed but that does not solve the problem. Everyone pretends they are not looking at the elephant in the room: draconian environmental regulations and lack of resources make the prices of housing go higher and higher. The governments have the money to solve that, instead of making it worse
You misunderstand, this is 10M euro extra tax revenue each year and it was only a pilot project covering a small part of France. The payback time is basically less than a year.
In America we have a credit score which is quite dystopian. America has the most prisoners and slavery in prisons. The NSA among others monitor citizens.
You made an offhand apolitical comment about China being dystopian in regards where America is arguably worse.
I wake up every day in a right wing dystopia. Even worse, people like you lack the knowledge or solidarity with other workers while having too much nationalism and so on.
I’m going to assume you wouldn’t be able to explain China’s politics nor explain why Taiwan is granted sovereignty but Palestine isn’t. Both places had people before each imperialist group of people conquered land where people already lived. When’s the last time any typical westerner has ever cared about the indigenous people of Taiwan. This doesn’t contradict anything. More of a case where I’m stating the obvious. Even if you happen to actually care about the indigenous people, you’re still going to arrogantly believe Taiwan is a Democratic good guy country. Let’s not even get into Taiwan being fascist for some time…
How did you arrive at your conclusion that the pools mentioned in the article belong to middle-to-lower class people? Did you do your own analysis and cross-checked it with their income statements? Myself I would expect the pools to disproportionally belong to well-off people.
I don't quite get why you differentiate between classes, everybody has to pay taxes. I would prefer the tax agency to go after (illegally evaded) tax revenue where they get the most bang for their buck, this project paid itself back in less than a year so that seems to fit the bill.
Yes, everybody has to pay taxes. The more money you have/make, the more taxes you need to pay, but the case now is that the more money you have, the more you can avoid taxes.
Sure, the agency can get more of the non-super-rich people who don't have an army of accountants optimizing their tax structure, but I don't think that's the most equitable thing to do.
„The spirits that I summoned…“ / “Die Geister, die ich rief“ came to mind. It is a well-known German phrase about losing control over something you started and unintentional consequences. It‘s adapted from the poem „The Sorcerer‘s Apprentice“.
- be affraid of a big general AI that will destroy humanity like ChatGPT
- recognize pools in garden from sat images
Actually, if the title was only "French Tax service find 20k hidden taxable swimming pools in France, netting €10M", nobody would care... and it would be fair!!! There is no "Intelligence" in this...
Most are in the garden in the back of the house... so hidden from the street but not really physically hidden. And house owner didn't declare that they build one (so hidden to the French Tax Service)
I've said for years the main use case for AI is to dilute and launder accountability so that decisions can be seen as the expression of corporate entities and committees where no individual can be held responsible or accountable. AI is to bureaucracy what cryptocurrency is money laundering.
Over a decade ago I was hired to do a privacy impact assessment for a government project that was going to "use AI to detect benefits fraud." Turned out under the architecture docs, the "AI" was a data repository managed by one of the big credit reporting companies, and their "AI" would flag back individuals to the govt benefits agency for further scrutiny. The company got to keep the data, there was no anonymization or de-identification, let alone any consideration of how the company would use the data after, or for re-linking the data to other data sets to make credit decisions about household members and other relations. The fact that the government was outsourcing their fraud detection to the very credit reporting and collection agencies who would be exploiting the data for credit decisions was also what nobody was supposed to say out loud or write down.
The point is, so-called AI in this case was used as a proxy to hide a relationship between the government and a private company and as a way to absolve either of any accountability for marking someone as a suspect for benefits fraud. The govt didn't have to make or document a regulation mandating them to do fishing expeditions, or create a paper trail on how random their selection of someone was for scrutiny, nor did they have to disclose that their AI system was just the sleazy credit reporting company pretending to be an "AI."
The problem with proxying decisions through so-called AI is that the bureaucracy only exists by its direct mandates, and the people in it are always trying to get around the constraints that imposes, so in these cases, AI is just a false-pretext generation machine. That any agency can act using "randomness," in any situation at all is a level of discretion that is very likely to be inconsistent with their actual mandates, imo.
The reason they say is that it increases the property rent value. The pool tax seems odd/unfair, because the rent is already taxable and water bill is paid.
Look at these idiots using AI to find Tax Cheats, they should do like the USA IRS, and hire 80,000 new agents, arm them and get them to sign a document statingthey are willing to use deadly force (yes this actually happened here in the US this year)...
--
Whats baffeling - is that the SEC should be all over this methodology - in fact - I am sure that there a re people out there right now building an AI to riffle through the Panama Papers and other "papers" scandals looking at shell companies for a way to blackmail those who are storing wealth in such.
Or using ai to find chinks-in-the-armor for ways to exploit said shell companies and their 'anonymous' owners...
I presonally used ChatGPT as well as AutoGPT to dive into Opensecrets.org and other online resources to look into the finances of congress - what their tenure is, age, salary, investments, committees served on and then major defense inititives, and the investments of congress into those contractors.
What I am trying to do is build a table of acts/laws passed which benefitted defense contractors, and then the stated investments by congress just prior to said defense deals which should reveal insider trading pretty definitively...
> A typical pool of 30 sq metres would be taxed at about an extra €200 a year.
I assume the average pool is less than 30 m2. I wonder how much effort people actually made to 'hide' their pool for not having to pay such rather small amount compared to pool building and maintenance. Plus there is the effort of building and maintaining this 'AI' system.
Much much more trivial to look at a map and see a big blue pool than try to parse water bill differences. Having had a pool, there isn't an obvious pattern as to when i had to fill it up, etc.
Low hanging fruit are the ones that aren't covered.
I programmed such a tool for my local city back in the nineties from 3d stereo overflies, exactly to detect undeclared extensions, verandas, garden houses and such.
It just wasn't called AI then, just image detection and 3d reconstruction.
It wasn’t so clear from the article, but I assume they’re using images from Google. Don’t France have water usage meters? Seems like the main reason for taxation is to save water, and taxing actual water use seems more reasonable.
> As property taxes are based on the rental value of the property, improvements mean an increase in taxes. A typical pool of 30 sq metres would be taxed at about an extra €200 a year.
Sounds like the tax authority just DDoSed itself with this, because processing all these changes is going to take some time.
The purpose and laws are clear, easily understood by all French citizens, and everyone knows whether they have skirted the tax or not. The tax law can be changed if enough people think it wrong.
Working for Facebook or Google or Amazon is less ethical, in my view.
I m not sure if the idea of going after pools is a good one though. Is the water shortages really that big that people are not allowed to even have blow-up tubs anymore?
Pools are good for cooling down in the summer. Is it better if they use electricity and A/C instead?
The worst thing is that other countries are copying this anti-pool thing because it's populist .
Blow up tubs are not targeted by this, because they're not taxable. Pools only get taxed if they're dug in the ground (fully or partly), and are more than 10 square meters.
It's not even going after pools in particular, it's just that pools raise the property tax. you're supposed to ask your city if you can build that pool, and your taxes will grow in consequence. Undeclared, no taxes.
And yes, filling up pools is banned in most of the country right now because we're going through a year long drought.
Water restrictions were common last summer over europe. True last year was particularly torrid and following a very dry winter. But this year seems likely to follow.
> Is the water shortages really that big that people are not allowed to even have blow-up tubs anymore?
Yep
> Pools are good for cooling down in the summer. Is it better if they use electricity and A/C instead?
There is not much A/C in France/Europe. Go to a lake or a public pool instead, no need for A/C.
> The worst thing is that other countries are copying this anti-pool thing because it's populist .
It is necessary. Not populist, necessary. We can't afford to just scream "freedom" or "populism" every time the upper middle-class wants to enjoy an environment-destroying luxury. Think of the freedom to live of the others. Is a pool necessary ? Of fsking course not. Don't try to color this as a basic need. You don't need a pool to cool down in the summer. You also don't need a 2 tons car, you don't need to travel to the other side of the world for your holidays, and those things are very detrimental to everyone, you included.
What is this? Ode to poverty? There is enough stuff in the worlds for everybody to have 10 houses, 10 cars, enough water to waste, etc. We just need to make some effort to organize ourselves (and of course stop using fossil fuels, they are not enough).
for the last point, i knwo that other mediterranean countries are copying that taxation on pools , even if AC is very common and very heavily used in the sommer, and even if there isnt a water shortage
Or wait, imagine if the AI were finding all the rivers and lakes that corporations are dumping trash, chemicals, and other waste products into!
Right? Right? Surely they'd do that with this great technology!