These workers are paid to just to one set of tasks, and will continue to do those functions even if what the public actually wants could be far more efficiently served by doing something different. The bureaucrats are just doing their jobs, and the people at the top do not give fuck about you and never will.
If having this content in a publicly accessible format is so important, why not just drop a couple grand to buy the DVDs, rip them, and then share the the content via p2p?
.[quote=âBoundegar, post:20, topic:22712â]
They simply arenât set up to dump seven million tax returns just because reasons.
[/quote]
Yes, they are actually.
http://www.irs.gov/Charities-&-Non-Profits/Copies-of-Scanned-EO-Returns-Available
They do exactly that, a dump.
Are you sure that your figures are at all comparable?
Pressed DVDs vs DVD-Rs
A little something to goose sales of a reissued product which has already sold seats in theatres vs a largely custom product demanded by a few customers.
527 organization returns are available online
But the broader swath of nonprofits are not.
Well, its been a long time since I bought a movie on DVD so Iâm going with what I recall âŚ
30 DVDs from IRS at $3,000 equals $100/DVD
A movie DVD used to cost $20. Therefore, 30 of them at $20 each would cost a total of $600. So, a movie company can make a profit after paying for actors, directors, assistants, rentals, artists, composers, writers, musician, marketing and I have no idea what else. Yes, they sell more discs and yet they end up collecting millions in profits.
The IRS collects the data that the people provide at their own cost. The data is then copied to a master set of discs which can be done with minimal training. Then they have someone load blanks into a copying machine which churns out the copies. Oh, wait, that same work is also done by the movie company, so letâs just cancel those out.
Even at union scale, the IRS pays far less to copy data to discs than a movie company does to produce the movie. Yet they charge 5 times as much as the movie company does.
Back in the day, there used to be articles detailing exactly what sort of costs Indie bands would face if they wanted to make a record album-- good for escaping from the RIAAâs clutches.
There was no cost per disc for CDs bought individually. There was a cost per disc for a run of 1000 discs, and 10,000 discs, and so on. And if you were absolutely sure that 2,000 discs could be sold, you could contract for that amount, pay the fee, and make more money because of the volume discount. If you couldnât be sure of strong enough sales, you could pay a higher amount per disc, and a lower amount overall.
The movie companies have lower costs per disc because they can sell hundred of thousands of copies.
Until we know the actual costs involvedâequipment, staff-- and the actual customer base, we canât argue that the pricing is extortionate. A freedom of information act request might well clarify some things.
Seriously?!!? A hundred dollars for a disc of data? I can go to WalMart and get blanks for something like 20 cents a disc. And that price goes way down when bought, as you said, in bulk. I can set up the copying in 5 minutes and come back once an hour to load more discs. The tech is reliable enough that ti doesnât need any physical monitoring. Making just one sale of those discs is more than enough to pay for a bulk copier which lasts what, 5 years? More?
Proving that oneâs self is stupid requires continuous effort. It is a state of being, in one sense. Rather like a verb. I stupid, you stupid, he/she/it stupids, we/you/they etc. It has been said that a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. From this one can posit that an organization is only as smart as its stupidest member. This seems particularly true in large organizations [whether they are government or non-government is of no significance unless one is bigoted against governments but that is a topic for a different day]. So here the IRS is only as smart as its stupidest member [or as I think of it the âsayingâ should be âAn organization is only as smart as its stupidest policy enforced by its stupidest memberâ after all just because the rule requires stupid behavior doesnât mean one âmustâ follow the rule. The IRS violates rules all the time but rarely for the good. So can we say that the IRS is âstupidingâ its way through⌠yes, which makes it just another day in Stupidland.
Daveâs not here, man!
My guess is that theyâre legally required to offer it, but donât really want to, and theyâre shipping it on DVDs because itâs too hard to get punch cards these days. And the cost of each DVD not only includes the cost of an individual worker looking up the images and burning them to DVD, but the cost of taking the data that was actually stored in some useful database format, converting it to low-res PDF, and converting the PDF to TIFF.
Itâs an attempt to price the records as if they were a commercial data product.
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