FWIW, accountability is much more important than openness. Openness is only important because there is no other way to even measure what degree of accountability is present.
Where does it say "citizens"? Where does it say "only within the bounds of the continental US?"... and I guess I should append "excluding, of course, the area within 200 miles of an area designated as a border" to that question.
Nobody, barring a loon, would PLAN that they would get into a nuclear conflict, but things have a way of escalating.
You are right about China's economic dominance over the US, but when a major war comes along, economics is often... altered. Foreign debts are often put on hold, and if it's against the country that you are at war with, they can even be repudiated with only relatively minor damage to your financial reputation. (This wouldn't help WalMart, of course.)
P.S.: China is no longer the current low cost outsourcer for many things. The last time I saw a story about it, China was outsourcing some manufacturing to Indonesia.
Definitely. I was talking about the countries participating in the war (whether or not involuntarily). The businesses supplying stuff are a totally different set of accounting...and it can be quite profitable even to supply stuff to the loser, if the winner doesn't come after your hide. (One reason there are so many multi-nationals.)
India does, though, and Afghanistan is a tough target. (For that matter, at one point the US had nuclear weapons stationed in Afghanistan. I don't know the current status.)
While if the war were only a "phony war", what you are saying might happen, I'm rather afraid you are being extremely optimistic. You are assuming that nuclear/biological/chemical weapons aren't used. (Well, chemical would actually probably not have large scale consequences.)
However you should look up Nuclear Winter/Autumn scenarios. I expect that global crop failures could be expected at a bare minimum. And by crop failures I mean that essentially NOTHING could be harvested, and that the fruit trees cracked by freezing, so they wouldn't be available later as anything other than firewood. I don't think a 90% die-off of all humans worldwide is an unreasonable expectation if there's a major nuclear exchange. It may be optimistic. And the deaths would mainly be due to starvation and hypothermia. The freezing cold might not get as far south as the equatorial regions, but it would likely get too cold for the plants native to those areas to live.
So my expectation is that your scenario wouldn't have time to develop before things sufficiently worse became commonplace that nobody would even notice it.
Actually, Hitler didn't want war. He just wanted everyone to surrender without more than the threat of fighting. (Except, possibly, the French. He may have really wanted to punish them for the WWI surrender terms. Ref. "Is Paris Burning?".)
But generally Czechoslovakia is how Hitler wanted to win.
OTOH, he was prepared to fight, and he was unwilling to accept anything less than surrender. So he was quite willing to start a war rather than relinquish his other goals.
I don't disagree that the US acted as you state. Only in your claim that the US initiated the pattern. Britain acted the same way before the US did. Prior to that. there wasn't a clearly dominant country, but diplomacy and war, or threat of war, have long been intertwined. Certainly it was used by the Romans. (I don't know enough Greek history, but I've got my suspicions.)
OTOH, some things have changed. Up through the early years of the industrial revolution, war could be profitable to the country that won. Since then it's gotten increasingly expensive, until by now it's ruinously expensive even if you are the victor, and impose unconditional surrender. But people still have it in their minds that it's possible to win a war. You can only lose less badly.
You REALLY don't understand atomic weapons. REALLY don't.
If there is a major nuclear exchange between major powers, we won't have global warming, we'll have an instant ice age. Expect 90% casualties among all living humans. (Details, naturally, vary, but none of the scenarios are nice.)
Now if there were a minor war, say between India and Afghanistan, and they refrained from using nuclear weapons on cities, we might only get several degrees of cooling for a decade or so. (This is based on weaponry estimates over a decade old, however, and they were ESTIMATES.) In that scenario the countries north of the equator would be spared most of the cataclysmic results. (Note: most, not all.) If, however, cities were burned, then the projections are several times worse, and widespread recovery of the glaciers is likely in the south within two years, and in the north within the decade.
The reason for this is that nuclear explosions lift soot into the stratosphere, above the level at which rain clouds form, so it takes decades to centuries to settle out. And at that height it acts to cool the Earth. Because of wind currents, the particles tend to remain either north or south of the equator, but over a period of a decade or so will spread out more evenly.
OTOH, this *would* solve the global warming problem. Just not in a very desirable or predictable way. And it wouldn't do anything to solve to acidification of the oceans. (A population crash caused by massive global crop failures, however, would act to solve that.)
And again, please note, this is for a nuclear war between countries that don't have many nuclear weapons. Which describes neither China nor the US. In that case we probably wouldn't see a re-enactment of "On the Beach", but something not too different, only featuring starvation and glaciers is reasonable. (Radiation poisoning is highly over-rated as a quick kill. It takes far too high a dose to be likely even in a maximal exchange. [I'm not counting, here, the induced cancers that show up 15 or more years later.] One should, however, expect the average lifespans of the survivors of a nuclear war, and their descendents for the next three generations, to be around 20 years, due to increased induced cancer, though this would drop off as the more radioactive elements burned out.)
We AREN'T going to invade China, and they aren't going to invade the US. Not unless someone with launch authority really wigs out. (This would be more comforting if we hadn't already had several close escapes. The report is we were once within 30 seconds of the US launching on Russia.)
P.S.: It's still true that only an idiot would get the US into a land war in Asia. This would be more comforting if there weren't so many idiots in positions of power.
Sorry, but that's not true. My wife was dunned by debt collectors because someone with the same name as her died in a nearby city without paying his hospital bill.
Yes, they were unscrupulous, cowardly, untrustworthy, liars. And they wouldn't accept reasonable proof that she wasn't the person who owed the money. (Being alive didn't seem to count.) But when *SHE* traced down what the problem was and mailed them copies of the death certificate, the problem ceased. It did, however, take over six months of continual effort, because they wouldn't give her the information to find out who really owed the debt.
Paying your bill doesn't protect you against "errors". They want money, and they don't really care if the person who pays is the person who owes the money.
No. But then we ALWAYS say "We do not accept any form of telephone solicitation." Doesn't matter if it's a group we support. At the end of each month we scan the requests for funding, and divy up an amount of money that we're donating this month among them. This lets us balance our budget, and still support those we deem most worthy of support.
(N.B.: It does mean we get lots of junk mail, but that's easier to deal with.)
I don't know about YOUR health care insurance, but mine decided that if Medicare didn't consider a routine physical to be worth covering, then they wouldn't cover it either.
The only databases that are good by that criterion are the pre-relational network databases. They could do tables. The could store data hierarchically. They could...well, anything. But they were a pain in the ass to use. Because they could do everything, you had to specify everything by hand.
N.B.: This isn't, or doesn't appear to be, the same kind of database that is currently called a network database, like Neo4j. It's more like assembly code. Primitives were things like, "Link this node to that node" or "follow the nth link from this node". But you could do hierarchies with rings of connections, you could do rings of rings, you could do simple tables. But since "table" wasn't a primitive concept, you had to write all the code that meant this link was a link across a row of the table, while that link was a link to the succeeding record of the table, etc.
Perhaps you need to think again about what constitutes a good database. A certain degree of predefined rigidity of concept is greatly advantageous...of course any particular rigidity will render it less than optimal for certain purposes. But tables have proven very useful as a databse concept. So usefule that network and hierarchical databases have essentially dropped out of sight. And, of course, been reinvented. But if you want reports and queries, then relational databases are quite hard to beat. Personally, I often want something a bit different. And for my purposes all I need is a unsigned long for a key, and a binary dump of a struct for the data. Having to change these into strings is quite annoying. So I generally prefer to use something else. TokyoCabinet is a good choice. Currently I'm working on something that maps more nicely onto a fixed length record random access binary file. (A good old Fortran concept that has fallen out of fashion. You can emulate it in C, but the language doesn't really encourage it.)
I bit more than that. There was an incident a decade or so ago when the driver got out to fix a jammed door, and when it was unjammed, the train decided it was time to take off for the next station. It got there, stopped, and opened the doors. And waited for the driver to show up.
Well, often they have someone already picked out, but I don't think many are total fabrications. Most people who go to the effort of posting a job application actually do want to hire someone. They may not want to pay enough to actually get someone who matches their requirements, but that's a spearate matter. (And often their requirements are literally insane. The people who wirte the applications must not have ANY idea of what they're asking for.)
Well, as normally stated, quantum theory DOES require an observer. It does not require that the observer be sentient. Any electromagnetic interaction will do. Also strong or weak force interactions. Probably gravity, too, but that's just a bit difficult to observe.
Typically experiments use electrons or photons as the primary observers, but nearly anything will work, with varying degrees of sensitivity.
OTOH, as a believer in the Many-Worlds interpretation, I think that the observation just details which of the worlds you have ended up in. And I also believe in multiple pasts as well as multiple futures. (And the only thing special about this present, is that it's the one that you are observing from.)
KDE4 has finally evolved into something not terrible. But it's not even approximately as good as was KDE3. It it were, I'd be using it. (I tried for a few months recently. It was OK, but inferior to Mate, where I rated KDE3 as superior to Gnome2.) Currently I'm using xfce, which is pretty good, but not quite as good (for my purposes) as was Gnome2, which, as I stated, was inferior to KDE3. It's been several months since I tried Cinnamon, but the screen shots I see don't appear to be as good as Mate.
It's also been over a year since I tried LXDE. It might have improved. When I tried it I rated it as better than either Gnome3 or KDE4, but then KDE4 improved (and, in any case, it was inferior to xfce).
OTOH, my wife always asks me "Where's electricsheep?". Unfortunately, I haven't been able to get it working on ANYTHING recently. (I did have it working on KDE4, which is a part of the reason I stuck to it for months.)
That's one think that anarchy can look like. Perhaps the most likely form. But look into the Yk tribe of Africa, before the famine. It can also be quite peaceful.
You, by the fact of this communication, clearly do not live in an isolated community (unless you consider the entire human species to be such). You might consider the various reasons why you do not.
There are many small, and relatively isolated communities, and many of them are quite happy. But they are required to abide by the laws of the larger community in which they are embedded. (Often they don't do so, and often because of that they are broken up, and occasionally killed off. But many are quite successful.) They are not, however, actually isolated. That has become essentially impossible. If you go back to the period of slow communication, you find small, isolated, communities that were relatively happy (as well as the other kind), but none of them were, other than in theory, anarchist. The successful ones had a leader (or small group of leaders) who had sufficient power to have anyone else in the community ostracised. Also, the young people tended to leave. Additionally, they weren't totally isolated. Wandering traders would occasionally come by to buy and sell. Etc. (If nothing else, they'd need things like steel needles, and there were other things which, if not actually required, were highly desireable.)
So even if you go back into history you don't find any REALLY isolated small communities. The Mormons came close at one point, and that brought in the US Army.
Going futher back, during the middle ages you still don't have actual isolated communities in most of Europe. During the early part of the Middle Ages some Swiss tribes were able to enforce isolation, taking advantage of the terrain. Then there were the Kazars, the Afghans, etc. Again, the successful ones didn't stay small, and their success depended on not only low technology, but a population small enough to take advantage of the terrain.
Please note that this is mainly European history, with a little bit of Middle Eastern. I don't know the histroy of ofher areas well enough. But given the history I know I'm quite skeptical of an actual isolated community. (Well, I believe there's one island near India that is still isolated, because the tribe living on it kill anyone who attempts to land. Nobody can say how happy they are, however, because they are actually isolated.)
Anarchy is unstable. Some limited forms in situations with low population density and limited speed of travel work reasonably well, but only by replacing government with "social controls", and for those to work you need to personally know nearly everyone you come into contact with, and to distrust strangers. (It doesn't require disliking strangers, if they are rare enough, but you can't trust them.)
Some minimal level of government is required for stability in an environment where you are likely to come into frequent contact with people you don't know.
Please note that I haven't even considered external stresses on the society. Or changing environmental stresses, like a drought.)
Still, within the "quasi-stable" area, many forms of government are possible. (And no stable form of government has been devised...unless you consider "kill them all" to be a form of government.)
I admit a great liking for a minimally controlling government, but for that to be feasible, there can't be any governmentally benefitted entities, like corporations. So there needs to be some other way of providing the services that they historically provide...preferably one that is as efficient, but which doesn't centralize power. (In fact, one of the necessary features for minimally governed system to be tolerable, is that the government still be more powerful than any pair of entities within it's jurisdiction. This is clearly a necessary, but not a sufficient condition.)
Governments are quite complex entities, and any simple attempt to model them is doomed to, at best, failure.
FWIW, I've gotten a letter saying that the spreadsheet I used added the numbers incorectly. I double checked, and it was the IRS that made the mistake. OTOH, it was only for $10 or so, so I didn't fight it.
Slashdot Mirror
FWIW, accountability is much more important than openness. Openness is only important because there is no other way to even measure what degree of accountability is present.
Not really. You should have the RIGHT to privacy, but when you want something to be taken seriously, you need to put a reputation behind it.
Where does it say "citizens"? Where does it say "only within the bounds of the continental US?" ... and I guess I should append "excluding, of course, the area within 200 miles of an area designated as a border" to that question.
No. But it's a good reason for other countries, or groups thereof, to establish their own root servers.
Nobody, barring a loon, would PLAN that they would get into a nuclear conflict, but things have a way of escalating.
You are right about China's economic dominance over the US, but when a major war comes along, economics is often ... altered. Foreign debts are often put on hold, and if it's against the country that you are at war with, they can even be repudiated with only relatively minor damage to your financial reputation. (This wouldn't help WalMart, of course.)
P.S.: China is no longer the current low cost outsourcer for many things. The last time I saw a story about it, China was outsourcing some manufacturing to Indonesia.
Definitely. I was talking about the countries participating in the war (whether or not involuntarily). The businesses supplying stuff are a totally different set of accounting...and it can be quite profitable even to supply stuff to the loser, if the winner doesn't come after your hide. (One reason there are so many multi-nationals.)
India does, though, and Afghanistan is a tough target. (For that matter, at one point the US had nuclear weapons stationed in Afghanistan. I don't know the current status.)
While if the war were only a "phony war", what you are saying might happen, I'm rather afraid you are being extremely optimistic. You are assuming that nuclear/biological/chemical weapons aren't used. (Well, chemical would actually probably not have large scale consequences.)
However you should look up Nuclear Winter/Autumn scenarios. I expect that global crop failures could be expected at a bare minimum. And by crop failures I mean that essentially NOTHING could be harvested, and that the fruit trees cracked by freezing, so they wouldn't be available later as anything other than firewood. I don't think a 90% die-off of all humans worldwide is an unreasonable expectation if there's a major nuclear exchange. It may be optimistic. And the deaths would mainly be due to starvation and hypothermia. The freezing cold might not get as far south as the equatorial regions, but it would likely get too cold for the plants native to those areas to live.
So my expectation is that your scenario wouldn't have time to develop before things sufficiently worse became commonplace that nobody would even notice it.
Actually, Hitler didn't want war. He just wanted everyone to surrender without more than the threat of fighting. (Except, possibly, the French. He may have really wanted to punish them for the WWI surrender terms. Ref. "Is Paris Burning?".)
But generally Czechoslovakia is how Hitler wanted to win.
OTOH, he was prepared to fight, and he was unwilling to accept anything less than surrender. So he was quite willing to start a war rather than relinquish his other goals.
I don't disagree that the US acted as you state. Only in your claim that the US initiated the pattern. Britain acted the same way before the US did. Prior to that. there wasn't a clearly dominant country, but diplomacy and war, or threat of war, have long been intertwined. Certainly it was used by the Romans. (I don't know enough Greek history, but I've got my suspicions.)
OTOH, some things have changed. Up through the early years of the industrial revolution, war could be profitable to the country that won. Since then it's gotten increasingly expensive, until by now it's ruinously expensive even if you are the victor, and impose unconditional surrender. But people still have it in their minds that it's possible to win a war. You can only lose less badly.
You REALLY don't understand atomic weapons. REALLY don't.
If there is a major nuclear exchange between major powers, we won't have global warming, we'll have an instant ice age. Expect 90% casualties among all living humans. (Details, naturally, vary, but none of the scenarios are nice.)
Now if there were a minor war, say between India and Afghanistan, and they refrained from using nuclear weapons on cities, we might only get several degrees of cooling for a decade or so. (This is based on weaponry estimates over a decade old, however, and they were ESTIMATES.) In that scenario the countries north of the equator would be spared most of the cataclysmic results. (Note: most, not all.) If, however, cities were burned, then the projections are several times worse, and widespread recovery of the glaciers is likely in the south within two years, and in the north within the decade.
The reason for this is that nuclear explosions lift soot into the stratosphere, above the level at which rain clouds form, so it takes decades to centuries to settle out. And at that height it acts to cool the Earth. Because of wind currents, the particles tend to remain either north or south of the equator, but over a period of a decade or so will spread out more evenly.
OTOH, this *would* solve the global warming problem. Just not in a very desirable or predictable way. And it wouldn't do anything to solve to acidification of the oceans. (A population crash caused by massive global crop failures, however, would act to solve that.)
And again, please note, this is for a nuclear war between countries that don't have many nuclear weapons. Which describes neither China nor the US. In that case we probably wouldn't see a re-enactment of "On the Beach", but something not too different, only featuring starvation and glaciers is reasonable. (Radiation poisoning is highly over-rated as a quick kill. It takes far too high a dose to be likely even in a maximal exchange. [I'm not counting, here, the induced cancers that show up 15 or more years later.] One should, however, expect the average lifespans of the survivors of a nuclear war, and their descendents for the next three generations, to be around 20 years, due to increased induced cancer, though this would drop off as the more radioactive elements burned out.)
We AREN'T going to invade China, and they aren't going to invade the US. Not unless someone with launch authority really wigs out. (This would be more comforting if we hadn't already had several close escapes. The report is we were once within 30 seconds of the US launching on Russia.)
P.S.: It's still true that only an idiot would get the US into a land war in Asia. This would be more comforting if there weren't so many idiots in positions of power.
Sorry, but that's not true. My wife was dunned by debt collectors because someone with the same name as her died in a nearby city without paying his hospital bill.
Yes, they were unscrupulous, cowardly, untrustworthy, liars. And they wouldn't accept reasonable proof that she wasn't the person who owed the money. (Being alive didn't seem to count.) But when *SHE* traced down what the problem was and mailed them copies of the death certificate, the problem ceased. It did, however, take over six months of continual effort, because they wouldn't give her the information to find out who really owed the debt.
Paying your bill doesn't protect you against "errors". They want money, and they don't really care if the person who pays is the person who owes the money.
No. But then we ALWAYS say "We do not accept any form of telephone solicitation." Doesn't matter if it's a group we support. At the end of each month we scan the requests for funding, and divy up an amount of money that we're donating this month among them. This lets us balance our budget, and still support those we deem most worthy of support.
(N.B.: It does mean we get lots of junk mail, but that's easier to deal with.)
I don't know about YOUR health care insurance, but mine decided that if Medicare didn't consider a routine physical to be worth covering, then they wouldn't cover it either.
The only databases that are good by that criterion are the pre-relational network databases. They could do tables. The could store data hierarchically. They could...well, anything. But they were a pain in the ass to use. Because they could do everything, you had to specify everything by hand.
N.B.: This isn't, or doesn't appear to be, the same kind of database that is currently called a network database, like Neo4j. It's more like assembly code. Primitives were things like, "Link this node to that node" or "follow the nth link from this node". But you could do hierarchies with rings of connections, you could do rings of rings, you could do simple tables. But since "table" wasn't a primitive concept, you had to write all the code that meant this link was a link across a row of the table, while that link was a link to the succeeding record of the table, etc.
Perhaps you need to think again about what constitutes a good database. A certain degree of predefined rigidity of concept is greatly advantageous...of course any particular rigidity will render it less than optimal for certain purposes. But tables have proven very useful as a databse concept. So usefule that network and hierarchical databases have essentially dropped out of sight. And, of course, been reinvented. But if you want reports and queries, then relational databases are quite hard to beat. Personally, I often want something a bit different. And for my purposes all I need is a unsigned long for a key, and a binary dump of a struct for the data. Having to change these into strings is quite annoying. So I generally prefer to use something else. TokyoCabinet is a good choice. Currently I'm working on something that maps more nicely onto a fixed length record random access binary file. (A good old Fortran concept that has fallen out of fashion. You can emulate it in C, but the language doesn't really encourage it.)
I bit more than that. There was an incident a decade or so ago when the driver got out to fix a jammed door, and when it was unjammed, the train decided it was time to take off for the next station. It got there, stopped, and opened the doors. And waited for the driver to show up.
Well, often they have someone already picked out, but I don't think many are total fabrications. Most people who go to the effort of posting a job application actually do want to hire someone. They may not want to pay enough to actually get someone who matches their requirements, but that's a spearate matter. (And often their requirements are literally insane. The people who wirte the applications must not have ANY idea of what they're asking for.)
Well, as normally stated, quantum theory DOES require an observer. It does not require that the observer be sentient. Any electromagnetic interaction will do. Also strong or weak force interactions. Probably gravity, too, but that's just a bit difficult to observe.
Typically experiments use electrons or photons as the primary observers, but nearly anything will work, with varying degrees of sensitivity.
OTOH, as a believer in the Many-Worlds interpretation, I think that the observation just details which of the worlds you have ended up in. And I also believe in multiple pasts as well as multiple futures. (And the only thing special about this present, is that it's the one that you are observing from.)
IIRC there's a Mercury based treatment that didn't rely on antibiotics. I don't know how effective it was.
KDE4 has finally evolved into something not terrible. But it's not even approximately as good as was KDE3. It it were, I'd be using it. (I tried for a few months recently. It was OK, but inferior to Mate, where I rated KDE3 as superior to Gnome2.) Currently I'm using xfce, which is pretty good, but not quite as good (for my purposes) as was Gnome2, which, as I stated, was inferior to KDE3. It's been several months since I tried Cinnamon, but the screen shots I see don't appear to be as good as Mate.
It's also been over a year since I tried LXDE. It might have improved. When I tried it I rated it as better than either Gnome3 or KDE4, but then KDE4 improved (and, in any case, it was inferior to xfce).
OTOH, my wife always asks me "Where's electricsheep?". Unfortunately, I haven't been able to get it working on ANYTHING recently. (I did have it working on KDE4, which is a part of the reason I stuck to it for months.)
That's one think that anarchy can look like. Perhaps the most likely form. But look into the Yk tribe of Africa, before the famine. It can also be quite peaceful.
But it's not stable under stress.
You, by the fact of this communication, clearly do not live in an isolated community (unless you consider the entire human species to be such). You might consider the various reasons why you do not.
There are many small, and relatively isolated communities, and many of them are quite happy. But they are required to abide by the laws of the larger community in which they are embedded. (Often they don't do so, and often because of that they are broken up, and occasionally killed off. But many are quite successful.) They are not, however, actually isolated. That has become essentially impossible. If you go back to the period of slow communication, you find small, isolated, communities that were relatively happy (as well as the other kind), but none of them were, other than in theory, anarchist. The successful ones had a leader (or small group of leaders) who had sufficient power to have anyone else in the community ostracised. Also, the young people tended to leave. Additionally, they weren't totally isolated. Wandering traders would occasionally come by to buy and sell. Etc. (If nothing else, they'd need things like steel needles, and there were other things which, if not actually required, were highly desireable.)
So even if you go back into history you don't find any REALLY isolated small communities. The Mormons came close at one point, and that brought in the US Army.
Going futher back, during the middle ages you still don't have actual isolated communities in most of Europe. During the early part of the Middle Ages some Swiss tribes were able to enforce isolation, taking advantage of the terrain. Then there were the Kazars, the Afghans, etc. Again, the successful ones didn't stay small, and their success depended on not only low technology, but a population small enough to take advantage of the terrain.
Please note that this is mainly European history, with a little bit of Middle Eastern. I don't know the histroy of ofher areas well enough. But given the history I know I'm quite skeptical of an actual isolated community. (Well, I believe there's one island near India that is still isolated, because the tribe living on it kill anyone who attempts to land. Nobody can say how happy they are, however, because they are actually isolated.)
Anarchy is unstable. Some limited forms in situations with low population density and limited speed of travel work reasonably well, but only by replacing government with "social controls", and for those to work you need to personally know nearly everyone you come into contact with, and to distrust strangers. (It doesn't require disliking strangers, if they are rare enough, but you can't trust them.)
Some minimal level of government is required for stability in an environment where you are likely to come into frequent contact with people you don't know.
Please note that I haven't even considered external stresses on the society. Or changing environmental stresses, like a drought.)
Still, within the "quasi-stable" area, many forms of government are possible. (And no stable form of government has been devised...unless you consider "kill them all" to be a form of government.)
I admit a great liking for a minimally controlling government, but for that to be feasible, there can't be any governmentally benefitted entities, like corporations. So there needs to be some other way of providing the services that they historically provide...preferably one that is as efficient, but which doesn't centralize power. (In fact, one of the necessary features for minimally governed system to be tolerable, is that the government still be more powerful than any pair of entities within it's jurisdiction. This is clearly a necessary, but not a sufficient condition.)
Governments are quite complex entities, and any simple attempt to model them is doomed to, at best, failure.
FWIW, I've gotten a letter saying that the spreadsheet I used added the numbers incorectly. I double checked, and it was the IRS that made the mistake. OTOH, it was only for $10 or so, so I didn't fight it.
And within the US it's at least the American Dental Association. Probably also several others. TLAs are highly overloaded.