There is a system whereby foreign banks are obligated to report accounts held by Americans to the US for “anti terrorism” purposes.

Could you give me a name, or at least some link to a government website that describes the system you’re talking about?

Ok, but realistically, the people who would actually attempt tax evasion here wouldn’t be susceptible to any of the above.

Let’s assume a scenario where you have a dual citizen of the US and a South American country that has less than stellar relations with the US government.

Let’s say they obtained their US citizenship by being born in the country during a temporary period of time that the parents resided there. The family decided to move back after a year or two, another 40 years passed, and the kid has grown to be a successful plastic surgeon who runs a self owned clinic and earns $200k income annually. Being aware of their dual citizenship they keep their wealth invested in entities with no US presence and never self-report anything to the IRS.

This is where I am not seeing any way for the IRS to enforce or do anything about this type of tax evasion.

they could also check your bank balance and international holdings against the amount you said you’ve been making and see if it matches up.

Does the IRS have authority to issue such requests to foreign banks? How would the IRS even know what foreign bank to issue these requests to?

Sorry, I have no knowledge about what information is communicated across international borders with regards to the banking world and how this gets tracked on a per-individual basis.

Maybe I’m not understanding what you mean, but if someone works and lives abroad for 330 days of the year they’ll likely have a bank account established within that country so that they don’t have to deal with all of their daily financial activities being international transactions.

Hardly any web developers had the deep skill set needed to pull it off.

I’m personally of the opinion it’s not so much an issue of a lack of talent that prevented graceful fallback from being adopted, but simply the amount of extra effort necessary to implement it properly.

In my opinion, to do it properly you can’t make any assumptions about the browser your app is running on; you should never base anything on the reported user agent string. Instead, you need to test for each individual JavaScript, HTML, (or sometimes even CSS) feature and design the experience around having a fallback for when that one singular piece of functionality isn’t present. Otherwise you create a brand new problem where, for example, a forked Firefox browser with a custom user agent string doesn’t get recognized despite having the feature set to provide the full experience, and that person then gets screwed over.

But yeah, that approach is incredibly cumbersome and time consuming to code and test for. Even with libraries that help with properly detecting the capabilities of the browser, you’ll still need to implement granular fallbacks that work for your particular application, and that’s a lot of extra work.

Add to that the fact devs in this field are already burdened with having to support layouts and designs that must scale responsively to everything ranging from a phone screen to a 100" inch TV and it quickly becomes nearly impossible to actually finish any project on a realistic timeline. Doing it that way is a monumental task to undertake, and realistically it probably mainly benefits people that use NoScript or similar – so not a lot of people.

If you were employed by a foreign company that has no presence in the US how exactly would the IRS know whether you’ve earning more than $125k?

It’s one month later and I am back to reply:

I don’t want to replace HTTP, or the web. But, I also absolutely don’t want to build anything in greater complexity than what we have today. In other words, keep it for what it’s doing now, but having an isolated app/container based platform efficiently served through a browser might just be a good thing for everyone?

5 years ago I was writing rust code compiled to web-assembly and then struggling to get it to run in a browser. I did that because I couldn’t write an efficient enough version of whatever the algorithm I was following in javascript - probably on account of most things being objects. I got it to run eventually with decent enough performance, but it wasn’t fun gluing all that mess together. I think if there was a better delivery platform for WASM built into browsers and maybe eventually mobile platforms, it would probably be better than today’s approach to cross-platform apps being served via HTTP.

Ok, let’s try to narrow this down so our exchanges aren’t vague. To me going from propellers to jet engines would have been “revolutionary”, but to you it may have just been incrementally expanding on the concept of a wing that keeps aircraft afloat.

So for clarity, I’m not suggesting a complete replacement to HTTP. I don’t envision a world where the web as we know gets fully “replaced”. But, I do think that it has out lived its purpose and ultimately we should be seeking a better protocol for information exchange. Or, in other words, I don’t think formulating a solution that can provide privacy, integrity, etc should be restricted to being built on HTTP just because that is what we essentially consider the web to be today.

To keep a modicum of privacy and openness, the web is de-facto dependent on Firefox continuing to exist in the medium term. And it has to be paid for somehow.

The web today has no privacy or openness. It has gmail accounts, russian propaganda bots, and AI SEO article spam. Does it matter which rose tinted browser you care to view or interact with this shit through? I’m approaching 40 and the web has been a fundamental part of my life to the point that I am sometimes bewildered about what I’d do without it. It is a sinking ship though, and at this point I’m much more interested in seeing alternatives to HTTP rather than trying to save the mess we built on-top of it.