// Discussing weird hobbies. Re-ordered for clarity.
jpo: My current hobby is reading about tax law
echarlie: Why?
haicen: Probably to learn how legal tax evasion works
haicen: But realistically, you either have enough money to hire someone to figure that out, or you don't have enough money for it to matter
jpo: No. You can hire someone to figure out how much you owe, but I haven’t been able to find someone who'd be able to tell me how to change what I'm doing to minimize future taxes in the first place
jpo: Such people give standard advice which may be good for most people, but I am not most people, and am trying to save way more than a typical American and retire early, which means my tax considerations are not standard, and "just max roth" doesn't necessarily make sense
jpo: So the best way is of course to write a program in Haskell that expresses tax laws as a directed graph of money-type transformations, express the resulting graph as a matrix, express your desired outcome as a fitness function, reduce said matrix, and out pops optimal tax avoidance strategy
jpo: Of course, nobody takes this approach, they just look at single choices in isolation, and so the overall macro-scale outcome is suboptimal because they aren’t considering everything holistically
haicen: I was with you except the Haskell part
lukas: oh what's this, a real world useful application of haskell?!?!?
jpo: actually yes! ;)