Re: [gentoo-user] Gentoo Council vs Umbrella Corp ?

[Ashley Dixon]

On Fri, Aug 28, 2020 at 10:15:32PM -0500, Dale wrote:
> Ashley Dixon wrote:
> >
> > Especially considering most Americans do not understand the system (the
> > readability of the I.R.S. tax code has been under scrutiny for a long time),
> > I wouldn't want to place the burden of conferring with such a convoluted
> > system on anyone.
>
> I read a article once several years ago where a magazine contacted the
> IRS and gave the same set of facts and asked the same question of over a
> dozen different IRS help agents.  You know, the ones that answer the
> phone to help you.  Given the same facts and the same question, they got
> several different answers.  It seems even the people at the IRS can't
> understand it either.

I did a quick on-line search regarding this matter (and readability  of  English
texts in general), and it seems like  the  I.R.S.   tax  code  is  incapable  of
achieving even a positive score on the Flesch readability index [1, 2], so  your
testimonial doesn't surprise me too much.

The same algorithm has been applied to a quite a  few  public  domain  works  in
Literature and Philosophy over the last few centuries; some of the  results  are
mildly interesting [3]. Although, considering Finnegans Wake attained a score of
62.8, I am dubious of the accuracy of this method (then again,  it's  very  non-
standard English, if you can call it English at all) [4].

[1] http://users.csc.calpoly.edu/~jdalbey/305/Projects/FleschReadabilityProject.html
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flesch%E2%80%93Kincaid_readability_tests
[3] http://www.infomotions.com/etexts/
[4] https://www.statslife.org.uk/culture/1572-how-unreadable-are-james-joyce-s-novels

-- 

Ashley Dixon
suugaku.co.uk

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