The reason the US doesn’t do that is thanks to lobbying by companies like Intuit and H&R Block.

I got distracted and forgot there were two guys halfway through the sentence.

At some point in the early 90s my mom’s American Staffordshire Terrier was stolen. About a week later a pair of guys show up at the house with the dog. “Lady, please take your dog back!”. He shoves the dog through the doorway and they take off as fast as he can.

Okay, so for some context .ml is run by the Lemmy devs and the devs are openly tankies (authoritarian communists). .ml, along with Lemmygrad (also run by the devs) and Hexbear are known as the Tankie Triad. While not as bad as the other two, .ml still has a lot of tankies compared to instances that aren’t part of the triad. Additionally, .ml used to be the recommended instance (until .world came along), making it one of the more populated instances. Most other instances defederate with Lemmygrad and Hexbear, but not necessarily .ml.

Basically, there’s a lot of extremely opinionated and often combative people there and provoking them (intentionally or not) is very easy.

That’s my understanding of the situation anyway.