Most of these big companies don’t actually sell your data directly, they monetize it through first party ads. If you have a well-oiled ad machine with strong first party data, selling the data just gives it to competitors, and is overall less valuable than using it for yourself.
I’d assume they’re still building that profile while you use the product, but you won’t see any ads, and can still delete the data from the various points like you’ve mentioned.
I’m not sure if this is what you meant, but at 17k t/s, you start to compete with the speed of network calls. You could approach the point of generating an HTML/js/css page faster than some websites can be returned over the network.
Plenty of places are sub-optimal in organization (or some other aspect)… while still being functional and successful.
Same with writing bad code. We’ve all seen sub-optimal decisions in code or technical artifacts that go on to be successful products or tools. Most people can’t/wont/don’t work at the Pareto-optimal workplace.
ZIRP alone isn’t even the full financial story - there was a time bomb tax change from a 2017 bill that impacted R&D (most software work) and that took effect in 2023.
But it’s fairly visible that big companies (eg Meta) that are spending a lot on AI are actually changing spending on headcount and hiring to maintain margins. It’s not the efficiency of the workers, it’s the maintenance of margins with big new spending.
My first and only layoff was effective 1h before that law went into effect. 1,000s of us were shunted off b/c an entire research arm was canned due to the changing cost of research s/w teams.
I'm poorer but happier now b/c of it. That job was nuts.
I took a decent sized pay cut about 6 years ago to join a small company and build out our own product knowing that I may not get a raise for awhile but got to work on something cool with people I liked and I haven't regreted it for a moment. Looking forward to waking up to do work is a wild feeling.
I’m kind of doing this right now for the first time as a founding engineer in a very small but tight knit team. On paper, I’m objectively in a less secure position, but holy shit is it nice to enjoy work consistently.
I haven't dreaded going to work in years. I also realized burnout is less about how much time you're putting in and much more about how that time is spent. And when I had micromanaging bosses every hour felt like 4.
> The One Big Beautiful Bill Act introduces Section 174A, which restores immediate deduction of domestic research and experimental expenditures starting in tax years beginning after December 31, 2024, reversing the controversial five-year amortization requirement that took effect in 2022.
The layoffs are happening all over, not just in USA. Atlassian has cut jobs. Spotify. Wisetech. Xero. It's happening all over. This is not a USA tax policy problem.
What could possibly trigger people to down vote this absolutely neutral, and 100% factual, normal post? Cant the moderators not explain, than down voting is not for things you don't agree with?
While factually correct, the US tax change was a huge driver of global layoffs. And the original comment didn’t just mention US tax policy as a source of layoffs, and the alternative source provided would apply globally.
The tax change impacted US company spend on their overseas businesses, so of course they’d be impacted, and it would indirectly impact overseas supplies of domestic business. Beyond that, it sets a tone and many in business are quick to follow the behaviors of others.
That's just silly. The fact that you disagree with an opinion does not mean that other people should not get the chance to be exposed to it. That's how echo-chambers form.
At the same time, the amount of disagreement an opinion gathers is an extremely important channel of information for determining whether you agree with someone's position. Silencing the disagreement with it gives an outsized benefit to harmful and malicious statements.
That's fine when a disagreement (or downvote) is just a signal on the post, but when it's used as a way to silence an opinion (e.g downvotes will hide it) that's even more harmful and malicious. Especially when the guideline is to downvote posts that are low-quality or don't conform to the rules, not posts you just merely disagree with or are against your belief system. Popularity should not be confused with truth.
This is true as stated. However, it is important context that the time bomb was originally introduced in Trump's signature Tax Cuts and Jobs Act in his first term. So, yes, Trump's OBBBA fixed it, but Trump's TCJA caused it in the first place, too.
This is a fair criticism and I am not defending the practice. My understanding is that time-bombs like this are very regularly introduced into all sorts of bills, party-agnostic. It's how they can say things like "We saved $X over Y years!" where a lot of the time-bombs go off half-way through the 'Y-years" bit unless renewed.
Please correct if I'm wrong about this. I only know what I read, which is hard to trust anymore.
As opposed to the publicly available Google Trends data? As opposed to running legitimate market research? Wouldn't you rather know the most searched person in your vertical, market, etc?
The data in this example was going to be made public anyways. All the examples of prediction markets are predicated on them becoming public. You not only need the info, you need the info before it becomes public.
and that's exactly how the Google engineer made money, right? He knew it beforehand, and once it was made public other people did too
Realtime access to internal Google search data may help you predict a lot of things that might be worth money, for example there's an existing market where companies buy usage estimation for competitors products (not though Google). I don't see why so many people are completely sure this information is worthless
> a thing that once set up is just the cost of energy
I don't think we can discount this, frankly. Newer electronics are energy efficient, but older devices are more energy-intensive, and unless configured well, a gaming PC can easily use a few dollars a month in electricity, so now you're approaching subscription territory. A subscription comes with no upfront cost, higher reliability, no wasted space in your home, mobile apps, etc. (and less privacy).
These are somewhat valid reasons, but I think most of us have seen the use of pasting AI responses that are simply a laziness of communicating.
If you're trying (1), it's easier to say "I don't know, maybe <available ai> can answer". It doesn't save any time to ask an AI that the other party is equally equipped to ask. It just saves the responder time from being genuinely helpful.
If you're (2), at least explain this (or include the prompt so it's self evident and a teaching moment). Of course, if you're a SME, maybe you also have the knowledge to just answer directly - see 4.
For (3), why reply at all: see 1.
For (4), saying this associates your own authority and knowledge, and is valuable, but the omission of such disclaimer makes it indistinguishable from 1.
An old law, belonging to a set of laws which have been eroded over the decades such that it's surprising this one hasn't been set aside already. Both Congress and the courts have changed in ways that won't ever let that be passed again, or let it stand if it somehow is snuck into law. That era is over, you will never succeed in bringing it back.
And if you think anything's going to change in November, you're going to be really disappointed.
Let’s do the bog-standard obvious and sane thing and pick a single point in time, once a year and use the value then. Maybe, i don’t know, close of market on the last trading day of the year. At which point it won’t fluctuate again until the new tax year. Then, we can call it “mark to market” because we’re marking the value to the market at a point in time.
Finally, we stop with silly bad faith arguments because fluctuations in stock have been successful taxed for decades. This is how day-traders pay taxes, and it’s not even a little challenging to do.
A friend of mine, a few years ago, had his stock options vest. He didn't sell the stocks. The stocks tanked a few months later. The IRS said he owed income tax on the value of the stocks when they vested.
He owed more tax than his net worth, lost his house, everything, and wound up in a trailer.
He never saw the money he was taxed on.
> bad faith arguments
A person's net worth can have wild gyrations on a daily basis. It's not unusual for a stock to move 10% in a few hours. MSFT dropped something like a third of its value last year. What something is "worth" is an utterly arbitrary notion, and basing taxes on that is inevitably unfair an inequitable. (A lot of effort
and handwaving is done by accountants trying to guess at what something is "worth".) Heck, what is your house "worth"? Do you agree with the tax assessor? I once told the assessor that if he believed my house was worth what he assessed it at, I'd sell it to him at a 10% discount and he can flip it for what he thought it was worth. He wouldn't take the deal.
With taxes on income, that is fairly well understood and can be accounted for to the dollar.
So your friend had a large taxable event occur, ignored any advice that such tax event would persist over the tax year, and failed to act at any time to address his tax shortfall. Sounds like he had a shit tax/financial advisor. And to consume all of his net worth etc, the number of options that vested must have been quite large.
Not going to be sympathetic to someone YOLO'ing their compensation/taxes.
I’d assume they’re still building that profile while you use the product, but you won’t see any ads, and can still delete the data from the various points like you’ve mentioned.
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