brainwad

20 ms·

391.
by brainwad 5y ago
It was a nightmare migration that went super over-deadline and people were dragooned into working nights/weekends.
392.
by brainwad 5y ago
The app could still send your keys _as_ an e2e message (to the app author). OS enforcement would need to be pretty intrusive to stop this (e.g. a pop-up for every message sent, displaying the actual destination of the message). I bet users
393.
by brainwad 5y ago
The app can just leak your keys to a central database? Using code other people wrote/compiled always requires trust.
394.
by brainwad 5y ago
They would tolerate and even want high utilisation by a normal customer; the problem is fraud. As fraudsters want to get the most out of each crime, they are likely to hit 100% utilisation. So 100% utilisation is a red flag for fraud, espec
395.
by brainwad 5y ago
They _do_ pay their due tax. It's not tax evasion to reinvest in new business areas. Corporate income tax is levied on net profit precisely to encourage economic development in a country, instead of economic extraction.
396.
by brainwad 5y ago
They need to operate AWS in Europe in order for AWS to be competetive - you can't run a cloud just in the US. It could be unprofitable indefinitely, but so long as the US business makes enough to cover the losses, it's fine. As fo
397.
by brainwad 5y ago
They made a profit globally for the last two years. But for many years they were very careful to expand neither so fast they went bankrupt, nor so slow they would waste investor money on taxes.
398.
by brainwad 5y ago
The EU has a minimum VAT rate of 15% and an average of like 20%, so a huge amount.
399.
by brainwad 5y ago
They do, when they run out of runway. But a well-calculated reinvestment strategy, like Amazon's, can have a very low burn rate and so a very long runway.
400.
by brainwad 5y ago
Is there some reason why wholly owned subsidiaries should pay income tax at all in other countries? I own assets in the US, but I don't pay income tax there, because I live in another country, where I pay income tax on my worldwide i
401.
by brainwad 5y ago
Bezos's billions are from capital appreciation of his Amazon stocks. They are pending taxation, because the US (and pretty much all other countries) don't tax unrealised capital gains, because they are not stable - during a crash
402.
by brainwad 5y ago
Because they cross-subsidise their unprofitable new markets with their profitable established markets, so overall the company makes (historically) a net loss. It's been a great strategy for Amazon and it is what the tax system is meant
403.
by brainwad 5y ago
Even Luxembourg and Ireland have non-zero corporate income tax rates. If Amazon is managing to not pay any corporate income tax, then it's corporate income must be 0 or negative, so the fact they have low corporate income taxes is irre
404.
by brainwad 5y ago
Except that it's wrong: _revenue_ may be €8.4m per employee, but that's not the same thing as income. In a low-margin retail business like Amazon's, of course the revenues will be high, but almost all of that is compensated f
405.
by brainwad 5y ago
Corporate income tax is paid on net profits, not on sales revenue (if it were otherwise, it would just ban low-margin businesses, which would be harmful to society). Amazon not owing corporate income tax isn't at all surprising. In mos
406.
by brainwad 5y ago
Wikipedia would seem to be general audience / big idea / short-term but survives on patronage.
407.
by brainwad 5y ago
Because English contract law has a reputation for reliability, thanks to the common law doctrine of stare decisis, which binds courts to decide the same way as previous cases with the same facts were decided (modulo appeals courts). French
408.
by brainwad 6y ago
They would presumably reconsider blanket ban, if the university says they will prohibit these specific researchers from committing to Linux.
409.
by brainwad 6y ago
If Google is prohibited from paying for default search engine status, because it is judged a monopoly, will that condemn us all to default Yahoo or Bing, like Firefox tried a few years ago? Google should at least be able to match the top bi
410.
by brainwad 6y ago
> Why would they want to do that once they have separate owners? Why or how would they end up with separate owners? The current owners of Alphabet would get equal shares in all demerged companies, I would hope. And presumably with the sa
411.
by brainwad 6y ago
No, it's totally feasible. In 2019, businesses had expenses related to keeping offices habitable, that reduced their taxable income. Those offices are now closed, so they will have higher taxable incomes than they otherwise would. This
412.
by brainwad 6y ago
This means countries like Japan or Singapore, where while technically multi-party, in practice the opposition parties never win. Obviously a country where other parties are outlawed (e.g. communist countries) is not a single party democracy
413.
by brainwad 6y ago
Well, if the form needs to be faxed (still a thing!) then having the filled PDF makes it easy to use an e-fax service. But I assume sending the file to another computer for printing is the main use case.
414.
by brainwad 6y ago
The market (especially in real estate) is not totally frictionless and arbitrage-free. Plus people can have genuinely different valuations for consumable assets (like housing) - that's the entire point of a market, to facilitate trade
415.
by brainwad 6y ago
What this law gives them is a way to force all their competitors (e.g. Fairfax) to join their boycott, by being able to negotatiate a single, mandatory price for the industry that their competitors won't be allowed to undercut.
416.
by brainwad 7y ago
That's very extreme. To solve the problem of capturing all profit, society just needs to agree some k so that all ad bidders only bid so much as would give them ROI of 1+k, instead of bidding all the way down to ROI of 1.
417.
by brainwad 7y ago
Yes, it is. There is a comic that is internally shared that describes it well. A Googler comes to a fork in the road. On the left, there is a road that is worn out, with a sign saying "deprecated, don't even think about it";
418.
by brainwad 7y ago
> Everybody is allowed to have more than one job if they please. In my country, it's generally illegal to work for a company also work for a competitor. It's a breach of the duty of loyalty to your employer.
419.
by brainwad 7y ago
We're talking about programmers; they have to be able to type english words because almost every language uses english keywords and most command line tools use english, etc. Since everyone has to be able to type english words, why add
420.
by brainwad 7y ago
Be a famous computer scientist who co-founded Y Combinator and created this very site?

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