"The irony of it is that those sites would be moderate, fence sitters in any other country."
Only in Europe. As a European friend of mine said, he moved here because in the EU there is a far left, a crazy far left, and an even further left and nothing else and he was tired of looking at the lazy deadbeats he worked to pay for day in and day out.
Yes. After a few days and on the second and subsequent hurricanes a few places with generators managed to get it hooked up. Before that I managed to get one to take a check but handing out checks is more risky for me than them.
What is sad is there are sane and coherent logical arguments to support a subset of what you are saying. You and those like you are a sort of strawman that lets those sane and coherent arguments appear to be easily defeated. You are a character that results in actual rational debate ending because anything associated with anything you'd say is laughable.
Personally, I don't think it is an accident. It's like The Colbert Report except the Colbert's don't even know they are a mockery of actual rational and educated people meant to discredit them.
Troll lol. I guess there are few rich tech beasts with mod points.
If you want to see an example of how the dodge income scam the rich play works just refer to the taxes Warren Buffet helpfully revealed. I'll fudge the numbers because I'm too lazy to look, the concept and rough scale is right. His actual gains were billions but he only directly cashed out maybe 20 mill and dodged almost all the tax on that giving another chunk to charity. For the most part he is able to invest in new companies, make acquisitions, etc by using stock to do it. Hell, he could pay everyone down to his lawn service in stock for all I know and they'd be crazy not to take it as the stock has a good return and appreciates over time unlike cash which depreciates with inflation.
This is the loophole which needs closed, these are the tax dodgers we need to go after. Leave the handyman alone, if he does well his business will grow and he won't be able to hide his few thousand a year from the IRS anymore. For the most part small independent business people like the handyman turn out to have a sense of ethics and want to bring it above board as soon as they have enough going on for it to be worthwhile anyway. That is why the IRS doesn't expend many resources tilting at that windmill.
No, it would be about making everyone account for all their money.
The problem is that the people who are hiding their money tend to be the poor. A handyman is a good example, these people don't make all that much money, what they do make is on a cash basis and they usually pay taxes on little or none of that money. This is what makes it possible for you to hire someone on craigslist who comes and installs an appliance for a reasonable rate. There isn't much tax to be gained here.
The people who are dodging significant amounts of tax that are worth pursuing are doing it legally. The biggest dodges are dodging income entirely. There are several ways to do that, real estate is a good one, just reinvest the proceeds or if you own a boatload of stock in a company only sell what you need and give a chunk to charity or to pay a debt to avoid paying tax on it. The stock you gave away counts as money spent but only stock you cash in and dividends count as income.
10 years isn't job hopping, 6mo-1year is a job hopper. 10 years is just falling in a comfortable rut. The issue is that you are are changing it up minimally and the needs, requirements, and shop philosophy all stay the same and fall in the same trend of solutions in one spot. If you don't hop into different environments and shake it up you aren't forced out of your comfort zone enough and your comfort zone grows too narrow.
"You really don't want a wannabe in that role but you do want a significant amount of direct and focused experience (which is why consultants and contractors in that area are highly paid)."
Depends. Security is a pretty generic term but most of that area is about compliance. It's important to be aware that security is more about being able to show what great measures you take because beyond a handful of well known and rarely followed best practices security tends to be snake-oil. Where it isn't snake oil and everything is enforced people can't really get their jobs done so it's only a measure of time until something gives, we are currently in one of those cycles with security right now.
"In most areas you don't want someone reinventing the wheel but would prefer that they can learn from past mistakes of others, and that is something I often see generalists failing at."
That isn't my experience. That is something I see the inexperienced failing at without regard to generalists or specialists. Specialists sometimes do come out a little ahead, not because they know better but generally more because they tend to just go along with the trends in their specialty. They just follow whatever they are being told are best practices from vendors, recommendations, and so forth but if they can rarely learn new tricks or apply things in creative new ways. They fall into routines with technologies that are limited in scope. Technology intermixes so much that becomes a liability fast. I don't care what area of technology you are in, it's doubtful you can be truly competent if you don't understand how the full stack works. The network guy should be able to work competently after six months shifting into a programming role, the programmer should be able to work competently stepping into a network role after a few months. All of the above should be at least junior admin level proficient with at least Linux.
"I think this is a mistake of many companies who assume that programmers are interchangeable cogs and can work on any topic as long as there's experience with programming. So I see fundamentally flawed network protocols that look like college projects, a complicated security structure that is easily bypassed, commercial RTOSs with novice mistakes and so forth."
I think what you are describing is a lack of experience not a lack of specialization. If you stack your team with 20 year olds that is what you are going to get. When you get into more specialized subjects like programming security solutions and high end networking you should start with people who have advanced experience in those areas and throw them on a team with people who have more of their experience with coding with a couple people somewhere in the middle. At the enterprise scale you shouldn't even be touching something that hasn't baked for five years in large environments outside a lab but latest trend is unleashing things out of dev into production in a continuous cycle or after baking for weeks or maybe a month with nothing but canned tests serving as a barrier.
You have clueless devs coding your environments with pseudo-code and automated frameworks. That is pretty much guaranteed to result in more holes than swiss cheese and instability. These realities and the ones you speak of are just the result of handing over control and listening to 20-25yr olds whispering into managers ears and selling them what amount to tech infomercials. They listen to because there is fast and easy money with all the other managers/execs listening.
Yeah, security is booming but you can only toss so much duct tape on the holes in that rickety boat and bail for so long. More and more things are going to start sinking.
Also... did you actually LOOK at your own article? Red indicates an increase, very few saw an increase and the biggest increase is at the top. Are you obsessing over the green bars? Of course the amount of increase grows with income level, the amount of taxes paid grows with income level. The top 10% pay 60% all taxes so any cut is going to impact them the most. If you only pay a couple thousand in taxes did you think there was going to be a giant >$500 boost to your refund or something?
Those lower tiers hardly pay taxes. In 2018 the top 1% (by income) paid 37.3% it becomes 69.4% when extended to the top 10% meaning the upper middle class (people who earn "6-digits") pay 32.1% of all taxes or the difference between those figures. That is 9% of tax payers footing that bill and 100% working class. That is a mere $139k+ which is barely enough to have a middle class lifestyle on a single income in the suburbs. This is where a district manager of a handful of restaurants sits. Or a couple making about $70k which is pretty much standard for "professionals" which isn't actually the upper middle class anymore an experienced restaurant manager falls here, it's just two middle-middle class people. Anyone making $40-60k that is entry level in tech or management, you are in the lower end of the middle class. Less than that and you aren't middle class at all though with two people working you can earn a middle class living. But all of these people are solidly working class. It doesn't matter if you are a doctor or a janitor, you are working class. Less than $30k and you are poor. Less than $15k and you are destitute.
Why? It is their own politics that created the situation and their politics that mean the gestapo will come after them if they don't do it. I can just sit back and watch their own dogs chew on them as they finally pay their own bill.
Why should I have sympathy for people who put in a loophole to avoid paying their fair share of the taxes for the federal programs they support? There is a whole lot more than just roads in the budget but infrastructure investment boosts the economy as a whole and if it is going somewhere the pays it's full and fair share of income tax it comes back with interest over time.
I live in one of the other 47 states. There are no personal income taxes in this state and there aren't taxes on businesses unless they made better than a million that year.
We have a cost of living comparable to the rural midwest with California level incomes and all enjoyed a massive tax cut. We also have some of the lowest utility rates you can find unless you are lazy and don't shop. Currently I pay 3.7 cents/kwh all in on fully renewable energy delivered directly from the grid. Our state is on track to be fully renewable by 2020 even though we have incredibly low priced gas. How are you looking in California/New York?
Irrelevant to the point. Bob the janitor will still have a 401k or retirement plan unless Bob the janitor is actual Juan and not legally working in the first place. In which case Susan who owns that little cleaning company will be the middle class worker who has stock in her retirement account. In that case Susan will also benefit because those tax cuts on her corporation mean she can place lower bids or possibly even survive when she comes under too much scrutiny and actually has to hire real US workers.
Bob the janitor wasn't really the point here and neither was the discounted stock. The cut was across all corporations and if you have a retirement account, big or small, you benefited even if they just dump the money out in dividends. Next year they'll actually be budgeting based on those funds because they can expect them and that is when you'll start seeing expansions and changes. Yes some of those changes will actually cut workers, they will be doing whatever they think is best for business but in some cases that will be expanding at home because the tax benefits and american English speaking workers now outweighs the increased labor cost. The companies doing that will result in more services and reduced costs here and the following year that will make the proposition a little better for companies revisiting the question at that point and so on.
The corporate tax cut and payout gave an immediate boost to retirement investments and most everyone has to have seen that. Actual serious and lasting economic adjustment takes years to bake in, you won't see the full extent until the end of the second term or possibly the next President who will take the credit or the blame even though his policies likely won't be felt until after he's gone. People who don't like that president will claim it's the last guy, people who do like him will pretend it's him making a difference. The people claiming immediate benefit will be wrong no matter who it actually is with the notable exception of something like this, a giant dump of cash across a large group. It's a parlor trick but it is nearly immediate and at least Trump dumped a huge chunk where it will end up in retirement funds and benefit people later in life.
And don't quote anything talking about stock mostly being owned by the top 10%, the top 10% are still middle class and definitely working class. The top 0.1% and above by wealth not income are the wealthy, not high earning workers.
"You honestly think that because shareholders were outraged over the firing of the single most influential figurehead of Disney, that a random janitor at IBM is going to benefit from these tax breaks?"
"Those fantastic tax cuts that go to publically traded corporations go nowhere except the top people, and as dividends to the shareholders."
Right, your second statement mirrors my assertion and the actual mechanism by which the working class benefits. Dividends to shareholders is money to everyone with a 401k, IRA, or bonds. Considering the corporate cuts were across the board maybe you don't work for IBM and get a discounted share price but your retirement money is almost certainly invested directly (stocks, bonds) or indirectly (mutual fund, composite ETF, etc) invested in corporations and you received the benefit of those dividends.
Why does everyone have so much trouble with concepts like this? Life is very grey and complex not black and white and resolved in a single move. When Joe does X to Sally or gives X to Sally and then Sally does something that benefits Dave you all get lost asserting Joe didn't do shit for Dave. Believe it or not, Joe could well have done/given to Sally rather than Dave because he anticipated what Sally would do and benefited both.
Even not working for IBM and getting discounted stock Bob may well own IBM stock because Bob will have a retirement account of some kind. And the janitor isn't the point, thousands of people do work for IBM and they are all working class with some possible exceptions at the executive level and Janet in accounting who is a trust fund baby that just loves numbers and husband who wants her out of the house all day.
30-90 day probation is pretty much standard when you hire a full time employee. Also you can do contract-to-hire to work around bureaucracy if needed.
Start looking for people who average 3yrs in position and have a diverse background. Ignore degrees, certs, and other credentials except for a slight bump in salary. Try to avoid technical/engineering talent who've sat in one seat for more than 10 years unless they had the diverse background before that and be aware you are going to have to kickstart their motor after having been in a rut for a few minutes.
The diverse and experienced background is the key. Avoid "specialists." The jack of all trades master of none phrase needs to die a painful death in technology. These are the people who learn and adapt, you get so many different perspectives for the price of one it is unbelievable. You can provide the information that fills in gaps and depth, unlike most who will regurgitate it back to you they'll actually value the new information and play with it.
Always remember that despite reports to the contrary, experience that has sit on a shelf for six months is valuable. Yes, they may not look much different right away and bomb an interview but its still all in their brain somewhere and memory is associative. As the information is revealed it will start triggering more and more memory and their old experienced proficiency will come back. It's like re-reading a book you've already read. Sometimes just the summary triggers recall, sometimes a conversation about the plot, sometimes you need to read a few chapters, but at some point short of reading the whole thing it comes back.
In the interview process just determine if someone can talk to talk. Save the proof for the first 30-90 days so people can work under normal circumstances. Some people suck at interviews anyway. For myself, I always bomb the easy questions because they are usually nonsense the compiler will catch, minor syntax, minor implementation semantics.
Unless you are hiring entry level these things are all minor noise and what separates talent from drones is higher level thinking. You are going to end up with someone who fits the old stereotype of an Indian firm that can only implement what you tell them verbatim but not think independently otherwise. At that point you might as well be outsourcing.
Tone and inflection are nearly everything. Without them you are very nearly having a conversation with an imaginary character in your mind combined with your own mannerisms and bias. These things are already extremely ambiguous. I don't really see that emoji is worse.
Maybe they will with it turning out there is evidence against Hauwei after all. With evidence of their practices and the increasing actions by China as a whole in industrial espionage and stolen plans sent to them for manufacturing it is only a matter of time before this escalates to international scale and the WTO.
Anti-Trumpism is only going to carry staying in bed with China for so long.
Reverse engineering a chip is not simple, fast, or cheap. It's dramatically more difficult than reverse engineering software and protocols and look at all the efforts that never finish in that area.
Are you under the impression that six figures is somehow outside the working class?
Kid grows up a trailer park, works hard in school, gets into state college and takes on a mountain of debt going to school, becomes a (doctor/lawyer/engineer/professional/broker). He can easily make a top 1% income and is definitely working class but then income isn't an indicator of the working class. $1 salaries are common among executives and $0 is common the board.
Wealth is the indicator of people who are outside the working class. Specifically having enough wealth to not need to work (even if you choose to). The average return rate of the S&P 500 with increases and dividends combined is around 15%. So you are looking for people who can passively make that 250k that denotes the top 1% by income purely on that passive 15%. That would be about $1.7 million in liquid assets. But realistically, you'd eat into principle without a buffer so make it about 20% higher and you'd also eat into principle because only half of that is dividends you can spend so make that 7% instead of 15. So $3.57m + 20% + 3% to cover inflation gives $4.4 million dollars in liquid wealth. If you are married you need to at least double that to $8.,8m and if you give the average of two children you'll need to double that again to $17.6m to assure they aren't in the working class. But those extra individuals don't change the $4.4m figure, they just mean you don't look at $4.4m for a household, purely individual basis.
"From profits, dumbshit. If you'd ever taken a first-year economics course, you would know that prices are not dependent on profits."
Strawman. Ad hominem. Plea to authority. The seller and more importantly all the sellers are PART of the marketplace, if their costs go up across the board the prices go up across the board to compensate and keep profits level. Companies do not just eat profits long term. If they can't raise profits they cut costs and for the most part that comes from staff.
"The marketplace sets the price. Whether or not the company can make a profit is dependent upon whether they can make the product for less than they sell it for."
We live in a time of pseudo monopolies due to widely accessible communication. A CEO can collude via open letters and press statements as well as twitter and a plumber colludes via forums and publication. If you apply a tax to an industry you adjust the market for all of them. With common business practices and a common interest collusion doesn't even require communication anymore.
What is less certain is that a REDUCTION in tax burden or costs will ever get passed back to consumers. If a company is successfully selling a product for X there is no particular reason to reduce the price or necessarily to increase staff.
"I can't believe you don't see the other option: Just accept a little less after-tax profit. Do you think Amazon would go out of business if after taxes they had $8 billion instead of $11 billion? Remember, "profits" is what's left over after expenses are paid. You think they'd say, "No, we don't want to make the $8 billion"?
No, they wouldn't say that because a competitor would come along and say, "Yeah, $8 billion in annual after-tax profits sounds pretty good to us"."
No, they wouldn't because it would cost that competitor even more than it would cost Amazon to take those profits from Amazon and Amazon has already established there is $11 billion to be had in that market. Why would an investor fund that competitor when Amazon is already doing a better job in that segment and they can just invest in Amazon? Why would they charge lower prices when Amazon has already established people will happily pay what Amazon is charging?
Bidding wars happen but for the most part the business world is aware of the work of John Nash, there is more profit in cooperation among competitors than cut-throat competition and competing on price is bad for business in the long run, everyone's business.
"You're right. Instead of taxing the corporations, there should be a tax on the executives (executhieves) who make salaries that are 100s of times greater than the average employees salaries"
No, there should be a tax on the stock holdings which will also target the biggest compensation for executives in most cases. That guy who is sitting on $10 billion in stock, cashed in a few million and gave several times that to charity to offset the capital gains on the few million he cashed in, should instead be charged a tax on the $10 billion, he should also be charged annually on his 4000 acre ranch.
There is some truth but it depends on the type, the timing, etc of the dividend. There absolutely is double taxation under many circumstances and for many transactions.
"Please stop perpetuating a myth that only benefits corporations."
There is no reason not to benefit corporations. There is reason to close certain kinds of loopholes and stop pretending corporations are anything more or less than a collection of partners, in some cases, at large scale. The mom and pop convenience store on the corner is a corporation as well.
"No. There is no data that corporations pass on taxes to consumers or employees."
Uh huh, and where pray tell is it you think the money comes from that they use to pay those taxes? A magical money tree?
The money comes from revenues and either you have to cut costs (employees) to make it up from existing revenues or increase revenues (aka pass on to consumers) or some combination of the two.
Slashdot Mirror
"The irony of it is that those sites would be moderate, fence sitters in any other country."
Only in Europe. As a European friend of mine said, he moved here because in the EU there is a far left, a crazy far left, and an even further left and nothing else and he was tired of looking at the lazy deadbeats he worked to pay for day in and day out.
Yes. After a few days and on the second and subsequent hurricanes a few places with generators managed to get it hooked up. Before that I managed to get one to take a check but handing out checks is more risky for me than them.
What is sad is there are sane and coherent logical arguments to support a subset of what you are saying. You and those like you are a sort of strawman that lets those sane and coherent arguments appear to be easily defeated. You are a character that results in actual rational debate ending because anything associated with anything you'd say is laughable.
Personally, I don't think it is an accident. It's like The Colbert Report except the Colbert's don't even know they are a mockery of actual rational and educated people meant to discredit them.
Troll lol. I guess there are few rich tech beasts with mod points.
If you want to see an example of how the dodge income scam the rich play works just refer to the taxes Warren Buffet helpfully revealed. I'll fudge the numbers because I'm too lazy to look, the concept and rough scale is right. His actual gains were billions but he only directly cashed out maybe 20 mill and dodged almost all the tax on that giving another chunk to charity. For the most part he is able to invest in new companies, make acquisitions, etc by using stock to do it. Hell, he could pay everyone down to his lawn service in stock for all I know and they'd be crazy not to take it as the stock has a good return and appreciates over time unlike cash which depreciates with inflation.
This is the loophole which needs closed, these are the tax dodgers we need to go after. Leave the handyman alone, if he does well his business will grow and he won't be able to hide his few thousand a year from the IRS anymore. For the most part small independent business people like the handyman turn out to have a sense of ethics and want to bring it above board as soon as they have enough going on for it to be worthwhile anyway. That is why the IRS doesn't expend many resources tilting at that windmill.
No, it would be about making everyone account for all their money.
The problem is that the people who are hiding their money tend to be the poor. A handyman is a good example, these people don't make all that much money, what they do make is on a cash basis and they usually pay taxes on little or none of that money. This is what makes it possible for you to hire someone on craigslist who comes and installs an appliance for a reasonable rate. There isn't much tax to be gained here.
The people who are dodging significant amounts of tax that are worth pursuing are doing it legally. The biggest dodges are dodging income entirely. There are several ways to do that, real estate is a good one, just reinvest the proceeds or if you own a boatload of stock in a company only sell what you need and give a chunk to charity or to pay a debt to avoid paying tax on it. The stock you gave away counts as money spent but only stock you cash in and dividends count as income.
It sounds like you gentlemen don't want to be in the NSA database. Sounds like we need to flag you for review.
"Uh oh, I've been 10 years in my job."
10 years isn't job hopping, 6mo-1year is a job hopper. 10 years is just falling in a comfortable rut. The issue is that you are are changing it up minimally and the needs, requirements, and shop philosophy all stay the same and fall in the same trend of solutions in one spot. If you don't hop into different environments and shake it up you aren't forced out of your comfort zone enough and your comfort zone grows too narrow.
"You really don't want a wannabe in that role but you do want a significant amount of direct and focused experience (which is why consultants and contractors in that area are highly paid)."
Depends. Security is a pretty generic term but most of that area is about compliance. It's important to be aware that security is more about being able to show what great measures you take because beyond a handful of well known and rarely followed best practices security tends to be snake-oil. Where it isn't snake oil and everything is enforced people can't really get their jobs done so it's only a measure of time until something gives, we are currently in one of those cycles with security right now.
"In most areas you don't want someone reinventing the wheel but would prefer that they can learn from past mistakes of others, and that is something I often see generalists failing at."
That isn't my experience. That is something I see the inexperienced failing at without regard to generalists or specialists. Specialists sometimes do come out a little ahead, not because they know better but generally more because they tend to just go along with the trends in their specialty. They just follow whatever they are being told are best practices from vendors, recommendations, and so forth but if they can rarely learn new tricks or apply things in creative new ways. They fall into routines with technologies that are limited in scope. Technology intermixes so much that becomes a liability fast. I don't care what area of technology you are in, it's doubtful you can be truly competent if you don't understand how the full stack works. The network guy should be able to work competently after six months shifting into a programming role, the programmer should be able to work competently stepping into a network role after a few months. All of the above should be at least junior admin level proficient with at least Linux.
"I think this is a mistake of many companies who assume that programmers are interchangeable cogs and can work on any topic as long as there's experience with programming. So I see fundamentally flawed network protocols that look like college projects, a complicated security structure that is easily bypassed, commercial RTOSs with novice mistakes and so forth."
I think what you are describing is a lack of experience not a lack of specialization. If you stack your team with 20 year olds that is what you are going to get. When you get into more specialized subjects like programming security solutions and high end networking you should start with people who have advanced experience in those areas and throw them on a team with people who have more of their experience with coding with a couple people somewhere in the middle. At the enterprise scale you shouldn't even be touching something that hasn't baked for five years in large environments outside a lab but latest trend is unleashing things out of dev into production in a continuous cycle or after baking for weeks or maybe a month with nothing but canned tests serving as a barrier.
You have clueless devs coding your environments with pseudo-code and automated frameworks. That is pretty much guaranteed to result in more holes than swiss cheese and instability. These realities and the ones you speak of are just the result of handing over control and listening to 20-25yr olds whispering into managers ears and selling them what amount to tech infomercials. They listen to because there is fast and easy money with all the other managers/execs listening.
Yeah, security is booming but you can only toss so much duct tape on the holes in that rickety boat and bail for so long. More and more things are going to start sinking.
Also... did you actually LOOK at your own article? Red indicates an increase, very few saw an increase and the biggest increase is at the top. Are you obsessing over the green bars? Of course the amount of increase grows with income level, the amount of taxes paid grows with income level. The top 10% pay 60% all taxes so any cut is going to impact them the most. If you only pay a couple thousand in taxes did you think there was going to be a giant >$500 boost to your refund or something?
Those lower tiers hardly pay taxes. In 2018 the top 1% (by income) paid 37.3% it becomes 69.4% when extended to the top 10% meaning the upper middle class (people who earn "6-digits") pay 32.1% of all taxes or the difference between those figures. That is 9% of tax payers footing that bill and 100% working class. That is a mere $139k+ which is barely enough to have a middle class lifestyle on a single income in the suburbs. This is where a district manager of a handful of restaurants sits. Or a couple making about $70k which is pretty much standard for "professionals" which isn't actually the upper middle class anymore an experienced restaurant manager falls here, it's just two middle-middle class people. Anyone making $40-60k that is entry level in tech or management, you are in the lower end of the middle class. Less than that and you aren't middle class at all though with two people working you can earn a middle class living. But all of these people are solidly working class. It doesn't matter if you are a doctor or a janitor, you are working class. Less than $30k and you are poor. Less than $15k and you are destitute.
Why? It is their own politics that created the situation and their politics that mean the gestapo will come after them if they don't do it. I can just sit back and watch their own dogs chew on them as they finally pay their own bill.
Why should I have sympathy for people who put in a loophole to avoid paying their fair share of the taxes for the federal programs they support? There is a whole lot more than just roads in the budget but infrastructure investment boosts the economy as a whole and if it is going somewhere the pays it's full and fair share of income tax it comes back with interest over time.
I live in one of the other 47 states. There are no personal income taxes in this state and there aren't taxes on businesses unless they made better than a million that year.
We have a cost of living comparable to the rural midwest with California level incomes and all enjoyed a massive tax cut. We also have some of the lowest utility rates you can find unless you are lazy and don't shop. Currently I pay 3.7 cents/kwh all in on fully renewable energy delivered directly from the grid. Our state is on track to be fully renewable by 2020 even though we have incredibly low priced gas. How are you looking in California/New York?
Irrelevant to the point. Bob the janitor will still have a 401k or retirement plan unless Bob the janitor is actual Juan and not legally working in the first place. In which case Susan who owns that little cleaning company will be the middle class worker who has stock in her retirement account. In that case Susan will also benefit because those tax cuts on her corporation mean she can place lower bids or possibly even survive when she comes under too much scrutiny and actually has to hire real US workers.
Bob the janitor wasn't really the point here and neither was the discounted stock. The cut was across all corporations and if you have a retirement account, big or small, you benefited even if they just dump the money out in dividends. Next year they'll actually be budgeting based on those funds because they can expect them and that is when you'll start seeing expansions and changes. Yes some of those changes will actually cut workers, they will be doing whatever they think is best for business but in some cases that will be expanding at home because the tax benefits and american English speaking workers now outweighs the increased labor cost. The companies doing that will result in more services and reduced costs here and the following year that will make the proposition a little better for companies revisiting the question at that point and so on.
The corporate tax cut and payout gave an immediate boost to retirement investments and most everyone has to have seen that. Actual serious and lasting economic adjustment takes years to bake in, you won't see the full extent until the end of the second term or possibly the next President who will take the credit or the blame even though his policies likely won't be felt until after he's gone. People who don't like that president will claim it's the last guy, people who do like him will pretend it's him making a difference. The people claiming immediate benefit will be wrong no matter who it actually is with the notable exception of something like this, a giant dump of cash across a large group. It's a parlor trick but it is nearly immediate and at least Trump dumped a huge chunk where it will end up in retirement funds and benefit people later in life.
And don't quote anything talking about stock mostly being owned by the top 10%, the top 10% are still middle class and definitely working class. The top 0.1% and above by wealth not income are the wealthy, not high earning workers.
"You honestly think that because shareholders were outraged over the firing of the single most influential figurehead of Disney, that a random janitor at IBM is going to benefit from these tax breaks?"
"Those fantastic tax cuts that go to publically traded corporations go nowhere except the top people, and as dividends to the shareholders."
Right, your second statement mirrors my assertion and the actual mechanism by which the working class benefits. Dividends to shareholders is money to everyone with a 401k, IRA, or bonds. Considering the corporate cuts were across the board maybe you don't work for IBM and get a discounted share price but your retirement money is almost certainly invested directly (stocks, bonds) or indirectly (mutual fund, composite ETF, etc) invested in corporations and you received the benefit of those dividends.
Why does everyone have so much trouble with concepts like this? Life is very grey and complex not black and white and resolved in a single move. When Joe does X to Sally or gives X to Sally and then Sally does something that benefits Dave you all get lost asserting Joe didn't do shit for Dave. Believe it or not, Joe could well have done/given to Sally rather than Dave because he anticipated what Sally would do and benefited both.
Even not working for IBM and getting discounted stock Bob may well own IBM stock because Bob will have a retirement account of some kind. And the janitor isn't the point, thousands of people do work for IBM and they are all working class with some possible exceptions at the executive level and Janet in accounting who is a trust fund baby that just loves numbers and husband who wants her out of the house all day.
30-90 day probation is pretty much standard when you hire a full time employee. Also you can do contract-to-hire to work around bureaucracy if needed.
Start looking for people who average 3yrs in position and have a diverse background. Ignore degrees, certs, and other credentials except for a slight bump in salary. Try to avoid technical/engineering talent who've sat in one seat for more than 10 years unless they had the diverse background before that and be aware you are going to have to kickstart their motor after having been in a rut for a few minutes.
The diverse and experienced background is the key. Avoid "specialists." The jack of all trades master of none phrase needs to die a painful death in technology. These are the people who learn and adapt, you get so many different perspectives for the price of one it is unbelievable. You can provide the information that fills in gaps and depth, unlike most who will regurgitate it back to you they'll actually value the new information and play with it.
Always remember that despite reports to the contrary, experience that has sit on a shelf for six months is valuable. Yes, they may not look much different right away and bomb an interview but its still all in their brain somewhere and memory is associative. As the information is revealed it will start triggering more and more memory and their old experienced proficiency will come back. It's like re-reading a book you've already read. Sometimes just the summary triggers recall, sometimes a conversation about the plot, sometimes you need to read a few chapters, but at some point short of reading the whole thing it comes back.
"What's the catch?"
Time, effort, resources. This is all very very expensive in all three areas since devs are being used as part-time admins it only gets worse.
In the interview process just determine if someone can talk to talk. Save the proof for the first 30-90 days so people can work under normal circumstances. Some people suck at interviews anyway. For myself, I always bomb the easy questions because they are usually nonsense the compiler will catch, minor syntax, minor implementation semantics.
Unless you are hiring entry level these things are all minor noise and what separates talent from drones is higher level thinking. You are going to end up with someone who fits the old stereotype of an Indian firm that can only implement what you tell them verbatim but not think independently otherwise. At that point you might as well be outsourcing.
Tone and inflection are nearly everything. Without them you are very nearly having a conversation with an imaginary character in your mind combined with your own mannerisms and bias. These things are already extremely ambiguous. I don't really see that emoji is worse.
Maybe they will with it turning out there is evidence against Hauwei after all. With evidence of their practices and the increasing actions by China as a whole in industrial espionage and stolen plans sent to them for manufacturing it is only a matter of time before this escalates to international scale and the WTO.
Anti-Trumpism is only going to carry staying in bed with China for so long.
"1. "tearing one apart and reverse engineering it" would give you a lot more details than asking someone out of their memory."
It would also take much longer than the useful life of the information.
Reverse engineering a chip is not simple, fast, or cheap. It's dramatically more difficult than reverse engineering software and protocols and look at all the efforts that never finish in that area.
Are you under the impression that six figures is somehow outside the working class?
Kid grows up a trailer park, works hard in school, gets into state college and takes on a mountain of debt going to school, becomes a (doctor/lawyer/engineer/professional/broker). He can easily make a top 1% income and is definitely working class but then income isn't an indicator of the working class. $1 salaries are common among executives and $0 is common the board.
Wealth is the indicator of people who are outside the working class. Specifically having enough wealth to not need to work (even if you choose to). The average return rate of the S&P 500 with increases and dividends combined is around 15%. So you are looking for people who can passively make that 250k that denotes the top 1% by income purely on that passive 15%. That would be about $1.7 million in liquid assets. But realistically, you'd eat into principle without a buffer so make it about 20% higher and you'd also eat into principle because only half of that is dividends you can spend so make that 7% instead of 15. So $3.57m + 20% + 3% to cover inflation gives $4.4 million dollars in liquid wealth. If you are married you need to at least double that to $8.,8m and if you give the average of two children you'll need to double that again to $17.6m to assure they aren't in the working class. But those extra individuals don't change the $4.4m figure, they just mean you don't look at $4.4m for a household, purely individual basis.
"From profits, dumbshit. If you'd ever taken a first-year economics course, you would know that prices are not dependent on profits."
Strawman. Ad hominem. Plea to authority. The seller and more importantly all the sellers are PART of the marketplace, if their costs go up across the board the prices go up across the board to compensate and keep profits level. Companies do not just eat profits long term. If they can't raise profits they cut costs and for the most part that comes from staff.
"The marketplace sets the price. Whether or not the company can make a profit is dependent upon whether they can make the product for less than they sell it for."
We live in a time of pseudo monopolies due to widely accessible communication. A CEO can collude via open letters and press statements as well as twitter and a plumber colludes via forums and publication. If you apply a tax to an industry you adjust the market for all of them. With common business practices and a common interest collusion doesn't even require communication anymore.
What is less certain is that a REDUCTION in tax burden or costs will ever get passed back to consumers. If a company is successfully selling a product for X there is no particular reason to reduce the price or necessarily to increase staff.
"I can't believe you don't see the other option: Just accept a little less after-tax profit. Do you think Amazon would go out of business if after taxes they had $8 billion instead of $11 billion? Remember, "profits" is what's left over after expenses are paid. You think they'd say, "No, we don't want to make the $8 billion"?
No, they wouldn't say that because a competitor would come along and say, "Yeah, $8 billion in annual after-tax profits sounds pretty good to us"."
No, they wouldn't because it would cost that competitor even more than it would cost Amazon to take those profits from Amazon and Amazon has already established there is $11 billion to be had in that market. Why would an investor fund that competitor when Amazon is already doing a better job in that segment and they can just invest in Amazon? Why would they charge lower prices when Amazon has already established people will happily pay what Amazon is charging?
Bidding wars happen but for the most part the business world is aware of the work of John Nash, there is more profit in cooperation among competitors than cut-throat competition and competing on price is bad for business in the long run, everyone's business.
"You're right. Instead of taxing the corporations, there should be a tax on the executives (executhieves) who make salaries that are 100s of times greater than the average employees salaries"
No, there should be a tax on the stock holdings which will also target the biggest compensation for executives in most cases. That guy who is sitting on $10 billion in stock, cashed in a few million and gave several times that to charity to offset the capital gains on the few million he cashed in, should instead be charged a tax on the $10 billion, he should also be charged annually on his 4000 acre ranch.
There is some truth but it depends on the type, the timing, etc of the dividend. There absolutely is double taxation under many circumstances and for many transactions.
"Please stop perpetuating a myth that only benefits corporations."
There is no reason not to benefit corporations. There is reason to close certain kinds of loopholes and stop pretending corporations are anything more or less than a collection of partners, in some cases, at large scale. The mom and pop convenience store on the corner is a corporation as well.
"No. There is no data that corporations pass on taxes to consumers or employees."
Uh huh, and where pray tell is it you think the money comes from that they use to pay those taxes? A magical money tree?
The money comes from revenues and either you have to cut costs (employees) to make it up from existing revenues or increase revenues (aka pass on to consumers) or some combination of the two.