I got back a response that literally said "Work smarter, not harder". (I wish I'd kept that email).
I literally got a "Work smarter, not harder" comment on my review for this year by the product manager on the project I mentioned above. Maybe you worked with the same guy in the past.
Doing all of my thinking on a tight deadline while also doing the actual design or coding involves a lot of bad guessing. But there comes a point where I could just think about all the possibilities forever and never start or get anything done.
Like most things, you aren't going to get good results if you don't have implementation teams you can trust to give realistic estimates. And management teams who listen to these estimates, while probably making slight adjustments based on past results (almost always adding time to the estimates).
I'm in a project right now where we were introduced to the project early October, sat down for a full day requirements gathering session mid-October, and gave estimates by the end of October. We estimated code completion in mid-January. They gave us a mid-December deadline. The product will now be complete at the end of January, after spending weeks in constant status meetings trying to hit that ridiculous deadline.
In the end the only thing that changed from the results we promised in our first estimates is now the team's two architect-level resources are prepping our resumes just in case this type of shit doesn't happen again and/or this year's bonus isn't a high five figure amount (aka starting with a 3+).
It's not a crime because it's not a crime. If he would have waited until after the story broke he would have made more money of the sale of his stock, because the price is still higher than it was on Nov 29th. You need to personally gain to be accused of insider trading.
The sale did occur after the security flaws (remember, there have been several) were reported. He may actually get away with this.
Get away with what? The stock went up after his sale, and it still at the same price now that it was in late November. You have to personally gain from insider trading to be convicted, and if he would have waiting until the exploit was made public he would have actually made more money.
Agreed. Microsoft browsers are the reason we cannot have nice things on the Internet. I still spend far too much time making sure things work on IE 11 which could be spent on meaningful work.
Even though I generally agree with the content of the article, the title made it hard to read it objectively. IE 6 was a horrible browser browser which didn't comply with web standards and caused a generation of developers to hate web development. Chrome is none of those things. The practices of Google mentioned in the article are troubling, but comparing it to IE 6 nearly makes me react the same as a Nazi analogy.
A friend or two that has the Model 3 is very much a Tesla fan. And so it will be for some time to come - or did you forget the pre-order lines just to lay down $1k for a car that would not be delivered for a year or two? None of the buyers for a long time is going to be anything but a die-hard Tesla fan.
The type of people who can afford a $50-60k car (which most early Tesla 3's will be) don't care too much about a $1000 refundable down payment. If your rainy day fund (which is generally in a no interest or very low interest bearing account) cannot spare $1000 which could take a few months to retrieve then you shouldn't be buying a Tesla 3.
I am one of those who waited in line to pre-order on day one, and the down payment was a meaningless amount. Not because I am wealthy, but just because I already keep about $30k in a savings account so I wasn't missing much by having $1k in a non-interest bearing account for a year or two. Maybe I lost a few dollars in interest from my savings account.
And while I am a big fan of Tesla, I ended up recently buying a traditional ICE BMW when I found the Tesla 3 I would have ordered would cost about $60k. While reasonable, it was too high to be competitive with used luxury cars already in the market. To me at least.
And here's one of the reasons Tesla is in a segment with zero competition
Tesla still competes with ICE cars, so you cannot say it has zero competition. There are a dozen car manufacturers competing with the Tesla S/3/X right now.
Any car, EV or ICE, sitting in my driveway is filling more of my vehicle needs than a $1,000 promise note from Tesla.
That may be true, but rarely is it a choice between no car and waiting. The choice here is generally between keeping your old car, getting a new car which doesn't fully fulfill your needs / desires, or waiting for a car that does.
In that context, waiting is probably the better option nearly every time.
I think that the market the Model 3 is in isn't really that competitive. Very few people are looking at a Model 3 or a Camry.
No, they are looking at Model 3 or Lexus / BMW / Mercedes / Cadillac / etc. The Model 3 is joining a very large and competitive market. It will still compete with ICE cars, not just other electrics. I for one ended up buying a three year old BMW for $30k when I found the Model 3 I pre-ordered would likely cost closer to $60k (at least the model I wanted). The Model 3 was still very competitive, but not enough for me to weather the depreciation of a new car.
This is very informative, thank you. Given those figures, 850k looks depressingly like breakeven for the company (if that 86mil/yr was all for this, it would take them (860mil+10mil+3.8mil)/0.95 = 919.79 mil revenue to break even, or about 920k per for 1k patients). I'm sure they have some profit baked in to the figure, but not as egregious as the summary headline sounds by itself.
Don't forget that only about 1 in 10 drugs pass all three phases of clinical trials, so for companies to get funding they would need to be reasonably sure they could return at least 5-10x the cost of development. So if it takes a billion dollars to break even, they would probably be expecting in the ballpark of $5-$10 billion in profits from this drug (and from licensing of patents related to the research). Too much less than that and it wouldn't make sense to fund the drug research in the first place.
Older people spent their working years during two major booms (Internet and Housing), went to school before the massive funding cuts of the Regan/Clinton/Bush era and were set in their careers before the outsourcing boom in the 2000s. No sh!t sherlock they're happier. They've collectively let the world go to hell and now it looks like they're gonna leave the younger generations with the fix it bill.
While I could see where you are coming from if you were talking about baby boomers, this article was about people in their 90's (the Greatest & Silent generations). They stopped working at around 1990. These generations dealt with hardships unheard of by the youth of today. Today's youth are the first generation in modern US history to have an arguably harder life than their parents, but not harder than their grandparents.
I think your logic here is pretty flawed because I'm an American worker, and I can tell you without a doubt that another 21% growth in my 401(k) and stock market accounts will meaningfully help me prepare for retirement someday, add to my rainy day cushion fund, and a not insignificant portion of it has already and will likely continue to go back into the economy.
First off, half of all households have no money in the stock market, so the people most in need of economic improvement gain nothing from stock market increases. 80% of the benefits go to the top 10%, with half of that going to the top 1%.
Other than not investing enough in the first place, the second biggest problem regular people have with the stock market is being too fixated on short term gains and losses. At least 95% of people, if not closer to 99% of people, shouldn't care at all what the stock market does in any given year. It should only matter what happens to it over a 10-30 year period. And for the most part no tax plan will ever have a meaningful effect on the stock market over those periods, unless of course it is bad enough to completely tank the economy for decades.
Sure some people who put short term savings into the stock market would have done well in the last year, but that same mentality would have made them lose half their money during the last recession. Saying that you bought a house with gains from your 100% stock savings plan isn't much different than saying you bought a house with lottery winnings. I mean, I'm glad for you, but that type of thinking very often destroys savings and ruins lives.
Your retirement savings 20 years from now would be the same whether or not the stock market rose 2% or 20% in 2017. In the long term it is based on macro trends which have nearly nothing to do with tax policy. That is why reputable economists say this tax plan will likely improve the economy by 0.1-0.3% in the next few years, and less than that if not having a negative effect after 2020. In the end your retirement savings in 2030 will be the same with or without this tax plan.
In the past 3 months, I've bought a new house (which I haven't done in 25 years), upgraded all the fire detectors/carbon monoxide detectors with nest protects, replaced the thermostat with a nest thermostat, replaced (some) lighting with Philips Hue lights and replaced (some) CFLs with LEDs, bought 6 echo/echo dots, bought two bedroom sets, one couch, remodeled a bathroom, paid off my car loan in full, hired a contractor for some misc stuff, etc etc. So while I can't speak for everyone, I can definitely tell you that from my personal perspective you are dead wrong.
Unless you cashed out retirement savings to buy all of that, this tax plan had nothing to do with any of this. If you did cash out your retirement savings for this then 2017 definitely worked well for you, but that was just luck. Plenty of people hoping to put a down payment for a house in 2008 through the sale of stocks had the opposite luck.
The article stretches to get $48 Billion and the press release says "spend well in excess of $50 billion" with more announcements coming in their January earnings report, so even at the most generous, there is still a gap there.
The article does not stretch to get to $48 billion, they use that figure to show that even if Comcast stops increasing their investments year over year they will invest $48 Billion over the next five years. Comcast's third quarter results, which were cited in the article, shows they have increased investment by 4.2% compared to 2016. If they continue that growth, they will invest $52 billion over the next five years. And even that is a pessimistic figure because it assumes Comcast's growth will remain constant and not accelerate.
There is no gap, and you are the one stretching to find a narrative where Comcast's stated motives are true. Plenty of corporations made similar claims for how they would spend the 2004 repatriated money, and in the end there were no significant increases in investment but were significant reductions in payroll. Likely because of the increased automation and mergers the repatriated money made possible.
There is no evidence yet because it hasn't happened yet.
What are you talking about? Do you think this is the first tax break for corporations, or the first repatriation attempt? We repatriated $300 billion in 2004, and we know what the companies did with it. The top 15 companies, which repatriated half of that $300 billion figure, cut 20,000 jobs in the next three years. 92% of the total repatriated money was simply given to shareholders in stock buybacks and dividends.
As for Comcast's specific case, the article shows how Comcast is already on pace to invest over $50 billion over the next five years, so there is ample evidence Comcast is not doing this because of the tax bill.
Large tax breaks to corporations generally equate to those companies spending between 10 and 20% of the initial take on employees wages and bonus's. This is already known.
But the remaining 8% didn't even all go to employees. I couldn't find exact figures, but some of that also went to capital purchases. At best you could say 5%-10% of large tax breaks go to employees, but even that is probably a bit high.
There is no honest debate on whether this tax bill will meaningfully boost the economy and help American workers. It won't. It will boost the stock market (or more likely already has) and create the illusion that the economy has improved, but that is about it.
If hotels stopped selling to wholesalers then they wouldn't have this problem.
But they would have a different problem. If they aren't listed by the OTAs, then they are invisible to many potential customers. 80% of something is better than 100% of nothing.
They are paying 20% of their gross to outsource their marketing, which is likely cheaper than the cost of doing their own publicity and promotions.
Which is why they have nothing to complain about. They are paying 20% for marketing, which isn't some egregious amount. If Google was being accused of dropping a hotel chain from their service if they also advertised with another search engine, or for having their own direct to consumer sales, that would be anti-competitive. But currently they are just charging for marketing.
as for the increases after the cuts expire... well, get congress to make the cuts permanent. the only reason they arent is because the democrats refused to allow it to happen. if 8 democrats voted yes, it could have been made permanent but they didn't. so blame them for that
No, the tax cuts are temporary because the Republicans wanted to pass the bill with no Democrat involvement. You cannot have a bill which is 100% partisan and then expect Democrats to vote for it just to make a few peanuts for the middle class permanent. The Republicans had the ability to make middle class tax cuts permanent and wealthy tax cuts temporary and they chose to do the opposite. Republicans are 100% responsible for every line of this tax bill.
Ultimately this approach of passing sweeping legislation in a partisan manner most likely benefits Democrats in the long run. It is politically harder to take benefits away than it is to give them, which is why the Republicans couldn't dismantle Obamacare. In three years the Democrats are likely to take back control of government, and with reconciliation they could take those $1.5 billion in tax cuts and give them all to the middle class without raising the deficit one penny. Then the next time Republicans gain power they will have an even harder time giving the wealthy tax breaks without even more massive deficits, or significantly raising taxes on the middle class.
If the Republicans had been able to hold strong and only give tax cuts which are revenue neutral, or only gave tax cuts to the working/middle class, they could have held onto their talking points of being against federal deficits and for the little guy. That ship has now sailed for at least a decade until this bill expires.
So people are rushing to pre-pay 2018 taxes for fun?
Technically even people who see their taxes go down in 2018 can get a big tax break by paying their property taxes early this year. The higher standard deduction coupled with higher child tax credit will cause many people who currently itemize to save money by taking the standard deduction next year. But since they won't deduct any property taxes (not even the $10k maximum amount), then deducting them on their 2017 taxes would save them big.
I for instance will have my base taxes go up about $800 next year, but will now get $4000 in child tax credits because of the increase to both the amount and the maximum income to qualify (my MAGI is above $110k). So my taxes are going down by about $3200 next year. But if I pay my 2017 property taxes early, that is potentially $12k in extra deductions reducing my taxes by an additional $3360. So in this case I would benefit in both 2017 and 2018.
In truth I am already hit with alternative minimum taxes, so I cannot deduct extra property taxes in 2017 anyway. But there are plenty of people who don't have as many deductions and personal exemptions as I do who can save thousands this year by paying hteir 2017 property taxes early.
You do understand that what happened was a tax CUT, correct?
If you think this was a tax cut, then I guess if I put $10k on my credit cards next year you would consider that a $10k raise. At best you could call this a stimulus plan. It certainly isn't a tax cut because many people will be paying more. But the vast majority of people will see their taxes reduced slightly for the next decade, and then the vast majority will see their taxes increased slightly after that. That said, it doesn't take a hard look to see the distribution of this stimulus is heavily skewed towards the wealthy who see a greater net benefit and percent reduction in this plan.
Considering giving money to the wealthy has a poor fiscal multiplier effect, as compared to giving money to the poor and middle class, it is clear the goal of this bill was not to stimulate the economy. The average $50k-75k income household will see a 1.8% reduction in taxes, while a $1M+ household will see a 3.3% reduction. In real dollars that is a difference between $870 in savings and $69,660. Considering stimulus money given to the middle class has a much greater fiscal multiplier than giving money to the wealthy, it is as I said clear that economic stimulus was not the intent of the bill.
This bill was nothing more than a tax cut to wealthy donors paid for in small part by upper middle class blue state voters and in larger part financed by federal debt. Around $50-$100 per month was given to working and middle class families so Republicans could misleadingly claim that everyone benefits from the plan by ignoring it is only a minor gain in the short term. Kind of like paying for a more lavish lifestyle with credit card debt. The real long term gains go to the wealthy.
Most people are never going to look at the bill in enough detail to know specifically how this bill screws them in the long term. For the average person as long as they understand the bill is a massive tax cut for the wealthy paid for by increasing wealth inequality, they are at least well informed enough to vote in their own interest.
Before the mid 1900's if you saw the term AI it would have almost certainly meant artificial insemination, so I assure you the meaning of AI has changed over time.
Words matter, caveman. What we are calling "AI" is definitely artificial, not not intelligent. If we are going to start calling computer programs "AI" just to start another VC hype cycle, then what is the point? Microsoft Word is "AI".
People really need to start modding these types of comments as Troll and move on. AI has included basic algorithms used as a stand in for intelligent thought since the field arguably began at The Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence over 60 years ago. At the time they were very aware of how difficult it could be to define intelligence, so they intentionally did not let that limit what was considered artificial intelligence research.
Today the researchers and field of scientific journalism both agree that machine learning and neural networks fit within the field of artificial intelligence. That is all that matters, not your personal feelings about what the field should be.
Fifty years ago was 1967. This was before the oil crunch. I would say, if you were getting out of college with -any- degree, you pretty much were set for life, since jobs were plentiful, especially because government gave a shit about doing the job right, since the attitude of "lets make things as shitty as possible until we get sued" was not around. If I graduated with an engineering degree back then, my life was pretty much set. Same with a natural sciences degree.
I'm going to take a wild guess that you either were born after 1950 (and therefore have no first hand knowledge about what you are talking about), or you are a white male. While I would agree that a small subset of white men are worse off today than they were 50 years ago, the Utopian world you describe was not enjoyed by the vast majority of Americans in the 1960's.
Ask working women in their 60's if the workplace is easier for women now or in 1967. Ask African Americans or Asians if life is easier today than it was in 1967. Ask some LGBT's if they prefer today's society as opposed to the "acceptance" they enjoyed in 1967.
Working class white men have a good argument that life was better 50 years ago than it is today for people like them. Everyone else has a very warped view of history.
Hehehe, did you see the tax bill the nazipublicans just passed? I doubt the whole "basic income" will happen in ours or our children's lifetimes
Even this tax bill had elements of basic income, for parents anyway, when it increased refundable child tax credits. I find it likely that basic income will never be called basic income, but instead will simply be increased refundable tax credits. So arguably parents in 2018 will have a basic income of $116.67 per month per child.
With even conservatives using refundable tax credits to give aid to the poor, I see it likely this strategy will be expanded upon over the next couple decades. Over the next year we will see if the conservative PR machine are able to effectively disguise this massive tax cut for the wealthy, but if public outrage continues then the backlash will undue any gains the republicans just made towards fulfilling pledges to their donors.
Obamacare is difficult to dismantle because doing so would hurt tens of millions of people. Dismantling a tax break for the 1% will be easier for the next Democratic run government than pardoning the Thanksgiving turkey.
Slashdot Mirror
Wait wait wait... where the hell do you get 30k+ bonuses?? I think the biggest I've ever seen was like 4k.
Finance
I got back a response that literally said "Work smarter, not harder". (I wish I'd kept that email).
I literally got a "Work smarter, not harder" comment on my review for this year by the product manager on the project I mentioned above. Maybe you worked with the same guy in the past.
Doing all of my thinking on a tight deadline while also doing the actual design or coding involves a lot of bad guessing. But there comes a point where I could just think about all the possibilities forever and never start or get anything done.
Like most things, you aren't going to get good results if you don't have implementation teams you can trust to give realistic estimates. And management teams who listen to these estimates, while probably making slight adjustments based on past results (almost always adding time to the estimates).
I'm in a project right now where we were introduced to the project early October, sat down for a full day requirements gathering session mid-October, and gave estimates by the end of October. We estimated code completion in mid-January. They gave us a mid-December deadline. The product will now be complete at the end of January, after spending weeks in constant status meetings trying to hit that ridiculous deadline.
In the end the only thing that changed from the results we promised in our first estimates is now the team's two architect-level resources are prepping our resumes just in case this type of shit doesn't happen again and/or this year's bonus isn't a high five figure amount (aka starting with a 3+).
It's not a crime because it's not a crime. If he would have waited until after the story broke he would have made more money of the sale of his stock, because the price is still higher than it was on Nov 29th. You need to personally gain to be accused of insider trading.
The sale did occur after the security flaws (remember, there have been several) were reported. He may actually get away with this.
Get away with what? The stock went up after his sale, and it still at the same price now that it was in late November. You have to personally gain from insider trading to be convicted, and if he would have waiting until the exploit was made public he would have actually made more money.
This is a non story.
Agreed. Microsoft browsers are the reason we cannot have nice things on the Internet. I still spend far too much time making sure things work on IE 11 which could be spent on meaningful work.
Even though I generally agree with the content of the article, the title made it hard to read it objectively. IE 6 was a horrible browser browser which didn't comply with web standards and caused a generation of developers to hate web development. Chrome is none of those things. The practices of Google mentioned in the article are troubling, but comparing it to IE 6 nearly makes me react the same as a Nazi analogy.
A friend or two that has the Model 3 is very much a Tesla fan. And so it will be for some time to come - or did you forget the pre-order lines just to lay down $1k for a car that would not be delivered for a year or two? None of the buyers for a long time is going to be anything but a die-hard Tesla fan.
The type of people who can afford a $50-60k car (which most early Tesla 3's will be) don't care too much about a $1000 refundable down payment. If your rainy day fund (which is generally in a no interest or very low interest bearing account) cannot spare $1000 which could take a few months to retrieve then you shouldn't be buying a Tesla 3.
I am one of those who waited in line to pre-order on day one, and the down payment was a meaningless amount. Not because I am wealthy, but just because I already keep about $30k in a savings account so I wasn't missing much by having $1k in a non-interest bearing account for a year or two. Maybe I lost a few dollars in interest from my savings account.
And while I am a big fan of Tesla, I ended up recently buying a traditional ICE BMW when I found the Tesla 3 I would have ordered would cost about $60k. While reasonable, it was too high to be competitive with used luxury cars already in the market. To me at least.
And here's one of the reasons Tesla is in a segment with zero competition
Tesla still competes with ICE cars, so you cannot say it has zero competition. There are a dozen car manufacturers competing with the Tesla S/3/X right now.
Any car, EV or ICE, sitting in my driveway is filling more of my vehicle needs than a $1,000 promise note from Tesla.
That may be true, but rarely is it a choice between no car and waiting. The choice here is generally between keeping your old car, getting a new car which doesn't fully fulfill your needs / desires, or waiting for a car that does.
In that context, waiting is probably the better option nearly every time.
I think that the market the Model 3 is in isn't really that competitive. Very few people are looking at a Model 3 or a Camry.
No, they are looking at Model 3 or Lexus / BMW / Mercedes / Cadillac / etc. The Model 3 is joining a very large and competitive market. It will still compete with ICE cars, not just other electrics. I for one ended up buying a three year old BMW for $30k when I found the Model 3 I pre-ordered would likely cost closer to $60k (at least the model I wanted). The Model 3 was still very competitive, but not enough for me to weather the depreciation of a new car.
This is very informative, thank you. Given those figures, 850k looks depressingly like breakeven for the company (if that 86mil/yr was all for this, it would take them (860mil+10mil+3.8mil)/0.95 = 919.79 mil revenue to break even, or about 920k per for 1k patients). I'm sure they have some profit baked in to the figure, but not as egregious as the summary headline sounds by itself.
Don't forget that only about 1 in 10 drugs pass all three phases of clinical trials, so for companies to get funding they would need to be reasonably sure they could return at least 5-10x the cost of development. So if it takes a billion dollars to break even, they would probably be expecting in the ballpark of $5-$10 billion in profits from this drug (and from licensing of patents related to the research). Too much less than that and it wouldn't make sense to fund the drug research in the first place.
Older people spent their working years during two major booms (Internet and Housing), went to school before the massive funding cuts of the Regan/Clinton/Bush era and were set in their careers before the outsourcing boom in the 2000s. No sh!t sherlock they're happier. They've collectively let the world go to hell and now it looks like they're gonna leave the younger generations with the fix it bill.
While I could see where you are coming from if you were talking about baby boomers, this article was about people in their 90's (the Greatest & Silent generations). They stopped working at around 1990. These generations dealt with hardships unheard of by the youth of today. Today's youth are the first generation in modern US history to have an arguably harder life than their parents, but not harder than their grandparents.
I think your logic here is pretty flawed because I'm an American worker, and I can tell you without a doubt that another 21% growth in my 401(k) and stock market accounts will meaningfully help me prepare for retirement someday, add to my rainy day cushion fund, and a not insignificant portion of it has already and will likely continue to go back into the economy.
First off, half of all households have no money in the stock market, so the people most in need of economic improvement gain nothing from stock market increases. 80% of the benefits go to the top 10%, with half of that going to the top 1%.
Other than not investing enough in the first place, the second biggest problem regular people have with the stock market is being too fixated on short term gains and losses. At least 95% of people, if not closer to 99% of people, shouldn't care at all what the stock market does in any given year. It should only matter what happens to it over a 10-30 year period. And for the most part no tax plan will ever have a meaningful effect on the stock market over those periods, unless of course it is bad enough to completely tank the economy for decades.
Sure some people who put short term savings into the stock market would have done well in the last year, but that same mentality would have made them lose half their money during the last recession. Saying that you bought a house with gains from your 100% stock savings plan isn't much different than saying you bought a house with lottery winnings. I mean, I'm glad for you, but that type of thinking very often destroys savings and ruins lives.
Your retirement savings 20 years from now would be the same whether or not the stock market rose 2% or 20% in 2017. In the long term it is based on macro trends which have nearly nothing to do with tax policy. That is why reputable economists say this tax plan will likely improve the economy by 0.1-0.3% in the next few years, and less than that if not having a negative effect after 2020. In the end your retirement savings in 2030 will be the same with or without this tax plan.
In the past 3 months, I've bought a new house (which I haven't done in 25 years), upgraded all the fire detectors/carbon monoxide detectors with nest protects, replaced the thermostat with a nest thermostat, replaced (some) lighting with Philips Hue lights and replaced (some) CFLs with LEDs, bought 6 echo/echo dots, bought two bedroom sets, one couch, remodeled a bathroom, paid off my car loan in full, hired a contractor for some misc stuff, etc etc. So while I can't speak for everyone, I can definitely tell you that from my personal perspective you are dead wrong.
Unless you cashed out retirement savings to buy all of that, this tax plan had nothing to do with any of this. If you did cash out your retirement savings for this then 2017 definitely worked well for you, but that was just luck. Plenty of people hoping to put a down payment for a house in 2008 through the sale of stocks had the opposite luck.
The article stretches to get $48 Billion and the press release says "spend well in excess of $50 billion" with more announcements coming in their January earnings report, so even at the most generous, there is still a gap there.
The article does not stretch to get to $48 billion, they use that figure to show that even if Comcast stops increasing their investments year over year they will invest $48 Billion over the next five years. Comcast's third quarter results, which were cited in the article, shows they have increased investment by 4.2% compared to 2016. If they continue that growth, they will invest $52 billion over the next five years. And even that is a pessimistic figure because it assumes Comcast's growth will remain constant and not accelerate.
There is no gap, and you are the one stretching to find a narrative where Comcast's stated motives are true. Plenty of corporations made similar claims for how they would spend the 2004 repatriated money, and in the end there were no significant increases in investment but were significant reductions in payroll. Likely because of the increased automation and mergers the repatriated money made possible.
There is no evidence yet because it hasn't happened yet.
What are you talking about? Do you think this is the first tax break for corporations, or the first repatriation attempt? We repatriated $300 billion in 2004, and we know what the companies did with it. The top 15 companies, which repatriated half of that $300 billion figure, cut 20,000 jobs in the next three years. 92% of the total repatriated money was simply given to shareholders in stock buybacks and dividends.
As for Comcast's specific case, the article shows how Comcast is already on pace to invest over $50 billion over the next five years, so there is ample evidence Comcast is not doing this because of the tax bill.
Large tax breaks to corporations generally equate to those companies spending between 10 and 20% of the initial take on employees wages and bonus's. This is already known.
[citation needed]
Correct, nowhere near 10-20% of large tax breaks goes to employees. Of the $300 billion companies saved from the 2004 Homeland Investment Act, about 92% of it went to shareholders in the form of share buybacks and dividends. The top 15 companies, who accounted for half of the repatriated money, cut 20,000 net jobs in the three years following the tax break.
But the remaining 8% didn't even all go to employees. I couldn't find exact figures, but some of that also went to capital purchases. At best you could say 5%-10% of large tax breaks go to employees, but even that is probably a bit high.
There is no honest debate on whether this tax bill will meaningfully boost the economy and help American workers. It won't. It will boost the stock market (or more likely already has) and create the illusion that the economy has improved, but that is about it.
If hotels stopped selling to wholesalers then they wouldn't have this problem.
But they would have a different problem. If they aren't listed by the OTAs, then they are invisible to many potential customers. 80% of something is better than 100% of nothing.
They are paying 20% of their gross to outsource their marketing, which is likely cheaper than the cost of doing their own publicity and promotions.
Which is why they have nothing to complain about. They are paying 20% for marketing, which isn't some egregious amount. If Google was being accused of dropping a hotel chain from their service if they also advertised with another search engine, or for having their own direct to consumer sales, that would be anti-competitive. But currently they are just charging for marketing.
as for the increases after the cuts expire... well, get congress to make the cuts permanent. the only reason they arent is because the democrats refused to allow it to happen. if 8 democrats voted yes, it could have been made permanent but they didn't. so blame them for that
No, the tax cuts are temporary because the Republicans wanted to pass the bill with no Democrat involvement. You cannot have a bill which is 100% partisan and then expect Democrats to vote for it just to make a few peanuts for the middle class permanent. The Republicans had the ability to make middle class tax cuts permanent and wealthy tax cuts temporary and they chose to do the opposite. Republicans are 100% responsible for every line of this tax bill.
Ultimately this approach of passing sweeping legislation in a partisan manner most likely benefits Democrats in the long run. It is politically harder to take benefits away than it is to give them, which is why the Republicans couldn't dismantle Obamacare. In three years the Democrats are likely to take back control of government, and with reconciliation they could take those $1.5 billion in tax cuts and give them all to the middle class without raising the deficit one penny. Then the next time Republicans gain power they will have an even harder time giving the wealthy tax breaks without even more massive deficits, or significantly raising taxes on the middle class.
If the Republicans had been able to hold strong and only give tax cuts which are revenue neutral, or only gave tax cuts to the working/middle class, they could have held onto their talking points of being against federal deficits and for the little guy. That ship has now sailed for at least a decade until this bill expires.
So people are rushing to pre-pay 2018 taxes for fun?
Technically even people who see their taxes go down in 2018 can get a big tax break by paying their property taxes early this year. The higher standard deduction coupled with higher child tax credit will cause many people who currently itemize to save money by taking the standard deduction next year. But since they won't deduct any property taxes (not even the $10k maximum amount), then deducting them on their 2017 taxes would save them big.
I for instance will have my base taxes go up about $800 next year, but will now get $4000 in child tax credits because of the increase to both the amount and the maximum income to qualify (my MAGI is above $110k). So my taxes are going down by about $3200 next year. But if I pay my 2017 property taxes early, that is potentially $12k in extra deductions reducing my taxes by an additional $3360. So in this case I would benefit in both 2017 and 2018.
In truth I am already hit with alternative minimum taxes, so I cannot deduct extra property taxes in 2017 anyway. But there are plenty of people who don't have as many deductions and personal exemptions as I do who can save thousands this year by paying hteir 2017 property taxes early.
You do understand that what happened was a tax CUT, correct?
If you think this was a tax cut, then I guess if I put $10k on my credit cards next year you would consider that a $10k raise. At best you could call this a stimulus plan. It certainly isn't a tax cut because many people will be paying more. But the vast majority of people will see their taxes reduced slightly for the next decade, and then the vast majority will see their taxes increased slightly after that. That said, it doesn't take a hard look to see the distribution of this stimulus is heavily skewed towards the wealthy who see a greater net benefit and percent reduction in this plan.
Considering giving money to the wealthy has a poor fiscal multiplier effect, as compared to giving money to the poor and middle class, it is clear the goal of this bill was not to stimulate the economy. The average $50k-75k income household will see a 1.8% reduction in taxes, while a $1M+ household will see a 3.3% reduction. In real dollars that is a difference between $870 in savings and $69,660. Considering stimulus money given to the middle class has a much greater fiscal multiplier than giving money to the wealthy, it is as I said clear that economic stimulus was not the intent of the bill.
This bill was nothing more than a tax cut to wealthy donors paid for in small part by upper middle class blue state voters and in larger part financed by federal debt. Around $50-$100 per month was given to working and middle class families so Republicans could misleadingly claim that everyone benefits from the plan by ignoring it is only a minor gain in the short term. Kind of like paying for a more lavish lifestyle with credit card debt. The real long term gains go to the wealthy.
Most people are never going to look at the bill in enough detail to know specifically how this bill screws them in the long term. For the average person as long as they understand the bill is a massive tax cut for the wealthy paid for by increasing wealth inequality, they are at least well informed enough to vote in their own interest.
Before the mid 1900's if you saw the term AI it would have almost certainly meant artificial insemination, so I assure you the meaning of AI has changed over time.
But not in science they don't! AI has a definite scientific meaning.
And since its inception in the 1960's, AI has included basic algorithms used to approximate the results of intelligent thought.
Words matter, caveman. What we are calling "AI" is definitely artificial, not not intelligent. If we are going to start calling computer programs "AI" just to start another VC hype cycle, then what is the point? Microsoft Word is "AI".
People really need to start modding these types of comments as Troll and move on. AI has included basic algorithms used as a stand in for intelligent thought since the field arguably began at The Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence over 60 years ago. At the time they were very aware of how difficult it could be to define intelligence, so they intentionally did not let that limit what was considered artificial intelligence research.
Today the researchers and field of scientific journalism both agree that machine learning and neural networks fit within the field of artificial intelligence. That is all that matters, not your personal feelings about what the field should be.
Fifty years ago was 1967. This was before the oil crunch. I would say, if you were getting out of college with -any- degree, you pretty much were set for life, since jobs were plentiful, especially because government gave a shit about doing the job right, since the attitude of "lets make things as shitty as possible until we get sued" was not around. If I graduated with an engineering degree back then, my life was pretty much set. Same with a natural sciences degree.
I'm going to take a wild guess that you either were born after 1950 (and therefore have no first hand knowledge about what you are talking about), or you are a white male. While I would agree that a small subset of white men are worse off today than they were 50 years ago, the Utopian world you describe was not enjoyed by the vast majority of Americans in the 1960's.
Ask working women in their 60's if the workplace is easier for women now or in 1967. Ask African Americans or Asians if life is easier today than it was in 1967. Ask some LGBT's if they prefer today's society as opposed to the "acceptance" they enjoyed in 1967.
Working class white men have a good argument that life was better 50 years ago than it is today for people like them. Everyone else has a very warped view of history.
Hehehe, did you see the tax bill the nazipublicans just passed? I doubt the whole "basic income" will happen in ours or our children's lifetimes
Even this tax bill had elements of basic income, for parents anyway, when it increased refundable child tax credits. I find it likely that basic income will never be called basic income, but instead will simply be increased refundable tax credits. So arguably parents in 2018 will have a basic income of $116.67 per month per child.
With even conservatives using refundable tax credits to give aid to the poor, I see it likely this strategy will be expanded upon over the next couple decades. Over the next year we will see if the conservative PR machine are able to effectively disguise this massive tax cut for the wealthy, but if public outrage continues then the backlash will undue any gains the republicans just made towards fulfilling pledges to their donors.
Obamacare is difficult to dismantle because doing so would hurt tens of millions of people. Dismantling a tax break for the 1% will be easier for the next Democratic run government than pardoning the Thanksgiving turkey.