Look at their theme parks... for $60 you get a ticket.. for $200 you get to cut in line ahead of the people paying $60... and the way they treat their old movies. Repeatedly taking them out of circulation to artificially raise their value by creating artificial scarcity and then rereleasing them at higher prices.
They'll probably have 2 tiers with 'really special content' being offered earlier to folks paying more.
What's a legitimate business expense vs a non-legitimate business expense?
Taxes are complicated because business is complicated.
A Delorean or Limo is deductable for one business and not another. Expensive lunches, uniforms, travel, etc etc.
It's not the rates. It's the deductions.
Rates are simple.
Are you going to pay your income as dividends?
Some businesses have high capital expenses which are deductible.
Other businesses do not have have capital expenses but have cost of credit.
There are huge sections of the code written just to give special accounting benefits to the fossil fuel industry (which are essentially much larger subsidies than alternative energy can every dream of having until it gets as big as those industries).
There are losing investments-- which lower profits (or income).. and which can be carried forward for a few years.
It's not simple at all. Any simple change is going to hurt the bottom 98% severely while probably putting more money in the pockets of the top 2%.
Like our recent tax "cut". The wealthy average six figure savings- many of the rest of the population saw huge tax increases this year at tax time. Hurting most the population to benefit under 2% of the population.
And one other thing. It never ends. Say you get your plan and somehow it doesn't screw the lower to upper income groups while giving piles of cash to the wealthy. The game starts again the *very* next day. The bill passes and the next day representatives start putting the old exceptions back under new names and making up new exceptions. Any solution has to put tax changes under greater scrutiny. Hell last time, they were writing tax changes in pen on the bill which *no* one got to read and which no representative or senator was held responsible for.
We need source control over these bills with only the senator or congressional representative being able to make changes to the text with a checkin where their name is *tied* to the provision.
FYI: I carry all my own prime and netflix movies and television episodes on my phone and I carry $20 battery that will power my phone for about 24 hours. I tried the bose noise cancelling headsets but for me- ordinary gun ear protection (under $35) + ear buds works much better and doesn't need a battery.
The AC being off was mentioned by someone else. That could get really bad fast.
So I can see it would be better to arrive as close to "on time" as possible for comfort reasons.
If you had arrived "on time" and been in the same seat 30 more minutes in the air, do you think you would have felt better about it than arriving "early" and sitting on the tarmac 30 minutes? The sitting time would have been the same.
I can see you might have issues if they didn't let you use the restrooms.
I've turned this off twice now and a few weeks ago, it went right back to "sending voice data to google" in a notification.
And it seems like over time, the voice recognition is getting *worse* not better. I think it's getting too many words and it's making more and more goofy choices of which is the correct word to use.
I can tell you that Laundry soap is the same price it was 6 years ago. Gasoline is also about the same.
But food is way up. 25% on most food- more on some.
Likewise- housing costs (and hence property taxes and rent) are up over 30%. More people are living in grossly overcrowded conditions, moving back in with parents, or going homeless.
I eat a lot more food than I use laundry soap.
The CPI is grossly understated. It's highly politicized and they substitute components all the time to keep the number low. But real inflation on the street has been running closer to 4.5% for the last 7 years.
Increasingly the economy seems to be tuned to the top 20%. Products are yield managed for that group on the logic that they generate 80% of the profits.
Even a small drop will lower prices significantly because it's the barrel that costs $60 to pump that sets the price, not the billions of barrels that cost $15 to pump.
This sets up an interesting feedback loop since electric cars are an *awesome* deal at $4 gasoline and $0.11/kwh electricity but not so great at $2 gasoline and $0.11/kwh (much less the $0.28/kwh it is in some countries).
So plug in electric vehicles (PUV) lower the cost of gasoline thereby making themselves less attractive.
Of course as internal combustion engines (ICE) lose their network effect, they will become more expensive. Service stations will be less profitable with fewer ICE cars on the road. And I think within 10 years,you'll be looking at some insane ranges for electric cars (like 400-500 miles) which mostly will charge overnight at homes and hotels, and at work, and while shopping. As they become less profitable, gasoline stations will need to charge more per gallon to cover their monthly base costs.
OTH, at least one electric vehicle company (Audi?) wants to put recharging on a subscription basis with a base cost per charge that is ridiculously high that makes their electric cars much more expensive (about $750 per year) to operate.
friend of mine was in line for the cheaper $40kish model but when it was clear that the subsidy would be cut in half before he could take delivery, he upgraded to the $50k (actually around $48k fr him for some reason) model to get the full subsidy amount and to get the car delivered now instead of sometime next year.
Oil, coal, and natural gas all have subsidies in the form of special tax treatment as well as security paid for by the rest of society ($2 trillion for the gulf war... and 4,000 dead).
Solar subsidies are tiny in comparison. And it's *clear* that solar is going to be superior, less costly, *and* blow a hole in the saudi and russian budgets.
Because we don't allow them to both help you search for goods *and* sell them to you. It's anti-competitive.
One likely result based on history is that you (Crashmarik) will get results which result in you paying a higher price for those goods than if you got fair search results.
In "high moat" businesses, it also allows them to drive competitors out of business, buy them up, and then charge much higher prices once they have no competition.
Minecraft says, "40 new slabs, walls and stairs!" Meanwhile, I just found in modded minecraft there are *hundreds* of new slabs, walls and stairs. Heck, cobble stone alone has about 30 different textures you can chisel it too.
And there's an upgrade path which takes more than a few days to max out.
And lots of new tools/tinker toys to puzzle over.
I've played the game for 7 years. I think it's just too simplistic and the pace of development is too slow. By 2 years in, I was chafing at the constraints. In my own game/servers I was doing custom command blocks to implement longer leveling/upgrade paths and new functionality.
Minecraft could and should have the functionality of tinker's construct by now. It's a billion dollar product. The team is too small.
I honestly don't see how I could go back to vanilla minecraft at this point.
Overprovisioning on backups is always the best choice.
Nothing is worse than going to restore your backup and discovering it's no good.
Your best bet is daily/hourly incremental backups with weekly/daily full backups. And once a month/year take a copy of your incremental backup and rotate it to long term storage purely for restores.
Slashdot Mirror
Look at their theme parks... for $60 you get a ticket.. for $200 you get to cut in line ahead of the people paying $60... and the way they treat their old movies. Repeatedly taking them out of circulation to artificially raise their value by creating artificial scarcity and then rereleasing them at higher prices.
They'll probably have 2 tiers with 'really special content' being offered earlier to folks paying more.
The $6.99 price probably won't even stand 12 months.
Not even sure $9.99 will hold long. Their behavior in the past already shows they'd rather sell to 20% of the market at a much higher price.
Thanks. Lots of good discussion here and some interesting points and insights too.
I appreciate your response!
I have a friend who went to that. But I have carpal tunnel. So it's painful even to swipe text.
But if you dont'- I recommend it. And using duckduckgo or some other similar browser.
What's a legitimate business expense vs a non-legitimate business expense?
Taxes are complicated because business is complicated.
A Delorean or Limo is deductable for one business and not another. Expensive lunches, uniforms, travel, etc etc.
It's not the rates. It's the deductions.
Rates are simple.
Are you going to pay your income as dividends?
Some businesses have high capital expenses which are deductible.
Other businesses do not have have capital expenses but have cost of credit.
There are huge sections of the code written just to give special accounting benefits to the fossil fuel industry (which are essentially much larger subsidies than alternative energy can every dream of having until it gets as big as those industries).
There are losing investments-- which lower profits (or income) .. and which can be carried forward for a few years.
It's not simple at all. Any simple change is going to hurt the bottom 98% severely while probably putting more money in the pockets of the top 2%.
Like our recent tax "cut". The wealthy average six figure savings- many of the rest of the population saw huge tax increases this year at tax time. Hurting most the population to benefit under 2% of the population.
And one other thing. It never ends. Say you get your plan and somehow it doesn't screw the lower to upper income groups while giving piles of cash to the wealthy. The game starts again the *very* next day. The bill passes and the next day representatives start putting the old exceptions back under new names and making up new exceptions. Any solution has to put tax changes under greater scrutiny. Hell last time, they were writing tax changes in pen on the bill which *no* one got to read and which no representative or senator was held responsible for.
We need source control over these bills with only the senator or congressional representative being able to make changes to the text with a checkin where their name is *tied* to the provision.
That's an interesting point.
FYI: I carry all my own prime and netflix movies and television episodes on my phone and I carry $20 battery that will power my phone for about 24 hours. I tried the bose noise cancelling headsets but for me- ordinary gun ear protection (under $35) + ear buds works much better and doesn't need a battery.
The AC being off was mentioned by someone else. That could get really bad fast.
So I can see it would be better to arrive as close to "on time" as possible for comfort reasons.
You misunderstood my question.
It wasn't ... "Arrive early and be allowed to deplane".
It was "13.5 hours in the chair, arriving on time" and "13.5 hours in the chair, arriving 30 minutes early and sitting on the tarmac for 30 minutes".
Serious question.
If you had arrived "on time" and been in the same seat 30 more minutes in the air, do you think you would have felt better about it than arriving "early" and sitting on the tarmac 30 minutes? The sitting time would have been the same.
I can see you might have issues if they didn't let you use the restrooms.
I've turned this off twice now and a few weeks ago, it went right back to "sending voice data to google" in a notification.
And it seems like over time, the voice recognition is getting *worse* not better. I think it's getting too many words and it's making more and more goofy choices of which is the correct word to use.
I'm retired.
I can tell you that Laundry soap is the same price it was 6 years ago. Gasoline is also about the same.
But food is way up. 25% on most food- more on some.
Likewise- housing costs (and hence property taxes and rent) are up over 30%. More people are living in grossly overcrowded conditions, moving back in with parents, or going homeless.
I eat a lot more food than I use laundry soap.
The CPI is grossly understated. It's highly politicized and they substitute components all the time to keep the number low. But real inflation on the street has been running closer to 4.5% for the last 7 years.
Increasingly the economy seems to be tuned to the top 20%. Products are yield managed for that group on the logic that they generate 80% of the profits.
There are many angry people out in society.
Ha hah ah ho ho h o ho ho ho...
How many times has Facebook said this. I think at this point, it's agame for them to see if they can get away with it "just one more time!"
Of *COURSE* this app will violate your privacy. It's just a question of how much.
It wasn't that long ago that people in the sticks regularly bought a barrel (about 60 gallons) of gasoline at a time.
That might return.
Even a small drop will lower prices significantly because it's the barrel that costs $60 to pump that sets the price, not the billions of barrels that cost $15 to pump.
This sets up an interesting feedback loop since electric cars are an *awesome* deal at $4 gasoline and $0.11/kwh electricity but not so great at $2 gasoline and $0.11/kwh (much less the $0.28/kwh it is in some countries).
So plug in electric vehicles (PUV) lower the cost of gasoline thereby making themselves less attractive.
Of course as internal combustion engines (ICE) lose their network effect, they will become more expensive. Service stations will be less profitable with fewer ICE cars on the road. And I think within 10 years,you'll be looking at some insane ranges for electric cars (like 400-500 miles) which mostly will charge overnight at homes and hotels, and at work, and while shopping. As they become less profitable, gasoline stations will need to charge more per gallon to cover their monthly base costs.
OTH, at least one electric vehicle company (Audi?) wants to put recharging on a subscription basis with a base cost per charge that is ridiculously high that makes their electric cars much more expensive (about $750 per year) to operate.
friend of mine was in line for the cheaper $40kish model but when it was clear that the subsidy would be cut in half before he could take delivery, he upgraded to the $50k (actually around $48k fr him for some reason) model to get the full subsidy amount and to get the car delivered now instead of sometime next year.
Oil, coal, and natural gas all have subsidies in the form of special tax treatment as well as security paid for by the rest of society ($2 trillion for the gulf war... and 4,000 dead).
Solar subsidies are tiny in comparison. And it's *clear* that solar is going to be superior, less costly, *and* blow a hole in the saudi and russian budgets.
Because we don't allow them to both help you search for goods *and* sell them to you. It's anti-competitive.
One likely result based on history is that you (Crashmarik) will get results which result in you paying a higher price for those goods than if you got fair search results.
In "high moat" businesses, it also allows them to drive competitors out of business, buy them up, and then charge much higher prices once they have no competition.
Most boomers will be dead by 2050 so you are really talking about millenials and genx. I'll probably be dead by 2037.
You can taste the difference and you can see the difference in some cases if you refrigerate it.
Some olive oils are extremely rich and tangy. You wouldn't normally use them for cooking.
I've had "pure" olive oil products which wouldn't solidify in the refrigerator. That's a bad sign.
Well your answer sounds like the kind of answer YOU would give, but that's not any assurance that an Apple or I would answer my post that way.
Yup.
And it's just so boring.
You can beat the game in a week tops.
Minecraft says, "40 new slabs, walls and stairs!" Meanwhile, I just found in modded minecraft there are *hundreds* of new slabs, walls and stairs. Heck, cobble stone alone has about 30 different textures you can chisel it too.
And there's an upgrade path which takes more than a few days to max out.
And lots of new tools/tinker toys to puzzle over.
I've played the game for 7 years. I think it's just too simplistic and the pace of development is too slow. By 2 years in, I was chafing at the constraints. In my own game/servers I was doing custom command blocks to implement longer leveling/upgrade paths and new functionality.
Minecraft could and should have the functionality of tinker's construct by now. It's a billion dollar product. The team is too small.
I honestly don't see how I could go back to vanilla minecraft at this point.
Sounds like they trained a neural network on a lot of falls.
Which means, they don't really know what they actually trained it to do either.
Minecraft sees so primitive and shallow compared to modded Minecraft.
They should really back up a truck full of money to the mod community and get some of that code added to the main code base.
The glacial pace of current development is stunting the game.
There is a rich deep world of play out there in the modded community.
Overprovisioning on backups is always the best choice.
Nothing is worse than going to restore your backup and discovering it's no good.
Your best bet is daily/hourly incremental backups with weekly/daily full backups. And once a month/year take a copy of your incremental backup and rotate it to long term storage purely for restores.
Media is *cheap*.
And having a triple cheeseburger shoved down your throat can choke you and kill you dead.
Average temperature increases of 3 degrees will result in many areas becoming uninhabitable.
DiHydrogen Monoxide is very safe in reasonable quantities. Co2 and Methane are fairly safe in reasonable quantities.
Excessive consumption of Dihydrogen Monoxide will make you sick and can kill you and inhalation will kill most humans in minutes.
We are developing a similar problems with Co2 and Methane. There is too much.
Also, water and air cooled nuclear tech doesn't work well when the water is 104 degrees fahrenheit.