AmericanChopper

Those two concepts are very much the same thing. There is no literally distinction between legally minimising the taxes you have to pay, and legally avoiding a tax that you would otherwise have to pay. You just want to have a different word to use to criticise people/groups/companies you don’t like doing something you seem to otherwise approve of, so you don’t look like a hypocrite.

According to this article, it’s actually evasion when Apple does it!

100% of the ones that do it on a contract basis…

The number of users they have is _the_ reason they’re generally better than the competition. It’s a social networking site dedicated to finding jobs/employees for people. It has slightly better features then a lot of other job listing sites, but the main reason it’s better than the other ones (outside of certain niches), is that it has more job seekers and more job posters on it.

Other sites will typically just have less jobs posted, less users, and marginally worse features. If you can’t find a job on LinkedIn, going to a slightly worse version of the same thing probably won’t be the change you’re looking for.

That probably says more about the market you’re in, or you as a candidate. Every time I’ve looked for a job on LinkedIn I’ve found one almost immediately, and the recruiters I know who most reliably have something for me I all met via LinkedIn.

You can turn all that off. If managing that is too annoying, every time you get a notification you can select to turn that type of notification off.

I was also annoyed by this, but I’ve managed to get it to be pretty quite now.

I absolutely cannot understand this perspective. I open LinkedIn to add somebody to my network, contact somebody, or look for a job/hire somebody, and for those things it’s really good. I don’t make any LinkedIn content, I don’t consume any of it, I don't struggle to ignore it entirely, and I don’t miss out on anything by doing so. Where exactly does it need to improve?

Then explain your solution for doing so, or show me a jurisdiction that has managed it and explain how. In reality no jurisdiction has ever achieved this, and for the reasons I have explained.

Real people also manage to avoid their taxes all the time. People complain about the rich not paying their taxes every day. People can also offshore their income in mostly the same way a company can, with the only additional complication being residency requirements. I just finished watching the F1 qualifying, a sport that has 1 Monegasque athlete, but nearly half of its currently active athlete living in Monaco.

If you want a system of global tax governance, then you’d need a global government. Something we don’t have, will not have, and a lot of people tend to be especially resentful towards any of the efforts to create one (or something that behaves like one).

This is just a reinvention of the global minimum corporate tax effort, and it would fail for exactly the same reasons. Except, with the added benefit of making corporate tax avoidance procedures more complicated, without actually accomplishing anything (now you need to offshore your profits to a friendly high tax jurisdiction before offshoring them again to a low tax one).

Also, aside from the fact that this policy would fail, what you’re describing is a rather extreme import tarrif, which is a highly protectionist policy.

I own several companies that have a large pile of transfer pricing agreements, I’m very familiar with the nature and complexity of international tax laws. All corporate tax avoidance is, is incurring offshore expenses to shuffle profits offshore. As long as you can do that, there is literally no way to prevent the tax avoidance. The only thing you can do is make it more complicated.

This is also the reason most developed economies have given up on regulating transfer pricing any more than they already have, and instead the strategy has shifted to trying to get the tax havens to implement or increase their corporate taxes. That’s why the “global minimum corporate tax rate” idea has recently emerged, and why the EU uses their black and grey lists to coerce foreign jurisdictions to write new tax laws. This strategy is arguably more effective, but still a complete failure, because you have some tax haven jurisdictions that simply ignore the pressure, and other tax havens are simply never sanctioned because they have sufficient leverage in the global economy to avoid the attention entirely.

It is very literally a choice between corporate tax, or globalization. There is no way to have both.

They’re not unavoidable, they can just potentially come at an unacceptable cost. In the corporate tax instance, literally the only thing you need to implement corporate tax avoidance is the ability to incur a deductible expense to an offshore company. No matter what other laws you write, if you can do that you can avoid corporate tax. If you can’t do that then you don’t have economic globalization (or you’re not participating in it at least).

This unrealistic wishful thinking you seem to be exhibiting is something I think politicians intentionally prey on. If some politician can convince you that it is possible to “fix this”, but without the all the obviously mandatory costs and tradeoffs, then they can also potentially convince you that they can and will do it. This particular policy issue has been a part of many political platforms, yet nobody has ever “fixed it”, because it cannot be fixed (at least not without also ruining a lot of other things).

The article takes an awfully long time to get to the point, but as far as I can tell it’s “this guy is religious and conservative and that’s bad”.

The possibility you’re not acknowledging is that the “spirit of the law” is trying to achieve something that cannot be done, or at least not done without massively modifying the way a system works to an unacceptable level. Law makers know this, but it’s not really a problem for them because they can write their bad law, leave it full of “loopholes” to be “exploited”, and then just cry about some loophole exploiting boogeyman to their constituents and donors as the reason their law making efforts have failed. If you wanted to be cynical you might even suggest that this is the desired outcome and a way of managing circumstances where donor and constituent interest are in conflict, or perhaps just a way of signalling that you’re delivering on a policy promise, when in reality you can’t.

Corporate tax avoidance is a great example of this. The only feature you need your laws to have to facilitate corporate tax avoidance is the ability to incur a deductible expense to an offshore entity. The only thing corporate tax law loophole closing ever achieves is to make corporate tax avoidance procedures more complicated, thus making them only accessible to more sophisticated tax avoiders. There is no conceivable way of closing these “loopholes” without extreme protectionism or isolationism. It would basically require ending globalization or at least removing your country from the globalized economy. A solution that most people would find completely unacceptable.

If that’s straightforward then congratulations, you’ve failed your assessment for not having immutable log retention.

They certainly wouldn’t let you keep it there, but if your SIEM was absolutely full of cardholder data, I imagine they’d require you to extract ALL of it, redact the cardholder data, and the import it to a new instance, nuking the old one. But for a QSA to sign off on that they’d be expecting to see a lot of evidence that removing the cardholder data was the only thing you changed.

Keeping secrets and other sensitive data out of your SIEM is a very important part of SIEM design. Depending on what you’re dealing with you might want to tokenize it, or redact it, but you absolutely don’t want to don’t want to just ingest them in plaintext.

If you’re a PCI company then ending up with a credit card number in your SIEM can be a massive disaster. Because you’re never allowed to store that in plaintext, and your SIEM data is supposed to be immutable. In theory that puts you out of compliance for a minimum of one year with no way to fix it, in reality your QSAs will spend some time debating what to do about it and then require you to figure out some way to delete it, which might be incredibly onerous. But I have no idea what they’d do if your SIEM somehow became full of credit card numbers, that probably is unfixable…

You illustrate a perfect example of simply not understanding what people want. Talkers get promoted because talkers have social skills, and companies are social systems, and social skills are required to advance through them. Social skills are probably more desirable than technical skills most of the time. It’s not luck that these people succeed, it’s the fact that they have the qualities that people want.

You can succeed through partially through luck, like if a record executive decides they going to manufacture some massive level of fame for you. But this isn’t a viable long term strategy, only providing what people want is. Over time the variance of luck goes away. The luck outlook relies on the fallacious idea that you only get one opportunity to succeed, but you don’t, you have as long as you’re willing to keep trying. Maybe a failure on one particular day can be explained by luck, but you get to wake up and keep trying every day, and if you have what people want then luck becomes irrelevant and eventually you will succeed. That’s how basically every single successful person you’ve ever heard of has done it.

Then blame the board imo. They define the objectives for the CEO, the incentives for achieving them, and the governance framework for governing their execution. If shareholders want this “short term thinking” that always gets brought up, then they have every right to it.

Of course this “short term thinking” trope is just a meme that the armchair commentators like to pedal out. If the system was dysfunctional enough to prioritise short term profit seeking to this extent, then all a competitor would have to do to monopolise any market is do enough “long term thinking” to outlast all their failing competitors. Investors would notice this and reallocate their capital accordingly.

But none of this is what happens in reality. If anything I would say the market is over-interested in long term strategies. The popularity of the growth over profit model that we observe amongst most prolific capital allocators takes “long term thinking” to absurd lengths.

This is just arguing over phrasing. It doesn’t matter what you’re trying to do, if you’re making YouTube videos, or music, or paintings, or cakes, or web apps, or cleaning diveways, your ability to succeed boils down to your ability to provide something other people want. That is the objective source of your merit.

Perhaps your own idea of success in life is something that revolves exclusively around your own satisfaction, like going off and living in the woods. But this is exactly the same situation, you’re just only trying to provide the things that one person wants in that scenario, yourself. Your ability to do this will again come down to your own merit.

Of course if you’re chronically frustrated by being less successful than you would like to be, then looking for alternative explanations such as luck will be an attractive scapegoat that could excuse you from scrutinising your own capabilities. But the human inclination towards doing that is certainly not morally righteous.

The idea that success is earned through luck rather than merit is a firmly ideological position, regardless of the domain you’re talking about. If you succeeded via luck then that provides a better moral justification for the related ideological position that you should be deprived of the fruits of your labor as much as possible, for redistribution to others who were simply less lucky than you. It’s really just sour grapes.

The formula for success in any field is simply to make a product that other people want to consume. It’s not 0 variance, but if you have some insight into what people want, and you do the work to execute your idea, then you can simply work through the ups and downs and success is almost inevitable.

Overprescription of antibiotics and overuse of antibiotics in agriculture have both been known as public health risks for decades. So perhaps a little more prevention is the best cure could help address this.

All of the world’s most successful unions (bar associations, the APA, UAPD..) achieved the greatly increased remuneration by increasing the costs and barriers to entry as much as possible. It makes sense that any employer would want to lower those barriers to entry as much as possible. The reason this trend across all employers has been emerging is simply because they started to realise they could get away with it, as in there were qualified candidates that didn’t have college degrees. All employers benefit from the increased labour pool from this, because increasing the supply of anything is going to put downward pressure on its price.

I know for sure it’s in the US, but I’ve heard stories of people intentionally making a nuisance out of paying debts in cash in a lot of countries.

I always thought that in a lot of places you can choose to only accept whatever payment methods you like, but you have to accept a cash payment for a debt.

The EU directly writes tax legislation for countries all over the world with the use of their black and grey lists, which restrict companies in those jurisdictions from trading with the EU, or trading with companies that trade with the EU, or from using any banking in the EU or banking that is especially connected to the EU.

Stranded means you have no means for moving from where you are, or really no practical/acceptable means (you could swim off a deserted island for instance, but that probably wouldn't be considered a practical means of moving off the island).

Boeing has stranded these astronauts on the ISS because it has no (acceptable) means of bringing them down, and the astronauts themselves have no personal means for doing so. If they want to become un-stranded then somebody will need to arrange the means for them to come down.

That doesn't mean that it's impossible for somebody else to provide those means, or that the means simply don't exist in any capacity. But they meet both the dictionary and common colloquial definition of stranded.

You’re describing a plan for how to deal with stranded astronauts. If I’m on a road trip and my car breaks down at a gas station, I’m stranded. Even if there are other people and other cars at the gas station, and even if I still have access to emergency services, and even if I have a plan for how to deal with being stranded at a gas station.

I used to play wow a lot, and it was fun… when I was young. When you have few responsibilities, and all of your friends also have few responsibilities you can invest a lot of time into leisure activities like this without giving much up.

The problem I see with games in general is that so many of them are now designed to dominate your time the way wow does. I somewhat recently used to play Warzone once a week (or once every other week) with a group of friends, and that’s a game that you should be able to pick up, play for a couple of hours, and come back whenever you want and play for a few more hours. But it’s not. New content comes out all the time, and a whole new game comes out once a year. If you don’t stay on top of it, you just don’t get the proper experience of the game. So once my casual level of interest drops below the level of time the game demands from you, I just give up playing it.

This trend of a constant demand for grinding and micro transactions has creeped into way too many products imo, and the conclusion I’ve come to is that most of these games are just not made for people like me any more.

I usually had some overlapping technical expertise with the candidates I was interviewing, so my approach was to prepare a line of questions relating to some obscure or esoteric technical issue I’d dealt with in the past. Usually I’d get to an I don’t know pretty organically.

One time I had a candidate who didn’t not know about a single massively obscure thing I’d asked him. He was a DBA for a Chinese ISP that had more subscribers than we had total population in the markets we were operating in. That guy was probably the best hire I ever made. He was always in an incredibly genuine good mood, he was always happy to help everybody, and he’d help people learn how to solve problems rather than just doing the solving for them. Everybody on the team got smarter and more competent working with him, and he was so good at his job that he never even got behind on his own work due to helping other people all the time. I hope he’s still doing well now, before I left that company I managed to make sure he was being paid bucketloads of money (which wasn’t something he ever seemed to be seeking out independently, he was always just happy to come to work and do his job).

People can change the behaviour for brief periods. But who they are day in day out is going to be pretty consistent. Telling people how I would want a good candidate to behave during an interview doesn’t help at all with candidate selection. An inclination towards saying things they think people want to hear is a characteristic I’d like to select out of my candidates as well, so perhaps I’ve been killing two birds with one stone here…

Interviewing is by no means the perfect way to assess a candidate, but ultimately that’s what the purpose is. If I just tell candidates what I want them to say upfront, then why even bother with it at all? I want to assess what qualities they have that I want/don’t want, and what qualities they don’t have, as best I can. They don’t need to be perfect. Skills can be trained, personality characteristic much less so. People are flexible enough that some of them could spend one hour flexibly pretending to be the candidate I’m looking for, but that’s not the purpose of the exercise for me.