mountainofdeath

IIRC, The IRS has a specific 20 point test and many states expand on it. Being responsible for your own costs and the "relative" flexibility in that, you can start and end deliveries whenever, wherever, however you want. It gets murky if say, you require them to be on during certain times and threaten them with termination if the don't.

In theory, you can deduct the fuel and repair costs since you are running your own business so you only get taxed on the profit.

Food costs are up overall because (assuming USA) 1. COVID and immigration enforcement severe restricted immigration (legal or otherwise) of farm workers who formed the backbone of farm labor. 2. Oil and gas is critical import for food production. Fertilizer comes from natural gas, farms burn diesel, etc. All of this adds up.

Food delivery always was a luxury especially when it's just for one or two people. Unfortunately, you can't generate exponential growth on wealthy families ordering Friday evening takeout.

How does this compare to what Tuya offers as well as Amazon's and Microsoft's IoT device solution? To me, it seems like higher level interface to ready made commercial devices that you can then perhaps plumb back into a building management system or something.

I agree that it isn't in the "everyone and their grandmother will have it" pricing territory. It will definitely sell well at least within a niche but won't have the deep penetration other products have.

If you recall, for many years, an iPhone was a luxury status symbol; the equivalent of a mid-range hand bag or a low-end luxury automobile. Expensive, but still within the reach of the an average person with at least some disposable income. It's why everyone seems to have an iPhone and EarPods.

The pro display, like many VR headsets before it, is really a niche product that will be limited to a standard deviation of what I would call "enthusiasts" or "power users".

(1). Even pre-iPhone, having an iPod, especially a premium one, was a status symbol. (2). Non-iPhone devices are generally scoffed at in many circles, green text message bubbles being associated with budget Android devices and not the expensive Android flagships.

Oh no, I mean literal state propaganda. The parent company of Russia Today leased an AM radio station to spout literal Russian propaganda (English language of course).

* Radio Sputnik for 6 hours a day* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KCXL#Broadcast_of_Radio_Sputni...

Most of the APM programs require a quantitative if not technical background but that isn't the real selection criteria. The selection criteria are "go getters". The people who graduate at the top of their class while preparing for the next Olympics and running their seed-stage startup on the side. Top MBA programs select for the same criteria but in a business context.

If you start as an analyst in Investment Banking at bulge bracket bank (the same hiring pool as for Google APM program and similar), you fall into one of two categories.

1. The coat-rider who sees everyone doing and how can the consensus be wrong. If you read Liar's Poker by Michael Lewis, the first few chapters document his experience at Princeton in the early 80s. It's just the fashionable thing to do.

2. The ones that hope to pivot somewhere in year 2-3 to Private Equity or the Hedge fund space. After a few more years, your hours and stress dramatically improve and you earn life-changing amounts of money (1M+ USD) on a yearly basis if you are good. Very few make it this far though. Many burn out and end up in other corporate finance roles.

Group 1 moved to tech and will slowly move back to high-finance.

One of the side-effects of the technology crowd becoming saturated with the straight-laced, standardized-test oriented, topper types is that LeetCode aligns neatly with how you prepare.

Right secondary school grades + near perfect exams -> Right Undergraduate

Right undergraduate + LeetCode (basically an exam) -> Big Tech job " + Case interview prep -> High paying entry level management consulting job " + Right connections -> High paying entry level wall-st job " + High LSAT -> Right Law School -> High-paying BigLaw job " + High MCAT -> Right Med School -> Right Residency -> High Paying Physician Job

If you notice, tech (Googles of the World and elite startups) have now fallen inline with the path for other white-shoe industries.

FWIW, I know at least a few people from memory that had non-technical undergraduates (usually economics) but are excellent at studying for exams. Sure enough, they did enough LeetCode they could get a job at Meta or similar. Ask them what actually happens in a CPU or similar technical question and you get a blank stare.

In my youth, console gamers were considered basement dwelling weirdos by normal people and PC gamers were considered weirdos by console gamers. Such was the hierarchy.

I can confirm. When I graduated in the early 2010s, one of the professors I was close to mentioned that the cohorts where turning away from the typical hacker types and to the high-achieving money and prestige seekers who did not really care about the field. The last time it had happened was leading into the year 2000 and the EECS department got an entire building out of it as a result. Once the dotcom bubble crashed, enrollment was down to third of its 1999 levels and the building was mostly empty.

History is a flat circle.

My last company was chock-full of Ivy league/Stanford/Berkeley/etc graduates with almost none being the type who actually is interested in technology. About half openly admitted to being a SWE because they couldn't get a product manager role and hoped to pivot into it from SWE after a few years. I will also say that parental pressure had a big part. Why spend 10 years of your life to be a doctor when you can make more money in big tech?

It also became fashionable for people to pivot out of high-finance or management consulting (traditional white-shoe industries) and into corporate development roles at hot companies.

My wife (former investment banker who pivoted to risk management) was half-joking when she said that high-finance is always the apex predator, even if at times it doesn't look like it. It sits at the center of all major institutions.

I mean, AM radio is basically dead (as is FM radio). Most of the stations are foreign language, talk-shows and and in at least one case in the USA, overt foreign propaganda by an unfriendly nation. I imagine the radio spectrum can be repurposed for better uses.

FWIW, I learned the startup I was at was doing this when I was fired after not even 60 days (as a Senior SWE mind you) for "browsing personal internet too much" in addition to a bunch of other stupid reasons.

Like how much time did InfoSec have on their hands?

At a prior company, this was the case. If you wanted to access a personal website, they had a fleet of repurposed Citrix servers running Windows Server 2012 that had nothing but Internet Explorer, Chrome and Firefox for this purpose. The account you used was ephemeral and wiped after 4 hours of inactivity with the servers located in the company DMZ. You had full access (less the usual NSFW filters). You could not browse anything that was not whitelisted through your local computer and even then, it all passed through a proxy to make sure it was safe.

You also couldn't use unapproved tools so you were limited to VS Code and PuTTY on Windows.

Eventually they got smart and issued Macbook pros to programmers and implemented zero-trust policies for related internal services. Unfortunately, technical managers and product managers were not so lucky.

Always this. The separation of intellectual property concerns alone is reason enough.

One of the major focus areas of the last 100 years or so of management theory is row to reduce bespoke professional white-collar roles where judgement is involved to assembly-line workers. The thinking is, if you can't force the job to become rote, then you can at least apply a forcing function to keep them in line.

It's well known that even famous companies Meta, Google and Amazon track various forms of SLOC-related metrics, tickets closed, etc of their SWE. It's usually left to the managers discretion to use it, but its is there and is used often as a coarse measure of productivity.

It's probably more-so that above a certain income threshold, your tax return becomes exponentially more complex.

Free-file is useful when all you have is 1-2 above-board wage earning jobs, maybe with a 1099 contract job where the employer is nice nice enough to pre-fill the form out for you.

Once you start dealing with non-trivial amounts of dividends, interest, securities, partnerships, real-estate, you really do need a professional to keep things organized.

True. I had a professor mention SNOBOL a few times in lectures. The same professor only taught classes in Scheme, including CS 101 and Software Engineering. The man was stuck in the 80s in every way.

"Criti-hype", I like that word. It indeed is like car salesperson hyping that the very thing they are selling is almost not street legal, begging the buyer to try it on and placing that seed of thought.

On another note, everyone is now using "algorithms and machine learning" in the same way they used "blockchain" in 2021. The best part is, the majority of the "algorithms" being used are basically glorified Excel models; something you would expect a fresher in college to piece together for their Physics 101 class.

That makes sense. Perhaps go to the full SaaS model like Rolls-Royce did for jet engines with "Power by the hour" where you lease the engine on a per flight-hour basis with all maintenance included.

This is most certainly not the case. Rental licenses are their own thing and usually get their own media stock. For DVDs, the discs usually had basic monochrome screen printing and came in paper sleeves that would later be processed into rent-able form.

Yet another self-inflicted wound the Congress of old men do to make the US software industry even less competitive. I would argue this is political because the tech industry is a convenient target at the moment, full of young people who tend to vote against the ruling party. That, and legacy industries don't care too much about R&D anyway.

Given what has been open sourced so far, it makes sense that content that is likely to be controversial, or content that generates neutral to negative engagement would have a smaller probability of being displayed.

I suspected this and told my far-right/left wing acquaintances, that no, Twitter (and Facebook too) isn't suppressing you, your content is just a net-negative from the platform's perspective. The platform is in the business of keeping the bulk of its users and advertisers happy.

This has been happening for at least the second half of the prior decade. I graduated in 2014 and that was the second year EE/CS had a significant uptick in enrollments. When I started in 2010, it was mostly the "runs Linux on the desktop" hacker-types.

This already exists though and is a technical solution to an economic problem. The reason the money transfer fees exist, slow confirmation, etc is there is no incentive to do so otherwise.

Crypto transfers for say USD->EUR via USD->BTC->EUR are just adding extra foreign exchange legs in the hope that the BTC holders on either end will give you a better deal.

You would be surprised how many brand-new investors through their money in 3x levered ETFs and/or way out-of-the-money options and were right 3/4ths of time on accident. High school students were writing Hedge Fund managers asking for jobs as they did ridiculously well through blind luck.

Same here. Luckily, I pulled out of pretty much all of them in February when Putin invaded and I saw the writing on the wall.

Money Market funds already do this and the collapse of money market funds is usually a harbinger of worse things to come. Money market funds are non-FDIC insured places to park short term cash, typically backed by some combination of AAA commercial paper, municipal bonds and various vintages of T-Bills. Some also are exclusively holding California and New York City bonds and are are totally tax free. Money market funds can do things like suspending redemption in case of a panic to let things settle.

The idea behind USDC is to collateralize it 1:1 like a money market fund provided the underlying bonds hold. Tether is doing fractional reserve banking but has no central bank to act as a lender of last resort. Even then, banks pay into the FDIC which retains reserves itself like any other insurance.

Tether works as long as the money flowing in >= money flowing out.

A severe run on Tether would dry up liquidity very quickly.

Grand opening...grand closing.

There was a time when CNN was real news like the BBC and not a somewhat-centrist entertainment channel.

Indeed this is a major problem in public service. Everyone from your local street police officer up the the president of the USA. Nobody cares when things are done correctly and go well, but everyone cares when things go wrong, even if (the hope is) the occurrence is rare. Thus, the entire bureaucracy is setup toward this.