fiat_lux

Why would I give them a vote of confidence with my money so that they can use it to convince investors that they’re popular and they should pony up a billion dollars for Spez’s pay?

They’re relying on gullible people who think either Reddit is legitimately a good investment or gullible people who think they can beat the market and won’t be left holding the bag. I’m nobody’s bag holder, let alone Spez’s.

if I can quickly make a couple of bucks and then cash out, that might be worth it.

Said every gambler ever.

Blocking modal windows are a sin and make me less likely to interact with a site. Imgur is also guilty. No, I don’t want to participate in your community meme event when I’m just trying to look at an image on the app that is clogging up my RAM because you think it does something important and interesting enough to warrant deeplinking it in an electron wrapper.

Also, while I’m here, fuck modal windows with no X to close button which forces you to read the buttons to figure out which one is the “fuck off” button and not the “take all my money” button.

You’re 100% correct

Understood! Thanks for the detailed insight, I appreciate it. I have witnessed business excess but I’m not in the financial professions, so the exact mechanics of how they get away with it were somewhat opaque to me. Breaking it up into small invoices across multiple companies and payments makes perfect sense though.

It’s also nice to know there are accountants who take this seriously enough to personally check.

If I’d tried to deliberately pass off a gold toilet as a business expense for a client, I wouldn’t just have gotten fired

But I’m guessing you probably wouldn’t think twice about an invoice for a contracted architecture firm for renovation plans, or a plumber’s parts and labor for extensive work. It’s not like accountants are inspecting all the invoices and checking the boss’ private bathroom for signs of excessively expensive and gaudy taste. Especially if you’re a contracted third party. Do you even technically need to be on the same continent?

Multinational firms will have to pay that level of tax on all of the profits they make worldwide, regardless of where the profits are generated.

If I have understood correctly from the article, this tax seems to apply to profits instead of revenue. If that is the case then all this does is justify companies hiring 10 more accountants and lawyers to find more novel ways to launder real corporate profit from exploitation into personal profit. Publicly traded companies might take a small hit to their next annual reports, but private businesses will experience almost no effect at all.

If a company has bought and “loaned” or given their executives cars, phones, food and rent stipends, paid for lavish parties with friends clients, bought out their family’s “startup” and put their kids on the payroll, started their own charity that functionally does nothing, and employed people to be their personal butler assistant, and contracted out their everything to other friend’s businesses, then those are considered “expenses”. The actual profit has been “reinvested back into the business” and the tax is applied to what is basically pocket change because the money has been spent. It doesn’t matter that the gold toilet in the CEO’s personal office bathroom isn’t necessary, it still counts as an expense. The core problem persists, the only thing it just changes the numbers on the documents.

“Reducing tax” is how companies strengthen social imbalance by consolidating power amongst a small group of people and exploit global markets. It’s not something to write off as an understandable necessity. This is why GDPR specifically targetted revenue instead of profits as the base value.

But it’s late and I may have missed a key phrase or three in the article. That also happens.

This is great in theory, but many companies just redirect actual profits back into “expenses” like donations, bonuses, consultancy fees, etc. Whatever writes off more taxes.

This will apply to all such companies and large-scale domestic groups with turnover above 750 million euros ($800 million) per year.

Yeah, OK. If they’re doing that kind of turnover the business most certainly has an accounting department and financial “strategy” in place. If Germany wanted to make it real they would have approached it like GDPR fines where it is based on global revenue, not profits.

This looks like political theater to me, and the unanimous party support seems to back that theory, but i don’t have enough German ability or the desire to dig further.

Exhibit #482,683 on why capitalism and medicine are inevitably a horrible combination.

And on why regulations and independent audits of product/service health effects are entirely necessary. If people could stop being such fucks and prioritising revenue, we wouldn’t need a bunch of people to investigate, document and litigate their bullshit. And we wouldn’t need courts to sit there and establish whether the law let’s them do that in that precise way right this minute.

Greedy parasites going out there, killing us, profiting from it, and making a bunch of extra work for us, just to prove they’re being greedy malicious parasites.

Company decisions should have personal consequences for the people who benefit the most from them.

That reminds me, I need to audit my Spotify library, acquire the library another way and cancel my subscription.

I appreciate you. 🙏 I have been considering looking into hardening my home network, but I dreaded the idea of figuring out which tools weren’t just sponsored SEO-optimising AI-generated time-wasting network-snooping bullshit. This gives me somewhere to start.

House arrest in a purportedly US$700k warehouse complex he spent US$30m renovating

It didn’t buy him a single gram of taste, but that part is not exactly surprising.

In jail

House arrest, unfortunately.

People have already mentioned testing and abstraction, but what about other developers and security?

Spaghetti code all you like in solo projects. But if someone else is coming along to debug a problem in their toppings, why would you make them remember anything about baking or the box when it’s completely irrelevant?

And why should the Box object be able to access anything about the Oven’s functionality or properties? Enjoy your oven fire and spam orders when someone works out they can trigger the bake function or access an Order’s payment details from a security hole in the Box object implementation.

It’s not just about readability as a narrative, even if that feels intuitive. It’s also about memory management, collaboration and security.

I wanted a strong drink after just sitting through the supercut, I can’t imagine how exhausting it must be for the lawyers on both sides.

The defence lawyer is going to need a whole case of the good stuff after that fiasco.

This was a fun watch. I thought maybe that he might be a even just a little less combative when the next day started, but no, straight back into it.

I guess when he started off abusing the lawyer less than 10mins after he met him, that was how this was going to go. Hilarious that the court stenographer refused to come back for another day, I can’t imagine their professionalism is easily tested!

He is a very scared person.

• When writing new code: make a good faith attempt to DRY (obviously not fucking with Liskov in the process). First draft is very WET - deleting things is easiet at this stage anyway and accidentally prematurely DRYing causes headaches. Repeat the mantra “don’t let perfect be the enemy of good” to prevent impulsive DRYing.
• When maintaining existing code I wrote: Refactor to DRY things up where it’s clear I’ve made a conceptual misjudgement or oversight. Priority goes to whatever irritates me most in the moment rather than what would be most efficient.
• When altering other people’s code: Assume they had a reason to WET (if you’re lucky, read the docs that discuss the decision) but be a little suspicious and consider DRYing things up if it seems like a misjudgement or oversight. Likely realise 50% of the way through that this is going to take much longer and be way more painful than you hoped because of some esoteric bullshit compatibility issue. Curse yourself for not letting sleeping dogs lie but still start engaging in sunk cost fallacy.
• When reviewing PRs: Attempt to politely influence the writer to DRY it up but don’t take too much offence to WET if it has a decentish reason in context. Throw in an inline one-liner to not make other maintainers question their sanity or competence when they realise they’re reading duplicate code. Also to more reliably establish git blame rather than blaming the next poor fool who comes along and make a minor reformatting revision across the file. Include a date so that someone can stumble across it in 10 years as an archaeological curiosity and their own personal esoteric bullshit compatibility issue.
• Long term maintenance: Live with your irritatingly damp mouldy code. There’s new code that needs to be written!

‘Live updates’ seems a little… unnecessary and even distasteful in this context, but ok.

I was wondering when he’d die though, there was no chance he was going to live a long life after the whole convoy to Moscow thing.

We used post-it notes on a wall at a previous workplace to aid a truly useless manager. It didn’t make him a better manager, but it did have upsides. It felt great to crunch completed tasks up into little balls and throw them in the recycling when we did standups. The extra visibility in the room was really helpful too, other colleagues would ask us about our work or when we might be free for their whims, and we could just point at the wall and say “after all that shit is done?”. Usually they would see the mountain in the to-do columns and say “oh.” and then walk off dejectedly. It stopped a lot of bullshit requests with the mere presence of colourful papers fluttering in the aircon, including incompetent managerial scope creep.

The fridge would work well for this with some little magnets and/or a whiteboard marker, like people do with reward charts for kids.

How will we be making WASM-based UI accessible for people using screen readers, screen zoom applications, text to speech and voice input users, etc.?

The Web is hostile enough to people with disabilities, despite its intent, and developers are already unfamiliar with how to make proper semantic and accessible websites which use JS. Throwing the baby out with the bathwater by replacing everything with WASM in its current form seems about as good an idea as Google’s Web Environment Integrity proposal.

He should indeed. But if we’re talking about should, then the emoluments clause should have been enough for none of this to have ever happened. And the base level ethical requirements to be President should have been law. And the American people should have demanded their lawmakers and officials enforced the law and legislated for white collar crime penalties. There were a millions shoulds before we got to this hot mess.

But here we are with a logistical issue of protecting a person for life from others, while similtaneously protecting others from him. Modernity is wild.