
How to Make Meals from Office Snacks - NaOH
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/04/style/free-office-snacks-diet.html
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cheerlessbog
Just because you can, doesn't mean you should.

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Scoundreller
But then you have to buy your own lunch/ingredients with your own after-tax
dollars, instead of your employer’s pre-tax dollars.

And good cheese is expensive in N. America.

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jjeaff
Actually, as of 2018, food for employee snacks are no longer deductible. So
it's post-tax money for the corporations.

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saghm
It still is money not out of your own pocket, at least

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jjeaff
Technically yes, but economically, that is part of your compensation and could
have been used to pay you more. In the past, there was at least the argument
that by providing the services with pre-tax money, it is going a lot farther,
so worth the trade off. Now, not as much. But, at least the economies of scale
remain. If every individual employee had to hire their own gourmet chef to
cook their lunch, then it would obviously cost them more.

But my guess is that if you quantified how much some of these benefits cost
and allowed employees to take the money instead of the benefit, they would
probably take the money.

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Scoundreller
If the corporation can’t deduct it, does that mean it’s a taxable benefit for
the employee?

If not, corporate taxes are less than personal (usually), so it still makes
sense for the Corp to provide it even if they can’t deduct it.

(Assuming they get équivalent pricing to what consumers get (probably false)).

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jjeaff
No, because the argument can still be made that the benefit is a part of doing
business or "for the convenience of the employer" which is the criteria used
previously on whether provided meals could be a deductible business expense.

Which is funny, because on one hand, google pitches to their employees that
all these fringe benefits are for the benefit of the employees and to make it
a great place to work. But at the same time, they are certifying to the IRS
that the real reason that they offer meals on campus is to keep employees
there longer and working more.

Meals and some other limited fringe benefits can still be provided to
employees without putting it on their w2, but the business can't deduct them.
And I should clarify, I checked the statute and actually, meals provided to
employees at the place of employment are now only 50% deductible and in 2025,
they will not be deductible at all.

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mido22
I don't want to be that guy, but why is this silly article from a pay-walled
site on the front page? Time for some sort of algo update?

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quickthrower2
It’s pretty unhealthy unless your company orders healthy food.

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benj111
I suppose you could use it as a prompt to request healthier snacks.

I don't see what problem the company would have with that, your coworkers
might complain though.

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dominotw
wow 5 nytimes articles on frontpage atm

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keiferski
Yeah, I posted an Ask: HN question about this last week. Posting articles from
nytimes.com on here seems to be a popular trend, which is disappointing, as HN
used to be more obscure and less mainstream. It’s called Hacker News, not Most
Popular Newspaper in the World News.

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freddie_mercury
[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=nytimes.com&sort=byPopularity&...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=nytimes.com&sort=byPopularity&prefix=false&page=0&dateRange=custom&type=story&dateStart=1267401600&dateEnd=1270080000)

9 years ago, in March 2000, I see 12 pages of NY Times articles in the
archive.

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keiferski
[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=nytimes.com&sort=byPopularity&...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=nytimes.com&sort=byPopularity&prefix=false&page=0&dateRange=custom&type=story&dateStart=1548979200&dateEnd=1551484800)

And 26 pages (500+ links) of submissions in the past month. Note that there
doesn’t seem to be a way to calculate total points, which is the real issue.
It seems very clear that nytimes.com is on the front page more frequently as
of late.

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nathanaldensr
I've said it before and been downvoted, but it's true: HN has becoming a
dumping ground for low-quality online rags--Vox, New York Times, etc.--similar
to the feeling one gets when visiting /r/politics or /r/news. HN has become a
source of eyeballs for these sites and I find it likely that people are being
paid to post links here. Nowadays, most of the time stories have no relevance
to tech whatsoever.

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cylinder
C'mon Americans. Midday means noon. It doesn't mean middle of the afternoon.

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jeandejean
I struggle to understand why these random ingredients put together are called
meals... Not for me!

