I used to work at Clockwise and am (was?) a common shareholder. I'm happy that many employees got to get a job at Salesforce. I'm sure it was tough to swallow some pride and recommend Reclaim, who was our strongest competitor in the space (or at least the one we talked about the most). Reclaim was acquired by Dropbox a while ago, although Dropbox wanted them to continue to run and develop the product there.
I also applaud them for not selling the data (as promised in the ToS). There was always a strong commitment to that from day 1, but I'm glad to see that wasn't an option when times got harder. Calendar data sometimes has really sensitive stuff in it, and it would have been a massive betrayal to do anything but delete it after a shutdown.
If you are interested in a more detailed piece about a company struggling in this space, I recommend Rise's shutdown announcement last year. We read this at Clockwise and unfortunately felt it in our bones. There is an ironic Clockwise callout in the piece if you can spot it.
I'm obviously not part of the decision, but I'm sorry the shutoff for users is so soon. Also, please don't revoke your Clockwise app authorization before the shutoff, since that will prevent Clockwise from cleaning up your calendar. If you want to cleanly turn off Clockwise before the shutoff, you can go through the normal deactivation process at https://www.getclockwise.com/uninstall.
It's a huge bummer for me too to have worked on something for years and then to have it suddenly vanish one day.
If you are looking to start a new company in this space, I'll gladly offer my services to talk you out of it. If any die-hard users want to make a self-hosted tool, I'm happy to give some tips from my experience. I know at least one large company has an internal tool like Clockwise's autopilot/flexible meetings.
I am not sure what clockwise is doing, but since calendar was mentionned, basically you need to break into M365, and for most entreprises, why acquiring another tool to manage calendars.
I happened to work for such companies, and the "application owner", and I am really not convinced by the ROI.
The real reason, VIPs didn't want to bother with a computer to manage their calendar, and they (well their assistants) had to organize meetings with 3rd parties.
Deferring taxes is essentially an interest-free loan from the government to you. You can take that money, invest it, and then keep most of the earnings when you eventually pay the taxes.
There are also some loopholes where capital gains taxes deferred until after death just don't get paid at all. This is the "step-up basis" where your inheritors get to reset the basis of capital assets and neither you nor they has to pay taxes on the capital gain.
This is what they call "buy borrow die" or some such. Buy an asset, borrow against it, die to reset the basis. Your estate will still have to repay the loans, but... that one part I don't really understand. Do they just refinance, taking a new loan against the newly valued asset?
This all seems to benefit from low interest rates. Was it a thing in the 90's? Or even the 80s when rates were much higher?
It's a strategy that's only really available to the ultra wealthy, because the banks are willing to give them a bespoke loan with a much lower interest rate that's payable after they die. There's also a complex trust setup to pass the asset to their heirs.
These laws are the way they are so that if a kid has their parents die they aren't facing an immediate giant tax bill on cap gains. It applies to basically anyone inheriting even a normal house. The difference in cost basis could be 90% of the value.
You only pay cap gains if you realize gains, so you would only face a huge tax bill if you had a pile of cash dumped on you. E.g if you inherit a $1M house and sell it, and the IRS thinks you own 20% taxes on $900,000 of gains, then you have $1M of cash on hand to pay $180K in taxes.
(Also, if you live in the house for 2 years and then sell it, you can exclude $250K-$500K in gains, but that has nothing to do with inheritance).
It would depend... elsewhere on thread, someone says Canada treats death as disposition, and capital gains tax is due for a transfer on death.
Family farms are the sympathetic example of choice. Let's say your parent's family farm, that they started from nothing in the 1950s is now worth $20M. If you have to sell it to pay the taxes, because the estate doesn't have $4M to pay capital gains tax, plus $2M for estate taxes, then another family farm goes corporate.
Maybe you can inherit the capital property at the original owner's basis... then you'd only owe the cap gains tax if you sold it, and you'd have money to pay it because you sold it. That could work... although one nice thing about the step-up in basis on death is that nobody has to dig through to find the old records to establish basis when there's a clearly established death instead.
If I have X dollars and get taxed such that I have X * T after the taxing, say T = (1 - .20), then I invest and that money grows by a factor, say G = (1 + .50), over the years, then in the mean time inflation hits and reduces my money by a factor, say I = (1 - .10), so that what I end up with in the end is F = X * G * T * I. If instead I invested and grew and inflated and then got taxed, X * G * I * T, it would be exactly the same. Multiplication is commutative.
What you are doing by delaying taxes is hoping you have a lower rate later. Say you make less in retirement or die untaxed and your kids get a step up in basis. But without a change in rate (which might go up even), there’s no difference.
If you take a loan against your larger capital pool, inflation helps you (to the extent it wasn't incorporated in higher lending costs).
But yeah that's a second order effect. There aren't really any scenarios where you have a fixed nominal tax that can be deferred without locking up the money, so I think you're mostly right that it comes back to lower tax rate and step-up.
Good point about inflation. Deferring can make sense. I was thinking what we earn today is more enjoyable to spend today than when we have bad knees and whatnot.
If you like OpenTTD, you may want to try OpenTTD-JGRPP (JGRennison's Patch Pack). It has a bunch of additional QoL improvements and additional features. It was never distributed on Steam, so nothing has changed there.
In the CA bill, "User" means child. It's pretty clear that non-human users aren't covered and don't have to participate. E.g. the API can return N/A or any other value for non-humans. If there is a way to make the API applicable only to human children users, then it doesn't even need to be callable for other entities. E.g. on android, each app gets its own uid, so the unix user doesn't correspond to a child, so the API will instead (probably) be associated with another entity (e.g. their Google account, an android profile, or an android (non-unix) user)
There is a section comparing flight emissions to US citizen average total emissions. This might make him feel good, but only 30% of an average American's emissions come from transportation and just a sliver from flying, so it's very likely his total emissions are much higher.
I believe you misunderstand what "average" is: Americans (or people in general), on average, do not fly much.
Some — eg. those who've moved for work — probably fly 10-15x the average, and 10-15x of people fly 1/100th of average. Flying cost and availability correlate with average needs, but that presupposes that some people have higher needs altogether.
> Fisher [...] suggested implanting the nuclear launch codes in a volunteer. If the President of the United States wanted to activate nuclear weapons, he would be required to kill the volunteer to retrieve the codes.
>> [...] The volunteer would carry with him a big, heavy butcher knife as he accompanied the President. If ever the President wanted to fire nuclear weapons, the only way he could do so would be for him first, with his own hands, to kill one human being. [...]
>> When I suggested this to friends in the Pentagon they said, "My God, that's terrible. Having to kill someone would distort the President's judgment. He might never push the button."
> — Roger Fisher, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, March 1981[10]
That's so idealistic. We should know by now the reality of power and what kind of people end up in power. Anyone who could climb all the way to the top would kill the volunteer without a second thought, and then go smile on TV.
You're confusing lazy cynicism with realism. Patrick Bateman is a fictional character. The vast, vast majority of people, including even most soldiers, and definitely pretty much all businesspeople, no matter how unscrupulous, do not have the capacity to violently murder a person they know and harbor no ill will towards with their own hands on short notice.
The whole damn point behind the idea is to achieve the exact opposite. Make it someone, through whatever criteria, whom the president will have a problem killing, so he'll only do it under the most extreme circumstances.
The "RPG Game" is hard to judge since it was produced over "multiple turns". The impressive version would be if it basically got a working game on the first attempt, and the prompter gave some follow-ups to tweak feel and style.
However, I think what actually happened is that a skilled engineer made that game using codex. They could have made 100s of prompts after carefully reviewing all source code over hours or days.
The tycoon game is impressive for being made in a single prompt. They include the prompt for this one. They call it "lightly specified", but it's a pretty dense todo list for how to create assets, add many features from RollerCoaster Tycoon, and verify it works. I think it can probably pull a lot of inspiration from pretraining since RCT is an incredibly storied game.
The bridge flyover is hilariously bad. The bridge model ... has so many things wrong with it, the camera path clips into the ground and bridge, and the water and ground are z fighting. It's basically a C homework assignment that a student made in blender. It's impressive that it was able to achieve anything on such a visual task, but the bar is still on the floor. A game designer etc. looking for a prototype might actually prefer to greybox rather than have AI spend an hour making the worst bridge model ever.
The bridge flyover reminds me of SimCopter, some of us like retro gaming and don't mind a little jankiness. Especially since this can give you a convenient base to work with.
The whole point of the bill is to create a cause of action for the Attorney General to sue companies. In the bill, they say the damages are up to $2,500 per negligently affected child ($7,500 if intentional), so it doesn't matter how many non-children it affects. E.g. if the OS/appstore/accounts/application is in the context of a workplace that only employs adults, none of this matters.
reply