I wonder why the original requestor isn't tied to the RBAC access, rather than the tool.
For example, in a database I know both the account that is logged and the OS name of the person using the account. Why would the RBAC not be tied by both? I guess I don't understand why anyone would give access to an agent that has anything but the most limited of access.
One of the classical assessments in strategic behavior is "be worse than your roommates at chores so they do them, but not so bad they kick you to the curb."
It was also weird because people pay money on income (dividend, partner payment, SCorp share, etc.) anyway, so in a long term view this incentivized companies to keep fewer software engineers on staff.
If correct, this is a good thing on a generally bad, overstuffed bill. Immediate expensing never should have been changed in the first place, and it was always weird seeing people twist themselves in knots defending it.
It’s an overstuffed bill because nobody will compromise on anything so the only way to pass a bill that has anything even remotely controversial to either party is one reconciliation bill a year.
> It’s an overstuffed bill because nobody will compromise on anything so the only way to pass a bill that has anything even remotely controversial to either party is one reconciliation bill a year.
No, and lots of controversial bills have passed other than as reconciliation bills, and especially so during trifectas where they "controversial" within the minority party but broadly supported by the majority; reconciliation is necessary to pass something that strains unity in the majority party and is uniformly opposed by (not "controversial to") the minority party, perhaps.
"Despite Democrats holding thin majorities in both chambers during a period of intense political polarization, the 117th Congress (2021-2023) oversaw the passage of numerous significant bills, including the Inflation Reduction Act, American Rescue Plan Act, Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, Postal Service Reform Act, Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, CHIPS and Science Act, Honoring Our PACT Act, Electoral Count Reform and Presidential Transition Improvement Act, and Respect for Marriage Act."
All of these except the first two were bipartisan and got 60 Senate votes (or more)
It does seem like things are trending toward less public laws passing over the last decade, as well as record low time in session and other congressional activity.
Threads being over is a good thing, isn't it? Truth's been discovered, all parties agree, no more time spent on going in circles, can move on to do other, meaningful things, etc. Unless you are facebook, and you optimize on endless churn, stealing time and showing ads.
I haven't seen the original comment, but the wiki article is moronic. None of the listed example seems even bad to me, claiming that they are the devil is ridiculous. Maybe even a false flag.
The only one that actually has anything to do with "terminating cliche" is "Let's agree to disagree.". But that's just the common phrase you say after you've decided to opt out of an argument. It is not (and can't be) the cause of it, it is the consequence of it.* And it is by no means any bad, or should one avoid it.
* : something something people being able to easily leave an argument makes them do it more. But it would need a lot of stretch to argue that the possibility to go away from arguments is a net negative for humanity
edit: can we agree that the random shit you linked is 100% unrelated to the argument at hand, therefore/and definitely should not be used?
edit2: yeah, it assumes the truthness of some ridiculously nonsensical concepts, and uses them in a meta meta way, that is 2-3 steps away from the topic at hand. Much-much more annoying than anything listed. "This is the hill you want to die on, huh? Naah.. How about.." *points downwards* "..there is this hill there 14000 miles away (actually there is only ocean), how about we move this fight there?" Yeah no thx.
A lot of what happens in Congress is obvious to do and everyone agrees. While the media certainly focuses on the handful of things the two parties are at odds over, most of the lawmaking done by Congress is not controversial between parties, and is simply passed, so we don't hear about it.
What does that matter? We're talking trifectas here, not supermajorities. The filibuster is a cute remnant of "decorum." It's a vestigial rule which will disappear when too inconvenient. (Fun question with not-so-fun answers: why isn't the filibuster gone already?)
I don't think this tells us much. The present distribution of supporters is rather unique in how strongly it correlates with population density, which means that Dems are going to have a major structural handicap in Senate. I don't think there was ever anything similar historically. And it won't change unless and until the coalitions change, which, sure, will happen eventually - but then it'll be a completely different party under the same brand, so why would Republicans today care about that new party's difficulties?
in American politics, 18 months definitely counts as an "anytime soon".
In the 2026 senate election, the Dems could absolutely flip Maine, North Carolina, and two others; maybe Alaska and Ohio.
If Elon Musk makes good on his threat to try to take out sitting GOP senators, that splitting of the vote could mean the Dems pick up a few more as well.
Because I don't think it's vestigial, I think it's serving an important function of governance that never made it into the official
rules but is nonetheless necessary as a stabilizing effect. It doesn't have to be the filibuster but something ought to provide the effect. It should be easier to block legislation than to pass it. It wouldn't be a good thing if you could have huge policy swings when a 51-49 becomes 49-51. Being able to, with effort, demand specific pieces of legislation reach a higher bar biases us toward the status quo.
The answer is to vote out politicians. Getting ranked choice voting on your states ballot would go a long way to fixing this. They would not have Mamdani on the ballot for NY mayor if it wasn't for ranked choice voting. Certain politicans know this and have made RCV illegal in their state. Get RCV on the ballot for your state.
RCV / Ranked Pairs of course. The IRV decision process is still a relic of the two party system, with the possibility for some pretty terrible strategic-voting dynamics as votes diverge from just two major parties.
> Certain politicans know this and have made RCV illegal in their state.
That would be Republicans.
While Democrats have pushed across multiple states for changing voting mechanisms, Republicans in eleven states have pre-emptively banned any and all use of RCV at any level within the state.
If you're doing a new thing anyway then it makes no sense to do something worse instead of something better. Popularity is determined by people; make the better thing the popular one.
It absolutely makes sense. You need buy in from the public. RCV is the most known alternative and it has taken a decade to get it that far. If you want to start the work of informing people about STAR voting then be my guess but RCV is a tremendous improvement from what we have and an acceptable alternative.
Personally I think “approval voting” is almost as good as RCV but orders of magnitude easier to sell to the public.
There’s just a checkbox next to each candidate and you check the box next to any candidate you’re “okay” with. Results in the most “okay-est” candidates getting elected so when the winner is announced everyone goes “…okay.”
Also could make primaries less important, because multiple candidates from a party could theoretically run for the general election without splitting votes.
Communication is easier because in RCV the candidate who gets the most #1 votes doesn’t necessarily win which could lead to a loss of confidence in the system. Its very easy to tell the American public “this guy got the most checkmarks” and no one gets confused.
If I recall the problem with approval voting is that it is much easier to tamper with than RCV. Filling in an empty bubble is a lot easier than changing the order of ranking on a ballot
That’s a good point. Seems like that could be a problem for current ballots too - add a second checkmark to invalidate ballots voting for the “other” guy. Doesn’t seem to be a widespread issue, but detecting it for current ballots would be more obvious.
Maybe that breaks this idea. Maybe ideally you’d maybe want a touchscreen+printer to fill in the bubbles with printer ink and show it to the voter for them to double-check before putting in the stack (or, if wrong bubble filled, put it in rejected stack).
Would love more feedback from people to get a better sense of all pros and cons.
The exact mechanism won’t be standardized, some places fill in ballots with pen today, let the voter feed it into the machine and optically scans to tabulate, and others use a computer that tabulates and (usually?) spools a paper record that’s behind a window so the voter can see that the paper record is accurate. The important part is the actual methodology itself.
Most people don't actually know anything about any of this. If they've heard of RCV at all their understanding of it is at the level of "it's something different than the status quo and supposedly better". You could swap in STAR and they mostly wouldn't even notice that you've changed anything. But you'd notice the difference in the election outcomes, in a good way.
Enough people know about it that it has been put on ballots in several states and has had strong pushes in other states while STAR hasn't at all. If you want to get outside and start informing people about STAR then please do but RCV has a decade long head start and is the path of least resistance.
tl;dr IRV is extremely poor, doesn't actually solve the vote splitting problem, and is radically more complex and cumbersome than superior alternatives like approval voting, which would plausibly scale far faster once gotten off the ground. plus approval voting was adopted by 2/3 majorities in fargo and st louis, so we know it's politically viable.
Obamacare was passed via regular order (60 Senate votes), not reconciliation. There was a follow-up package to tweak it that passed via reconciliation in 2010, but the original bill was regular order. It's the only (very brief) window where one party has held 60 Senate seats since 1977.
Which is why we need to get rid of reconciliation and go back to actually needing to get compromise, but hell will freeze over twice before that happens.
It seems like a more formalized quid pro quo system is needed so that political favors can be split across bills and relied upon. This sort of thing seems to be human nature, it doesn’t help anyone to pretend in the procedural rules that it doesn’t happen.
Though I agree that favors did seem to be more separated across bills in the past. This is an interesting manifestation of congress becoming a lower trust system, I suppose.
Classic 45-47 maneuver, first create a problem. Then solve it, often poorly and incompletely. Finally, claim victory, another 300 IQ 5D chess move in the books.
Or set a little timing booby trap. Like in this, "We're going to cut Medicaid, but only after the midterms, so if you start screaming about it, we'll blame the Dems for it."
It lets you claim BBB doesn't increase the budget by as much as it'll ultimately do.
By having a bunch of random provision in BBB that generate revenue it lowers it's impact on the defect and then you can repeal them later on after passing BBB.
Maybe for every other item in the bill there is a another group of people out there who also think that "that is a good thing on a generally bad, overstuffed bill".
Twisting not required. Depreciation straightforwardly applies to every other business capital expenditure. Hire someone to put a new roof on a rental property, and you're out the tens of thousands of dollars cash while only getting an immediate deduction for one thirtieth of the value. If you were expecting to pay that cash out of income, it's effectively a realized income and then reinvestment.
The recent (-ly undone) change went against decades of how things were, was crippling for medium size cashflow-positive startups, effectively increased taxes, etc. But it was really just a straightforward application of the general principles that apply to most everything else.
Yes, salaries spent to build a capital asset. Half the cost of a new roof is paying salaries, right? And yet, you still depreciate the whole value of the completed thing, not just the cost of the input materials. If you hire the roofers yourself as employees, you're still supposed to be accounting this way - although obviously there are many ways to fudge it.
The point is that building a piece of software that is going to be in use for several+ years is creating an asset. It just goes against our intuition since this industry is so driven by fast fashion, and the bookkeeping of specific components, their depreciation schedules, early end of life, (etc) seems like needless complexity.
At least 50% of time on every software team I've ever been on was spent on maintenance and fixing bugs.
You can expense such time as opex, but it has to be justified, and that's often difficult to do. Did you fix a bug by refactoring some code to avoid the problem? Is that capex or opex? Can you convince the IRS of such?
The old (and now new) rules eliminated this accounting game and uncertainty.
Sure. I get that having to facilitate accounting takes away from programming, and that nothing is cut in dry with the IRS. I'm not even a fan of the general idea of mandatory depreciation schedules, seeing depreciation as more of an artifact that fell out from double entry book keeping's proliferation of different types of accounts. My only point was that this is just the same regime that everything else has to deal with.
For example if you pay someone to fix a leaky roof and they replace a section of a given size, can you call it a repair/maintenance expense or should you be depreciating it as an improvement to the building? Can you convince the IRS of such? The only reason this has more straightforward answers is that accountants have been answering this question longer.
"1-year deprecation [sic]" would mean that salaries paid in the second half of the (fiscal) year are only half deductible in that year, and half in the next.
But seriously what is with this trend of throwing out simple reframings as if they're insightful on their own?
> The recent (-ly undone) change went against decades of how things were, was crippling for medium size cashflow-positive startups, effectively increased taxes, etc. But it was really just a straightforward application of the general principles that apply to most everything else.
The error was in reconciling them by getting rid of it for software R&D instead of allowing other business expenses to be deducted when they're paid for as well.
For large stable incumbents that have the same expenses every year, the difference doesn't matter except in the first years after you make the change, because it doesn't matter if you deduct all of this year's expense this year or 5% of each of the last 20 years' expenses this year, they add up to the same deduction every year.
Where it matters is for new challengers, because they don't have arbitrarily many years worth of legacy expenses to deduct, so their deduction in their first year will be less than their incumbent competitor's.
It also creates a disincentive (or competitive disadvantage) to increase long-term investments. If some existing company had been making a $5M investment every year but is now facing new foreign competition and needs to increase it to $10M in order to stay competitive, they're in the same position as the upstart. Moreover, then they may not be able to do it, because they were going to have to run lean and divert the $5M profit they usually make to increasing their capital investments, but then the government is expecting tax on most of that $5M which means they can't spend it this year it even though it's ultimately a deduction.
Notice what this does specifically in the case of real estate: If rents start going up the normal incentive is to build new housing, but now you have to put out all the money to build a new building in year 0 and not get to deduct it for decades. Is that the incentive we want? Probably not.
Sure, a lot of that understanding was included in my recognition of the downsides.
The fundamental dynamic is that the government wants there to be a forcing function on having to actually realize profits, so that taxes have to be paid in a timely fashion. They don't want people to be able to reinvest all of the effective profit and keep kicking the can into the future indefinitely. Capital gains and retirement plans are exceptions, each for their own reasons.
> The fundamental dynamic is that the government wants there to be a forcing function on having to actually realize profits, so that taxes have to be paid in a timely fashion. They don't want people to be able to reinvest all of the effective profit and keep kicking the can into the future indefinitely.
I would have to question whether that is actually a good policy.
To begin with, it doesn't work unless you do it consistently, which they don't. Then businesses defer the taxes anyway, and you get huge market distortions because it majorly affects where investments go, e.g. we're then lacking for sufficient housing construction because it's heavily disfavored by the tax code over alternatives. But doing it consistently also doesn't work because many of the industries that have exemptions have them because they would implode without them. In particular, anything that experiences significant foreign competition would be screwed as soon as the other country does it the other way. It would also create bad incentives -- you'd have to get rid of the retirement deferral, damage everyone's retirement savings and create perverse incentives for immediate spending over saving/investing.
Moreover, the main reason we use an income tax instead of a consumption tax is in order to have a progressive rate structure. If you want to put a different effective rate on someone who spends $1M/year than someone to spends $10k/year, a merchant collecting the tax at the point of sale wouldn't know what rate to charge. (There are also other ways to achieve this, like combining a flat consumption tax with a UBI to achieve the desired effective rate curve, but that's a more systemic change.)
But if you allow business expenses to be deducted immediately, that's another path to having a consumption tax with a progressive effective rate curve. The rate can be higher for the people who spend more but you still have to pay the tax when you want to buy a yacht or a personal mansion. It also gives you a way out of the "they borrow money to avoid realizing capital gains" thing: Make the loan taxable income in the year it's taken out and a deduction in the year it's paid back, but if it's a business loan then you get a canceling deduction when you take it out and invest it (and the same for e.g. student loans), which makes it so you can't spend the money on personal consumption without paying the tax.
Meanwhile if you always reinvest 100% of profits then you don't pay tax until you stop, but that's what we want them to do. Build housing, hire people, invent things, donate to charity. These things are tax deductions on purpose.
> But if you allow business expenses to be deducted immediately, that's another path to having a consumption tax with a progressive effective rate curve
If I had written a longer comment, I was going to go in a similar direction. But I think it's a bit fallacious to be talking about that when it would make the tax code even more lopsided to heavily taxing wage earners. Like when you buy a car to be able to get to work, you can't even deduct that from your earnings even though it is a necessary expense for being able to earn that income. If that last part were changed - both with direct deduction of things like living expenses and also unrestricted traditional IRA contributions/withdrawals, then it would make sense to start talking in terms of moving towards a de facto consumption tax. But without doing that, it just seems like a rallying cry to further reduce taxes on the investment-owning classes.
(I'm using the word "deduct" in the business tax sense of direct subtraction, not the personal income tax sense where your expenses have to rise above the level that is otherwise a personal exemption. Being able to deduct so many specific expenses would of course end up placing a heavy bookkeeping burden on individuals, though)
The immediate effect of this is that one of my customers simply cranked up the amount they can spend on R&D this year by the amount of the tax savings. Which is substantial, because they were only planning to expense 20% of what they would pay us, and budget paying about 25% in income taxes on the rest.
So out of $100,000, that’s $17,600 more in spending, or a 17.6% increase. And they can expense that extra $17,600 too.
Fundamentally there are reasons why we don't allow companies to funnel all operational profits into capital assets without them paying taxes.
An analogy would be a company that used all their profits to extract gold from the ground such that they get the labor worth of gold out. In doing so they would effeciently dodge paying taxes of their profits.
Now back to your comment: you portray it is as only good that this law was changes
. And in doing so you leave out these details that essentially leads to instantiating laws like these.
Your analogy suggests a deferment of taxes paid but not elimination.
In your example, they still own all the gold and would eventually pay taxes on any liquidation.
I bring this up because I, too, am as interested in your parent to know the original inspiration for these parts of the tax code…
Further: I have a suspicion that this should be applied differently to C-corps vs. pass through entities in the same way that corporate taxes and retained earnings are…
You could also just don't allow to deduct taxes on the work out into digging out the gold.
In the end I do not care. But i feel like people would be equally ignorant if it was proposed to tax the software in other ways (eg VAT on the derived services from operating).
Planned obsolescence of durable goods is a nasty, brutal thing. MEs and SWEs in the space ought to be speaking out loudly about the abuse of their trade.
For example, in a database I know both the account that is logged and the OS name of the person using the account. Why would the RBAC not be tied by both? I guess I don't understand why anyone would give access to an agent that has anything but the most limited of access.
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