We're going to stop using X to refer to Spring, but I haven't figured out how to do that in the standard title format yet, so I'm punting till next year.
I wonder if we should just change the format to "YC YY", e.g. "YC 25" for 2025, and stop including a letter for the batch.
It makes sense when you consider that there is no minimum tax rate on businesses.
Given the choice, Amazon would rather spend 100% of its profits on itself than allow any of its profits to be paid out in taxes. Section 174 was implemented without a minimum tax on corporate profits before voluntary deductions such as research. Therefore, it’s exploitable and all companies ought to hire and fire staff to ensure their profits show as 0%.
This tax code defect is now closed by accident, but could have been done much more intelligently than it was. Oh well.
(EDIT: My first sentence is potentially confusing when I reread it later. To restate: section 174 was defective as implemented due to the uncapped 100% deduction, but the concept of a significant research exemption is still excellent. Just need to close the effective 0% corporate tax rate loophole.)
The company already pays payroll taxes on those salaries, and the employees pay income taxes. And the people hurt by this aren't the shareholders or top executives, it's the rank and file workers getting laid off, losing benefits, and being asked to work more for the same pay.
What this change effectively did was make software developers significantly more expensive, without increasing the amount those developers get paid.
It matters alot. Both the employee and employer are benefitting from government spending, the employee shouldnt have to foot the whole bill. That is dytopian
If corporations were able to operate in a high trust fashion and actually take responsinility for their tax burden properly, instead of trying to shirk it, then this policing wouldnt be needed, but we dont live in that world
Suppose amount of money an employer is willing to pay for an employee is $100,000. For the employer, if there is a $20,000 payroll tax, then the employer would only pay the employee $80,000 to keep the total cost at $100,000. If the employee pays the tax, then the employer will pay the employee $100,000, then the employee pays $20,000 and has $80,000 after taxes. Either way the employer pays $100,000 and the employee gets $80,000. It doesn't matter which party is paying the government $20,000*.
Now, there are other tax schemes that aren't based on how much an employee is paid, but that is a completely different matter.
And FWIW sales/vat tax is somewhat similar. It doesn't matter if the buyer or the seller pays the tax, either has the same effect on the total amount paid.
Software developers are already too expensive in US, so this applies some downward pressure on those salaries. Frankly the economy will be much better off when tech salaries equalize across geos, thus avoiding the deep whole US manufacturing is in (for example, manufacturing wages in Vietname are one tenth of US manufacturing wages, and thus it is better to open new plants there).
If you want equalized poverty, feel free to move to the EU. Say goodbye to owning a nice house, or building any kind of wealth - that's reserved for the old money class.
In the US, software is one of the few remaining ways to achieve the American dream. I came to this country to work hard and earn money.
If you look at happiness and indexes versus taxation rates - yes, making everybody poorer does tend to solve things. Not too soon in the growth curve - but certainly not never.
Those two scenarios are only comparable if you isolate happiness and taxation and completely ignore things like social services and inequality.
I think you're referring to Nordic countries which consistently rank as the happiest countries and also have relatively high tax rates (4 of 5 Nordic countries rank in the top 11 tax rates globally. Norway has oil.) The high taxes that "make everybody poorer" also fund extensive social services that contribute to happiness.
However, this conversation is about making (a class of) workers poorer by using tax policy that puts downward pressure on their salaries. Tax revenues will stay the same, so social services will not be increased. Economic inequality increases because the workers became poorer, the C-Suite and Board Members don't.
Don’t forget the other stakeholder - the general public.
Yes it sucks for developers, but does it make any difference for any other employee? Why does Joe’s plumbing have to pay those taxes, but Jane’s AdTech company doesn’t?
Sure, there are benefits to investing in R&D in general, and tech has fueled a lot of growth, so incentivizing it has likely paid off for the whole economy. But will that forever be true? Maybe?
In some parts of the world we have a sales tax which is a form of minimum tax on business outputs. The consumers of plumbing and software pay 10% regardless on a businesses profitability.
Yeah, VAT would help tremendously in alternative here, but for gestures at United States sociopolitics reasons the existing U.S. taxation methods can’t keep up and won’t be repaired any time soon. I could boil the ocean on this down to bedrock (citizens should be taxed on [redacted] in excess of threshold, services and goods should be VATed) but I stand by “section 174 with a sub-100% cap” as what at minimum would have balanced research and taxation.
Joe's plumbing doesn't have to pay those taxes. Operational costs, including paying employees for normal operations, is deductable.
But with the change, the cost of R&D employees is now only partially deductible (right now, you can eventually deduct the full amount over the course of several years), and software development has to be considered R&D.
> Given the choice, Amazon would rather spend 100% of its profits on itself
And why is this bad, exactly? Money will be spent and will go back into the economy. Amazon will have to use the funds to build new offices, datacenters, do research, whatever.
And even if execs give themselves $10^11 USD in bonuses, they will be taxed as personal income, at even higher rates than corporate income.
It is complex - is it better for the money to go back into the economy by paying high salaries to a specific group of highly-educated people? Or is it better for the money to go back into the economy through taxes, then disbursing the benefits to lower-income benefit programs?
I’m not sure what the answer is. The former is likely to drive some innovation, which I’m sure varies by company. Where the latter could also unlock innovation by giving the bottom-quartile of earners a chance to improve their situation.
The answer is simple: it's the biggest growth generator in USA.
Growth has its own problems of course (I don't want to estimate the health impact of Coca Cola), but it's a prerequisite of a country not falling behind others.
At that point, do we need to fundamentally rethink political donations by companies (outright ban them) and SuperPACs? No representation without taxation.
> It is complex - is it better for the money to go back into the economy by paying high salaries to a specific group of highly-educated people?
Yes. Also, the salary will not go _only_ to highly-educated people. For example, if Amazon decides to build a new distribution center, it will employ blue-collar workers to build it, not software engineers.
> Or is it better for the money to go back into the economy through taxes, then disbursing the benefits to lower-income benefit programs?
No.
> I’m not sure what the answer is.
The answer is pretty clear: invest money into the private sector, rather than divert it into the Federal budget. Private actors are more efficient at allocating funds than the government.
I'm not against social spending, it's a necessary evil for any real state. Pure libertarianism leads to dystopian outcomes. But it should be understood that it's a very real artificial inefficiency that is imposed on the economy.
There are also situations where additional social spending is necessary, but they are VERY easy to detect: when your interest rate is near zero.
because a high percentage people on HN fall into the group that benefits more from neoliberal economics than the larger group of people within those economies who don't benefit.
I used to think like you, until I saw what the lack of neoliberalism does to countries. And before I witnessed the magic of market economy that adapts to changes far, far, far better than anything else.
If you want a static economy that supports gradual decline (preferably with a mineral-based income stream), then a lot of state spending is fine.
Then you misunderstand, the markets and economies of the past 5 decades have been two children playing Candyland. Saying it's not is a No True Scotsman fallacy, because clearly since I labeled it as Candyland economy it must be so.
Sure, and you could argue that we haven’t actually tried communism, or that US democracy is so gerrymandered and neutered (eg Citizens United), etc about any political system. I don’t think we’d be where we are in the US if we had a “pure” democracy, I don’t think Russia would be where it is if they had actually gotten to communism. South America might be a much different place if the US hadn’t looked at the budding socialist movements and said “no way, buddy”.
That isn't a loophole. It is working exactly as was intended. Reinvesting is good.
The deal is that you can delay taxes by reinvesting (and either make the government more money at the end or lose it all if you were a fool, but you gain nothing by losing it all) but you cannot skip them when it comes to taking the profit out. The entire point of it was to promote investment into businesses which has kind of been a crucial factor in international competitiveness since the Industrial Revolution. Remember the fall of US Steel? That happened because they didn't reinvest.
after 5 years then every year is deducting a whole year's worth of R&D - as long as that investment is not too lumpy from year to year you are back where you started
exactly. so this policy which was ostensibly about closing a loophole used by big tech is actually a benefit to big tech because it keeps disruptive new competitors from arising. regulatory capture strikes again.
I experienced it when I was using headphones on a headphone jack on multiple Mac laptops over time. Haven’t used that setup since the shift away from Intel though.
Yeah, I don’t doubt that it’s happening but I’ve been using headphones on Mac laptops since the turn of the century (OS X 10.0) so it’s mildly amazing that it hasn’t happened to me.
Nope, it’s a bug! Been happening for years and years. (Unless you’re using certain fancy headphone amps and the volume is below 25% and it’s not a mechanical relay volume knob, in which case that could be it too.)
The incest doesn’t excuse the torture. My thoughts and feelings about the violence, gore, and torture take up around a hundred times as many words as my opinion about the final chapter’s incest scene.
I would be comfortable warning someone about the violence and so on when recommending the book, in order that they make their own decision. With certain friends, I would be able to discuss it in depth. That’s not something noteworthy to this novel alone; see also Ender’s Game and The Magicians and Westworld for having particularly violent moments that earn some sort of caveat, and deserve discussion of their value to the novel as a whole.
I do not in any way ‘excuse’ the violent scenes, however. This is a violent novel. These violent delights have violent ends. If that’s not in-scope for someone, no amount of making excuses will help someone derive value from it. This is not a noteworthy point to make about this novel in specific, at least generically, unless one is interested in discussing societal mores and the tensions of tolerance and desire for ultraviolent content versus Western sexual repression.
(I’m not presenting here any specific viewpoint or opinions on the matter of the violence in this work, as those views are fully decoupled from my objection to the incest.)
Separately, I find the final sex scene to be needlessly detailed. Yes, that’s exactly what you’d have to do in an Adam/Eve scenario. No, I don’t want to read a portrayal of incest. Yes, it flows logically from the story. No, I don’t want to read a portrayal of incest. Yes, the incest is only a single page compared to one half of the book’s ultraviolent dedication. No, I don’t want to read a portrayal of incest.
Whatever your position regarding the book’s use of violence, I urge you to take caution in considering it to be of equivalent moral priority to the book’s use of incest. Perhaps for some, they are of equal priority weighting; but that is no guarantee, in most societal contexts, that they can be evaluated using equivalent methodologies. No amount of refactoring and generalization will defuse the “this is unacceptable” outcome of the incest as presented, without regarding how much or how little violence is presented at all — because the explicit detail provided does not contribute to the story.
In general, I expect incest scenes of the type written in this book’s conclusion will continue eliciting such hostility for the foreseeable future, remaining wholly uncorrelated from societal shifts in acceptance or rejection of violence in fiction. That last chapter has been a problem through thirty years of cultural shifts. Here’s to another thirty years of warning people about it.
Notably, if this was erotica rather than hard sci-fi, and the incest scene was a component of titillation in a work dedicated to that outcome, then I would have just ao3-tagged it and skipped reading that bit and given people a simple cw and recommended the story. The segment in question is presented as matter of fact non-erotic consequence and conclusion of the story, and so does not earn from me the shrug-whatever-next tolerance and the much simpler warnings that I grant to erotic works in general. However, that presents the one exception I would make in recommending this story: if I’m recommending it to someone with familiarity with romance novels, gothic novels, ao3 tagging, or pornhub categories, then I would absolutely have a much easier time expressing my discontent with the novel:
“The last chapter has some unnecessarily explicit incest for half a page or so, which is in keeping with the lurid violence and sex tone set by the rest of the book, but I think the author’s dedication to the purity of their art critically weakens the potential impact of their work.”
And then, having concluded the incest warning, I would proceed to deciding if a violence and gore warning was appropriate for my audience. But that’s far too abbreviated for use at HN, so HN gets the long form — and HN is not what I would deem a ‘violence-averse’ community, relative to some others, making it uncertain whether I consider the violence of use to discuss here at all.
I hope this helps offer some clarity into how one might evaluate two equally upsetting things by completely different processes without sacrificing internal logical consistency.
Quoting Shakespeare poorly does nothing to make up for however many hundreds of blameless keystrokes 'signifying nothing,' save your strength of wish to impute your own unsettled emotions via the text unto its author.
Two hours ago you implied that simple possession of the text may be a major crime: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44167140 Why strive so now for the pretense of evenhandedness?
It couldn't be much more obvious how the work interests you. The problem is mistaking that for a commentary on it. Your effort at literary criticism is no more belated than radically ungrounded, as I have already detailed in a prior comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44167578 No one who gives the work an honest reading will find therein what you describe.
The quote is first attributed to Shakespeare but his usage is not the one I’m referencing.
I tried to show that it’s possible to engage with the violence of the book and the incest of the book as two separate concerns, by engaging with one but not the other. In response, you’re challenging my motivations rather than challenging the separation I described as possible. That ends my engagement with your thread; be well.
It is good form to cite or at least indicate, with quotation marks, when quoting. If you meant not to reference the famous usage, to name the work is best, not least to establish relevance and avoid appearing pretentious.
You say you find the incest and the torture equally upsetting, then you justify one and indict the other. If you can't be consistent even in the scope of a single comment, or for that matter distinguish fiction from reality better than this, wise indeed you seek balm for your dismay over the book elsewhere than with me; I have only so much patience for patent nonsense these days.
> You say you find the incest and the torture equally upsetting
I presented no information whatsoever regarding my personal views on the violence. Perhaps you tried to infer my position from the verb “excuse” in the first sentence.
I inferred your position from your constant use of the first-person singular to describe it, across what must now be at least a dozen paragraphs. Also by the fact you have found this position worth strenuous and irate effort to defend. If you had meant something else or had some relevant interest to disclose, I assume you would have said so.
What you did say was
> I hope this helps offer some clarity into how one might evaluate two equally upsetting things
which I took, by the way you called the two things - namely, the incest and the torture, as introduced at the top of your comment - "equally upsetting," to mean you consider them equally upsetting. If you wish now to claim you intended something by the phrase "equally upsetting" other than its literal meaning, you need to clarify.
You have by now after all impugned, whether openly or by implication, both the motivations and the intellectual competence of the author, the audience, and I myself. None of this is convincing. It is time to try something else. Ideally, that might involve discussing the text, but I agree it isn't for everyone.
Oh, good grief, I wish I'd caught this while I still could delete my prior comment. You opened with
> The incest doesn't excuse the torture.
But that is not what I said. I said, in the comment of mine to which you first replied, that people excuse the torture, but not the incest, just as you have done.
I still can't figure out what you meant by "equally upsetting," but the basic issue is that we're talking past each other because you failed to apprehend my thesis and I was too busy to notice and call you on it right away. I hope this clears things up!
Second this. The main story remains relevant to this day. I remember clearly where I was when I read it for the first time in 2001. I read most of it every ten years or so.
However.
The last chapter is explicit in a way that is unnecessary and does not contribute to the story. It may be illegal in some jurisdictions, depending on how strict the laws are. There are plausible reasons to select the path it takes but the explicit detail incorporated is awful, corrosive, and is solely responsible for why I can’t recommend the story to anyone.
I should mirror the story and truncate the final chapter so I can share it with people.
I read this book and liked it, but I don't remember anything really bad about the last chapter and having a quick scan of the linked page above, I don't see anything really out there. What am I missing?
Ah yes, my memory clearly didn’t want to keep that bit. It sort of made sense in the context of having a tiny number of people left. I read another book called Dark Eden that had some similar problems.
United States culture celebrates and often elects grifters, whose core precept can be summarized as “either you’re running the con, or you’re the mark”. Cheating at academics is treated no differently, through a social lens, from attempting to scam a widow out of her insurance payout: simply attempting to run the con places you in a higher social caste than those marks who do not attempt any con, even if you fail. That the cheaters often get caught is much less relevant to them than the shame and shunning and demotion to the lesser caste that their peers would respond with if they did not try to grift their grades — even if they could graduate with a 4.3 without cheating at all! (I don’t personally subscribe to these beliefs, but it’s important to understand why ‘cheating is wrong’ is so contentious in U.S. culture, if only to be able to evaluate whether academic policies are designed effectively to decrease the rate of cheating per student capita.)
1) capitalism and the money is all you need has gradually worn down all other moral and ethical institutions over the decades. Without something like WWII to reset a popular ethos in a uniform manner, it's a gradual slide downward
2) maybe the universality of team sports in the United States, where again winning is all that matters and if you aren't bending the rules and burdening the referees, you aren't trying.
3) this all gets cranked up based on socioeconomic stress, which also is being steadily ratcheted up each decade.
I guess it depends on what you mean by contentious and by whom. The current US administration is a love letter to grifters, con artists, liars, and cheaters. And is staffed with many of the same kind of people.
It's a fairly long way from those people elected to the actions of individuals.
Given a few minutes of thought, it's not hard to imagine one side calling the other cheaters, while holding themselves to higher standards (even holding up those "others" as reasons why its important to be honest). That's just how politics seems to go.
I was thinking more of our cultural appreciation for con men, Robin Hood types, and so on. Many movies come to mind over the past several decades; Ocean’s Eleven, whatever that grass seed salesman movie was, etc. Also, I’d been considering the endless cheating in multiplayer games, whether video or IRL, for as long as humans have played games; and the tendency of United States drivers to cut in line in congested traffic, which is a less-considered form of cheating but still hits all the right points to count as such. Olympians and their endless doping scandals demonstrate that some authorities might think cheating is wrong, but athletes clearly aren’t so uniformly concerned about it. Still, you make a good point about politics demonstrating both the controversy and popularity with voters of cheating and grifting!
Those movies, stories, and games are popular _because_ we have an aversion to rule breaking, IMHO. The average person could never muster up the courage to steal a candy bar, let alone a treasure from a kingdom. It's a fun fantasy to live out precisely because we cannot bring ourselves to do it in the real world, and precisely because it wouldn't go well in the real world.
Being asocial myself, the aversion described comes across as an outcome of societal pressures, rather than any sort of innate characteristic. I still voluntarily adhere to the principles intended by it, but without ever feeling the aversion that typical vulnerability to social pressures confers. So, yes, I do agree that aversion holds true in some social environments — but not all. If one constructs a theoretical culture where lying to, conning, and stealing from outsiders is ethically neutral, then the opposite becomes true: courage is only required to steal a candy bar from an insider, else it’s ethically neutral and courage is not required. This isn’t a thought experiment; such cultures do exist within the United States and have numerous adherents both in U.S. politics and at home. One of the controversies around cheating on homework is whether it’s cheating or not; if a degree ultimately earned fraudulently is only used to exploit outsiders — e.g. including faceless corporate and government non-person entities — then it is not necessarily cheating under an “insiders-only” ethical framework at all. The threats of such frameworks are many and various, but right at the top of the list is “ethical concerns are only applicable to in-group members”, which neatly sidesteps the courage otherwise required to take advantage of a professor, college, etc. Thus the controversy: to say that “cheating is wrong” assumes not only that cheating is “wrong”, but that the ethical concerns implied by the label “cheating” are even applicable at all. Unfortunately, colleges tend not to engage at that level with students (other than those that self-select into philosophy!), and so punitive-only efforts are ineffective at shifting the underlying cultural issues.
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