update: torch for Linux on ARM isn't built with Apple's MPS support so it didn't work with the pip install version. Perhaps it's possible to compile from scratch to have it.
Amortization is bad policy when it comes software. Software is inherently high risk. Every piece of software is unique and does not guarantee steady income over 5 years. Most startups won't survive 5 years to fully realize the deductions. This is the end of US software dominance.
> Selling you code, lol -- code is more of a liability really :)
It's important to consider that lawmakers (who are not well informed or downright stupid) might think code has intrinsic value because of media married with a lack of real-world experience.
Lawmaker is a misleading word. The people who actually make the law and lobby for it probably know quite a bit. The representatives are law voters not makers. They don't design the laws literally. They vote because they are told to.
I remember the day I mentioned this in my high school^ honors sociology class and the eventual valedictorian exclaimed that I was stupid to think that. The system has been broken for longer than I have been alive, but the indoctrination has been working to make up for it.
Amortization is bad policy, period. If cost is actually incurred, it should be fully deductible immediately. No matter if it's a piece of equipment or software.
i'd disagree heavily with that... let's say you have an expense of an insurance policy that covers you for the next 10 years. You're paying for 10 years of service, that should be amortized over 10 years.
Yeah but if the insurance policy requires me to pay upfront, I'm out the entire ten years' worth of insurance premium. Amortization forces it to be divorced from actual cash flow.
Amortisation is for accounting/tax purposes. A large negative on the first year does not make sense. It should be divorced from actual cash flow, because cash flow doesn’t tell you the full picture of the company, while assets/profits do
> Is US software dominance because of our startups? Or because of the giant trillion dollar monopolies we have?
Most likely neither: It is its massive trade deficit, the one it strangely wants to get rid of now, that has allowed US consumers to consume more than they produce (i.e. you can take something with no real expectation of having to give anything back in return). Which, as it relates to tech, has enabled offering services for what is effectively free to dominate the market. Nobody else in the world can compete with that.
> Didn't AAPL, GOOG and FB all create products _before_ they had any taxable income?
Wouldn't you say they had no taxable income because of it? If Facebook brought in $100,000, and paid $100,000 to developers, then there would be no taxable income under normal regimes. But if the developers were not tax deductible, then that $100,000 in revenue would be taxable, even though the bank account is empty. This isn't nearly so simple, but it has changed the calculus in a similar way. The business models of old no longer work because of it.
Well, presumably the claim would be that a factor in their not having taxable income was the fact that they didn't have to amortize their development cost.
Yeah; start-ups will start paying tax much sooner since salaries are the main expense in software development, and only a fraction can be deducted per year. The tax change must make things marginally more difficult for young companies that have some revenue, aren't cash-flow positive, and have a short horizon.
It's worth noting that FB was quite possibly being secretly funded with taxpayer money by national intelligence interests at inception, which would have substantially reduced or eliminated commercial pressure early on.
DARPA was working on Project LifeLog starting in 2003, was to be "an ontology-based (sub)system that captures, stores, and makes accessible the flow of one person's experience in and interactions with the world in order to support a broad spectrum of associates/assistants and other system capabilities". The objective of the LifeLog concept was "to be able to trace the 'threads' of an individual's life in terms of events, states, and relationships", and it has the ability to "take in all of a subject's experience, from phone numbers dialed and e-mail messages viewed to every breath taken, step made and place gone".
The program, at least officially and publicly, was cancelled on February 4th, 2004, the exact same day that Facebook was founded.
You can call it a coincidence if you want, I just tend to be very skeptical of "coincidences" where massive, powerful, unaccountable, immoral, unethical institutions like the US intelligence community get exactly what they want at the expense of our civil liberties.
I often wonder if national intelligence interests are behind or have taken control of major corporate players like Microsoft, Google and Apple. There was an article [0] back in 2015 that brought forth the proposition that google was created by the CIA. It would explain the current enshitification of these companies and the lengths they are going to take away choice.
I don’t know how it works in the U.S., but we had HMRC in the U.K. write us a cheque every year, as if you have a greater R&D claim than your tax bill, you get a rebate.
It started with small and nimble innovators. Then it was shifted to Big Tech with the squeeze of patent trolling in the 2000's applied. It was capturing massive created value into the hands of few, connected, corrupt shitbags.
I’m not familiar enough with the very early days of Apple which started out as a hardware company to rebut you; but perhaps you mean the current Apple that has re-invented itself?
This impacts deductable expenses, not profits directly. The labor you pay for internally owned IP related to software must be amortorized. This screwed up an enormous number of business plans because software has more risk than many other endeavors. For small businesses, you basically can't do your own software.
It applies to things like configuring your internal tools too. Good luck at audit time.
What is that? Software sold by companies that have HQ in the US? Or software created by someone in the US? Because if it is only the first, good riddance.
Some OTs do, some don't. OTs with the TP2 property do not require a central authority to order edits I believe.
In my experience if you are persisting your edits or document state, you have something that creates an ordering anyways. That thing is commonly an OLTP database. OLTPs are optimized for this kind of write-heavy workload and there's a lot of existing work on how to optimize them further.
Yup. Haven't used an OpenAI model for anything in 6+ months now, except to check the latest one and confirm that it is still hilariously behind Google/Anthropic.
I'm starting to see line-of-business folks start jumping into Python using LLM. It's going to be hard to compete with that with your custom flow diagrams.
There's an ongoing debate whether LLM should be considered intelligent when it's just generating tokens from latent space. Meanwhile there are humans that are only capable of spitting out the same 5 tokens yet still considered to be "intelligent".
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