I believe he meant that people make jokes to cover/approach things they actually feel or fear. I recall when I first heard this that all of a sudden my friends were struggling with more things than they let on. She’s always joking about money. He’s always joking about his sexuality… uh oh.
I am too. Although it appears computer and computer machinery, like chips amongst others, are the 2nd largest export[1]. I'm guessing these types of companies are very important to economic stability within the country and economic posturing in outside the company in global trade.
We really would like to keep these companies alive. Geely buying Volvo is a nice example of a proper acquisition and Geely has - as far as I know - always played by the rules. What happened here would not fly under any management and China should take note, ownership does not give a pass to 'do as you please', we have many stakeholders including employees and customers, not just owners and managers.
Interesting, I've heard otherwise but it was anecdotes. Do you have any data on that?
> to track non-fraudulent users
You listed a large number of ways to fake the phone number which is why you believe it doesn't prevent fraud. What is to stop a non-fraudulent user from doing the same thing to prevent the tracking by the company?
The original stated intention of the practice was that "it" [mandatory phone number registration] "prevents fraud" (though this stance was being critiqued by the person who raised it, not defended).
I'll concede that it probably has stymied some of the most trivial, incompetent fraud attempts made, and possibly reduced a negligible amount of actual fraud, but the idea that it can "prevent" fraud (implying true deterministic blocking, rather than delaying or frustrating) is refutable by the very reasonable assumption that there is almost certainly no company that implements mandatory phone number registration that has or will experience ZERO losses to fraud.
That said, in fairness, this is an unfalsifiable and unverifiable claim, as to my knowledge, there is nothing resembling a public directory of fraud losses experienced by businesses, and there is no incentive for businesses to admit to fraud losses publicly (they may have tax incentives to report it to the IRS, legal incentives to report it to law enforcement, and publicly traded companies may have regulatory incentives to at least indirectly acknowledge operating losses incurred due to fraud in financial reporting), but that doesn't make the claim itself unreasonable or improbable.
>What is to stop a non-fraudulent user from doing the same thing to prevent the tracking by the company?
The argument isn't that mandatory phone registration unavoidably forces privacy infringement upon all users, just that it does infringe upon the privacy of some (I'd suggest a vast majority) of users in practice.
I still remember that Frontpage exploit in which a simple google search would return websites that still had the default Frontpage password and thus you could login and modify the webpage.
But does this mean I need to keep receipts around for decades? What if a claim gets denied and dr. is dead or no longer practicing?
Has anyone tested this HSA claim approval amd reimbursement of 30/40/50 year old medical work before? Is there a chance the rules could change and the medical care has to be recent?
The HSA is like a bank or investment account, not an insurance program; there's no claim process; you just withdraw the money whenever you want at your say-so. There is only an IRS audit process if they think you acted against the rules of the HSA.
For keeping receipts, we have a process where we dump our eligible receipts into a folder on the NAS and have the scanner/printer setup with a one-button "medical scan" that also dumps paper bills into that folder. You only need receipts to substantiate your position during an audit if they decide to do one, so a big pile of receipts and a spreadsheet with the annual amounts is enough for my taste.
For a reduction of taxes at our full federal tax bracket plus our state income rate, it's worth keeping a folder on the NAS and pushing a button on the scanner a couple handful of times per year.
> Is there a chance the rules could change and the medical care has to be recent?
There's always a theoretical chance, but any prior (or likely then-current year) medical bills would almost surely still remain eligible for reimbursement. The worst case that I can see as being likely is a rule change to require that a 2026 expense would have to be claimed by April 15, 2027. But I wouldn't expect that and think there's precedent that they couldn't change the reimbursement eligibility for expenses incurred prior to the law change. US v Carlton is one where specifically a one-year period of retroactive change was found to be "supported by a legitimate legislative purpose furthered by rational means" which suggests to me (IANAL) that longer periods of retroactive change would likely be found to violate due process.
So? The point of h1-b isn't to hire new grads. It's to find the already educated, industry proven, experienced top talent that exists in the world. How would a new grad fit that description?
H1-Bs are overwhelmingly new grads, and have been since the inception of the visa. The purpose of a system is what it does- H1-Bs are issued to new grads, hence the point of the visa is to hire new grads. You may want a different system, but that's not how it works now.
Experienced career professionals don't generally move to the US as adults, and anyways if your company really needed one you could just hire them remotely
Repealing SB174 has bipartisan support. The house already passed its repeal but it died in Senate because a separate took (that also repealed it) took its place but that separate bill stalled out.
174 is so small it can't go through both chambers on its own so it needs to get attached a larger bill like OBBA.
It's unfortunate because it appears both sides want this repealed to allow immediate amortization of domestic R&D expenses.
It's almost funny that small code reviews are preferred in software engineering (https://google.github.io/eng-practices/review/developer/smal...), but in Congress we have these stupid "big beautiful bill(s)" that are sometimes thousand pages long, and sometimes only released hours before a formal vote. Almost like these bills are intended to fool constituents, cripple opponents' plans, and created just in the hope that they get passed and signed into law without anyone looking carefully.
The short timeline actually makes this an excellent opportunity for LLM analysis if you have a model which could digest the entire bill without reaching token limits.
Back during the communist vs capitalism and free market era
Politicians were patriotic like you hope them now to be, they were worried about the rise of communism and were extremely attentive and focused and unified to making sure capitalism and free market works for the masses, that everyday westerners are enriched and have better social and health outcomes than their communist counterparts.
It did succeed to the point that Boris Yeltsin after dissolution of USSR was dumbfounded by just looking at american grocery stores that are affordable for public in comparison to the Empty shelves back at home [0]
However after the end of cold war they gave up on bipartisan, or helping society as “one nation” in almost every major western democracy. They filed every major new infrastructure build with red tape, red tape, bureaucratic nightmare. They made the economy as a pingpong ball to intentionally sabotage it for the incoming rival presidency/prime ministers, while benefiting themselves with unsustainable debt. They gave up all public infrastructure like highspeed rail, cheap transportation like Greyhound Buses across american cities, cheap housing, good housing.They gutted our manufacturing and industries, outsourced all our jobs with no better ones for those without jobs to replace them.
Now everything’s going to shit, and they wonder why people are starting to vote in populists and authoritarians, they were sold a great and good ideal of men and women, parliamentarians working together united to deliver the public with better outcomes for everyone in a democracy. Yet now they see them busy with personal enrichment, ideological wars, petty infighting, inaction on key issues.
And then they wonder why people are voting in and then tolerating objectively authoritarian dictators sometimes evil sometimes good who promise to steamroll changes as a monarch/dictator, just in hopes that they just ignore the democratic chaos and finally deliver the public something (even though often they also just personally enrich themselves or make the problems worse) we lost our prosperity, authoritarians promised us prosperity if we give away our freedoms now most of us are going to lose both at current trajectory. All because of petty infighting and laziness and lack of patriotism among politicians.
European and American society will need another cold war of ideologies with them on one side to actually defend and work for common citizens again, they wont do it until then, they’ll only do the bareminimum while continuing their petty fights and lectures as “leaders”.
I think unemployment is a poor metric if it's the only one you're looking at. Unemployment says nothing about the quality of the jobs. For example, if 90% of the country was employed in a minimum wage job, then the unemployment metric would look great but I don't know anyone who would call that a healthy economy.
10% of the population drives more than the bottom 90% of the population in consumer demand and purchase now, you think that’s normal ? This was never a thing until very recently, america’s wealth has skyrocketed one can argue the middle class is shrinking and certainly didnt gain their share of this wealth growth.
Go look at the debt levels of an average american, and realise that greater than a majority of americans dont even have $500 saved for emergencies in their account.
The unemployment rate is a sham that doesnt even count underemployment and it cleverly masks and removes people who were looking for a job, gave up hope and now are no longer looking for a job.
Adjust that medium household income statistics for purchasing power in usa across last 40 yrs, you’ll realise wages are same or have declined in real value term’s when the total wealth in country has skyrocketed.
Look there is nothing wrong with others enjoying their life but if the majority doesnt feel like they have safe equal and sustainable life sooner or later they give up on the existing system, at that point a country risks a lot of instability.
Unemployment rate has been cleverly gamed and distorted as a statistics in every major country from china to europe to usa, you name it.
Look at the median household income in terms of debt servicing, mortgage servicing, final disposable income, net wealth/assets of average income
If you make the same or lets even say a bit more money/income than mom and pop’s gen but you pay 50% of your income in housing rent or mortgage in major cities compared to only 10% back in previous gen’s times how is that better ?
And college fees have skyrocketed by 6-7x in real money terms while wages have not, thats an expensive thing too for a lot of kids.
Pensions are not a thing.
Im not saying america is completely broken, america is awesome and is equipped to do much better than most developed economies and especially compared to europe in future.
But we must admit there are problems that are fomenting troubles that can end up blowing over if we as a society dont start rapidly fixing it.
> Adjust that medium household income statistics for purchasing power in usa across last 40 yrs, you’ll realise wages are same or have declined in real value term’s when the total wealth in country has skyrocketed.
I wholeheartedly agree on the housing issue though. The cause there isn't with top politicians or some evil cabal limiting housing but it's a local problem caused by elections of NIMBY candidates and local community having too much input on permitting while only a small group of mostly of older and wealthier NIMBYs show up to those meetings.
Maybe? This isn't a direct connection and I'm not sure a voter from that state would care unless it was legislation that DIRECTLY benefitted them, maybe their state, or at best the country overall.
Even when a massive security funding bill was put forth the years after 9/11 to provide additional funding to NY, US ports, and other national security areas they had to pad the bill with funding to protect areas that wouldn't likely be targeted just to get support.
That means even with a bill that is vital to US security, could be wrapped in patriotism, and at a time when NYers had sympathy from the rest of the country representatives were still selfish as fuck.
Arguably, that's the whole of politics: why should I give you something if you don't give me something?
The people involved are, generally, not deep thinkers, aren't aren't thinking much beyond their direct short-term advantage. The system selects against that.
No, the system selects for people who are brilliant for using it to maximize their own individual benefit. Never take the bait that these people are in anyway stupid.
Yes, check the reply for the comment above yours for an example where you'd think everyone would unite but still needed pork.
It's even worse if you're a Republican. If a bill comes up for one specific item that would increase government spending but not in your state what are you going to tell local Republican voters?
Anything that's not a budget reconciliation bill can just get filibustered in the senate by the minority party. That's why they're attaching everything to the OBBBA.
If they could be required to craft single issue bills, this wouldn't be as big an issue. Instead we get the clusters of good and bad that inevitably die or sometimes worse, pass.
That's still not true. As long as a group within "everyone" (or multiple groups) decide that their support is required to pass the bill, they can suddenly demand concessions and the bill now gets complicated with good and bad.
> As long as a group within "everyone" (or multiple groups) decide that their support is required to pass the bill, they can suddenly demand concessions
Well, yes, but then everyone doesn't really want it, do they? Someone wants something else, and wants that something else enough that it is worth jeopardizing the supposedly universal goal for it.
If you've ever negotiated, I bet you've done the same thing of jeopardizing something you want in order to get something else you want. If you never do that, you'll make a lot of deals where you're riding the edge of just barely acceptable and the other person is taking advantage of you. But in this case, with a standalone law, doing it gets pretty rude and we'd be better off if nobody did it.
