bluegatty
Vermont has effective governance. Probably so does Mass. That's not why people go there.
So if your company gives you something worth 1M, then yes, you have to pay taxes right there, that's not what I mean, I mean on the cap gains.
A company gives you options but at market value, they are worth $0 when they give them to you, just like if you incorporate a company, shares are worth some nominal amount.
You give the equity - not the realized gains later.
The problem with cap gains is they are deferred. Musk takes loans against his equity and never pays taxes.
Musk can move to the lowest tax regime, pay taxes on massive cap gains, and then move somewhere else. That's bad.
To avoid that, the equity is allocated instead of the cash and it's allocated at the start, not the end. Or in the relevant locale.
It means he owes state of Cali 1/3 of SpaceX, irrespective of where he moves.
Another way to do it, would be to make people pay up when they change tax domicile.
So if Musk moves from Cali to Texas, he has to pay his tax bill on the way out at 'market rates'. And he's 'zeroed out' when he moves to Texas. Any further gains made in TX, he pays in TX.
That becomes a problem with private ownership etc.
It's very different than the south or west texas.
Every state offers wealthy people a good place to live - the suggestion that somehow this is a trade off is very wrong.
This has a lot to do with taxes.
I'm a snow person that could not imagine life without 4 seasons, but as I get older I'm starting to 'get it' a bit.
It also doesn't take a lot of people for those transfers to show up in big numbers.
This is going to sound wild - but hear me out: you pay taxes in equity the moment you get it.
'Shares are income' - so you got 1M shares in a company you made, the tax is, 1/3 or whatever - and then you never pay taxes on cap gains from that again.
You might be able to control liquidity, but when it's liquid it goes to the state etc..
That way taxes are captured appropriately and where wealth is created.
It just feels extra odd that you incorporate a company and immediatley gov. gets 1/2 or whatever - but that is the case the moment it goes into your pocket as $ anyhow.
It takes about 10 minutes of focus and attention from someone who understands the product to make a quick coherent introduction and overview, which is essential and very valuable.
There is no time/value trade-off equation where it doesn't make sense to provide that.
* This is from a company trying to convince us that their AI can automate many jobs *
It's almost disturbing is that people could see this otherwise.
"Our AI will dramatically improve your productivity but we can't even leverage it to do the most rudimentary and basic things" is a message that implies a lack of credibility.
It's lazy at a guttural level.
This is 'totally absent product management, even the utterly basic things a regular developer would think to do without professionals to support them'.
This would not even pass muster as Open Source for friends, or internal use.
The hard part is knowing what behaviours you want it to have, in the context of what is possible and what is not.
It's like if someone handed you an arcane set of page 20-40 of an IKEA assembly manual and expected you to be excited.
About what? Exactly?
It's not an appropriate equivalence because there's too much variation in the outcome that cannot be meaningfully controlled with the same leverage.
If what you were saying were true - there would be 100% not Software Developers anywhere, and Product Managers would be churning out new products daily. But it's not the case.
Well if you think that's what it's doing - that's on you.
For gosh sakes, start with Claude Shannon's 'noisy channel problem' and consider why the notion of idea -> program is a fallacy.
That's for the Wix, Lovable and Shopify - wherein AI is only a component, and where the conditions are highly constrained.
To manage the output in detail, we need abstractions ... which do not exist.
Code -> Machine Instructions is not a noisy channel - it's deterministic.
Idea -> Code is theoretically not possible at any scale in a stable scenario because it's not deterministic, it won't make 'what you want' - then you have to spend a Million Mythical Man Hours to get it to do what you want.
Given that only a small portion of a developers job was ever 'writing code' in the first place - and that we write on average a fairly small number of 'usable lines of code' per day, the 'coding' was never it.
Research, prototypes, corners cases, help, bug fixes, ideation - so many ways it's powerful ... but not like a compiler.
Ignoring AI is like ignoring the industrial revolution, but AI is something very different than.
Also while some jobs are going to go - software hiring is up, not down - that should be a clue.
Yes, we max out on focus time ...
... but no, you're not a concert violinist. The rest of you time is all the other stuff - meetings, light reading, sales reps, catching up with professional colleagues, filling out forms, HR stuff, all the inquires from he newbies, returning emails, etc. etc..
The 3hrs focus/day is one kind of work, all that non-focus time is the 'work part of work'.
Literally most jobs is like that, it's 100% that kind of thing, there is no 'peak performance' it's just putting one foot in front of the next.
A lot of edge cases they'd rather run WASM then a JS or Python VM, it has nicer containerization characteristics. But even with those key cases - it's not necessarily a core, critical technology.
WASM is 'always on the horizon' as being important.
If we had in 2015 what we had today, there might have been a bit of a breakthrough.
These are not 'point systems' with 'A on B' capabilities aka 'it works on this but not that'.
They are networked systems that work in the context of a layered AA strategy along with many other parts.
A single S300 system outside the context of a layered strategy is useless and will be picked off quickly.
We have ballpark estimations for their capabilities, and S400, in proper defensive posture, will hold out against anything NATO has ... for a while.
(Not accounting for 'magic' unknown gear that either side has)
AA defence will have long range radar, AWACS, satellite, other point systems, all kinds of EW (electronic warfare), and defensive patrols of various kinds. And we're now seeing Chinese passive systems deployed in Iran as well.
If that layered defence is very effectively managed, then it becomes very hard to pin the various pieces down. SEED munitions are maybe 60 miles range, and S400 can see F35's at 50 miles, that's a 'very tight' standoff even in a theoretical situation. If an adversary has AWACS then they're not going to use their tracking radars so the F35 has nothing to launch at.
There are all sorts of things adversaries can do to spook NATO AWACS off, push them back, which shortens the distance at which sorties can take place.
If a nation has 'all the layers' and they have good leadership, training, and are nimble and know what they are doing, they can be effective.
If there is 'kink in the armour' or the defence is piecemeal, it can be picked apart.
Think of it like those Roman Phalanx: we can't just say 'they have a certain shaped shield' - it's everything together. Coordination, training, tactics makes them hard to penetrate, but incompetence, exposed flank, etc. and they will break.
Also, Patriot is more capable, but given 'apparent doctrine' of limited munitions, the West has badly depleted inventories. Russia is pumping out enormous volumes of supplies. All of that means they get used differently.
It's not trivial to hit them with drones - but there so, so many these days, the density makes things dramatically hard. They are there waiting for movement of supplies.
Minor coastal incursions, sure. Tiny special forces operations, maybe.
There's nowhere for Marines to hunker down for any length of time.
AI today cannot effectively distinguish a 'convoy' from other vehicles on the road.
Many vehicles may not have military markings - it's hard for a human to make the inference.
This notion of 'defending the homeland' is in many ways a modern concept.
Plebes did not view the local principality as 'theirs' - another prince coming to take over just means a 'choice between lords'.
Obviously, it's different if the Romans are coming into German tribal areas, but, 'state nationalism' as we undertstand it is a modern concept.
Invading people to 'spread an idea' was mostly an Islamic/Arabic thing, and then Napoloenic in modern era. Very rare in history.
And propaganda is usually pointless, it's obvious who is invading who - there is no 'media' to control the narrative within, obviously, the local folks in towns were instructed what to say but this is low-grade propaganda.
They're going to 'snatch' because they want prisoners to exchange, they want info, etc.
Russia's S300/S400 can absolutely down everything the USA has including F22 and F35 - stealth is an 'advantage' not 'cloaking device'.
Rotary wing are 'dead' - because manpads and now drones, they are just not used. Any smart adversary can figure out the drones, as for now.
Iran is a poor country with challenging AA but even they downed like 30 predators (or equivalent). They have passive systems.
Russia doctrines is to have massive numbers of S300/400 which makes it takes weeks at minimum for US to get enough Air dominance to be able to fly, though, eventually they would be worn down as we have seen US standoff munitions are limited.
US used 30-50% of munitions against just Iran. Imagine Russia.
China has a lot of sneaky new toys up their sleeve as well - very long range capabilities for a lot of things, enough to 'deter' USN pretty hard.
Nobody doubts US would ultimately 'win' v Russia, but everything is up in the air right now.
FYI even Houthis downed US jets.
Ukraine will be grabbing Russian soldiers off the field within 12 months, I predict.
Edit: they've already been trying.
FYI the IoT wave was firmly industry driven.