blago

There is no need for exact numbers. I'm mostly interested in your tax bracket and effective federal and state rates. It sounds like you had a good year with a one-time payment that couldn't be classified as long-term gains, virtually no expenses, and you are probably filing as a single. That's the only way those numbers can make sense. Do you think this one-time fluke puts you at odds and you are being "squeezed by the working class"? Do you think your fluke-year taxes are representative? Do we really have a country or a CA-wide problem with 60% tax? Is there anything that you, or your company, could have done to better plan for this event?

...52% tax which is still damn egregious given that I had better roads and most public services in Florida (0% income tax)

Hmm, I live in Southern Florida. Full time. It has the shittiest roads of any place in the US I have been and some of the highest fatality rates to go with.

Highways look like someone ran a snow plow at full speed, turning what were once scattered potholes into a continuous network of trenches making their own interstate.

This is in a state without cold weather, ice, or snow...

There are many non-0 income tax states that have vastly superior roads than FL. Does this prove anything about taxes?

Oh boy. Tax brackets are incremental. Most people in the 40% bracket will not pay anywhere near 40%. There is a theoretical possibility that someone, who's income exceeds the highest bracket MANY times will have an effective tax rate approaching 40%. But in reality people with that kind of income derive their earnings from sources that are taxed in a very different way such as long-term gains.

Well positioned to take over VR if it becomes a thing.

This is an incredibly generous way to admit that Meta failed their pivot to VR and they will probably never recoup the tens of billions of dollars that was spent on it.

Sixty percent is high. So high, that it almost seems impossible. Can you provide some details? What's the breakdown?

Taxes on corporations, like tariffs, are just passed onto consumers

Never heard this argument before - it sounds very implausible. Do you have any studies or source for that claim?

I'm all for the TikTok ban but listening to your last argument a reasonable opponent might notice that:

1. You assume others play dirty by default, even though we never caught them red-handed. Not necessarily unreasonable, but see 2.

2. You assume we play fair even when we are caught red-handed. You rationalize it with "it only goes to show this was the exception and look what happened after". Spoiler alert, nothing happened after, neither the courts nor public opinion shit it down.

You have to admit these two are a little inconsistent to say the least.

Proponents of small functions argue that you don't have to read more than the signature and name of a function to understand what it does;

Although this is often the case, the style of the program can change things significantly. Here are a few, not so uncommon, examples where it starts to break down:

1. When you’re crafting algorithms, you might try to keep code blocks brief, but coming up with precise, descriptive names for each 50-line snippet can be hard. Especially if the average developer might not even fully understand the textbook chapter behind it.

2. At some point you have to build higher than "removeLastElementFromArray"-type of functions. You are not going to get very far skimming domain-specific function names if don’t have any background in that area.

More examples exist, but these two illustrate the point.

Companies are afraid of being left behind in the new arms race...

Sometimes it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.

Do you mind me asking, what does the last calculation do: pi=(pi * 100 | 0 ) / 100;

EDIT: Ah, nvm. It's truncating the result to 2 decimal places.

The prevailing opinion is that the death penalty was handed down to provide leverage and incentivize restitution.

Are you saying that there will be a large number of Starships on duty for immediate launch to deploy kill vehicles over an arbitrary area in space over and around the US? I'm no expert but this sounds pretty different form what Starship is designed to do. And not cheap at all.

When we moved to the US with two babies last year it was very important for us to buy non-toxic furniture. We ended up buying a sofa and chairs from Medley. Their products are made in LA out of wood and are free of formaldehyde, flame retardants, and PFAS. It's been only a year but it looks like the furniture is going to last.

I think it's even more precious that the boy has learned how to learn and has developed a taste for achievement based on a dopamine loop that doesn't employ sugar or special effects in 4K.

One can probably say that there exists a level of abstraction where there’s not really a difference between a database and a file system. That's not a lot :-)

Snow?

For much of history (i.e. millennia) the north and the south of Vietnam have experienced different degrees of voluntary and involuntary separation. For hundreds and hundreds of years they existed as different countries and even tried to conquer each other. The vast majority of south Vietnamese people today have more sympathy for the US than for Hanoi.

Source: half my family is Vietnamese and I lived there for 3 years.

Sorry your genetic ancestral memory of the Balkans doesn’t stack up to...

Ah, we have a serial West-splainer. I emigrated when I was 24 and I speak for pretty much everybody I've known in those years. I've studied and wrote essays on the literature and the history of the region daily through high school and college. I speak the language and the customs.

You on the other hand seem completely oblivious to the cultural significance of Kafana, or its different incarnations throughout the region, to recognize that arguing about politics, whining about history, the Great Powers, life, and the Universe, has and still is pretty much the purpose of their existence.

PS. Was I right about the educated professionals part, or were you a displaced person whose village was razed?

I'm having a hard time comprehending the relevance. Did the displaced people in Yugoslavia 30 years ago define the pathos of the region, which BTW is more than just former Yugoslavia, in the last 600+ years?

It sounds like you are from the West. Thank you for explaining the psychology of my people so clearly to me. I think I understand it better now but it looks like I can use some book reading. Any recommendations?

Have you been to Vietnam? There is no comparison between what was done to them and Serbia, yet Vietnam has moved on. Victimhood is strong in the Balkans, it's a way of life. I know because I was born there.

Yep, ChatGPT did a pretty impressive job when I tested a few days ago. Just grab a mockup from a Google search and prompt ChatGPT 4 to generate a web page. I'm sure your milage may vary.

However, my point was that Phind's answer was worse than a No, or a hallucinated attempt would've been. By saying "Yes, here is how YOU can do it...", it left the impression that it didn't even understand the question.

It failed for me at a much more basic level.

I asked 5 different, and increasing explicit, variations of the following question: "Can you generate HTML and CSS for a JPG mockup I'm going to give you?"

Each time it answered along the following lines: "Sure, here is how you can create HTML and CSS from a JPG mockup. Follow this process..."

In my experience this never happens with GPT-4.

This is not from 1993.

"Trace amounts of formaldehyde can be found in our products"

Trace amounts sounds great, but that's open to interpretation. There are MANY guidelines by different authorities and their levels differ by more than an order of magnitude. If you take OSHA PEL as baseline you can claim trace amounts and still be pretty harmful.

"however, we do not add formaldehyde to our range."

Range? This sounds so vague it feels deliberate.

"As a precautionary measure, IKEA has phased out several chemicals that could potentially be harmful, often ahead of legislation."

They didn't say formaldehyde was one of them :-)

Also, did you ready the linked PDF? It says they don't use formaldehyde in their paint and lacquer. They didn't say anything about their glue and particle board. That's where formaldehyde is indispensable and used in large amounts.

What happened in 1993?

So much irony considering that Ikea's furniture is probably the main source of formaldehyde pollution in most people's homes. I don't judge them too hard but ironic nevertheless.

Air purifiers work pretty well for most kinds of pollution, and they are widely available.

I was very excited when I learned about it until I realised that it doesn't work very well with a magsafe wallet.

This sounds very plausible. And not just against NATO I would guess. They've deployed almost their entire active land force to Ukraine leaving their enormously long borders unprotected.

If this turns out to be true, it's probably going to be remembered as one of the biggest blunders in military history.

I don't know if handing out AK-47's necessarily translates to desire to fight the Russians. People can be getting those to protect their families.