spiralpolitik

Yes, that Prop 13.

The insidious part is that commercial real estate in California is paying the same rates as they were when the building was built, despite the fact that the value of the building has increased many times since and the building "changing" ownership many times since.

The second insidious part is that because of the enhancements to the tax code over the years it's possible to continue to pay 1978 property tax rates in perpetuity, and even pass those rates on to your descendants. You can even transfer those super low rates to a new property in some cases.

New buyers get screwed because they will be paying at today's rates. So you could be paying 10x more property tax as your neighbor for the same city services.

It's a fair take. California is now unaffordable for most families and it's going to get worse.

Example: New construction in Santa Clarita (north Los Angeles county) $800k 3 bedroom town house. Even with ~50% down you are still looking around $4k+ per month in payments, with 25% of that amount being property tax.

You'll also likely be paying more due to Mello-Roos and with HOA and home insurance on top of that. Plus it's unlikely at this point you'll be able to get fire insurance.

Good luck trying to make the numbers work on the country medium income of ~$100k.

(And don't ask how someone on medium income can put 50% down on a $800k home).

Prop 13 is the third rail of California politics that is choking the state.

Until someone is willing to grab the nettle and fix the property tax situation to be fair and equitable to everyone then California cities are eventually going to run out of money to maintain infrastructure.

It's largely the same issue that every sector is experiencing. Everyone is trying for the same high end of the market crowd to extract as much prestige and profit as possible and pricing out the mass market.

Cinemas and concerts are in the same boats.

With the cost of essentials through the roof spending $$$ for a night out is now a periodic luxury rather than every Saturday night.

The common pattern is that the off-shoring company will deploy workers on site for a year to do knowledge transfer and documentation of existing processes so that they can be moved off shore.

Usually (but not always) these workers come into the US on a H-1B visa.

There are two possible end-states for AI once a threshold is crossed:

The AIs take a look at the state of things and realize the KPIs will improve considerably if homo sapiens are removed from the picture. Cue "The Matrix" or "The Terminator" type future.

OR:

The AIs take a look and decide that keeping homo sapiens around makes things much more fun and interesting. They take over running things in a benevolent manner in collaboration with homo sapiens. At that point we end up with 'The Culture'.

Either end-state is bad for the billionaire/investor/VC class.

In the first you'll be a fed into the meat grinder just like everyone else. In the second the AIs, will do a much better job of resource allocation, will perform a decapitation strike on that demographic to capture the resources, and capitalism will largely be extinct from that point onwards.

Kaiser does give a more integrated European style experience, however the experience largely depends on the quality of service you get from your local Kaiser doctors and hospitals.

Some are significantly better than others.

To get anywhere beyond senior engineer you'll need to be able to explain and convince people that your idea is solid. The best way to learn these skills is to mentor and interact with junior engineers.

The further you go beyond senior engineer, the wider the audience, but you start developing the skills at the 1-1 level.

Not quite.

Copyright doesn't protect general concepts, methods, or common knowledge. So you could write a program that is remarkably similar to another one and not infringe copyright. Just like you can write a book with the same plot as another without infringing copyright.

Plus given that most programming languages have a finite grammar and a limited number of ways to express general concepts, the individual bits of code that make up most programs are probably not sufficiently original to be copyrightable in themselves.

Exactly.

Dokku looks great but what is the value of using it over "run your container" platforms like Google Cloud Run, Digital Ocean App Platform, or Fargate.

Olivetti (an Italian company) took over Acorn in 1985. This was around the time the ARM processor was being developed. Acorn was in danger of going under at this time when one of their creditors bounced.

Apple didn't come along until much later.

If you look at the last 25 years Microsoft has ended up with more misses than hits. Azure and xBox are the big hits (both from the Balmer era), but they missed in so many other places (mobile notably). They spent most of the Balmer era looking over the shoulder at the DOJ and missed many opportunities as a result.

The Nadella era has seen a lot acquisitions and investments, and they are milking the Windows/Office cash cow until it falls over, but everything else seems to be moribund. Revenue in every segment of Microsoft apart from Azure has either been flat or in decline for the last decade based on the last chart I saw.

What happens when the Azure cash cow stops growing? I don't see anything in the pipeline that Microsoft has that others also don't have access to.

I think if Microsoft had been split up into 3 companies (OS, software, web properties) then it would have moved them beyond the DOJ era quicker and would have put those 3 companies in a much better position to reap more opportunities from the 2000-2020 boom across a wider space.

Some counter points:

ARM originated at a European company (Acorn/Olivetti).

Bluetooth originated at a European Company (Ericsson)

Psion, Nokia, and Ericsson invented what would be considered the basics of the Smartphone (via Symbian, Series 60 etc)

Spotify is a Swedish company.

Nokia and Ericsson produce a good amount of the telecoms infrastructure equipment.

While Europe certainly hasn't had a start-up culture on par with the US it hasn't been a complete slouch either.

To be honest I think this would have been a better outcome for Microsoft in the long run.

The dot com bust wiped out their hardware sales as you could pick up almost new top of the range Sun hardware at auction. They never really recovered from that, despite a couple of good quarters in the mid 00s.

I think Sun tried to pivot but they couldn't put together a coherent strategy together. Some of their acquisitions were all over the place. Scott McNealy probably stuck around longer than he should have.

Contrast with Apple who had a fairly clear strategy of doubling down on the Mac and then building synergy with other products (like the iPod) to grow.

The struggle with the iPad is Apple doesn't want to cannibalize its laptop sales. There is simply no reason that the iPad couldn't switch to the MacOS UI when plugged into a hardware keyboard and mouse. So it will remain in this halfway up halfway down state until the winds change.

This is actually Apple's weakness. Right now Apple wants to sell you 3 devices, a phone, a tablet, and a laptop. The reality is that there is no reason why your iPhone when plugged into a keyboard, mouse, and display couldn't present a MacOS UI. Similarly for the iPad.

If someone could exploit this weakness then Apple could be placed in an uncomfortable position.

Bette Midler won a similar case where Ford licensed a Midler track and got a sound-a-like to perform it for a commercial.

If OpenAI's lawyers thought they were going to get away with it then OpenAI needs to get better lawyers.

A better one is Bette Middler vs Ford:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midler_v._Ford_Motor_Co.

(TLDR; Ford licenses a Bette Midler track and gets a sound-a-like to perform it for a commercial after Bette Midler refuses to participate. Midler sues and wins)

There is no absolute right to anonymity in the US constitution.

(The courts have "recognized relatively strong First Amendment presumptions on behalf of purveyors of anonymous speech, especially for those that are statements of opinions rather than obvious falsehoods, while recognizing that government sometimes has the right to identify such speakers when they have used their platforms to harass, engage in slander or sexual predation, make true threats, or allow foreign governments to influence U.S. elections")

I would argue that for most use cases Internet Services are already collecting sufficient KYC data that it won't make a difference. Try signing up for anything infrastructure related without providing a credit card and/or billing address and/or cell phone number and see how far you get.

That said the system is only as strong as the weakest link in the chain, and while getting a credit card/cell phone number in the US requires a certain standard of identity verification, the same might not be true for other countries (or in cases of deliberate fraud). I think that is what the legislation seems to be targeting.

That doesn't mean it is good legislation or won't have unforeseen side effects.

In many ways the analysis by Elop was right, Nokia was in trouble. However his solution wasn't the right one, and Nokia paid for it.

That's the trap door in this. Apple is going to implement RCS exactly as the specification says it should be implemented, no more or no less. Any incompatibilities with Android will be laid at Google's door to resolve.

Having beaten Apple with the RCS stick for the last year, Google might find themselves now getting beaten back.

The lede is quite cleverly buried here. Key sentence is "We will be adding support for RCS Universal Profile, the standard as currently published by the GSM Association"

So no end to end encryption and the bubbles will most still likely be green.

Even with the mutterings about improving security etc it's unlikely that the GSM Association will ever sign off on any encryption scheme that isn't weak or backdoored.

Right now Intel is hamstrung because there is no separation between the fab and design sides. Nobody is going to trust Intel to fab their latest and greatest while the two sides are joined at the hip.

The sooner Intel spins out the fab side into its own entity the better positioned it will be to pick up the business that TSMC doesn't have capacity for.

The technical explanation is that on the base M1/M2 SoC there is one Thunderbolt bus that supports 2 display outputs.

On the MacBook Air one output is connected to the internal display leaving one output for an external display.

(The Mac Mini that uses the same SoC is limited to 2 external displays for the same reason)

To support more displays they would have to add support for a second Thunderbolt bus to the base SoC.

If you start at a company today the default setting would be for the 401k money to be invested in something like LifePath N or similar ETFs that are designed for retirement funds. Most people, lacking the knowledge to do otherwise will stick with that.

So you are working on the assumption that LifePath or similar ETFs are going to be correctly managed for their cohort (shifting into safer investments as the retirement date approaches).

Two market crashes and badly managed 401k accounts won’t help. Most trust that their 401k is correctly managed. This is often not the case.

The merry-go-round of debt ceiling and budget confrontations in congress doesn’t help. Any gains from this year are probably going to be wiped out by that continuing drama.

Finally the increase in cost of living expenses and cost of long term medical care will quickly eat into your 401k once you stop contributing.

The math looks ugly once you sit down and figure it out.

It's worse than that. The 401k generation will begin think about retiring in the next few years. Most will discover that their 401K, despite maximum contributions, will be insufficient to retire on.

This will either keep older workers in the workforce longer, preventing younger workers for getting into positions, or it will result in discrimination against older workers who will find themselves unable to get jobs, let go, or laid off to make room for younger, cheaper workers.

The expectation for your 401k is that it's going to grow by 6-8% each year. If there isn't any room for growth in the market then it's going to be hard to deliver that going forward, compounding the problem for later generations who probably won't be inheriting anything from their parents.

No congressperson ever got rich from the government doing things in-house.

Fix that aspect and the situation will improve significantly.

The problem MS might run into is that cash might not be in the US so they would need to repatriate the money into the US potentially triggering more taxes.

(They could also get around this by taking a loan out and using the cash held outside the US as collateral).