Your NM friends have better Spanish than anyone else in this thread.
Meanwhile, my fellow Texans have famously bastardized “chile con carne” to refer to spicy beef stew, and would tend to specify “chili pepper” to refer to the actual fruit itself.
> That said, I can't think of a situation where degrees (of temperature?) would disappear in a mathematical operation.
I regret that the decades that have elapsed since I studied physical chemistry & thermodynamics don’t permit me to make a proper answer, but if you want this to make sense I believe you should look many orders of magnitude smaller- Boltzman’s derivation of the ideal gas law from Newtonian mechanics using statistical methods.
Temperature is basically thermal density; it’s not really a fundamental unit. Chemical engineers use steam tables all the time to convert temperature to heat or other quantities.
You guys are familiar with how we arrived at this particular regime of mispricing risk, right? It’s preferable to the alternative. This is why banks are tightly (but imperfectly) regulated.
Similar observations apply to that more fundamental instrument of mispriced risk - limited liability business entities. The worst possible arrangement, except for all the others.
Personally I prefer to tilt at the windmill of the asymmetrical payoff diagram of US CEO compensation structures. While it’s still the case that nobody much cares about my opinions on the subject, this one at least has less of an aspect of battle-tested socioeconomic optimality.
Americans didn't arrive at this particular set of institutional arrangements by some rational process that weighed the alternatives properly.
Really, have a look at eg https://www.cato.org/blog/there-was-no-place-canada for a comparison between American finance and Canadian finance. The Canadian arrangements were much superior to the old and new American system.
> Similar observations apply to that more fundamental instrument of mispriced risk - limited liability business entities. The worst possible arrangement, except for all the others.
I don't see what's wrong with it? In most countries you can form both limited liability business entities as well as unlimited liability business entities.
When you do business as a company you (typically) have to clearly declare what kind of business you are, and your counter-parties can decide whether they want to deal with you based on that information.
(At least for the most part. If a limited liability contractor paves my driveway, and they damage my neighbour's roses while they are at it, my neighbour never got a choice.)
> Personally I prefer to tilt at the windmill of the asymmetrical payoff diagram of US CEO compensation structures. While it’s still the case that nobody much cares about my opinions on the subject, this one at least has less of an aspect of battle-tested socioeconomic optimality.
Related:
In the years after the big financial crisis of 2008, Credit Suisse paid their bankers' bonuses in the form of 'toxic assets'. See eg https://archive.is/x3GKl
That make got the 'toxic assets' off Credit Suisse's balance sheet. It was also popular with the general public. And, the best part, over time those ostensibly toxic assets actually mostly paid off in full, so the bankers got a much better bonus than if they had gotten straight up cash.
The windmill I like to tilt at is the different tax treatment of equity vs debt in many tax systems around the world. Both shareholders and creditors demand a return on their capital. But when your business pays creditors, via interest and return of principal, that's usually with money that's less taxed ('pre-tax money') than when they pay dividends or do share buybacks ('post-tax money').
Most people agree that an economy with less leverage, ie less debt and more equity, is more stable and less prone to crises. But then we have tax systems that prefer debt.
We should at least treat them equally, or even better, tax debt higher than equity, to nudge company's in the direction of more equity.
(And, of course, there's also the big, big windmill of land value taxes being superior to almost every other form of taxation. But almost no one uses them.)
> If a limited liability contractor paves my driveway, and they damage my neighbour's roses while they are at it, my neighbour never got a choice.
Limited liability doesn't mean no liability. You can still go after them and get the assets of the company or its recent profits, which will generally be more than the value of some roses. You just can't get company owner's house.
But that sort of thing is always the case. There is no such thing as unlimited liability because nobody has unlimited assets. You can cause a million dollars in damage when you only have a hundred dollars to your name and there is nowhere for the money to come from.
Limited liability is just choosing the line at which we say something is closely enough associated with another thing to have to pay for its mistakes.
> But when your business pays creditors, via interest and return of principal, that's usually with money that's less taxed ('pre-tax money') than when they pay dividends or do share buybacks ('post-tax money').
It's worse than that. Corporate acquisitions use pre-tax money, which encourages business consolidation.
The real solution is to use consumption taxes instead of income taxes, which are much fairer, harder for tax laywers to avoid and less invasive of individual privacy, and are one of the best ways to tax international corporations. Then if you want a progressive tax system you just give each individual a tax refund in a fixed amount, which creates a progressive effective rate curve.
This would also have the benefit of disadvantaging debt, because you would have to borrow enough to pay the tax on whatever you buy and then pay interest on the higher amount, discouraging debt-based purchases.
But there are a bunch of misguided claims that it would hurt the poor somehow (even though they would be paying less in total tax after the refund), probably because it would actually work and the people who benefit from the status quo have to put out some argument against it.
It is news to me that websites can so easily be coerced to fork over user data by private citizens prosecuting fairly petty civil actions. Is this about par for the course in European jurisprudence, or a high water mark for right to due process in the digital age?
The first order effects seem pretty benign, even salutary - but I’m not sure the court really thought through all the implications here.
Is the Dutch legal system inviting themselves to become a party to every single he said/she said drama on Facebook?
What will Facebook need to do to extricate themselves from such an odious entanglement?
Slander and libel are criminal offences in the Netherlands. If a crime had been committed against someone, they should have the means to seek justice.
Normally, you wouldn't need Facebook to disclose any names because Facebook isn't anonymous 99% of the time. There are plenty of anonymous and pseudonymous forums that would be at risk and yes they too have to follow warrants should the court decide against them.
If Facebook wants to stay out of such cases, they should either leave the jurisdictions where such warrants are possible (so planet earth, probably) or they should enforce non-anonymous posts so plaintiffs can sue each other without involving a court warrant first.
> If Facebook wants to stay out of such cases, they should either leave the jurisdictions where such warrants are possible (so planet earth, probably) or they should enforce non-anonymous posts so plaintiffs can sue each other without involving a court warrant first.
How do you propose they leave?
Why is the responsibility on Meta to make sure users in a jurisdiction don’t sign up for their service? Surely some of this responsibility could fall on the user.
I don't like the idea of extraterritorial jurisdiction. For example, if Iran wants to prosecute the operator of a website hosted in Amsterdam for featuring images of women without hijabs, no other country should cooperate with them.
That's not what's happening here. Facebook has a Dutch subdivision (Facebook Netherlands B.v.) and an office in Amsterdam. They're absolutely subject to Dutch law. They could leave, but the EU means that they'd be subject to this kind of order from a Dutch court unless they left the EU entirely, which would make it harder for EU companies to pay them for advertising, hurting their profits.
>That's not what's happening here. Facebook has a Dutch subdivision (Facebook Netherlands B.v.) and an office in Amsterdam. They're absolutely subject to Dutch law. They could leave, but the EU means that they'd be subject to this kind of order from a Dutch court unless they left the EU entirely, which would make it harder for EU companies to pay them for advertising, hurting their profits.
I agree that they are subject to the laws of the countries they operate in. I do not agree that a company should own all of the responsibility in making sure no Dutch citizens access their services. The idea that the internet would be different depending on where I access seems anti-internet.
When your business model relies on user data to generate profits, you have to collect it and that makes it discoverable.
Extraterritorial jurisdiction is becoming increasingly common. If a person commits a crime in a foreign jurisdiction they are convicted, and then when they return to their homeland they are once again convicted for committing a crime abroad.
I know the UK and USA definitely do these prosecutions regularly, even though both countries would throw a hissy fit if Iran started prosecuting every tourist who visits and was known to not wear a headcovering outside Iran.
The summary actually goes into this, the Dutch branch isn't actually involved in this case but Meta didn't object to the reasoning provided by the plaintiff that Dutch law should apply to them.
I'm pretty sure the Dutch subsidiary exists just to avoid taxes, the Irish branch is the main company most EU citizens interact with.
If you're the person having their reputation smeared by anonymous cowards it maybe doesn't seem so "petty" as you dismiss.
This seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to do; have the person slandering somebody anonymously brought into the light where there is a level playing field in which they can present their case.
I'm not sure it's creditable that enough credence is being given to these anonymous claims in a private group to be impacting this person's life. Seems more akin to a slapp.
So, access to the court system is limited to those with the income to defend themselves. Is this a good thing? Or, is there a fund setup for people who need to sue/defend against a suit for defamation?
This court ruling seems entirely reasonable. If a trillion dollar corporation is profiting from someone spreading malicious lies about you, it seems logical that the victim has some legal recourse against both entities.
Why is this surprising? If someone accuses of you a crime anonymously, you need to know their identity to sue them for damages. Otherwise, anonymity becomes a license to libel.
As high as engineering director candidates still need to pass a coding interview (at pretty relaxed standards), and write code to clear tasks in bootcamp (just a few). If you won't get your hands dirty, even a little, to send a signal & land a job, then either you don't want it or you'd be a bad fit for it.
I. don't. care. about. coding. interviews. It's junior employees giving senior employees leetcode questions (find the subset of numbers whose sum is larger than a the largest prime...) with the test values straight from the leetcode site.
> Terminology: in the tax preparation industry, "pre-tax" and "post-tax" usually only refer to contributions (not account types) that are or are not (respectively) excluded from current income. Earnings in the account over time are either tax-free or tax-deferred (depends on account type and what the distributions of said earnings are eventually used for), and distributions are either taxable (possibly with penalty), or tax-free.
This is all true as far as it goes. However, if you've ever had to do any work for one of the trust custodians, you'd be keenly aware that DOL regulations require that all the different types of contributions be segregated into different accounts - or if you physically commingle the funds, you have to account for them separately on your own books.
So there are in fact different accounts for pre-tax & post-tax... except it's actually more like pre-tax employee contribution, pre-tax employer match, pre-tax employer profit-sharing, post-tax employee contribution, post-tax excess contribution, etc. etc.
These different account types are used to track the tax character of the eventual distributions. If you didn't have different pre- and post-tax accounts, it would be a frickin' nightmare to prepare forms 1099-R
You are correct, for 1099-R reporting where the issuer determines the taxable amount (such as pensions, annuities, etc). For IRAs, the taxpayer tracks the tax basis in the combined balance of all their Trad. IRAs, using tax Form 8606 from the IRS--the IRA trustee does not know or need to know that number. Then there is also that wonderful "taxable amount not determined" check box on the 1099-R. :)
> Out of interest, how does this work? In my ignorance, I'd have imagined a number of different chemicals with similar properties DMT that would also dissolve in the naptha.
Sure, that's right. The extraction step ... converting alkaloid salts to free base, mobilizing to nonpolar fracton... would indeed give you a mix of chemicals; DMT is not unique in its electrical properties in this regard.
The following step (crystallization) dramatically bumps up the purity of your sample.
