Here's a good one: When you need to pay hush money to a porn star so she doesn't talk about your mushroom dick when you're trying to gain political office, have your lawyer pay the hush money and then have your company reimburse the lawyer and write it off as "legal expenses". You gain twice, you don't have to pay income taxes on the hush money you are paying and your company gets to deduct the hush money amount.

Or here's another one, you have your company rent an apartment nominally for business purposes but then let your CFO live there in lieu of salary. You can also have the company provide him a car, vacations, pay for his grandkids exclusive private school, and provide other benefits. The employee doesn't have to pay taxes on this compensation so you can pay them less overall. You can also use this weird trick for yourself, your family, and other close employees.

If you're so smart why don't you know about these awesome scams?

Did you miss the story earlier today? iPhone 17 Air Drops Physical SIM Slot Globally, Pushing eSIM-Only Future said in the summary that 75% of phone connections are going to be eSIM by 2030. Just because a cellular device doesn't have a physical SIM card doesn't mean they can't communicate. This will make it harder to identify hardware that has undocumented cellular components, you will have to identify the actual components instead of just going "WTF is a SIM slot doing there?". It will be almost impossible to identify if the manufacturer actually is trying to hide such hardware in a SOC or something like that, the only giveaway might be the need for an antenna but those are getting smaller and smaller.

Oh, the guy who runs a firm investing in private capital wants you to think that there's no money to be made on public companies? Color me surprised.

Buybacks and dividends are the same from the company's standpoint. They are transferring $X to the shareholders with either method. But from the investor's POV, the buyback is better. If a company issues an investor a dividend they have to take that money right now. That means they have to recognize it as income even if they didn't want/need that income. By contrast, if the company increases the per-share price via a stock buyback then the investor can take that gain whenever they choose, rather than at the whim of the company. A dividend puts the timing of the income under the company's control where a buyback puts it under the investor's control, at least under current US tax law. That's why investors (and hence the companies they invest in) mostly prefer buybacks these days.

They can play similar games with dividends, there have been plenty of companies that continued to pay dividends right up to their bankruptcy because that's what investors expected. Don't get me wrong, there have been plenty of shenanigans with buybacks -- like the airlines doing big buybacks before COVID then begging for bailouts when their business tanked but they can do the same thing with dividends.

Thanks for answering, the animus toward buybacks puzzled me when from my perspective (as a retired person living on investments) dividends and buybacks are just two sides of the same coin. I prefer buybacks for the reason stated above, but any ROI is good and I'll take it in any form I can get it.

Why? I see this a lot but don't understand people's objection to stock buybacks. Are companies not supposed to ever return profits to their investors? If not, then why invest in that company? Sometimes a deep piggy bank is not in the best interest of a company -- they may end up just squandering it on something stupid like the metaverse or AI. I would much rather see a company return profit to its investors then watch it burn money while management flails and fails at something that is not in their core competence. I expect rsilvergun to be against stock buybacks because he is a perpetual victim so any action by anyone is designed to keep him on the bottom, but what's your specific beef with them?

You pretty much are describing the Alternative Minimum Tax, which already exists.

I first read "AI 'Business Agents' Will Kill SaaS by 2030, Says Microsoft" as "AI 'Business Agents' Will Kill Us by 2030, Says Microsoft" but knew, since it was Microsoft, that it wouldn't happen.

I believe the story to which the parent is referring is this 2017 one: Facebook AI Creates Its Own Language In Creepy Preview Of Our Potential Future.

I'm not sure what your beef is here, that's exactly what they are saying. When they quote "state media" it means that's what the government is saying, that's why they use that term. I could see your complaint if they just quoted something like Russia Today without disclosing that it is state media, but that's not the case here.

My default on YouTube is 1.75x but it just means I get to the ads more quickly.

Obama misspoke, then immediately corrected himself. The "series of tubes" and Guam statements were purely the confident ignorance displayed by so many politicians, but I don't think Obama is one of them. Just for the record, here is the statement referred to:

“Everybody knows that it makes no sense that you send a kid to the emergency room for a treatable illness like asthma. They end up taking up a hospital bed. It costs when, if you, they just gave, you gave, treatment early, and they got some treatment, and uhhh a breathalyzer, or uhh, an inhalator, not a breathalyzer...”

Yep, seems like vaporware. The linked article was very light on details, like cost per kwh stored or round-trip efficiency, both of which are very important when discussing energy storage. Looks like just another "press release project" where the whole point of the "project" is to generate press releases.

What do you think the cost of a shipping container full of CPUs is, versus what it's worth. Shipping is a rounding error when talking about chips.

It hallucinates confidently," one unnamed FDA employee told CNN.

Pretty much sums up the problem with all current LLMs. They aren't only wrong, the answers are phrased so definitively that they sound correct even when they aren't.

Negative leap seconds are rare, it has never happened before. From Wiki:

The leap second was introduced in 1972. Since then, 27 leap seconds have been added to UTC, with the most recent occurring on December 31, 2016.[1] All have so far been positive leap seconds, adding a second to a UTC day; while it is possible for a negative leap second to be needed, this has not happened yet.