I’m always pleasantly surprised when I’m reminded that he and his brother made SRE and BRE. I love hearing that folks from those days are still making great things.
The guy who died on one was Jimi Heselden, who was a British entrepreneur who bought the company from the American inventor, Dean Kamen. Dean is alive, however he was recently found to have hung out with the "disgraced financier".
Exactly this - I had a role in a multinational, US-founded company, however - I was based in Canada - our title had the name "engineer" contained within it. We were NOT by any means certified professional engineers according to any regulatory body - we were great at our jobs, but that was the reality.
We were NOT allowed to refer to our job title when deployed to the province of Quebec, which has strong regulations around the use of the term "engineer". It was fine - we still went, did our jobs, satisfied our customers and fixed their issues.
And the people of Quebec are much safer for it. /s
This divide between Canada and the US has existed since the birth of software engineering as a thing. Where is the evidence the protected name has done anything useful for either Canadian software engineers or its citizens?
It's really hard to disentangle the myriad of factors that go into the differences that we see in life expectency and quality of life between Canada and the United States but it wouldn't surprise me that this is one of those ones that accounts for some miniscule amount of the difference.
That has already been happening for decades - and it isn't the "net benefit" most think it is - here is just one example - but there are dozens of similar articles that can be found:
That is a slightly different scenario than taking cheap "fast fashion waste", compressing it into bales, shoving it into shipping containers, transporting/dumping it and flooding local countries/markets.
(And many of these large shipments do not end-up as donations by the time they get to their destination, but are actually sold by weight and then resold again)
But yes - distribution/logistics of donated goods needed to those who need them should be a "solved problem", but unfortunately it is not - regulations could help. (In countries/regions where governments actually WANT to regulate and then subsequently FOLLOW the regulations rather than cancel, ignore or throw them out entirely... Pretty sure everyone knows which country I am referring too...)
Man it would really make my day if all the homeless people started walking around in Prada and Gucci. That would probably be just thing to kill off these brands for good.
How would we tell if the homeless started wearing Balenciaga though? Most of that trash already looks like it was lifted off the back of a homeless person (and one who is hard on his clothes)!
Some perspectives would say that they serve no real purpose other than performative wealth display and distribution. They appeal to everyone at fundamental psychological levels to "fit in" with a popular trend or "in group".
Their actual quality is often no better than other manufactured goods. It is their perceived quality and style that are the entire reason their brands exist.
(and... I can admit that certain "luxury brands" are definitely appealing to me personally, even if they make little "logical sense" to own - maybe not clothing so much, but... watches...)
Perhaps not but in the context of this discussion and legislation it is pertinent question to ask, perhaps not of you specifically but of the wider audience.
Brand value particularly for commodity products is usually just a form of information asymmetry between consumers and suppliers, and creates economic inefficiency since it diverts expenditure from other products that can materially improve lives. It also allows enshittification to happen since it creates inertia (brand loyalty) to switching, and the positive brand image sticks around for longer than the actual good quality products.
That has already been happening for decades - and it isn't the "net benefit" most think it is - here is just one example - but there are dozens of similar articles that can be found:
> Imported secondhand clothing is sold at prices that local textile producers cannot compete with. As a result, local garment industries collapse, unable to survive against the flood of cheap imports. Hence, jobs are lost in manufacturing and design, stifling innovation and economic growth.What was intended as charity often becomes a form of economic sabotage.
Isn't that another version of the Broken Window Fallacy? Destroying things to create jobs re-creating them is a net loss.
Well, it's pretty hard to generalize that to the entire globe, or universe. Imagine if an alien race started landing thousands of crates on Earth full of cars, computers, clothes, etc. Every day for 30 years the crates come, all of it's free. Several dynamics can arise:
1. The elites grab the crates and hoard them, leveraging their existing power to make sure they enrich themselves and extend their power. They sell the items, but at a lower price than the Earthly-produced items, which is easy since they have 100% margin.
2. Whether or not #1 happens, it becomes impractical to make any of these goods for a living, so people stop. Eventually, the factories are dismantled or simply crumble.
Now Earth is dependent on the aliens to keep sending the crates. If the aliens ever get wiped out, or just elect a populist who doesn't like to give aid to inferior planets, then we won't have any cars, or clothes, or computers.
We don't even need to bring aliens into this scenario - as this is the direction we are already heading towards with fully automated manufacturing and AI replacing vast sectors of human labour...
(And yeah, I get it - no one "really" wants to work on a "soul-crushing" assembly/production-line... People want to make art (or games) or write novels... (both areas of creative work which are ALSO being targeted by AI)... but people definitely want to "eat" and have shelter and our whole system is built on having to pay for those priviledges...)
This doesn't address my point though. You're talking about how it's okay if we lose all our factories to make the cars, computers, and whatever else is in the Crates. And sure, if all those workers can find new careers like they did when we industrialized farming, that's all well and good.
I'm talking about how our usage of the "Crate Goods" makes us incredibly vulnerable to a disruption in Crate delivery.
this is not destroying things to create jobs. this is about globalization negatively affecting local culture. clothing especially represents culture. if people can not afford to create their own clothes then that has a negative effect on their culture as a whole.
nobody buys the local style because it is more expensive than the imported stuff. as a result the local style dies out, or it doesn't get a chance to be developed in the first place.
that's how you protect your local economy. that's pretty normal everywhere. in europe people go on strike if imports threaten their livelyhood. dumping cheap clothing on an economy that can't handle it is not really helping. it's going to make the local stuff even more expensive because there is less demand for it.
local development simply does not happen if outside products are allowed to dominate.
if we were talking about a part, say less than half of the market, that would be fine, but the import of cheap clothing is so massive that there is no more room for a local market.
Yes, I know this practice is commonplace. What it does is "protect" a specific industry, but that results in less choice for consumers and higher prices.
Protectionism has value when applied to strategic industries, like chip making, that you cannot afford to have cut off.
Making local garments is not a strategic industry.
P.S. Every businessman believes in the free market for everyone except his own business, which the government should protect from competition. The same for unions.
this is not about protecting businesses. this is about providing jobs for locals. many african countries are struggling with that.
providing an income for everyone is important. keeping everyone satisfied is too. not to mention not loosing your cultural identity. and if the clothing industry is able to provide jobs by keeping cheap low quality products out of the country, why would that be bad? clothing is not the biggest expense people have, so making clothing a bit more expensive is not going to hurt that much.
We have had that in Argentina for 40 years. The result? One of the most expensive countries to live in the world. The PS5 you can buy for 500 dollars in USA? it is 1000 here in Argentina. The Samsung Galaxy you pay 800 in USA? It is 1600 in Argentina. The Levi jean you pay 100? It is 250 in Argentina. Or, if you want to pay the same price for a jean, you can, but the quality will be 1/3 of the one you can buy in USA/EU.
we are not talking about banning the import of regular products, but about donated or second hand items that are sold for next to nothing, half of which is useless junk. the point is to not allow these inferior imports to undercut local products, not to make any imports more expensive than local ones. the latter happens too, and it's stupid, but just because that is bad, and we should be allowed to sell our products, that doesn't mean that we should also be allowed to dump our junk that we don't want in those countries too.
sure there may be some that can benefit from these donations, but there are others that are hurt. it's up to them to decide what they prefer. it's not up to us.
Whether or not is a net loss for the planet as a whole is irrelevant. Africa countries need jobs to sustain a middle class so they no longer accept donations of clothes.
"Just send them money" implies that we don't use them as a dumping ground for the imperfect/unwanted goods, implying that we do destroy those goods.
If you want to compare this to broken windows, the controversy is: the developed countries produce so much glass that we don't know what to do with it. When we have extra and irregular pieces of glass, we can either melt the extra panes down, or we can just ship boatloads of "free glass" to Africa every week (likely result: Their glass factories will eventually shut down). Doing the former is simply not the same as breaking windows to make work for glaziers as in the analogy you're referencing.
Had to do this back in 2018, because I worked with a client with no direct internet access on it's DEV/build machines (and even when there was connectivity it was over traditional slow/low-latency satellite connections), so part of the process was also to build an offline install package.
Well - "run as admin" wasn't a problem for that scenario - as I was also configuring the various servers.
(And - it is better on a shared-machine to have everything installed "machine-wide" rather than "per-user", same as PowerShell modules - had another client recently who had a small "C:" drive provisioned on their primary geo-fenced VM used for their "cloud admin" team and every single user was gobbling too much space with a multitude of "user-profile" specific PowerShell modules...)
But - yes, even with a highly trimmed workload it resulted in a 80gb+ offline installer. ... and as a server-admin, I also had physical data-center access to load that installer package directly onto the VM host server via external drive.
Why is it a personal benefit? If I am onsite for 5-10 days, I am likely going to have 1-2 bars/day - especially if I am working a high-stress engagement where actually leaving the client site would have taken away my ability to execute to the required level of service.
At some point, policing what each employee eats and how they spend their maximum "per day/per diem" total allowance becomes a cost-drain.
I have been in orgs where some people were frugal and bought essentially groceries, so they could eat in their hotel room - some of that was dietary or health choices and restrictions. Eating restaurant food every single day for 3-meals/day is not a healthy choice (especially years ago when portion sizes were typically far too vast in some countries/regions). Then, in the same group - we had staff who would determine an average size meal - and then ensure that the tips they left would max-out to their daily maximum allowance, to "spread-the-wealth" so-to-speak.
Neither was fraudulent - we were allowed a daily max budget (it was not a per diem), we still had to submit receipts - heck, in our region if you wanted to spend your budget entirely on alcohol, there were (at the time) no red flags.
That's a non-compliant plan, I'm pretty sure. You can't just expense an all-alcohol trip to a bar because you're stressed. You're not personally in violation but the organization is violating the IRS rules for letting you do it. They'll get away with it usually, and if a tax auditor sees it there'll be modest fines unless it was systematic approach to dodge taxes.
As for "why" it's a personal benefit, that's just how we've decided as a society. We want people to pay tax on personal income irrespective of how it's spent and we want to allow businesses to pay tax on net income because to create economic value you sometimes have to spend a lot on inputs.
So we have rules for what income is taxed on gross and what income is taxed on net. For the most part, personal income is taxed on gross and business income is taxed on net. And then, to compensate for the gross taxation, a standard income deduction is offered.
Because of this difference between the way personal and business income are taxed, the classification of things into one and the other matters. A logical way for a company to restructure things given just the naïve implementation is to transfer all payment to payment in kind: the company buys your groceries, pays your rent, and so on. You love this, your taxes are lower and you still get the same benefit of the money. The IRS, therefore, qualifies what is personal and what is business. Your company cannot buy you your groceries and pretend they aren't paying you.
However, it is true that the company sometimes sends you on assignment where your costs would be higher than if you were to stay at home. In these cases, it is reasonable for them to pay for your expenses. Well, ideally, your company then always sends you on a one-day trip every month but sends you back with a Costco-haul. This would let them pay you more (you both win, the tax man[0] loses) so long as they appropriately redirect pay into in-kind. So the IRS says "you can either be careful or you can have a fixed amount for travel that works for these categories"[1].
So, "why" is it a personal benefit? It's because we have taxation, and because business and personal income are differently taxed, and because business spending has to therefore be defined. That's the broad strokes of it though there's nuance, and a lot of "well, actually" to get it out but that's the picture for the most part.
In the end, the lines have to be drawn somewhere. If you eat the office catering that's not a taxable benefit. But if you were to drive home to pick up and eat the Doordashed sandwich from the same place there and return to work, you would have eaten identical food and perhaps done identical work, but the treatment is different. Such is life at scale.
0: That's us, this society. We collectively are the tax man.
Thanks for the detailed and in-depth explanation - I was (and am) actually a citizen of a different country, but the company was American - so, the myriad of IRS rules about valid expenses and deductions was (and is) completely foreign to me. This was 20-years ago, so rules and regulations have probably changed. For example - they were ok with actual claims of even bottled alcohol purchases at the time. (One "old-hand" told me that for any yearly "offsite/internal conferences" that while those expenses would not be approved during the event, they were fine on your initial "travel-day", so other old-hands would stock-up, so that they could have parties with co-workers in their hotel rooms... "it was a different time" apparently...)
> For the most part, personal income is taxed on gross and business income is taxed on net
This bothers me a lot.
So basically a wealthy billionaire can take one company that makes profits and acquire a large loss making company that he also owns and Viola suddenly the profit making company doesn't need to pay as much in taxes anymore.
Or Google takes out huge ads on its own properties but it doesn't have to pay anyone and therefore doesn't have to pay any sales tax on those ads.
It feels like we are structurally encouraging vertical integration and bigger businesses.
We need to have some kind of alternative minimum global tax for companies based on gross receipts rather than net.
Taxing on net specifically reduces integration. Imagine if every business was taxed on 30% if their revenue. You would buy an iPhone for $1000 including $300 tax, and $700 to Apple. Apple pays $700 to Foxconn, who pays $210 tax and gets to use $490 to make the phone. But now imagine Apple buys Foxconn and makes it one company, now they keep $700 to make the phone with. Taxing on net fixes this.
It's not required for personal income because you can't conjoin yourself with your butcher to become one person.
Of course it is a personal benefit, you are literally benefitting by not spending your own post-tax dollars for something that goes into your stomach. However, there are legal rules that allow categorizing certain such expenses and amounts as a cost of doing business even though the manifest benefit is purely “personal”.
These rules have tightened up since the days of company cars and company houses “expensing” employee cars and houses as a tax advantaged form of compensation. If you try to do that now, that all shows up as “compensation” which is taxed. If you look at say Mark Zuckerberg’s yearly “salary” you will see that it is almost entirely non-monetary compensation for bodyguard services and “paying” for Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO, using the plane of Mark Zuckerberg, the person, and paying personal income taxes on that “compensation” even though Mark Zuckerberg was not paid any dollars (for that compensation).
The allocations you are provided and the manner in which you are allowed to spend them are generally considered “safe” from a accounting perspective. There is usually wiggle room above them if you are willing to more thoroughly document or finagle them, but that is extra accounting department cost to do things beyond the safe, well-trod legal path even if it is actually okay at the end of the day.
Please cite the de minimis threshold you are referencing. Here is a basic 67 page overview by the IRS on this topic [1] which does not indicate any uniform generally accepted de minimis threshold for arbitrary expenses, so you need to cite specific laws, regulations, case law, or generally accepted accounting advice to support your statement.
It may not be worse "objectively" and in direct harm.
However - it has one big problem that is rarely discussed... Normalizing of behaviour, interests and attitudes. It just becomes a thing that Grok can do - for paid accounts, and people think - ok, "no harm, no problem"... Long-term, there will be harm. This has been demonstrated over decades of investigation of CSAM.
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