Demand. When the first 5,000 units cost a mil a piece, few manufacturers are going to go all in, especially when a product improvement could make their systems obsolete before they're finished being built.
If you had a large country like china or the us or some other big baller walk in and say, "make 5,000 MRIs to these specs and we'll buy them" then by the end that manufacturer could quite possibly crank out another 5,000 for comparative pennies and flood the market, but until someone puts a few billion on the line it's not going to happen.
Landlords require a certain multiple of rent in proven income. So the rent is automatically capped by local wages.
It's pretty black and white - either the landlord asked a price in line with local wages or they didn't. If they go too far,the landlord gets punished with expensive vacancies, or they loosen rent/income requirements and get punished with even more expensive evictions.
Point is, landlords aren't gangsters who can demand whatever number they pull out of their arses. They have to keep rent a reasonable ratio of local wages or they feel the pain.
Because the definition of vaccine has been muddled with what used to be called gene therapy. In this case, they are tricking the body's immune system to attack specific cancer cells like it would learn to attack a flu virus or any other antigen.
Can we not make a reasonable assumption that whistleblowers against a powerful company have a much higher than average risk of dying? Knowing nothing about them personally we can reasonably conclude:
- They get regular death threats.
- The opposing law firms probably have PIs digging into their lives for dirt to discredit them.
- Their careers in their line of work are over and as far as I know, there's no whistle-blower retirement fund.
- Everyone they knew and worked with for many years and who still works there probably cut them off for fear of being associated with them.
- Because of all this their sleep is probably horrible, they're much more likely to have unhealthy alcohol habits, and to have financial problems.
Maybe. But these are all random assumptions, and we have no way of taking them into account without a lot of work on the modeling.
But the point I was trying to make (badly, based on where the discussion is going :) was that "two whistleblowers dying is still somewhat probable". Increased likelihood of death just makes it more probable.
This assumes the risk of getting caught offing whistleblowers is less than the risk of more whistle-blowers coming out. Does it really make sense that you'd risk exposing a whistle blower murder program as opposed to whatever corporate problems they have? Not to mention, it's a lot easier to smooth over corporate screw ups than getting caught hiring hit men.
If these are hits, i would think it's one or two rogue execs or stakeholder with a lot of personal money to blow doing this, OR they are leveraging US military contacts to get it done. It's probably impossible to keep an assassination program from leaking carried out in any other way.
I'm baffled by how someone can say crypto is a scam in 2024, at least for Bitcoin. But I'm grateful that it is taking many people so long to adjust to the new reality. Their stubborn skepticism is keeping the early(ish) adopter window of opportunity open way longer than I would've imagined.
We still haven't seen the boom in utility tokens yet. We've seen the boom in Bitcoin, L1s, and L2s. But there are a lot of developers exploring product/market fit for DApps.
Oh don't worry. When you get an audit notice you get assigned an agent dedicated to your case. You can talk to them easily. They will talk to you all the time. It's amazing. The question and answer flow is just non ending.
I got an audit notice once. The agent never answered his phone or my voicemails. Ended up having to actually drive down to the Federal Building and hunt down his cubicle on the deadline date.
That said, the process was pretty smooth, and since I wasn't trying to pull any tax shenanigans, not all that upsetting. There are any number of corporations whose customer service is far worse than the IRS's.
I made an error on my tax form one year causing the IRS to say I owed a whole year of taxes, and I was able to resolve it amicably even after they realized they weren’t going to be getting any money from me. When you are in accounts payable, the service does get better.
I’m in one of those now again because we forgot to file the 1099s for the RSUs sold to satisfy my wife’s ordinary income tax on RSU grants. Of course, since it was sold to pay ordinary income tax the cost basis adjusts all the way up, they haven’t gotten back to me yet.
Every interaction with the IRS I’ve had has been top notch, if sometimes excruciatingly slow.
That includes the “you forgot cost basis in day trading so you made fifty million dollars” letter a friend got, to the “you are an idiot and filed wrong, here’s the few grand we owe you unless you really want to contest” because of forgetting withholding.
I had to do this years ago when someone registered my email address on an online dating service, I kept getting spam from it. I sent support requests, messages, help tickets, asking for them to remove my address or change it - no response.
Used the "forgot password" link, logged in, posted porn. Account deleted in about 5 minutes.
Did the site not have a way to delete the account once you logged in, or did you not feel like spending time looking for it given that you had already had your time wasted by them?
But I do worry ... that I may not get an audit notice. I thought that as an American, I was entitled to one, since people go one about this all the time. In 35 years, I've never received one.
Oh wait ... the audit rate is 0.38%
Oh and wait again ..
> Of the more than 164 million individual income tax returns filed with the IRS last year, only 626,204 were audited—down from 659,003 during fiscal year 2021. Of those 626,204 audits, 93,595 were regular audits while the remainder (532,609) were correspondence audits, which are usually done for simple mistakes on a tax return and can be easily corrected through mail correspondence with the IRS.
The IRS gained this reputation in the 1980’s when audits were much more common and likely to happen to middle class people.
It may have been warranted, though, because Congress passed a law that required people to provide a social security number for the dependents claimed on the return. Before that, you could just claim you had a dependent without providing proof. And, lots of people did just that.
Also in the 1980's, corporate customer service was still staffed by reasonably competent and empowered employees. So having that for comparison, the government failure modes of incompetence getting entrenched plus layered bureaucracy looked quite poor.
Now the corporate fashions have gotten rid of all the competent reps, through underpay and disciplining anybody that speaks up. And corporations have developed even more bureaucratic diffusion of responsibility than government! Add in the cherry on top of offshoring (heavy accent plus lowest-bidder voip jitter), corporate customer service has become generally terrible.
So with that backdrop, one expects that calling the government will be even worse. But what you actually find are reps that have the bandwidth to actually understand at least some of what they're talking about, as they haven't been squeezed like the corporate world has.
A dependent saves you a rather small amount of tax. By my understanding, audits are focused primarily on failure to report actual income, or claiming outsized business expense.
I don't think there is long term evidence that ESG adds alpha. Even if it did in the past, there's no reason to believe it will continue once it is being gamed as it is now and the term becomes amorphous. Texas ever investing in ESG in the first place was the ideologically impure thing to do, if their only goal is performance.
Toilets haven't been fundamentally changed in 100 years. We flush unfathomable gallons literally down the toilet because we can't think of a better way to move poop around.
We mandate half-flush systems in Australia. A half flush is 0.8 gallons and a US system uses 1.6 gallons per flush. Easy to retrofit your home if you care about water usage.
I have a toilet that uses probably 5 times less water than one used 30 years ago, and it even flushes better (feels like a power-flush without being one).
You mean they bought a house assuming they could WFH and the RTO mandate forced them to quit since it was too far away? Or they said no to the ultimatum and bought a house elsewhere?
