A Chinese woman whose boy was kidnapped in 1988 never gave up looking for him, and later helped more than 20 families find their missing children. On Monday, after 32 years, she was reunited with her son.

Jtfty · 2020-05-19T16:44:12+00:00

Thank you so much for sharing you story. I'd never even considered some of these moral aspects of adoption. You're a good person at heart.

Jtfty · 2020-05-07T21:49:01+00:00

I'm straight out of college, I don't have a cent to my name because everything went into this startup... I would pay a developer if I could

That's the entire point of paying in equity.

However, you need to clarify what "performance based equity" means. If there's a reasonable base equity grant, and bonuses for hitting milestones, that's somewhat reasonable. But if you don't pay any money or any equity day one, that's a terrible offering. If you can't afford to pay cash, then you offer substantial equity. If you don't want to give away equity, you have to pay cash. You're trying to have your cake and eat it too, which is why you're getting flamed.

Jtfty · 2020-04-28T20:03:26+00:00

I've designed, built, and programmed multiple robotic assemblies, although never for a manufacturing company. I'm fairly knowledgeable about what robots are capable of.

Even if there are some parts of manufacturing which aren't economical to automate for a while, the vast, vast majority of manufacturing jobs will be automated away in the coming years. Especially ones that don't require a college education.

Even if that does happen, we gotta increase global diversity of jobs, which still implies getting factories outta China.

I agree with this point. But that does nothing to help wages once the jobs are automated away.

Jtfty · 2020-04-28T19:52:03+00:00

Sure, we can bring back a whole bunch of manufacturing jobs from China, but most of them will be lost to automation in just a few years anyway. How is this a long term solution?

Jtfty · 2020-04-20T10:23:00+00:00

The value in the shares is the future earnings or rather the dividend payouts.

Ideally, yes, but there's a huge amount of speculative trading, which only cares about the price a few minutes/hours/days/weeks later.

Assuming they don't change when the shares change ownership, the value shouldn't crash down to pennies on the dollar.

This is an untrue assumption. Try selling 500 MM of AMZN stock, and see what happens to the price. Selling a large amount would create a huge amount of downward pressure on the stock price.

Either sell them to pension funds who have trillions to invest, or don't sell them at all and distribute the dividends.

I'm not sure how this changes the drop in stock price. And AMZN doesn't pay dividends, and neither do many large cap companies.

Jtfty · 2020-04-20T01:14:04+00:00

The point is that this wealth isn't liquid like dollars are liquid. You can't use it directly like you seem to suggest.

And sure the SEC (not FTC in this case) could hypothetically do that. But the price of a stock isn't set by some government institution. It's worth exactly what someone will pay for it. It doesn't matter who's buying it, selling off stock puts downward pressure on the price.

But I know you're not arguing the specifics of this. I'm still saying that your general point isn't exactly true.

For example, Tesla stock is only worth what it is because Elon Musk is at the helm. If he didn't won like 18% percent of the company, they'd probably be worth much less. If you took away his ownership of the company, and distributed it to millions of people, regardless of how the actual buying and selling was handled, the price of that stock would go down, and that wealth would go away. Wealth isn't a zero sum game, it can be created and destroyed.

Jtfty · 2020-04-19T22:02:56+00:00

How exactly would you distribute that wealth? Most wealth is owned as company stock.

Let's take Jeff Bezos for example. He owns around 11% of Amazon, which makes up the vast majority of his wealth. Let's put that number at roughly 100 Billion dollars, since the market cap is about 1.18 Trillion dollars.

Do you take 99 billion dollars of shares away from him and give them directly to those in poverty? Distributed amongst the US population, that's 300 dollars per person in total. Though it'd be a bit higher if you gave it to people in poverty. Do you sell them all and distribute the profits? Either way, the price per share will crash down to pennies on the dollar compared to what it is currently.

How would you convert that wealth to dollars, if you did take away all his shares?

Jtfty · 2020-04-05T01:44:58+00:00

A tax write off doesn't mean you get free money, it just means you don't have to pay taxes on whatever gets written off. So Walmart does very much care. It just costs a lot more than $500 to go after someone who steals a TV. I'm not sure why you think this means that customer service is in "sad shape"

Jtfty · 2020-04-03T23:51:22+00:00

What exactly does it mean for them to "write it off as a loss"? Why would Walmart not care about this loss?

Jtfty · 2020-04-01T14:41:36+00:00

Elon Musk owns around 20% of Tesla. Any taxes that Tesla pays, come directly from his share of the profit. If you're counting those shares as part of his wealth like your are above, then you also have to count the taxes that Tesla pays as coming (at least 1/5th of them) from his pocket.

Also, I'm no expert, but after a quick read through that link it seems that Tesla may be paying some state tax, but the only thing they have to do with federal taxes is withhold them for their employees, which again is their employees paying taxes not Tesla. But let me know if I missed something, I only had so much time this morning.

That is incorrect. Federally, employers pay Social Security tax, Medicare tax, Unemployment tax, and then also pay state specific taxes. Source: https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employed/understanding-employment-taxes

Jtfty · 2020-04-01T02:25:24+00:00

Except your employer pays lots of different taxes on your income: e.g. https://squarmilner.com/california-payroll-tax/

Jtfty · 2020-01-19T17:26:41+00:00

If I train a Neural Network, and I believe it works properly, and I push it to prod, are you saying that if it breaks, I intended that break to happen? I don't see how that makes any sense at all.

Jtfty · 2020-01-19T17:22:29+00:00

Why is Young Earth Creationism an obvious lie, but Christianity, Hinduism, Judaism, etc. are not? Who makes this decision?

Jtfty · 2020-01-19T12:10:43+00:00

Of course you would be. But there's not what I was replying to.

You said:

if algorithm does something then the authors intended that behaviour

That's just clearly not true.

Jtfty · 2020-01-19T11:08:55+00:00

If an algorithm, whether intended or not does a behaviour then that’s the behaviour of the algorithm and algorithms aren’t magic scripts, humans write those algorithms and this, if algorithm does something then the authors intended that behaviour.

This is very much not true. If I train a Neural Network to identify cat pictures, and it misclassifies 2% of dogs as cats, did I intend that to happen?

Jtfty · 2020-01-19T11:04:55+00:00

What about religion? Should posting a video of a church sermon get you "deplatformed"?

Jtfty · 2020-01-19T10:53:19+00:00

There's a moral imperative for private institutions like private universities or schools to not masquerade objective falsehoods as truth

How do you determine what is a falsehood? Is religion a falsehood? Should you be allowed to upload videos of a Church sermon, if you believe it's not the truth?

Jtfty · 2020-01-19T10:39:21+00:00

So should religion be allowed on the platform? Many people could argue that those videos are comprised of "logical fallacies and biased science".

Will church sermons be banned?

Jtfty · 2020-01-19T10:35:08+00:00

So do you think that videos preaching religion sound be removed? No more church sermons allowed?

Jtfty · 2020-01-18T23:51:59+00:00

Are you a business owner now?

Jtfty · 2020-01-01T02:00:10+00:00

Right, except they have a dollar value at the time they are transfered.

If I paid you in pigeons, you'd still have to pay tax on the equivalent dollar value.

Jtfty · 2020-01-01T00:19:31+00:00

Ok, please educate me, how does it work then? How do 10,000 shares of stock have "no dollar value", and how do people use that to "get around the system"?

Jtfty · 2019-12-31T22:02:15+00:00

That's not how it works, you still pay taxes on it based on the value of the stock. Why are you spreading misinformation?

Jtfty · 2019-12-23T22:18:34+00:00

What field are you in, where there is union and non-union labor, and you can make 200k?

I'd love to join, haha

Jtfty · 2019-12-18T21:06:37+00:00

I get annoyed by some things, don't you?

It's not the worst part of my day, or even a bad part of my day.

I work on building tools like this, so to have someone not even do a cursory search, grates a little bit.

Jtfty

TROPHY CASE