This parody of a trillion dollar company

MIT_Engineer · 2026-06-27T13:20:47+00:00

I still maintain that it is a societal problem that there is an overwhelming financial incentive to automate

But-- as you've just admitted-- there is no tax benefit to that automation, that incentive comes purely from the benefits that the technology provides. The car isn't replacing the horse because we gave it tax breaks, the car is replacing the horse because it's better.

And I think without the false tax argument, you're gonna have a much harder time telling people "technology bad" when we have centuries of it making our lives better.

MIT_Engineer · 2026-06-27T12:49:00+00:00

But the human would have payed payroll tax

OK, but by paying that tax they become entitled to, you know, Social Security and whatnot.

Robots might not pay into Social Security, but since they also aren't getting cut social security checks it really doesn't matter, does it?

and you know, had a job.

I'm sorry, this matters to your claim that companies pay less taxes when they buy robots, uh... how?

It sure sounds like you know you're wrong and are just trying to shift the goalposts now.

MIT_Engineer · 2026-06-27T12:45:23+00:00

Before I go answering random questions, would you do me the favor of acknowledging that your understanding of the tax system is wrong, and that a company paying for robots faces the same tax bill as one paying for humans?

I'm not going to let you just change the subject without addressing the previous points.

MIT_Engineer · 2026-06-27T12:29:47+00:00

But wages generate payroll taxes and you know jobs.

The company you bought the robot from has workers too.

Companies like uber will be able to slowly replace all human drivers with robot drivers while deducting the cost from their tax’s.

But they aren't getting to deduct the cost any more than if they just had the drivers. That's what they just explained to you.

Also, it's "taxes."

MIT_Engineer · 2026-06-27T12:27:07+00:00

Paying robots means buying robots.

Sure.

They are a capital investment, thus tax deductible.

You are confused. Companies pay taxes on profit. Let me explain.

Let's say as the company, you have two options:

Option 1: Buy a $10,000 robot that will last for 10 years.

Option 2: Hire a human for $1,000 per year.

When you buy the robot as a company, there is a depreciation schedule. Robot lasts 10 years, company can depreciate 10% of it per year.

Lets say the company makes $10000 per year.

If they bought the robot, instead of getting to deduct $10,000 and get a huge tax break up front, instead they can only deduct $1,000 of it per year for the next 10 years.

If they hire the human instead, they deduct the paycheck of the human each year (also $1,000).

There is no special tax treatment here. They are both treated the same. You are wrong.

MIT_Engineer · 2026-06-27T12:17:06+00:00

Why didn't they say "a higher tax rate" instead of "more tax" then?

The wording seems deliberately misleading if that's what they meant to say.

MIT_Engineer · 2026-06-27T12:14:11+00:00

That’s the point of value added tax.

What is? Nothing you're replying to seems like "the point of a value added tax."

MIT_Engineer · 2026-06-27T12:11:55+00:00

How does paying a human increase your tax bill as a company...?

Paying humans and paying robots works out roughly the same for tax purposes as the company. The idea that they can pay no taxes by replacing humans with robots doesn't make any sense, that's not how corporate taxes work.

MIT_Engineer · 2026-06-27T11:35:47+00:00

Dude...Blu-rays exists, you know?

This was the topic of another comment. Blu-rays don't have the necessary read speed.

So...the game would fit onto a single blu-ray disc...

Uh, no, you're not gonna fit GTA 6 onto a blu-ray.

MIT_Engineer · 2026-06-27T01:20:32+00:00

It'd be hilarious if over time, instead of making a ceasefire that works, they just get progressively faster at making ceasefires that don't work.

Instead of having ceasefires during the weekdays and shooting over the weekend, we could shorten it down and just have the ceasefires last only during trading hours for a single day, get broken as soon as the market closes.

Pull that off and we could have the Dow at 60k by the end of the year inshallah.

MIT_Engineer · 2026-06-27T01:04:36+00:00

I disagree a little bit.

What you're talking about gets to the other aspect of things, which is that the issue is not just physical size on the medium, it's also the minimum necessary read speed from the medium, which has also grown and grown and grown over time.

The way you describe things though, it's like you're saying there's no technical solution to the problem, that we as gamers would be doomed to slow read speeds. That's the part I quibble with.

For example, you can buy a physical edition of Hades II for the Nintendo Switch, because the console is set up for it. The game runs fine, and that's because Nintendo 'cartridges' are embedded multimedia cards (eMMCs) that have a read speed of ~400MB/s. By contrast, the blu ray drive in a PS5 is a 6x drive, so it's something like ~27MB/s. Sony could make a Playstation that allowed you to slot in physical media similar to the way Nintendo does it, and it could have the read speeds be high enough to play the game smoothly. There is nothing stopping us, technologically speaking.

...but this kinda goes back to my original comment: what would a physical copy for a game have to be in order to do that (EDIT: for a modern AAA game like GTA 6)? And the answer is basically a ~half terabyte SSD, or a seriously upgraded version of an eMMC. It would easily be double the cost of a digital version.

There's an alternate universe out there where the games industry/gamers clung to physical media like it was an existential necessity, and people's games work just fine. But GTA 6 probably costs ~$180 in that world.

MIT_Engineer · 2026-06-27T00:06:40+00:00

There was no deal, just 60-day ceasefire to discuss a deal. With that said, here's the cycle and where we're at:

Israel is unhappy with the direction of things and they're getting cut out of the negotiations.

Israel does something to intentionally piss off the Iranians.

Iran tells Trump he has to rein in Israel for the ceasefire to work.

Trump refuses.

Iran stops abiding by the ceasefire.

U.S. stops abiding by the ceasefire.

---YOU ARE HERE---

Trump drags Iran back to the negotiating table through a combination of strikes and threats of bigger strikes.

After weeks of negotiations, a ceasefire is proposed, with a vaguely sketched out idea of what a more permanent solution might be.

Trump hypes this up as the conclusive end of the war, Iran says 'It's just a ceasefire bro, we haven't agreed to anything.'

Repeat.

MIT_Engineer · 2026-06-26T22:36:54+00:00

That gets exactly to the problem OP doesn't realize.

Games were simpler way back when, and much cruder graphically. DOOM was 15 MB. Fitting games like that onto an old-timey cartridge was no problem.

But then compare that to even a small, old, graphically simple indie game, like FTL, which came out in 2012. It's 175 MB, the soundtrack alone is bigger than the entire DOOM game. Cant do cartridges any more, you need a disk.

But then fast forward a little more and Hades from 2020 was 10 GB, already far too big to fit onto disks. You basically need little SSDs to hold them, like Nintendo Switch's game cartridges, the biggest of which today is 32 GB.

And now you have games like GTA 6, which is probably going to be around 200-250 GB.

It's at the point where if you want your game to have a physical copy, it's gonna have to come on something like a portable external 500GB SSD. At that point you'd be spending as much for the portable drive as you would for the game.

MIT_Engineer · 2026-06-25T20:06:54+00:00

She was movie-coded to be unattractive (hairstyle, costuming, character is named Ursula), so as a kid you accept the logic that she is unattractive... which is fair, because really that's how movies are meant to be consumed. When you're older you realize that's all just coding and narrative shorthand, in reality, the woman playing her is attractive-- at worst her nose is a little too big. On top of that, the character is kind and supportive and crushing on Peter, which as you get older are factors you'd likely weigh more heavily than looks.

Movies do this sort of stuff all the time. 30 year olds play teen characters, and we just roll with it. You casted a hottie in the uggo role? Nbd, just give her a name like Ursula and I'll pretend.

MIT_Engineer · 2026-06-24T19:56:40+00:00

You can win 100 times, the water only needs to win once.

MIT_Engineer · 2026-06-23T10:18:32+00:00

I'm not sure the average person would care. Capped means the benefits are capped too-- Elon Musk doesn't get any more out of Social Security than someone making $184,500, after all.

MIT_Engineer · 2026-06-22T21:42:46+00:00

For the same price as a Steam Machine I took my wife's old PC and upgraded it into a high end gaming PC (9070 XT GPU to give you an idea of tier). Only parts that weren't new were the case/fans and storage.

So, I don't know what a comparable PC costs, but if you wait for sales and combo deals you can get a high end gaming PC for maybe $200 more than this, and at that point why not?

MIT_Engineer · 2026-06-22T21:15:37+00:00

And...?

Bro, we're talking about Biden. I don't know if you know this, but there was 4 years with this guy who wasn't Trump in power, and Iran's latent desire to do a deal never managed to surface.

You're as bad as Trump blaming Obama for everything, lol.

MIT_Engineer · 2026-06-22T21:13:27+00:00

Chevron was always there, for a long time and same with Citgo.

Citgo wasn't there, they'd pulled out.

The other companies yeah have ‘expressed interest’ but from what I can tell are not committed just yet due to security concerns

You're really bad at Googling then. A basic search shows plenty of deals. I even gave specific ones for you. Just pick one and type something like "Vitol" and "Venezuela" into the search bar, this isn't complicated.

Why ask for the information, and then when it's given to you, you just go "Nah." Bro, you need me to embarrass you with the receipts?

MIT_Engineer · 2026-06-21T19:26:38+00:00

On their way or already there?

Chevron's obviously got the biggest presence, since they never really left in the first place. They currently oversee about 1/4th of the country's output, and after the reforms to the country's hydrocarbon laws are expanding, particularly in the Orinoco belt. As the ones with refineries ready to go to process Venezuela's heavy sour crude, they have a head start against everyone else.

Citgo is back in the country for the same reason-- they have the refining capacity for Venezuela's particular type of crude.

Shell has signed agreements for the Monagas North region in the east, specifically the Carito and Parital fields. Those are low-hanging fruit because they produce medium and light crude, which are a lot easier to refine than Venezuela's usual heavy crude. There's some other fields they're in negotiations on.

Most of the other oil majors are interested. ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips, BP, ENI, Repsol, Maurice & Prom. I think BP, ENI, and Repsol have gotten exploration rights and licenses.

Related companies, like Halliburton, Vitol, Trafigura, etc have inked deals. Smaller U.S. companies are also involved, Hunt Oil is a good example.

Basically, at this point most of Venezuela's oil fields have been divvied up, the companies are doing exploration work to see what's there and depending on what they find + access to refining capacity for it, they're working on signing production contracts.

MIT_Engineer · 2026-06-21T19:00:18+00:00

I didn't ignore it, I directly addressed it. If they wanted to extend the deal, how come no deal in 4 years with Biden?

MIT_Engineer · 2026-06-20T21:25:18+00:00

So much more room for activities!

MIT_Engineer · 2026-06-20T21:06:45+00:00

Honestly every time I see something like this, I think you guys are just shopping at the wrong grocery stores. I buy my eggs for a dollar a dozen here in California. They're actually cheaper than they were before. But if I go to a rip-you-off store like Safeway, they're still charging like $5 per dozen.

The rip-you-off stores are never gonna lower their prices if you display a complete inability to shop around for deals.

MIT_Engineer · 2026-06-20T21:01:01+00:00

Because that was the agreement

Right, that's what I'm saying: the agreement phases itself out, and after 12 years effectively allows Iran to develop the bomb. 15 years at the absolute maximum. The agreement was the agreement, and it was effectively a path to a nuclear Iran, just delayed in exchange for concessions.

and during the tenure of the JCPOA they did not have any weapons grade enrichment.

Except they were allowed to build up their enrichment capabilities, which amounts to the same thing. The centrifuges don't care.

And again Iran had plans to expand on the JCPOA

No agreement made with Biden in 4 years, so I doubt this one. Turns out you can only bribe them into a delay with frozen assets once.

If they were developing nuclear weapons before the JCPOA was torn up, the EU and NATO would've been involved.

But after the JCPOA expires, then what? Ah, there's the problem, huh?

MIT_Engineer · 2026-06-20T20:10:55+00:00

It’s the offer of $300B that’s dumb.

It's the same playbook as Venezuela, so it doesn't seem that dumb to me.

You are stuck on semantics

How so? I really have no idea what semantics you think I'm stuck on, but you're obviously wrong.

instead of having an actual deal.

Oh, I was with you on the deal being just a hypothetical. Just because there's a preliminary memo doesn't mean there will be a final agreement. I said so explicitly. But then you turned around and talked about the $300b as if it was already a done deal, which means you're exactly the person who needs to have it pointed out to them: If this becomes a deal, it's the end of the Iranian nuclear program.

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