jfactorial

TL;DR: recent changes in Section 174 IRC will _incentivize_ R&D spending, not cause layoffs of researchers and developers.

Section 174 allows businesses to deduct their domestic R&D expenses.

In 2017 Trump made businesses have to amortize these expenses over 5 years instead of deducting them, starting in 2022 (it is common for an administration to write laws that will only have a negative effect after they're gone). This move wrecked the R&D tax credit. Many US businesses stopped claiming R&D tax credits entirely as a result. Others had surprise tax bills.

Trump's second term work is now to undo the disaster he caused (S.O.P.). Congress has reversed the amortization rule and businesses can again deduct R&D expenses immediately.

This is a good thing rolling back a bad thing. The bad thing might have been responsible for layoffs a few years ago, but it will have only positive impact on 2025.

But if we asked users "Choose one: the ideal convenience of being able to log in with just your username (but anyone who knows your username can login as you), or the inconvenience of having to enter username plus a secret password?" almost all users would choose the security over convenience, because they would understand the risk/reward. I think users care more about convenience than _theoretical_ security, and that we owe them education on how security impacts them directly.

The key to lucid dreaming for me is to question reality regularly, and as a result do things in waking life to test if I'm dreaming. About once a month I will legitimately wonder whether I'm dreaming and press my hand into a solid object expecting my hand to sink into it. This has helped me go lucid in a dream a few times. It's made me seem nutty a few more than that.

Eventually someone is going to have to be the first person in tech to be pretentious. ;)

That is a better one. I don't know why three rich guys investing in a new company would result in a slowness that Trump could fix, though, and a promise to rush or sidestep regulatory approval still sounds nefarious.

This is my question too, but I haven't seen a journalist ask it yet. My baseless theory: Trump has promised them some kind of antitrust protections in the form of legislation to be written & passed at a later date.

An announcement of a public AI infrastructure program joined by multiple companies could have been a monumental announcement. This one just looks like three big companies getting permission to make one big one.

Start a Slack and invite your community to it. Moderate it graciously with a simple, public, fair code of conduct. Make sure all the FB users are invited. The features just beat Facebook IMHO.

I agree with you about trying to avoid thought stopping terms, and the desire for more specific language in important topics. It's tempting to think that history repeats itself, but it doesn't. It really doesn't. Historians will find ways of comparing and contrasting one moment with another, but whatever is happening right now is not determined by any historical law playing out.

Our language is bending as it ever does to help people explain these political shifts—often people who see what's happening but don't have much education on the matters of history, political science, philosophy. Bear in mind that 21% of US adults are illiterate, and far fewer are even equipped to read, say, Thomas Paine.

We need ways of talking about the values that are winning (nationalist theocratic autocracy) and the ones that are not (the open society, secular liberal democracy), and the word "liberalism" in the US has beenn so tarnished, so I think "fascism" today has come to mean "anti-liberal." I'll take what I can get.

I think "techno fascism" is a term people are using to describe tech company CEOs operating as unelected oligarchs embedded within the new US government.

If you're looking for a better term, we could call it "technocratic anti-liberalism" to perhaps cover all the bases. People are attempting to describe the current situation in which the wealthiest humans in all of history are supporting an anti-liberal executive by making financial donations to anti-liberal leadership and making changes to their products to further the messages thereof, e.g. broadcasting Nazi ideology and making Nazi salutes.

"Wealthy" as in "holding more personal wealth than the bottom half of the US population"; "anti-liberal" as in "espousing and acting in opposition to classical liberal values of consent of the governed and equality under law by denying the validity of elections, attempting to overthrow the US liberal democratic government with force, pardoning foot soldiers found guilty of such an attack, utilizing king-like executive direction to undermine the highest law of the land, avoiding all punishment for his own guilt, and so forth.

That's how I interpret the term.

What's your opinion of "architect" as a verb? I was in a workshop once wherein the instructor paused everything to beratingly correct someone for 5 minutes on how you can't "architect" something because, he insisted, that word must only ever be a noun.

They're perfect for each other.