I find your comment interesting, but I don't know what this is referring to. Any chance you can expand on this point? or link to something that explains it?
There's an additional tax on all storage media, be it harddrives, usb sticks, burnable CDs. If you can write data to it, the tax is applied. The tax is used to compensate rights holders. I don't know exactly how it's distributed or who is actually receiving the money, but the goal was to offset the alleged loss of income from piracy
The discussion of how much artists are actually getting from this has been going on since forever. Plenty of Swedish artists have publically stated that they receive either "practically nothing" or "literally nothing" and that the only ones who appear to benefit are the "fat cats" at the top of the association collecting the fees rather than the artists.
I was not aware of this. Thanks for bringing it to my attention
Do you know whether it's the organisation representing the artists (Coda here in Denmark) or the labels/movie studios that end up being the beneficiaries of the tax?
No idea, I've never seen any actual accounting from Copyswede (nor the record companies) of how they split the 150+ million SEK collected annually. But Swedish artists, by their own accounts, aren't getting anything.
Some countries in Europe decided that it was impossible to stop piracy. Instead they added a fee to storage devices, like disks and USB drives, that is supposed to compensate for the lost revenue. I don't remember where that money goes, but probably to big media companies?
The law states that it's for "lost sales" originating from e.g. recording songs aired on radio instead of buying the tape/CD. "Piracy for private use".
Am I missing something in the pricing or is the Storage costs very unappealing. For anything with a usage skewed towards high ratio of storage to usage, the costs aren't competitive.
2.5$ per GB in "Scalar" and 1.5$ per GB in "Scalar PRO" compared to 0.11$ RDS for General purpose (or 0.125$ for provisioned + the IOPS you use, double that for multi-az), Supabase at 0.125$, Firebase at 0.1725$,DynamoDB at 0.25$, MongoDB Atlas serverless at 0.25$, cockroachDB serverless at 0.5$ per GB, FaunaDB at 1$ per GB.
(Neon says it's 0.000164 per GiB, but somethings seems off, it's not at the same scale, so I'm guessing there's a catch here)
> Am I missing something in the pricing or is the Storage costs very unappealing
Yes, there's no comparison on the IOPs or anything else and what counts as storage. They all count slightly differently and so unless you account for it all it's a bit moot.
AWS alone has different tiers of storage from HDD to NVME ssd. The pricing varies greatly.
RDS will literally count anything including temporary files as usage of storage. Planetscale claims not to.
Neon price is listed as per hour, instead of per month like the others :)
While you're not necessarily missing something, it's worth pointing out that usually storage costs don't dominate the bill, the compute costs are usually higher. But with the PlanetScale storage price being more then 10x the price of the other, it's definitely something to keep in mind, and it can dominate the bill.
I think that was a really good way to get the point across. Which I suppose I already agreed to, but if I ever wanted to argue the point of how hard content moderation is, I might share this website.
I doubt this is the case but theoretically you can make stupid or incorrect captcha and it will still deter bots if you actually check the pattern of use (I.e how many clicks in what intervals etc...) instead of checking if the answer is correct.
This is more or less what cloudflare and such do now as I understand it (as well as checking browser features and such)
Further to that point, Kotlin mainly targets the JVM (which can run pretty much everywhere), but also can be compiled to JavaScript, LLVM, and a bunch of other targets.
Honestly the only times I've evaluated Kotlin for personal projects was bc of that flexibility.
With various levels of implementation quality, Kotlin/Native had to be rebooted, on JS it hardly offers anything better than TypeScript, on the JVM it is mostly used by Android shops anyway.
It was adopted on Android quite fast after Jetbrains made the integration in Android Studio almost flawless, partly because back then the Android runtime was stuck on the Java 6 syntax plus some syntax sugar that the IDE provided to mimic lambda functions.
It helped a lot that I think Jetbrains took advantage of all they could to make development in Kotlin very smooth, I remember back then people joked how Kotlin worked so flawlessly on Android Studio almost like it was the main language while on Xcode Swift was slow, the highlight would stop working constantly, refactoring was not supported, often indexing the project would hang forever etc.
I think everyone jumped from Java to Kotlin due to Oracle suing Google over Java in Android. It also provided a huge opportunity to be more deliberate since Android was maturing.
"This suggests that the department reclassified all of FTX’s contractors to full-time employees in order to arrive at such a large tax payroll-related tax claim."
Genius. Why not, free money. Unless of course you don't think government agencies should play fast and loose with their enforcement based on the likelihood of the defending party to successfully resist.
I'm definitely anti-IRS at this point in most ways, but... let's be honest, this is FTX we're talking about. Their so-called "balance sheet" for their multi-billion dollar operation was an approximately one-screen-large Excel file at a level of detail that would have embarrassed your local plumbing shop. Even through my anti-IRS biases I have no problem whatsoever believing that FTX went well beyond playing "fast and loose" with tax laws to outright tax fraud. I doubt this is even the end of their troubles, which will more likely end simply by the matter becoming moot rather than investigations coming to their end.
FTX was so badly run that it isn't even suitable as a business school case study. The questions it really raises is how they got as far as they did at that scale without ramming into one legal wall or another even sooner, and I don't even mean exotic cryptocurrency laws, I mean just plain ol' corporate laws that everyone else faces. How much you want to bet they weren't correctly an Equal Opportunity Employer, or managed to have non-trivial OSHA violations, or... just pick your agency, really.
That a government agency shouldn't knowingly lie to try and get a piece of the pie. They shouldn't artificially inflate a tax bill so that they can have more leverage.
There is no doubt in anyone's mind that that tax bill isn't real, it's obviously a negotiation tactic to try and get a larger cut. I don't think that's something that a government agency should do, even if the target is a giant fraud.
44B$ is more then FTX's ever had in assets, it's definitely more then they had in revenue and more then they probably ever paid employees. And taxes should be a fraction of that on top of what they probably did pay.
Most likely their argument is "but this will keep my from recouping the money I had in FTX when it went bust because I'm in the class of people who are last to get paid out"
It's a sign of the times that I can't tell if this is a /s. I think many on this board would support the IRS cracking down on crypto companies even if they do so in an extralegal manner. I am not one of them fwiw.
IRS just wants the payroll tax to be paid by someone, and don't really have a dog in the FT vs contractor question. Ordinarily contractors end up paying it, making IRS happy. So this suggests they did not.
Okay, now the government is just getting greedy. Taxes are the biggest scam in 2023 as our leaders don't respect us enough to create a balanced budget.
I don't know about others but the move from AngularJS(v1) to Angular burned that bridge for me.
Developers have long memories. And the fact google keeps burning good will with other shutdowns isn't contributing.
Besides that Angular is also a heavy framework (gives a lot, but requires you to do things in a very specific way) where hacker news crowd has usually a preference for unintrusive frameworks and ones that give a lot of freedom and leeway.
