I think you totally could replicate these experiences without the restaurant involved. Fun surprises are nice, but the absurdity of having the restaurant provide these kinds of experiences seems tacky.
I don't think I'm alone in wanting the restaurant's personality to be just as much a part of the experience as my own personality. Otherwise, what makes this place more special than any other wanting to pull the same gimmicks?
A baby penguin is not service --- it has no impact on their 2 star rating.
Unless they are on the menu, penguins have no part in the restaurant's mission. It is simple pandering to those who psychologically crave attention. It is put forth as a substitute for the lack of better product and service.
My stance has long been that LLMs are currently worse than the evangelists are claiming they are, but are significantly better than the detractors and skeptics think they are.
Like most things, the truth is somewhere in the middle. But unlike many things, they are changing and advancing rapidly, so it's current state is not the resting state.
Only if you assume that the 900k in costs is exclusively the salary of 5 engineers. Realistically you will employ other people and have overhead costs like rent, etc., and I assume that other non-salary costs (health insurance, etc.) aren't included (b/c I assume health insurance, like rent, is a company-wide overhead cost and that companies aren't expected to carve out what portion of that is going to the software folks but what do I know?).
But if we more realistically assume it's 3 software folks at 200k, then the taxable profit is 580k (100 profit + 3*(200k salary - 40k ammortized))
Today I am cash flow neutral at 5m revenue, but with this I'm paying taxes on 800k "profits", which don't exist anywhere but on paper. But I have to pay the taxes in real dollars.
This is going to sound silly but you paid 800k in profits, but now have 4 years of banked costs you can use to _reduce_ your profit margin.
So you pay taxes on 800k profits, but then each subsequent year you reduce you profit by 200k, even though you don't have 200k leaving the door.
If 1M eng salaries was your stable state, then after several years you're... going to have 1M in costs to subtract from your profit! The stable state is the same!
I'm not going to argue about the capex change being "good", I do think it's worth highlighting that for large enough companies you're now looking at a different flavor of tax flow. Amortizing your costs over 5-10 years is something people like doing for other costs after all.
It becomes a cashflow issue for startups. While the stable state is the same (not really the same, because of how companies evolve etc), cashflow issues in early days means $$$ from the VC money that I could've used to grow the company, now goes towards taxes for 5 years. That could be make or break for small companies.
If you have a pile of cash that you have no apparent use for, or can live without, yes, it makes no difference.
> That gives you a profit, from a tax perspective, of $820k.
> But you only have $100k of actual dollars.
> Good luck paying your taxes!
a lot of people here are conflating "taxable income" and "the amount owed in taxes" for some reason.
if I earn $100/year, and I can deduct $50 of that, my tax bill is not $50. It is some percentage of $50, usually a low number for businesses. (Amazon regularly pays $0/year in taxes.)
depending on the tax rates and the locality of that business, the amount owed on tax is going to be anywhere from $0 to $50, and it is going to heavily favor the low end of that spectrum. I don't think any business pays 100% of its taxable income in taxes unless they have been heavily fined.
$100k is likely far more than enough to pay the tax on $820k of taxable income for a business. It could be enough to pay that tax bill 10 times over, it's hard to say.
> if I earn $100/year, and I can deduct $50 of that, my tax bill is not $50. It is some percentage of $50, usually a low number for businesses. (Amazon regularly pays $0/year in taxes.)
It’s not that low. Federal corporate tax rate is 21%. So you would be on the hook for $10 in taxes.
A wordle-like game based on a road trip game my friends and I used to play. It serves you up a mashup of two different movie plots, and you have to guess the combined movie title. There's always some sort of shared word or wordplay between the two movie titles.
An example from the tutorial: the day after tomorrow never dies.
It's so frustrating to be walking into the train station, hear the train pulling in, rush to board and miss it by five seconds. Especially when you could have walked just a hair faster, or not stopped to look at that thing in the window for ten seconds.
> Some of them just made stupid mistakes when they were younger and sometimes dumb kids get way overcharged for cyber crimes. For the most part I think it's fine for kids to go through a phase where they think it's cool but they don't really know what they are doing.
I think a lot of the concern is that these kids aren't out of that phase yet.
SIM swapping is where you spoof a caller identity of a target in order to make a phone call impersonating that individual and then drain his retirement fund into a crypto mixer.
He was never charged for these activities, let alone overcharged.
Agreed. There was a lot of stuff I thought was cool when I was 20 which I shudder to think about now, 20 years on. It took me a long time to grow up past those phases of my life.
Yeah. I'm all for kids hacking, and even hackers with criminal records getting a second chance at security firm. Hacking is done for a lot of reasons, it could be just an interest in solving puzzles, and they happened to get in trouble with the law.
The part I'm not digging, is they seem a bit young to be taking over the Treasury Dept, or any department. It seems like this would have been better done by an Accounting Audit Firm, not hackers.
Hackers are just trying to get in, get data. An accounting audit would be more about finding impropriety.
So, it seems on the surface like 'finding waste' is not the goal.
>> So, it seems on the surface like 'finding waste' is not the goal.
Finding waste is pretty easy. As we're seeing already, cutting the waste is harder than it looks:
- The Congressional Budget Office recently found that Congress provided $516 billion in appropriations this fiscal year to programs that had expired under federal law.
- Federal government agencies are using just 12% of the space in their headquarters buildings on average, according to the Public Buildings Reform Board, which is an independent federal agency focused on recommending the disposal of underutilized federal properties.
- The House Oversight Committee spent $3.3 billion on furniture over the past few years.
- The federal government made $247 billion worth of payment errors in fiscal year 2022 and $236 billion in 2023, according to the Government Accountability Office.
These errors, also known as improper payments, include overpayments or payments that should not have been made, such as to someone who died or someone no longer eligible for government programs.
Estimates show the federal government spent $2.7 trillion in payment errors since 2003.
Did any of those findings need teenage hackers to figure out?
Also, by the dates you supplied, it looks like Biden/Democrats were already successfully in-progress of cutting costs.
Every large organization needs reviews/audits to find waste. I think the problem with the 'right' is the idea that because there is waste, we should abolish government. But, every organization accumulates waste, and then needs to have a review process to make corrections. The whole burn it all down is pretty immature take on leadership.
You could try clicking around and reading a little bit before throwing wildly inaccurate, speculative, and slanderous accusations at an org you know nothing about.
If it's not for you, that's fine.