Tee Hee, I'm just a girl canned audio about to become therapists for thousands of teen aged girls everywhere. Hey barbie, what is the roots of the following equation, 3x^2+2xy+7x

AI or no AI, Barbie's answer will still be "Math is hard. Let's go shopping!".

Right, so you pay $10M in programmer salaries, make $5M in revenue, and have to pay tax on your $3M in profit. Kinda puts a wet blanket on things. And every time you grow you go through the same thing -- expenses now, taxes now, deductions later.

The artist could have waited a year or two then approached Bungie about back licensing fees for the game Marathon which inappropriately used the artist's work without remuneration or credit.

Not unless they could come up with a good excuse for why they didn't know about the violation and attempt to stop it. Deliberately allowing damages to pile up violates the "duty to mitigate damages" and the court would likely not allow further damages after the point at which the copyright holder could have objected.

The idea of "herd immunity" is that the immunized proportion is great enough that an introduction of the disease results in few infections and the disease dies out again, thus protecting members of the "herd" who aren't immunized also. For a region to be "post-herd-immunity", outbreaks coming from unimmunized communities or from places which never had herd immunity would have to be self-sustaining in the larger once-herd-immune population. Is that the case? I don't know, the article doesn't say. I doubt it, as it appears the Texas outbreak (largest in the US) remains concentrated in the particular community it started in.

So it appears to me this is sensationalism, we are not seeing the breakdown of herd immunity as a whole but rather a very large outbreak among a subpopulation that was never herd immune. There will be (and has been) spread to the general population, but so far I don't see evidence that there will be a return of endemic measles; the US used to have over half a million cases a year with a much lower population. In the meantime, might want to avoid the outbreak areas if you have a not-yet-immunized child or some reason to believe immunization has failed.

I want management to worry about why what I'm doing makes money and I worry about doing it. They are in fact doing that, of course. The reason they ask engineers to justify whatever they are doing in the moment in terms of its direct effect on the bottom line is to make them feel insecure and get them to work harder and not ask for more pay. And of course sadism.

So what would predict would happen to the industry if there was no (federal) Income Tax?

Obviously all would be rainbows and unicorns.

There's no question of there not being a Federal Income Tax. The question is whether software engineer salaries are deductible in the year the expense is incurred or whether they have to be amortized over 5 years. In the latter case, a fast-growing software company would show a profit for tax purposes much sooner than they have an actual cash profit. Unfortunately, they can't amortize the tax payment; they have to pay the taxes right up front out of cash. So, expenses $50 million, income $20 million, profit $10 million, and now the company has to pay $2.1 million in taxes.

But even so, history suggests that the pendulum will swing again.

Or it won't, because Section 174 changes have stopped it. You now have to amortize costs of employing software engineers over 5 to 15 years. This makes it untenable for a startup to grow, because they get taxed on paper profits they did not actually realize. Big tech of course likes this because it limits competition.