Makes sense.

Could be worse than that. One year I had a problem that my brokerage reported all of my gains but failed to report the cost basis. This was on a bunch of Restricted Stock Unit sales which happened automatically when the stock vested, so the actual capital gains are always very close to zero, since the sale occurs minutes after the vesting. But from the 1099-B it appeared I had 100% gains on a bunch of stock sales that approximately equal my annual salary (about half of my income is stock). Worse, taken at face value would have taxed me on that money twice, since the vesting counts as normal income and is taxable income reported on the W-2, then the sale counts as a 100% short-term capital gain.

What would happen in your scheme in such a situation is that the government's pre-filled form would show up as a massive tax bill. Assuming the taxpayer survived the resulting heart attack, they'd just have to file a return that shows the correct cost basis. So it's fine; no worse than the status quo, and better for most people.

Or you could just fire most of the IRS staff and reduce their capacity that way... which the party currently in charge is already happily doing, so I'm not sure why you think reducing their capacity by burying them in paper would cause a reversal. It would just make it even easier for wealthy people with long, complicated returns to cheat outrageously, confident the IRS doesn't have the capacity to audit them. That is the GOP's goal.

Sure. And on that same form you can also report all of the other details they might not have, like whether you bought an EV or installed home efficiency upgrades that qualify for a tax credit, and what charitable donations you made that are tax deductible, and what your state and local taxes are, and... you get the point. Just to be sure, maybe you should also include the details you're sure they do have. And given that there's some ambiguity in the law about how some of this stuff fits together as well as some choices you get to make, maybe you could also do the calculations.

You've just reinvented the 1040.

This one is completely solvable, but the place you have to start is not with the forms and flow of information, the place you have to start is the tax code and the laws regulating what other entities have to report, and are allowed to report.

For example, consider state and local taxes. Two options: Either you eliminate the state and local tax deduction on federal income taxes or you require all state and local tax entities to report your payments to them. This also means that all of those entities have to have a way to uniquely identify you. We abuse the social security number (which was not intended to be used as an identifier for anything except the social security program) for this, and that's probably fine in this case, though it's also possible that the Privacy Act restricts it in some cases, so the law might have to be tweaked there, too.

For the charitable donations case, same options: Either eliminate the tax deduction or require all charities to report donations, which will require you to give your social security number to them. I'm not sure how people would feel about having to provide their SSN to Goodwill when they drop off some old furniture.

Same with EV. If you want to keep the tax credits, auto dealers will have to report to the IRS. At least you already more or less have to give them your SSN.

Same with energy efficiency upgrades, except that's complicated by the fact that some people buy the units themselves and install them, so Home Depot et al have to begin reporting to the IRS, and you have to give them your SSN, while other people hire a contractor, who will have to do the reporting, and to whom you'll have to provide your SSN.

And so on across the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of other issues.

Yes, most people don't have any of these other issues in a given year (except state and local taxes), so a compromise might be a simple system for people who just have W-2 income and take the standard deduction, and no other complications. It's hard to see how it could be simplified for anyone with more complex taxes, though, unless the tax code was overhauled to simply eliminate all of the deductions and credits.

When discussing automobile transmissions, "five gears" is shorthand for "five gear ratios". We usually don't include the last word because there's no need, but the terminology is not inaccurate, just not fully articulated. Well, it's still kind of inaccurate because reverse is usually a different gear ratio than any of the forward selections, and I suppose you could consider neutral to be a gear ratio.

We also talk about bikes as having 15 gears, again failing to articulate the "ratio" -- and a bike with 15 gear ratios has 8 gears in its drive train, so it's clear we're talking about ratios, not the number of toothed wheels. This is entirely consistent with automotive terminology, where we talk about a car as having five gears or being a five speed.

What he means is that Tesla is not offering an upgrade path.

That sucks. We lost a lot of good people in those layoffs. Google is still trying to reduce headcount through smaller, incremental layoffs but mostly through attrition.

BTW, I work for Google, going on 15 years now. I'm not trying to defend Google; my job is writing code, not PR. But I worked a lot of places before Google, and Google's email retention policy isn't remotely unusual. If anything, at 18 months it's a little longer than most places. I'm not sure how the rest of the corporate world is handling chats; chat wasn't yet a big thing in corporate communications when I joined Google in 2011. It was used in many places then, but mostly with departmental chat servers (e.g. IRC, Jabber, etc.) and under the legal radar.

I'm not sure what the policies were in the past, but as of now it's 30 days for 1:1 chats, 18 months for group chats, same as emails.

Whose theory is that? It's not a law, and it's certainly not what the legal department of any corporation will say.

Indeed. Not just "evil" stuff, either. Anything that could be interpreted badly when presented out of context with the right spin. For example, basically all HR discussions everywhere (in the US, at least) are conducted by phone or video conference, then followed by carefully crafted written documentation, because HR is a legal minefield. This is true even when everyone is doing their level best to be fair and reasonable.

Sure. That's the reason all American companies have auto-deletion policies. It's not about saving storage space.

I haven't seen any allegations that Google failed to comply with contractual retention requirements, and that doesn't seem to be what the judges are complaining about. Have you seen anything like that?

The auto-deleting chat criticism is a bit weird to me. Every big corporation I've worked for (four of them -- including Google -- as an employee, and maybe two dozen more as a contractor/consultant) has had automatic email deletion policies, and before that they had policies requiring memos and other written communications to be shredded/burned. Offices had boxes with slots in them that you dumped documents in and the contents were collected and destroyed daily. Automatic deletion of chats seems like a straightforward extension of typical American corporate policy. I'm not saying such policies are "right", just that they're routine. They're routine, of course, because the US is a very litigious country.

The flip side is that American corporations also have document preservation processes in place, so that any employee whose job might touch on a topic of active litigation has their documents and communications exempted from automatic destruction. There might be legitimate criticism of Google if Google didn't have those processes or didn't use them appropriately, but I've never seen any claim of that in any of the news about the court cases.

But maybe there's some nuance to Google's actions that I've missed.

Where I find current-generation AI helpful in writing code is not in writing it so much as modifying it. It's especially helpful when you decide to make some change that requires updating dozens of lines of code over several files. Sometimes such changes can be performed by a simple search and replace, but often you have to examine and edit each one individually. It's tremendously helpful to be able to tell the LLM to go find all the places a change is required and make it. You still have to look at each edit performed by the AI, but nearly all of them are usually right, and this takes a fraction of the time.

Another way AI is useful to me is due to my particular context: Android (the OS, not an app). Android builds are slow. Even incremental builds that don't touch any "Android.bp" file (a Makefile, basically) take 2-3 minutes, minimum, because that's how long it takes the build system to determine that only the one file you touched needs to be rebuilt. Anyway, this creates a situation where the typical edit/compile/test cycle takes several minutes, most of which is just waiting for the machine. If you touch an Android.bp, it's more like 8 minutes. If you context switch during that wait, to read email or edit a doc or whatever, the context switch overhead begins to kick your butt.

But what I've found is that I can give the AI a task, like "Write unit tests for feature X", then start the build/test and context-switch away. The code the AI wrote won't compile or work, but that's fine (and also true of my own code, which rarely builds and executes perfectly the first time). When the build/test run is complete I don't mentally context-switch back into the coding task, I just copy-paste the output to the AI, which will make some changes (I don't bother looking at what), and I start the cycle again. After a half-dozen iterations of this (~20 minutes), the AI will have something that builds and passes, and then I actually switch back to see what it did and determine what needs to be improved. Usually I find some small tweaks that need to be made. Depending on their nature I either make them myself or tell the AI to do it.

This would be vastly better if the AI could run the build/test script itself and iterate to a working state without my input. I expect that will be possible soon -- and probably works for some environments now. But even as-is, the AI makes it so that while I don't actually produce the code any faster (maybe even a little slower), I'm more productive overall because I can take care of other things while the AI is working. The small interruptions to copy-paste output don't require a context switch.

I find that current LLMs are roughly equivalent to a smart but extremely inexperienced entry-level programmer who just happens to have thoroughly read and absorbed the language manual and all of the available APIs. If you use them the way you would a such a junior programmer, it works pretty well. You don't ask them to write the tricky code for you (or if you do you expect their work to need significant improvement) and you don't expect them to have a good sense of what good design or architecture are. But they can still be extremely useful.

And, of course, they're still getting better. Fast.

According to data I found online, the average paid by CA residents is 30 cents per kWh, so if you're paying 12.9 cents, then the right phrase is "less than half". Though of course, the need for heating/cooling between the temperate Bay Area and the more extreme conditions in Texas is different, and usage obviously affects the bill, but we're talking about rates.

Here in Utah I would also normally pay about 13 cents per kWh. I'm actually on a TOU plan which is 5 cents off-peak and 25 cents on-peak, with peak being 3 PM to 8 PM on weekdays. I have an EV so I configure my charger to only operate during off-peak hours and this saves me quite a bit. In the summer I also set my A/C schedule to cool the house a few extra degrees just before 3 PM so it mostly doesn't have to turn on until the peak hours end.

Is "gouging" the right word? Residential consumers in TX pay half what those in CA do. And the massive price spikes generally only apply to wholesale buyers. I don't think most residential users even have the option of a variable-rate plan.