i noticed that whole foods sells in multiples of 6 which kind of locks me into their hot dog brand, given than their brioche buns are pretty awesome. everyone else seems to sell in 8's.
I spent extensive time there. The way a Japanese investor explained it to me is that they don't really need Uber because the public transportation is so good, and they don't really need Doordash because any combini two minutes' walk away can provide a good meal to you any time of day or night. Their startups are of a different nature.
The Japanese will also explain to you that they can't digest bread because their intestines are longer or import skis because Japanese snow is different.
The real reason Uber hasn't taken off in Japan is that restrictive legislation and a large taxi lobby (which is also responsible for a near-total lack of public transport at night) means UberX is impossible. DoorDash was not in Japan because local player Demae and Uber beat them to the punch, but the market is growing fast and they're joining the fray.
I agree with your point about doordash. I see Uber Eats everywhere.
I disagree about Uber in general. At least in major cities in most places you'll get a taxi much faster than you'd get an Uber and abundant public transportation also reduces the need.
A better question is what if your tax evasion savings had been stolen by your friend who has already paid taxes on the property he had stolen, but not returned, last year?
This comment got me laughing really hard, but since this is HN I'm going to try to figure out the answer anyway:
I think this scenario is pretty simple and is essentially just that you deduct the amount of money stolen from you from that year's income, provided you discovered the money was stolen that year. Obviously if you haven't discovered it's stolen yet you won't be deducting anything.
It seems that the tax evasion part essentially becomes totally irrelevant since, as others have said, you don't report evaded taxes as income, you just don't tell the IRS you owe those taxes and don't pay them, so from the IRS' perspective it's no different than you getting that quantity of non-evasion money stolen from you
Vaguely related, one of my biggest tax pet peeves (beyond people that don't understand marginal tax brackets at all) is the people who will cynically claim that a billionaire just donated to charity $X because they actually make more money from doing that because of the tax deduction. And it's like, no, they get to deduct it from their earned income, so they mathematically always end up with less money by donating it and deducting rather than just keeping it.
You can't derive income from tax evasion. You already have the income from some other source, you're just evading being taxed on it. (It's like how, if you buy a video game on sale at $10 off, you didn't make $10, you just avoided spending $10 that you already have in your bank account.)
So you've already reported it (or, if you're evading taxes, perhaps you've already decided not to report it, in which case the answer is simply that you have to not evade taxes...).
If you advise other people on tax evasion and they pay you for your services, then that's presumably employment income of some sort that you should report.
The scammer pretending to be the creator of Bitcoin started off this way: Australia had a refundable tax credit for Research and Development, you could tell them you spent $6 million on R&D and they'd cut you a check for that, even if you had no income. He claimed to have purchased a supercomputer (in panama...). He successfully collected the credit to the tune of millions of dollars, but in a subsequent year asked for something like $40 million, which finally triggered the tax office to act. The whole 'creator of Bitcoin' thing fell out of needing a source for the money supposedly spent on R&D.
(They ultimately didn't fall for it, but he seemed to have escaped criminal prosecution by fleeing the country. He's continuing his scams elsewhere, and sadly now he's started suing journalists and others as yet another component of them.)
In a related story, we (my sharehouse) pay $5000 a month for rent in hard cash, and our landlord declares $2500 a month to the ATO.
As a back of napkin calculation, between her >=2 rental properties, and due to negative gearing, she's declaring a $60,000 loss per annum on her rental properties. Combined with the 50% deduction for capital gains on property sales, I don't think she will pay a single cent for the income earned from her rental property investments.
Even better (from an article reporting on the original call):
> “I think they probably enjoy having just one person up there because they can secure promises from me and I can’t say, ‘Oh, well, my fellow commissioners wouldn’t go along.’ It’s easier for everyone, actually. At a time like this when I’m communicating all the time with the Legislature, it’s easier to just be going through one person.”
Just... just really laying it all out there. "Hey guys, I can do whatever I want, let's make some back-room deals"
Conservatives recently realized that they can say the quiet part loud and not only will nobody punish them for it, more people will vote for you the louder you shout it.
This goes back farther than you are likely asking for, but general warrants were called out in the U.S. bill of rights and were alluded to in the declaration of independence because the British crown had been using them to investigate smugglers and tax dodgers, especially in the northeastern American colonies.
Their original works are all in the public domain in every jurisdiction, but classically (hah) the problem has been that copyright is applied to re-set scores. Luckily, there are a good number of modern scores dedicated to the public domain that were based on scans of the originals. A good starting place is https://imslp.org/wiki/Main_Page
No, although I once recorded myself playing Beethoven and posted it on Facebook and the audio got muted by a stupid algorithm that thought I was violating some Sony recording of some artist.
I don't know whether to feel honored that my playing was decent enough to be (mis-)recognized by the algorithm as a professional artist or sad that I got muted.
Consider the possibility of simple polymerizing molecules that are not living, but are biologically very active (and harmful). Prions are not chemically very complicated but can be incredibly lethal.
As far as my understanding goes, prions require contact with either the same or extremely similar proteins to have any affect, so they would require even greater biological similarity. Are their prion-like agents that work differently than I suppose?
> prions require contact with either the same or extremely similar proteins to have any affect
There is no requirement for similarity or sameness. Even if there aren't any that I know of that violate this - it's not in the definition that prions require contact with either the same or extremely similar proteins to have any affect.
Contamination doesn't even have to be self-replicating to be a major concern. Many organometallic compounds are exceedingly lethal and accumulate in biotic life. If alien tissue uses any to a significant degree, it would have disastrous consequences.
Obviously, the dangers of runaway self-replication makes even the smallest samples of primitive life potentially more deadly. And, while primitive life is far more likely in the universe at large, it is astronomically unlikely to reach our solar system undirected.
But when talking of other solar system bodies, like Mars, isn't it the other way around? I.e. astronomically unlikely that contaminants haven't already found their way to earth, undirected, for billions of years now?
I realize that Krugman was being tongue in cheek in this work, but a lot of the work in theory-heavy areas of "mathematical" economics are similar exercises in obscurity and dubious scientific value.
Krugman, in one of his autobiographical essays, described economics as the field that people get into when they can't hack it in math, physics or some other high-rigor STEM field. Part of proving one's intelligence as a junior economics faculty member is doing a lot of mathematically-heavy fireworks and then moving on to "real" research that matters.
We can laugh at this one but what is not laughable is the huge resource cost in supporting an academic economics establishment (at least in the theory area) whose product is actually not that much different from this.
>I’ve been getting some comments from people who think my magazine piece was an attack on the use of mathematics in economics. It wasn’t. ... What I objected to in the mag article was the tendency to identify good math with good work.
It's somewhat the same thinking, but it was a much more candid essay from an earlier part of his career. It was a frank recollection of why he went into economics as a field; he talks about the Asimov Foundation series, and a practical reflection that he was not really cut out for something like physics.
It was back when people had janky self-hosted html sites, and the like; probably written in the late '90s.
>practical reflection that he was not really cut out for something like physics.
And it's definitely the case that a great deal of very accomplished people (including in areas like software development and chemistry) are also not really cut out for a career in physics.
I would welcome someone to help me look for this. I read many of his online essays around 2001, and don't think they were part of any formal publication.
