Washington's constitution says: "The word 'property' as used herein shall mean and include everything, whether tangible or intangible, subject to ownership". That is extremely broad, and there is 90 years of precedent affirming income is include here as something intangible and "subject to ownership."
Washington State’s constitution limits a tax like this to no more 1% and requires it to be uniform; this law meets neither requirement.
I am uncomfortable that supporters of the income tax are so unbothered by it being unconstitutional. So few are insisting we amend the constitution to allow or not do it at all, on the grounds that violating the constitution (or flexibility construing it to match our desired ends) is bad.
I think this is right, in part because I've been told exactly this from people who work for Google and their job is to sell me cloud stuff- i.e., they say they have so much internal demand they aren't pushing TPUs for external use. Hence external pricing and support just isn't that great right now. But presumably when capacity catches up they'll start pushing TPUs again.
There are almost always obvious conflicts of interest. In a normal startup, VCs have a legal responsibility to act in the interest of the common shares, but in practice, they overtly act in the interest of the preferred shares that their fund holds.
I once worked somewhere where I found some evidence that the offsets we were considering buying were probably junk. The CEO agreed, bought them anyway, and proudly proclaimed to all staff how we were now a net-zero company. Junk offsets are cheaper.
Making advanced LLMs and releasing them for free like this is wonderful for the world. It saves a huge number of folks (companies, universities & individuals) vast amount of money and engineering time. It will enable many teams to do research and make products that they otherwise wouldn't be able to.
It is interesting to ponder to what extent this is just a strategic move by Meta to make more money in the end, but whatever the answer to that, it doesn't change how much I appreciate them doing it.
When AWS launched, I was similarly appreciative, as it made a lot of work a lot easier and affordable. The fact AWS made Amazon money didn't lower my appreciation of them for making AWS exist.
We're adult enough to have discussions like this in public. They are healthy to have. People make mistakes. Kudos to the original authors for releasing the source code so people could inspect and replicate their results.
That is a good point. Are there modifications to the voting strike idea that would make it effective?
For instance, what do you think about an "inverted-voting" strike instead? Everyone on strike does things roughly as normal, but swapping most of their down votes for up votes, and visa-versa? That way, people on strike will continue to vote about the same amount as before, and in the same subeditors as before, so it would be harder to identify them. The hope would be that although Reddit could do work to clean up the voting data, it would be annoying & take time, and presumably still end up as significantly lower quality data than they had before.
I think a "down-vote everything" strike could be highly successful. As long as enough users participate, it could cripple subs whose moderators didn't choose to participate. And it is fitting. Reddit is trying to charge its users for content and data created for free by its users, so why shouldn't users make that data junk for awhile to make a statement?
DOCSIS 3.1 has been out for 10 years, and I'd be happy if Xfinity just offered me those speeds. Compared to max speeds of the standard, Xfinity offers up to 12% the download speed and 3.5% upload speed.
Loser pays causes higher legal fees, because on average, one only has to pay half of one's own fees, and also because losing becomes more costly making it worth it to spend more to try to avoid losing.
Hart says "Amazon served me with a lawsuit,"[0] but it was Amazon who was sued by California citing Hart as a witness to support the lawsuit. Hart is having to go through discovery as part of that.[1][2] Amazon is allowed to do this discovery, on the theory it should be able to scrutinize claims being made against it, particularly when billions of dollars are at stake.
Hart's estimate for the fees Amazon charges him seem approximately the same as the fees Amazon estimates it would charge for products like his.[3] Given that, perhaps he shouldn't matter much for the lawsuit. But the law is vague, often saying something is prohibited only when it is bad for competition. So vague claims of what helps vs hurts competition matters, which is why Hart's testimony matters.
Most stores choose not to feature items that one can readily buy cheaper elsewhere. So what exactly is the state's theory about when that is legal or not in such a way it is illegal for Amazon to be doing -- and is the state's theory here supported by the laws?
The problem really is the laws around what is anti-competitive are vague & subjective. As a result, everyone has to spend a ton of money on lawyers (and lobbyists) to figure out an outcome. Instead of this, the legislature should revise the law to be clear. I assume this is not done because the lawyers and lobbyists like the flow of money to them created by vague laws, but it also might be because vague laws are easier for the legislature to write.