If you work at all in energy, the Clean Energy Business Network is also proactive in fighting for change. A couple of years ago they put me touch with Ron Wyden's staff. The Democrats are almost universally opposed to what was added to Section 174.
You know not what you speak of. I am small developer without funding.
For every developer I hire I pay tax on 90% of their wages in year 1.
So, if I hire a 200k a year developer, I have an increased tax liability of 180k. That works out to paying about $75k ~ $85k. So my 200k developer becomes an 285k developer.
Now, eventually I could regain that cost, or I could do like I know of a few companies and commit tax fraud by not correctly reporting my expenses.
BTW even as a partner I am hit by this - to correctly file my taxes I have to report my retirement savings as development revenue and pay tax on what is supposed to be tax free.
Untrue: for example, if you are a lawyer employed to help a company acquire real-estate or another company (i.e., a merger) then your salary is treated the same way by the US tax code (i.e., your employer must amortize your salary).
If you want to argue against the current tax code, point out that currently companies do not have to amortize the pay of executives even though arguably their work fortifies the company's ability to make a profit in future years like the work of software developers does.
A recruiter, or an HR person in general, do work that “fortifies the company’s ability to make a profit in future years” as you say, by hiring people that will hopefully work there for years.
Same as a financial analyst implementing new processes and spreadsheets to better control money spending.
One can argue that most white collar worker is investing in future profit. Sales people nurturing long sales cycles, lobbyists, content marketing, SEO.
Why are software developers (and merge lawyers) snowflakes among all those types?
If a recruiter or HR worker helps a company hire 100 new employees, all 100 are free to quit at the end of the year whereas the artifacts created or improved by a developer will be the property of the company forever.
In other words, maybe it is a bad idea to treat people (employees in this case) like property even in our tax code? (I'm personally OK with software's being treated like property.)
The ‘smothering’ you speak of is taxing the retention of earnings for capital assets. If you think this smothers software development, you should look into how much capital assets cost in other industries.
Personally, I think we should either eliminate the corporate income tax (and increase capital gains taxes correspondingly), or allow for all capital spending to be written off fully on day one. Your position of treating capital spending on software differently makes no sense to me.
In the first year, you only get to deduct 20%. But in your second year, you get to deduct 40% (20% from the first year and 20% from the second year). In the 3rd and 4th year it's 60% and 80%. And so on until you get to steady state of 100%.
So, no, it is not "really bad" for you. You as the owner might not make as much money for the first year, but you will be at steady state in a few years, and you get to deduct the salary for years after they leave.
I think an implicit assumption here is that the company is able to survive the five years. This rule affects cash flow in the initial years pretty hard and a lot of small companies cannot survive that.
In the initial years most startups have massive losses that they carry forward and don’t need to pay taxes anyway. During that bridge period the affect of section 174 is zero since they aren’t paying taxes anyway.
This really only affects software companies that are profitable in their first year, which is a very small minority.
I think you're missing something - the only way these startups have those massive losses is if they can deduct them. This rule change stops them feom being able to deduct 80% of most of their expenses in the year where the expense occurs.
This does feel a bit like propaganda. I'm a CPA with ex-Big4 audit experience, albeit only 4 years, and specialized in revenue rather than expenses. I just briefly read over the pwc summary of the related FASB standards covering Subtopics ASC 985-20 and ASC 350-40. It pretty much says that you expense everything on software that intended for selling until it's technologically feasible. Upgrades afterwards are capitalized, then amortized. Internal software development is capitalized. Like, if you build internal infrastructure, it likely has value, similar to PP&E. Differences is, Equipment is physical. The value of the software is the minds and time that went into it. I'm also certain that if you could prove to your auditors that your software is not worth much, you could probably expense more of the costs. This whole thread screams big tech company propaganda.
any amount paid or incurred in connection with the development of any software shall be treated as a research or experimental expenditure [and be capitalized and amortized over five years even if it is disposed of, retired, or abandoned]
I stand corrected. I've not seen GAAP vs IRS differ so much in my experience. Thanks for referencing IRS section 174 which clears things up. It appears to be quite strict on the 5/15 year amortization of software development expenses, and I now agree with OP that the change to section 174 as part of the TCJA is some bullshit.
We are small and so have been on a hiring freeze since 2022. I’d like to hire but the upfront cost is high.
For those around when this went into effect many business owners were surprised. Our accountants told us they seriously thought congress would fix this before it went into effect.
... they did that because that's exactly how Trump presented the change. The article points that out: this change was an attempt to lie to the congressional budget office, not intended to be an actual tax change.
Often the way this works is that some time bomb is added to the tax code so that forecasts for future tax revenue will be higher (justifying more spending in the short term) and congress then needs to remember to remove the time bomb before it blows up. So it isn’t that uncommon for these things to be reverted.
Everyone knows it’s a time bomb but the only way we can get an omnibus funding bill through Congress is reconciliation. That’s how our government has been functioning since like 1980 and almost nothing has been “reverted” since then except for the time bombs required to get through the reconciliation process.
Or in this case, not justifying extra spending, but justifying extra tax cuts for incomes above a half million dollars per year, inheritances of more than 5 million dollars, corporate profits, private jet flights, and a variety of other special tax cuts, mostly aimed at wealthy GOP donors.
There's another word for "educating" people until they reach the decision you want them to.
Brainwashing.
You know it's completely possible that people have a different outlook or opinion or perspective on things and that is why they disagree with you, not necessarily a lack of education?
Some people think these are good ideas and they vote or welcome them. Some people think they are bad ideas and they vote or oppose them.
No, education is not brainwashing. These terms have different definitions. One is by definition good, one bad. Words matter, definitions of words matter.
I’d love an education system that only teaches scientific consensus, and leaves moral conclusions to parents and households. However I’m sure you’d appreciate that’s not what we have.
For example: What’s the right way to live? How to relate to others? On what basis do we cooperate? What are/are not the overall goals of society? What’s the meaning of life? What is it to be a good person?
I would disagree. Many ideological worldviews are taught in the curriculums of the public education system. For instance, the idea that homosexuality is wrong (not a view I personally hold) is not tolerated. Students are taught that homosexuality is a valid, normal, way to live (and I happen to agree).
However, whether it is right or wrong, valid or invalid, is an ideological argument. Schools should simply teach that it occurs in humans, and leave the question of whether to accept or reject it to parents (there are plenty of other natural behaviours many of us reject on ideological grounds, polygamy for instance). There are countless other examples where ideology is taught as curriculum.
Fortunately our system is setup such that passionate folks like you can work to effect change. Go do it - volunteer for your local PTA, run for school board positions, show up to public hearings. Be the change you want to see in the world. God Speed my friend.
Having the ideology of the majority taught in schools is the outcome of a strictly democratic process like the one you’re describing. I’m suggesting that the separation between church and state be extended to any ideological teaching.
Maybe when churches start obeying the "no pushing any political candidate" laws and stop pushing things like "all scientists are evil", it would be a more acceptable position for those outside the church? Seriously - I've seen (not joking) statements like: all scientists know god exists, but deny it because they don't want to follow the laws of the bible. This was before I deconverted.
I’m directly responding to your point. Ideological education is brainwashing. In fact “brainwashing” is usually just another way of saying “an ideological education I disagree with”, also known as “indoctrination”.
Any conclusion that cannot be arrived at cannot be arrived at by a scientific process is inherently ideological. You’re saying flowers smell good. I say they smell bad. Neither of us is any more right than the other, since these are entirely subjective takes. The closest you could get is that flowers might smell good to x% of the population, which is what schools should teach. Not that they smell good or bad.
The distinction is small but important, since the latter conclusion doesn’t make any judgements about people with a legitimate minority opinion.
What about art,Mozart, the Dead shakespeare, south park and everything in-between? Those aren't science, but are some of the most vital components of education.
Education describing what cultural artifacts exist and how to produce them isn’t ideology. These are objective areas of study. Though lots of cultural education is ethnocentric, where minority cultures are less represented, making the education less well rounded.
Education is not about what cultural artifacts exist, but why and how. Music appreciation and art appreciation, music history and art history are a small part of a music or art Education for someone who is hoping to practice it.
> Polyester is still used extensively but it isn’t the replacement industry wanted
This is almost always the case. It's very rare that an improvement is better than the original in everything.
The new thing is always sold as universally better, and some times it takes a while for the mass consciousness of people to figure out that the new is better in some respects but the old is still better in others.
Sorbet helps. We’ve even created a typed HTML template engine and it helps catch a lot but also allows using the Sorbet LSP to rename things and of course correct autocomplete.
A nice example of this is Masamune Shirow, of Ghost in the Shell fame. If you go through the interviews, most of his inspiration comes from early scientific research and engineering debates that he internalized and integrated into a coherent and compelling vision of the future.
This is no small feat, he is extremely influential in that he exposed whole generations of people to these ideas and cutting edge research fields, and many researchers today probably chose their fields based on the ideas exposed in his art.
But did he get there before the researchers ? I'd say no. And he doesn't need to, what he did is incredible in other ways already.
PS: too many people assume that scientists or engineers don't have imagination nor project their ideas into the future. That would be misguided.
Did Arthur C Clark "beat the scientists" when he wrote about geosynchronous radio communication satellites in 1945? This was 12 years before humanity had launched _anything_ into orbit, and 20 years before we launched a communications satellite to geosync orbit.
Did he "get there before the researchers"? I'd say "that question makes no sense".
Mathematicians certainly "beat him" to the realization that orbital periods depend on distance, and could obviously range longer and shorter than 24 hours. Physicists certainly "beat him" to calculating the altitude of a 24 hour orbit of earth. Engineers almost certainly "beat him" to the idea of satellite radio communications.
This is kinda cheating though. Clark was a physicist as well as a fiction author. He even calculated the delta-v needed to launch to geosync orbit and compared it to the German V-2 rocket.
We don’t use it though. Elm 0.19.1 just works. New packages and plenty of support. It’s difficult to comprehend in a world of endless updates that maybe something doesn’t need updates.
After years of looking at APL as some sort of magic I spent sometime earlier this year to learn it. It is amazing how much code you can fit into a tweet using APL. Fun but hard for me to write.
It's not as extreme but I feel similarly every time I write dense numpy code. Afterwards I almost invariably have the thought "it took me how long to write just that?" and start thinking I ought to have used a different tool.
For some reason the reality is unintuitive to me - that the other tools would have taken me far longer. All the stuff that feels difficult and like it's just eating up time is actually me being forced to work out the problem specification in a more condensed manner.
I think it's like climbing a steeper but much shorter path. It feels like more work but it's actually less. (The point of my rambling here is that I probably ought to learn APL and use it instead.)
Indeed numpy is essentially just an APL/J with more verbose and less elegant syntax. The core paradigm is very similar, and numpy was directly inspired by the APLs.
I don't know APL, but that has been my thought as well - if APL does not offer much over numpy, I'd argue that the I'd argue that later is much easier to read and reason through.
If you acquire fluency in APL -- which granted takes more time than acquiring fluency in numpy -- numpy will feel bloated and ungainly. With that said, it's mostly an aesthetic difference and there are plenty of practical advantages to numpy (the main one being there is no barrier to entry, and pretty much everyone already knows python).
I thought that too, but after a while the symbols becomes recognizable (just like math symbols) and then it's a pleasure to write if you have completion based on their name (Uiua developer experience with Emacs). The issue with numpy is the intermediate variables you have to use due to using Python.
>Afterwards I almost invariably have the thought "it took me how long to write just that?" and start thinking I ought to have used a different tool.
I think there is also a psychological bias, we feel more "productive" in a more verbose language. Subconsciously at least, we think "programmers produce code" instead of thinking "programmers build systems".
> All the stuff that feels difficult and like it's just eating up time is actually me being forced to work out the problem specification in a more condensed manner.
Very well put!
Your experience aligns with mine as well. In APL, the sheer austerity of architecture means we can't spend time on boilerplate and are forced to immediately confront core domain concerns.
Working that way has gotten me to see code as a direct extension of business, organizational, and market issues. I feel like this has made me much more valuable at work.
I tried it out. Fascinating language and a completely different paradigm. The language itself is familiar, but the structure of the program is different - no files – all functions are in a database and their history. I found the language a bit difficult to navigate, but that is probably because of my experience of work with files, and having tools based on files.
> While at SGI, Tarolli, Sellers, and Smith had all had some exposure to SGI’s Reality Engine, and with video games (especially the PlayStation) moving toward 3D graphics, all three saw the potential for consumer 3D acceleration.
Were they exposed to early versions of the Playstation? It wasn't publicly released until after 3dFX was formed.
While working at Virgin games in 92 we did see some demos of 3D gaming, but I can't recall who the manufacturer was.
Playstation was in development and was released in japan almost a year before 3dfx released their first card. It's reasonable to draw that someone could have had experience working on the playstation graphics system prior to moving over and creating 3dfx. The fact they were building a prototype system for Sega as well means they were likely involved in that space before. SGI also licensed the CPU to sony for the playstation and back then the CPU would have done most of the graphics workload for the playstation - similar to an APU today with even less segregation between gpu and cpu.
https://ssballiance.org/about/engage/
And Michelle Hansen was an early organizer https://x.com/mjwhansen
If you work at all in energy, the Clean Energy Business Network is also proactive in fighting for change. A couple of years ago they put me touch with Ron Wyden's staff. The Democrats are almost universally opposed to what was added to Section 174.
https://www.cebn.org/media_resources/house-republicans-advan...
Fight this thing - it is terrible. Not just for software but any innovative business in the USA.