I just happened to catch this at random a couple of months ago when I looked at my bill (I normally don't review my bill every month).
I called AT&T and they similarly to others' experience did not give any explanation as to why they permit third parties to initiate subscriptions without any explicit confirmation from users. Of course, I had them put on purchase block and refund my money, but I'm sure for everyone one of me there are 20 people who didn't notice or just happened to not look at their bill - I normally don't either. This is really unbelievable.
But this isn't even true of many groups at Google, where people are managed by young (admittedly generally very smart) hotshot product managers without an engineering background.
I admittedly don't know everything that goes on at Google, but last I heard, a PM would never be people-managing an engineer (although there's a separate "manager" track that sometimes ends up managing engineers), and all PM hiring required a CS degree or engineering background.
There was a period of time (roughly 2004-2007) where Google hired a bunch of managers without engineering backgrounds, but they discontinued that practice a long time ago because they found it doesn't work so hot. I've heard that many of the worst offenders have since attritioned away.
Why not also have an automated script for the vast majority of sites for which people don't upload their own summaries? First two paragraphs and last paragraph seem like they would do the trick 80-90% of the time.
Shrewd (though likely just very lucky and timely) choice of topic. Looks like they can either (i) take their talents to any one of 10-15 companies that desperately need improvement in this area OR (ii) create a very promising startup and perhaps get taken out in a talent acquisition.
It's also an issue of timing and deferral. Because one can offset short-term capital gains with capital losses, and individuals generally have absolute control over realization of capital gains, the effective rate on capital gains can effectively be zero or near-zero given sufficient liquidity, despite a statutory rate equal to the ordinary income rate.
This is cash that was taxed once in the foreign jurisdiction at whatever prevailing rate was in effect there. With the exception of the US, nearly all developed countries have territorial tax systems at which the rate on those foreign profits would be 0%.
A repatriation holiday would be a huge (and poorly targeted, considering nearly the entire benefit inures to about 10-20 firms) giveaway, but it's only discussed in the first place because of our strange worldwide corporate tax system.
It is not even clear that it is tax avoidance. In most situations the capital gains preference is meant to mitigate, and in fact only partially mitigates, income taxation at the corporate level.
Preferences for real estate and investment managers in the form of carried interest...well, that's another story.
I think it is more symptomatic of the terrible job market than anything else. For most jobs available today (talented engineers in NY/SV excluded) there are usually hundreds of applicants for almost any half-decent position, and so employers have the luxury of culling based on any non-protected class that has any sort of predictive value, even if the correlation is extremely weak.
If the economy ever turns around, I suspect this issue will disappear. I certainly don't recall this when unemployment was at 4%.
It almost seems backwards though. When unemployment is high, it is less likely for someone that is unemployed to be so 'for a good reason.' If unemployment is low, and you are unemployed for long periods of time, I would think that would be the time to raise questions, because it would presumably be easy to actually get a job.
I called AT&T and they similarly to others' experience did not give any explanation as to why they permit third parties to initiate subscriptions without any explicit confirmation from users. Of course, I had them put on purchase block and refund my money, but I'm sure for everyone one of me there are 20 people who didn't notice or just happened to not look at their bill - I normally don't either. This is really unbelievable.