True, but only momentarily. At the end of the first depreciation cycle, assuming purchasing of hardware is not accelerating, you're depreciating 5x as much hardware over 5x the time, and your momentary bubble in the stock price is gone.

And even if hardware purchasing is growing right now, eventually, that will flatten out, and the above will be true.

The only real question should be whether the depreciation rate is reasonable. If you're still getting substantial use out of the hardware after five years, then depreciating it over 3 years is questionable.

Also, the more slowly you depreciate it, the less you save on taxes each year. Faster depreciation is beneficial if you think the tax rate will go down and you will lose the benefit of that depreciation. Slower depreciation is beneficial if you think the tax rate will go up and you will benefit more from depreciating it later. So this may also mean that these companies are expecting corporate income taxes to go up. Make of that what you will.

I have always through three years was too short for servers and network equipment. Especially nowadays that Moore's Law is slowing down, I think a 5-year depreciation period for servers makes sense.

For AI processors, though, I think three years might be too long given how much change is going on in that space.

Imagine the hilarity when tow trucks incorporate similar anti-theft systems...

Even in the UK/EU where merchant service fees are capped, once you start ordering in the 10's of thousands of Euro/Pounds... merchants start insisting on non-card payments because that 1% starts hurting at that volume.

Back in the day (early 00's) I ran a shop in Australia and I had to maintain accounts with my suppliers that needed to be paid off monthly. I did this via bank transfer (including a line of credit I could use for bank transfers). My card fees for sales would sometimes dwarf my staffing costs and this was 20+ years ago when a lot of people still used cash exclusively even when paying a few hundred bucks.

Most countries got rid of both problems years ago.

In the UK and many other developed countries a basic, fee free, bank account with a debit card is almost a human right. There is no law stopping you, in fact in the UK it's law that any resident has the right to open a basic bank account that must be free at the point of use (very few accounts have a monthly fee in the UK and those that do typically come with benefits that pay for it). No one here is unbanked except through choice. This is because a lot of transactions occur using interbank transfer (called "faster payments" in the UK) that again, is government mandated that everyone has access, free at the point of use. Your pay goes into your account using this system, bills, rents and repayments leave your account using this system.

Visa/MC hate it as they don't see a penny from this system.

The US is the only developed country I know of that does not have an inter-bank payment system that is free at the point of use. Although it seem the US is doing all it can to rid itself of its "developed" status.

Interbank transfer systems have all but eliminated cheques, I've never in 30+ years been paid for work with a cheque. The last time I received a cheque it was a refund from the DVLA after I sold a car (for the unused portion of road tax) and the last time I used a cheque was to buy a car in Australia in 2013 (Australia's interbank transfer system used to take 24 hours, it's now instant) and that was a banker's cheque, I've never used a personal cheque, given or received, in my 40+ years of existence and suffering upon the surface of this planet.

Unbanked is what we expect from developing countries... and cheques are an anachronism from the 50s.

Maybe it's proof of the existence of Afluenza and it's debilitating side effects. Doctor Payola recommends seeing two of daddy's contacts.

Aside from that, kids find way to game system. Not really anything new, I've seen this in the workplace for a few years. Some people use a marginal disability to openly skyve off work or shut down any criticism against them, it's a new move in a very old game though... People game systems, even when it harms a system that is meant to help people who genuinely need it. If you know a way to fix it without harming people who genuinely need help, I'm all ears.

It could be worse, a lot worse.

Imagine if those useless middle managers were tasked with doing something important rather than merely wasting the time of people capable of doing something important.

Probably stolen from the UK or Western Europe. Maybe even as far away as the US.

A lot of the UK's stolen cars end up in Eastern Europe, some even keep the UK number plates for that authentic feel.

LAG restrictions have been lessened or even gotten rid of in Australia and the UK. Air travel is not as bad outside the US.

Batteries are becoming a problem for airlines because people are entitled fuckwits and won't follow basic instructions (I MUST charge my phone no matter what people tell me) as they keep bringing damaged batteries on board which conflagrate. So they're getting banned at the insistence of airlines rather than governments.

I suppose my question is if you are going to go on at some length at how Home Assistant is some techbro nonsense, what do you see as the alternative that hits the same use cases:
- Centralized 'smart home' device management
- Does not lock you into a cloud connected dependency
- Does not lock you into a particular device or phone vendor
- Can implement various local automations without the device itself having to support things like schedules and so forth. E.g. turn off all lights still on at midnight, or reduce heating/air conditioning when everyone's phones leave a geofenced area, or start increasing it when I leave work so it's more comfortable by the time I get home.

You needed a handbook for that?

Anyone who ever went to a business meeting could've told you that.

By my experience, it takes only 4 things to make a meeting productive: a) someone is in charge of the meeting and moderation, b) that someone had time to prepare, c) everyone in the meeting has received an agenda with enough lead time to have read it and (if necessary) prepare their part, at least a bit and finally d) there is at least a simple protocol of the meeting for those who couldn't attend, those who dozed off in the middle, and those who claim next week that something else was agreed on.

Well....

shucky darn.

John Deere remotely disabled a bunch of tractors that Russians stole from Ukraine in 2022.

Now Porsche can do the same thing to all of their vehicles in Russia.

In my experience, with only rare exceptions, the limit should be three. More than three, and you are likely involving people working on multiple projects who don't really need to know what the people on other projects are doing beyond what an email every few months would provide.

Those rare exceptions are situations where you have a meeting of managers in an org or similar with each other, where everybody is working towards the same goals, and they're planning towards those goals.

Or the way I usually describe it is that the usefulness of a meeting with n participants is one over the square of n minus 2 for all values of n greater than 2.

Time for the US to nationalise all things vehicle. Registration and taxes. Emissions and smog checks. Safety inspections. Dealership laws and regulations. Driver licensing (including for trucks, busses etc). Road rules. The lot.

Depends on what the person was doing at the time. If the person who didn't pull the trigger was holding up a liquor store and the police shot the wrong person, there's at least arguably mens rea, which is how we get things like the felony murder rule. Extending that to involuntary manslaughter when the person didn't actually pull the trigger but directly created a situation where the police did seems like not that much of a stretch to me.