Companies should, in general, avoid keeping any user data one second longer than they legitimately need it. Data should be viewed as a liability more than an asset, and every company that achieves significant scale with user data soon realizes this, though some take longer than others to learn the lesson.

The reason it's a liability is because it exposes the company to an endless stream of warrants and subpoenas, and contrary to popular belief, the government does not pay for that data. In some cases the government might pay a portion of the expenses the company incurs in responding, but it's always still a net loss, and most of the time the government just shows up with a court order and says "Hand it over or be held in contempt of court". What makes it even worse is if companies actually want to be good stewards of the data and not hand over more than they should, they'll often get overly-broad requests and then have to go to court to fight to narrow or quash the requests.

This all gets very expensive. It's just a cost of doing business... but it's a cost that can be avoided if you don't have and can't get the data.

Encrypt everything, and arrange to destroy the keys when you no longer need the data is the best way to do it, too. Scrubbing large databases quickly and effectively is hard. Deleting a set of AES keys is a lot easier. This also means that you can focus your internal access controls on controlling which systems and employees can get the keys.

I'd encourage Ring to find ways to close the window of access even more.

The male/female ratio in China isn't that skewed, it's something like 106:100. A lot of it is probably the same thing you see in every other country, where both men and women lose social skills and have unrealistic standards of what kind of partner they are entitled to.

Right-wingers have been loudly cheering the inevitable economic downfall of California for years as its economy continues to grow. It must be so infuriating to them that Commiefornia just keeps getting richer.

"After 9 years as a US citizen, he could run for the US Senate. He would be 76 (or 74) years old.In short, it looks highly unlikely that he could (or even would) run for the US Senate."

Yeah, he would be way too young for our Senate.

The quote was from the Bavarian government guy, so it seems unlikely that he's concerned about Waymo's competitive worries.

Also, German regulators are very cautious, so I expect Tesla's camera-only and less-mature robotaxi service will have a harder time getting approved.

Well, given that Waymo has been testing for nearly 20 years and been operating commercially for six years, currently operating nearly 4000 vehicles in 11 cities doing 500k rides per week... there's not a lot of risk.

Roads in Munich aren't terribly different from roads in US cities. Stoplights work a little differently. Munich does get a little snow, but rarely very much and it almost never lasts long. If Waymo's vehicles can't deal with it they may just suspend service... though I expect they'll probably handle it fine. They're supposed to go live in Detroit and Minneapolis this year, and if they can handle the weather there (where just shutting down for snow is not an option), Munich will be no problem at all.

So, not much like OceanGate.

I feel bad for entry-level folks -- though continually surprised how many of them outsource so much of their thinking to AI themselves. It seems like most college students cheat with AI, making them less useful as entry-level employees.

The recording engineer only records (and maybe mixes) the audio that is generated, which is part of what I meant by "mechanical process", along with generating the audio. Dre could use AI to transform his ideas into digital audio tracks, obviating the recording engineer and the performers, and to then select and mold the results. This would still require talent and creativity, which was my point.

Caldera didn't buy SCO.

I didn't bother getting into the Novell situation or the fact that TSG didn't actually acquire the assets they'd have needed to do what they tried to do, since my goal was just to distinguish between SCO and TSG, but, yes, the details get pretty intricate.

If you were worried about being chased by kill bots, go and watch some videos from drone operators in Ukraine. Robots don't need feet for that job.

It's almost certainly all operational expense, same as the salary paid, which means it's "written off". But "write off" doesn't mean "it's like you didn't have to pay it", it just means that it's subtracted from revenues when calculating profits. Net is that writing something off saves about 21% (the corporate tax rate) of the amount written off.

It's the same as your personal taxes, more or less. When you donate to charity, you get to subtract the donation from your adjusted gross income. If you make $100k and donate $10k, then it's as if you made $90k. Supposing (for simplicity) you pay a flat 20% tax rate, and you didn't make the donation, you'd pay $100k * 0.2 = $20k in taxes. Having made the donation, though, you only pay $90k * 0.2 = $18k in taxes. You donated $10k and basically got $2k of it back from Uncle Sam so the donation only cost you $8k out of pocket. But you still ended up $8k poorer (but the charity is $10k richer!).

The principle is the same with corporate "write-offs", though the mechanics are different.

Silicon Valley companies will pay the $100k. The positions typically pay $500k+ (base + bonus + equity + benefits) and companies are accustomed to spending tens of thousands of dollars in addition to deal with the H1B filings, and for other immigration services, including fees for green card filings, etc. An additional $100k is painful, but since it's good for 6 years, they're already paying around $3M, so it's only a ~3.5% increase.

I used it quite a bit and found it pretty decent. I never used a modem, though, so you may be right about that.

Except time and willpower. However, the McDonald's analogy does hold up -- nobody is ever going to get rich flipping burgers at McDonald's, precisely because it requires so little skill to do that job, making McDonald's workers completely fungible. Since anyone can man a grill, no one is going to command a salary much more than what a high schooler will agree to do it for.