If you could call it thinking, maybe.

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.

More likely this is posing and nothing else.

If it is something else, it's a threat, solicitation for bribes, or both

Yes. And no. AI is here to stay. Demand for hardware isn't going away. Companies and consumers are starting to dial in how they actually use and leverage the technology. Companies built on the hype around AI including hedge funds are going to definitely get a painful correction. AI is simply a tool and the faster companies see that, and learn how to use it correctly, the faster they will be able to profit from its use. It's not magic but it is powerful and useful.

Off topic but kind of funny to see the comments on here from people who've never seriously used it (in software development). And then the people who do use it and have realistic things to say about it, good and bad.

Beat feet, give food

Roller skating.
Ice Skating.
Downhill skiing.
Bobsledding.

All things which are pretty easy for a human to start doing but very very difficult to STOP doing. At least not safely and voluntarily.

I do not believe this is true.

It's true that the job of Accountant still exists, but it is not true that the number of humans employed to maintain and transact the the ongoing financial operation of a business in the 70s-80s is the same as the number today. In the 70s-80s we had entire rooms filled with "bookkeepers", accounts payable, accounts receivable, payroll, bursars, finance, etc. And we needed to hire multiple duplicates of them to run the books for every local branch, because so much of the work was still done tangibly, with actual sheets, actual ledgers, actual books. The functions they performed were separate from the Business Manager, Branch Manager, Store Manager, Director, Secretary, Filing Clerk, Data Processing, Information Systems, Operations, and other roles who back then were not expected to also have financial data analytics skills and maintain spreadsheets. People with those skills would have an edge in the management market, sure, but Financial Accounting or Economics degrees were never what made someone the Boss.

Today, Managers and Directors are using spreadsheets on a daily basis to generate analytics that report to dashboards for the VP/Exec level. They are entering their purchasing and costs into a centrally managed enterprise platform, or those data are automatically populated into the platform when a PO is submitted. They are not running their assessments and recommendations through a CPA in an office across the hall before making business decisions. Business execution is a software function. For large businesses you still have your folks that watch the budget, but you only need one set of them to oversee the entries that flow into the Internetworked enterprise platform.

Indeed, you now want to keep your few accountants centralized, closer to the executive team, and insulated from the general workforce, so your operational-finance executive decisions can be immediate and also discreet. You don't want every branch manager who goes to happy hour with their local accounting or payroll department to find out about the upcoming layoffs or bankruptcy because someone saw some numbers change.

So yes, Accountants still exist, but each business needs fewer of them, and for many businesses a huge amount of those bookkeeping duties are now expected to be done by people in everyday operational departments -- because now everyone at all levels of the hierarchy can use spreadsheets and software tools to run financial analysis and generate slide-deck infographics on their own. Or, again, all the budget/purchasing data is already in the enterprise procurement platform from the very first click, so a Director or VP doesn't have to "call down to the boys in Accounting and get them to run the numbers". They can just log in and look at departmental breakdowns while sitting on the veranda listening to the ducks in the pond.

They can't do that until they finish destroying the ACA

Given the price increases on the former and the price drops on the latter, soon it might be feasible

You ignored vulture capitalists buying the starter homes and the Airbnb epidemic

There are people starving on the streets NOW

Many require you to use the phone app for MFA, even if you're using a web browser.

I guess there's the option of just doing all your banking in person, at a physical branch location... or at least an ATM.

This is, of course, capitalism-worshiping nonsense. Corporations are legal fictions. Having bought one, you have become the owner of the entire fiction, including the name. They are SCO now in every sense that matters, and I say that as someone who used to run SCO software and who knows several former SCO employees. That SCO is dead, hopefully this SCO can also die soon, but they are legally the same SCO.