This makes an interesting assumption: that being told by any member of government that you're legally required to do something, means you're required to do that thing, and that they're definitely not making those things up as they go.

But that's not the case, is it? The government can say that it's legally required to give Donald Trump a gold bar every Sunday. That wouldn't even be too far off from the outlandish claims we've seen over the past year. The Trump administration is, as Chapelle would put it, a habitual line stepper.

Minor correction, expat income is deductible up to (currently) $130k under the FEIE. After that it's taxes as usual. There's also an array of other mandatory forms like FBAR for foreign accounts, and the nightmare that is form 5471, with absolutely wild allowances for the IRS to impose penalties, often with no statute of limitations and per-violation fines. For example, a US citizen with multiple bank accounts and a mistake in FBAR reporting for multiple years running will be liable for the (iirc) $10,000 fine for each bank account, and each year (e.g. 4 accounts, 8 years, $320,000 fine).

Living and doing business overseas is as a US citizen is a high risk endeavor.

FEIE is only one of the options for avoiding federal income tax. The other is the Foreign Tax Credit, which has no such limit: https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/f1116.pdf. If the place an American lives and works has a higher income tax rate than the US one, in practice he will not face any tax liability, regardless of income level.

Those AOL prices were insane. It has admittedly been so long that I'm not sure I trust my memory, but I seem to recall per-minute pricing that could rack up over $20 per hour just from playing any of their text based games. I begged and begged my parents to let me just try one for a few minutes and they very wisely said absolutely not.

A few years went by and suddenly playing MUD / MOOs was free. I honestly miss those days, text-based has a vibe that no graphical game can ever replicate.

My dad worked for a studio that sold a game to WorldPlay. WorldPlay games charged by the hour, but the developers received AOL accounts that bypassed this charge. Theoretically I could play any WorldPlay game for free, but mostly I played my dad's game, which was free anyway as some kind of "check out our new game" introductory promotion.

There was a small regular community which got wiped out when WorldPlay started charging for it. The studio got more free accounts and gave them to regular players so that the game didn't just evaporate immediately, which meant everyone suddenly had a minor name change. After that, the game evaporated.

Yeah, so many of us with stories of angry parents over too large an AOL bill. If I recall correctly, my month where I did that was in Modus Operandi, the detective themed text game. I don't remember exactly how I spent all that time in MO one month, but I know part of how I spent that many hours was logging into my AOL account from my grandparents' place and a friend's place, in addition to what I was doing at home, which contributed to why my parents hadn't tracked that much "screen time" in that era. Amazing to consider how many things changed since then, but also how many of those concerns are the same even if the reasons for the concerns are different.

Yes, it was crazy. $2/hour in 1997 dollars! Agreed… I think only Pubg has come close to replicating the intensity of emotion in PvP (which was my main interest in playing)

I assume TikTok and similar apps are always doing this stuff.

The thing I'm curious about is whether the GDPR / DSB complaints are likely to have any result. Is that likely to just result in some cost of business fines and TikTok goes on with life? Or could those complaints bring about substantial repercussions?

The expected result is that the complaints will rot in the queue for years and eventually either closed on a technicality or result in a token fine. That's the reality of GDPR "enforcement".

The population as a whole has a rapidly dwindling appetite for tech billionaires trying to impose "tough decisions and sacrifices" on everyone else, so Bill's probably in the right lane. He has already been the target of a vast array of conspiracy theories.

I don't know if that's accurate to software developers, but it makes me cringe a bit as a game developer. I upgraded from a 1060 to 4060 and suddenly did waaaay less optimization; it just wasn't top of mind anymore. Of course, that bill still comes due eventually..

I've read that there are tribes who spent a month or more at the peak of biting insect season hiding in their tents and filling them with smoke. The bugs swarm so thickly that they can kill cows. Not by biting them to death, but by clogging their nostrils until the cow suffocates.

You're being downvoted but I get where you're coming from.

The dismay is from not needing to speculate, wonder or theorize about why he did this pardon. It's a quid pro quo pardon for helping the Trump family make billions of dollars in under a year using the office of the president. The corruption is entirely flagrant and open.

Yeah, it's a forum of smart people, but none of those smarts are oriented to dealing with this kind of problem. There's a system but it's non-functional, laws but they're ignored, the tools are raw political and social power. It's going to take a while to figure out what to say and do about the slide from normal, functioning democracy into semi-theocratic banana republic.

Yeah the whole "successful businessman" schtick is pretty much a trope in US elections. Before Trump it was Ross Perot, before Perot it was others like Wendell Wilkie. Trump had that going for him AND the celebrity status like Reagan. These things are basically status buffs for elections in the US.

Yeah I'm similarly confused by the idea that it was great a decade ago. SoMa, which more or less includes Moscone, has been gritty for at least 20 years and probably much longer than that.

Similar for a lot of other parts. Market anywhere between 6th and City Hall has been grimy for a long time. The Tenderloin, I'm assuming, has been the way it is for a century (since it derives its name from police getting higher pay for patrolling it). That stuff is all stumbling distance to the downtown core, tourists and business visitors.