> Regulatory frameworks like SOC 2 and HIPAA require audit trails and evidence retention
Sidebar:
Having been part of multiple SOC audits at large financial firms, I can say that nothing brings adults closer to physical altercations in a corporate setting than trying to define which jobs are "critical".
- The job that calculates the profit and loss for the firm, definitely critical
- The job that cleans up the logs for the job above, is that critical?
- The job that monitors the cleaning up of the logs, is that critical too?
These are simple examples but it gets complex very quickly and engineering, compliance and legal don't always agree.
Thats when you reach out to your insurer and ask them their requirements as per the policy and/or if there are any contractual obligations associated with the requirements which might touch indemnity/SLAs. If it does, then it is critical, if not, then its the classic conversation of cost vs risk mitigate/tolerance.
depends, if you don’t clean up the logs and monitor that cleanup will it eventually hit the p&l? eg if you fail compliance audits and lose customers over it? then yes. it still eventually comes back to the p&l.
In Ted Turner's autobiography [0] (highly recommended) he describes how wealth individuals got around the very high income taxes in the 1960s-1970s:
- Person A is selling their company to Person B
- The total price is very high (let's say millions)
- I B pays A the millions, A will have to pay a large tax burden
- Instead, A "loans" the money to B so that B can "buy" the business
- This creates a stream of small payments (less tax), spread out over time
I mention this only b/c smart people will eventually figure out ways around these taxes.
For example, there are already "barter networks" in Scandinavia where Person 1 does plumbing for Person 2, Person 2 does legal work for Person 3 who in turn does accounting for Person 1. All so there is less income reported.
Also, uniquely in the USA, interest payments on debt can be deducted from your income. There are some caveats to deducting this from personal taxes rather than business taxes, but in general if you can show your personally used the loan for business purposes, you can use the Schedule C form to deduct the interest on it from your personal income to lower taxes paid.
In the NL the one who provides the loan is supposed to do that against a normal interest rate, which is a capital gain subject to tax. So this trick would not work here afaik, because now there is still a party paying taxes.
What about the "default on the loan" backdoor? Would that work?
Let's say I sell you my business for $1 million. You give me a loan for $1,2 million. The money is transferred into my account. I pay 2% interest for 10 years and then I default on the loan. You do nothing to recover the money.
I had a few colleagues in the UK that tried this to avoid taxes. The tax services generally don't look too kindly on that sort of arrangements. Searching for "Loan charge" should surface quite a few distressed stories.
This reminds me of a story about how veterans with PTSD from recent wars were reading the Odyssey b/c there is a point where Ajax describes a "flashback".
P.S. Almost every time I hear discussions about veterans and PTSD, the veterans say something like "having a therapist be someone who is ALSO a veteran and has seen combat is worth a million points"
(I'm sure there are therapists who are excellent and are not veterans, just pointing out what the veterans value).
Been using Gemini + OpenCode for the past couple weeks.
Suddenly, I get a "you need a Gemini Access Code license" error but when you go to the project page there is no mention of this or how to get the license.
You really feel the "We're the phone company and we don't care. Why? Because we don't have to." [0] when you use these Google products.
PS for those that don't get the reference: US phone companies in the 1970s had a monopoly on local and long distance phone service. Similar to Google for search/ads (really a "near" monopoly but close enough).
> A jeweler might have high material costs (gold and diamonds), an artist moderate material costs (paint and canvas), and a greeting card company low material costs (paper), but they all have "material costs".
There is a great line in the book Narconomics [0] that compares the "value added" of creating high end paintings to narcotics. He points out that the input (paint, coca leaves) are VERY cheap. The end product (high end paintings, cocaine) is very expensive.
(I believe he makes this point to show that raising the price of inputs slightly has no real bearing on the price at the end given the size of the margins)
Not sure how many people are aware that the newer Alexa devices have "presence detection" that uses ultrasound so they can detect when people are nearby. [0]
Heck, even Ecobee remote temperature sensors can do this.
Reminds me of the story about how the Google Nest smoke detector had a microphone in it. [1]
Not even the biggest privacy issue of using Alexa devices. I think listening you 24/7 is a bigger potential issue.
Not sure if Alexa has this, but cheap mm-wave wideband multi-GHz sensors(or radars more accurately) now enable more finely grained human presence detection and also human fall detection[1] with the right algos, so you can for example detect if grandma in the nursing home fell down and didn't get back up, but in a privacy focused way that doesn't resort to microphones or cameras. Neat.
>Reminds me of the story about how the Google Nest smoke detector had a microphone in it.
Vapes have microphone arrays in them to detect when you're sucking and light up the heating element. Cheap electronics have enabled a new world of crazy.
The Nest smoke detector microphone was never really secret. It was part of the monthly self test to determine if the alarm was working. It would send you a notification telling you it was going to sound the alarm and that it would be listening for the sound to confirm it was working.
How many people have Alexa devices vs wifi? I got gifted an Amazon Echo Dot some years ago. We set it up and switched it off later the same day because it felt creepy to have the thing listening to everything we said.
with a high speed camera any vibrating reflective object like a potato chips bag can become a weak microphone if you have line of sight even behind a soundproof window:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FKXOucXB4a8
At my first full time job in the early 2000s I was tasked with building a webscraper. We worked for law firms representing Fortune 500 companies and they wanted to know who was running "pump and dump" stock schemes on stocks using Yahoo Finance message boards.
At the time, I didn't know the LWP::Simple module existed in Perl so I ended up writing my own socket based HTTP library to pull down the posts, store them in a database etc. I loved that project as it taught me a lot about HTTP, networking, HTML, parsing and regexes.
Nowadays, I use playwright to scrape websites for thing I care about (e.g. rental prices at the Jersey Shore etc). I would never think to re-do my old HTTP library today while still loving the speed of modern automation tools.
Now, I too have felt the "but I loved coding!" sense of loss. I temper that with the above story that we will probably love what comes next too (eventually).
Sidebar:
Having been part of multiple SOC audits at large financial firms, I can say that nothing brings adults closer to physical altercations in a corporate setting than trying to define which jobs are "critical".
- The job that calculates the profit and loss for the firm, definitely critical
- The job that cleans up the logs for the job above, is that critical?
- The job that monitors the cleaning up of the logs, is that critical too?
These are simple examples but it gets complex very quickly and engineering, compliance and legal don't always agree.
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