The linked short story is barely 5 paragraphs long. You could have just read it instead of writing an insubstantial remark like this. It’s a fun anecdote about a famous programmer (Bill Atkinson).
Charitably I'm guessing it's supposed to be an allusion to the chart with cost per word? Which is measuring an input cost not an output value, so the criticism still doesn't quite make sense, but it's the best I can do...
This also applies for options exercised before the company reaches $50M in assets. And then the gain from a valuation from $50M to say $1B is all excluded.
Uneducated question, seems like Philadelphia has around $5B of revenue a year, and the transit deficit is ~$200M. I understand the city has to provide services and a lot of the revenue will be restricted as to what it can be allocated to. But with these orders of magnitude, why is the default expectation not for cities to fund their own transit with city tax revenue?
Much of the service being cut is the regional rail that primarily services the collar counties. Philadelphia will lose bus routes but the core of their transit will survive.
It’s Bucks, Montgomery, and Delaware Counties that will suffer the most from this.
Well that just confuses me more, if the losses are spread out across all these counties each with their own revenue, why isn't that the default place where money is allocated from?
Probably due to the impossible complexity of coming to an agreement on proper funding allocation between the 7 different counties served by SEPTA, especially since 2 of those counties are not even in Pennsylvania... and then having to re-debate that on a periodic basis as ridership trends shift over time.
SEPTA was formed by the state, and its existence benefits the whole state by enabling economic activity (which then leads to more state-level taxes), reducing congestion on roadways maintained by the state, etc. And if my back-of-the-envelope math is correct, nearly 1/3rd of PA's population lives in counties served by SEPTA.
That's a very unsatisfying while probably correct answer. I wish voters stopped accepting this kind of stuff being "impossibly complex" for government.
I just don't think that's realistic when the number of stakeholders grows too high. How do you accurately determine how much each county should pay? How do you allocate funding for commuters who live in one county but work in another?
When a transit agency serves the state's largest population center and economic center, it seems reasonable for its funding to be a state-level concern. Especially when it also serves other states, and additionally ~40% of the tracks used by SEPTA are owned by Amtrak, which is Federal. County-level officials are just not the best layer to interface with all that.
Great read. I have a tiny, inconsequential, possibly wrong correction. You had assumed that the “Negative” word on the internal search engine screenshot was sentiment analysis. I think it was instead a button to report the post in the internal system as a “negative” result as in, not actually matching the search they were trying to do. Sentiment analysis doesn’t seem like it would be very useful in this scenario.
I disagree. The icon of "Negative" is of a red human head. Who would choose that icon for "False positive"? IMO it makes more sense as "Negative sentiment"
Direct File was rolled out gradually as a pilot program. It was also only available for taxpayers in 12 states.
My guess: since the tax code is so complicated, they probably wanted to support the simplest and most common filing cases in the first release. Handling all the edge cases would delay the launch, and prevent them from collecting feedback. If the feedback and demand was positive for v1, they could expand the surface area in the future.
Assuming I am reading this Census table correctly, 2023 Table A-2 [0] says 76% of the US has a household income under $150k. So as an initial deployment, covering 3/4 of the country as the first filter is not terrible.
From what I can tell the effective value of the "Cache Exchange Fund (After fees and expenses)" portfolio will be $660,282 once liquidating to actually use the money? Is the point that this allows waiting for a possible lower tax rate in the future? Or is the point that if the holder was really strapped for cash in this exact moment, they would have to pay less taxes now?
Also this PDF contains a detail I haven't seen reported elsewhere:
> Furthermore, on Monday, April 7, 2025, while my client and my team were
preparing this disclosure, someone physically taped a threatening note to Mr. Berulis’ home door with photographs – taken via a drone – of him walking in his neighborhood. The threatening note made clear reference to this very disclosure he was preparing for you
It's an interesting detail because if true -- and I fully assume it is -- the intention likely wasn't to dissuade him from going public, but instead to make him look like a conspiratorial nut. When I first saw this story and heard that "drone shot of him / threatening note" I admit that I immediately assumed it was a flake, but on further details I think that was actually the reason for doing that.
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