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mppm commented on Many lung cancers are now in nonsmokers   nytimes.com/2025/07/22/we... · Posted by u/alexcos
nancyminusone · a month ago
Every time you look up something related to Radon, it's always cited as "the second leading cause of lung cancer after smoking"

I wonder if that's really true.

Radon is a big deal where I live. Most homes have a radon mitigation system which is a 20-watt fan that goes over your sump pump hole, and runs continuously to a vent on the roof.

mppm · a month ago
> Every time you look up something related to Radon, it's always cited as "the second leading cause of lung cancer after smoking"

> I wonder if that's really true.

That claim is in fact based on extremely poor research methodology. It is made by combining the linear no-threshold model of radiation damage (which contradicts everything we know about cellular repair and hormesis) with evidence from "case-control studies", a kind of retroactive hand-waving that has nothing whatsoever to do with a "controlled trial", despite the name.

mppm commented on The patterns of elites who conceal their assets offshore   home.dartmouth.edu/news/2... · Posted by u/cval26
phtrivier · a month ago
Is there a good primer on how this kind of offshoring works, for people ? I have notions of how tax evasion / optimization works (things like the irish-dutch sandwich, where you manage to pretend that Google does not make any money in France because it has to pay a very expensive license to Google Ireland , etc..)

But for offshoring, I'm clueless as to how manage to "reshore" the money, so to speak, so that you can eventually... Spend it to buy stuff. (Or isn't that the purpose of hiding the money ?)

mppm · a month ago
Maybe a bit late to comment, but for what it's worth: There is no primer that could be actually useful, because the "tax optimization" landscape is fragmented and constantly shifting. Everything depends on where you live, where you do business, how much much money is involved, etc.

But there is a central driving force behind it all: governments constantly fight for "tax justice" with one hand and create various "incentives" and exceptions with the other, in an effort to briefly gain the upper hand over other countries in the zero-sum game of attracting international capital. The former tends to plug all possible loopholes for the "ordinary wealthy", while the latter always leaves options for the truly big fish, they just don't stay the same decade-over-decade.

mppm commented on Grok 4 Launch [video]   twitter.com/xai/status/19... · Posted by u/meetpateltech
fumblebee · 2 months ago
If indeed, as the new benchmarks suggest, this is the new "top dog" of models, why is the launch feeling a little flat?

For comparison, the Claude 4 hacker news post received > 2k upvotes https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44063703

mppm · 2 months ago
[flagged]
mppm commented on Trump Organization announces mobile plan, $499 smartphone   cnbc.com/2025/06/16/trump... · Posted by u/srueg
mppm · 2 months ago
At the risk of stating the blatantly obvious, this will be a rebranded Chinese phone, if it happens at all. The photo on their website [1] is a quick and sloppy Photoshop job (note identical lenses and lack of flash), and the specs and pricing are totally implausible for a US-made phone. Compare that to the 2000$ Purism charges for their comically under-powered Liberty phone [2] that is mostly US-made.

1. https://trumpmobile.com/t1-phone 2. https://puri.sm/products/liberty-phone/

mppm commented on NASA Is Worth Saving   caseyhandmer.wordpress.co... · Posted by u/EvgeniyZh
jfengel · 2 months ago
The SLS was very effective as a subsidy to large aerospace and defense contracting firms.

That's not sarcasm. We do a lot of things that are strictly wastes of money, in order to ensure that we have more than we need of something. It's why we subsidize agriculture: we don't want "just in time" food production. We want too much of it, even if it means wasting some of it.

I don't know if we want to continue to subsidize Boeing, but on the other hand, I think America would feel weird if we didn't have a domestic airline manufacturer. Sure, we could buy them elsewhere, but do we want to?

(Answer: not if it's from the company that keeps screwing it up. But we can't just conjure a new one from scratch, one that doesn't mess up.)

mppm · 2 months ago
It's legalized graft, not a subsidy. The tens of billions flowing into SLS do not bolster productive capability in the civilian or military aviation sector, they tie up engineers in a nonsensical, dead-end project, and totally mess up incentives on top of that.
mppm commented on Being full of value‑added shit   feld.com/archives/2025/06... · Posted by u/rmason
pixl97 · 2 months ago
You meet a lot of people with no morals and no money.

You meet less people with morals and no money.

You meet even fewer with no morals and a lot of money.

And you meet almost no one with morals and a lot of money.

mppm · 2 months ago
I think you are misusing Berkson's Paradox here. It applies when you sample two extremes, i.e. when you look at the richest 0.1% and the most moral 0.1% and notice that the two appear mutually exclusive, even though they might actually be uncorrelated in the general population. When you look only at the richest 0.1% and notice their lack of morals compared to the general population, that is a legit correlation.
mppm commented on The time bomb in the tax code that's fueling mass tech layoffs   qz.com/tech-layoffs-tax-c... · Posted by u/booleanbetrayal
svara · 3 months ago
Taxes are calculated according to tax accounting rules, not IFRS, though?

I know of at least two Western European countries where you don't have to do that. Don't worry, we pay enough taxes either way ;)

mppm · 3 months ago
Yeah, seems I was wrong about that. Apparently most IFRS countries allow expensing R&D for tax purposes, regardless of accounting. Many even have an R&D superdeduction nowadays.

Sorry for the noise :(

mppm commented on The time bomb in the tax code that's fueling mass tech layoffs   qz.com/tech-layoffs-tax-c... · Posted by u/booleanbetrayal
svara · 3 months ago
Is this true even if you don't capitalize the immaterial IP asset generated by the R&D salaries on the balance sheet? Is that required in the US?

Otherwise I'm quite amazed that salaries can be carried forward as future expenses.

mppm · 3 months ago
Elsewhere in the world (under IFRS accounting rules) capitalization of R&D costs has been a firm requirement for a while. The US has been somewhat unique in allowing them to be expensed instead, until recently.
mppm commented on The time bomb in the tax code that's fueling mass tech layoffs   qz.com/tech-layoffs-tax-c... · Posted by u/booleanbetrayal
svara · 3 months ago
> For cash-strapped companies, especially those not yet profitable, the result was a painful tax bill just as venture funding dried up and interest rates soared

Can someone explain this? What taxes do unprofitable US businesses owe that this would be deducted against?

mppm · 3 months ago
If the business has some revenue, but is not yet profitable after deducting development costs, it can become profitable on paper (and owe tax) if R&D is capitalized instead.
mppm commented on MIT's Sodium Fuel Cell Powers Planes, Captures Carbon, and Outruns Batteries   scitechdaily.com/mits-sod... · Posted by u/joak
pacoWebConsult · 3 months ago
It's a little bit of a misnomer to say that electric aviation is infeasible on lithium ion batteries, not to mention hybrid & hydrogen fuel cell alternatives. They're obviously not flying transatlantic flights at the moment, but regional, small payload flights can already be flown fully electric and there's around a dozen companies working through certification processes globally.
mppm · 3 months ago
That depends on what kind of aviation we are talking about. An air taxi usable over 200km with 2 passengers is easy to achieve. But a minimally useful regional plane with 100+ passenger capacity is an entirely different matter, because it will be subject to the same regulations as conventional airliners. That is operational margin, winds, diversion and hold, etc. This means you probably need something like 2000km net range to be able to fly 500-1000km routes, which means you need close to 1000 Wh/kg batteries under reasonable assumptions for battery mass fraction and L/D-ratio.

u/mppm

KarmaCake day1092November 4, 2015
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