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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • You’ve obviously gotten the base level answer, but to add some color here - certain types of food, such as dried pasta, rice, beans, grains, high proof alcohol, vinegars, and basically anything frozen to name a few, never spoil in the sense that they’re unsafe to eat.

    Flavor, however, is an entirely different matter. Just ask anyone who has eaten freezer burnt food.

    Pretty much any high proof alcohol will fall into this category. And, if it’s unopened, it should retain most of its flavor for a very long time. Once opened, however, it can deteriorate relatively quickly, depending on how it was stored.







  • As an interviewer, I think that certs are only useful if you take the test with a different company than you studied with. So I don’t think I’d care if you have a coursera cert, because I’d assume it just meant you finished the course that you paid for.

    It’s worth noting that some coursera courses are created and maintained by actually accredited institutions, and some courses qualify as college credit with ACE accreditation. Also, many tech certifications host their courses on coursera too, like microsoft has official azure cert courses on there.

    That doesn’t necessarily mean anything for any given random cert, though, because that means that the entire site is a pretty big grab bag in terms of the usefulness of their certs.





  • If you invest 80 million and make 80 million in return, it’s a wash, and you wouldn’t pay any taxes because you didnt make any money.

    You would have to invest 80 million in a movie, scrap it, and then 80 million in another movie, which goes on to make 160 million in order to have 80 million in profits to offset with an 80 million write off. This would result in a net $0 made for tax purposes.


  • you can’t just write off anything you want. You only get to write off certain things, but at the end of the day, a tax write off is just a tax deduction for how much you need to pay, in the same way any normal person paying their taxes does. Just like with personal taxes, you can just reduce your tax liability down to 0 if you get enough deductions.

    Corporations obviously work differently than for a normal person, but the same basic principle applies.

    Edit: i suppose i should clarify - You can take deductions for investment losses. Normal people can even do this. What you’re referring to would be a deduction along those lines, where you’re “writing off” a loss on your taxes. If you invest $100 in stock, and sell when the value is $50, you took a $50 loss, and can deduct those loses from your tax burden, because you’re required to pay taxes on 50 less dollars that year.




  • You’re talking about XMPP, and it was google with google chat that people refer to with it.

    That said, there’s a lot of details that story people throw around about google killing it that lacks some details. Specifically that the premier service that used and developed the standard, jabber, was acquired by cisco like 8 years before google supposedly killed it, which i would argue affected it far harder than google chat did.

    It’s also lacking a lot of modern features that were becoming staple around the time that it was killed; i.e. QoS, assured delivery, read receipts, and a few other things. I still don’t think the protocol supports them.

    Also, the protocol still exists and is used. It’s used by microsoft in skype for business, it’s also the IM protocol for lots of gaming platforms like origin, playstation, the switch (for its push notifications for their online service), League of legends, fortnite, and others. It’s still a reasonably popular standard when it comes to chat programs, though none of them that i’m aware of use the actual federation piece of it to talk to each other.

    While the tactic alluded to does exist (“embrace, extend, extinguish”), i’ve never been necessarily convinced that google “kiled” xmpp, as its been around a long time and continues to be for various reasons. Even with google chat, it was never a ‘front end’ thing many users even thought about, because it’s back end frameworks tech, and it continues to be so in lots of different places today. I’m reasonably sure that the people who get upset about it and proclaim google killed it are basically just upset that it didn’t become the defacto chat standard today, which i would argue almost nothing is the defacto standard anyways, unless you count discord which kinda came out of nowhere like a whirlwind and took over the chat space and has nothing to do with any XMPP drama.

    Ultimately, its up to you (whoever is reading this) to look into the facts of the matter and decide for yourself if that’s what really happened, but keep in mind, the people who usually repeat the anecdote about how google killed it have an agenda to push. I’m personally skeptical, because there’s reasons for google to have dropped it (see mentioned limitations above), and even back then, it wasn’t that outrageously popular. In fact, i would argue its more widely used today than it was back then, but i have no hard numbers on that.