Believe me, I understand how impossibly frustrating it can be to represent a minority/contrarian view in an internet discussion on an inflammatory topic, but turning over the chessboard and storming off—which is what deleting comments and leaving spiteful remnants in their place amounts to—is not a positive contribution.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

If person A slaps person B and person C goes "I didn't experience anything. There are no slaps in this company", does that sound reasonable?

Such (pro)active denial usually indicates the denier has something to hide. Now that may not be the case here. But assuming you're right about this not being a Google problem but just small pockets like sexual harassment and racism.

Doesn't google still hold talks about racism & sexual harassment? I'm pretty sure they do. So why the voice against this talk, and this issue specifically?

If something bad is occurring inside Google, then of course it is Google's problem.

Whether or not it's ocurring I don't know, but to think that just because they have training materials saying something is bad and absolutely not to be tolerated means that it's necessarily in practice not tolerated is very naive!

The article doesn't suggest it is a problem unique to Google. It suggests that Google's efforts at DEI, which you are telling us are industry best, have a blind spot on this subject, as evidenced by the way they handled this situation. A story that sounds plausible to me.

I think the discussion should be had anyways. There might be some value that comes out of it. Like in my own case, I'm on the losing end of these policies in theory despite having very serious disadvantages in my life that aren't on the list of things to account for. Broadening the definition of diversity could alleviate feelings people have that they're not being treated fairly. But because we aren't willing to have difficult conversations about this stuff we have a supreme court case about it instead.

cough...'wealth inequality'...cough

An AP analysis finds that most foreign workers with H-1B visas are paid less than their American counterparts. But for most non-computer science occupations, foreigners are paid more.

https://apnews.com/afs:Content:873580003

Just like I can't blast my music tastes on others, not everyone should be subjected to insane Eric Andre humor

It was much better when memegen was a force for positive google culture, such as when somebody exposed just how bad hello.com's static content was or how dumb google+'s policies were.

I would expect Google to have a non-negligible Russian and Ukrainian community.

I've had fellow team members subject to extreme verbal abuse by managers who would stop by their desk and say absolutely horrible things to them in their native language while maintaining otherwise perfect composure. Threatening their visa status, threatening their family reputation, or just threatening to fire them. I've also learned of the out-of-work social pressure they can face because their communities are smaller and insular and so they interact with these folks outside of work, and there can be power dynamics extending to those places that are just not at all visible to other employees or leadership within the organization.

Those peers have had to suffer quietly some of the most abusive workplace relationships I've ever been adjacent to.

Just because you don't see it, doesn't mean it isn't happening.

Another thing that I've learned, is that companies very often talk to the most about the things they suck at the most. For example, one firm that I worked for touted how everything was based on Teamwork. There were teams for everything. Every employee was expected to be on at least 5 teams. 3 "position related" and 2 "organizational" (e.g. The Birthday Part Team). Your annual evaluation wasn't based on your direct manager at all, it was entirely based on feedback from your "teams".

Needless to say, I've never seen a less team-oriented culture in my life. Every single team was entirely dysfunctional. Nothing got done. Epic levels of in-fighting over every little thing.

Anyhow, people usually talk the most about their insecurities. So, just because it's being talked about, with tons of posters and "trainings", doesn't mean anything truly effective is being done. Probably just the opposite.

ps. As a fellow fan of "edgy" humor, you just gotta learn that work isn't where your edgy sense of humor belongs. Even in the "edgy humor" industry, you'll find that people don't like it mixing with "the job". It's how you get fired or have your career ruined. Regardless of Google's internal HR policies, you're gonna need professional references at some point, and if you've annoyed or creeped everyone out, it's going to be a self-limiting behavior. It doesn't matter if you work at Google, or a truck stop, or a comedy club. Be professional, be inclusive, be friendly. I know a lot of people are going to disagree, but the simple fact of the matter is that you aren't as funny as you think you are, and you probably don't have the ability to "read a room" the way a world-famous entertainer does. Even they get it wrong.

Follow the money. Google has a lot to lose if they discriminated against black people or gay people. Google has, or at least had, little to lose by allowing discrimination against dalits. Never forget that all major corporations are essentially money-generating psychopaths and if they stood to make a buck by building death camps for left-handed people they would break ground tomorrow.

Would you say the same thing to someone facing racism at work? To Oliver Brown?

Professional athletes pay taxes to every state where they play a game.

You are advocating for evasion of taxes as well as working in a country on a tourist visa. In the US that can get you as lifetime ban.

EDIT: the company you work for has to pay things like payroll taxes and unemployment to the country as well, unless you are a contractor. So the company itself is on the hook if you are working from another state/country.

The same is not true of businesspeople.

Programmers do not pay taxes to every state in which a hotel is situated in which they write a line of code.

Corporate salespeople do not pay taxes to every state that hosts a conference in which they close a deal.

CEOs do not pay taxes to every state that hosts an event at which they speak to the public and recruit a new staff member.

Perhaps the tax authorities expect them to, but in general this is simply not done, any more than your bartender is claiming their cash tips.

It is perfectly legal for tax authorities to demand taxes for EVERY ONE of your situations you mention. They usually give a certain leeway because it’s impossible to catch every instance but if you blatantly disregard the tax laws in the country where you are at, you are setting yourself up for legal troubles.

Just because you can do it because the authorities don’t pursue it doesn’t mean that you can do it. You are saying “do it because no one will catch you” is advocating for tax evasion. You can also commit murder and possibly get away with it, it doesn’t mean that you didn’t commit murder.

State income tax is not the only burden employers are expected to shoulder.

I didn’t tell anyone to do anything. Please stop claiming this, it is false.

I’ve re-read it literally six times since I posted it.

You are mistaken, and have taken your own assumptions about what I was intending to communicate or perhaps implying (such as the idea that I was referring to interstate or international travel) as literal fact about what I did actually say.

This is objectively an error.

I did not advocate nor instruct anyone to do anything.

Please read my comment again (carefully) and consider redacting your false accusation.

Your comment in case you edit or delete it:

“ It's also possible to leave your mailing address the same (I like to use a post box) and blur your background on calls and use a VPN router and simply... not tell anyone. Where you sleep really isn't anyone else's business. This whole "you can't work from $PLACE while remote, it's illegal!" thing is super overblown. Just keep your mouth shut and live your life. Your coworkers/customers have no need to know with regards to your physical location.”

From the outside, I think the original author might be implying that it isn't anyone else's business and I will comply with proper tax filings.

I live in Canada, not the USA. My understanding with the IRS is that as long as you properly file with your primary residence and pay owed taxes everything is fine. This assumes you're legal to work for the entity there.

If you work at a company that says, you must live in New York, but you move to Austin, why should the employer be able to say no to that if you're hired under a remote contract? I hear the arguments of security, customer contracts, but then you have executives who travel for work outside of even the country and continue to do work. Double standards.

Even living in another state, why is the employer a part of this conversation? I don't think employers should be apart of the conversation of knowing if an employee is eligible to work for them or not. It should be the government who provides an employee number and as long as you have a valid one the employer shouldn't be involved.

For withholding taxes, the same thing, the employer should pay to the government in reference to the employee number, government withhold and deposit with the individuals configuration.

I know the argument is on the company's liability side regarding state laws, but those should be governed where the entity and employer contract is, not the individual's location.

For example, NY state had VERY different laws and obligations when it comes to a money transfer service. If you transfer money and you aren’t registered in NY state then you obviously don’t need to obey the regulations. For example all board member of the money transfer company need to submit financial documents.

However if an employee moves to NY, then the entire company would fall under the blanket of that because the company would need to register itself in NY. This is just 1 example. Colorado has laws regarding giving pay ranges on job postings. Many jobs no longer advertise in Colorado now because of it because they don’t want to fall under that blanket.

How does NY state enforce their regulation on a company that isn't an entity in that state? If the company is not physically there with an office and has no registered entity there why do they have to comply to anything when they hire someone from that state? Would the employment contract not have a section saying that the contract will be governed by the state of the company entity located in X state (Non-NY)?

They can also issue tax warrants that can seize your out of state entity’s money from an out of state bank account.

These are commonly issued without any burden of proof and banks are legally required to obey them, so it allows any tax authority in any state to rob your account at any time without any evidence of wrongdoing.

This happened to me once; the state of Indiana whole-cloth fabricated nonexistent tax liability because I didn’t file a form with them, and stole all of the money I had in the world out of my Chase bank account in New York. I almost lost my home. Every claim they made was fictitious. Chase charged me $150 or so on top for carrying out the robbery.

Months later, after spending dozens of hours on the phone and filing many forms, I got most of the money back, less $700 or so in “collection fees” (printing and mailing letters is apparently extremely expensive in Indiana), and of course the bank fees.

Now I don’t keep money in banks.

You'll also note that the concept of "the place you reside" is somewhat of a leaky abstraction. Where do you reside if you own 12 flats in 12 different countries and spend 30 days in each of them per year?

Where do you reside if you are actually completely homeless and spend a month each in a different AirBnB living out of a suitcase in 12 different countries in a given year?

The case of having two or three homes in two or three different jurisdictions is a common one, though it usually has some convoluted rules for which qualifies as your "domicile" or "tax home".

In Europe, we have freedom of movement for goods and services, special tax status still has to exist between (for example) Denmark and Sweden, for Swedes who travel the bridge to Denmark to work. -- I believe this is called the Oresund agreement.

You must have a primary residence and you must spend 51% of your time there. Other countries in Europe do not permit working from them unless it's temporary, I believe you have 3 months to register with the local tax office.

For example, during the recent tax year I moved, my accountant filed my taxes in two states for before and after the move.

Typically, you designate the number of days in each location.

The key term here is "reside". We'll get back to this in a bit.

> Professional athletes pay taxes to every state where they play a game.

You are confusing tax-at-source with residence based taxation. Which is fair enough because many countries try to do both.

For the purposes of these next few paragraphs, lets say that country X is your country of residence for tax purposes and country Y is where you happen to be performing some work temporarily.

Source-based taxation means that if you are paid from a source in country X (or the income you make has a sufficiently strong connection to country X), then you pay tax to country X on that income. Typically the tax is withheld by the payor as opposed to the payee needing to file a tax return. This is what applies to your example of professional sportspeople. There's a very clear link - you play the sport in country X, you get paid by the competition in country X and you pay some tax to country X. This income might also be taxable in your country of residence, but that's a different issue where tax treaties and paid-foreign-tax deductions come into play.

With remote work for a foreign employer getting paid into a foreign bank account where the work doesn't have much connection to the country, the link is less clear. For short stays, many countries will not consider this to be locally sourced income. See this example from the Australian Tax Office which answers this very question (https://www.ato.gov.au/General/COVID-19/Support-for-individu...). Note that in this case, you are still only paying tax on locally sourced income and not worldwide income.

Then there is the question of "tax residence". Different countries have different rules about this and residence is not "exclusive" (so you can be multiple-resident if you're unfortunate in how you set up your affairs). Tax residence in most places happens after a fixed period of stay in the country (typically 183 days) and/or if you have "residence ties" to that country. "residence ties" is typically a multi-factor balancing test, which includes things like owning real estate, supporting a spouse and dependents who continue to live in that country, having a fixed address in that country, having your essential social connections (club memberships, service subscriptions etc) run out of that country, nationality etc. Short non-successive trips to a country don't usually create residence ties. Most countries follow this model (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_taxation#Source_...). Then there's Eritrea, Hungary, Myanmar, Tajikistan, the United States for which citizenship automatically counts as tax residence, but usually there's offsetting procedures and tax treaties to avoid double taxation even if there might be double filing.

Then there's the "working on a tourist visa" question. This is unfortunately a significantly more murky area, especially when it comes to remote work. A good rule of thumb is that coming to a country for the purpose of remote work and not for the purposes permitted under a tourist visa or visa waiver is possibly over the line, but replying to some emails, attending a few meetings via call, fixing a bug here or there while you're mainly on holiday is likely to be fine. Of course the safest bet is not to do any work at all, but if we were to apply some common sense here, it would be absurd that you get an entry ban for the apparent crime of replying to an urgent email from your boss or colleague while on holiday.

Then there's the question of payroll taxes and unemployment/health insurance contributions to be paid by your employer. I don't know very much about this, but I think a starting point in the analysis would have to be whether your foreign corporate employer is subject to any sort of personal or tax jurisdiction by the country that you're in at all. Maybe someone else will fill in on this one.

The fact that Instagram is copying them is sad.

When I first started watching TikTok videos, I got the videos of 20-somethings dancing to the same song over and over and over. It was annoying. But now my "feed" is largely chefs making interesting dishes, like-minded people with opinions on politics (yes, I know echo chambers are dangerous), wood working, lawn care and pressure-washing videos for that dose of satisfaction, and then your random 10-second bytes of this generation's "America's Funniest Home Videos".

I don't watch every day, maybe a few days a week. But when I'm done watching, I'm usually grinning and feeling like it was time well spent, emotionally.

To each their own.

Or it somehow comes to understand that there's certain general topics I'm interested in more than others, but they're all seemingly variations on the same theme, just applied to different topic areas.

I'm either completely missing something or the death of TikTok will become the fact that it is so predictable that it's memeable. Inevitably someone will make a TikTok satirizing TikToks, and then everyone will move [back] to something else.

Social media sometimes feels like an echo chamber to me, never quite right. Blogs, websites, forums, and so forth (yes, YouTube) all make sense to me. Sites focused on bottlenecking communication all lose something key imho. It's like they're taking something meant to be supplementary and trying to force it as the main conduit.

I haven't seen a single "20-something nobodies dancing" video since the day I downloaded the app. All I get on my feed is DnD stories, interesting math, physics, and history facts, and the occasional standup comedy routine. Exactly the sort of things that keep me, specifically, engaged for far longer than I would like everytime I open the app.

Do a search for your actual interests, quickly swipe past the random things that pop up that you don't like, and soon, after a few days of this, you'll begin to see what tik tok's actually about.

Or, like.. don't. I mean, great that you're having a blast, but this is a literal endorsement to "design your own skinner box". It's small comfort to be able to choose the colours of the bars on your windows.

Perhaps you are engaging with these videos you are not interested in by finishing the videos, etc.

* China is still purusing zero COVID.

* There's a land war in Europe with Russia effectively cut off from the Western world.

* German manufacturing, once a workhorse, is being crushed by energy costs

* much of the developing world is swimming hard against the current just to stay alive.

I don't think we are in a situation analogous to 1947, of course, and I do think we are in or at least heading into a more-than-technical recession. But "irrelevant because that only happens after once in a lifetime extremely disruptive events" is a pretty... odd... take in 2022.

And—relatedly—a once-in-ever declaration of a recession of less than one quarter, because of how uniquely sharp the decline in output, employment, and all the recession-relevant measures was, even though it quickly reversed direction due to stimulus and other policy responses.

So it's kind of weird people today pretending that the 2-consecutive-doen-quarter thing has always been an ironclad definition of a recession.

Hmm, maybe Germany can solve this the same way they "solved" ballooning Berliner rents: just pass a law saying how much energy should cost. Simple. They do love regulations over there.

Or just ask Gerhard Schröder and the rest of their former chancellors who were in bed with Russia, to blow their hot air through the pipes this winter. They have enough of it.

The comment you replied to gave evidence that directly contradicts the OP comment.

It isn't used as evidence; it's used to manufacture pretext to justify collecting "real" evidence. SpotShotter is not an ignorant party: they understand that the service they sell to police departments is a pretextual laundromat for busting up whoever the police feel did the crime.

That's the crux of this case: SpotShotter is being asked to produce evidence that they are compelled to produce, and they'd rather take the loss in this instance (and continue to use it for parallel construction) elsewhere.

(If I'm being pedantic, "fruit of the poisonous tree" usually refers to illegally obtained evidence, which ShotSpotter is technically not. It's purely a source of investigatory pretext.)