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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • This.

    You’d be surprised how much of a place’s physical infrastructure depends on a physical line. Automated fire alerts for high rises, security alarms, remote access for gates and doors, backup phone connections. A lot of this still uses old physical lines because it is easy to fix and highly reliable.

    Now consider the infrastructure needed for specialized services like EMS, police, secure and classified buildings, federal agencies, embassies, smart traffic signals. Shutting down a network like that has massive implications for anything in society that relies on it, which is well beyond your cell phone plan.


  • The S-IVB-506.

    This was the third stage of the launch vehicle for Apollo 11. After entering Earth orbit, the S-IVB rocket was responsible for the translunar injection burn. Once the burn was complete, the command module, LEM, astronauts and the spent rocket were then coasting to the moon. The astronauts would detach the CSM, pitch up, translate in, extract the LEM, then thrust with RCS to get clear of the S-IVB. At this point, the rocket is still on a coarse to the moon.

    Many of them orbit between the Earth and moon to this day. One is speculated to orbit between the Earth and Sun. Many impacted the lunar surface, including the one from Apollo 13.

    The S-IVB-506 rocket was the one that carried Apollo 11 to the moon. It’s a piece of human history, floating silently in a heliocentric orbit above us.



  • $350k includes the salary but also all of the health insurance benefits, taxes, stock options, office space and perks, compute hardware, software services… the works. An employer will have an averaged overhead factor for their skilled workforce, which can be anywhere between 1.5 and 2.5 typically. A worker with an annual pre-tax salary of $140k could cost Google $350k in overall expenses per year. Labor is expensive.

    Also, these people weren’t just making simple Python scripts. Most of them were contributing core functionality into Python itself and managing the internal Python version and the ecosystem of Google software stacks that depend on it.



  • They don’t actually know the final amount, but they do have an independent expectation for certain items.

    If your job withholds income tax then it is paid quarterly to the government, so they know how much you made and how much taxes you should be paying.

    If you win a large sum of money in the stock market or gambling at a casino then the broker or management company reports a tax bill to the IRS. The same happens for large early withdrawals of retirement funds.

    They also know information based on previous returns, like how many kids you have or if you own a home.

    They may not know it down to the dollar amount you’ll be paying because of the complexity of the US tax code and the deductions you’ll claim. For example, the government has no record of you purchasing a $600 electric car charger but you can claim that on your taxes to reduce your tax liability. That being said, if you under-report the amount you made at your job they will almost surely audit you if the number reported by your employer doesn’t match the number you provide.