Frankly, IR signature + movement is more than enough to the ChatGPT+Claude+Deepseek axis to completely obliterate all those pesky electricity wasters that are not involved in useful industries like Energy and Chipmaking.
For companies operating on a cash basis with a standard Jan-Dec fiscal calendar (e.g. most small businesses), this would allow you to deduct future spending by prepurchasing AWS credits. It locks away whatever money you dedicate to it but that’d be peanuts compared to paying income tax on it in order to carry it forward as retained earnings.
I don't think that works the way you suggest, but I also admit the guidance is unclear.
Reg. Section 1.461-1(a)(1) provides the following:
If an expenditure results in the creation of an asset having a useful life which extends substantially beyond the close of the taxable year, such an expenditure may not be deductible, or may be deductible only in part, for the taxable year in which made.
If you buy 10+ months of AWS credits in December and have a Jan-Dec fiscal year, I'd argue that you bought "an asset having a useful life which extends substantially beyond the close of your taxable year"
I worked on this feature when I was at Amazon—and the demographic we were after were mostly government & some non-profit organizations. The biggest thing with these orgs were that they _needed_ to have a clear and structured per-month budget over a long period (~year) OR they had to use up their funds before their grants “expired”
Also on a technical note, this allowed for some nice internal data models/patterns that could be utilized in further use-cases
I work at AWS, but I wasn't involved in this feature, so this isn't anything more than speculation on my part. I've certainly talked to customers who would time their reserved instances and savings plan purchases based on the USD exchange rate for their local currency. This could make sense for those customers too, who often don't have USD denominated bank accounts.
Other comments have covered cases like departments having money left over in their quarterly budgets, or companies looking to spend in a particular quarter for earnings/tax deduction reasons, or reducing currency risk by hedging forex prices. But the biggest use by far that I've seen for this is government/public orgs that are prevented by outdated laws/auditing regulations/processes from using pay-as-you-go models. They are forced by their accounting department/government grant to treat infra expenses as capex and have zero budget to expense them as opex (this model assumes an on-prem physical plant for an IT department). Previously AWS had a way to get around part of that with reserved instances, this solution is more comprehensive.
The pricing on reserved instances is so appealing over on-demand instances, though, that people are using it for more than just opex vs. capex accounting. You legitimately save money by buying in advance.
> What's the point, if there isn't a discount for paying upfront?
In a past life, I did some work with government clients who preferred to be charged up-front in a lump sum, because it was much easier for them to get funding for that than a recurring subscription.
I like those kinds of services for personal projects. I don't always have enough money on my bank card and I'm lazy to go to ATM to fill my card with cash, so those monthly payments could be missed very easily. If that leads to service disruption, it's very annoying. It's much easier to load a balance for year and forget about it until next year.
Our bank recently started charging us negative interest on any balance over €150K in our checking account. So I wouldn't mind pre-paying a bit if the balance gets too high. Alas, it seems this is US only for now.
Myself and most all my coworkers are on 40%, and obviously tax evasion is not on anyone's mind. I think it comes down to your social environment and values.
If I were born and raised in the US, with all that anti-government and anti-tax rhetoric around me, I might feel similarly to the impassioned gentleman or lady above. Yet as it stands I am happy to pay for taxes as I see great value in them, and I would generally be happy for a tax rise if justified and needed.
They're not different words, as the origin is the same. They're the same word, with a slight semantic shift from one language to the other. And frankly, quince marmelade is not very different, in preparation or use, from other types of marmelade.
A similar case is the Italian "mostarda" vs the English "mustard"- two very different preparations, but both based on mustard seeds.
A real case of culinary false friends is the Spanish "aceite", which means (olive) oil and is derived from an Arabic word, and the Italian "aceto", which means vinegar and comes from Latin "acetum" (related to the English "acid").
Not the product itself, but there were only two features of Spotify around ~2010 that I used, which have both been removed:
* Set as Current Playlist: would allow me, with one action, to set the next playlist, but not interrupt the current song. Song would finish playing, then only song from selected playlist would follow (until I'd set a new 'Current Playlist' again).
* Empty Playlist: I used to have a plsylist called NULL with no songs in it. Combined with the Set as Current Playlist feature, this would allow me to, with one action and without waiting, let the current song finish, and then not have another one start (e.g. to go to bed, play a game, or to focus more intensely). Nowadays you cannot have an empty playlist anymore.
Sounds like you used it as a replacement for a sane queue system. Rdio had it and it allowed to persistently queue songs, albums or even playlists across any rdio client.
My 2008 MBP has a cool feature I miss: regardless of whether the laptop was o switched on or off, lid open or shut, you could press a little button on the left side and a number of LEDs would light up to indicate how much battery you had left.
"We put a splitter on the internet so that we can keep our own copy in locations A, B, C, and coming soon, D. We use an automated selector-based filter to find nodes of interest in realtime, as well as tools for querying the enormous amount of data we keep in the storage facilities at said locations."
That would count as both open and honest. What could the implications possibly be? Congress isn't going to investigate them based on those statements, and if you try to enter those locations you'd get denied entry just like you would today.
So what exactly is this "nature" that prevents the NSA from publishing the paragraph I wrote above?
* the "splitter" as you call it (an useful simplification for this discussion) might be on devices of public companies without their consent against their wishes - IIRC that was part of Snowden's revelations.
* the "splitter" might have been secretly placed on an undersea cable in foreign waters, and there's a clear national security interest not to reveal that fact - the key job of NSA is to listen in to other nations and ensure that they don't know if/how it's succeeding.
* the "splitter" might include cooperation from friendly governments that's not public knowledge to their populations. Again, there's a clear foreign policy interest not to disclose that.
* the "splitter" might have been made possible by a vulnerability in something that everyone believes is secure (e.g. RSA cryptosystem), and revealing what kind of data is captured will reveal that it's possible to capture that kind of data, which (if it's a surprise) by itself might lead to it becoming useless as people worldwide deduce what component needs to be replaced.
There's obviously more. NSA can reveal that their job includes spying on everyone outside USA; but any more details would generally be harmful to that mission.
> Since at least May 2016, the surveillance agency had featured honesty as the first of four “core values” listed on NSA.gov, alongside “respect for the law,” “integrity,” and “transparency.” The agency vowed on the site to “be truthful with each other.”
Also, I'm thinking they should probably remove all of these, if they were truly honest with us. Respect for the law? Come on. They've been constantly misinterpreting what the surveillance laws actually allow them to do. And there's certainly no respect for the Constitution, because I don't think the Fourth Amendment means much to them anymore - even to the FBI, considering they can now get Americans's communications content without a warrant.
