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It is a human problem, there's not necessarily a technical solution. How do you define a Adidas shoe? Something with the same name could easily be fake
This isn't eBay. They have partners. They can require things from them. They can boot them if they aren't real or fake. The problem is, they don't.
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It is a human problem, there's not necessarily a technical solution. How do you define a Adidas shoe? Something with the same name could easily be fake
If only globally distributed authentication weren't an unsolved problem... (how do I know I'm visiting an Amazon.com server controlled by Amazon?)
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IRS definition is probably more relevant: https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-regs/research_credit_basic_sec41... (Not 100% sure this is the most up to date definition but it gives you an idea)
Perhaps more relevant for Amazon, but not for France?
If we don’t understand how Amazon categorizes R&D, we can’t make a fair comparison to France.
If anything, IRS’s (very) broad definition of R&D helps France in that Amazon’s R&D spend isn’t truly R&D in the colloquial sense (or the Wikipedia definition)
In other words, Amazon’s R&D spend is likely overstated (based on what an average person would consider “R&D”)
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The market seems like it would preclude that. If they're making "another todo app" with nothing novel then the market will reject it, they will have no income, and they never would have been taxed anyways. The thought of research tax breaks is that the market qualifies them as useful. Useless inventions make no money, and have no income to be taxed anyways.
Markets aren’t efficient like that though. In theory they’re supposed to be, but we’ve had wave after wave of “innovation” that’s the same shit with different paint. Take a car, replace all the perfectly good knobs with touch screens you won’t be able to replace in 5 years. Innovation! Massive conglomerates control the internet and feed you expertly tuned rage engagement. Innovation! Smart home lights that stop worki…
I think in most of your examples, you want something different than what the market values, and me too! But our values are different than the average person. I'm willing to fiddle with running a home server to do those things, but most people aren't.
> Printers that refuse to print black because you’re out of cyan wouldn’t exist.
They do because the crappy business practices let them sell at a lower upfront cost. That appeals to enough people for the company to make money.
> Markets blow and aren’t really maximizing productive anything directly. Tangentially, occasionally, when they’re not causing cost savings that cause doors to blow off of planes to save money. Seems tenuous at best.
The markets optimize for profit. That generally comes from innovations in something; products, processes, equipment, who knows. I won't pretend the markets are perfect, or efficient. What I will say is that I don't have a better proposal. Planned economies have historically turned out much worse than free markets.
I think there are compelling arguments that we're short on regulations in a fair few places. I'm more leery of arguments that the government should be making broad definitions of "innovation", it veers a little too close to central planning for my liking.
Maybe they need to spend even more to figure out how to show Adidas shoes when I search “Adidas shoes”. Seems that’s a really hard CS problem. Once they have that, maybe they can show products ordered by price when I select “Sort by price low to high”.
It is a human problem, there's not necessarily a technical solution. How do you define a Adidas shoe? Something with the same name could easily be fake
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Perhaps more relevant for Amazon, but not for France?
I’m responding to how Amazon categorizes their R&D expenditures (which is based on IRS’s definition, not the Wikipedia definition). If we don’t understand how Amazon categorizes R&D, we can’t make a fair comparison to France. If anything, IRS’s (very) broad definition of R&D helps France in that Amazon’s R&D spend isn’t truly R&D in the colloquial sense (or the Wikipedia definition) In other words, Amazon’s R&D spend…
Maybe they need to spend even more to figure out how to show Adidas shoes when I search “Adidas shoes”. Seems that’s a really hard CS problem. Once they have that, maybe they can show products ordered by price when I select “Sort by price low to high”.
One thing I absolutely cannot understand is the "price range" functionality seems to be broken as well. Maybe it's the same root cause and/or change which broke price sorting but when I put in a range of say $100-$200 searching for "network switch" the first result is $240, the 2nd result $90, and the 3rd result $120 and legitimate results go on for tens of pages. So it's not that there isn't anything for sale in tha…
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As a user, I don't want to be second-guessed. I can explore price ranges on my own, thanks.
How do you ever buy flight tickets then? It’s all about trade offs and checkboxes(layovers, specific terminals, airlines, aircraft body types, price ranges, dates, non-stops, insurance, in-flight Wi-Fi, meals, early boarding) etc. Do you first look through the page with all the options, then open different tabs with each unique combination of checkboxes and options enabled/disabled? That must exponentially (literally…
I input my source and destination and date and travel class and then choose from the listed results. At no point I would expect the website to show me business class if I chose economy. If I chose non-stop, I expect non-stop flights and nothing else.
I suspect its just a tax break related policy, ive been doing the same shit at US companies (still in EU), and some European companies (in EU) and the US one were the only one asking me to file reports for hours classified as R&D, maybe european ones have no incentive to do that Id say, considering that, and considering that for these corps taxes are lava, i’d go to look at incentives on taxes about R&D filing
Been doing the same in the UK. Everything not BAU was R&D. Installed a new server package and configured it? R&D baby. Or so I was told, because you know, it’s new to the company ;) ;)
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Can confirm, filed some “R&D” hours at a company some years back that did software development but nothing I’d call “R&D”. They straight-up told us it was a requirement for some tax benefit or other. Like they did have us do it only on non-client work, but… it was not really R&D the way anyone means that.
The D in R&D literally stands for development. So 'software development' would fit.