Silicon Valley is celebrating that its precious stock options are safe from new taxes — for now.

After hundreds of startups, investors and engineers collectively panicked — and petitioned anyone in the U.S. Senate who would listen — lawmakers dropped from a fast-moving tax reform package a proposal to tax options issued by private companies as soon as they vest.

In the eyes of investor Ron Conway, one of the idea’s fiercest opponents, such a change to federal law threatened to damage startups’ ability to compensate their earliest employees, who probably wouldn’t be able to pay the tax because they never received any actual income from their stock options or grants in the first place.

Those fears led Conway and hundreds of others — including Y Combinator’s Sam Altman and companies like Airbnb, Lyft and Uber — to band together in a letter Monday calling on the Senate to follow the lead of House lawmakers and remove the provision entirely. The National Venture Capital Association and other industry lobbying groups similarly pressed the issue on Capitol Hill.

And by late Monday, they had prevailed.

By the time the Senate Finance Committee released a modified version of the so-called Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, the stock option tax had been deleted. And in its place, Senate lawmakers included a new provision that would actually provide aid to startup employees who are forced to exercise their stock options. Under the provision, those employees could defer paying any taxes they incur in the event they don’t have a liquid market to sell those options.

“The entrepreneurial ecosystem can breathe a sigh of relief,” said Bobby Franklin, the president and CEO of NVCA, in a statement.

And you also have to stand and cheer as if you're watching a soccer game and your team scored a goal, in order to maximize your humiliation before your corporate overlord.

If our world heads in this direction, I'm moving into the forests into a mud cabin. Bye bye technology.

I would rather be cold than ever be forced to participate in corporate advertising by a machine.

The IRS will audit you for tripping some inscrutable criminal detecting neural network that Equifax sold them. Completing the audit will require a dedicated internet connection and the latest smart device. Every 10 minutes you will be required to stand and shout "H&R Block" or your session will time out.

Gotta watch out for those white people! Stay safe, folks.

Nothing dictatorial about a poll like this.

Unless filling it out is mandatory and it has an actual bearing on policy, no, it isn't dictatorial. It's discourse damaging manipulative PR nonsense. Hate it for what it is.

It may not be mandatory, but I think Reid might want to respond just in case they decide to put him down for greatest.

Eh, Trump is going to use the results to argue against the "mainstream media" results about his approval rating. Maybe not straight dictatorial but it fuels his conspiracy theory b.s.

85% guaranteed the results of the poll are going in the circular file.

Oh yeah, Trump is doing the best job. Really unlike any president ever before.

Eh. Probably, I guess. I just can't imagine whoever thought that would be a decent poll wouldn't also accept the results after tweaking them in Trump's favor.

Gotta watch out for those white people! Stay safe, folks.

Newsweek's claim ["white men have committed more mass shootings than any other group"] is literally accurate. But it's worth noting the imprecision of this data, and the percentage of mass shootings by white men is lower than their share of the male population, according to Mother Jones.

I'm only mentioning they're white due to the racially differential way mass shootings are treated by Republicans and Trump specifically, I don't have a problem with the media on this point.

Literally everybody in that discussion is wrong.

However, perhaps none as wrong as the guy who said Elon Musk is unimpeachable because he and Musk are both INTJ. You see, INTJs are the rarest and smartest of MBTI categories, which is why they enjoy talking about Jungian pseudoscience so much.

That's such an INTP thing to say.

“The proof capitalism doesn’t work is that all billionaires have the minds of 13 year olds” is hysterical nonsense. Stuff like this hurts the anti-capitalist discourse a lot. There is nothing wrong with an immature or unlikeable person becoming rich or admired for the work he has done. Complaining about something this petty only distracts from the real problem - that Elon Musk isn’t actually admired for the work he’s done, he’s admired for the work that others did.

Elon Musk didn’t found Tesla, it was founded and indeed even bootstrapped by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning. Musk wasn’t involved until they were raising their Series A. SolarCity was similar, founded by Peter and Lindon Rive. He did actually have the idea for SpaceX, at least, but he had none of the skills to actually make the company happen. Hyperloop was promoted as Musk’s idea, but there’s not much evidence he was involved in the invention outside of his own assertion, and the Hyperloop company that formed wasn’t even founded by him.

But who takes the credit? Musk. Who takes the surplus? Musk. The people who actually do the work, founded these companies, invented the products, and build the products, are paid only what Musk deigns to pay them, and treated only as well as Musk wishes to treat them.

That’s the failure of capitalism.

Who gives a **** whether some borgie **** likes Rick and Morty. Some perspective, please.

“Our research found that the extent to which one is blind to her own bias has important consequences for the quality of decision-making. People more prone to think they are less biased than others are less accurate at evaluating their abilities relative to the abilities of others, they listen less to others’ advice, and are less likely to learn from training that would help them make less biased judgments.”

Participants in one follow-up study who showed the better-than-average bias insisted that their self-assessments were accurate and objective even after reading a description of how they could have been affected by the relevant bias.