Ooh, this is a great point: "there is reason to believe that the further the government is willing to go in its statutory definition of publicity the greater likelihood is there that it may be excused from the necessity of exercising direct administrative control." -- Henry Adams https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Adams
I particularly like the idea that corporate tax returns should be public, just like the way 990 forms from nonprofits are. Sunlight is the best disinfectant.
yes, power wants to act surreptitiously because that minimizes both reputational damage and potential resistance, and transparency is a natural counter to that.
i'm a strong proponent that transparency should increase superlinearly with power, which is something that our framers (in the US) had approximated, but never made particularly explicit. the average individual has a substantial right to privacy, basically having much autonomy to control information disseminated about themselves.
on the other end, the average multinational conglomerate should have basically no privacy, for the company itself, its owners, and its management, as well as its political & commercial transactions. of course you'd have to be careful of the privacy rights of customers and suppliers (who'd also have varying transparency levels for themselves), but those could be anonymized. the neat aspect of that is that only larger entities would tend to be susceptible to being deanonymized through transaction pattern analysis, which is fine, since larger entities require more transparency anyway.
in between are powerful individuals (full politicoeconomic transparency required) and small businesses (little transparency required).
For me, right to privacy declines with impact to others. What you're doing alone in your house? Don't care. Between consenting adults? I almost don't care, except when public health matters (e.g., STDs, or COVID contact tracing). but the more we move toward public impact, the more I think there's a public right to know.
Another way to look at it is that people have a right to privacy, but not secrecy. Me lending my brother some money is reasonably seen as private. Me giving the same amount of money to a legislator as a bribe is something I might want to keep secret, but given the public impact, can't really be called private.
I don’t find what happens between consenting adults to have a compelling STD-related public health reason to breach privacy. If you do, could you expand on why you think that?
Not OP, but it is not clear that people should have the right to risk infection. The problem isn't that the person could get sick (which is something an adult should be able to make an informed decision on), but that having an infectious disease gives you the ability to spread said disease to nonconsenting people. If you think weapons should be regulated, you should think that a bad enough disease should also be regulated.
I'm referring to things that exist already. Sex is generally private, but if somebody is transmitting STDs while they do it, they are subject to public health contact tracing, which goes like this: https://www.ncsddc.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/infographi...
This seems reasonable to me. I don't think the right to privacy extends as far as the right to secretly give people diseases, especially ones that cause permanent damage and possible death.
>Another way to look at it is that people have a right to privacy, but not secrecy.
You seemed like were balancing things, then you ruined it by speaking out both sides of your mouth with that.
What you've effectively endorsed is "You have the right to privacy/secrecy as long as I don't care to look."
Everyone already has that. The entire point of a right to privacy/secrecy is to strictly corral what can be looked at/for/and how even when the People come looking.
You just threw out the entire point of the 4th Amendment there. No need for warrants, or to strictly define what the public interest is. Just define anything you're looking at as the public interest and have a party. Hell, you even threw out a workable implementation avenue of specifying that this carve out from the 4th only applies to legal fictions, which wouldsolve half your issues right there. Anything illegal would have to be done by a particular person or cohort of people outside the confines of legal fictions, meaning evidence lines should very clearly lead to individual parties; or at least until people stopped using corporate entities to do sketchy things plausibly like they do now.
That's quite dramatic. I'm drawing a distinction between private matters (things where the involved parties are both fully in the know and are the only ones impacted) and secrecy (working definition: ones with information asymmetries that don't match the impact).
This is obviously a tricky and subtle distinction, so yes, one absolutely needs the sort of power-restricting and rights-balancing apparatus that getting a warrant is an example of.
I know it's not a popular term in the U.S. but the socialist answer would be that companies serve the public and should therefore make information freely available unless there's a good reason not to.
For the same reason companies shouldn't get to keep or distribute information on the very people they're supposed to be serving (unless there's a good reason to).
So rather than transparency increasing with power, you could also say that the lack of transparency itself is placing powers in the exact opposite place of where it should be.
that's viewed with skepticism because it presumes, or at least implies, that socialism inherently and structurally solves the transparency problem, but it still requires similar policy to augment the underlying ideology appropriately. there's no free lunch when it comes to some (usually small) proportion of people trying to leverage a system.
It has always seemed to me that corps should be taxed on the greater of 1) their tax return profits or 2) their publicly reported profits to the markets.
When major public corporations are paying zero or near-zero tax rates, one of those figures is blatantly misleading.
Allowing secret and offshore books for taxes is a farce, and damages every other taxpayer, especially the smaller businesses and startups that lack the funding or scale to take advantage of the tons of loopholes available to larger and transnational corps.
Much of the spread between 1 and 2 are either jurisdiction or time based. Time-based seems 100% reasonable to allow the current spread. If you build a business over a decade, incurring losses along the way, it seems entirely reasonable to get credit for those losses when you first start making profits.
Jurisdictional differences are more subtle or complicated. Certainly, we wouldn’t expect a company to pay taxes to every jurisdiction on its entire global profits. So, we presumably must allow some kind of apportionment of profits to different jurisdictions and then the question becomes how to do so.
Of course there are distinctions between current operating profits and depreciation. There should be zero issue in making both public, e.g., [current profits=$100], [current year depreciation of past R&D=$15], [Net Profit=$85]. Report them both, pay taxes on $85, and both the govt and the stock market are happy.
The jurisdictional differences are the main thing that is being exploited here, and must be cracked.
Sure, if Acme Widgets makes 50% of their widgets in Germany and sells that whole lot in the EU, then fine. But Apple, Google, Amazon, FB, etc. setting up "R&D Offices" in Ireland, Bermuda or other tax havens and sending $$Billions in "licensing fees" to those entities to effectively hide their profits from US taxes is a flat-out farce, and it is literally stealing from you and me.
It is simple, if you are profiting off of the US economy, society, and infrastructure, you need to be contributing to it.
If you have a better solution to the time and jurisdictional problems, please state it. But it is long past the time when saying "it's complicated" and walking away is anything more than making excuses for those who game the system and steal from us every day.
It’s not depreciation that is the major timing concern (as that already hits both GAAP and taxable profits), but rather prior period net operating loss carry-forwards (which are not a GAAP or typical non-GAAP reduction of current profits, but are a tax credit [and properly/necessarily so in a profit-taxation system])
Fine, those can be handled the same way - transparently.
Report them to both the IRS and to public stock markets.
Yes, it will reduce your publicly reported earnings, as it should. Smart investors & analysts will quickly learn to account for that. In fact they already do with constructs that are bogus from an actg point of view, like EBITDA, but useful from an investing POV.
Indeed, it will be very useful for investors to see that Company X and Company Y both report $100 of earnings, but Co_Y is reporting that number after taking $50 in loss carry-forwards.
Again, paying on the greater of SEC-reported earnings or tax-filing earnings hurts only companies that are trying to scam the system and their investors. It helps everyone else, including you and me.
You want the capital market benefits of reporting big profits? Fine, pay the commensurate taxes. Letting them have it both ways is literally telling the thieves to have a nice day as they walk out the front door with the contents of your family safe in their bags and your electronics on their carts.
Net operating loss carryforwards are reported today. They are not treated as a reduction in current profits (operating or otherwise), because they are water under the bridge from long ago.
Yet, people are up in arms over it.
If company A experiences actual results (and reports) -50 two years ago, 0 last year, and +50 this year in operating profits, in my view, they should owe no taxes on their profits, as they have had none. There's nothing gaming or scamming about that in my view. If your method suggests they should report -50, 0, 0, (or 0, 0, 0) I think that's actually obscuring their true results.
In that specific case, what would you suggest they report for each of those years?
I know NOL carryforwards are reported today, done it myself for a small corp. I don't see anyone up in arms about it. A NOL carryforward is easily understood, and legitimate ones don't last long, especially against scaled massive profits.
They don't begin to explain the decades of major US corps, including the FAANG group, of paying zero-to-trivial US taxes.
It is the long-term sum of all the evasion, even if it is technically legal, that amounts to theft.
Even if it is technically legal, the net result is theft. There are many tax dodges that are -in practice- available only to large corporations simply because the costs of the setup and/or the costs of the army of financial experts and tax attnys is so high that it only works at scale. So FAANGs can take advantage of it, and leave the tax bill to all the small startups.
If you have a better solution, by all means, propose it.
Stop making single-point excuses about the trees when the forest is the problem.
If something is tax-deductible if it happened in the same year, but not tax-deductible if it happened in a different year, you end up with a very uneven system (and a lot of pointless gyrations designed to turn one into having the structure of the other).
Of course having tax laws that account for events crossing time periods is reasonable.
You still haven't explained how it is unreasonable to require companies to either 1) commensurately reduce their publicly reported profits or 2) pay the tax on the publicly reported profits if they want the public/market image of higher profits.
There’s a reason we don’t use sunlight to sterilize surgical instruments.
Wait... Unless the sterilizer is solar powered, or used coal power, since coal is just compressed plant matter, which basically exists because of sunlight...
Exactly. UV sterilizers are sunlight simulators. Per Wikipedia, without our atmosphere blocking a lot of the sun's UV, there'd be little or no life on land.
You can say the same of Wind and Hydro, and even Oil and Natural Gas are just compressed plant matter to a larger degree. Only Nuclear is truly sun-neutral energy.
Wouldn't this put US registered corporations at a disadvantage by allowing foreign competitors to analyze their cost structures and finding their weaknesses?
Sure. But is that sufficiently bad? Minimum wage laws, health and safety laws, and all sorts of other regulations put US corporations at a disadvantage on the world stage. The state shouldn't just exist to make our corporations as profitable as possible.
Competition is good for consumers, that's why we want to encourage it. If your business model is undermined by people understanding it, you've got a problem anyway.
Sure - competition can result in higher prices and/or lower quality especially when it isn't properly regulated.
One reason for this is that people make choices to beat their competition rather than to provide for their customers. Often short term thinking leads to quality losses in order to capture market share and sometimes the competition devolves into direct sabotage of competitors. This intense competition can result in higher costs for consumers as it becomes more difficult to bring products to market.
Even without that, you can have price competition which, while theoretically leading to a low cost for consumer in the short term, can price out high quality goods in a price conscious market.
Flooding the market with cheap, low quality goods can lead to overall quality drop and a decrease in investment in the area. Even though consumers prioritize cost over quality when given the option in some markets, it doesn't necessarily mean they are making the correct decision.
The same thing could just as well happen with a monopoly, though. Look at ISPs injecting ads and fiddling with DNS, for example. There's very little competition in the US ISP market, but plenty of players are still eagerly seeking bottoms.
If some people lived near a beautiful meadow and river, and everyone else lived in the desert, then competition (e.g. opening up a direct train to the meadow) would hurt the ones living in the meadow.
Yes, this does not sound like an equilibrium state. It’s not sufficient to have transparency. There needs to be an alignment of incentives between consumers and corporations. This can’t happen when not all competitors are subject to the same laws.
One of the great strengths of the US approach is our highly transparent capital markets. Plenty of non-US companies raise money here despite having to make a ton of information public. Why? Because just as much as companies want secrecy, investors want transparency.
That sounds like the right thing to do? You should only be profitable if you make constant improvements. The constant need for improvements is why we use capitalism at all. If you're going to stagnate and stay profitable by hiding your process, it might as well be run cheaper by the government
>You should only be profitable if you make constant improvements.
What? You should be profitable if you provide a good or service that people want for a price they can pay. If you're not profitable, you'll go out of business. The idea that you must always be improving can be really, really negative.
>If you're going to stagnate and stay profitable by hiding your process, it might as well be run cheaper by the government
Sure, the government should take over running KFC because they won't publicize the herbs and spices.
The are bold, but not ridiculous. Look at the restaurant market, for example. Everybody's constantly working to improve things. And you find the best restaurant scenes in places with the highest competition. In contrast, a lot of bad restaurants I've eaten at are in places with low competition where some owner is just coasting.
>Look at the restaurant market, for example. Everybody's constantly working to improve things.
Not really - I'm actually in the restaurant business, so it's funny you use that as an example. There are consistently profitable businesses that have made things the exact same way for many years. Keen's steakhouse, for example, has been famous for their mutton chop for 130 years, and the pipes in their collection are just as old. Competition amongst NYC steakhouses is very steep, but they don't need to constantly improve to stay profitable. They just need to maintain a high degree of excellence, which they do.
Sure, to be on the cutting edge of the industry you need to change things, but not everyone wants to "improve" barbecue, for example.
When a restaurant coasts, you're really not talking about them making the same great dishes over a long period - you're talking about them cutting corners.
To me, the idea that you must constantly be changing to be profitable is ridiculous. The idea that the government should take over any business (and that it could run it cheaper!) that doesn't want to share its process is ridiculous. Neither is a particularly bold idea, they are simply bad ideas.
I am pretty sure the average age of restaurants is not 130 years. I don't think an outlier makes for a great general-case example. If you'd like to argue that the median restaurant never changes, feel free to make your case, though.
It's not really about being a general case example.
It's about this statement: "You should only be profitable if you make constant improvements." - do you think that restaurant deserves to be profitable?
You seem to be treating a generalization as an absolute. I don't think that's what the original author meant and if it were, I don't know that I'd agree. Did you have a point beyond picking a very small nit?
I don't think it's small. Unfortunately, neither you nor I can tell that the original author meant anything other than what they said, and I am not in the habit of assuming people mean something different than what they post; it's demeaning.
So if they said "You should only be profitable if you make constant improvements." Then that is what they meant. They didn't say "You should only be profitable if you make constant improvements or if your product is good or if you serve a genuine need or if...etc."
In fact, the OP said "The constant need for improvements is why we use capitalism at all." Which leads me to believe that they meant exactly what they said. It happens to be false, but totally conforms with their absolutism about profitability.
I obviously don't agree. There are many companies that make good products and are profitable and I believe should remain profitable without the need to change the products they make. You seem to agree. That is good, because "You should only be profitable if you make constant improvements" is a ridiculous statement.
That's my point. I don't know what's bold about it or why anyone would agree with it generally and I think logically it's easy to counter.
You've never run a (non-trivial) business, have you?
Some of the things I read on HN are jaw-droppers. Then I remember that people these days confuse opinion and lack of context with facts and reality.
My wife often repeats a saying that goes something like this: Your Google search isn't equivalent to my medical degree, residency and decades of experience afterwards.
I've run a non-trivial business that depended on secrecy, and I recognize some of the ideas from the guy above. I wouldn't say "just let the government run this hedge fund", but there's some truth to what he's saying.
I think it's also important that people can make comments on large social issues such as corporate transparency without feeling like they need to be experts. In fact, nobody can be an expert on these sweeping issues, because these laws affect such a wide variety of entities.
I don't think the doctor comparison holds water. With a lot of work, someone can be recognized as a medical expert, but it's still a specific field that one can be qualified in.
On the other hand, sometimes your Google search can help a doctor in their analysis. An informed patient will get better treatment than an uninformed one; you must be your own healthcare advocate. And for anything nontrivial, this is why second opinions are a must. It would also be interesting if we lived in a world where case complexity and outcomes for doctors and various diagnoses/operations were published as well, so we can see how everyone really holds up competitively.
> An informed patient will get better treatment than an uninformed one
Absolutely true. Yet that does not turn them into a doctor. The statement I made is very specific.
Personal note: My mother is going through pancreatic cancer at the moment. She is reading everything in sight. Good. Bad. Ugly. She is not intellectually equipped to understand and evaluate it. She is not a doctor.
Well, she is driving her doctors insane. She is refusing certain treatments and asking for bullshit treatments. One doctor has already refused to work with her and asked her to switch to a different doctor. Her current doctor is pretty tired of burning valuable time with this google nonsense.
So, yeah, in general terms, informed individuals --in any field-- are better than the uninformed. The twist, however, is in the meaning of the term "informed".
The internet has created this paradox where millions of people believe they are "informed" or know something, when, in reality, they live in deeper ignorance of facts than before they became "informed" by google and social media.
It's the difference between "Practice makes perfect" (which is a lie) and "Practicing correctly makes perfect".
> Your Google search isn't equivalent to my medical degree, residency and decades of experience afterwards.
Agreed, though I see the value of expertise partly in how it allows those with it to explain why they see things differently, rather than simply point out that they know more.
> I particularly like the idea that corporate tax returns should be public
This is the sort of thing that sounds interesting but would be an absolute disaster. This is particularly true in the context of a globally competitive marketplace.
Simple example: If I want to enter your market and know your exact cost structure, sales, etc. I can engineer a viable competitive entry, secure IP and financing/investment come into the market and destroy you. If, for example, I know your margins are running very thin and funds low, I can squeeze you out of existence.
Put in simpler terms, this is the reason you don't tell your opponent what you are thinking and what your strategy and concerns might be during (and even after) a chess game.
Same reason armies don't publish their battle plans either. Business isn't a vacation in paradise. Every single competitor (and other actors) is actively trying to kill you. If they are not, they aren't a real competitor.
Public corporations are a very different story. Until the advent of SPACs (aka: Ponzi Scheme) a company was very careful about when to go public and had to achieve a certain mass and scale to be able to justify and endure the scrutiny and exposure.
The world of successful businesses is paved with stories from entrepreneurs and companies who went to the very edge of insolvency in pursuit of a dream, mission or objective and came out of the other end with a massive success.
This seems quite extreme to me. Do a lot of companies put "what you are thinking and what your strategy and concerns might be" in their tax returns?
The truth is that in any mature industry, companies have a very good idea of each other's "exact cost structure, sales, etc". Talk with a restaurateur about the competition, for example, and they'll be able tell you in great detail about how they operate. The sale prices are right on the menu. They're buying from the same suppliers, hiring from the same labor pool. And anybody can figure out how busy they are with a a quick look in the windows. But restaurants are somehow not "an absolute disaster".
And of course you're focused here on empathy for corporations. But the whole theory of functioning marketplaces is that companies shouldn't be comfortable. It's best for the world when they compete vigorously.
It isn't about empathy for corporations. It's amazing to me how people always find a way to attach evil intent through language.
What drives me is far simpler than that: We (I'll use that to mean the US and Europe) are in a straight path to being economically decimated by China. Nobody understands this more than those who have been intimately involved in manufacturing for a non-trivial amount of time. In my case, over thirty years.
Someone devoid of this perspective isn't equipped to understand where we are (again, Europe and the US), where we came from and where we are going.
Capitalist, socialist, communist, Martian. I don't care. The simple fact is that the ONLY thing that can give us (US and Europe) any hope of reverting the unrelenting path we have allowed ourselves to navigate is an almost unreasonably intense shift to being pro-business and pro-entrepreneurship.
Nothing else. NOTHING. Can slow this down, much less revert it.
Well, you could have a war. Great.
No amount of social programs, infrastructure rebuilding or, the great oxymoron "government money" is powerful enough to give us the tools and opportunities necessary to avoid what's coming.
You think things are bad in terms of unemployment and income inequality today? Continue on this demented path and see just how much worse this becomes.
There are people like me screaming at the top of our lungs. Have been for years. No political affiliation. Just math and facts.
Simple math/facts: Right now, today, we are allowing people to freely enter the US through the southern border at a rate of about TWO MILLION per year.
Anyone, please, kindly name where in this nation we are generating 150,000 ADDITIONAL new jobs every month.
Because, if we are not, what we are importing is deep unemployment. By the millions. The unemployment rate in black and Hispanic sectors in the US is in the order of 20% at this time. How can we possibly justify making it worse?
If we (US and Europe) want to have a chance to not lose even more industries we need to focus intently on the things that matter. Today. Immediately. No more bullshit.
So, yes, companies should pay no taxes. We should NOT throw money at nonsense "infrastructure" (don't get me started on that) and, instead, invest in technology, semiconductors, entrepreneurship, anything and everything that can possibly rebuild the ecosystem we relinquished to China. Not all of it. Enough of it.
In other words. Invest in business.
Some corners of industry are gone forever. As a simple example, I used to buy specialized hardened glass from a company in NY. They got killed by the Chinese. That was the last US-based company for that product. I then switched to buying from the only company left in Europe for this product, it was in Germany. That lasted about a year. They could not compete with government-subsidized Chinese companies ripping through the market at 50% of their price. Gone.
I then had no choice but to buy from China. A year later they doubled their prices. About 18 months later they doubled them again. At that point nobody outside of China would, unless they were stupid, dare to re-enter the market. They knew exactly what would happen with regards to predatory pricing. A chemical company isn't something you spin up with an Ansible script. It requires time and investment. And so, the Chinese ended up killing all competition and owning that industry.
I don't hate China at all. They are doing exactly what we should be doing. They focusing on what matters for them. And they are doing an amazing job of it.
So, you see, my intensity with regards to these matters doesn't come from some theoretical indoctrination received in school. No sir. It comes from, as they say, having had skin in the game for quite some time.
The simple fact is: We are focusing on nonsense while the Chinese are focusing on advancement.
Businesses are not evil. We need them in order to survive and advance. Destroy them at your own peril.
I have a contract right now that I am hoping to close this week. It will require designing a device and then manufacturing 5K to 10K units per month.
I was initially looking at this and though: Great! We'll invest in developing a fully automated assembly line. Hire engineers and technicians and a few operators. We'll make them right here in the US.
Now I am looking at our politicians talking about raising corporate taxes and all kinds of other nonsense. They should be doing exactly the opposite. But, no, let's go out of our way to put as many competitive barriers as possible in front of our own businesses.
So, I'm looking at this and thinking: Fuck it! I'm done. Atlas Shrugged moment. It is SO EASY to manufacture in China. If they don't want my business in the US I am done. I am not going to bang my head against the wall trying to be a good citizen if my own country and government will actively try to kill me and refuses to support my efforts and sacrifice. Why should I?
Sorry, this ideology is 100% demented, will drive away business, grow unemployment and income inequality.
If businesses are evil. Fine. Go figure out how to earn a living not working for one. And don't complain when people like me give up and offshore even more layers from our economy and you can't find a job.
I'm not saying your intent was evil. I'm saying the only empathy you displayed in your comment was for corporations. If you think it's evil to act like that, changing your behavior is within your power.
I'm just going to leave the rest of your China panic aside. It's deeply reminiscent of the 1980s panic about Japan's impending takeover of America. That you wind up your screed with a favorable reference to a fantasy novel elevating a "genocidal prick" [1] convinces me you're too far wrapped up in your fictions. I'd rather spend my time on the people who read the one about orcs. [2]
And yet the US and Europe have lost millions of jobs to China over the last several decades.
The fact that you bring up Japan tells me you don't really understand what has been going on. Which is fine. I get it. Most people don't. I wish I didn't. I have no choice but to see reality across my desk each and every single day. I can buy semiconductors from China for a third of the best price I can get in the US. Asking "Why?" you start navigating the many layers of the multivariate business equation in order to understand.
Insulting me isn't going to change reality. Insulting me does not explain how we are where we are...a moment in time when we can't even make simple masks because we don't make the thread, cloth, rubber and machinery in the US and Europe. That's not a fantasy. And that didn't happen because of some imaginary character in a novel. And that will not stop because people like you prefer to respond to someone like me by insulting and ignoring them.
Remember what you said here and re-evaluate in a decade or so. I don't see anything changing any time soon. Sadly, you'll have the opportunity to understand. It will likely be too late to do much about it.
Just look at what happened to almost every single country in Latin America for a convenient time machine. My father used to manufacture products at scale in Latin America. In fact, I was with him this weekend and he told me the story again. The Chinese came in and made it impossible to operate at anything resembling a profit. Every single factory in his industry shuttered. That was about four decades ago. None of these industries have returned.
Again. Fantasy vs. reality. Living in the former does not change the latter.
I haven't actually insulted you yet. You'd know if I meant to. That you perceive it that way seems to me of a piece with how you process everything else through the lenses of fear and threat.
There you go again. Attacking the person rather than the argument being made. Now I process everything through a lens of fear and threat.
Never mind that I have lived the issues I speak of. I have been in manufacturing in the US for over thirty years. I have far more examples than what I have posted here. My family has been in manufacturing for at least two generations, on both sides, both my father and my mother were in manufacturing and my grandparents, on both sides, were in manufacturing, in at least two continents. The industries my family was exposed to spanned textiles, clothing, hard good, pharmaceuticals, consumer and industrial products/electronics and aerospace.
Never mind that during this time I have worked with an associated with other manufacturers in all kinds of industries, not just mine. No. Never mind any of that.
Never mind that I hear these cries from other manufacturers. A good friend of mine has a 100,000 square foot contract manufacturing facility in the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles. He has been in manufacturing for a decade more than I have. He used to manufacture the entire line of Hewlett Packard servers and, if I remember correctly, quite a few of their higher end workstation products. He is also yelling at the top of his lungs at what has been going on and just-about ready to give up, shrink down to a small office and make everything he is manufacturing today in China.
Never mind any of that.
I'm just a guy quoting stupid books and looking at the world through a lens of fear and threat.
Sure. No problem. Go with that if it makes you happy.
I should remind myself that most people have never held these cats by the tail. They can't possibly know or understand that reality. There's almost only one way to understand it, and that is to grab onto that tail and go for that ride.
It doesn't make me happy. I feel kinda bad for you. I think there are even some glimmers of good points in there. But you have not participated here in a way that suggests engaging with you will in any way be worth my time.
"leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world."
Insulting someone through links. I think that's a new one. Clever. And now you try to take the an invisible high road. Brilliant really.
Once again. Attack the person, not the argument. While my college course in Logic dates back a few decades, I think that logical fallacy pretty much says, paraphrasing: Reality isn't changed by attacking the messenger.
If you want to invest your identity in being a fan of Ayn Rand enough that you feel personally insulted by somebody critiquing the behavior of her characters and her devotees, then that is your prerogative. Not one I feel responsible for, though. Again, you seem very wrapped up in your notions. To the extent that rather than dealing with the message, you're attacking the messenger.
So you can see they redact "Bernanke" as in "Project Bernanke". Why? What possible trade secret is there involved in naming something after a guy that never worked for you? What kind of judge acquiesces to this bullshit?
Where is Alsup to tell these clowns to no more redactions?
Judges do not approve redactions. Parties redact things in the documents they produce, and then the other side has to challenge them in court to get the unredacted version.
...but since such challenges are costly and time consuming - typically they aren't done.
Search Bernake Helicopter Money, so it could imply that Google thinks this project is so profitable that money will be falling from the sky or maybe Google thinks it is a license to print money, like the the 'Fed and the money printers go brrrrrrrr' meme.
This is a very small niche meme, and most of the "money printers go brrr" stuff is meme-ing post March 2020, when people didn't understand why the markets didn't go down.
Certainly, it's a reference to central banking, I doubt it is to this meme.
When Bernanke made the speech in 2016 where he invented the idea of a helicopter dropping money it was pretty much instantly a meme... everyone in the finance community knew about it because of how ridicules it sounded
> The name "helicopter money" was first coined by Milton Friedman in 1969, when he wrote a parable of dropping money from a helicopter to illustrate the effects of monetary expansion. The concept was revived by economists as a monetary policy proposal in the early 2000s following Japan's Lost Decade. In November 2002, Ben Bernanke, then Federal Reserve Board governor, and later chairman suggested that helicopter money could always be used to prevent deflation.
Several years ago, a person deep inside GOOG told me that the company had a secret knob that they could turn to increase revenues. He didn't go into details, but I concluded that it had something to do with the ad auction pricing. This could be that "dial".
Perhaps it's just a reference to Fed policy snoozery, but the helicopter connection seems like a better fit to me.
I'm sure they could adjust the auction pricing, but they could also increase the size of ads (either more ads, or bigger text) on the search result page (or other high traffic pages). Many moons ago, at Yahoo Travel we had a few requests to boost revenue near the end of the quarter; adding a third text ad works, but you don't really want to keep it because it reduces the utility of the page.
It is however very suspicious knob if most of the spending is automated.
To attempt an anology, consider if all phone calls where charged by the minute and there is a knob to adjust the pricing.
One cal argue it's a reasonable tool to have.
You can turn the knob up to "print money". Or you can turn it up to survive in a time when number of phone calls goes significantly down and you need to cover the fixed expenses.
If the price is too low you are leaving money on the table. If the price is too high users will see the costs surpassing the benefits and move to other products. Why not take all the money the market will bear?
Or, it's called Bernanke because the previous system was called Greenspan. And the previous system was called Greenspan because the original system had been named Alan, because someone on the team watched the video of the prairie dog yelling "Alan!" and thought it was funny.
So will there be criminal charges brought. I highly doubt it. That is typically the problem, a normal person gets the book thrown at them (even if they e.g. commit a crime accidentally), while nobody goes after the big guys because it is deemed to be too expensive or some other reason.
That's exactly it. Rich people have the resources to fight for longer than you will hold your office.
There's a really eye opening report 2 years ago from Charles Rettig, commissioner of the IRS, where he openly states that his agency focuses audits on poorer people, because they have less resources to fight and are more likely to just pay up and move on. Most of the audit resources are targeted at people claiming the earned income tax credit.
> On the one hand, the IRS said, auditing poor taxpayers is a lot easier: The agency uses relatively low-level employees to audit returns for low-income taxpayers who claim the earned income tax credit. The audits — of which there were about 380,000 last year, accounting for 39% of the total the IRS conducted — are done by mail and don’t take too much staff time, either. They are “the most efficient use of available IRS examination resources,” Rettig’s report says.
The problem is that these require a tremendous amount of research and expertise. You can't just throw some low-level employees at them and hope they'll figure it out.
We have the same thing in Germany where very successful auditors (their biggest hit was them investigating a major bank which lead to about 1bn euros of evaded taxes getting collected) got removed from their posts, forced into early retirement and declared insane (literally). Corrupt politicians and their rich clients considered them a nuisance and made them go away.
It's quite obvious what kind of signal that sends to anyone in tax auditing: if you want to live your life peacefully, don't go after the highly criminal high-value targets.
Yes, but you might only have to do it occasionally to have it pay off. Just enough that the dozen or so people at the top would think twice, because especially with the IRS bounty system, it may not take more than o e person with cold feet to either stop the fraud, or whistle blow and make prosecution much easier.
Although it would help significantly if corporate tax returns were public as originally intended. That's a bit like open sourcing the data, and you could have a bug bounty on finding issues.
A better characterization, from memory, was that they don't bother with the ultra-rich because it's difficult to win. 200k-1M is probably the danger zone.
Not sure if others but I found your comment is an unfair characterization of what Rettig said, the from him is...
' the most efficient use of available IRS examination resources'
The IRS has less resources so, it is not directly targeting those with less resources like you are attributing to Rettig. The IRS is targeting the most fraudulent schemes where it can effectively recover, based in its staffing and budget level.
> The IRS does not focus a large share of its energy on poorer people.
This is just untrue. In 2021, almost all of the IRS' enforcement energy is focused on poor people. This is continuing a trend that has gone on for 30+ years now of steadily reducing enforcement on the rich and holding it steady or increasing it on the poor, particularly aiming at anyone who claims the Earned Income Tax Credit.
The IRS audits half as many people as it did just five years ago. It audits 1/5th as many people as it did in the 1970s. And these cuts have applied mainly to the top end of the income spectrum. Somehow it passed without much public notice that Trump's budgets massively slashed an already severely underfunded IRS.
In fact, the IRS has now ceased reporting its audit rates of the rich and large corporations, because they're so low, so we no longer even know how low they are.
Thank you for this. This seems to be of quite a lot of significance, and I've not heard it mentioned even on alternative media (although, granted, I'm not from the US so I don't follow as closely as a local would).
If you are gonna get the vapors, maybe post IRS data that covers the period it has been administered by Rettig, instead of a report coming in at the tail of the previous administration?
So that story does basically say that the EITC audits don't cost a lot, but it also doesn't say if they are worthwhile, and it says that the wealthy are getting audited less and less.
Sadly Congress isn't going to fix this because it requires a much simpler tax system instead of one that is filled from end to end with special carve outs and rules.
When our current President subscribes to using tax law shenanigans to avoid paying taxes you can damn well bet much of the rest of Congress and high ranking state leaders will be found doing the same. One of the larger avenues of abuse is through S Corporations which let individuals shunt off income thereby avoiding certain types of taxes. It is also used by leadership of various charitable organizations to redirect money for purposes many would think fraudulent; like using them to buy homes for use by organization leadership or cover business jet ownership
It’s sad, even the place that is supposed to be fair isn’t due to money. Money rules too many of America’s systems. But I have a feeling that money will always find a way to be influential.
A YouTuber cant use their likes to get the best lawyer can they? Even if they can (promos), it still means the legal system is unfair. The ones who benefit the system the most benefit from it.
And the conversion rate is good at quantifying how much actual influence a person has. Which may be less than they think.
How much influence a typical YouTuber with 10k subscribers have? Very little, actually - they can affect audience's thinking in a limited domain, or get them to buy some stuff to a limited degree. All restricted to how much a cohort of volunteers cares about what their entertainers tell them.
Contrast that with a person wielding a $100. They can literally get someone to do almost anything for them for a couple of hours. Or, in general, they can exchange it for $100 worth of goods and services provided by an industrial civilization. That's what hard influence looks like.
And if someone gets charged it's the company which ends up paying a relatively small fine, since companies are people but we cannot send them to prison.
I think this belief is the problem. At the very least, a company has representatives; if it was to go to jail for a crime, then the C-suite or board could go in its place. A reasonable risk and form of accountability for the high rewards they already get.
But I think it's fair to take it a step further: imprison the company. That is, apply any effects you would apply to a prisoner to that corporation. Lack of communication or direct control of assets and funds for the equivalent period of time for a start.
Would that be existential, if not company ruining for any large length of time? Sure, just as it is for the average citizen. They'll lose many of the things they own, their jobs and livelihood and sometimes much more with any large prison sentence. Their loved ones and dependants' and acquaintances' lives are dramatically affected. So too can it be made the same for a company.
The limit of limited liability should change with scale.
"...during the five minutes it took to draft and send the
email, Google’s Gmail email system automatically saved
eight “snapshots” of the email and put the copies into the author’s draft email folder. No action was required by the author. It was all done by the auto-save.
When Google learned that it had inadvertently produced
draft versions of the email to Oracle, it requested that
Oracle return all copies. Oracle complied, but filed a
motion to compel production of the draft and final versions of the email. Oracle successfully convinced the district court that the email was not protected by any privilege, and the court ordered the production of all versions of the email. Google sought a writ of mandamus to have the district court’s ruling overturned, but the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit denied the writ."
The auction part of this sounds like what people say rock bands and Nvidia should do: raise prices to make supply match demand and cut scalpers out of the loop.
“Google acknowledged in its responses that it had agreed to make ‘commercially reasonable efforts’ to ensure that Facebook was able to identify 80% of mobile users and 60% of desktop users, excluding users of Apple’s Safari web browser, in ad auctions.”
"Think how weird it would be if the cosmetologists trade org suddenly started requiring people to get a BA in whatever, as the ABA does, before they could go to a barber training program and had all 50 states make that the law in order to get a license"
Well actually they go to schools of cosmetology, but note this California training requirement:
"According to the state of California, students must complete at least 1600 hours of training in an accredited program to start their journey of becoming a licensed cosmetologist."
Conversely how much traning do you think is required to become an EMT (Emergency Medical Technician) in California?
"California EMT programs are at least 160 hours and include at least 136 hours of didactic training and at least 24 hours of clinical training. The individual must have 10 patient contacts."
Perhaps there are fewer EMTs signing up than cosmotologists?
Or perhaps the number of practice hours to e.g. create the perfect braid is lower than the number of practice hours to e.g. apply narcan?
Or perhaps the effectiveness of the school education for one profession is more closely related to what you will experience in the real world, thereby requiring fewer hours of on-the-job training?
So can someone with some knowledge about Google’s and Facebook’s past give an idea on how legally and morally good/bad this is compared to previous things they did?
It seems really bad, to the point that Black Mirror-esque things are simply a decade away.
With that said, I don’t know enough to draw that conclusion.
Seems like Google’s internal units were bidding up ad prices. Since no one can see that but Google, ad buyers didn’t know they were paying higher prices.
It could just be stupidity. Or bad policy. Or it could be systematic to maximize their as sales. Google’s not stupid, so them allowing it means they were aware and will able to easily explain why it’s not that big of a deal.
It’s like if eBay sellers had their subsidiaries bidding up prices on their items. And not disclosing. Maybe there’s a good reason, probably just sneaky greed.
Shill bidding is illegal in auctions. They've represented these ad markets as auctions, but it seems like they aren't. You're bidding against some machine designed to make you pay more.
One possibility: Google creates a fully independent subsidiary that bids on AdSense auctions with a goal of turning a profit by reselling the slots they buy. This might make sense if Google sees large inefficiencies in the ad market that are being taken advantage of by third party resellers, at the expense of their customers. It’s not a great look, but it could be done in a way that is aboveboard from a legal standpoint.
That was the idea, wasn't it? Only they didn't make it independent, but gave it access to data that they didn't give to external bidders, because it would be less efficient (read: less profitable) if it had to act on public information.
If ebay did that, they might end up buying a whole lotta crap. This technique is not a money pit when information is available. I'm not clear on the information available to publishers, but I don't think its as clear as ebay. The legality is more subtle
Not if they used their proprietary data to bid up but never win auctions. Especially since they know other bidders max price willing. So bidding for max-1 would result in no wins, but lots of extra money.
This would make me not use eBay. But there’s really not an alternative for ad markets controlled by Google.
eBay sellers don't control their marketplace nor do they have access to all the internal data that can influence purchasing decisions. Google controls its ad market fully.
I think it's the same category as inflating conversions from the point of the advertiser (both are nasty, here it is more easy to prove criminal intent): if you are an ad buyer, make sure that you are adapting your bids and measure everything yourself.
A position I've come to via free markets is public information.
If you look at economic inefficiency, a lot of models depend on some kind of information problem, eg the famous lemon cars.
Consequently, I think far more of how society works should be made public:
- Actual incomes from various sources. Maybe anonymize it, but I've looked up my Norwegian friends' incomes and it hasn't caused a revolution or an epidemic of kidnappings yet. X person is a doctor, he needs a 10 year degree to do that, he get paid £120k, he gets this much pension, these are his working hours. Again, as you grow up you find out some of this but it's very not easy to find, especially when you're deciding.
- Actual business models. "We provide a search engine, where we dynamically auction off advertising space, it makes x amount of money, and we thin y and z are critical to our profitability. Here's book about how it works." To some degree we know this about certain large businesses, but apart from the huge firms whose models have Ben Thompson writing about them, it's not actually that easy. It should be easy for everyone who's graduated high school to find out how the largest 10k firms in the country operate, so that people can think about how to improve things.
- Actual business models, part 2. "We make x millions from y thousand widgets, which we sell to these people. Our suppliers are these firms, and we paid this much to them." Which again is one of those things where you can say "Google pays Apple to be default" but I also want to know if there's some other relationship that maybe I could get my company into. Or it may be that there's some social negative such as monopoly that we want to know sooner rather than later.
- A who-owns-what database that doesn't have anonymizing entities in it. How will we know how society works if we don't have this? There's no way to know who has an interest in what without this. Again, you can say "kidnappings" but there's got to be some middle ground here. It's also a bit strange for society's major legal invention, property law, to work in favor of people when they ask for it, but the rest of the time society doesn't know who it is protecting. I'm no expert but you'd think a sane system would say "so-and-so owns this land, and in exchange for a bit of tax we'll make sure they can use it as they see fit".
- Government needs to be transparent. People already believe this, it's just quite hard and boring to get done. But for instance David Cameron trying to lobby his old mates, it's a great thing that we can see it.
As for this specific article, the interesting thing is that if ads were traded on a security market, a whole can of worms would be opened. We discovered a long time ago that it's bad to favor certain participants, so some stringent rules were put in place regarding fairness. But if I make a market for some other thing and behave the same way, it's not nearly as serious. I mean sure maybe they'll get done for this, but will it be proportional to the harm? Write to me when they're broken up, as the LSE would be if they made a principal business that front-runs the customers.
I've always thought it would be cool if there was a "declassification" period for commercial contracts. Any contract has to be escrowed to be enforceable, and after N years the contract is made public, possibly with names redacted. This would help everyone understand what types of business relationship are possible, which are common, etc.
I don't know for sure this happened, but the adjective "properly" in "properly redacted" makes me wonder if they did black highlight, or drew black boxes over the text, instead of using a PDF editor's redaction feature. Only the latter truly works.
> The court system is supposed to be a public accounting
I'm not a lawyer but I can't see how having every court case public is a good thing. The public accountability should likely be based on judges (the participants) and whistleblowers with a solid burden of proof threshold. Court cases do need to stay private in my mind.
> I'm not a lawyer but I can't see how having every court case public is a good thing.
Well for one, the US has a common law legal system, so it's entirely dependent on the public availability of court cases. In terms of fairness, I think the current status quo is (in this limited respect) very reasonable; you're entitled to absolutely iron-clad privacy in the interactions which you pay for, which are your interactions with your attorney. When you start making use of public funds by bringing your dispute to the courts, the public has a right to know what it's money is being spent on and it has a right to know what's going on in the community. The vast majority of legal disputes are settled in state district courts, which are local in scope.
I also don't think privacy mixes well with the degree to which the judiciary is uniquely unaccountable, though this is admittedly less and less relevant as time goes on since basically nobody in government is accountable for anything at this point.
I'm still not convinced accountability means that the public gets full view of everything. There's probably other ways to ensure that the public gets to know their money is not wasted without hearing and seeing every little detail.
I know many like this sort of article, but I lost interest at "Henry Adams, one of the most important thinkers in the 19th century", because it promises that the article will blather on with philosophical arguments for a long time before actually revealing its point (and thus before showing whether it is worth to spend any time on it).
Ok, but please don't post off-topic, shallow complaints to HN. They get upvoted to the top of the thread (it's basically a community bug) and then choke out interesting discussion.
I've marked this one offtopic now, which puts it lower on the page.
Similarly, I lost interest when I clicked a link to another of the author's posts talking about the FTC declining to sue Google in 2012 and it treated the claims of Yelp as gospel for proof of Google's anticompetitive behaviour.
Yelp like to paint Google as the bogeyman because it distracts from the fact that Yelp hasn't changed in a decade and the product, well, sucks.
The core claim here seems to be that Google is giving itself preferential pricing on impressions. Maybe that's.true? It's not clear to me what the effect of that is. I would've liked more detail about that and less grandstanding on the evils of Google, honestly.
I think this heuristic is good, but specifically for identifying bad writing. You, me, and almost everyone here wants a straightforward account of what happened. The opening sentence is tone-deaf to what the readers want to learn.
Also, the phrase "one of the most" is almost always indicative of poor writing, even if it is far better than using a superlative.
I particularly like the idea that corporate tax returns should be public, just like the way 990 forms from nonprofits are. Sunlight is the best disinfectant.