291–300 of 383 posts
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A progressive tax on the size of the company can do this.
Don’t we have enough taxes? Taxes should fund government not be used to force people to do things.
Others think differently: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steering_tax
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Crazy to think that, despite trump existing, the Democrats still lost two elections to him.
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Why did the democrats just simply forget to do it again?
How many hoops will you have to jump through to answer these questions?
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The article seems to distingish ads from ad tech, stating ads bring in a lot of revenue, but ad tech not. Kinda confused about what the difference is.
Ok, so "ad tech" is basically situations where someone pays you to run their ad network, like a newspaper or a magazine or something who sells their own ads to people. Google used to call this "Doubleclick for Publishers" (DFP) and don't anymore to be confusing, but I am going to use the old names so it is easier to tell you what each part of the business does. When someone sells "ads" they are selling the placement…
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Don’t we have enough taxes? Taxes should fund government not be used to force people to do things.
> Don’t we have enough taxes? Objectively no. For example carbon taxes or other environmental taxes have been proposed by free market advocates since the 70s and never been implemented (from the left you see advocacy for environmentalism but not related to taxation) Also if we had enough taxes, the wealth inequality would not be ramping up to great depression levels and basic necessities like healthcare and housing w…
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This point of view has more to do with your information diet than it does with reality. Companies un-merge and spin out all the time, for many reasons. Mergers and acquisitions are more interesting because they are often associated with a growth story. We like success. Aswath Damodaran, who teaches corporate finance at NYU Stern, has a bunch of great talks and content about this where he discusses how companies shoul…
I would say google is still in its growth phase, albeit a slower one. Especially with capex spending etc.
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A product/service that can drastically reduce the top cause of injury and death, as well as give safe mobility to so many who do not currently have it is not a "cute tech project". >I would rather pay substantially less on anything I buy, and have the free market sort out self-driving cars. Alphabet's entire revenue divided by the total amount of goods and services sold is miniscule, so I don't see how it could be ma…
Self-driving cars are an absurdly inefficient way to reduce traffic deaths that exists only because it makes substantially more money for shareholders than the alternatives. You are being witheld a good and cheap solution now for the promise of a worse and expensive solution some time in the future. All the while people keep dying. Oh, and what's this "those who don't have it" bullshit? If anything, turning driving i…
You mean public transport? I live in a country with one of the best public transport systems in the world. I enjoy it, but please don't fool yourself into thinking that it is cheap. It is not, very much NOT. All the big Czech cities spend between 25 and 35 per cent of their municipal budgets on public transport, and those are mostly already mature systems where the most expensive work like laying track is already amortized. New trams and buses, repairs, drivers wages, electricity, nothing is cheap nowadays.
Sure, an American city can decide to build a new tram or subway system from scratch, but don't promise anyone that it is going to be cheap. It won't, doubly so if the mayors stipulate high wages for the workers, like NYC does.
And even the best public transport system fails at the peripheries, where density of the population drops under a limit of viability. Then you have two buses a day even here in CZ.
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Progressive corporate taxation could make it happen for reasons other than dodging the ghosts of chemical sins past!
Can we stop with taxing everything you don’t like? Taxes should be equal and used to fund the government, not as tools to make people do things you like.
"Should" needs some unpacking; there's a subjective value lurking inside.
Personally, i prefer economic incentives over coercion. My starting point: there is a degree to which society must govern entities within it.
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Progressive corporate taxation would give the market an incentive to do spinoffs and undo the merger wave. Or we could just roll antitrust policy back to what it was before Ronald Reagan and Robert Bork installed the Consumer Welfare Standard, the idea that companies must be allowed to merge if they can scribble a tall tale with crayons on butcher paper about how the merger will benefit consumers, for sure, pinky pro…
Progressive corporate taxation would lead to every company splitting its revenue and expenses across 50 shell companies, without actually splitting operations.
I like globalisation on its face. The second-order effects are a bitch. I don't want to go full protectionist, bit we should swing the needle back a bit.
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Isnt that updated by some national database and google just pulls that data? Apparently Apple Maps will also get it in a few days, since they get the data from them as well.
I have been wondering this as well. I cannot imagine having this be autoupdated without review from a centralized database is a good idea. This is a process that needs to be frangible and have some friction in it. In this day and age, GPS mapping tools have major implications for societal function, safety, economics, national security, healthcare, etc. I'm struggling to think of an industry where a sudden absence/sub…
You mean GPS (or rather GNSS) navigation tools.
GPS != map
Slightly tangential thought: My belief is: legislation needs to either make it just as hard to merge two companies as it is to unmerge them, or make it just as easy to unmerge two companies as it is to merge them. It's insane to me that for how often companies merge and cause competition issues, we effectively never see the opposite happen. I know there's a ceremonial approval for merging two companies (at least in t…
> or make it just as easy to unmerge two companies as it is to merge them. [Disclaimer: I work at Google, all words my own and not representative of anyone, etc.] There's no such thing. Let's stick to software since it's what HN knows best, but it's a universal truth. Merging two companies: you take the two sides and they keep running. You probably need some extra accounting work to make sure the mandatory reports fr…
A contract for purchasing Parent Co.'s HR, legal, and compliance expertise for child co.
And a contract for sharing technology infrastructure.
The terms and pricing of the contract would likely be strictly regulated to prevent preferential treatment and encourage a clean separation over time.
I'm not a lawyer though, so who knows.