byrneseyeview

I always get the feeling that what they're really supposed to do is grovel--to admit that it wasn't an honest mistake, but that they really were being evil, and that they've finally been caught and forced to own up. I don't think people are comfortable with diversity when it means that some people think it's totally okay to do something that other people would find horribly offensive.

I'm sorry if that's offensive. But that's all I'm sorry for.

I haven't heard of situations where someone refers a bunch of garbage applicants for the referral bonus--and I'm sure the usual referral agreement has some legal caveats that allow the company to cut off particular referrers if they're abusive.

It's not necessary for every company, but it's not as toxic as it sounds. From working as an actual recruiter: recruiting is really hard. Doing part-time recruiting for a fee well below the industry standard is a waste of effort; if you can make good money doing that, quit your dev job and start recruiting full-time.

Whenever I find myself thinking this way, the klaxons start going off. I'm basically saying "My mental model of a clearly smart person, surrounded by clearly smart people, who has made more money than I have and raised money from other smart people who have also made more money than I have--is that he's an idiot."

And then we get to:

So here Zynga finds itself, sitting atop a group of popular games and bracing itself for the next Draw Something to come onto the market so it can swallow it up...So the matchup is Zynga against the field, the field being every person in the world who knows how to, and has the will to create a social game.

Another way of looking at this is that Zynga is building a competitive advantage in social game monetization: if you have a given audience, Zynga can do more with it than you can. Meanwhile, giant deals like OMGPOP create a tournament dynamic, where everyone wants to build the next Draw Something. If Zynga is making their raw material cheap while putting their competitive advantage at a relative premium, that's great for their future.

It's also a more solid theory than just assuming that Pincus doesn't know what he's doing.

"If we all behaved the way corporations do" doesn't really mean anything. Corporations are people. It would be much more accurate to say "If all people behaved like the people who work at Apple, the world would be a worse place," but I don't think that's defensible at all.

If it does become a social norm to obey the law you wish Congress passed, instead of the law they actually passed, you're subsidizing people who ignore this norm. I wouldn't want to live in a world where RIMM out-competes Apple because Apple scrupulously follows good, imaginary rules, and RIMM scrupulously follows actual rules instead. This would all be a lot less meaningful if the US had lower corporate tax rates, but ours are effectively the highest in the world. Since the corporate tax rate is also the subsidy for hiding a given amount of income, it's no wonder that we lead the world in tax avoidance, too.

You could theoretically borrow against those assets, but only if your lender expected you to be paid. That's the beauty of the plan: it means that the only taxable event is the one that materially benefits you.

Meanwhile, corporations:

a) Get taxed on their profits

b) May pay lower notional levels, but only by paying people to game the rules

c) Get taxed on their dividends (essentially a 15% surtax on the 35% tax on their profits)

d) Also get taxed through capital gains--which is a change in the (un-inflation-adjusted) net present value of future dividends (which, remember, are taxed when they're earned, then taxed when they're paid).

If you give our tax code enough credit, the 35% tax rate is a lower bound. If the government is willing to let you pay $X less in taxes for doing Y, they're saying that the benefit of Y exceeds the forgone tax income of $X. So if I get a $5K tax credit for installing solar panels, the amount of tax-equivalent benefit the government has derived from my behavior is at least $5K.

You could argue that the tax code is imperfect, and that action Y is not always worth $X. But then you're suggesting that we transfer money from a competent rule-follower to an incompetent rule-writer. If governing skill is constant across tax collection and other government behaviors, then exploiting tax loopholes is just in proportion to how exploitable they are--a government so screwed up that it can't manage to legally tax you for anything is a government that definitely shouldn't have its hands on your money.

Obviously, the government has other core competencies besides taxation. But corporate taxes are worth reconsidering. I'd much rather have dividends taxed as regular income--turning corporations into a pure savings vehicle. Taxing corporation-generated wealth four times--when it's generated, when it's calculated, when it's distributed, and when ownership is transferred--is at least three times too many.

Oddly enough, New York has implemented an effective Henry George-esque tax system: to merely exist in the city, you have to live in fairly pricey real estate, and the taxes your landlord pays are effectively passed through to you by market rents. Other places have much cheaper real estate, so they don't have the same dynamic.

Just like Apple, in this case. Under the current legal regime, they have successfully deferred taxes, not evaded them. It's the same way I carefully evade sales taxes by saving some of my money instead of spending every paycheck.