Google is a megacorp, and while megacorps aren't fundamentally "evil" (for some definitions of evil), they are fundamentally unconcerned with goodness or morality, and any appearance that they are is purely a marketing exercise.
... or at least that's what these people have to be telling themselves at all times.
while knowing this seems useless, it's actually the missing intrinsic compass and the cause for a lot of bad and stupid behavior (by the definition that something is stupid if chosen knowing it will cause negative consequences for the doer)
Everything should primarily be measured based on its primary goal. For "for-profit" companies that's obvious in their name and definition.
That there's nothing that should be assumed beyond what's stated is the premise of any contract whether commercial, public or personal (like friendship) is a basic tool for debate and decision making.
I think megacorps being evil is universal. It tends to be corrupt cop evil vs serial killer evil, but being willing to do anything for money has historically been categorized as evil behavior.
That doesn’t mean society would be better or worse off without them, but it would be interesting to see a world where companies pay vastly higher taxes as they grow.
This is a very important point to remember when assessing ideas like "Is it good to build swarms of murderbots to mow down rioting peasants angry over having expenses but no jobs?" Most people might answer "no," but if the people with money answer "yes," that becomes the market's objective. Then the incentives diffuse through the economy and you don't just get the murderbots, you also get the news stations explaining how the violent peasants brought this on themselves and the politicians making murderbots tax deductible and so on.
That's old thinking. Now we have servitization. Now the business who can most efficiently offer value deserves the entire market.
Basically, iterate until you're the only one left standing and then never "sell" anything but licenses ever again.
No, no. Call a spade a spade. This behavior and attitude is evil. Corporations under modern American capitalism must be evil. That's how capitalism works.
You succeed in capitalism not by building a better mousetrap, but by destroying anyone who builds a better moustrap than you. You litigate, acquire, bribe, and rewrite legislation to ensure yours is the best and only mousetrap available to purchase, with a token 'competitor' kept on life support so you can plausibly deny anticompetitive practices.
If you're a good company trying to do good things, you simply can't compete. The market just does not value what is good, just, or beneficial. The market only wants number to go up, and to go up right now at any cost. Amazon will start pumping out direct clones of your product for pennies. What are you gonna do, sue Amazon?! best of luck.
1. https://drakelawreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/lrdisc...
So in effect you have to call the employees and shareholders evil. Well those are the same people who also work and hold public office from time to time, or are shareholders, or whatever. You can't limit this "evilness" to just an abstract corporation. Not only is it not true, you are setting up your "problem" so that it can't be addressed because you're only moralizing over the abstract corporation and not the physical manifestation of the corporation either. What do you do about the abstract corporation being evil if not taking action in the physical world against the physical people who work at and run the corporation and those who buy its products?
I've noticed similar behavior with respect to climate change advocacy and really just "government" in general. If you can't take personal responsibility, or even try to change your own habits, volunteer, work toward public office, organize, etc. it's less than useless to rail about these entities that many claim are immoral or need reform if you are not personally going to get up and do something about it. Instead you (not you specifically) just complain on the Internet or to friends and family, those complaints do nothing, and you feel good about your complaining so you don't feel like you need to actually do anything to make change. This is very unproductive because you have made yourself feel good about the problem but haven't actually done anything.
With all that being said, I'm not sure how paying vastly higher taxes would make Google (or any other company) less evil or more evil. What if Google pays more taxes and that tax money does (insert really bad thing you don't like)? Paying taxes isn't like a moral good or moral bad thing.
I think if you look at quality of life and happiness ratings in Norway it's pretty clear it's far from "entirely undesirable". It's good for people to do things for reasons other than money.
[1]: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
The market fairy has also decided that medication commercials on TV is good for you. That your car should report your location, speed, and driving habits to your insurer, car manufacturer, and their 983,764 partners at all times.
Maximally beneficial indeed.
And if Googs doesn't do it, someone else will, so it might as well be them that makes money for their shareholders. Technically, couldn't activist shareholders come together and claim by not going after this market the leadership should be replaced for those that would? After all, share prices is the only metric that matters
We could literally have high speed rail, healthcare, the best education on the planet and have a high standard of living... and it would be peanuts to them. Instead we have a handful of people with more wealth than 99% of everyone else, while the bottom 75% of those people live in horrifying conditions. The fact that medical bankruptcy is a concept only in the richest country on earth is deeply embarrassing and shameful.
Want to make more? then take personal risk.
People making meaningful decisions at mega corporations aren’t a random sample of the population, they are self selected to care a great deal about money and or power.
Honestly if you wanted to filter the general population to quietly discover who was evil I’d have a hard time finding something more effective. It doesn’t guarantee everyone is actually evil, but actually putting your kids first is a definite hindrance.
The morality of the average employee on the other hand is mostly irrelevant. They aren’t setting policies and if they dislike something they just get replaced.
Edit: answered, not asked
I don't think it's necessary to conclude that because a company is evil then everyone who works at the company is evil. But it's sort of like the evilness of the company is a weighted function of the evilness of the people who control it. Someone with a small role may be relatively good while the company overall can still be evil. Someone who merely uses the company's products is even more removed from the company's own level of evil. If the company is evil it usually means there is some relatively small group of people in control of it making evil decisions.
Now, I'm using phraseology here like "is evil" as a shorthand for "takes actions that are evil". The overall level of evilness or goodness of a person is an aggregate of their actions. So a person who works for an evil company or buys an evil company's products "is evil", but only insofar as they do so. I don't think this is even particularly controversial, except insofar as people may prefer alternative terms like "immoral" or "unethical" rather than "evil". It's clear people disagree about which acts or companies are evil, but I think relatively few people view all association with all companies totally neutrally.
I do agree with you that taking personal responsibility is a good step. And, I mean, I think people do that too. All kinds of people avoid buying from certain companies, or buy SRI funds or whatever, for various ethically-based reasons.
However, I don't entirely agree with the view that says it's useless or hypocritical to claim that reform is necessary unless you are going to "do something". Yes, on some level we need to "do something", but saying that something needs to be done is itself doing something. I think the idea that change has to be preceded or built from "saintly" grassroots actions is a pernicious myth that demotivates people from seeking large-scale change. My slogan for this is "Big problems require big solutions".
This means that it's unhelpful to say that, e.g., everyone who wants regulation of activities that Company X does has to first purge themselves of all association with Company X. In many cases a system arises which makes such purges difficult or impossible. As an extreme, if someone lives in an area with few places to get food, they may be forced to patronize a grocery store even if they know that company is evil. Part of "big solutions" means replacing the bad ways of doing things with new things, rather than saying that we first have to get rid of the bad things to get some kind of clean slate before we can build new good things.
This is a meme that needs to die, for 99% of cases out there the line between good/bad is very clear cut.
Dumb nihilists keep the world from moving forward with regards to human rights and lawful behavior.
Sounds like the effort needed for bonuses here in the US. Why try if the amount is largely arbitrary and generally lower than your base salary pay rate when you consider all the extra hours. Everything is a sham.
Their entire economy and society are structured around oil extraction.
There are no lessons to learn from Norway unless you live somewhere that oil does from the ground.
If using AI and other technology to uphold a surveillance state, wage war, do imperialism, and do genocide... isn't evil, than I don't know if you can call anything evil.
And the entire point of taxes is that we all collectively decide that we all would be better off if we pooled our labor and resources together so that we can have things like a basic education, healthcare, roads, police, bridges that don't collapse etc.. Politicians and corporations have directly broken and abused this social contract in a multitude of ways, one of those ways is using loopholes to not pay taxes at the same rate as everyone else by a large margin... another way is paying off politicians and lobbying so that those loopholes never get closed, and in fact, the opposite happens. So yes, taxing Google and other mega-corporations is a single, easily identifiable, action that can be directly taken to remedy this problem. Though, there is no way around solving the core issue at hand, but people have to be able to identify that issue foremost.
Moral character is something that has to be taught, it doesn't just come out on its own.
If your parents don't do it properly, you'll be just another cog in the soulless machine to which human life is of no value.
I take issue with "don't blame the employees". You need people to run these organizations. If you consider the organization to be evil you don't get to then say well the people who are making the thing run aren't evil, they're just following orders or they don't know better. BS. And they'd be replaced if they left? Is that really the best argument we have against "being evil"?
Sorry I'd be less evil but if I gave up my position as an evil henchman someone else would do it! And all that says anyway is that those replacing those who leave are just evil too.
If you work at one of these companies or buy their products and you literally think they are evil you are either lying to yourself, or actively being complicit in their evil actions. There's just no way around that.
Take personal responsibility. Make tough decisions. Stop abstracting your problems away.
This is a cliche you hear from right winger in any country that has a progressive tax system.
Regarding Norway, taxes aren't in the same ballpark as in some US blue states.
Also, it's a very simplistic view to think that people are only motivated by money. Counter examples abound.
Putting money before other considerations is what’s evil. What’s “possible” expands based on your morality it doesn’t contract. If being polite makes a sale you’re going to find a lot of polite sales people, but how much are they willing to push that expended warrantee?
> Sorry I'd be less evil but if I gave up my position as an evil henchman someone else would do it!
I’ve constrained what I’m willing to do and who I’m willing to work for based on my morality, have you? And if not, consider what that say about you…
Complaining is not unproductive, it signals to others they are not alone in their frustrations. Imagine that nobody ever responds or airs their frustrations; would you feel comfortable saying something about it? Maybe you're the only one, better keep quiet then. Or how do you find people who share your frustrations with whom you could organise some kind of pushback?
If I was "this government", I would love for people to shut up and just do their job, pay taxes and buy products (you don't have to buy them from megacorp, just spend it and oh yeah, goodluck finding places to buy products from non-megacorps).
Most people consider neglect evil in my experience.
Instead of taking action they complain, set up an abstract boogeyman to take down, and then nobody can actually take action to make the world better (based on their point of view) because there's nothing anyone can do about Google the evil corporation because it's just some legal fiction. Bonus points for moralizing on the Internet and getting likes to feel even better about not doing anything.
But you can do something. If someone thinks Google is evil they can stop using Gmail or other Google products and services, or even just reduce their usage - maybe you can switch email providers but you only have one good map option. Ok at least you did a little more than you did previously.
Depends on the considerations and what you consider to be evil. My point wasn't to argue about what's evil, of course there is probably a few hundred years of philosophy to overcome in that discussion, but to point out that if you truly think an organization is evil it's not useful to only care about the legal fiction or the CEO or the board that you won't have any impact on - you have to blame the workers who make the evil possible too, and stop using the products. Otherwise you're just deceiving yourself into feeling like you are doing something.
The fact you assume people are going to do things they believe to be morally reprehensible is troubling to me.
I don’t assume people need to be evil to work at such companies because I don’t assume they notice the same things I do.
> The fact you assume people are going to do things they believe to be morally reprehensible is troubling to me.
This seems to be very common behavior in my experience. Perhaps the rhetoric doesn't match the true beliefs. I'm not sure.
Increasing marginal income tax rates on highly compensated employees might be a good policy overall. But where are we on the Laffer curve? If we go too far then it really hurts the overall economy.
Weird thing is for corporations, it's humans running the whole thing.
We all recognize that a democracy is the correct method for political decision making, even though it's also obvious that theoretically a truly benevolent dictator can make better decisions than an elected parliament but in practice such dictators don't really exist.
The same reasoning applies to economic decision making at society level. If you want a society whose economics reflects the will and ethics of the people, and which serves for the benefit of normal people, the obvious thing is the democratize economic decision making. That means that all large corporations must be mostly owned by their workers in roughly 1/N fashion, not by a small class of shareholders. This is the obvious correct solution, because it solves the underlying problem, not paper of the symptoms like taxation. If shareholder owned corporations are extracting wealth from workers or doing unethical things, the obvious solution is to take away their control.
Obviously, some workers will still make their own corporations do evil things, but at least it will be collective responsibility, not forced upon them by others.
...I just picture a similar conversation with a CEO going: "Sir, shareholders want to see more improvement this quarter." CEO: "Do we run ads? Have we run ads? Will we run ads this time?" (The answer is inevitably yes to all of these)
This is flatly untrue. Corporations are made up of humans who make decisions. They are indeed concerned with goodness and/or morality. Saying otherwise lets them off the hook for the explicit decisions they make every day about how to operate their company. It's one reason why there are shareholder meetings, proxy votes, activist investors, Certified B-Corporations, etc.
I guess corrupt cop vs serial killer is like amorality (profit-driven systems) vs immorality (active malice)? A company is a mix of stakeholders, some of whom push for ethical practices. But when shareholders demand endless growth, even well-intentioned actors get squeezed.
the architecture of the system is imperfect and creates bad results for people.
This isn’t new. Facebook, for example, received early funding from In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital arm, and its origins trace back to DARPA’s canceled LifeLog project—a system designed to track and catalog people’s entire lives. Big Tech and government surveillance have been intertwined from the start.
That’s why these companies never face real consequences. They’ve become quasi-government entities, harvesting data on billions under the guise of commerce.
Not a cliché - a fact. I'll explain to you.
The incentive structure of progressive taxation is wrong: it only works for the few percent that are extremely money hungry: the few that are willing to work for lower and lower percentage gains.
Normal people say "enough" and they give up once they have the nice house and a few toys (and some retirement money with luck). In New Zealand that is something like USD1.5 million.
I'm on a marginal rate of 39% in New Zealand. I am well off but I literally am not motivated to try and earn anything extra because the return is not enough for the extra effort or risk involved. No serial entrepreneurship for me because it only has downside risk. If I invest and win then 39%+ is taken as tax, but even worse is that if I lose then I can't claim my time back. Even financial losses only claw back against future income: and my taxable income could move to $0 due to COVID-level-event and so my financial risk is more than what it might naively appear.
Taxation systems do not fairly reward for risk. Especially watch people with no money taking high risks and pay no insurance because the worst that can happen to them is bankruptcy.
New Zealand loses because the incentive structure for a founder is broken. We are an island so the incentive structure should revolve around bringing in overseas income (presuming the income is spent within NZ). Every marginal dollar brought into the economy helps all citizens and the government.
The incentives were even worse when I was working but was trying to found a company. I needed to invest time, which had the opportunity cost of the wages I wouldn't get as a developer (significant risk that can't be hedged and can't be claimed against tax). 9 times out of 10 a founder wins approximately $0: so expected return needs to be > 10x. A VC fund needs something like > 30x return from the 1 or 2 winning investments. I helped found a successful business but high taxation has meant I haven't reached my 30x yet - chances are I'll be dead before I get a fair return for my risk. I'm not sure I've even reached 10x given I don't know the counterfactual of what my employee income would have become. This is for a business earning good export income.
Incentive structures matter - we understand that for employees - however few governments seem to understand that for businesses.
Most people are absolutely ignorant of even basic economics. The underlying drive is the wish to take from those that have more than them. We call it the tall poppy syndrome down here.
(reëdited to add clarity)
> We are clarifying that, as we continue to increase the breadth and depth of the content we make available to you, circumstances may require that certain titles and types of content include ads, even in our 'no ads' or 'ad free' subscription tiers.
So at this point they aren't even bothering to rename the tier from "ad free" even as they put ads in it. Or maybe it's supposed to mean "the ads come free with it" now? Newspeak indeed.
Also, scale plays a significant part as well. Any high-exposure organization which operates on a global scale has access to an extremely large pool of candidates to staff its offices... And such candidate pools necessarily include a large number of any given personas... Including large numbers of ethically-challenged individuals and criminals. Without an interview process which actively selects for 'ethics', the ethically-challenged and criminal individuals have a significant upper-hand in getting hired and then later wedging themselves into positions of power within the company.
Criminals and ethically-challenged individuals have a bigger risk appetite than honest people so they are more likely to succeed within a corporate hierarchy which is founded on 'positive thinking' and 'turning a blind eye'. On a global corporate playing field, there is a huge amount of money to be made in hiding and explaining away irregularities.
A corporate employee can do something fraudulent and then hold onto their jobs while securing higher pay, simply by signaling to their employer that they will accept responsibility if the scheme is exposed; the corporate employer is happy to maintain this arrangement and feign ignorance while extracting profits so long as the scheme is kept under wraps... Then if the scheme is exposed, the corporations will swiftly throw the corporate employee under the bus in accordance to the 'unspoken agreement'.
The corporate structure is extremely effective at deflecting and dissipating liability away from itself (and especially its shareholders) and onto citizens/taxpayers, governments and employees (as a last layer of defense). The shareholder who benefits the most from the activities of the corporation is fully insulated from the crimes of the corporation. The scapegoats are lined up, sandwiched between layers of plausible deniability in such a way that the shareholder at the end of the line can always claim complete ignorance and innocence.
That word comes with a lot of boot-up code and dodgy dependencies.
I don't like it.
Did Robert Louis Stevenson make a philosophical error in 1882 supposing that a moral society (with laws etc) can contain within itself a domain outside of morals [0]?
What if coined the word "alegal"?
Oh officer... what I'm doing is neither legal nor illegal, it's simply alegal "
The main thing here I think is anonymity through numbers and complexity. You and thousands of others just want to see the numbers go up. And that desire is what ultimately influences decisions like this.
If google stock dropped because of this then google wouldn't do it. But it is the actions of humans in aggregate that keeps it up.
Megacorporations are scapegoats when in actuality they are just a set of democratic rules. The corporation is just a window into the true nature of humanity.
That is to make a mistake of composition. An entity can have properties that none of its parts have. A cube made out of bricks is round, but none of the bricks are round. You might be evil, your cells aren't evil.
It's often the case that institutions are out of alignment with its members. It can even be the case that all participants of an organization are evil, but the system still functions well. (usually one of the arguments for markets, which is one such system). When creating an organization that is effectively the most basic task, how to structure it such that even when its individual members are up to no good, the functioning of the organization is improved.
People have the incentive to not do evil and to do evil for money. When you abstract the evil away into 1 vote out of thousands then you abstract responsibility and everyone ends up in aggregate doing an inconsequential evil and it adds up to a big evil.
The tragedy of the commons.
Obviously because they don't give a shit.
That creates limits to growth of an Ad based ecosystem.
So the thing to pay attention too is not Revenue growth or Profit growth of a Platform but Price of an Ad, Price to increase reach, price to Pay to Boost your post, price of a presidential campaign etc etc. These prices cant grow forever just like with housing prices or we get the equivalent of a Housing Bubble.
Want to destabilize the whole system pump up ad prices.
Growing up in soviet bloc I took that story at face value. After all democracy was still a new thing, and people haven't invented privacy concerns yet.
Since then I always thought that some sort of cooperation between companies like Facebook or Google and CIA/DOD was an obvious thing to everyone.
And if one wants to know why big tech from China isn't welcome, be it phones or social media, it's not because fear of them spying on Americans, but because of the infeasibility of integrating Chinese companies into our own domestic surveillance systems.
The difference is Norway’s economy being far less dependent on petroleum which is only 40% of their exports.
The income tax rate isn't all that relevant to the costs and benefits of starting a company, so I don't understand that part of your story. The rewards for founding a successful company mostly aren't subject to income tax, and NZ has a very light capital gains regime.
I have started my own company and I do agree that there are some issues that could be addressed. For example, it would be fairer if the years I worked for no income created tax-deductible losses against future income.
But NZ's tax rates are lower than Australia and the USA and most comparable nations, and NZers start a lot of businesses, so I don't think that is one of our major problems at the moment.
> Years ago a friend working in security told me that every telco operator in Elbonia
See info about the fictional country of Elbonia here, from the Dilbert comics:
Isn't that a contradiction? Morality is fundamentally a sense of "right and wrong". If they reward anything that maximizes short term profit and punish anything that works against it then it appears to me that they have a simple, but clearly defined sense of morality centered around profit.
That's good that it motivates you. It doesn't motivate me any more. I'm not interested in "investing" more time for the reasons I have said.
> the taxes paid aren't burned, they mostly go to things I care about.
I'm pleased for you. I'd like to put more money towards things I care about.
> The income tax rate isn't all that relevant to the costs and benefits of starting a company
I am just less positive than you: it feels like win you lose, lose you lose bigger. I'm just pointing out that our government talks about supporting businesses but I've seen the waste from the repetitive attempts to monetise our scientific academics.
> The rewards for founding a successful company mostly aren't subject to income tax
Huh? Dividends are income. Or are you talking about the non-monetary rewards of owning a business?
> NZ has a very light capital gains regime
Which requires you to sell your company to receive the benefits of the lack of CGT. So every successful business in NZ is incentivised to sell. NZ sells it's jewels. Because keeping a company means paying income tax every year. NZ is fucking itself by selling anything profitable - usually to foreign buyers.
The one big ticket item I would like to save for is my retirement fund. But Labour/Greens want to take 50% to 100% of capital if you have over 2 million. A bullshit low amount drawdown at 4% is $80k/annum before tax LOL. Say investments go up by 6% per year and you want to withdraw 4%. Then a 2% tax is 100% of your gains. Plus I'm certain they will introduce means testing for super before I am eligible. And younger people are even more fucked IMHO. The reality is I need to plan to pay for the vast majority of my own costs when I retire, but I get to pay to support everybody else. I believe in socialist health care and helping our elderly, but the country is slowly going broke and I can't do much about that. I believe that our government will take whatever I have carefully saved - often to pay for people that were not careful (My peer-group is not wealthy so I see the good and the bad of how our taxes are spent). Why should I try to earn more to save?
What are you are saying is: optimising for commercial success is incompatible with morality. The conclusion is that publicly traded megacorps must inevitably trend towards amorality.
So yes, they aren't "evil" but I think amorality is the closest thing to "evil" that actually exists in the real world.
I would argue that is fundamentally evil. Because evil pays the best. Its like drunk driving, on an empty road it can only harm you, but we live in a society full of other people.
Seems it would be informative to many of the people posting on this thread.
I find it hard to understand how $60K means no motivation but $100K would be highly motivating.
> I'd like to put more money towards things I care about.
You said later that you care about the public health system and helping the elderly. That's where a large percentage of our taxes go.
> Huh? Dividends are income. Or are you talking about the non-monetary rewards of owning a business?
No, I'm talking about selling all or part of the business. I agree with you that it's a problem our businesses often sell out to overseas interests who hollow out the company. But the general pattern of making most of your money by selling shares in the business is completely normal worldwide.
It either takes risk of private capital or future taxpayers' taxes to create big leagues. I'd take the former over the latter.
I think "this isn't free; you pay with ad views and your data is sold" is something that should be on a price tag on services that operate this way, though. It doesn't work if the price isn't clearly advertised.
This ad hominem stuff is very out of place. Why not solely engage with the argument?
One of the second order consequences of progressive taxation is that it increases gross wages for higher earners, as people care about their net pay being larger, not their gross pay.
An extreme example, in the UK the tax rate is an effective 60% between £100k and £120k (ish), so people's salaries get driven through that zone quickly. This obviously means there's less money to give to other people.
This sort of discussion gets a bit tricky because it often turns out one person is not having a discussion; they're trying to advertise something about themselves.
That's why it's being tentatively called "Technofeudalism".
Seems fundamentally evil.
The marginal rate in NZ is 39%!? That’s LOWER than in California, the land of “serial entrepreneurship”, for anyone with a successful startup. Not to mention the US tax rate doesn’t include a myriad of other small taxes that for some reason are not included in that number. On top of having a higher tax rate the average Californian entrepreneur also has to source extremely expensive healthcare.
It sounds more like an excuse to keep doing what you already wanted to do rather than an actual demotivating factor.
A couple years ago, my state banned single use plastic bags. The very moment they did, all of my local Walmarts switched to heavier plastic bags that technically weren't single use. They still gave them away for free just as they did with the first ones. (These we're good quality bags and I was frustrated that Walmart didn't just give them away by default). Eventually my state banned those too, and like clockwork, Walmart was giving away paper bag bags -- decent quality ones, too. Though I still really liked the thicker plastic ones since I could use them for other things.
This made me realize that no corporation would do anything slightly better for the environment unless forced. I think this is the case for anything a corporation would do, including evil things. I think they just follow the money, no ethics, and it's up to the government to provide those ethics.
Our society mostly works because of our non-monetary rewards, not because of monetary incentives. My teaching and nursing friends work for their own satisfaction, and more money is not a high priority to them.
I am not particularly motivated by money. I suspect you are a businessperson that believes money is strongly motivating? I chased financial success for 15 years when I started from $0: however I now hope I have enough and I hope it won't be unfairly taken from me. Yes, money was a big incentive then (and my personal costs have been very high), but now I have other goals.
I suspect I psychologically find high marginal taxation demotivating (48% if we include GST). Maybe because I have too many acquaintances and family sucking at the government tit. I see where government money goes because I have a wide variety of acquaintances including retirees, elderly, unhealthy, and unemployed. Yeah, I know they are not living the high life (well, maybe my drug-abusing anti-social acquaintances think they are).
> No, I'm talking about selling all or part of the business
Which requires an intense amount of work, and sometimes a significant loss, and usually requires selling 100%... Why should I sell at 4x earnings when I can hold on to the business - even if I don't want it? Taxation has too much influence on my investments because rebalancing across other investments has too high a cost/risk.
I guess I'm an idealist. I believe in startups, and I believe they help all New Zealanders. But the incentives of our taxation system mean that founding a startup is foolish: I don't recommend to anyone that they should be a founder (even though I have won the gamble). The unrecoverable costs of anything but spectacular success are too high. The non-monetary rewards are poor in my experience. The expected median return for a startup founder is about $0. Our social systems and taxation systems need to encourage business inception and growth so that all of NZ can be better off.
Thank you for your questions. It is always good to be asked why!
Sales tax 15%, 91 petrol USD5.34/gallon, means testing for many things, no tax friendly retirement savings (IRAs/ROTHs whatever). Auckland housing is less affordable than San Francisco https://www.visualcapitalist.com/least-affordable-cities-to-...
I pay for private healthcare insurance because I want better outcomes than waiting for years to get urgent surgery. I have seen loved ones literally killed by our healthcare system (unnecessary death - not just normal risks of medicine). Our public health system is good when it works but it has some sharp edges. Although I assume poor NZers are better off than poor Californians for heathcare access.
> It sounds more like an excuse to keep doing what you already wanted to do rather than an actual demotivating factor.
I am telling you that it demotivates me. We don't always know why we think things and I don't have to be perfectly rational. You might be right, but calling it an excuse is extremely rude.
“I love hanging out with Tim he’s a funny guy helped me move a couch last week, kind of which he hadn’t pushed me in front of that bus that one time but ehh I doubt he’d do that again…”
Not thinking anything about who you’re working for is just kind of the default. However, IMO if you do feel something is wrong then that’s when the obligation to carry through comes in.
Hard to avoid cheaters.
A policy could be that the government could pay for 2 years of current salary and you only get one chance per person -- however I can't imagine how the government could get that into the budget.
The policy I implied is be to reward winners with a tax break to offset their risk. Difficult to sell to any voters that don't understand risk/reward or voters that believe business owners are greedy worthless bâtards.
Ha: if the business fails you lose money (the wages you didn't receive), and if the business wins you are taxed: "Privatise the losses, socialise the gains" ;)
Allallarmia https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sichere_Inter-Netzwerk_Archite...
(Really süperspeciälly VPN-hardware used to securely suck data out of ISPs with extradeutsche Gründlichkeit,
mandatory to be installed by law,
just in case,
for some random chase.)
Edit: Thinking of it this is bubbling up https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dagger_Complex ,
where Magagagia built some little base just 'a stones throw' away from Allallarmias former monopol government Telcos early internet exchange and HQ .
( https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fernmeldetechnisches_Zentralam... )
What are the odds?
So the difference between earning a decent salary of $80-100k and a great salary north of $150k isn't much tax-percent-wise. If you make another $1000 you take home about $500.
Also keep in mind we don't have to pay for health insurance, we don't have to pay for our kids to go to school, if we get sick and can't work we have a social security net that will take care of us indefinitely. Norway is a great place to live. The people who complain about taxes are idiots who don't know how good they have it. If you make $200k+ you're living a fucking great life, if you make $400k it's even better. Hell i used to make like $35k and I got by on that. $50k is perfectly liveable. And those people pay like 20-25%.
I'm happy to pay taxes, I'm doing great and I don't even earn that much yet. I expect to nearly double my salary within the next 5ish years. Maybe more than double.
Then you have middle class+ Norwegians with a big house, $100k+ car, sweet boat, cabin in the mountains etc complaining about taxes. Man shut up you're literally top .1% in the world you won the damn lottery.