Slashdot Mirror
Google Founders Cut Salaries to $1
GeneralCern writes "MSNBC Reports that Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and CEO Eric Schmidt
all slashed their salaries to $1
last year. Since you do not have to pay FICA, Medicare, or income taxes on
the capital gains associated with stock sales, they stand to substantially decrease
their tax burden. Is this a breach of the company's "do no evil" mission
statement, or just an example of people who love their jobs so much they don't
need to be paid to go to work?" Update: 04/09 13:11 GMT by H :And don't trust the above tax lines; it all depends on how sales are done; moreover when you are worth X amount with stock, I suspect the "tax burden" of what is, relatively speaking, a salary that's small compared to networth isn't a substantial impact. Sorry folks; poor story.
How can you expect "do no evil" from a company that patents algorithms.
Nothing to see here
They will get paid by stock options and alike, paying much less taxes for the same income... anyway, I think it is more a PR stunt ("we work because we are fierce of our product") than any other thing...
Why can't
Does the US have a minumum wage?
Can you get done for underpaying yourself, or does the wronged party have to complain to start legal action?
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
Now i don't want to be google's next CEO any more.
var sig = function() { sig(); }
In this economy, I'll take what I can get. :)
e.g.
http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=define%3Abreach
or
http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=define%3Abreech
I thought screwing Uncle Sam was "doing no evil"... especially around tax time.
I think those guys are really smart! Such intelligent people is rightly rewarded by luck.
Paying less taxes is funding less evil. What more can one say?
I have long given up my hopes that google will be a "nice" corporation. They have prooven over the last few months that profit is #1, like any other corporation. Like any other corporation: they should not be trusted.
It's neither a breech of "do no evil" nor an example of their love of work... it's a legitimate way of avoiding paying tax which is standard practice for business leaders everywhere.
Total non-story; yet completely on message for the nonsense that Slashdot has decended into over the past few years. News for nerds? Barely. A barrage of pointless bollocks? Definitely.
What a ridiculous post. How could you possibly draw an association between minimizing personal income tax and Google turning 'evil'.
The word is TOO - "we pay too many taxes..."
Perhaps you need to pay more taxes to fund your failing education system.
Sergey Brin is, according to Forbes, already worth $7.2B. Wouldn't it be great to be so incredibly rich that you did'nt have to worry about personal income ever again?
Anyway, this is PR that's probably worth way more than the salary itself. Steve Jobs does the same thing, IIRC.
When the companies "company" is based on those algorithms how can you not patent them!
Dashboard Widgets
One *always* pays taxes on capitals gains from stock sales. Has nothing to do with salary.
Is it me or does the article poster spin from the left and ignore facts ?
How can they do this? Isn't it illegal to be paid less than minimum wage? Or do they only work a few minutes/yr?
It's never evil to stick it to the man!
Sugapablo
Well, "don't be evil" does not mean "be stupid" or "be kind to IRS".
It's actually the other way around:
This way they are saving taxes which gives them the opportunity to be even more not-evil to all the people.
Except the IRS, or course.
Apple has been evil for a few years.
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
It's just one of the many idiocies that arise from taxing "unearned" income less than "earned" income. Income from all sources should be taxed the same, to avoid giving people reason to come up with complicated schemes to move their income between categories. But given that the tax system sucks, you can't blame people for taking advantage of that fact.
Look,even if I pay 75% tax on 200,000 dollars I STILL MADE MONEY! 25% of X == > 0 if X !=0. They got payed less, how is that anything bad?? Sad that the posts on /. are trolls these days.....
Does that mean that in soviet Russia Slashdot posts you?
Oh,for the love of gos and country, kill me.
I mod everyone down who says "I'll get modded down for this." I hate to disappoint.
Ups... sorry, the "taxes on your salary" was really "Social Security" (Health system, Unemployment and Retirement funds). There is also a maximum for these payments in order to not fake the retirement income calculus (that is based in how much you you have paid)
Why can't
Google has agreed to reimburse Schmidt up to $2.1 million this year for using his jet.
2.1 million seems a little bit higher then $1 to me.
But even so, they're able to survive on google stock. If google's stock goes down, their wage goes down (I'm guessing here, to me stock seems like gambling and make-believe). So they have quite a big incentive to ensure google's stock stays up (wonder how that will impact their do-no-evil mantra). This is nothing but a tax trick, which CEOs are reknown for doing. Of course, no-one here is going to say that avoiding tax is a bad thing. Because everyone pays too much tax as it is. [gripe type="about people who complain about paying tax"]Because stuff like roads are free.[/gripe]
Seriously why would you need a salary when you have the credit rating associated
with owning Google?
Steve Jobs is in the same boat; he worked for the use of a private jet one year,
he doesn't need a salary - he founded Apple, Pixar and continues to run both.
I doubt his wallet is dusty dry after The Incredibles or the iPod.
Neko
Quit your whining, people. Oh, and look up the "Minimum Alternative Tax" while you're at it. It may have been a good idea at first, but it's getting to be a real mess these days.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
because this way he pays less taxes. He earns anyway money from his stocks in the society.
In Italy (and i think everywhere in the EU) it would mean the opposite, because profit obtained from work is less taxed than profit obtained from capital goods, because is considered to be obtained with fatigue and sacrifice. Also probably here such a salary would be illegal because we have collective contracts that give you rights you cannot dispose of.
The article poster stated that you don't pay FICA tax (another word for social security tax), medicare tax or income tax on stock appreciations. That is completely true and all of those are different than capital gains tax - which is what they would pay based on appreciation in their stock price.
I believe the article poster's premise is that they're becoming ungodly rich because of stock appreciation and that they cut their income to $1 per year to avoid contributing to society in the way that the rest of us do.
If I had to pick a reason, I'd say it's more of a PR stunt to make the Google founders appear frugal (or froogle if you like) and make it seem like the money hasn't gone to their head. Many other CEO-types have done this (including Steve Jobs).
I'm a big tall mofo.
In related news slashdot announces that downloading music is a legitimate way of avoiding paying tax, which is a standard practice for geeks everywhere.
Since they own close to 2/3 of the company, I'm sure they feel that what they do for the company affects their personal wealth a LOT more than a simple salary does.
To me, this tells me that they're vesting their livelihood in this company. And why shouldn't they? It seems that google adds new features to their search on a weekly, if not daily basis.
------
Oh yeah, did you see MSN's "billionaire hotornot" slideshow? Don't you, as a reader, feel a little patronized there trying to choose which of the capitalist elite are the best looking? Where's Mr Gates, for that matter?
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
they should have donate theire salaries insted.. or somthing..
it looks like they're trying to avoid paying taxes...
anyways, go google
Wouldn't you love to be in Google's founders' shoes right now?
:-/ Darn computers.
How much tax of any kind is owed on stock options sales when you hold them for more than a year? Let's see - google on stock sales - OK. Your profit is the sales proceeds minus the basis (acquisition price) minus the expenses of selling. Nutz. I KNEW I should not have just trusted TurboTax to compute the tax owed for me! Now I don't understand it!
English -- gotta love it! / The engineers refuse to refuse the rocket until the refuse is removed from the launch pad.
They just America so much that they don't have to pay their fair share. Let some other proud citizen pay for the services they use.
It's the Google Way(tm)
Tubby or not tubby. Fat is the question
Coincidentally I was just reading this article from Inc. magazine last night.
t ml
http://www.inc.com/magazine/20050401/priority.h
The IRS prosecuted Menard for paying a large salary and no dividend because that arrangement results in paying less tax. See the article for details.
Only silly dweebs would think this is "evil". The amount of money they got from their salaries, and the amount of taxes they paid on those saleries, were miniscule compared with their equity in Google stock. They aren't the first wealthy people to take a token salary from the company they founded.
So, get over it. Making Money Isn't Evil.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Come on, you question whether it's evil? They've broken the evil rule so many times it's not worth mentioning anymore. They're as evil as any other corporation.
In hitachi marketing, salaries always GET PERPENDICULAR
Isn't this what Steve Jobs has been doing for years?
You bet they are evil when they cut everyone's salary to $1!!!
Maybe it's just the way I read it?
Get your Unix fortune now!
How are they doing evil when they are actually not greedy...!!
To Google, evil means ruining the web experience for its customers and users. Given that Google defines evil as such, it is doing a marvelous job of living up to its promise.
Evil is a subjective concept. To you, and others, perhaps, patents are wrong. But to Google, the sole criterion for evil is the user experience. Therefore, patent issues do not apply.
If these guys still took a large paycheck they would be dumping 50% of that cash into nifty government projects like missle defence and the war in iraq instead of into their business. Since they offer a really nice stock plan to all employees and the stock is doing well they are basically reinvesting in their business through a nice tax loophole. It also gets one of the average 2 - 3 weekly obligatory google media mentions out of the way without launching a new product. :)
Look up these words: complex, nuance.
It's never been the salary that makes the heads of big companies rich. While a few hundred thousand a year would sound great to us, that's chump change to these guys that pull down millions a year in stock and bonuses.
Facts are stubborn things.
Not paying taxes is just cheap. It's a way of saying that you only want to leech on society and not give anything back.
Unless you do it as a form of civil disobedience, but in such case it should be accompanied with a statement of some sort..
tsk tsk tsk...
now go ahead and mod me down 'cause you don't agree =)
/* We dance to the sounds of sirens and we watch genocide to relax*/
I do think though that they have broken the "do no evil" ideology by exploiting the way taxes are calculated. With a salary of $1 they can pay like 30c tax on that, and keep a much larger proportion of their earnings via the stock dividens. Saddening that they would sink so low really.
I'm moving out of IT, behind the bar in MacDonalds I'll earn more than as the leader of a huge software company.
capital gains tax - 15% income tax - 35% do the math the only catch is to hold the stock for 1yr and 1 day before sale.
A lot of the posts here show how little people know about accounting. Since they aren't getting paid their salaries, the money they would have received is flowing down to the bottom line and is getting taxed at the corporation level instead.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
Tax is the greater evil. You can say what they are doing is the lesser of two evils.
Alternatively, you can do like me. Don't give into the dark side by paying your taxes.... geez, I gotta stop watching Star Wars...
It could be taken that way, I think.
Certainly that's why that great champion of the "little guy", John Edwards, cut his salary and took his pay in capital gains from stock in a dummy S corporation.
He was able to cheat those suckers at the US Treasury out of $738,000 in Medicare taxes that otherwise would have been wasted on grannies in nursing homes. Let's hear it for the ethics of the Democratic Party!
-ccm
Too much Law; not enough Order.
The tax rate for the options is probably going to roll in at 15% - certainly a lower tax rate than had it been 'earned income' (salary), but much more than zero. These rates were lowered in the 2003 tax revision - they had been 20% (there's a lower tax bracket as well, but I don't think it applies in this situation :-) ).
You only pay social security on the first $90k of earned income - so that tax relief in this case is pretty negligible (compared to the 15% of some huge number).
Of course, this assumes they sell any shares - most people in this position sit on a lot of the wealth in paper form, so there's a negligible cash flow anyway. At some point Page and Brin will diversify, but we don't know what their personal situations are like.
Furthermore, as founders, they may well have a much more complicated tax role than simply investors. This can get complex very quickly - but that doesn't intimidate the IRS.
If you've thought of the loophole, the feds have figured out how to get a piece of the pie. It's not _that_ easy!
I don't follow the conspiracy-theory part of the /. posting -- if you give up $250K in salary to save paying $100K in taxes, how are you ending up ahead financially?
They'd be getting the capital-gains deductions on their stock and options either way, unless there's some secret twist in U.S. tax law.
YES - Stop asking OR questions
Sure they don't pay much tax, but they don't have anything coming in. Money doesn't just pile up on it's own ya know.
You are right we do. Next time you think about the high cost of ... education, know that you paid your share for it and the directors of google, who make a 1000 times what I or I am guessing you make, did not. That is but one example. If googles rich wanted to make a tax statement, they could have found a way through gifts etc... to make the low paid at their company pay less taxes. What they did is to increase (theoretically) everyone elses tax burden by not paying their own. What they did is evil
but the still pay a lot of tax!
IMO the tax should only go for govt. infrastructure, operations, and defense. All other tax should be 'user pays', i.e. roads, corporate oversight in the form of excise tax.
instead we have this huge can of worms in which the smart worms get fat and the other worms are paying the fare. the ignorant worms have all but given up their last hope at beating the system by abandoning the cash economy. before you know it, every thing you buy or sell will have a serial number (including your knowledge, creativity, and time) and every transaction will dump the serial numbers as well as the monetary amount into a big govt computer which will tax you at that instant. serial number fraud will be punishable by death because after all, if you are avoiding your tax you are contributing to grevious harm of those who depends on your contribution to the outflow end of the tax machine
... back when Chrysler was in danger going belly up. Saved his company some dough. And they did survive in the end, didn't they?
I think a lot of you are not getting it, the Google guys are indeed paying taxes, namely capital gains taxes, on their equity earnings. Probably a lot more than they ever would have paid as income tax on their salaries.
I think they're just saving their company some money and acknowledging that the real moolah comes from their investments. For most of us, a yearly salary of a couple of hundred G's would completely change our lives, but these guys are billionaires.
Even if things start going very badly for Google and its stock price, they probably have enough safe investments spread around that they are assured of lives of ease no matter what happens. And make no mistake, they pay tax on all those investment earnings, probably more than most of us ever will. I don't see anything particularly evil or unevil about this either way.
Always keep a sapphire in your mind
Imagine, for a moment, if extremely over-paid executives from companies facing collapse were to drastically cut their salaries and invest that money back into their business. For example, why do US Airways execs need to make millions of dollars a year when they are trying to file for bankrupcy? It seems pretty straight forward to cut costs where costs can be cut.
Join Tor today!
While this does evade the burden of income taxes, it does NOT avoid all taxes. They still pay sales tax, land tax, capital gains tax and others I'm sure. You DO pay tax on monetary gains from dividends (although significantly less after the Bush administration's ill-conceived tax plan) and from stock sales and from stock gains (including stock compensation from work). That said, it's still a damn good PR stunt. They were getting paid more before, but it was still the stock options that were the real bulk of their income I'm sure. Anybody have any numbers?
MacroHard - Boning you in a big way! (TM)
Once again, Apple innovates and others follow. Does this mean they will be adopting the title of iCEO, or maybe CEOplex? Can't wait to see Google's new single-button mouse.
... and then they built the supercollider.
Bill Gates' open letter to hobbyists.
I am an organism. The sole point of my existence is to reproduce. I'm not a monk.
I have urges that must be met, enormous balls and need to get laid. Its going to be in my interest to get funky.
So, does that make it right? Film at 11: Politician indulges in hypocrisy.
Oh wait, you were trying to make a partisan political point. Never mind, you wouldn't listen to reason, anyway.
... and then they built the supercollider.
Well, actually it does if you already have some. It's called interest.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
that's reimbursement of costs..
:)
Ever buy something for work? and turn in the receipts for reimbursement?
same thing- coupla orders of magnatude higher.
sometimes, executives own power toys, and rent them to work, and turn in the receipts for payback.
Know what operating a personal jet runs?
It's not a scam, (although it can be abused) but they have to justify the expense to stockholders, and the value for services rendered-
ever try to book 8 seats leaving in the next 4 hours to destination X on a major airline?
yeah, there are times when large, mulitnational corporations can justify the expense of a private jet hire.. if it happens to be owned by an exec, that's ok too-- proabbably makes it easier to arrange
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Umm... aren't you mixing up two entities: the people and the company?
Employees "optimizing" their income tax is not the same as the company not paying its taxes or trying to evade its responsibilities. Even if the employees are in high positions in the company.
There are multiple pieces to the answer.
First, they're going to get the capital gains (profit) from sale of stock ANYWAY.
Second, you routinely hear about CEOs at "troubled" companies agreeing to take $1/yr salaries until the problem is fixed. (They still get their bonuses.)
Third, on the books, if they're only drawing $1/yr, that frees up salary money to pay employees.
Fourth, in the United States at least, it is absolutely legal to arrange your financial affairs to minimize your tax burden. There are a LOT of charities out there doing a lot of good who spend a lot of time and effort arranging things so that donors get the maximum tax deduction for their donation. (Review Bill Clinton's tax returns, where he deducted something like four bucks a pair for donating his old knickers to charity.)
Having said all that, this does raise some interesting questions about employee benefits at Google. Normally, in this day and age, the employee most places is required to kick in part of the costs of, for example, medical insurance. If the Google guys are only getting $1/yr, does that mean that Google doesn't offer employee health insurance (BAD!), does it mean that Google pays ALL of the costs of employee health insurance (GOOD!), or does it mean that Google is separately ponying up for their insurance (legally very questionable)?
Well, Google are not the ones taking the tax from everybody else.
I'm sorry, it's doing evil. How can you patent a mathematical expression? That's like patenting a statement of truth! I outright denounce any patenting of mathematical expressions, which includes, but is not limited to, encryption methods and software. You shouldn't be able to patent a philosophical expression. What if "I think therefore I am" had been patented by Descartes?
All this really means is that they're independently wealthy, i.e., their investment income is sufficient to pay for their lives. Yeah, they are sitting on a pretty sweet pile of Google stock, but even a little diversification would keep them in the black for life. Not only do they not need a salary, they don't need to work a single day for the rest of their lives.
They're still paying income, FCIA, Mediplan taxes, just not on their Google salaries. So yeah, it's a stunt.
> Since you do not have to pay FICA, Medicare, or
...or just an example of people who love their
> income taxes on the capital gains associated
> with stock sales, they stand to substantially
> decrease their tax burden.
This is true. One does not pay taxes on income that one does not receive.
> Is this a breech of the company's "do no evil"
> mission statement...
Sigh. If they had kept their salaries they would have received salary income, paid taxes on it, and _also_ made money on stock sales. Now they will only make money on stock sales (and pay the relevant taxes). How is the latter more "evil" than the former?
>
> jobs so much they don't need to be paid to go
> to work?"
It is an example of how some people have chosen to manage their money. I know damn well that if you could rearrange your income so as to increase the amount left after taxes you would.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
First, this is the IRM section that deals with stock options and FICA taxes. It's worth a read, especially the bit where the Service's position regarding FICA/FUTA etc, is laid out, and the temporary and permanent regulations indefinitely forestalling the formal adoption of the position.
Second,This piece of political grandstanding (scroll down to secion 162(m)) is the reason so many corporate presidents have bizarre compensation packages. Note the the $1,000,000 figure was set by the Clinton administration in 1993, and has not been updated since. (This is much like the AMT, but that is an issue for another time.)
Finally, you will recall that Social Security is, to a non-trivial extent, a means-tested benefit program. Google's founders are going to be on the receiving end of every punitive modification to the program made "to ensure that it is fair". That this might lead to a certain reluctance to fund it is not surprising. OTOH, we are only talking about $6885 in FICA taxes, if that really is the issue, which I doubt.
Personally, I agree with the other posters who think this is Jobsesque PR.
It may not be just, but it is fair, and that is more important.
form 1040, line 13: "Capital gain or (loss). Attach Schedule D if required."
Then see schedule d. That income does have to be reported, and will be captured somewhere. Dividend income is capped at...28%? hell, I don't remember...but if you exersize options and sell the stock, or flat out sell stock you own (a long-term gain instead of short-term), you still pay taxes.
And as far as FICA and medicare...FICA is what, 7% of the first $120k? Think the $8,400 is really all that big to someone making hundreds of millions? Medicare is similarly only taxed for the first bit of income, I just don't recall what the cutoff is.
All in all, they're not really cutting their tax burden. If anything, they're shifting from short-term to long-term, which only puts off taxes really - which maybe hints they plan on retiring in a few years? Who knows.
In the post-9/11 world, India may outsource their call centers to cheap Google founders.
Wage vs. salary does affect some laws; but not minimum wage.
m ployer/nolo/ency/244AD836-D9F5-49AE-813B0478FF9729 8B.html)
(from http://cobrands.business.findlaw.com/employment_e
The main law affecting workers' pay is the federal Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), found at 29 U.S.C. sections 201 and following. Although the FLSA is very broad, some employers and employees are not covered. Generally, your business must abide by the FLSA if you have $500,000 or more in annual sales. Even if your business is smaller, however, your employees are entitled to the minimum wage if they work in what Congress calls "interstate commerce." This includes any employee who makes a phone call to or from another state, sends mail out of state or handles goods that have come from or will go to another state.
There are a few exceptions. The following workers do not have to be paid the federal minimum wage:
* Independent contractors. Only employees are entitled to the minimum wage.
* Outside salespeople (a salesperson who works a route, for example)
* Workers on small farms
* Switchboard operators employed by phone companies with no more than 750 stations
* Employees of seasonal amusement or recreational businesses
* Employees of local newspapers having a circulation of less than 4,000
* Newspaper deliverers, and
* Apprentices, students and learners -- certain inexperienced workers as defined by federal law.
The way it's spent, sending money to the US Government is evil, so Google's "no evil" policy
requires them to avoid as much tax as possible.
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
How did this modded as "insightful"? By shifting their entire salary to stock options, the Google directors are not avoiding a single "education" tax. Education is paid for out of the general fund (partially from standard income tax). They'll still be paying this tax! (See capital gains on stocks/options) The taxes they'd be avoiding (social security, medicare, etc) are all HEALTH and RETIREMENT taxes, they have nothing to do with education.
Unless your tax rate is over 100% you can't get richer by forgoing taxable income. What this does do is reduce expenses for Google the company by a greater amount than it reduces the income of the Google founders. This is good for the company, which is good for the founder's investments in the company.
I'm not sure if anyone else follows "insider transactions," but I find it almost comical that Google would let this news out just days after Sergey Brin had stock transactions of $26M and 16M on Arpil 5th and 4th. Here is the link: http://finance.yahoo.com/q/it?s=GOOG It's good to be EVIL!
i imagine that patent would have expired by now, so that's kinda a moot point :)
ashridah
The taxes they'd be avoiding
Nice point, well stated. The generic fact that they were avoiding taxes was probably what got the mod points. I did not feel like becoming a tax lawyer over a simple question and used education as an example (and yes, out of your income tax there is fed money that goes to education) but your examples are better. My point is not even slightly altered. They are avoiding taxes.
You guys *are* a bunch of looters.
Ed R.Zahurak
You know, oblivion keeps looking better every day.
There is nothing wrong with patenting algorithms, not a sausage.
The problem often lays in how the companies subsequently licence their IP to others.
Music is everybody's possession.
It's only publishers who think that people own it.
Fuck Beta
~John Lenno
"What they did is evil"
Wow, if this is 'evil' what do you call...say...gassing people in ovens, handing out smallpox infected blankets, or downloading music without paying from the internet? Did you just ignore all the posts explaining that they pay taxes other ways? By the way, you have to pay taxes on company 'gifts'. Why is avoiding taxes one way OK but another way 'evil'? These guys are b-b-b-billionaires, maybe they're just too embarassed to take a 150K salary and still look their employees in the eye. I'm sure you take pride in being a somewhat stealthy troll but after Bush's 9/11 speech I pledged myself to fight 'evil' in all its self serving, rabble rousing, ignorant redneck provoking, holier than thou, bogus definitions. Besides, everyone knows the only TRUE evil is putting ads in your sig!
billy - let us pray...our Auditor, who art in heaven
Who says compassion is dead? That the system's broken? After all they're giving their fair share! Just because Social Security and Medicare are in crisis, why do they deserve a percentage of poor Sergey's, Larry's, and Eric's stock sales?
How is keeping earnings evil? Everybody, yourself included, seems to think that any attempt by Google to make money is evil. You are wrong. To be evil is to do things like run ugly ads on your webmail and charge people money to remove them, or, worse, to accept payment for changes in PageRank. If they can find a legitimate and doable way to increase their profits, it's a good thing, because they have more money to fund stuff and their shareholders are happy. Pleasing your shareholders is not evil unless it is at the expense of your customers.
Tired of free iPod sigs? Subscribe to my blacklist
This is no more a scam than employer-paid health insurance. The ONLY reason for health insurance to work the way it does is taxation. If you had to pay for it yourself with after-tax dollars, the cost would be at least 30% higher. By keeping the cost concealed from the IRS, it is concealed from the employee as well. Most of the incentive for controlling healtcare cost is pretty much gone. Ideally, market forces would follow supply/demand and create a relatively efficient system. Instead, the whole thing is out of order because the entity that pays the bill is not the one who uses the service. We keep the two disconnected only because of tax policy.
For many years, senior executives have been paid partially in stock and options. The concept has filtered down to the not-so-senior level of management as well. In theory, the managers are motivated to do things that will raise the stock price and therefore their compensation. Nothing illegal about it. Capital gains tax MUST be less than the rate for ordinary income, otherwise the stock market will become as inefficient as the health care system.
The fact that converting salary to capital gains defeats FICA as interesting. On one hand, it IS a loophole. On the other hand, how guilty should anyone feel about declining to participate in the world's largest Ponzi scheme?
Doesn't matter if you label yourself "left" or "right", it's all the same motive in the end.
Would this mean then that according to Slashdot logic (aka. nonsense) Bill Gates is not evil, because he pays FICA and Medicare taxes on his $900k salary. Slashdot may soon need to change their motto to Slashdot: News for Fools. Irrelevant mindless ramblings
The IRS requires people to pay themselves a "reasonable salary" and $1.00 AIN'T IT!!
Y'all need to wake up and consider what you're saying. To clarify your muddled thoughts you might want to grab a copy of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, which'll teach y'all the value of money and make clear the right of the people who earned it to keep it in any way they please.
...
"So you think that money is the root of all evil?" said Francisco d'Anconia. "Have you ever asked what is the root of money? Money is a tool of exchange, which can't exist unless there are goods produced and men able to produce them. Money is the material shape of the principle that men who wish to deal with one another must deal by trade and give value for value. Money is not the tool of the moochers, who claim your product by tears, or of the looters, who take it from you by force. Money is made possible only by the men who produce. Is this what you consider evil?"
"Or did you say it's the love of money that's the root of all evil? To love a thing is to know and love its nature. To love money is to know and love the fact that money is the creation of the best power within you, and your passkey to trade your effort for the effort of the best among men. It's the person who would sell his soul for a nickel, who is loudest in proclaiming his hatred of money--and he has good reason to hate it. The lovers of money are willing to work for it. They know they are able to deserve it.
Let me give you a tip on a clue to men's characters: the man who damns money has obtained it dishonorably; the man who respects it has earned it."
You can bet the IRS will have a field day. They don't like to see huge drops in wages until retirement age. Being young I bet they will be flagged for suspicous activity and investigated.
Now I have been studying the tax sytem. I oppose the belief that there is an "income tax" on people at all. But this to too radical an approach. I have been called a "tax protestor" by people on the board. Let me ask this: Have the google founders avioded a "duty" to pau "their fair share"? Why does ones "fair share" (or their "duty") to the government increase or decrease on how many hours they punch on a clock? Does Bob the janitor owe the country more if he mops floors 2 hours extra a day? Why has he incurred additional liabilty to the government? Surely his mopping does not add and costs to the government
What has happened? Well, the IRS has been extremely effective at making people think that "wages are income" when in fact only wages from public service are "income". In order to read the 16th amendment you have tounderstand waht the word "income" in 1913 meant. It did not come to mean "everything that comes in" until 1942. What happened in 1942, well we had a var, a victory tax, and a duck. Why did it take Donald Duck to make all wages taxed? Does any of that change what "income" is defined as? No. But the IRS is very convicing and has several tricks up its seleve. In fact, in 1913 interpretaion of the term, I read court casea about people paying taxes on stuff that is not even income! The IRS doesn't care if your assesment is right, just that they get the most from you. After all they are hired agents whose mission it is to collect everything that they can.
Incentelly, we use a system of "self assessment". The crux of that is one only need to convince himself what is and what is not income. If a computer wereto do it, it would have to use the formal definition and many american's taxes would be much lower. It is completely in the poer of government with the advent of computers to eliminate April 15th. Why don't they? Well there's a huge tax industry for one, two, they oould loose money. ALL of your "income" recipts are eletronically transmitted. Why can't they just use those. Anyone awarding you "income" has to produce some recipt (1099, w2)
If you read the book in my sig, you'll find out starling truths. I have not even started the ligitimacy of the income tax debate.
The book below only talks about whether or not your wages are taxed (never mind the taxable issue) and how to overcome a w-2 or 1099 that is issued in error.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
If they are only getting $1 p.a. salary, then the only way they're going to be able to afford to eat is to sell stock. Assuming the US tax system is similar enough to how Australia works, I'd think that the proceeds of the stock sales would be taxed very similarly to the way salary income would is, and therefore would be paying for the same government services that anybody else would be. IOW, I'd doubt they are avoiding tax at all.
What you are worth, and what money you have available to spend are two different things. For example, Bill Gates might be worth $60B, however, the only way he could spend that (assuming he actually could), is to sell off his major ownership of Microsoft. Quite obviously (or maybe it isn't to most slashdotters?), he wouldn't have $60B cash sitting in his bank account, waiting for him to hit the ATM.
The Internet's nature is peer to peer - 20050301_cs_profs.pdf
A stock's appreciation is only taxed when the stock is sold, and a capital gain (if any) is realized (that is, converted to cash). That is, if a stock doubles one year, and halves the next, a U.S. taxpayer who has held the stock through the whole up-and-down cycle has no (federal) tax liability.
I wonder if walmart will follow suit with all its employees?
Some people believe 1-1=3 and for the sake of being politically correct, we should respect their differences
They'll only get "income" if and when they sell Google stock they own. As they're only getting $1 p.a. as a salary, that'll probably be pretty soon (or rather, I think I read they each sold some a while back.
The Internet's nature is peer to peer - 20050301_cs_profs.pdf
Interest is taxible income, by the way
By them illegally not paying themselves a "reasonable salary" like the IRS requires, they are forcing all us honest people to subsidize what should be their fair share of the burden.
SHAME ON THEM!!
Because, if they are only getting a salary of $1 p.a., that is the only cash they'll have available to buy food with. I suppose they could eat their Google stock certificates.
Of course, the stock certificates are probably a bit tasteless, so if they need money to buy food etc., they'll need to sell some of their Google stock. Then the government has a tax go at the gains from those profits made on the stock sales.
This is the third time I'm making this point in this thread. It surprises me that a lot of Slashdotters don't seem to understand even the fundamentals of what stock are, what a salary is, and why having a very low salary and a lot of stock doesn't magically mean that (a) you have money in your pocket to live off of and (b) that stock isn't money in the bank - you have to sell your stock (which means reduce your ownership of the company) to convert the stock into cash.
The Internet's nature is peer to peer - 20050301_cs_profs.pdf
http://givemeliberty.org/
Second Circuit Court of Appeals January 2005 ruling in Schulz v IRS (Case No. 04-0196).
The recipient of an IRS administrative summons "cannot be held in contempt, arrested, detained, or otherwise punished for refusing to comply with the original IRS summons, no matter the taxpayer's reasons or lack of reasons for so refusing."
In Schulz, the Court also held that "IRS Summonses apply no force to taxpayers, and no consequences can befall a taxpayer who refuses or ignores, or otherwise does not comply with an IRS summons until that summons is backed by a federal court order."
Why is this important? If you don't know that, you need to go get a clue. Basicly, they can't do anything to you till a court orders it, and in a real court (this is not "tax court") you can ask for their delegation of authority that they never have, let me spell it out, they have no authority or jurisdiction in the several states, go get a clue.
Are you stupid enough to keep on paying them?
die young, real young.....
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Algorithm patents are extremely difficult to enforce. It is likely that the google people know this.
Patenting their work is allowing other people in the research world to build upon it. Any extremely honest competition will also not enter their domain, but this is not something you can count on.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
And people also seem to think getting for example, $1M in stock is the same as getting $1M in cash salary. Of course it is not, because stock needs to be sold before it has any actual, spendable value, and it is during the conversion from stock to cash that the government will stick their nose it to tax it.
The Google guys will probably need to periodically sell stock so that they can "live" - a salary of $1 p.a. isn't going to pay many bills.
The Internet's nature is peer to peer - 20050301_cs_profs.pdf
(If they have less than 40 credits, then they should pay themselves the minimum that counts, which I think is somewhere around $360 per month. Tip for those of you looking into self-employment.)
Dunno how this could conflict with "do no evil." GeneralCern, have you stopped beating your wife?
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A422 35-2005Mar16.html
fuckedgoogle.com's take on this is what you might expect- it's a PR stunt designed to make stupid people think Google is being generous and shareholder-friendly:
http://www.fuckedgoogle.com/
Once again slashdotters show their extreme ignorance of tax law and their extreme hatred of anyone successful and/or rich.
"Shaq is rich; the white guy who signs his checks is WEALTHY." --Chris Rock
You don't pay tax on net worth turbo brain. You pay tax on income. That's why they call it income tax.
Don't let the right-wing apologists confuse you about the taxes wealthy people aren't paying.
holy crap. no wonder they don't care about getting paid a salary!
I thought all the google people were still in the lockup period after the IPO- i had no idea they were selling this much stock already. damn.
Ever wondered what kind of data mining is going on in the background? You got 100s of millions of people doing searches every single day, and from that data you can mine a lot of information that companies around the globe are willing to pay premium to know. Forget about Google being the nice little cozy company who does no evil. As for me, I admired Microsoft back in the early 80s, before their ugly side surfaced to the public eye.
How many billions of dollars could someone make from "I think therefore I am"? Why shouldn't people be able to protect their idea? Who would inovate if there was nothing in it for them? a final question, all any patent is protection of an idea, of information So you hate all protection of idea? You know one of the few ways the little guy can be protected from the big guy.
I see nothing evil about reducing (by any amount) the money our beloved federal government gets to take from the citizenry(sp?)
The way our maze of tax collection works, They pay plenty in taxes and will continue to do so because not all taxes are based on income. Their avoidance of Social Security tax will only hurt themselves - they will accrue les "benefits". The payout on SS is based on your "life income".
... They will also pay plenty of taxes indirectly - anyone they hire will pay SS taxes and income taxes and all the other taxes.
They will pay plenty of tax. Luxery taxes on expensive items. Electricity taxes, Gas taxes, Property taxes,
Their company will pay plenty of tax. Corporate taxes and all sorts of other taxes.
Our society collects plenty of taxes. The main problem is the wasteful spending of our governments. Our governments try to do too much and wind up doing everything badly or wastefully.
How can maximizing profits be evil? I know of only one other person I can remeber recently using the "evil" word, and I don't agree with his methods either. Slashdot is supposed to be a exchage of information, not an opposite of Fox news. Business is business, these changes that were made are perfectly legal and may reflect the founders belief that the stock is more valuable than dollars. The fact that it's a tax dodge also is possibly a secondary benefit.
"If you ask me to name the proudest distinction of Americans, I would choose--because it contains all the others--the fact that they were the people who created the phrase 'to make money.' No other language or nation had ever used these words before; men had always thought of wealth as a static quantity--to be seized, begged, inherited, shared, looted of obtained as a favor. Americans were the first to understand that wealth has to be created. The words 'to make money' hold the essence of human morality.
"Yet these were the words for which Americans were denounced by the rotted cultures of the looters' continents. Now the looters' credo has brought you to regard your proudest achievements as a hallmark of shame, your prosperity as guilt, your greatest men, the industrialists, as blackguards, and your magnificent factories as the product and property of muscular labor, the labor of whip-driven slaves, like the pyramids of Egypt. The rotter who simpers that he sees no difference between the power of the dollar and the power of the whip, ought to learn the difference on his own hide-- as, I think, he will.
"Until and unless you discover that money is the root of all good, you ask for your own destruction. When money ceases to be the tool by which men deal with one another, then men become the tools of men. Blood, whips and guns--or dollars. Take your choice--there is no other--and your time is running out."
The murder is not over yet, but will there ever be a rebirth?
Atlas Shrugged is the "second most influential book for Americans today" after the Bible, according to a joint survey conducted by the Library of Congress and the Book of the Month Club. One of the most acclaimed and influential works of the 20th century, Atlas Shrugged portrays the murder and rebirth of the human spirit.
Only a liberal would assume it is "evil" to legally avoid taxes. Liberals dont like tax avoidance because it lowers the amount of money they can re-distribute to other democratic voters. If those guys figured out how to keep more of what they have earned, more power to them. Liberals are destroying this country.
Phredd - "I have found people tend to take you far less seriously once you start waving your genitals at them..."
Keeping earnings is evil because the health of the economy depends on the transfer of money which can be siphoned (by legitimate and non-legitimate persons) and taxed. It's good for everyone if money is spent rather than sat upon.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I'll have to admit that I've been considering to stop paying my federal taxes recently in protest of all the crap that is going on with the federal government. Its not just the war in Iraq, but many other things as well. However, I was talking to a lawyer friend of mine last night and I asked him about people who do that and he said that it unfortunately doesn't work and that the cases are pretty funny. He's going to send me one so I might share it on my website once I've read it.
I'm not trying to get out of paying taxes, I just think that the way the U.S. is spending our taxes is becoming more and more immoral. What I was going to do, is stop paying my federal taxes (and keep paying state and local) and then take that $10,000 a year that goes towards federal and donate it towards local schools or community projects. So I would just be controlling where my tax money is spent.
Why don't you write a letter to those two gentleman at Google and tell them exactly how much you expect them to be earning. They owe you some goddamn respect! HOW DARE they earn more or less than that amount which you declare to be most beneficial to the government!
These guys are already billionaires, it doesn't surprise me they don't care about big salaries anymore...
It's good for everyone if money is spent rather than sat upon.
That all depends on the state of the economy. It's not good for everyone if you're in demand driven inflation. Then you want everyone to save and not spend.
But given the fact that Americans really enjoy their right to consume I doubt you could steer many towards not consuming.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
That's all this is. They've got their billions, they don't NEED a salary.
breech n.
1. The lower rear portion of the human trunk; the buttocks.
Sometimes spelling makes the difference between breaking an agreement and the human ass.
Attention deficit disorder is a complicated issue, spanning several major... HEY LET'S GO RIDE BIKES!
You know one of the few ways the little guy can be protected from the big guy.
I don't know where you live, but it hasn't been that way in the states for years, and if you're a European, you'll find out soon enough when software patents are finally approved by the EU.
And I'm not going to go into my beliefs about patents in general, but software patents are patents on mathematical algorithms. You know, like E = mc^2, the Pythagorean theorem, calculus. What if these things had been patented? Think about it. Patents on software and math are detrimental to society, plain and simple.
Sounds like Steve Jobs. He made peanuts for $, but got stock and got a private jet as a gift, etc etc. I think he still makes a dollar a year (technically).
Think about the poor google employees who had a heart attack reading "Google founders cut salaries to $1", before realizing to whose income it refers.
Besides, what's the difference between patenting an algorithm that makes some computers perform actions, versus patenting some algorithm that results in a unique product. Afterall, what are assembly instructions (for a particular physical artifact, not computer code)?
That might be logical, if he was stuffing his billions in a mattress. I'd say it's highly likely he has it invested somewhere.
The government should tax net assets, in excess of levels typically protected under personal bankruptcy, at a rate equal to the rate of interest on the national debt, thereby eliminating other forms of taxation. Creator-owned intellectual property should be exempt.
The levels typically protected by personal bankruptcy can be approximated by the median price of housing an individual added to the median capitalization of a job in the economy. Together, these exemptions add up to between $50,000 and $100,000. Additional but smaller exemptions may be added to represent the lower levels of bankruptcy protection typically extended to children within families.
The NAT is a self-adjusting system that seeks an equilibrium between government debt levels, current tax rates and private wealth distribution, without attempting to achieve an outright balanced budget or direct intervention in the economy.
Seastead this.
It would be nicer if they paid themselvs $90,000 such that they would at least contribute maximum fica to the ssn pool.
It wouldn't be if Disney had bought him out :)
Fnord.
How can you patent a mathematical expression?
The same way you patent anything else, and for the same reasons. If I am some company, like Google, and I pay people money to spend time thinking up algorithms, it's only fair that I get to use them exclusively for a while. I paid for them, after all. Otherwise, there's no motivation outside of the goodness of my heart for me to keep mathematicians on my payroll.
Anyway, just why, besides what appears to be sincere but baseless moral indignation, shouldn't people be able to hold patents on mathematical expressions? (Please remember, patents aren't forever.)
Also, what's the real difference between holding a patent on performing a chemical reaction in a particular way to increase yields and holding a patent on an algorithm to make web searches provide better results? Is chemistry somehow less real or less true just because it isn't purely intellectual? It seems to me that chemistry is as "owned in common" as philosophy or mathematics. Are you opposed to patents altogether?
CEOs of public companies get proper compensation even when they take a $1 salary... the idea is that they are working to increase the value of the stock and/or options that they hold or may be granted. Which is usually a whole lot.
In other cases I know of (Apple, Chrysler) taking a $1 salary has been a partly symbolic move used to indicate that the CEO isn't a robber baron squeezing ridiculous amounts of money from the corporation. It demonstrates that the CEO has incentive to increase the value of the stock, and thinks he/she can do so effectively.
A series of smart initiatives from a Google founder over the course of a year will increase his overall net worth by much more than any piddling salary.
I can't believe anybody trying to make a point would link to a Robert Novak article.
that depends.
bank interest, yes?
muni bonds? only to the muni and state gov, no fed taxes.
... hi bingo
As so many people (including me, occasionally) rag on the editors here, I think it's right to also give a pat on the back when it's due. I appreciate Hemos adding the "non-story" update about this one.
I'm pretty sure that Marc Andreesen of Netscape was working for 1USD/year as well prior to AOL buying Netscape.
The problem with this (at least in the US) is that assets are considered property and property taxes are considered "direct taxes" under the constitution. This means they must be apportioned among the states. Congress usually avoids these type of taxes because it's a pain to do the apportionment.
Who knew that studying to be a tax lawyer means you can post something useful on /. ??
These individuals already had the stock, so they were going to have to pay capital gains rates on that stock whenever they sold it. Long term rates are 15%. The highest marginal tax rate is 35%, which is what they would have paid on their salaries.
What does this mean? They were going to get that lower rate on their stock anyways. They do lose those $250,000 they were making in salary, but when you have a billion in stock, $250K is propably not going to kill you.
They were likely going to receive more options anyway, so the real question is, are they receiving more options for foregoing their salary? Options recieved are also taxed like income, but that is a very complicated road depending on the type of option, qualified or non-qualified, etc.
Also, California's income tax, I believe, is around 9%. I am not sure what their capital gains rate.
Better yet, he should support conversion to a single tax on net assets at a rate equal to the national debt (since government debt vehicles are the "welfare safety net" for capital) with an exemption for subsistence assets (since the populus is effectively held on retainer as mercenaries for defense of property rights and should be paid mercenary wages for said retainer) as a clarifying step.
Alice Rosenbaum merely represents the other side of the coin to communism's central planning. Rosenbaum represents centralized wealth. The coin itself represents centralization and crushing the life out of young families and small business.
Seastead this.
I'm fully convinced that few people here know what "evil" even is...
Hitler was evil. Killing, that's pretty much on the evil side of things. But advertising? Avoding paying some taxes through a completely legal, often used scheme? This is your new definition of evil? Get back to me when they start exploiting third-world countries or natural resources to the point of destruction. Or when they start sending their competitors to bankruptcy through lawsuits and lock-in. Nothing they have done has been close enough to evil to require such an outcry.
Why is this Insightful? I mean, this is enlightened shit.
Should be Score:infinity, Bow... or something
Of course not -- one could argue that it is, in fact, required by the "do no evil" mission. The United States Federal Government does an enormous amount of evil, both domestically and overseas. Anyone who helps fund it is helping it to do evil. So doing one's best to avoid taxes is a necessary part of "do no evil".
You can and should patent a mathematical expression when your competitors can patent it as well and put you out of a job.
It's not Google's or even Amazon's or Microsoft's fault, per se. It's the ridiculous parody of a patent system we have. If they allow companies to patent knives, spoons and forks then companies pretty much have to patent them to survive.
especially in the US, a place where you can get sued as a CEO for not trying to maximize the profits of your share holders.
What the... I can?
That does it. I'm stepin down and immigrating.
Because not wanting to be forced to give money to the government is evil? What? The government laid out laws and they're following them. Some of the laws follow natural arguments (do not kill do not steal etc) and some of them follow artificial arguments.
Then the government goes and points a gun to your head and makes you follow all of these laws. If they don't there's anarchy.
However, I personally feel it is absurd the amount the government steals from people. While taxes are needed to run the government, build roads and arguably schools (although I wonder if the private sector could do a better job there... couldn't do much worse) as well as the securing the defense of our nation.
However the constitution did not give the right for the government to take money from the rich for the sole purpose of giving it to the poor (at least not in the US, some revisionist judges have however allowed it). People who declare that the rich owe it to the poor sicken me. Someone works harder or smarter and ends up with more money than those who didnt does not owe money to those who didn't work as hard or were not as smart. Often they more than rewarded the others through the jobs they created or the services and/or products they created that make everyones lives better.
Arguing that someone who wants to save some of their own money from the government is morally wrong is a morally bankrupt argument. While I believe in some of slashdot's philosophies, the socialist rhetoric passed around gets old fast.
Phil
I wouldn't be suprised if they have an anual bonus.
The same way you patent anything else, and for the same reasons. If I am some company, like Google, and I pay people money to spend time thinking up algorithms, it's only fair that I get to use them exclusively for a while. I paid for them, after all. Otherwise, there's no motivation outside of the goodness of my heart for me to keep mathematicians on my payroll.
...
Also, what's the real difference between holding a patent on performing a chemical reaction in a particular way to increase yields and holding a patent on an algorithm to make web searches provide better results? Is chemistry somehow less real or less true just because it isn't purely intellectual? It seems to me that chemistry is as "owned in common" as philosophy or mathematics. Are you opposed to patents altogether?
Really though in both cases, no one outside of companies would have knowledge of the processes being used. The only exception would be if your employees broke NDAs.
What's with these Aussies, man!
Always making stereotypes man, these Aussies.
Can't stand these Aussies cause they're always making stereotypes man. Fuck them Aussies for making stereotypes man. Fuck them all cos they all stereotypes us man.
How can you patent a mathematical expression?
The patent on the PageRank algorithm (U.S. Patent 6,285,999) is not a patent on computing eigenvectors of an adjacency matrix. Rather, it's a patent on the specific use of properties of an adjacency matrix for ranking results of a database query where the database forms a graph.
After all 63% of it (minus state income tax) is still yours.
"Minus state income tax" is a big one. There's no counterpart to the Uniform Commercial Code for state revenue codes, and many states' revenue codes have all sorts of tax shelters.
What does E=MC^2 do? what monetary gain did Albert stand to gain from that? Now if Google couldn't patent thier software? We wouldn't know about them becuase Yahoo or MSN or Alta Vista would have stolen thier software and copied it as thier own and gotten all the money for someone elses work. How is that fair? How would you prevent people from benifiting from others work? So it is niether plain nor simple. IP is property and peopel have a right to protect thier property.
Unfortunately, if they don't patent it, someone who sees what Google does will patent it, and try to get money out of Google.
While Googles prior art would be a solid defense, it would still be a fair amount of money and time to fight the frivolous claim. As long as the attacker makes sure to ask for less than the court case would cost, theres a decent chance Google would settle just to make them go away.
If Google has it patented, however, the potential attacker won't be able to get a patent to attack Google with. And on the off chance the patent office screws up and issues a duplicate patent, Google would be much more likely to get the case dismissed if they can wave an actual patent, rather than simply internal records, in the judges face. That substantially lowers the financial and time investment to fight a claim, when you can expect a dismissal in the event of a truly frivolous claim.
If I were to come up wiht a brilliantly innovative algorithm, I'd patent it. I'd also immediately turn around and license it for use with Open Source software- probably would declare it royalty free for any OSI approved license.
These days, you *need* to patent your algorithms or you can get screwed hard by the system. It's like the Cold War and MAD... if you don't have it, you'll get destroyed, so you need to ensure you can destroy your opponent too.
CEOs used to cut their salaries during hard times to leave more for their employees. Back when CEOs were decent people... I'm glad that Google has some good people at the helm.
It's quite incredible to see /.ers come to the defense of google at every opportunity, particularly when their actions mimic those of corporations we insult daily.
"Orthodoxy means not thinking--not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness." --Eric Blair
Why should they be forced to pay into a system they don't need or benefit from? I'm pretty sure they have all the health insurance and retirement savings they want; why should they throw money into programs designed to provide those things?
He'd be rich?
There are two reasons to patent something:
1) to prevent your competitors from using your tech without paying
2) to prevent them from developing the tech you developed first, patenting it, and then trying to leverage that. Take note, Carmack vs. Creative.
In case 2, they *could* cite prior art, but that assumes they've already been sued, are in court, and probably had operations suspended using the algorithm in question. Pain in the ass, and loss of revenue stream. Sure, Carmack could've taken Creative to court, but they chose their timing carefully...just a few days before the release of Doom 3. If he'd fought, it wouldn't have been on shelves, automatically making the figth much more expensive for him than for creative, regardless of who "won". Easier to just settle, even if you are in the right.
Anyway, just because most of us disagree with how the US patent system is set up doesn't mean we can hold every company that patents something as evil. Under our system, sometimes it is defensive. When Google starts suing, that'll be something.
What is it with you Americans and this dogged obsession with "companies only exist to make money"? [..]
Money is a means to an end, not the end in and of itself. Companies exist to make cars, build furniture, produce electricity, sell food, provide services, and literally 1000s of other purposes. Making money is part of that process, but it is not the actual objective.
When companies are privately owned and are run by some visionary like Henry Ford who wanted to mass produce cars, or Wozniak and Jobs who wanted to mass produce computers, yes, companies are about making products. But publicly owned companies really do have only one purpose: to maximize the return to the stockholders.
Seriously, if the shareholders of Apple decided that the best thing for Apple would be to stop making computers and become an investment bank, that's what would happen. More than a few product making companies have gone that route.
Googles competitors will patent every little thing and try to sue google. Any large company is in a position where they have to patent software because their competitors do.
Most of claims against breached patents can be countered by claiming the other party breached your patens.
"Action without philosophy is a lethal weapon; philosophy without action is worthless."
for a fact that wealthy, non-working people pay ALOT in taxes. My wifes step-mother pays out over 50% of her "income" from stocks to the I.R.S. And lets not talk about what the communist state of California thinks its owed.
Si vis pacem, para bellum! For evil to succeed good men need only do nothing!
So companies should invest gobs and gobs of money in R&D when the only thing preventing their having nothing to show for it is the trustworthiness and/or fear of reprisal of every individual employee with damaging knowledge?
This also ignores the fact that many companies derive income from licensing their technologies.
Here here.
A much more pithy argument than my long-winded drivel. Essentially, don't blame the players, blame the game...
In the CEO biz, your total compensation is the way you get compared to other CEOs. It appears to be a kind of penis-measuring exercise (female CEOs aside) - after all, does a $20M CEO really work twice as hard as a $10M CEO? The usual justification for big CEO pay is "everyone else does it".
I hope the $1/year salary is their way of saying "we may be a public company, but we aren't going to play those games - we run Google because we want to solve hard problems and make money at it, not so we can wave our paychecks at Yahoo's management and laugh about how small they are."
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
Normal laws do not apply to the international elite.
I dont believe there are alternative methods of recovering FICA or SS taxes from these guys. I do however believe if they're not paying into the SS system then they will never receive benefits from it.
As long as they're paying income taxes fairly I could care less. I doubt they'll ever be a burden on SS or Medicare.
Given that the company's philosophy is "do no evil" when did some stupid fucker w/ posting powers on slashdot decide to ask a stupid rhetorical question that makes it seem like paying taxes is good and legally finding ways to not pay taxes is evil?
zonk, just stfu, your ignorance shames this whole community
Who says they're not spending it on infrastructure, or salaries/wages for more researchers?
In my mind, "don't be evil" extends only to Google's customers, shareholders, employees, and others they're connected to--not the entire world economy. But you do have a point.
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The tax situation in the US is out of control and needs to be fixed. We tax money that's been taxed and taxed again. Plus the rates are ridiculously high.
We don't need the enormous government bureaucracy and entitlement programs. We've just been conditioned to think we do. Fight higher taxes, and demand smaller, smarter government.
my patent on the mathematical proof that a square has four equal sides. Maybe I can get triangles too!
Reading at high threshold levels is group-think.
Steve Jobs does the the same thing.
The other week ago we were bombarded with 'stupid' google maps. Who gives a flip ! Microsofts terraserver is way better for satellite photos. Is it that hard to switch from a map site to a satellite photo site ?
Slash is becoming googles little puppet and 'pr trialballoon site'.
I agree that the owners of Google are pulling a publicity stunt. If we want to assign a nefarious motive to the stunt we could note that salaries are recorded as an expense, so the stunt reduces the amount in the expense column on the company's income statements.
There are people who dislike that we label salaries as an expense (something to be reduced) and would prefer a system where employees were treated more like profits (something to be maximized). Sadly, it seems that most of the efforts to make employees equal stakeholders in a company fail when a clever MBA realizes that high minded ideals provide an easy way to externalize the risk of the company onto the backs of the employees.
The original reason for the apportionment was to approximate a tax on net assets under the Articles of Confederation! During the early stages of the country the distribution of asset value was very much dependent on the presence of population to turn natural resource, primarily land, to productivity. Rather than trying to track everyone down and assess their property values, the States were essentially taxed on their populations.
So if the Congress wants, it can go back to the simple system of directly taxing just States.
Alternatively it can even go to a more rational system of just charging reinsurance fees to the States for the cost of underwriting defense of property rights and let the States, as regulators of premiums within their own jurisdictions, figure out how to tax assets appropriately.
Seastead this.
This is an honest question - why $1? My salary is zero, nada, zilch. I only pay myself dividends, but this is Canada. Is there a legal reason why these guys use $1? Is the $1 worth all the extra paperwork?
Oh well, what the hell...
they stand to substantially decrease their tax burden. Is this a breech of the company's "do no evil" mission statement,
There are only two certainties in life. Death and taxes. But since money is the root of all evil and by reducing the amount of money the government gets correspondingly reduces the amount of evil they can do. So in one respect they are being true to their mission statement. Yet in another since they are keeping more money they have the potential for doing more evil; however, the amount of evil that google can do pales in comparison to the amount of evil the government can do with the same amount of money. Overall there is a total reduction in evil. Right?
Since there are a bunch of whiney liberal bastards and evil fucking neocons on this list I posted this little comment anonymously form my karmic whoring goodness... er that's hoarding my karmic goodness.
This is wrong. A publically owned (which google now is) corporation's top priority is to do what the majority of the shareholders want.
Most of the time shareholders are after money, but some are attracted at least partially by the promise of a moral company.
What you are ranting about is what you get when the shareholders are all greedy, cutthroat jerks. Great companies attract great shareholders by balancing making money with being good.
Also, who owns the majority of google? Is it the people who they sold it to, or the original owners? Hmm....
So they've got the biggest obligation to the original owners of Google, and to what they want than they do to the public shareholders.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
Tax AVOIDANCE is lawful and completely honorable.
.... The question arose whether the law which imposes such a tax upon them was constitutional. The opinion of the Attorney General thereon was requested by the Secretary of the Treasury. The Attorney General, in reply, gave an elaborate opinion advising the Secretary of the Treasury that no income tax could be lawfully assessed and collected upon the salaries of those officers who were in office at the time the statute imposing the tax was passed, holding on this subject the views expressed by Chief Justice Taney. His opinion is published in Volume XIII of the Opinioin of the Attorney General, at page 161. I am informed that it has been followed ever since without question by the department supervising or directing the collection of the public revenue..."
...A tax upon one's whole income is a tax upon the annual receipts from his whole property, and as such falls witin the same class as a tax upon that property, and is a direct tax, in the meaning of the Constitution....
...We have unanimously held in this case that, so far as this law operates on the receipts from municipal bonds , it cannot be sustained, because it is a tax on the powers of the States, and on their instrumentalities to borrow money, and consequently repugnant to the Constitution. ...it follows that, if the revenue from municipal bonds cannot be taxed because the source cannot be, the same rule applies to revenue from any other source not subject to the tax; and the lack of power to levy any but an apportioned tax on real and personal property equally exists as to the revenue therefrom.
...that personal property, contracts, obligations, and the like, have never been regarded by Congress as proper subjects of direct tax. The United States Constitution provides Congress the power to lay and collect taxes directly only as long as it is apportioned with regard to the census or enumeration."
Tax EVASION is illegal.
The payment of taxes is not a moral oblication, and "fair share" is not a legal term. It is used to intimidate and confuse people.
"The legal right of an individual to decrease or ALTOGETHER AVOID his/her taxes by means which the law permits cannot be doubted" Gregory v. Helvering, 293 U.S. 465
----------
Pollock v. Farmers Loan & Trust Co., 157 US 429 (1895)
This decision states that it is unconstitutional to impose the income tax on the interest and dividends, on the deposits of U.S citizens, in U.S. banks, because that would be a Direct Tax WITHOUT APPORTIONMENT, which is not authorized, and is, in fact, prohibited by the Constitution.
Excerpts from the decision:
"...Ordinarily, all taxes paid primarily by persons who can shift the burden upon someone else, or who are under no legal compulsion to pay them, are considered indirect taxes; but a tax upon property holders in respect of their estates, whether real or personal, or of the income yielded by such estates, and the payment of which cannot be avoided, are direct taxes..."
and;
"...Subsequently, in 1869,
and;
and;
Admitting that this act taxes the income of property irrespective of its source, still we cannot doubt that such a tax is necessarily a direct tax in the meaning of the Constitution.
In England, we do not understand that an income tax has ever been regarded as other than a diect tax. In Dowell's History of Taxation and Taxes in England, given, and an income tax is invariably classified as a direct tax..
and, even in dissent:
----------
Brushaber v. Union Pacific R.R. Co., 240 US 1 (1916)
The Brushaber decision determined that since the provisions of Article I of the Constitution were not repealed, they are still in full force and effect. Article I, Section 2, Clause 3, and Article I, Section 9, Clause 4, BOTH specify that Direct taxes MUST BE APPORTIONED (to the state governments for collection). The Court ruled that:
As your lawyer friend said, tax evasion is illegal. Tax avoidance, however, is not only legal it's encouraged -- hell, even the President wants you to pay as little tax as possible (if you're already rich). That's all these Google folks are doing. Fortunately, the law doesn't care if you're rich, even the poor can avoid taxes if they're careful. Back when I was in school and filed a 1040EZ I was able to cut my tax burden at least a little each year; now, with a house to kick me into itemized deductions, I milk it for all it's worth (e.g., don't throw anything away -- take it to Goodwill and let them throw it away; meanwhile, you claim the donation.
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
One persons savings is another persons spendings.
Karma: 2.71828182846 (Mostly due to small, fun pills)
However the constitution did not give the right for the government to take money from the rich for the sole purpose of giving it to the poor (at least not in the US, some revisionist judges have however allowed it).
The 14th amendment gives Congress the power to tax, and gives no restriction on its use. No "revisionist judges" necessary.
Article XVI.
The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration.
There has been lots of Apple Fan Boys steve-ass-lickin posts and ridiculously-unrestraited mod-every-praise moderations as well!
they stand to substantially decrease their tax burden. Is this a breech of the company's "do no evil" mission statement
The article says NOTHING about taxes, and the suggestion that the salary cut might be a tax-cutting ploy makes me wonder if the poster has ever actually paid income tax, or for that matter understands simple arithmetic. The highest income tax rate is currently 35%. Cutting 100% of their salary (except the $1) to avoid paying the 35% tax is no gain. Duh.
But along the same lines, grown adults have told me with a straight face that buying on credit is good because the interest is tax deductible. Ridiculous. The interest deduction only saves you the amount of tax that you would have paid if you had kept the money instead of paying it out as interest. But of course, you have to pay the interest in the first place. So if your tax rate is 25%, you have to pay $1000 interest to lower your tax by $250. That's a smart thing?
but what about all the spinoffs? if a few key statements had been patented just when the modern philosophers really started picking up steam... Nietszche: "Shit, can't say that. Patented by Goethe." Goethe: "Dang. Patented by Kant" Kant: "Fricken' ey! The English got that one." (Disclaimer: Chronology not a point. I don't know jack shit about these men's real philosophical accomplishments.)
Yes, except that the players have the biggest influence on the rules of the game. Do you think IBM, after going through the cost of patenting thousands (or whatever number) of patents each year, will take a rule change to no software patents kindly? HP? Microsoft? Those companies are generating significant revenues from their software patent licensing - they have a legal responsibility to their shareholders to engage in legal bribery of the government(s) to improve their revenue streams. The only direction the biggest players in the industry will lobby for is more enforcement, more patents for large corporations, less access for little guys, and more legal junk so they can threaten legal action anyone at any time.
Besides, you should blame the players because they are the ones that lobbied for the software patents in the first place.
Your Attention please...
After reading the posts here,you would know that no one is sure of why Google guys cut their sal.
Issues like cutting salary to $1, would be pretty well known [ the Real reason ] ,to you Financial Graduates .Take a moment to explain us please....
Why does yahoo do this
nothing wrong with company executives that avoid paying their fair share of taxes by using their position to hide their salary as stock or bonuses. Bill Gates does the same thing. You dont hear everyone saying bill gates is evil. So does larry elison. You dont hear everyone saying Larry Elison is unethical.
e=mc^2 is an equation. Ditto for the pythagorean theorem. Calculus is a branch of math. None of those are algorithms. Patents SHOULD be given for novel algorithms or novel applications of algorithms (i.e. compression, pagerank, crypto). A dozen years should be enough, though. Once the patent expires then it should go into the public domain.
The problem is that we have too many patents for ideas which are NOT truly novel, and are a result of being a market leader. Small/obvious innovations do NOT deserve a 14 year term to collect royalties. The patent office is too lenient.
Taking off the rose-colored glasses for a minute, you'll notice many of those who are rich have obtained their wealth through means other than hard work, be it exploitation of others or inheritance. For example, a significant portion of the top 20 wealthiest people in the world is composed of Sam Walton benefactors.
:P
The idea not only can anyone become rich if they work hard, but that everyone who is currently rich has gotten there through determination and a lot of elbow grease is just a way to jerk off egos.
That being said - the idea to tax the rich proportionally higher than the poor is not to support a robin-hood system of wealth redistribution, but rather an acknowledgement of the fact that rich people are able shoulder a greater portion of the burden. There are enough loopholes in the system to get out of it if you *really* don't like paying taxes. Of course, to find all the loopholes, you need to have enough money to pay someone to do your taxes
I may not be Warren Buffet but I dare say I know more about this junk then most of the other people on this list.
-Matt
1) 1$ salary as tax-avoidance. Doable, very doable, and if you know what you're doing, the only way to make Real money. You make sure that your shareholdings etc are set up correctly and away you go. The reason: tax for personal income is done before you spend, tax for your company dollars are all after you've paid your fees, your R&D your investments etc. So a 1$ salary means it's both a wonderful PR gimmick, as well as a reduction in the dollars they send to the government. -- 2 birds, one stone.
2) Nobody should get modded to a 4 ranking for the fifth comment on the string having nothing to do with the topic at hand. Excuse me suso (#12187013) but I don't give a rat's ass that you didn't want to pay your federal taxes and are too stupid to figure out a way. And any mod that ranks you highly for that should be dragged out into the middle of the street and shit-kicked. (Yes, I am offering o mighty slashdotters!)
3) Trying to page through 400 comments of bullshit to find the three decent comments on a topic is getting to be a detriment to the slashdot experience. If you have nothing intelligent and relevant to the topic at hand go find a fucking chatroom.
4) the update by 'H'; First off, don't fuck with another's article, secondly, don't discredit something just because you are too stupid to figure it out. The tax breaks are astounding, unfortunately, it seems nobody is able to look at a subject such as finances in an analytical manner. They just hear something from 'my friend, the expert' and then pass it off as gospel truth.
Now that I've ranted on y'all, re-read #1; the article means only those 2 things. Now go outside and play goddamn it! You've all got a terrible case of NADD. OK, back to my morning coffee :p
A couple fans told me that my last journal entry was mint; give it a shot. Hope you like.
Steve Jobs rocks, homage to you
Once you can find it acceptable to do 'evil' in one arena, its not long before your doing it all over the place. Peoples main concern when they went public is that they would loose focus. Cutting salary to $1 is purely to save themselves tax burdeon.
Its a loophole for the rich and once they start using rich mans tactics, its not long before the whole ship sinks.
I think most of you are totally missing the point of these salary reductions. The Google Triumvirate are smart guys and did the math and realized that they would make more money by giving up their salaries. I'll walk you through the reasoning, since you don't seem to have figured this out:
:)
Consider the case of Larry or Sergey: each of them owns approximately 13% of Google's stock. Google has a market capitalization of approximately $52 billion, and is estimated to earn approximately $1.1 billion in profits in the 2005 fiscal year, which would give it a Price/Earnings ratio of approximately 47. This means that for every extra $1 of earnings that Google reports, the market capitalization is expected to increase by $47. 13% of $47 is $6.11. Think about it: every dollar that Larry and Sergey don't take in pay is another dollar that Google can report as earnings, making their personal stock wealth increase by $6.11. If you account for the taxes that employers have to pay on wages (like the 6.2% employer FICA contribution) this starts looking even more favorable. And then if you start looking at how long-term capital gains are taxed at a much lower rate than salary, it's even more favorable.
Do the same math and you'll see the case for Eric Schmidt reducing his pay is not quite as good as for Larry and Segey, because he only owns 5% of the company, but it still is a big win for him.
This move is obviously not about avoiding taxes. It's about making lots more money. In fact, if these guys could find out some legal way to give Google money that would increase Google's reported earnings, their net worth would increase. If Larry and Sergey were evil they could sell some of their stock in the open market, give half the proceeds to Google to report as earnings, which would make the rest of their stock go up by more than enough to offset the money that they gave to Google. They could keep doing this until their percentage ownership got low enough to make it not profitable any more. By that point they would have raked off billions in profits from this scheme. The downside at that point would include a crash in the price of Google stock due to earnings no longer being inflated, and the subsequent SEC investigation probably would be a bummer for these guys. So even if they were evil they are probably smart enough to not do this. I guess the best they can do is to just cut their salaries to $1.
Since you've been here from the early beginning, has
Linux at home
So because they act like other CEOs and because their company is public, therefore they will follow in the footsteps of others and do something evil? I don't buy that.
As for doing 'evil', if they believed patents were not evil, and thus applied for them, are they evil? If so, who defines what is evil? The public? The government? The Pope?
I've read a few software patents, and they don't look anything like pure math. They are usually recipes for accomplishing a specific improvement in a specific kind of software.
I have seen software patents that shouldn't have been issued, in my opinion. But it wasn't because they were "pure math". It was, sometimes, because the claims were too broadly worded, covering prior art. Other times, the invention was obvious.
The "pure math" argument is illogical. Many electronic circuit inventions are essentially data processors, and can be simulated in a computer. If someone spends a year of research, and develops a huge PC board, a machine vision module that takes the output of a video camera and senses whether a human being is present, is that patentable? What if he reduces the board to a single FPGA? Still patentable? What if he turns the method into software?
I agree that we have a problem with obvious patents being granted. But why "small"?
If someone discovers how to make an oil refinery 0.1% more efficient by sticking a brass wire into a certain pipe, should that be unpatentable because it's "small"?
"So I would just be controlling where my tax money is spent."
They have a term for controlling where you money is spent. It's called a "free market".
This is true. You can cut your tax burden on even a minimal wage if you know the right places to look. The problem is that most poorer people don't have accountants with their fingers on the pulse. Perhaps there should be an easy 'how to cut your taxes" web site about this :)
Someone needs to explain to me how cutting your salary by something like $150K results in cutting your tax burden.
Suppose that the founders have $7B in the bank, and a salary of $150K.
That $7B will generate some amount of income, which will be taxed as ordinary income (interest, subject to income tax), short term capital gains, or long term capitals gains.
The $150K also pays income tax, and also pays FICA and Medicare. FICA is 12.6% of the first $90K, Medicate is 1.45% of the entire $150K.
Based on interest and short term cap gains, assume that the entire 150K is taxed at a marginal rate of 33%.
33 + 12.6 + 1.45 = 47% tax rate, so the 150K salary nets down to about $80K after tax.
At a salary of $1, they next down to $0.53 after tax.
Dropping the salary costs them 80K. Even more, they do get not credit for social security wages, so their eventual social security checks will be reduced. (not that they are likely to need a social security check).
Now they certainly aren't hurting, and anyone with $7B in the bank can afford to forgo $80K, but I don't see any way in which this can be construed as "evil".
I know that the federal government has the right to tax the rich for all they want. However the government does not have the right to redistribute this wealth in any manner they see fit. The constitution laid out a groundwork for what the federal government could spend money on.
Section. 8.
Clause 1: The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;
Clause 2: To borrow Money on the credit of the United States;
Clause 3: To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes;
Clause 4: To establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization, and uniform Laws on the subject of Bankruptcies throughout the United States;
Clause 5: To coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures;
Clause 6: To provide for the Punishment of counterfeiting the Securities and current Coin of the United States;
Clause 7: To establish Post Offices and post Roads;
Clause 8: To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;
Clause 9: To constitute Tribunals inferior to the supreme Court;
Clause 10: To define and punish Piracies and Felonies committed on the high Seas, and Offences against the Law of Nations;
Clause 11: To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water;
Clause 12: To raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years;
Clause 13: To provide and maintain a Navy;
Clause 14: To make Rules for the Government and Regulation of the land and naval Forces;
Clause 15: To provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions;
Clause 16: To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the Militia, and for governing such Part of them as may be employed in the Service of the United States, reserving to the States respectively, the Appointment of the Officers, and the Authority of training the Militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress;
Clause 17: To exercise exclusive Legislation in all Cases whatsoever, over such District (not exceeding ten Miles square) as may, byCession of particular States, and the Acceptance of Congress, become the Seat of the Government of the United States, and to exercise like Authority over all Places purchased by the Consent of the Legislature of the State in which the Same shall be, for the Erection of Forts, Magazines, Arsenals, dock-Yards, and other needful Buildings;--And
Clause 18: To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof.
Nowhere in this list does it say that the federal government has the right to support social security systems, medicare, welfare etc etc. These were allowed during the great deppression, and even then people talked of needing a constitutional ammendment to get away with them. Back then of course the programs were small time and allowed but over the years they've been continuously expanded to the monstrosity we have today.
Nowhere in the constitution do i see the rights you discuss given to the federal government.
Phil
I'm not saying that's the case here, but you can make more money by forgoing taxable income due to tax brackets. A dollar under the tax bracket boundary means taking home more than a dollar over would.
Not all mathematical expressions are statements of truth...
ex: 2 + 2 = 5.
Or less trivially, truly mathematical expresions generally are statements of truth, for example, Addition is a closed commutative associative binary operation on the set of all complex numbers. (assuming that addition, closed commutative associative binary operation, and set of all complex numbers have been adequately defined.) But I doubt that that is what you were referring to. Stop me if I'm wrong, but you were mostly likely talking about an arithmetic expression, which has much less untouchable standing as "A STATEMENT OF TRUTH". I do agree that patenting even an arithmetic expression is nonsensical, but not because it is somehow universal and unapproachable.
SIGSEGV caught, terminating
wait... not that kind of sig.
Simple answer. You can't patent a "mathematical expression," just like you can't patent a "law of nature." However, you can patent the application of either solve a specific problem.
Speaking of Steve Jobs, he too had and might still have a salary of $1 a year. But his benefits were more numerous then the President's. What does this mean for Google? They might be showing their similarities with Apple. They're both highly innovative and the first thing you ask for; you don't get mint-flavoured lozenges, you get lifesavers. In the same way, Google MIGHT be starting a load of FUD, because, in the realization of being a brand name, they have realized that they can do whatever they damn well please. And as for /.?
who knows what happened. It seems that instead of catering to news that "nerds" want to know about, slashdot has become a curse word in other corners of the internet. The prestige of being "slashdotted" is sometimes enjoyed, but usually not, because in the surpluss of slashdotters, theire bandwith is sucked up. In short, the stories are cruddy, and nobody really likes us anymore.
-Tux
>Nowhere in the constitution do i see the rights you discuss given to the federal government. Did you even read the parent poster's post? Let me quote it for you "The 14th amendment gives Congress the power to tax, and gives no restriction on its use." Ah, so it comes from the 14th amendment! And what does the 14th amendment amend? The constitution!
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
by finger on the pulse do you mean actuall access to the tens of thousands of pages of tax code?
I KUT J00 M4NG!!!
Demand smaller government I agree with you there. But fighting higher taxes does nothing, since they(with the banks that back them) own the currency almost everyone uses. The government just inflates it and sucks your purchasing power if they don't have enough money from taxes to pay for things.
Been done, they are not very creative on this front. And I do believe that guys worth 5+ billion (on paper or in real dollars) aren't going to do stupid things. I would hire some really smart lawyers, advisors and let them figure out how my money is going to double and trip in 5 years time. Besides they can get loans to exercise and buy options without a salary. BTW, did anyone even consider this Steve Jobs move is a has been, done it thing? Google, focus on googling tools, not PR. Oh wait, those days are over now, they have to suck it up to the investor banks now.
--- Old Time NeXThead
I would do it to
What else would they want - a 40% tax bracket or 28% tax bracket on capital gains?
Google, the fleecing of the working poor.
Getting pay $1million and getting tax at 40% or getting $100 million and pay 28%?
Google - The fleecing of America
Social Security, FICA, Local/state/income and whatever else. And since they only get pay for $1 - does that mean that can also claim hardship deduction, and whatever else benefits that under $20K a year folks can claim?
First I whole heartedly agree with you, that companies exist to make a product, I have considered starting a compnay for my own software development ideas. I wasn't thinking "hell maybe I'll get rich" although the thought isn't that far from my mind.
Second, there are companies that provide a service, that in my most humble opinion are bending thier customers over like its some kinda of prison party!
My biggest peve would be Cell phone companies.
10c per SMS message WTF is that all about!
calculated that the minimum voice bandwidth is probably 8kbps for compressed audio that sounds like crap, which equates to 1024 bytes PER second, and they charge (last I checked my bill) 35-45c/min. when you go over. thats 60sec*1024k=65536 which is 0.703125 per 1024 bytes. SMS limits you to 160 (I think) chars - to me it sounds like you should be able to send 409 messages per 45c or 0.11c per SMS message - and besides that SMS is an easy thing to implement on the network PLUS a message does NOT have to be sent immediately (in computer terms) you can wait a few ms or seconds even, so that the network is not busy and shove your message on the line (effectively using the network when its not busy)
anyway to keep to post closer to the topic, all they did was report thier income as 1$, sold some stocks and filed for capital gains tax - skipping the payroll taxes, squeaking themselves out a few extra percent in the end, everyone else is just mad cause they don't have enough stock to sell and do the same with! - come on you're telling me you wouldn't do the same to get a few extra bucks - PLEASE!...
The 14th amendment gives Congress the power to tax...
That's funny -- I thought the 14th amendment was that whole "deprive folks of life, liberty, or property" bit. I think you mean the 16th Amendment.
Even better is the fact that you have XVI right there in your text. That might have been a hint =P.
Steve Jobs (CEO of Apple) has been on the $1 salary for a while now. He is in the Guiness Book of Records for this 'achievement'. "OK, so he might only get a measly $1 a year, but with a luxury Gulfstream jet and $10 million lucrative share options to his name, he's unlikely to ever go begging."
If Carling made signatures they would be the best signatures in the world...
This story, rather then having some sarcastic remark regarding tax evasion and "Do no evil," should say hey "apparently these guys like their company."
Doing this is a symbol that they don't need to collect a salary for their work. Just as Stevie J takes $1/year salary from Apple, it's symbolic of their love of the company and their desire to coninue work without the carrot that drives most of the workforce. These men have considerable net worth which makes their additional salary seem paltry.
You honestly think they're worried about the tax liability on $150K dollars? The tax liability on a large personal stock sales is probably more then their salary in 10 years!
Come on people, a $1 boost in Google's stock price is a larger loss or gain for these guys then most people take home in salary for a year! Basically, they don't need the money, Google already made them billionaires! Google can use it to hire a couple more non-billionaires, provide more free lunches or other random things that companies do with excess money.
This story, rather then having some sarcastic remark regarding tax evasion and "Do no evil," should say hey "apparently these guys like their company." Doing this is a symbol that they don't need to collect a salary for their work. Just as Stevie J takes $1/year salary from Apple, it's symbolic of their love of the company and their desire to coninue work without the carrot that drives most of the workforce. These men have considerable net worth which makes their additional salary seem paltry. You honestly think they're worried about the tax liability on $150K dollars? Their tax liability thanks to their billionaire net worth and capital gains is more then their annual salaries was. Basically, they don't need the money, Google already made them billionaires! Google can use it to hire a couple more non-billionaires, provide more free lunches or other random things that companies do with excess money.
algorithm patenting has been going on for more than 50 years, maybe more than 100. Specifically in the sense of patenting processes, in manufacturing, or electrical circuits. GM has done it much more than them. You have a grave misunderstanding of patent law.
This sig is o Unfunny o Funny
Except that, unless you reinvest your dividens, that is taxable income as well.
DO trust the following tax line: You should declare on your taxes that you earned 0 this year; wait a few months; call the taxing authority; tell them that you lied. This is good for your health.
This is one of the reasons why a consumption tax should replace income tax. Income tax doesn't work.
I think Ayn Raynd just had a God damned heard attack.
The same way you patent anything else, and for the same reasons.
Except that you *can't* patent mathematical expressions. That's the whole argument against software patents --- all algorithms are trivially reducible to mathematical expressions in the lambda calculus, and you can't patent those.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Algorithms are a branch of mathematics. Any software algorithm can be trivially reduced to a statement in lambda calculus. It's no different from an equation like e = mc^2, it's just a different branch of mathematics.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
It'd be pretty funny for a billionaire to walk into a bank with a check for $1 and deposit it... Maybe even worthy of a posting on /.
All the torrents you could want.
ten million dollars in the proper kind of accounts, you can live on the interest.
Where did the ten million come from in the first place ? If it came from a stock sale, then they paid tax on it. The ten million is after tax, so they might have had to sell $15 to $20 million worth of stock to have $10 million after paying tax.
Governments aren't that stupid. Such an obvious loophole as a way to "avoid" paying tax that is typically applied to salaries would have been plugged many years ago.
The Internet's nature is peer to peer - 20050301_cs_profs.pdf
Taxes for social security and medicare, which is taxed at a flat 15% (give or take), is assessed based on salary and is taken off the top before any other taxes are subtracted. An employee is responsible for half that tax, the employer is responsible for the other. By reducing their salaries down to $1, they effectively save themselves 15% of whatever they salaries were before. Dividend distributions and income derived from other sources is not assessed for this tax. So, there is a tax advantage to this move.
Monitor bandwidth usage on IIS6 in real-time: http://www.waetech.com/services/iisbm/
If I am some company, like Google, and I pay people money to spend time thinking up algorithms, it's only fair that I get to use them exclusively for a while.
No, when you apply for patent, you must reveal your algorithm. If you don't apply for patent, the only people who know what your algorithm is are the people who have access to your code. Thus there is no reason to patent an algorithm. If I come up with the same algorithm independently (because obviously I did not see what your algorithm was), I should not have to pay you.
You raise a good point about chemistry, and I'll admit something: I am still young and have not decided what I believe about a great many things, but I think patents are wrong as of now. For something like a medicine company, I think the medicines should not be patented; they should be copyrighted the same way books, manuals, and paintings are. This would keep people from reverse engineering the pill and copying it (because that is copyright infringement) while at the same time allowing someone to independently come up with the same thing. I am still open to many arguments, but software patents is something I have firmly decided upon; I believe they do not benefit society, which, after all, is what patents are supposed to do. Code can be copyrighted, algorithms should not be patented.
But you can't patent mathematical expressions outside of software, and that was my point; all software can be trivially reduced to mathematical expression (in lambda calculus, as another slashdotter pointed out), so I don't understand the purpose of software patents.
However, you were making the case that the game itself is broken, and I agree. I do not change my opinion that, just because the system is broken, playing the game should not be excused. If your competitors come up with an algorithm independently of you, how is making them pay you license fees benefitting society? Patents in general are meant to provide for scientific advancement, and software patents do not; they block people from independently coming up with anything, for fear of implementing something that has already been patented. Code can be copyrighted, but algorithms should not be patentable.
However, you were making the case that the game itself is broken, and I agree. Still, I do not change my opinion that, just because the system is broken, playing the game should not be excused.
So without that "still", it made less sense. I apologize for the unclearness. I just merely was trying to say that playing the game is as bad as making the game.
What does E=MC^2 do? what monetary gain did Albert stand to gain from that?
Well, relativity is used every day by scientists all around the globe for many things, including for NASA's space flights, for research on stars and black holes, and for pretty much anything involving travel of bodies outside of our planet. So, Einstein would have stood to gain a huge amount of money from licensing.
Now if Google couldn't patent thier software? We wouldn't know about them becuase Yahoo or MSN or Alta Vista would have stolen thier software and copied it as thier own
No, because that would be plagiarism and copyright infringement, and probably violation of non-disclosure agreements by Google employees (which falls under contract law, not patent law). Algorithms are not automatically known unless Google explains them (which they have). So, if patents didn't exist, their algorithm would be known only by leaks in the company (violations of contract by employees), by explanation by Google (which, because patents don't exist in my hypothetical world would mean Google wanted people to have free use of it), or by breaking into Google and stealing the hardware/copying their software. Both of these are crimes without requiring software patents. One is copyright infringement and the other is theft.
How would you prevent people from benifiting from others work?
Simple, don't tell other people how your software is implemented; if they come up with it independently, then good for them. Software patents really only protect against other people independently coming up with the same idea. Thus, software patents harm innovation. If you can come up with some other protection provided by software patents that I haven't already shown to be a non-true benefit, please speak up. But I believe I've shown how they don't benefit society at all (which is, of course, whom patents are supposed to benefit).
So it is niether plain nor simple.
I believe I have just shown how it is plain and simple. Please, if it is more complex, respond with examples I have not addressed, and I will address those. But, at the end of the argument, I assure you that I will have defeated every argument that is in favor of software patents. They are morally inconsistent with the purpose of patents in general, and only harm innovation. Period. Any side-benefits derived from software patents are either detrimental to society, or can be derived via some laws already in existance.
IP is property and peopel have a right to protect thier property.
Which is making the statement that people have a right to patent things like E = mc^2, or other expressions. Since you didn't like that, how about I ask what if scientists had patented their ideas on quantum mechanics?
Someone else has done a nice job of explaining that software algorithms are a branch of mathematics via lambda calculus.
My belief that they should not be patentable notwithstanding, 14 years in software is the equivalent of at least a hundred years in other areas. Even if I were to admit patents on software should exist, they still should not exist for more than two or three years (a generation in software design).
Here. Read this and then tell me software is not reducible to lambda calculus, a branch of pure mathematics.
He should patent the non-software version. If someone else implements a non-software version, they are infringing on his patent. If they implement a software version, they are coming up with another method of performing the same task. Without the software, his idea is still patentable. If he puts his idea into software for ease of description, he is giving away, in my opinion, a non-patentable way of implementing his technology. His fault.
Wow, if this is 'evil' what do you call...say...gassing people in ovens, handing out smallpox infected blankets, or downloading music without paying from the internet?
So first, by this question are you stating a belief that downloading music = the holocaust? Interesting view. Now onto your question, I was using evil in the context that they use it in their motto. They did not come up with their motto to prevent themselves from ever committing genocide, normal societal norms should handle that with most internet search companies. They meant, that they planned on not being an 'evil' corporation.
I agree with you, fight evil I am glad you do that Ramblin Billy. I did that once also in a place called Iraq after a different Bush speech about Kuwait and freedom. I have fought evil with Bullets as well as words.
Yes, that was my zealous, math-loving side stating that all expressions were statements of truth.
I state that all math that software is based on is universal. This describes lambda calculus, which can be used to trivially reduce all software to pure mathematics.
I know that the federal government has the right to tax the rich for all they want. However the government does not have the right to redistribute this wealth in any manner they see fit. The constitution laid out a groundwork for what the federal government could spend money on.
The 16th Amendment (not the 14th - please, at least read the Constitution before twisting its meaning) gives Congress the power to "lay and collect taxes on incomes". It did not, as the grandparent correctly pointed out, change in any way the things that Congress is allowed to spend money on. Other amendments have given Congress powers above and beyond those granted in Article 1, Section 8, usually through a "Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation" clause. However, the amendments that have that clause (13, 14, 15, 18, 19, 23, 24, 26) generally have little, if anything, to do with spending money.
The 16th means Congress could tax every income bracket at 99% if they wanted to, but they still could only spend that money on the things Section 8 (and relevant amendments) say they can spend it on.
live(free) || die;
Does this mean Steve Jobs's record in Guinness, for the lowest paid CEO, has been matched?
You idiot. Foregoing $150,000 in salary will not affect any capital gains taxes they may pay. These guys are worth BILLIONS. $150K is practically a rounding error.
Insert witty sig here.
Certainly that's why that great champion of the "little guy", John Edwards, cut his salary and took his pay in capital gains from stock in a dummy S corporation.
His salary was $600,000, not $1, and it was an S-corporation, so there were no capital gains, there were dividends./p>
You'd think programmers would be good at math. Follow me here:
Page and Brin are worth $7,000,000,000. That's 46,666 TIMES that chump change $150,000 a year salary!
To put it in perspective, that $150K is to Page and Brin as $1.00 is to someone who has, say, $46,666 equity in his house.
Q. E. goddam D.
And in case you still don't get it and you think it is a tax dodge, let's hear what a great American jurist had to say about taxes:
Over and over again Courts have said there is nothing sinister in so arranging one's affairs as to keep taxes as low as possible. Everybody does so, rich and poor, and all do right, for nobody owes any public duty to pay more than the law demands. Taxes are enforced exactions, not voluntary contributions. to demand more in the name of morals is mere cant.
-- Honorable Learned Hand, US Appeals Court Justice
Insert witty sig here.
Indeed I was. That point was that Democrats are typically clamoring for higher taxes, yet see nothing wrong with gaming the system themselves. Republicans are for lower taxes on everyone, and therefore do not open themselves to charges of hypocrisy on this subject.
-ccm
Too much Law; not enough Order.
You are right and I stand corrected. However, he earned tens of millions of dollars during the time this dodge was in operation, cheating the Treasury of nearly a million dollars of Medicare taxes that could have paid the medical bills of hundreds of elderly people. This is abuse of the system, and the charge of flaming hypocrisy stands.
-ccm
Too much Law; not enough Order.
My comment was not intended to be "flaimbait". I was just expressing an opinion.
The anger of Google apologists is truly amazing. God forbid someone brings up an issue related to Google that doesn't sing their holy praises.
Instead of debating the merits of the story everyone just says "It isn't a tax issue, any idiot can see that, this story sucks." Way to point out exactly how it isn't a tax issue for those that question it (which, if you read the F'in summary you would see was the whole point).
I'm not even going to get into this:
"Update: 04/09 13:11 GMT by H:And don't trust the above tax lines; it all depends on how sales are done; moreover when you are worth X amount with stock, I suspect the "tax burden" of what is, relatively speaking, a salary that's small compared to networth isn't a substantial impact. Sorry folks; poor story."
WTF does that even mean? This was an update posted by an editor? Jeeze. Sorry folks, poor sentence (if you can call it that).
Bottom line, even though these guys are worth a gazillion dollars, they went out of their way to reduce their taxable income, even if only by a small amount. (I think that might be what "H" was trying to say, but I can't be sure.) They may not be evil, but they sure are cheap.
Ad hominem arguments are the mark of a feeble mind. Attack his arguments, or don't waste my time. And take note, this was discussed in many other media including Forbes and the the Chicago Tribune.
-ccm
Too much Law; not enough Order.
Why? Why do you think the VHDL (FPGA description) should be patentable, but not equivalent C code?
And don't say "pure math". The VHDL is just as much pure math as the C.
Thank you for representing our country, and in that regard, me. I in no way equate anyone's service in the military with the government in control. One of the most important ideas in the Constitution is the civilian control of the military. The US military's adherence to that policy, often against their better judgment, is an important guarantee of our freedom. I honor those who protect that freedom.
In the same sense, not all people who oppose some policies of the US are evil, although when they are shooting at you the distinction loses its importance. The liberation of Kuwait CAN NOT be considered as equivalent to the invasion of Iraq. Dismissing the discussion of the right and wrong of the action, I believe the American people were deliberately mislead and cynically manipulated in order to influence their acceptance of the invasion. We cannot allow our government to lie to us. If we do it holds in contempt the sacrifices of those who have fought for our country. Our founding fathers had no illusions about the honor of men who seek power. Neither should we.
I don't think it a total coincidence that in the last election - regardless of outcome - the loser would congratulate the winner with the secret handshake of the Skull and Bones. Maybe that makes me a "tinfoil hat" kind of guy, but then again, I've read Machiavelli and I know what really happened to the Maine.
As far as Google is concerned - you know those guys are gonna pay taxes. Given the company's record it seems a bit over-the-top to call them 'evil'. I'm not sure they can even be called 'sneaky'. After all, they did brag about it in a press release. I guess I'll leave the tax evasion evaluation to the IRS and continue to use google.
billy - just kidding about the P2P