I've said it before and I'll say it again: How is that any excuse to give up without a fight?
If someone comes to you every day and eats your lunch, do you just acquiesce because you know he'll come back tomorrow if you don't? No, you give him a good swift kick in the jewels and then try to have them prosecuted. Then you get together with all their other victims and start planning out a strategy to stop them from coming back again.
I don't think anyone has ever made a particularly strong argument for eliminating hardware patents. The reason why people so very loathe Rambus was not the quality of their patents (although they did, as it turns out, happen to be invalid) -- it was that they went to the JEDEC standards meetings and encouraged the standards body to adopt their technology, without saying a word about it potentially infringing their patents, and then proceeded to sue everyone in the memory industry after the standard was set in stone and shipped on millions of motherboards.
It was the troll behavior that got everyone up in arms: Nobody whatsoever minds if you come to them and offer a license for your validly patented hardware technology before they ship it in their products. If the amount you're asking is less than the value of the technology to their company, you have yourself a mutually-agreeable deal. The problem is when someone (like Rambus, but unlike ARM) waits until you've unknowingly committed to ship several million infringing units before jumping out from under a bridge and flinging lawsuits in every direction.
Whatever, we'll just mandate small enough class sizes that the ones who can't find any alternative jobs can just become teachers.;)
Seriously though, the idea that there wouldn't be enough jobs is totally ridiculous. Again, unless all the world's problems are solved, there will always be demand for someone to solve them. The problem can only be that the available labor supply is not qualified to meet the demand, and you fix that by helping them achieve the necessary qualifications.
Even with the uproar about bills, ACTA will become the law of the land still.
If you sit on your duff and do nothing about it? Sure. Or you could make some phone calls like we did against SOPA and maybe we can chalk up another win for the good guys.
Let's suppose that some time in the next, I don't know, ten or twenty years, A.I. becomes sophisticated enough to write computer programs based on plain old voice instructions, kind of like Siri already does with real-world tasks. Once everyone can "program" there won't be a very big market for programmers.
Quite the opposite, actually. The number of problems that can be reduced to software solutions, but that aren't solved solely because it isn't cost effective to pay a programmer to solve them, is truly epic. If you made it so that everyone could make software, everyone would have a job making software -- even if that job was only working for some investment bank to produce algorithms that outsmart the algorithms used by competing investment banks.
But as the current economic status in the US shows, what they can do, and what they will do is completely different. Companies are sitting on huge piles of cash. Very few of them are hiring.
"Sitting on huge piles of cash" is just something people say who don't understand that by "cash" they mean "securities" -- they don't have a huge money bin like Scrooge McDuck that they can go around swimming in. They just buy stock in other companies. Then whoever sold the stock has the money, and they buy something with it. If they buy stock too, then whoever sold that stock gets the money, ad infinitum until somebody uses the money to buy something that requires labor to produce (and even past that, but the subsequent economic activity would still have occurred in the original case).
Of course you do.
No, you don't. I will personally hire everyone currently unemployed for a year, as long as they're collectively willing to work in exchange for a coequal share between all of my new employees of the $20 currently in my wallet. Naturally they'll all decline my offer because I'm not paying enough, but that's the point: It isn't that there are no jobs, it's that there are no jobs that pay as much as these people are demanding for their labor.
If there is nothing to be done that can cause their labor to be more valuable, we need to do something to make it so that the amount their labor is actually worth in the marketplace is enough for them to make a living on. That means reducing the cost of consumer goods, which you do by increasing efficiency and automation.
And of the current unemployed, how many of them do you think are actually capable of doing any of these things?
As part of a team tasked with working toward them, having received relevant training? Almost all of them. Certainly all of them with any worth ethic whatsoever, and the people with no work ethic are supposed to starve.
As you mention, there's the slight matter of being qualified, and I doubt 99.99% of the workforce is qualified to solve fusion, solve P=NP, or cure cancer. Even with government subsidized education.
What, other than lack of education, do you imagine they would require in order to be qualified?
And those aren't jobs, those are things that *could* be jobs. Unless and until someone is willing to hire and pay people to solve them, they're just wishful thinking. "Wouldn't curing cancer be nice?" "Yeah, what's on TV?"
There is a financial incentive to solve each of those problems. The reason they haven't been solved is that the cost of solving them exceeds the benefit -- but that is the thing increasing efficiency changes. It lowers costs so that more of the unsolved problems become cost effective to solve, and then people direct resources toward solving them (and thereby create jobs), because it is suddenly cost effective to do so.
The problem is not that those people can't find a job. The problem is that they can't find a job that will pay enough to buy food and shelter. You can always find a job if you're willing to accept a low enough wage, even if it's just acting as a maid or a cook for some doctor or lawyer. If you can reduce the cost of food and shelter and other necessities to the level that someone making that little money can still afford to make a living, problem solved.
If there's no work they're qualified to do which can't be done better by machine, then what items of value will they trade for the (cheap, but certainly not free) food and housing? Or is this utopia just going to be a gigantic welfare state with a few owners on top, then a small engineer class, a similarly small operator & maintainer class, and a the vast majority of people at the bottom living on the dole?
Government pays 100% for anyone without a job to attend university (including a dormitory and a cafeteria pass) as long as you can maintain a B average against a degree that would qualify you for a position in demand in the job market. You thereby continue to get food and shelter until such time as you're qualified to do the jobs that exist, at which point you can get a job and pay your own way.
With all due respect, you're kind of thinking about this backwards.
Suppose a group of 100,000,000 people each have on average $500/year to spend on music. If tracks each cost $1, they each get 500 tracks and a collection of, say, 500,000 artists each gets on average $100,000.
Now suppose each track costs $0.10. Each buyer still has the same amount of money to spend, so now they can each buy on average 5000 tracks from the same 500,000 artists and each artist still makes on average the same $100,000.
Changing the price doesn't change the amount of disposable income people have, but it sure as heck changes the number of songs they can buy. And more volume means better network effects and more efficient markets (i.e. each artist gets heard by more customers, and so the ones with the best sound are the ones whose concerts get sold out, rather than the ones with the best marketing).
Such things tend to be pretty useless because they're exactly the sort of thing that lossy compression algorithms strip out to save space -- and if every anyone invented a way to insert one that existing compression algorithms didn't remove, the algorithms people would be very interested in it so that they could improve the algorithm (which would then go back to stripping it out).
Is that what you think we're giving them in this context? I'm pretty sure we and they would both be better off if their jobs were done by machines. Unemployment is a much easier problem to solve when the production of food and housing is fully automated.
Something or someone. Today we have guys in a building somewhere in CA flying drones in Afghanistan. Tomorrow we could just as easily have some base-wage-guy in India running a ditch-digging machine in Michigan. Or a doctor in Israel doing your heart surgery in Cleveland.
That's what I'm saying. If you want higher wages than they pay in other countries, you have to provide something they can't. The existence of software developers in India is only a threat if they're better than the software developers in America -- so we need to make sure that they aren't, by making sure that American software developers (and doctors etc.) are the best in the world.
Personally, I'm of the opinion that we're rapidly reaching the point where there won't be enough work. Period. Globalization. Automation. Robotics. Telepresence. Millions of people are going to be displaced and rendered obsolete. If not billions.
Those things all increase efficiency. Efficiency creates as many jobs as it displaces -- because every dollar saved by efficiency is a dollar in somebody's pocket that they can spend paying someone to do something new.
You don't run out of jobs until there is nothing left worth doing. Is commercial-scale Fusion working? Have we colonized Mars yet? Anybody prove whether or not P = NP? How 'bout that cure for cancer?
At worst what you have is a mismatch between the skills required to do the work that needs doing and the skills of the labor force. But there is a pretty obvious solution to that in the form of government subsidized education.
That only applies if 0% of the imported workers displace the jobs of domestic workers. If the displacement rate is at least as high as the unemployment rate (as it seems likely to be, since the unemployment rate is in the single digits) then the unemployment rate goes up.
Cheap labor impacts the rate at which machines replace humans for manual jobs, because it reduces the incentive to invest in developing those machines (since there are less savings to be had, so the margins on the machines are lower). But that investment has not been zeroed out by any means.
On top of that, we're talking about American jobs, so who cares what the Chinese are doing? You might as well throw them in the same class as the robots, in the sense that if there is {something} that will do the work cheaper than Americans, Americans had better find some other work to do.
And as time goes on, the number of jobs in that category continues to increase -- it wasn't that long ago that they put in those hand scanners at the grocery store that let you scan the items in your cart as you put them in and then do nothing more than swipe your credit card as you walk out the door. I'd bet a fair number of checkout clerks lost their jobs over that one.
We can eat it, wear it, breathe it... What the hell kind of society will this be if everyone just writes software all day?
Let's suppose that some time in the next, I don't know, ten or twenty years, the combination of general purpose programmable robots and 3D printers allows you to do anything that might generally fall under the designation "manual labor" more cheaply with a machine than it costs to hire a person.
You know what kind of jobs that leaves for people to do? Let me give you some examples: Lawyers, corporate managers, stock brokers, insurance salesmen, etc.
Also, programmers.
And I've got a punch in the face for anyone who thinks we should be concentrating on creating more jobs for the people on the first list.
Steve Jobs and Eric Schmidt were actually good friends for a while. Schmidt was even on Apple's board, until he had to leave when Google bought Android and it created a conflict of interest. That was one of the reasons Jobs was so mad about Android -- he felt like it was busting up his friendship.
Incidentally, if you want to help me test a hypothesis, try paying attention to the media coverage of this story to see how much the MPAA-owned media cover this story with Google as the principal antagonist/coordinator of the scheme and Apple as a secondary or unimportant player now that Google has gone to bat for us against SOPA, even though it was Steve Jobs who started the ball rolling on this whole no poach thing. Pay special attention to News Corp coverage (e.g. Fox News and the Wall Street Journal) -- my hypothesis is that Murdoch has it in for Google now and is executing a campaign against them. Let's see if I'm right.
Actually if you look at our history the times of the highest growth was when the top tax rate was 70% or above which makes perfect sense if you think about it.
Well sure: Politicians cut taxes to stimulate the economy when times are tough and then raise them again after a recovery when things are going well, so they're always high during periods of high growth -- but the causal relation is the reverse of the one you want. Politicians set the tax rate inversely to the level of economic growth -- the state of the economy sets the tax rate rather than the other way around.
On top of that, your assertion is a great example of how to lie with statistics. When, pray tell, was the period when tax rates were above 70% and economic growth was the highest? It was during the decades following World War II. Taxes were high to service the debt incurred during the war, and the economy was good because the US was one of the only first world countries that hadn't recently been bombed into the stone age and US competitiveness was thereby at an all time high.
you see when you have a tax rate that high for the uber rich if they sit on the money then they don't sit on the money, they invest it instead since there was all these provisions that lowered their tax rates if they used the money to increase productivity.
That doesn't even make sense. If you create a bunch of provisions (AKA "loopholes") to lower tax rates, you don't actually have a high tax rate at all, all you have is de facto fines for not conducting business in a particular way (namely in accordance with receiving the tax incentives).
By contrast, higher effective tax rates reduce the incentive to earn more money for anyone (i.e. the rich) who isn't required to earn at least a minimum amount to buy food and pay the mortgage before they can go to the beach, because for the same amount of work or investment you see a smaller return after taxes. Why bust your hump operating a small business to beat the market by 2% if the government is going to take two thirds of it? Or, if you're a venture capitalist, every penny the government takes as taxes is a penny that isn't going to fund a new startup -- stock purchases aren't tax deductible.
And that doesn't even consider the most insidious flaw in trying to make the rich pay more: Consider what it does to the Congressional Budget Office figures for any proposed bill. It causes any bill that reduces the disparity in income levels to create a hole in the federal budget: If a proposed bill would result in you earning $1 more and Warren Buffet earning $1 less, but you're paying 10% and he's paying 50%, Congress is now out $0.40 on the dollar. If you think any bill that might cause that to happen and thereby creates a 40% hole in the budget is going to make it out of committee, think again.
You're obviously asking the question rhetorically, but I'll answer it anyway: It's because they have what we want, namely money and jobs. That leaves them in a stronger negotiating position with governments than solitary individuals have. Your response is that we should not give them what they want -- let them make good on their threats, right?
The problem is that they do. In 2002 Apple made iMacs in California. In 2012 Apple makes iMacs in China. So you can call their bluff, but then you lose the jobs and the money.
(Of course, you can also outsmart them -- by charging a sales tax on their products regardless of which country they make them in, which get paid by the corporations through margin reductions when customers aren't willing to pay as much for their products -- but then you get "progressives" wailing about how it's regressive while ignoring that the reason you're doing it is so that poor people won't lose their jobs.)
Obviously the original entrapment scheme wasn't a response to Google helping us fight SOPA, but this new release of information to try to make them look bad and generate more negative press certainly could be.
It doesn't go "directly in their pockets," but what happens is that the extra money is brought to the attention of the people who allocate budgets. Those people then allocate more to whoever brought in the money in the hope that there is more where that came from and extra staff will better be able suck that cash out of the economy and into the government budget without anything so politically unacceptable as "tax increases."
Slashdot Mirror
I've said it before and I'll say it again: How is that any excuse to give up without a fight?
If someone comes to you every day and eats your lunch, do you just acquiesce because you know he'll come back tomorrow if you don't? No, you give him a good swift kick in the jewels and then try to have them prosecuted. Then you get together with all their other victims and start planning out a strategy to stop them from coming back again.
I don't think anyone has ever made a particularly strong argument for eliminating hardware patents. The reason why people so very loathe Rambus was not the quality of their patents (although they did, as it turns out, happen to be invalid) -- it was that they went to the JEDEC standards meetings and encouraged the standards body to adopt their technology, without saying a word about it potentially infringing their patents, and then proceeded to sue everyone in the memory industry after the standard was set in stone and shipped on millions of motherboards.
It was the troll behavior that got everyone up in arms: Nobody whatsoever minds if you come to them and offer a license for your validly patented hardware technology before they ship it in their products. If the amount you're asking is less than the value of the technology to their company, you have yourself a mutually-agreeable deal. The problem is when someone (like Rambus, but unlike ARM) waits until you've unknowingly committed to ship several million infringing units before jumping out from under a bridge and flinging lawsuits in every direction.
Whatever, we'll just mandate small enough class sizes that the ones who can't find any alternative jobs can just become teachers. ;)
Seriously though, the idea that there wouldn't be enough jobs is totally ridiculous. Again, unless all the world's problems are solved, there will always be demand for someone to solve them. The problem can only be that the available labor supply is not qualified to meet the demand, and you fix that by helping them achieve the necessary qualifications.
Even with the uproar about bills, ACTA will become the law of the land still.
If you sit on your duff and do nothing about it? Sure. Or you could make some phone calls like we did against SOPA and maybe we can chalk up another win for the good guys.
Let's suppose that some time in the next, I don't know, ten or twenty years, A.I. becomes sophisticated enough to write computer programs based on plain old voice instructions, kind of like Siri already does with real-world tasks. Once everyone can "program" there won't be a very big market for programmers.
Quite the opposite, actually. The number of problems that can be reduced to software solutions, but that aren't solved solely because it isn't cost effective to pay a programmer to solve them, is truly epic. If you made it so that everyone could make software, everyone would have a job making software -- even if that job was only working for some investment bank to produce algorithms that outsmart the algorithms used by competing investment banks.
But as the current economic status in the US shows, what they can do, and what they will do is completely different. Companies are sitting on huge piles of cash. Very few of them are hiring.
"Sitting on huge piles of cash" is just something people say who don't understand that by "cash" they mean "securities" -- they don't have a huge money bin like Scrooge McDuck that they can go around swimming in. They just buy stock in other companies. Then whoever sold the stock has the money, and they buy something with it. If they buy stock too, then whoever sold that stock gets the money, ad infinitum until somebody uses the money to buy something that requires labor to produce (and even past that, but the subsequent economic activity would still have occurred in the original case).
Of course you do.
No, you don't. I will personally hire everyone currently unemployed for a year, as long as they're collectively willing to work in exchange for a coequal share between all of my new employees of the $20 currently in my wallet. Naturally they'll all decline my offer because I'm not paying enough, but that's the point: It isn't that there are no jobs, it's that there are no jobs that pay as much as these people are demanding for their labor.
If there is nothing to be done that can cause their labor to be more valuable, we need to do something to make it so that the amount their labor is actually worth in the marketplace is enough for them to make a living on. That means reducing the cost of consumer goods, which you do by increasing efficiency and automation.
And of the current unemployed, how many of them do you think are actually capable of doing any of these things?
As part of a team tasked with working toward them, having received relevant training? Almost all of them. Certainly all of them with any worth ethic whatsoever, and the people with no work ethic are supposed to starve.
As you mention, there's the slight matter of being qualified, and I doubt 99.99% of the workforce is qualified to solve fusion, solve P=NP, or cure cancer. Even with government subsidized education.
What, other than lack of education, do you imagine they would require in order to be qualified?
And those aren't jobs, those are things that *could* be jobs. Unless and until someone is willing to hire and pay people to solve them, they're just wishful thinking. "Wouldn't curing cancer be nice?" "Yeah, what's on TV?"
There is a financial incentive to solve each of those problems. The reason they haven't been solved is that the cost of solving them exceeds the benefit -- but that is the thing increasing efficiency changes. It lowers costs so that more of the unsolved problems become cost effective to solve, and then people direct resources toward solving them (and thereby create jobs), because it is suddenly cost effective to do so.
The problem is not that those people can't find a job. The problem is that they can't find a job that will pay enough to buy food and shelter. You can always find a job if you're willing to accept a low enough wage, even if it's just acting as a maid or a cook for some doctor or lawyer. If you can reduce the cost of food and shelter and other necessities to the level that someone making that little money can still afford to make a living, problem solved.
If there's no work they're qualified to do which can't be done better by machine, then what items of value will they trade for the (cheap, but certainly not free) food and housing? Or is this utopia just going to be a gigantic welfare state with a few owners on top, then a small engineer class, a similarly small operator & maintainer class, and a the vast majority of people at the bottom living on the dole?
Government pays 100% for anyone without a job to attend university (including a dormitory and a cafeteria pass) as long as you can maintain a B average against a degree that would qualify you for a position in demand in the job market. You thereby continue to get food and shelter until such time as you're qualified to do the jobs that exist, at which point you can get a job and pay your own way.
Who said the FBI was behind it? It looks to me like the Wall Street Journal (now under new management).
With all due respect, you're kind of thinking about this backwards.
Suppose a group of 100,000,000 people each have on average $500/year to spend on music. If tracks each cost $1, they each get 500 tracks and a collection of, say, 500,000 artists each gets on average $100,000.
Now suppose each track costs $0.10. Each buyer still has the same amount of money to spend, so now they can each buy on average 5000 tracks from the same 500,000 artists and each artist still makes on average the same $100,000.
Changing the price doesn't change the amount of disposable income people have, but it sure as heck changes the number of songs they can buy. And more volume means better network effects and more efficient markets (i.e. each artist gets heard by more customers, and so the ones with the best sound are the ones whose concerts get sold out, rather than the ones with the best marketing).
Such things tend to be pretty useless because they're exactly the sort of thing that lossy compression algorithms strip out to save space -- and if every anyone invented a way to insert one that existing compression algorithms didn't remove, the algorithms people would be very interested in it so that they could improve the algorithm (which would then go back to stripping it out).
Is that what you think we're giving them in this context? I'm pretty sure we and they would both be better off if their jobs were done by machines. Unemployment is a much easier problem to solve when the production of food and housing is fully automated.
Something or someone. Today we have guys in a building somewhere in CA flying drones in Afghanistan. Tomorrow we could just as easily have some base-wage-guy in India running a ditch-digging machine in Michigan. Or a doctor in Israel doing your heart surgery in Cleveland.
That's what I'm saying. If you want higher wages than they pay in other countries, you have to provide something they can't. The existence of software developers in India is only a threat if they're better than the software developers in America -- so we need to make sure that they aren't, by making sure that American software developers (and doctors etc.) are the best in the world.
Personally, I'm of the opinion that we're rapidly reaching the point where there won't be enough work. Period. Globalization. Automation. Robotics. Telepresence. Millions of people are going to be displaced and rendered obsolete. If not billions.
Those things all increase efficiency. Efficiency creates as many jobs as it displaces -- because every dollar saved by efficiency is a dollar in somebody's pocket that they can spend paying someone to do something new.
You don't run out of jobs until there is nothing left worth doing. Is commercial-scale Fusion working? Have we colonized Mars yet? Anybody prove whether or not P = NP? How 'bout that cure for cancer?
At worst what you have is a mismatch between the skills required to do the work that needs doing and the skills of the labor force. But there is a pretty obvious solution to that in the form of government subsidized education.
That only applies if 0% of the imported workers displace the jobs of domestic workers. If the displacement rate is at least as high as the unemployment rate (as it seems likely to be, since the unemployment rate is in the single digits) then the unemployment rate goes up.
Only if the thing you want is energy and not matter, i.e. nuclear power FTW.
That's not how it works.
Cheap labor impacts the rate at which machines replace humans for manual jobs, because it reduces the incentive to invest in developing those machines (since there are less savings to be had, so the margins on the machines are lower). But that investment has not been zeroed out by any means.
On top of that, we're talking about American jobs, so who cares what the Chinese are doing? You might as well throw them in the same class as the robots, in the sense that if there is {something} that will do the work cheaper than Americans, Americans had better find some other work to do.
And as time goes on, the number of jobs in that category continues to increase -- it wasn't that long ago that they put in those hand scanners at the grocery store that let you scan the items in your cart as you put them in and then do nothing more than swipe your credit card as you walk out the door. I'd bet a fair number of checkout clerks lost their jobs over that one.
We can eat it, wear it, breathe it... What the hell kind of society will this be if everyone just writes software all day?
Let's suppose that some time in the next, I don't know, ten or twenty years, the combination of general purpose programmable robots and 3D printers allows you to do anything that might generally fall under the designation "manual labor" more cheaply with a machine than it costs to hire a person.
You know what kind of jobs that leaves for people to do? Let me give you some examples: Lawyers, corporate managers, stock brokers, insurance salesmen, etc.
Also, programmers.
And I've got a punch in the face for anyone who thinks we should be concentrating on creating more jobs for the people on the first list.
increasing H-1B visas for highly skilled coders
How is increasing the number of workers supposed to decrease the unemployment rate?
It does indeed. But unions have a statutory antitrust exemption.
... Google, Apple...
They aren't allies.
Steve Jobs and Eric Schmidt were actually good friends for a while. Schmidt was even on Apple's board, until he had to leave when Google bought Android and it created a conflict of interest. That was one of the reasons Jobs was so mad about Android -- he felt like it was busting up his friendship.
Incidentally, if you want to help me test a hypothesis, try paying attention to the media coverage of this story to see how much the MPAA-owned media cover this story with Google as the principal antagonist/coordinator of the scheme and Apple as a secondary or unimportant player now that Google has gone to bat for us against SOPA, even though it was Steve Jobs who started the ball rolling on this whole no poach thing. Pay special attention to News Corp coverage (e.g. Fox News and the Wall Street Journal) -- my hypothesis is that Murdoch has it in for Google now and is executing a campaign against them. Let's see if I'm right.
Actually if you look at our history the times of the highest growth was when the top tax rate was 70% or above which makes perfect sense if you think about it.
Well sure: Politicians cut taxes to stimulate the economy when times are tough and then raise them again after a recovery when things are going well, so they're always high during periods of high growth -- but the causal relation is the reverse of the one you want. Politicians set the tax rate inversely to the level of economic growth -- the state of the economy sets the tax rate rather than the other way around.
On top of that, your assertion is a great example of how to lie with statistics. When, pray tell, was the period when tax rates were above 70% and economic growth was the highest? It was during the decades following World War II. Taxes were high to service the debt incurred during the war, and the economy was good because the US was one of the only first world countries that hadn't recently been bombed into the stone age and US competitiveness was thereby at an all time high.
you see when you have a tax rate that high for the uber rich if they sit on the money then they don't sit on the money, they invest it instead since there was all these provisions that lowered their tax rates if they used the money to increase productivity.
That doesn't even make sense. If you create a bunch of provisions (AKA "loopholes") to lower tax rates, you don't actually have a high tax rate at all, all you have is de facto fines for not conducting business in a particular way (namely in accordance with receiving the tax incentives).
By contrast, higher effective tax rates reduce the incentive to earn more money for anyone (i.e. the rich) who isn't required to earn at least a minimum amount to buy food and pay the mortgage before they can go to the beach, because for the same amount of work or investment you see a smaller return after taxes. Why bust your hump operating a small business to beat the market by 2% if the government is going to take two thirds of it? Or, if you're a venture capitalist, every penny the government takes as taxes is a penny that isn't going to fund a new startup -- stock purchases aren't tax deductible.
And that doesn't even consider the most insidious flaw in trying to make the rich pay more: Consider what it does to the Congressional Budget Office figures for any proposed bill. It causes any bill that reduces the disparity in income levels to create a hole in the federal budget: If a proposed bill would result in you earning $1 more and Warren Buffet earning $1 less, but you're paying 10% and he's paying 50%, Congress is now out $0.40 on the dollar. If you think any bill that might cause that to happen and thereby creates a 40% hole in the budget is going to make it out of committee, think again.
You're obviously asking the question rhetorically, but I'll answer it anyway: It's because they have what we want, namely money and jobs. That leaves them in a stronger negotiating position with governments than solitary individuals have. Your response is that we should not give them what they want -- let them make good on their threats, right?
The problem is that they do. In 2002 Apple made iMacs in California. In 2012 Apple makes iMacs in China. So you can call their bluff, but then you lose the jobs and the money.
(Of course, you can also outsmart them -- by charging a sales tax on their products regardless of which country they make them in, which get paid by the corporations through margin reductions when customers aren't willing to pay as much for their products -- but then you get "progressives" wailing about how it's regressive while ignoring that the reason you're doing it is so that poor people won't lose their jobs.)
Obviously the original entrapment scheme wasn't a response to Google helping us fight SOPA, but this new release of information to try to make them look bad and generate more negative press certainly could be.
It doesn't go "directly in their pockets," but what happens is that the extra money is brought to the attention of the people who allocate budgets. Those people then allocate more to whoever brought in the money in the hope that there is more where that came from and extra staff will better be able suck that cash out of the economy and into the government budget without anything so politically unacceptable as "tax increases."