I agree mostly with what you wrote, except the bit about the internet favoring medium and large businesses. The internet has been a boon to many small businesses, just not the local old-fashioned brick-and-mortar kind. For small businesses that exist solely on the internet, selling products or services directly to people, it's been a boon, because it lets your little mom-n-pop business sell directly to people across the country and even around the world, if what you're selling is something that can be shipped easily (or doesn't require shipping).
So yes, many local small businesses have been hurt greatly by the internet (because these businesses were middlemen between producers and consumers), but many other small businesses have done very well.
* Messaging is about creating repeat customers. Once you get their contact information, you use it to incent them to come back.
So you think spamming your customers is going to make them think highly of you?
* Ever heard of a twitter feed?
Yes, the whole thing is total bullshit. At least Facebook can be potentially useful, but Twitter is a total waste of time. Any business that wastes their time with a Twitter feed is immediately demoted in my mind. And no, Facebook is not a good way to "connect" with customers. When I buy something from a business, I want to hand some money over, and get a good product. I don't want to waste my time fucking around on Facebook talking to them or seeing a bunch of ads. I'm already a customer; why would I want to see more ads?
I will add, however, that a small and simple website can be very useful for many local businesses. For instance, for a restaurant, a small website with some photos of your dining area and your menu are very helpful.
If we're talking about mom-n-pop local brick-and-mortar businesses, like the local deli, no, they don't need any of that crap. All they need to do is produce a good product/service consistently, so people living nearby will go buy stuff from them regularly.
What they CAN benefit from, on the internet, is showing up on mapping services (like Google Maps), so that when someone searches "deli near 90210", their deli shows up, and people nearby go check it out. It also helps if there's reviews on there, as Google Maps does, so that customers can leave positive or negative comments about their experience there; if there's lots of positive reviews, people are more likely to try them out. It also helps if they communicate their business hours to Google Maps so that when you look at the "more info" for that business, you can see if they're still open today.
None of this actually requires any internet work, aside from the initial work of making sure your business actually shows up on the mapping service, and the hours are correct. You don't need "social engagement" or "reputation management": just do a good job providing for your customers and that stuff will take care of itself. If you have to expend a lot of energy "managing" your reputation, it's because you've earned a bad reputation because you suck, and now you're trying to use underhanded tactics, such as creating shill accounts, to improve your business's image.
What if I don't want anyone to know that I'm opposed to the actions of my government? I live in a country where it's unlikely (but not impossible) I'll get in trouble for that opinion
Don't worry, the way things are going, that's going to change within a decade.
Well my point wasn't that something like this has the potential, if handled properly, to allow hiring managers to configure the system with their own personal biases, rather than the HR morons' biases. Obviously, your company doesn't do this: it has instead allowed the HR fools to program the system with their biases, and the result is a disaster. Well what did you expect? If you allow the HR idiots to filter resumes, it doesn't matter if they do it on an individual basis, or they make an algorithm and allow a computer to do it automatically, the result is always going to be bad, because HR people are idiots who aren't able to do real jobs--that's why they're in HR, and allowing them to screen applications will always have a bad result.
At least with a system in place allowing someone to configure it to use their personal biases to filter resumes, if a company is smart, they could set it up so that the hiring managers set up these filters, rather than the HR morons. But that would require a company that has some intelligent executives which don't allow HR to do whatever they want, and most companies I've seen aren't like this; for some reason, it's pretty normal for companies to assume that HR personnel are somehow experts in hiring people in fields they don't understand at all, and then just allow them to have all the power in this process, even though everyone complains about it.
Why would all companies use the same algorithms? Do all companies now get together and discuss how they hire employees? Of course not, because they're competing for those employees, and frequently trying to steal them away from each other. Why on earth would all companies decide to suddenly cooperate and share their hiring-discrimination algorithms? If anything, that information would be considered a highly-protected trade secret.
Personally, I've never found any headhunters to be useful at all. The few times I've gone on interviews organized by one, they ended up giving me an offer that was tens of thousands lower than other available positions, with the company whining how they couldn't afford to pay any more than that (probably because the headhunter was demanding a $30k fee).
Anyway, even so, I haven't found many who insist on a Word version of resumes; the ones who do that usually do so because they want to edit your resume and replace your name and info with their own letterhead before passing it out to employers, to make sure the employers don't go around them and call you directly.
While having an ignorant salesman probably didn't work out too well for the company (it's hard to say with a sample size of one though), the interesting question would be: how well did it work out for the saleman personally? If he made a killing selling a product he didn't understand well, then it was a winning strategy.
It's exchanging one person's personal prejudice for another's. However, it's really a good thing: the personal prejudices of recruiters are stupid; if they can replace those with the personal prejudices of hiring managers, the companies would be much better off. The problem in hiring, for many companies, is that hiring managers (the guy you end up working under every day if you get the job, the guy who actually knows what you do, and probably did something similar when he was more junior) is separated from candidates by know-nothing recruiters and idiotic HR staff, who know absolutely nothing about the job except for some buzzwords they don't understand like "C++". So hiring managers end up getting presented with tons of resumes from useless candidates who are totally unqualified for the job.
Anything which reduces the influence of recruiters and the morons in HR has got to be an improvement.
That's easy: buy a refurbished Dell Latitude and install Linux Mint (with GIMP) on it. Total price around $250-300. Plus you get a very good (for a laptop) keyboard, unlike the idiotic mushy keyboards that all Macs and other consumer laptops have.
No, they can't. They'll argue that those aren't contradictions at all. Google it: there's websites full of explanations for why these contradictions really aren't, according to them.
Not from what I've read, though my prior statement probably needs a modifier: "excepting Catholics". According to statistics I've seen, the mainline Protestants have been losing members steadily, while the fundamentalists and "non-denominational" evangelicals have been growing fast, so much so that the latter now outnumber the former. The Catholics probably comprise around 1/3. So, maybe not a clear majority, but definitely a large and growing minority.
Unlike for Christianity, where the bible doesn't have divine origins,
Incorrect. Christian fundamentalists insist that the Bible is inerrant, and the divine/inspired word of God. Many other Christians will insist it is inspired by God (which sounds like "divine origins" to me). These two groups probably comprise the majority of Christians in the USA.
Yes, those are all definitely downsides with maximizing individual freedom.
However, what's a better alternative? I haven't seen any. Now, this doesn't mean that libertarianism is the answer to everything, and that no government regulation is ever useful or necessary: the economic meltdown was proof of that. However, while I think the economic crisis shows that the downsides of government regulation are an acceptable compromise in the financial sector to prevent economic disasters, I don't think this extends to every single sector of the economy, and certainly not video games. Do we really need government bureaucrats telling us what kind of video games we should and shouldn't be allowed to buy? It's not like EA going under would result in economic devastation (and if it did come to that, that would be a failure of the government to enforce its own anti-monopoly laws, which apply to all industries). There's nothing stopping other gaming companies from competing with them, and indeed, many do. If EA's customers are getting shafted by EA's business practices, it's their own fault, plain and simple, for continuing to buy their stuff. Yeah, it's too bad many consumers are stupid, irrational, and refuse to do research before making purchases. Having a command economy is no answer to that, and neither is excessive regulation on sectors of the economy that really aren't that important to society and don't involve health or safety.
Moreover, unless the pirated version "phones home", how would EA even know that you have a copy of it? (And if it does "phone home", that'd make it easy for them to sue you like the MPAA does.)
Actually, they do have something to worry about. Mobile phones aren't exactly necessary as food (though of far more utility than games), yet look how far Nokia and RIM have fallen, while other phone makers have risen in their place (Apple, Samsung).
There's lots of other companies making games besides EA, and it's folly to think they can't be unseated by their competitors. Young people may be addicted to these things, but people can be fickle about these things. They could easily stop buying EA games and switch to Valve or whatever else.
To be fair, unless I'm mistaken, there are not blank media taxes here in the US. For some odd reason, Canada actually implemented that, but we never did, though I'm sure the MAFIAA would have loved that.
Yes, they have gotten crazy copyright laws, but those only help them if people actually want their stuff. If everyone ignored their stuff, it wouldn't help them.
And what exactly is your alternative? Having a big government agency that determines how companies should act, and forces them to act in ways that (some) people like? Or better yet, just eliminting private companies altogether and having the government own and run everything?
History has shown that command economies don't work. We've also seen many times that very large companies can be destroyed or at least massively shrunken when their customers abandon them. Remember AOL? It's a tiny shadow of its former self. RIM isn't looking so hot these days either. Is Blockbuster Video around any more? All the other video rental stores are gone. How's Atari doing these days? Microsoft is still doing OK thanks to Office and Windows, but as much as they try, they just can't get many people interested in Windows Phone.
EA is doing fine because tons of stupid gamers keep buying their crap, and then complaining about it. If you don't like it, don't buy it: it's that simple. EA isn't a monopoly, and video games aren't a necessity by any means. This isn't like banking, where it's a pretty integral part of the economy and regulation can be reasonably called for. This isn't like power or water or other utilities, where people depend on them to live or have modern civilization. This situation is akin to a bunch of teenage and 20-something hipsters complaining about Starbucks' crappy burnt coffee, and then continuing to go back and buy more of them for $4 per cup. Cry me a river.
Again, the thing you're missing is that there's lots of cases of employers providing free food, whether it be catered meals for special functions, or free donuts and snacks, and the IRS doesn't tax employees or the employer for that either. Yet somehow Google's supposed to be taxed for its free meals, just because they're a little nicer and more expensive than free donuts. That doesn't wash.
The essence of my argument was already spelled out before: the tax code needs to be simplified. Why is a free lunch not exempt, but free donuts are? Because donuts are hard to track, or it's not worth the puny amount of revenue? Sorry, I don't buy it. If free food needs to be taxed, it needs to be taxed no matter how cheap it is. I assume there's no $240/mo. exemption for free food, so they need to expend IRS manpower to go after those free donuts and coffees even if it only nets them $1 per employee per year. If they'd do as I suggest, and stop discriminating based on perks (up to a certain dollar amount of course, to avoid giving away cars or houses or yachts in lieu of cash), then this wouldn't be an issue, and the IRS wouldn't have as much work to do with enforcement. Of course, that'd mean less need for IRS agents, and government agencies always want a bigger budget, so they'd be against any simplification of the tax code.
That Starbucks coffee also requires a lot of other costs to be paid: rent on the storefront, power, water, WiFi/internet, etc. Not to mention profit. When the IRS wants you to account for the "fair market value" of something, they don't care what it actually cost to make it, they only care how much you could get something similar for elsewhere.
So if your neighbor comes over and unclogs your toilet, you're supposed to pay taxes on the "fair market value" of that labor service. It doesn't matter if you live in some little small town where there's only one licensed plumber and he charges $1000 to unclog a toilet; that's what you're supposed to enter on your 1040 form as income. The fact that your neighbor used your plunger and works a minimum-wage job so his 5 minutes of labor were worth less than $1 is irrelevant to the IRS.
However, in the IRS's defense, the country (and every country) needs tax money to run the government. How else are they going to get that money? Sales taxes are regressive and hurt poor people who buy all their stuff locally much more than richer people who buy stuff online or overseas. Property taxes force you to keep paying just to continue to own something, which hardly seems right, though it's standard for real estate and leads to retired people being forced to move. Import tariffs hurt trade. There's probably a good reason every developed country has settled on progressive income taxes to fund the bulk of government operations. But it causes a lot of problems when the income tax code is ridiculously complex, which is mostly unique to the USA (Europeans don't spend any significant time doing their taxes or worry about it the way we do).
So... give your employees a pay raise that will cover the value of a weekly massage
That'll cost the company much more money than just hiring a masseuse. Not all employees will want massages anyway (but of course will happily take the raise); offering free massages ends up not costing that much, especially since (if the IRS didn't tax it specifically) there'd be no tax involved, being a perk.
Why should massages not be tax-free, but parking is? What if they limit the value of massages to $240/month? It IS micromanaging, because the IRS is deciding which things they think are appropriate for a business to provide as a perk, and which things aren't. That stuff is none of their business; businesses should be able to run themselves as they see fit, and if they want to offer free limo services (or whatever) to employees, instead of free parking, to attract better employees, that's their business. A set dollar value limit would be appropriate to ensure this isn't abused (like with CEOs and megayachts), rather than picking and choosing which things are and aren't allowed, and then having to argue over definitions--does a free coffee or free ice cream count as a free meal? What if they give out donuts? Is that a free meal? You could argue all day about stuff like that.
The issue here is that Google is giving employees a valuable benefit that employees are not paying taxes on
So what? Google's paying taxes to buy the food, they're paying payroll and FICA and other taxes for the employees working at the cafeteria, they're just making it more efficient by not giving a bunch of money to some third-party vendor to use as profit, by doing it in-house. They also give other valuable benefits that are untaxed, such as free parking. Why should free parking be exempt, and not free lunches? Why not free bus fare?
If the gov't doesn't care to simplify the tax code
And this is precisely the point of my whole argument: the tax code needs to be simplified. Deciding that parking lots are OK (except in Manhattan because the price of parking is higher than the $240/month limit there), and so is free coffee, but that free lunches and free massages are not, is micromanaging, and results in excessively complex tax code which costs more money to be in compliance with, and requires more money on the government's side to ensure compliance and do audits, thus increasing the amount of revenue needed from taxes, in a vicious cycle.
no, quite relevant. We are talking about taxable compensation. Google isn't "giving you" the property they own that constitutes a parking space. They are allowing you to park your vehicle on their property as long as you're an employee. The service has monetary value, but it is not compensation for your work any more than "providing electricity to power your computer" is compensation for your work. It is a precondition of you being able to work, and it is provided for work purposes by your employer.
Wrong again. It's not a product, but it is a service. Services have value, and can be taxed.
If, for instance, you know how to do plumbing work, and your neighbor knows how to do electrical repairs, you can mutually agree to exchange services: you installing a new toilet in his house and him replacing some light fixtures in your house. However (of course no one actually does this), this exchange of services is subject to taxation, and legally you are required to determine the "fair market value" of your respective services, and count them as income on your taxes. No, no one really does this, but it is the law, just like paying "use taxes" for internet purchases, another thing almost no one actually does.
So your company providing you parking is similar to your neighbor doing electrical work for you; it's not "free", it's an exchange of services. Your company is giving you "free" parking as a perk, rather than paying you extra, and you paying $5/day to park at a privately-owned parking lot across the street.
Parking is not a "precondition of you being able to work". You don't need parking to go to work. You can take a bus, or you can park at a privately-owned parking lot, or you can take a cab, or you can have a chauffeur drive you there. Just because it's commonly expected by many people to have "free" parking in many places in the US doesn't mean you actually need it. In fact, there's plenty of places where there is no free parking for employees: ask anyone who works in Manhattan.
And these often can be exempted under the "de minimis" fringe benefit exceptions. You should review the EMPLOYEE's tax guide to fringe benefits: http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-tege/fringe_benefit_fslg.pdf [irs.gov] They explain pretty clearly what conditions allow you to exclude meals and other fringe benefits from your taxable income.
You're correct about this, but what I'm arguing about is the IRS's rules themselves: I think the IRS is picking and choosing what it allows employers to give to employees as perks, and it's wrong and micromanagerial. Now obviously, we need to have some kind of limits in place so that, for instance, the company doesn't buy the CEO a megayacht and allow him to avoid taxation this way, but this can be solved with a simple (perhaps yearly) dollar limit, rather than a ridiculous list of rules spelling out exactly what is and isn't allowed. If a company wants to give out free weekly massages to employees to help them work better, or free lunches, or whatever, it shouldn't have to account for this exhaustively to the IRS. It's just extra wasted paperwork and overhead.
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I agree mostly with what you wrote, except the bit about the internet favoring medium and large businesses. The internet has been a boon to many small businesses, just not the local old-fashioned brick-and-mortar kind. For small businesses that exist solely on the internet, selling products or services directly to people, it's been a boon, because it lets your little mom-n-pop business sell directly to people across the country and even around the world, if what you're selling is something that can be shipped easily (or doesn't require shipping).
So yes, many local small businesses have been hurt greatly by the internet (because these businesses were middlemen between producers and consumers), but many other small businesses have done very well.
* Messaging is about creating repeat customers. Once you get their contact information, you use it to incent them to come back.
So you think spamming your customers is going to make them think highly of you?
* Ever heard of a twitter feed?
Yes, the whole thing is total bullshit. At least Facebook can be potentially useful, but Twitter is a total waste of time. Any business that wastes their time with a Twitter feed is immediately demoted in my mind. And no, Facebook is not a good way to "connect" with customers. When I buy something from a business, I want to hand some money over, and get a good product. I don't want to waste my time fucking around on Facebook talking to them or seeing a bunch of ads. I'm already a customer; why would I want to see more ads?
I will add, however, that a small and simple website can be very useful for many local businesses. For instance, for a restaurant, a small website with some photos of your dining area and your menu are very helpful.
If we're talking about mom-n-pop local brick-and-mortar businesses, like the local deli, no, they don't need any of that crap. All they need to do is produce a good product/service consistently, so people living nearby will go buy stuff from them regularly.
What they CAN benefit from, on the internet, is showing up on mapping services (like Google Maps), so that when someone searches "deli near 90210", their deli shows up, and people nearby go check it out. It also helps if there's reviews on there, as Google Maps does, so that customers can leave positive or negative comments about their experience there; if there's lots of positive reviews, people are more likely to try them out. It also helps if they communicate their business hours to Google Maps so that when you look at the "more info" for that business, you can see if they're still open today.
None of this actually requires any internet work, aside from the initial work of making sure your business actually shows up on the mapping service, and the hours are correct. You don't need "social engagement" or "reputation management": just do a good job providing for your customers and that stuff will take care of itself. If you have to expend a lot of energy "managing" your reputation, it's because you've earned a bad reputation because you suck, and now you're trying to use underhanded tactics, such as creating shill accounts, to improve your business's image.
What if I don't want anyone to know that I'm opposed to the actions of my government? I live in a country where it's unlikely (but not impossible) I'll get in trouble for that opinion
Don't worry, the way things are going, that's going to change within a decade.
Well my point wasn't that something like this has the potential, if handled properly, to allow hiring managers to configure the system with their own personal biases, rather than the HR morons' biases. Obviously, your company doesn't do this: it has instead allowed the HR fools to program the system with their biases, and the result is a disaster. Well what did you expect? If you allow the HR idiots to filter resumes, it doesn't matter if they do it on an individual basis, or they make an algorithm and allow a computer to do it automatically, the result is always going to be bad, because HR people are idiots who aren't able to do real jobs--that's why they're in HR, and allowing them to screen applications will always have a bad result.
At least with a system in place allowing someone to configure it to use their personal biases to filter resumes, if a company is smart, they could set it up so that the hiring managers set up these filters, rather than the HR morons. But that would require a company that has some intelligent executives which don't allow HR to do whatever they want, and most companies I've seen aren't like this; for some reason, it's pretty normal for companies to assume that HR personnel are somehow experts in hiring people in fields they don't understand at all, and then just allow them to have all the power in this process, even though everyone complains about it.
Why would all companies use the same algorithms? Do all companies now get together and discuss how they hire employees? Of course not, because they're competing for those employees, and frequently trying to steal them away from each other. Why on earth would all companies decide to suddenly cooperate and share their hiring-discrimination algorithms? If anything, that information would be considered a highly-protected trade secret.
Why did you waste your time with that headhunter?
Personally, I've never found any headhunters to be useful at all. The few times I've gone on interviews organized by one, they ended up giving me an offer that was tens of thousands lower than other available positions, with the company whining how they couldn't afford to pay any more than that (probably because the headhunter was demanding a $30k fee).
Anyway, even so, I haven't found many who insist on a Word version of resumes; the ones who do that usually do so because they want to edit your resume and replace your name and info with their own letterhead before passing it out to employers, to make sure the employers don't go around them and call you directly.
While having an ignorant salesman probably didn't work out too well for the company (it's hard to say with a sample size of one though), the interesting question would be: how well did it work out for the saleman personally? If he made a killing selling a product he didn't understand well, then it was a winning strategy.
It's exchanging one person's personal prejudice for another's. However, it's really a good thing: the personal prejudices of recruiters are stupid; if they can replace those with the personal prejudices of hiring managers, the companies would be much better off. The problem in hiring, for many companies, is that hiring managers (the guy you end up working under every day if you get the job, the guy who actually knows what you do, and probably did something similar when he was more junior) is separated from candidates by know-nothing recruiters and idiotic HR staff, who know absolutely nothing about the job except for some buzzwords they don't understand like "C++". So hiring managers end up getting presented with tons of resumes from useless candidates who are totally unqualified for the job.
Anything which reduces the influence of recruiters and the morons in HR has got to be an improvement.
That's easy: buy a refurbished Dell Latitude and install Linux Mint (with GIMP) on it. Total price around $250-300. Plus you get a very good (for a laptop) keyboard, unlike the idiotic mushy keyboards that all Macs and other consumer laptops have.
No, they can't. They'll argue that those aren't contradictions at all. Google it: there's websites full of explanations for why these contradictions really aren't, according to them.
Not from what I've read, though my prior statement probably needs a modifier: "excepting Catholics". According to statistics I've seen, the mainline Protestants have been losing members steadily, while the fundamentalists and "non-denominational" evangelicals have been growing fast, so much so that the latter now outnumber the former. The Catholics probably comprise around 1/3. So, maybe not a clear majority, but definitely a large and growing minority.
Unlike for Christianity, where the bible doesn't have divine origins,
Incorrect. Christian fundamentalists insist that the Bible is inerrant, and the divine/inspired word of God. Many other Christians will insist it is inspired by God (which sounds like "divine origins" to me). These two groups probably comprise the majority of Christians in the USA.
Yes, those are all definitely downsides with maximizing individual freedom.
However, what's a better alternative? I haven't seen any. Now, this doesn't mean that libertarianism is the answer to everything, and that no government regulation is ever useful or necessary: the economic meltdown was proof of that. However, while I think the economic crisis shows that the downsides of government regulation are an acceptable compromise in the financial sector to prevent economic disasters, I don't think this extends to every single sector of the economy, and certainly not video games. Do we really need government bureaucrats telling us what kind of video games we should and shouldn't be allowed to buy? It's not like EA going under would result in economic devastation (and if it did come to that, that would be a failure of the government to enforce its own anti-monopoly laws, which apply to all industries). There's nothing stopping other gaming companies from competing with them, and indeed, many do. If EA's customers are getting shafted by EA's business practices, it's their own fault, plain and simple, for continuing to buy their stuff. Yeah, it's too bad many consumers are stupid, irrational, and refuse to do research before making purchases. Having a command economy is no answer to that, and neither is excessive regulation on sectors of the economy that really aren't that important to society and don't involve health or safety.
Exactly.
Moreover, unless the pirated version "phones home", how would EA even know that you have a copy of it? (And if it does "phone home", that'd make it easy for them to sue you like the MPAA does.)
Actually, they do have something to worry about. Mobile phones aren't exactly necessary as food (though of far more utility than games), yet look how far Nokia and RIM have fallen, while other phone makers have risen in their place (Apple, Samsung).
There's lots of other companies making games besides EA, and it's folly to think they can't be unseated by their competitors. Young people may be addicted to these things, but people can be fickle about these things. They could easily stop buying EA games and switch to Valve or whatever else.
The last game of theirs I bought was Bard's Tale II (PC version).
To be fair, unless I'm mistaken, there are not blank media taxes here in the US. For some odd reason, Canada actually implemented that, but we never did, though I'm sure the MAFIAA would have loved that.
Yes, they have gotten crazy copyright laws, but those only help them if people actually want their stuff. If everyone ignored their stuff, it wouldn't help them.
There's an old saying that applies here:
"A fool and his money are soon parted."
And what exactly is your alternative? Having a big government agency that determines how companies should act, and forces them to act in ways that (some) people like? Or better yet, just eliminting private companies altogether and having the government own and run everything?
History has shown that command economies don't work. We've also seen many times that very large companies can be destroyed or at least massively shrunken when their customers abandon them. Remember AOL? It's a tiny shadow of its former self. RIM isn't looking so hot these days either. Is Blockbuster Video around any more? All the other video rental stores are gone. How's Atari doing these days? Microsoft is still doing OK thanks to Office and Windows, but as much as they try, they just can't get many people interested in Windows Phone.
EA is doing fine because tons of stupid gamers keep buying their crap, and then complaining about it. If you don't like it, don't buy it: it's that simple. EA isn't a monopoly, and video games aren't a necessity by any means. This isn't like banking, where it's a pretty integral part of the economy and regulation can be reasonably called for. This isn't like power or water or other utilities, where people depend on them to live or have modern civilization. This situation is akin to a bunch of teenage and 20-something hipsters complaining about Starbucks' crappy burnt coffee, and then continuing to go back and buy more of them for $4 per cup. Cry me a river.
Again, the thing you're missing is that there's lots of cases of employers providing free food, whether it be catered meals for special functions, or free donuts and snacks, and the IRS doesn't tax employees or the employer for that either. Yet somehow Google's supposed to be taxed for its free meals, just because they're a little nicer and more expensive than free donuts. That doesn't wash.
The essence of my argument was already spelled out before: the tax code needs to be simplified. Why is a free lunch not exempt, but free donuts are? Because donuts are hard to track, or it's not worth the puny amount of revenue? Sorry, I don't buy it. If free food needs to be taxed, it needs to be taxed no matter how cheap it is. I assume there's no $240/mo. exemption for free food, so they need to expend IRS manpower to go after those free donuts and coffees even if it only nets them $1 per employee per year. If they'd do as I suggest, and stop discriminating based on perks (up to a certain dollar amount of course, to avoid giving away cars or houses or yachts in lieu of cash), then this wouldn't be an issue, and the IRS wouldn't have as much work to do with enforcement. Of course, that'd mean less need for IRS agents, and government agencies always want a bigger budget, so they'd be against any simplification of the tax code.
That Starbucks coffee also requires a lot of other costs to be paid: rent on the storefront, power, water, WiFi/internet, etc. Not to mention profit. When the IRS wants you to account for the "fair market value" of something, they don't care what it actually cost to make it, they only care how much you could get something similar for elsewhere.
So if your neighbor comes over and unclogs your toilet, you're supposed to pay taxes on the "fair market value" of that labor service. It doesn't matter if you live in some little small town where there's only one licensed plumber and he charges $1000 to unclog a toilet; that's what you're supposed to enter on your 1040 form as income. The fact that your neighbor used your plunger and works a minimum-wage job so his 5 minutes of labor were worth less than $1 is irrelevant to the IRS.
However, in the IRS's defense, the country (and every country) needs tax money to run the government. How else are they going to get that money? Sales taxes are regressive and hurt poor people who buy all their stuff locally much more than richer people who buy stuff online or overseas. Property taxes force you to keep paying just to continue to own something, which hardly seems right, though it's standard for real estate and leads to retired people being forced to move. Import tariffs hurt trade. There's probably a good reason every developed country has settled on progressive income taxes to fund the bulk of government operations. But it causes a lot of problems when the income tax code is ridiculously complex, which is mostly unique to the USA (Europeans don't spend any significant time doing their taxes or worry about it the way we do).
So... give your employees a pay raise that will cover the value of a weekly massage
That'll cost the company much more money than just hiring a masseuse. Not all employees will want massages anyway (but of course will happily take the raise); offering free massages ends up not costing that much, especially since (if the IRS didn't tax it specifically) there'd be no tax involved, being a perk.
Why should massages not be tax-free, but parking is? What if they limit the value of massages to $240/month? It IS micromanaging, because the IRS is deciding which things they think are appropriate for a business to provide as a perk, and which things aren't. That stuff is none of their business; businesses should be able to run themselves as they see fit, and if they want to offer free limo services (or whatever) to employees, instead of free parking, to attract better employees, that's their business. A set dollar value limit would be appropriate to ensure this isn't abused (like with CEOs and megayachts), rather than picking and choosing which things are and aren't allowed, and then having to argue over definitions--does a free coffee or free ice cream count as a free meal? What if they give out donuts? Is that a free meal? You could argue all day about stuff like that.
The issue here is that Google is giving employees a valuable benefit that employees are not paying taxes on
So what? Google's paying taxes to buy the food, they're paying payroll and FICA and other taxes for the employees working at the cafeteria, they're just making it more efficient by not giving a bunch of money to some third-party vendor to use as profit, by doing it in-house. They also give other valuable benefits that are untaxed, such as free parking. Why should free parking be exempt, and not free lunches? Why not free bus fare?
If the gov't doesn't care to simplify the tax code
And this is precisely the point of my whole argument: the tax code needs to be simplified. Deciding that parking lots are OK (except in Manhattan because the price of parking is higher than the $240/month limit there), and so is free coffee, but that free lunches and free massages are not, is micromanaging, and results in excessively complex tax code which costs more money to be in compliance with, and requires more money on the government's side to ensure compliance and do audits, thus increasing the amount of revenue needed from taxes, in a vicious cycle.
no, quite relevant. We are talking about taxable compensation. Google isn't "giving you" the property they own that constitutes a parking space. They are allowing you to park your vehicle on their property as long as you're an employee. The service has monetary value, but it is not compensation for your work any more than "providing electricity to power your computer" is compensation for your work. It is a precondition of you being able to work, and it is provided for work purposes by your employer.
Wrong again. It's not a product, but it is a service. Services have value, and can be taxed.
If, for instance, you know how to do plumbing work, and your neighbor knows how to do electrical repairs, you can mutually agree to exchange services: you installing a new toilet in his house and him replacing some light fixtures in your house. However (of course no one actually does this), this exchange of services is subject to taxation, and legally you are required to determine the "fair market value" of your respective services, and count them as income on your taxes. No, no one really does this, but it is the law, just like paying "use taxes" for internet purchases, another thing almost no one actually does.
So your company providing you parking is similar to your neighbor doing electrical work for you; it's not "free", it's an exchange of services. Your company is giving you "free" parking as a perk, rather than paying you extra, and you paying $5/day to park at a privately-owned parking lot across the street.
Parking is not a "precondition of you being able to work". You don't need parking to go to work. You can take a bus, or you can park at a privately-owned parking lot, or you can take a cab, or you can have a chauffeur drive you there. Just because it's commonly expected by many people to have "free" parking in many places in the US doesn't mean you actually need it. In fact, there's plenty of places where there is no free parking for employees: ask anyone who works in Manhattan.
And these often can be exempted under the "de minimis" fringe benefit exceptions. You should review the EMPLOYEE's tax guide to fringe benefits: http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-tege/fringe_benefit_fslg.pdf [irs.gov]
They explain pretty clearly what conditions allow you to exclude meals and other fringe benefits from your taxable income.
You're correct about this, but what I'm arguing about is the IRS's rules themselves: I think the IRS is picking and choosing what it allows employers to give to employees as perks, and it's wrong and micromanagerial. Now obviously, we need to have some kind of limits in place so that, for instance, the company doesn't buy the CEO a megayacht and allow him to avoid taxation this way, but this can be solved with a simple (perhaps yearly) dollar limit, rather than a ridiculous list of rules spelling out exactly what is and isn't allowed. If a company wants to give out free weekly massages to employees to help them work better, or free lunches, or whatever, it shouldn't have to account for this exhaustively to the IRS. It's just extra wasted paperwork and overhead.