Yes, but the people who get the benefit are people who own things and so it's good solid American Capitalism(TM). We wouldn't want poor people to benefit from things funded by the taxpayer, that would be Evil Socialism(TM).
There is no way that producing meat via laboratories is going to be better for the environment then letting cows or goats munch away in a pasture somewhere
That's not so clear cut. A cow is a phenomenally inefficient machine for producing meat. It spends a huge amount of energy on growing bits that humans don't eat and on all of the support infrastructure and takes a long time to grow to a size where it's worth eating. It's pretty likely that you could grow a steak in a machine designed to grow steaks a lot more efficiently than using a cow.
The problem with the watch is the same as the problem with smartphones in the mid '90s: the technology isn't up to the vision. I have a Skagen watch that has a titanium band and is so thin that I can forget that I'm wearing it. That's the sort of form factor that a watch should have. In comparison, the Apple watch reminds me of the Casio calculator watch that I thought was really cool when I was 11: it's big and bulky. On top of that, it has a short battery life. It needs to be about a quarter of the current thickness and have a battery that can last at least a few days between charges. I can see the advantages of a smartwatch, but I can't yet see them outweighing the inconvenience of the poor form factor.
With get_iplayer, you can grab programmes for watching later, in high definition, up to either 7 or 30 days after broadcast. That's far more useable than a VHS (which has to be programmed before the start of a show and grabs a time window, not a specific show).
It's $10/W, not $10/Wh (which would be absurdly expensive, given that retail price for electricity is about 2% of that). At £24b, that works out at £81.3/W. 3.2GW means 3.2GWh every hour, or about 28TWh/year. It is still pretty expensive though.
For comparison, solar panels are typically about £1/W peak, but only deliver that output for the equivalent of an average of 6-8 hours a day, but that's not including the other costs associated with installation (alternator, mounting, labour, and so on). Electricity in the UK costs around 12p/kWh retail, or around £0.00012/Wh. That means that you can buy about 68kWh of electricity for the price of 1W installed capacity. Or, to put it another way, that 1W installed capacity has to run for just under 8 years to sell enough electricity to justify the cost (assuming no operating costs and that 100% of the retail price is profit). In practice, it's likely to be around 15 years, unless electricity prices go up (which they probably will). That's not too bad for a plant that's expected to last 40+ years and can provide around 10% of the UK's electricity consumption as base load for that time.
Never understood government paying people to buy stuff?
That's because you think of the government as some entity that has no relationship to the society that it governs. A demographic government is elected to represent the ideals of the population and has an income that is dependent on the overall health of the economy (you can't tax people who have no money). There are lots of ways of spending money that improve the overall health of the economy. The simplest example is building roads: if people can trade more cheaply with each other, the amount of wealth generation increases.
Often particular products have, to use a metaphor from chemistry, a high activation energy and can benefit from the government acting as a catalyst. At the initial cost of production, no one will buy it. If demand becomes high enough, then economies of scale in manufacturing will kick in (often high enough up the supply chain that all manufacturers will benefit) and the price will drop enough that they become attractive to a lot more people. By subsidising the initial price, the government increases the total sales and receives revenue in the form of sales taxes on all of the goods that wouldn't ever have come to market (or would have years later) without the subsidy. Additionally, by providing a local demand, they encourage suppliers to set up locally. These companies then have first-mover advantage and will eventually shift to exporting a lot of their product once the local demand has allowed them to scale up to the size where they have a lot of production capacity and low costs. This, again, increases tax revenue through corporation taxes and through income taxes on the employees.
No wonder governments are broke.
I'm guessing that you're one of the people that voted in favour of 'austerity' and are now completely ignoring the fact that countries that did this are the last ones coming out of recession.
I can imagine down the road how much government funds will go into building more power plants to feed all those electric cars charging at night.
Why would it? There's already a thriving market in electricity generation. Increasing the demand just makes it more attractive to existing players (and, potentially, new players) in that market to increase their capacity.
And, in particular, they buy because the up-front costs are lower. The EU has made some fairly big wins by gradually pushing up the minimum efficiency of household appliances that you're allowed to sell. Most people don't think about the 5-year or even 2-year cost of ownership for an appliance that they're going to keep for 10 years, they look first and foremost at the sticker price. If the sticker price is 10-20% cheaper, a lot of people buy them even if they're going to have spent more in total by the end of the year and then keep paying more for the lifetime of the device.
Increasing the size of the market for more efficient products, either by subsidising them or outright blocking the sale of the less efficient versions allows economies of scale to kick in sooner and so, as you say, speeds up adoption.
The key benefit of electric anything is decoupling the means of producing energy from the means of consuming energy. Power line and even battery efficiency are sufficiently high that you generally gain more than you lose by making the power generation remote (not to mention the local improvements in air quality - even if it were less efficient, moving the exhaust fumes out of built-up areas would be a win for humans).
If you remember the introduction of unleaded petrol, it was a long and painful switchover. New cars only took unleaded, older ones typically couldn't. It took a few years for petrol stations to set up the distribution network and get pumps connected to an additional storage reservoir well enough that you could guarantee that you'd be able to fill up your tank in most places. The switch to electric is likely to be at least as long and painful, but once it's done then it's very easy to switch the battery storage technology (individual cars can do it and remain compatible with the charging infrastructure) and to switch the generation mechanism (we already have a heterogeneous electricity generation system).
Presumably he offered less for a three-year license than for a perpetual license and the hotel decided that they would want more up-to-date photos in a couple of years and so decided to save money. Two million is excessive, but given that copyright laws are horrendously broken I don't see why only big music or movie studios should be able to take advantage of the breakage. Hopefully a few more high-profile cases will start to provide the impetus for getting them fixed.
Being able to live on the golden parachute for the rest of your life is a big part of the justification. The theory goes that you want CEOs who are willing to take risks, because companies that always try to play it safe tend to fail. If you're a CEO who takes a risk that doesn't work out, then you're going to find it hard to get another job, because people will point at your previous experience (this is where it starts to fall down - in all likelihood, a CEO who ran one company into the ground will immediately get a job doing the same to the next one).
Yahoo! had around $5bn in sales last year with a 56.65% gross profit margin - they made around $2bn in profits from their ad business alone. That's not exactly a failing company. They're small in comparison to the likes of Google, but a big part of their financial trouble is that they own 20% of Alibaba, which turned out to be a spectacularly good investment and they made more money from their investments than they did from operating the company. This makes investors nervous (if they wanted to own a stock whose value tracked the performance of Alibaba, they'd have bought Alibaba, not Yahoo!). The doom and gloom pronouncements have more to do with Wall Street than Silicon Valley.
The problem with the GPL for a lot of companies is that it's an all or nothing question. There's a fairly common sequence of adoption for BSD licensed code in companies:
First, they look at it and say 'this must be too good to be true, we can take it and not give anything back? Amazing!'. Then they get their lawyers to check the license and find that's really what it says, so that's what they do.
After a while, they discover that they've fixed some bugs that are only triggered by their workloads or added some features that they particularly need. Then they find that someone else has implemented something similar (often less suitable for their requirements) upstream and now it's difficult for them to merge bug fixes and security updates from upstream.
Next they realise that their business does depend on doing something that this code does, but their private fork isn't something that gives them a competitive advantage, it's just a cost centre (much like the rest of IT, according to their bean counters). Upstreaming their changes means that they get to design new features to fit their requirements and means that pulling down fixes is trivial, so they start doing that. At the same time, they may be linking the code with something that really does give them a competitive advantage.
There's no real equivalent with the GPL. As soon as you start distributing (a fairly poorly defined term) the GPL'd code, you have to release everything that links it under a GPL-compatible license. That's a big psychological barrier to try to overcome all at once. The typical reaction is for companies to decide to not use the GPL'd code and write a new in-house proprietary replacement. If you're very lucky, they'll write a BSDL replacement instead and so at least this only has to happen once.
A tyranny of the 51% is far from ideal, but have you ever tried getting 51% of any large group to agree on anything? A tyranny of 5% is far worse, and that's what you end up with in a capitalist plutocracy.
If you're going to quote Marx, I'd recommend getting right to the end of the books. In a Marx-style communist society, there is very little government because everything is owned locally by the workers. Some of the earliest purges in the Soviet Union were of people who subscribed to Marx's vision and opposed the trend towards central control that people like Stalin were pushing.
Oh, and if you're going to argue 'socialism is scary because Marx viewed it as a step on the road to communism' then you might try going back a couple of chapters and remembering that Marx also argued that capitalism was a step on the same road, in between an agrarian economy and socialism.
Most people who claim to support capitalism would reject it as defined by Adam Smith (who also coined the word, long before Karl Marx used it). How many capitalism advocates, for example, would be in favour of a 100% inheritance tax (i.e. not allowing any inheritance of wealth)? The problem with modern capitalism is that it cherry picks the parts of the system that benefit the rich and ignores the rest. A system of socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor is not sustainable long term, but that's what we've ended up with.
I don't disagree that public transport is pretty bad in much of the UK (unless your baseline for calibration is the USA), but there are some important differences. Cities in the UK tend to interleave different property types. This means that most people live within easy walking distance of a pub (most villages collect around one and you'll find at least one in most residential areas of a city). In contrast, UC city designers like ensuring the places where people live and places where people want to be are as far apart as possible, so that it's basically impossible to get from home to a bar without driving.
As a knock-on effect from this, if you do need to get to the pub in a car and there aren't busses (and there often are in many cities, though they're not always convenient), a 10-15 minute ride in a taxi is pretty cheap. Most US cities sprawl so much that it's a 30-40 minute drive, which is a lot more expensive.
In other words, your $650 iPhone isn't a $650 phone. It's a $400 phone that Apple is selling to you for $650
Not necessarily true. The Apple figure likely also includes Apple's 30% cut on all apps that are sold over the lifetime of the device. In contrast, when Samsung sells a phone, they get the sale price of the phone. That's also the reason that Apple devices keep getting updates for longer. If a new app doesn't work on an old iPhone, then Apple potentially loses revenue from not making a sale of that app. If a new app doesn't work on an old Samsung phone, then Samsung doesn't lose any revenue and might gain revenue from having the user buy a new Samsung phone.
It's also worth noting that just because Apple can build an iPhone for $400 doesn't mean that anyone else can. Having a huge cash reserve means that Apple often enters into deals with companies where they build the factory for a key part (flash chips, screens) and then get huge discounts on the parts for the first couple of years. They're effectively taking the risk in exchange for lower prices, but there isn't actually much risk because they're going to buy all of the output anyway. For a while, iPod Shuffles were the cheapest way of getting USB flash drives because Apple charged about the same for them as anyone else could buy the flash chips wholesale.
Assume that Apple is using the same revenue hiding tricks as Google. That means that you'd expect them to pay 2.66 times as much corporation tax, or $3.192bn. That leaves around $16bn that you're claiming comes mostly from sales tax. The highest sales tax in California is around 10%, so that works out at selling $160bn in goods. That would mean that roughly half of Apple's total worldwide sales are in California. Even factoring in the significantly above average hipster density in the Bay Area, I suspect that this is not actually the case.
They weren't idiots (well, Jefferson definitely wasn't. The jury's still out on Washington), but they lived in a very different world. The industrial revolution started in the UK around 1760. The US declaration of independence was in 1976, when most of the USA still hadn't been touched by it. Colt didn't start making guns and railroads didn't hit the country until the 1830s. Most people would have owned very few things made of iron (or any other metal). Contrary to popular belief, most people did not own guns, because they were far too expensive.
In that setting, a village of a hundred or so people could build all of the technology that existed in the civilisation if it had a bit of woodland and open-cast iron and coal mines. In such a world, that village doesn't need to interact with anything else. It benefits a bit from some collective defence, because a village of a hundred can easily be overrun by the army of a dozen villages of a hundred that do decide to collaborate. It benefits from some trade links, because it can sell surplus production and buy things when crops fail and so on. In terms of government, it needs a sherif to enforce some form of consensus ethics that look a bit like a law. It needs someone to organise training and equipping a militia. It needs someone to make sure that the roads are kept vaguely clear. And that's basically it.
It's completely understandable that, in such a world, the correct amount of government would be viewed as a rounding error above zero. Fast forward two hundred years and all of the metal available in open-cast mines is gone. Modern devices use a lot of aluminium, which must be smelted at very high temperatures. They depend on large-scale infrastructure for water and electricity. They buy goods from shops that have supply chains spanning continents.
It's almost misleading to talk about government. The real limiting factor is the degree of cooperation required to maintain a society. That's increased by at least two orders of magnitude since the USA declared independence. As such, the amount of government (or some other equivalent entity) required to mediate that cooperation has also increased.
Where did he say that he's flipping burgers? The IT systems for most fast-food chains are pretty complex. They do all of the stock management and inventory control and most of the point of sale stuff has to be operated by someone who can't read (and can't follow complex instructions). McDonalds was SCO's biggest customer before they imploded. They were one of the first companies to put this much automation in their supply chain and to unify and integrate their POS systems across an entire chain.
The problem is this "trick" actually requires a ton of work and a bunch of risk
It's not so much that it requires risk, it's that it requires capital. It makes sense if you're a company making a reasonable profit to pay an accountant to work out how to make the most of their tax situation. If you're an individual, then the amount that an accountant can save you might be proportionally more, but is likely to be a similar magnitude to the accountant's fees.
That's the underlying problem with the system: the more money you have, the smaller the proportional costs of having someone optimise it become. Perhaps there's a technical solution here: if we had some software that can parse all of the various tax rules in different jurisdictions, register companies (this can typically be done online) in the relevant places, and set up income and asset ownership to be channeled to the correct places. I suspect that there'd be a big incentive for governments to fix their tax rules if suddenly everyone could find and exploit the loopholes, rather than just the friends of the legislators...
Do they get any kind of scripting support? In many games of this kind, the AI has a big advantage in being able to split its attention easily. That was obvious in Total Annihilation, where the AI could be issuing commands to units all over the map simultaneously (though it often did badly strategically because it wasn't making good decisions about overall resource usage). You can offset that advantage a lot by having a human responsible for strategy and allowing delegation of tactics to simple programs.
Not sure about the US, but in the UK a limited company needs to have its books inspected by an accountant each year. That's still probably a win (though not anymore as the stamp duty rules have changed for companies as of this month), but it's a big psychological barrier for people who aren't from the sort of upper middle-class background where starting up companies is a fairly routine thing to do.
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But still at the expense of the taxpayer
Yes, but the people who get the benefit are people who own things and so it's good solid American Capitalism(TM). We wouldn't want poor people to benefit from things funded by the taxpayer, that would be Evil Socialism(TM).
to slaughter a cow or an oven
I'm not completely sure about muslim cuisine, but I'm pretty sure ovens don't need slaughtering.
There is no way that producing meat via laboratories is going to be better for the environment then letting cows or goats munch away in a pasture somewhere
That's not so clear cut. A cow is a phenomenally inefficient machine for producing meat. It spends a huge amount of energy on growing bits that humans don't eat and on all of the support infrastructure and takes a long time to grow to a size where it's worth eating. It's pretty likely that you could grow a steak in a machine designed to grow steaks a lot more efficiently than using a cow.
The problem with the watch is the same as the problem with smartphones in the mid '90s: the technology isn't up to the vision. I have a Skagen watch that has a titanium band and is so thin that I can forget that I'm wearing it. That's the sort of form factor that a watch should have. In comparison, the Apple watch reminds me of the Casio calculator watch that I thought was really cool when I was 11: it's big and bulky. On top of that, it has a short battery life. It needs to be about a quarter of the current thickness and have a battery that can last at least a few days between charges. I can see the advantages of a smartwatch, but I can't yet see them outweighing the inconvenience of the poor form factor.
With get_iplayer, you can grab programmes for watching later, in high definition, up to either 7 or 30 days after broadcast. That's far more useable than a VHS (which has to be programmed before the start of a show and grabs a time window, not a specific show).
Good question, but if it's costing £26bn to build, I imagine that the operating costs will be a fairly small part of the total cost.
It's $10/W, not $10/Wh (which would be absurdly expensive, given that retail price for electricity is about 2% of that). At £24b, that works out at £81.3/W. 3.2GW means 3.2GWh every hour, or about 28TWh/year. It is still pretty expensive though.
For comparison, solar panels are typically about £1/W peak, but only deliver that output for the equivalent of an average of 6-8 hours a day, but that's not including the other costs associated with installation (alternator, mounting, labour, and so on). Electricity in the UK costs around 12p/kWh retail, or around £0.00012/Wh. That means that you can buy about 68kWh of electricity for the price of 1W installed capacity. Or, to put it another way, that 1W installed capacity has to run for just under 8 years to sell enough electricity to justify the cost (assuming no operating costs and that 100% of the retail price is profit). In practice, it's likely to be around 15 years, unless electricity prices go up (which they probably will). That's not too bad for a plant that's expected to last 40+ years and can provide around 10% of the UK's electricity consumption as base load for that time.
Never understood government paying people to buy stuff?
That's because you think of the government as some entity that has no relationship to the society that it governs. A demographic government is elected to represent the ideals of the population and has an income that is dependent on the overall health of the economy (you can't tax people who have no money). There are lots of ways of spending money that improve the overall health of the economy. The simplest example is building roads: if people can trade more cheaply with each other, the amount of wealth generation increases.
Often particular products have, to use a metaphor from chemistry, a high activation energy and can benefit from the government acting as a catalyst. At the initial cost of production, no one will buy it. If demand becomes high enough, then economies of scale in manufacturing will kick in (often high enough up the supply chain that all manufacturers will benefit) and the price will drop enough that they become attractive to a lot more people. By subsidising the initial price, the government increases the total sales and receives revenue in the form of sales taxes on all of the goods that wouldn't ever have come to market (or would have years later) without the subsidy. Additionally, by providing a local demand, they encourage suppliers to set up locally. These companies then have first-mover advantage and will eventually shift to exporting a lot of their product once the local demand has allowed them to scale up to the size where they have a lot of production capacity and low costs. This, again, increases tax revenue through corporation taxes and through income taxes on the employees.
No wonder governments are broke.
I'm guessing that you're one of the people that voted in favour of 'austerity' and are now completely ignoring the fact that countries that did this are the last ones coming out of recession.
I can imagine down the road how much government funds will go into building more power plants to feed all those electric cars charging at night.
Why would it? There's already a thriving market in electricity generation. Increasing the demand just makes it more attractive to existing players (and, potentially, new players) in that market to increase their capacity.
They buy gas because it's cheaper. So far.
And, in particular, they buy because the up-front costs are lower. The EU has made some fairly big wins by gradually pushing up the minimum efficiency of household appliances that you're allowed to sell. Most people don't think about the 5-year or even 2-year cost of ownership for an appliance that they're going to keep for 10 years, they look first and foremost at the sticker price. If the sticker price is 10-20% cheaper, a lot of people buy them even if they're going to have spent more in total by the end of the year and then keep paying more for the lifetime of the device.
Increasing the size of the market for more efficient products, either by subsidising them or outright blocking the sale of the less efficient versions allows economies of scale to kick in sooner and so, as you say, speeds up adoption.
The key benefit of electric anything is decoupling the means of producing energy from the means of consuming energy. Power line and even battery efficiency are sufficiently high that you generally gain more than you lose by making the power generation remote (not to mention the local improvements in air quality - even if it were less efficient, moving the exhaust fumes out of built-up areas would be a win for humans).
If you remember the introduction of unleaded petrol, it was a long and painful switchover. New cars only took unleaded, older ones typically couldn't. It took a few years for petrol stations to set up the distribution network and get pumps connected to an additional storage reservoir well enough that you could guarantee that you'd be able to fill up your tank in most places. The switch to electric is likely to be at least as long and painful, but once it's done then it's very easy to switch the battery storage technology (individual cars can do it and remain compatible with the charging infrastructure) and to switch the generation mechanism (we already have a heterogeneous electricity generation system).
Presumably he offered less for a three-year license than for a perpetual license and the hotel decided that they would want more up-to-date photos in a couple of years and so decided to save money. Two million is excessive, but given that copyright laws are horrendously broken I don't see why only big music or movie studios should be able to take advantage of the breakage. Hopefully a few more high-profile cases will start to provide the impetus for getting them fixed.
Being able to live on the golden parachute for the rest of your life is a big part of the justification. The theory goes that you want CEOs who are willing to take risks, because companies that always try to play it safe tend to fail. If you're a CEO who takes a risk that doesn't work out, then you're going to find it hard to get another job, because people will point at your previous experience (this is where it starts to fall down - in all likelihood, a CEO who ran one company into the ground will immediately get a job doing the same to the next one).
Yahoo! had around $5bn in sales last year with a 56.65% gross profit margin - they made around $2bn in profits from their ad business alone. That's not exactly a failing company. They're small in comparison to the likes of Google, but a big part of their financial trouble is that they own 20% of Alibaba, which turned out to be a spectacularly good investment and they made more money from their investments than they did from operating the company. This makes investors nervous (if they wanted to own a stock whose value tracked the performance of Alibaba, they'd have bought Alibaba, not Yahoo!). The doom and gloom pronouncements have more to do with Wall Street than Silicon Valley.
The problem with the GPL for a lot of companies is that it's an all or nothing question. There's a fairly common sequence of adoption for BSD licensed code in companies:
First, they look at it and say 'this must be too good to be true, we can take it and not give anything back? Amazing!'. Then they get their lawyers to check the license and find that's really what it says, so that's what they do.
After a while, they discover that they've fixed some bugs that are only triggered by their workloads or added some features that they particularly need. Then they find that someone else has implemented something similar (often less suitable for their requirements) upstream and now it's difficult for them to merge bug fixes and security updates from upstream.
Next they realise that their business does depend on doing something that this code does, but their private fork isn't something that gives them a competitive advantage, it's just a cost centre (much like the rest of IT, according to their bean counters). Upstreaming their changes means that they get to design new features to fit their requirements and means that pulling down fixes is trivial, so they start doing that. At the same time, they may be linking the code with something that really does give them a competitive advantage.
There's no real equivalent with the GPL. As soon as you start distributing (a fairly poorly defined term) the GPL'd code, you have to release everything that links it under a GPL-compatible license. That's a big psychological barrier to try to overcome all at once. The typical reaction is for companies to decide to not use the GPL'd code and write a new in-house proprietary replacement. If you're very lucky, they'll write a BSDL replacement instead and so at least this only has to happen once.
A tyranny of the 51% is far from ideal, but have you ever tried getting 51% of any large group to agree on anything? A tyranny of 5% is far worse, and that's what you end up with in a capitalist plutocracy.
If you're going to quote Marx, I'd recommend getting right to the end of the books. In a Marx-style communist society, there is very little government because everything is owned locally by the workers. Some of the earliest purges in the Soviet Union were of people who subscribed to Marx's vision and opposed the trend towards central control that people like Stalin were pushing.
Oh, and if you're going to argue 'socialism is scary because Marx viewed it as a step on the road to communism' then you might try going back a couple of chapters and remembering that Marx also argued that capitalism was a step on the same road, in between an agrarian economy and socialism.
Most people who claim to support capitalism would reject it as defined by Adam Smith (who also coined the word, long before Karl Marx used it). How many capitalism advocates, for example, would be in favour of a 100% inheritance tax (i.e. not allowing any inheritance of wealth)? The problem with modern capitalism is that it cherry picks the parts of the system that benefit the rich and ignores the rest. A system of socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor is not sustainable long term, but that's what we've ended up with.
I don't disagree that public transport is pretty bad in much of the UK (unless your baseline for calibration is the USA), but there are some important differences. Cities in the UK tend to interleave different property types. This means that most people live within easy walking distance of a pub (most villages collect around one and you'll find at least one in most residential areas of a city). In contrast, UC city designers like ensuring the places where people live and places where people want to be are as far apart as possible, so that it's basically impossible to get from home to a bar without driving.
As a knock-on effect from this, if you do need to get to the pub in a car and there aren't busses (and there often are in many cities, though they're not always convenient), a 10-15 minute ride in a taxi is pretty cheap. Most US cities sprawl so much that it's a 30-40 minute drive, which is a lot more expensive.
In other words, your $650 iPhone isn't a $650 phone. It's a $400 phone that Apple is selling to you for $650
Not necessarily true. The Apple figure likely also includes Apple's 30% cut on all apps that are sold over the lifetime of the device. In contrast, when Samsung sells a phone, they get the sale price of the phone. That's also the reason that Apple devices keep getting updates for longer. If a new app doesn't work on an old iPhone, then Apple potentially loses revenue from not making a sale of that app. If a new app doesn't work on an old Samsung phone, then Samsung doesn't lose any revenue and might gain revenue from having the user buy a new Samsung phone.
It's also worth noting that just because Apple can build an iPhone for $400 doesn't mean that anyone else can. Having a huge cash reserve means that Apple often enters into deals with companies where they build the factory for a key part (flash chips, screens) and then get huge discounts on the parts for the first couple of years. They're effectively taking the risk in exchange for lower prices, but there isn't actually much risk because they're going to buy all of the output anyway. For a while, iPod Shuffles were the cheapest way of getting USB flash drives because Apple charged about the same for them as anyone else could buy the flash chips wholesale.
Assume that Apple is using the same revenue hiding tricks as Google. That means that you'd expect them to pay 2.66 times as much corporation tax, or $3.192bn. That leaves around $16bn that you're claiming comes mostly from sales tax. The highest sales tax in California is around 10%, so that works out at selling $160bn in goods. That would mean that roughly half of Apple's total worldwide sales are in California. Even factoring in the significantly above average hipster density in the Bay Area, I suspect that this is not actually the case.
If they did, they were idiots.
They weren't idiots (well, Jefferson definitely wasn't. The jury's still out on Washington), but they lived in a very different world. The industrial revolution started in the UK around 1760. The US declaration of independence was in 1976, when most of the USA still hadn't been touched by it. Colt didn't start making guns and railroads didn't hit the country until the 1830s. Most people would have owned very few things made of iron (or any other metal). Contrary to popular belief, most people did not own guns, because they were far too expensive.
In that setting, a village of a hundred or so people could build all of the technology that existed in the civilisation if it had a bit of woodland and open-cast iron and coal mines. In such a world, that village doesn't need to interact with anything else. It benefits a bit from some collective defence, because a village of a hundred can easily be overrun by the army of a dozen villages of a hundred that do decide to collaborate. It benefits from some trade links, because it can sell surplus production and buy things when crops fail and so on. In terms of government, it needs a sherif to enforce some form of consensus ethics that look a bit like a law. It needs someone to organise training and equipping a militia. It needs someone to make sure that the roads are kept vaguely clear. And that's basically it.
It's completely understandable that, in such a world, the correct amount of government would be viewed as a rounding error above zero. Fast forward two hundred years and all of the metal available in open-cast mines is gone. Modern devices use a lot of aluminium, which must be smelted at very high temperatures. They depend on large-scale infrastructure for water and electricity. They buy goods from shops that have supply chains spanning continents.
It's almost misleading to talk about government. The real limiting factor is the degree of cooperation required to maintain a society. That's increased by at least two orders of magnitude since the USA declared independence. As such, the amount of government (or some other equivalent entity) required to mediate that cooperation has also increased.
Where did he say that he's flipping burgers? The IT systems for most fast-food chains are pretty complex. They do all of the stock management and inventory control and most of the point of sale stuff has to be operated by someone who can't read (and can't follow complex instructions). McDonalds was SCO's biggest customer before they imploded. They were one of the first companies to put this much automation in their supply chain and to unify and integrate their POS systems across an entire chain.
The problem is this "trick" actually requires a ton of work and a bunch of risk
It's not so much that it requires risk, it's that it requires capital. It makes sense if you're a company making a reasonable profit to pay an accountant to work out how to make the most of their tax situation. If you're an individual, then the amount that an accountant can save you might be proportionally more, but is likely to be a similar magnitude to the accountant's fees.
That's the underlying problem with the system: the more money you have, the smaller the proportional costs of having someone optimise it become. Perhaps there's a technical solution here: if we had some software that can parse all of the various tax rules in different jurisdictions, register companies (this can typically be done online) in the relevant places, and set up income and asset ownership to be channeled to the correct places. I suspect that there'd be a big incentive for governments to fix their tax rules if suddenly everyone could find and exploit the loopholes, rather than just the friends of the legislators...
Do they get any kind of scripting support? In many games of this kind, the AI has a big advantage in being able to split its attention easily. That was obvious in Total Annihilation, where the AI could be issuing commands to units all over the map simultaneously (though it often did badly strategically because it wasn't making good decisions about overall resource usage). You can offset that advantage a lot by having a human responsible for strategy and allowing delegation of tactics to simple programs.
Not sure about the US, but in the UK a limited company needs to have its books inspected by an accountant each year. That's still probably a win (though not anymore as the stamp duty rules have changed for companies as of this month), but it's a big psychological barrier for people who aren't from the sort of upper middle-class background where starting up companies is a fairly routine thing to do.