That is what auditors are for. John Chang (the controller of the state of California) does not mess around. He is one of the few decent people involved in the state government.
Amazon is a publicly traded corporation. Their books are open. It is easier to just pay the right amount in the first place, than pay lawyers, fight a court fight, lose, and then end up paying fines plus the taxes that should have been paid in the first place.
Agreed. I live in California and have family in other states. I cannot wait to get out of here. The last straw for me was the granting of scholarships and funds so that illegal aliens can go to college. Meanwhile, my girlfriend who is a state employee, has already taken a 15% pay cut and makes little more than the national poverty level was not eligible for financial assistance to go to college because she earns "too much" money. She made it through college after ten years of working full time, some times working more than one job, and going to school at night. Yet the state wants to give illegals a free education?
This whole conversation is silly. The Federal government needs to step in and settle this. Amazon and every internet retailer should have to collect taxes and remit them to the state. Amazon has a "presence" in every single state that has internet connected computers. Right now they are exploiting loopholes in laws that have not caught up to the internet age.
I do not understand people who can in good conscience defend what Amazon is doing. Corporate charters are granted to companies with the understanding that the companies will act in the best interests of the country. In theory (and this never happens), if a corporation does not act in the best interests of the state, the charter can be revoked. Those limitations on corporations have been largely eroded, but that is the way our Founding Fathers intended for corporations to be limited.
Amazon is basically saying "fuck you" to America. They are saying "fuck you" to the states who depend partially on sales tax to fund their operations. How much sales tax revenue do you think the state of California has lost since the year 2000? How many businesses have gone under and not been replaced because of the internet?
I am not a fan of big government by any means, but this is getting ridiculous. In case you guys have not figured this out yet, the corporations are not here to benefit us. They are here to extract as much labor from the people of the United States as possible, and provide the least amount of compensation to those people as allowed by law. The government and our ability to elect our representatives is the only tool we have to defend ourselves from the corporations. Beyond that, we can starve them of income by refusing to buy their products.
On one level I get it. A bunch of you guys are cheap bastards. You do not want to pay sales tax and believe you can spend the money better elsewhere. Fine. Stay off of the public roads, do not use electricity, water or any other necessity that is partially funded by government subsidies, never call the police or the fire department, take your kids out of school, and basically go the fuck into the cave that you want to live in. You obviously do not want to be a productive, CONTRIBUTING member of society.
Amazon has a presence in every internet connected household in California. Anyone with an internet connection can go to http://amazon.com/ make a purchase and have it delivered to their home in California. To argue that Amazon does not have a "presence" is false. They are just as much in California as a store in the mall, or a liquor store on the corner.
As soon as people have to physically leave California to buy something from Amazon then Amazon can start making arguments about not being "in California".
This is a trivial matter for Amazon and the state to deal with. At the time of purchase, Amazon can check the zip code of the delivery location and tax the purchase according to where it is being delivered to. Now, if someone wants to purchase something in California and dodge a percent of two of sales tax by having it delivered to Nevada, let them. Those who live on the border of Oregon can dodge the tax completely. Of course, they will have to pay for a PO box, and then pay for gas to go pick it up.
Have you bought anything from Amazon lately? The last time I was on there, EVERY SINGLE THIRD PARTY offering an item on there had sales tax included as a separate charge. It was (item cost) + (sales tax) and clearly labeled as such. If the third parties can handle it, Amazon can handle it. They do not because it gives them a competitive advantage.
What is so hard to understand about this situation? A company is selling goods to customers in California. The state of California wants that company to collect taxes on the goods sold to California residents.
Look at it another way. I'm not sure where Burger King corporate HQ is, but for the sake of discussion, let us assume it is in Colorado. Would it be reasonable for Burger King restaurants in California to stop collecting sales tax because corporate HQ is not in the state?
Just because things happen "on the internet" does not mean that the law changes. If a company sells goods in a state, they should collect sales taxes for the state.
If the company wants to cry about "the costs incurred by following the law" then maybe they should take a million or two out of executive compensation and channel it toward complying with the law. Who knows, they might even hire a couple of people in the process. Heaven forbid that corporations should actually create jobs or anything. Why, it's just not fair. Think of all of the millions that they could be paying their executives instead.
If you're thinking along those lines, then consider this. Sony is being used by the United States government as a puppet to go after LulzSec. They put their man, the former DHS employee, at Sony so that they have an insider on the front lines. Sony is just a casualty in the war. They have nothing to gain by actively going after LulzSec and everything to lose. On the other hand, the United States government might want to nip LulzSec in the bud.
We don't live in such a police state that they can simply go after people without cause. They would need a pawn like Sony. Sony has suffered "damages" due to LulzSec and therefore Sony can engage the Department of Justice to bring down the hammer on LulzSec.
I don't agree with that line of thinking, but if that is what was going on, it would be happening along those lines.
They're buying political cover. This man is showing up not to make them secure, but to make sure that they comply with all applicable Federal laws regarding data privacy. If they get hacked again, they will have legal cover against being sued because they will have implemented all of the relevant preventative measures that will then have been signed off by auditors, and Sony will be allowed to say, "We did our due diligence."
The hire has zero to do with addressing the underlying problems and everything to do with mitigating the fallout from the inevitable future breaches.
What do they want to do with the money they are trying to raise by selling T-Mobile? Do they have debts that they need to pay down? Do they have other projects in the works that need more capital? It seems pretty obvious that DT does not want T-Mobile anymore and does not have any interest in investing money infrastructure upgrades to continue competing in the market. So what do they want?
What boggles my mind is that some how the government can afford to give unemployment to millions of people, but those same people cannot be employed producing things like iPads and everything else that we use domestically.
Sure we can. The question is, will we? Does every American need an iPad? Nope. The iPad could disappear tomorrow and the only people would care are Apple stock holders, Apple employees and the Chinese who manufacture them. The rest of the country would get along just fine.
The same logic applies to just about every consumer widget made in China.
In short, solar manufacturers around the world are taking a hit due to an oversupply of panels. America actually exports more solar technology than it imports, to a tune of $2 billion a year (study funded by solar industry so take it with a grain of salt).
A lot of the discussion around here seems to focus on individuals purchasing solar panels. That thinking is too small. The real solar projects in America are happening on larger scales with companies like Southern California Edison, PG&E and other utilities. They are bringing hundreds of megawatts online every year and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.
In another article I read recently, solar companies struggling to survive are integrating vertically and offering consulting and design services on larger projects. The margins are too slim on the manufacturing side.
From the article,
"While solar-panel manufacturing is likely to continue migrating to China and other Asian countries, U.S. companies do supply many of the Chinese manufacturing giants. U.S.-based MEMC Electronic Materials Inc. (WFR) and Hemlock Semiconductor supply the raw silicon needed to make solar wafers, while Applied Materials Inc. (AMAT) makes solar-product manufacturing equipment. "
We have a couple of years until these Chinese manage to reverse engineer the equipment that Applied Materials is selling them.
Once again it comes down to the labor advantage that the Chinese have. American companies are making the equipment that the Chinese are using to crank out the product. They are able to produce the product for less because they have lower overhead and can pay their people less.
In the end, are we really losing here? We develop the technology. The Chinese make it for us for less than we would have to spend to make it ourselves. We buy it from them and then use it in projects designed by Americans and built by American companies. I'm pretty sure that these projects were not built by Chinese contractors.
However we do own the companies that product the equipment that the Chinese use to manufacture the panels with. With also own the companies that produce the polycarbonate material used in the panels.
Here we go again. Perfectly insightful and on point analysis of Apple gets modded down. I sure hope this ends up in meta-moderation and someone fixes this abuse of the system. Or barring that, hopefully enough people reply to this with posts that are then modded up to keep it part of the discussion.
Yes Apple, we know you have your fanboys here from the PR department with mod points to try to control the discourse. As Streissand learned, you can't control teh intarwebz. We all know how much your company sucks, and how shady your business practices are.
That is the part that showed up after a couple of Google searches.
Of course your logic is flawed though. If that is the part of Samsung that is making parts for Apple, then that is also the part of Samsung that is making competing products.
Thanks for the support. I took the down modding (after having been at +5 initially) to mean that it hit a little too close to home for the Apple brigade. There were not any good counter arguments presented, so they had to mod it to 0 to remove that point of view from the discussion.
My favorite claim made in this thread was, "Steve Jobs created a large company that employs a lot of people, and some those people probably gave to charity." That probably is true given that in a large enough sample of people, there will be a few charitable members. Yet just because other people hired by Steve Jobs give to charity does not make Steve Jobs charitable.
The guy has a net worth of about 8.3 BILLION dollars. He will never spend all of that money. He could give his family that money and they would never spend. There is no reason to have that much wealth concentrated in the hands of a single individual. If I had that kind of money, there would be community gardens all over the place. There would be art and music and concerts for the neighborhood. Not a single one of my friends would have any debt.
Of course I say that now. Who knows what earning that many zeros does to a man's mind. Maybe Steve needs to sit on it all of it, to make his life worth something in his own head.
According to Samsung they have a single IC production facility in China. They also have facilities in Korea and Austin, TX. Does Apple even make anything in the United States anymore?
The point I was making is that even with bad publicity around Foxconn and environmentally destructive manufacturing processes, consumers do not care. Why you turned that into a personal attack is beyond me.
The consumers of Apple products have a certain image to maintain. They like to perceive themselves as progressive and socially responsible. Therefore any organization that wants to make an issue of the dirty business practices engaged in by Chinese manufacturing companies will look at a company like Apple and lampoon them. In theory, Apple's hip, socially conscious consumers are more likely to influence Apple than say HP's or IBM's corporate purchasing agents.
Of course it won't work. One of the most socially responsible women I know, when making the choice between an iPad and a Samsung tablet and having been presented with information about how destructive Apple's manufacturing processes are, still went with the iPad. She professes to care about such things, but when the rubber met the road, she didn't really care. I'm sure most other consumers, even those who profess to care, really could give two shits less about what happens to the environment in China as long as they still get low cost iPads out of the deal.
That is a good point. The way this process works is that AT&T lays out their justification and the DoJ either accepts or rejects it. In this case the DoJ has rejected it. Now AT&T has the opportunity to go back to the drawing board and come up with some other lies.
Every once in a while, the Feds get it right. From the article,
"Moreover, the department said that AT&T could obtain substantially the same network enhancements that it claims will come from the transaction if it simply invested in its own network without eliminating a close competitor."
We have been saying this here forever. AT&T et al need to invest in their own infrastructure. It is about time that the Federal government is on board with that.
Anyone with enough resources to pay themselves in dividends and stock options would be stupid to take a large annual salary. Capital gains taxes are significantly less than income taxes.
It could be that Steve Jobs donates anonymously. If that is the case, it should be pretty easy for you guys to find some press releases or other PR material where Steve Jobs is at least speaking positively about groups he feels strongly about. Surely there is a lot of that information out there. Right?
I tried to search for some and this is what I came across.
Slashdot Mirror
That is what auditors are for. John Chang (the controller of the state of California) does not mess around. He is one of the few decent people involved in the state government.
Amazon is a publicly traded corporation. Their books are open. It is easier to just pay the right amount in the first place, than pay lawyers, fight a court fight, lose, and then end up paying fines plus the taxes that should have been paid in the first place.
Agreed. I live in California and have family in other states. I cannot wait to get out of here. The last straw for me was the granting of scholarships and funds so that illegal aliens can go to college. Meanwhile, my girlfriend who is a state employee, has already taken a 15% pay cut and makes little more than the national poverty level was not eligible for financial assistance to go to college because she earns "too much" money. She made it through college after ten years of working full time, some times working more than one job, and going to school at night. Yet the state wants to give illegals a free education?
This whole conversation is silly. The Federal government needs to step in and settle this. Amazon and every internet retailer should have to collect taxes and remit them to the state. Amazon has a "presence" in every single state that has internet connected computers. Right now they are exploiting loopholes in laws that have not caught up to the internet age.
I do not understand people who can in good conscience defend what Amazon is doing. Corporate charters are granted to companies with the understanding that the companies will act in the best interests of the country. In theory (and this never happens), if a corporation does not act in the best interests of the state, the charter can be revoked. Those limitations on corporations have been largely eroded, but that is the way our Founding Fathers intended for corporations to be limited.
http://reclaimdemocracy.org/corporate_accountability/history_corporations_us.html
Amazon is basically saying "fuck you" to America. They are saying "fuck you" to the states who depend partially on sales tax to fund their operations. How much sales tax revenue do you think the state of California has lost since the year 2000? How many businesses have gone under and not been replaced because of the internet?
I am not a fan of big government by any means, but this is getting ridiculous. In case you guys have not figured this out yet, the corporations are not here to benefit us. They are here to extract as much labor from the people of the United States as possible, and provide the least amount of compensation to those people as allowed by law. The government and our ability to elect our representatives is the only tool we have to defend ourselves from the corporations. Beyond that, we can starve them of income by refusing to buy their products.
On one level I get it. A bunch of you guys are cheap bastards. You do not want to pay sales tax and believe you can spend the money better elsewhere. Fine. Stay off of the public roads, do not use electricity, water or any other necessity that is partially funded by government subsidies, never call the police or the fire department, take your kids out of school, and basically go the fuck into the cave that you want to live in. You obviously do not want to be a productive, CONTRIBUTING member of society.
Amazon has a presence in every internet connected household in California. Anyone with an internet connection can go to http://amazon.com/ make a purchase and have it delivered to their home in California. To argue that Amazon does not have a "presence" is false. They are just as much in California as a store in the mall, or a liquor store on the corner.
As soon as people have to physically leave California to buy something from Amazon then Amazon can start making arguments about not being "in California".
This is a trivial matter for Amazon and the state to deal with. At the time of purchase, Amazon can check the zip code of the delivery location and tax the purchase according to where it is being delivered to. Now, if someone wants to purchase something in California and dodge a percent of two of sales tax by having it delivered to Nevada, let them. Those who live on the border of Oregon can dodge the tax completely. Of course, they will have to pay for a PO box, and then pay for gas to go pick it up.
It tends to act the other way. Look at Oregon. They have high property taxes but no sales tax.
Have you bought anything from Amazon lately? The last time I was on there, EVERY SINGLE THIRD PARTY offering an item on there had sales tax included as a separate charge. It was (item cost) + (sales tax) and clearly labeled as such. If the third parties can handle it, Amazon can handle it. They do not because it gives them a competitive advantage.
What is so hard to understand about this situation? A company is selling goods to customers in California. The state of California wants that company to collect taxes on the goods sold to California residents.
Look at it another way. I'm not sure where Burger King corporate HQ is, but for the sake of discussion, let us assume it is in Colorado. Would it be reasonable for Burger King restaurants in California to stop collecting sales tax because corporate HQ is not in the state?
Just because things happen "on the internet" does not mean that the law changes. If a company sells goods in a state, they should collect sales taxes for the state.
If the company wants to cry about "the costs incurred by following the law" then maybe they should take a million or two out of executive compensation and channel it toward complying with the law. Who knows, they might even hire a couple of people in the process. Heaven forbid that corporations should actually create jobs or anything. Why, it's just not fair. Think of all of the millions that they could be paying their executives instead.
If you're thinking along those lines, then consider this. Sony is being used by the United States government as a puppet to go after LulzSec. They put their man, the former DHS employee, at Sony so that they have an insider on the front lines. Sony is just a casualty in the war. They have nothing to gain by actively going after LulzSec and everything to lose. On the other hand, the United States government might want to nip LulzSec in the bud.
We don't live in such a police state that they can simply go after people without cause. They would need a pawn like Sony. Sony has suffered "damages" due to LulzSec and therefore Sony can engage the Department of Justice to bring down the hammer on LulzSec.
I don't agree with that line of thinking, but if that is what was going on, it would be happening along those lines.
They're buying political cover. This man is showing up not to make them secure, but to make sure that they comply with all applicable Federal laws regarding data privacy. If they get hacked again, they will have legal cover against being sued because they will have implemented all of the relevant preventative measures that will then have been signed off by auditors, and Sony will be allowed to say, "We did our due diligence."
The hire has zero to do with addressing the underlying problems and everything to do with mitigating the fallout from the inevitable future breaches.
What do they want to do with the money they are trying to raise by selling T-Mobile? Do they have debts that they need to pay down? Do they have other projects in the works that need more capital? It seems pretty obvious that DT does not want T-Mobile anymore and does not have any interest in investing money infrastructure upgrades to continue competing in the market. So what do they want?
What boggles my mind is that some how the government can afford to give unemployment to millions of people, but those same people cannot be employed producing things like iPads and everything else that we use domestically.
Sure we can. The question is, will we? Does every American need an iPad? Nope. The iPad could disappear tomorrow and the only people would care are Apple stock holders, Apple employees and the Chinese who manufacture them. The rest of the country would get along just fine.
The same logic applies to just about every consumer widget made in China.
http://theenergycollective.com/breakthroughinstitut/51021/china-rd-investment-grow-faster-us
It might be time to start removing any economic subsidies or benefits we provide to companies who decide to offshore their R&D.
http://www.borsaitaliana.it/borsa/notizie/mf-dow-jones/internazionali-dettaglio.html?newsId=893539&lang=en
In short, solar manufacturers around the world are taking a hit due to an oversupply of panels. America actually exports more solar technology than it imports, to a tune of $2 billion a year (study funded by solar industry so take it with a grain of salt).
A lot of the discussion around here seems to focus on individuals purchasing solar panels. That thinking is too small. The real solar projects in America are happening on larger scales with companies like Southern California Edison, PG&E and other utilities. They are bringing hundreds of megawatts online every year and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.
In another article I read recently, solar companies struggling to survive are integrating vertically and offering consulting and design services on larger projects. The margins are too slim on the manufacturing side.
From the article,
"While solar-panel manufacturing is likely to continue migrating to China and other Asian countries, U.S. companies do supply many of the Chinese manufacturing giants. U.S.-based MEMC Electronic Materials Inc. (WFR) and Hemlock Semiconductor supply the raw silicon needed to make solar wafers, while Applied Materials Inc. (AMAT) makes solar-product manufacturing equipment. "
We have a couple of years until these Chinese manage to reverse engineer the equipment that Applied Materials is selling them.
Once again it comes down to the labor advantage that the Chinese have. American companies are making the equipment that the Chinese are using to crank out the product. They are able to produce the product for less because they have lower overhead and can pay their people less.
In the end, are we really losing here? We develop the technology. The Chinese make it for us for less than we would have to spend to make it ourselves. We buy it from them and then use it in projects designed by Americans and built by American companies. I'm pretty sure that these projects were not built by Chinese contractors.
http://www.energy.ca.gov/siting/solar/index.html
On the other hand, we are getting screwed on the R&D front.
http://blog.appliedmaterials.com/worlds-most-advanced-solar-rd-center
However we do own the companies that product the equipment that the Chinese use to manufacture the panels with. With also own the companies that produce the polycarbonate material used in the panels.
Lets see. Samsung makes the A5 processor for Apple.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_A5
They also make their own processor for the Galaxy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsung_Galaxy_S#Processor
Go find someone else to troll.
Here we go again. Perfectly insightful and on point analysis of Apple gets modded down. I sure hope this ends up in meta-moderation and someone fixes this abuse of the system. Or barring that, hopefully enough people reply to this with posts that are then modded up to keep it part of the discussion.
Yes Apple, we know you have your fanboys here from the PR department with mod points to try to control the discourse. As Streissand learned, you can't control teh intarwebz. We all know how much your company sucks, and how shady your business practices are.
That is the part that showed up after a couple of Google searches.
Of course your logic is flawed though. If that is the part of Samsung that is making parts for Apple, then that is also the part of Samsung that is making competing products.
Thanks for the support. I took the down modding (after having been at +5 initially) to mean that it hit a little too close to home for the Apple brigade. There were not any good counter arguments presented, so they had to mod it to 0 to remove that point of view from the discussion.
My favorite claim made in this thread was, "Steve Jobs created a large company that employs a lot of people, and some those people probably gave to charity." That probably is true given that in a large enough sample of people, there will be a few charitable members. Yet just because other people hired by Steve Jobs give to charity does not make Steve Jobs charitable.
The guy has a net worth of about 8.3 BILLION dollars. He will never spend all of that money. He could give his family that money and they would never spend. There is no reason to have that much wealth concentrated in the hands of a single individual. If I had that kind of money, there would be community gardens all over the place. There would be art and music and concerts for the neighborhood. Not a single one of my friends would have any debt.
Of course I say that now. Who knows what earning that many zeros does to a man's mind. Maybe Steve needs to sit on it all of it, to make his life worth something in his own head.
Do you have any facts to back up your claim that Samsung's manufacturing is WORSE than Apple's?
http://www.samsung.com/global/business/semiconductor/aboutus/AboutUs_Profile.html
According to Samsung they have a single IC production facility in China. They also have facilities in Korea and Austin, TX. Does Apple even make anything in the United States anymore?
The point I was making is that even with bad publicity around Foxconn and environmentally destructive manufacturing processes, consumers do not care. Why you turned that into a personal attack is beyond me.
The consumers of Apple products have a certain image to maintain. They like to perceive themselves as progressive and socially responsible. Therefore any organization that wants to make an issue of the dirty business practices engaged in by Chinese manufacturing companies will look at a company like Apple and lampoon them. In theory, Apple's hip, socially conscious consumers are more likely to influence Apple than say HP's or IBM's corporate purchasing agents.
Of course it won't work. One of the most socially responsible women I know, when making the choice between an iPad and a Samsung tablet and having been presented with information about how destructive Apple's manufacturing processes are, still went with the iPad. She professes to care about such things, but when the rubber met the road, she didn't really care. I'm sure most other consumers, even those who profess to care, really could give two shits less about what happens to the environment in China as long as they still get low cost iPads out of the deal.
That is a good point. The way this process works is that AT&T lays out their justification and the DoJ either accepts or rejects it. In this case the DoJ has rejected it. Now AT&T has the opportunity to go back to the drawing board and come up with some other lies.
Every once in a while, the Feds get it right. From the article,
"Moreover, the department said that AT&T could obtain substantially the same network enhancements that it claims will come from the transaction if it simply invested in its own network without eliminating a close competitor."
We have been saying this here forever. AT&T et al need to invest in their own infrastructure. It is about time that the Federal government is on board with that.
In fact, Jobs even went so far as to eliminate corporate philanthropy programs at Apple.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs#Philanthropy
That is not the behavior of someone who agrees with charitable giving, anonymous or otherwise.
Anyone with enough resources to pay themselves in dividends and stock options would be stupid to take a large annual salary. Capital gains taxes are significantly less than income taxes.
It could be that Steve Jobs donates anonymously. If that is the case, it should be pretty easy for you guys to find some press releases or other PR material where Steve Jobs is at least speaking positively about groups he feels strongly about. Surely there is a lot of that information out there. Right?
I tried to search for some and this is what I came across.
http://www.stephenthomas.ca/steve-jobs-hates-good-it/