Your experience of humans seems somewhat skewed.
Do you not think it’s possible that human nature, such as it is, is wrecked by the capitalist system that you like so much?
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Democracy = consent is Orwellian-light. It’s not a boot to the face for all time, but it’s still pissing on me and calling it rain.
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This gets to the heart of the difference
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You made a comment about why Amazon doesn’t pay taxes, and that it was likely due to their profits being artificially low. Their profits aren’t low. Again, they generated over $42 billion of net income over the last 3 years. Their Return on Equity over the last few years has been 27.4%, 21.9%, 28.3%. That’s an incredible financial performance. I’m not sure what’s fishy about it. (I would particularly ignore net profit margin, because I don’t think it’s a useful summary measure. As an investor, I want to know how much income a firm can generate per dollar of investment. That’s ROE.)
Maybe it’s the case that they’re gaining market share by selling some items at low/no/negative margins in order to generate future profits. But that has nothing to do with them paying or not paying taxes. Which is what my post was responding to. The reason they pay far less in taxes than what you would expect is because they have significant excess tax benefits from stock-based compensation and significant research and development tax credits.
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Nope. They’ve been this way since long before capitalism. Seriously one of the older human fossils we have’s cause of death was a spear to the head.
The company has an equity of 93 and change billion dollars and a market cap of of over 3T with an annual top line of 386B. Showing 40B in net profit over 3 years when AWS is doing 13+B in profit a year is pretty obviously low.
You’re defending the Amazon numbers the way Amazon defends them. Jeff comes from finance, so don’t worry all the ratios are in the right place. Financial engineering at its finest.
What do any of those numbers have to do with Amazons standard practice of price dumping though? Does your point have any bearing whatsoever on the main point I was trying to make, which is that their business model is to take over industries by behaving like a monopoly and deducting the cost from their official profit?
You’re kind of missing the forest for the trees here IMO. If your whole point was that I hadn’t looked at Amazons financials before I made my post… guilty as charged. Amazon isn’t the kind of stock I bother analyzing. Not my kind of play.
My whole point was that you made an unsupported claim about Amazon’s taxes, and I provided some information that would indicate your claim wasn’t true. I have no idea what you’re talking about with regard to financial engineering or why you think taxes paid or not paid are evidence of price dumping.
I mean, the fact that you posted this:
kind of indicates that you just made up the tax claim? So I have no idea why me pointing it out is raising such a response.
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Sorry man the problem isn’t that I don’t understand or haven’t read enough. The ways in which violence state sponsored or otherwise gets legitimized is kind of a neurodivergent special interest of mine. Offer something substantial or stop talking to me about it. Telling me I just don’t understand is super irritating and reminds me of talking about religion with the very religious.
We aren’t even in disagreement about much when it comes to the police state we live under lol. You want to abolish the police… and in their current form so do I. I don’t think there’s any road to ‘reform’ the way the apologists mean it either That’s because I’ve read literally everything I’ve ever come across on the subject of how society decides when violence is allowed both officially and unofficially. Law enforcement, the criminal justice system, and organized crime are where I’m strongest, but my knowledge of the history of union movements in Europe and the US is pretty deep too.
I was talking a libertarian who I think considers himself more of a right-libertarian and maybe ACist or close to it and he started talking about “mutual-aid”. I was like “wat, that’s what I’ve been on about this whole time!”
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WHAT R U REALLY GONNA DO?!?
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SEND YOUR KIDS TO SCHOOL WITH JUST PEANUT BUTTER AND JELLY WITH NO BREAD STFU
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Just to clarify you’re trying to say that Amazon’s net profit (perhaps the most important variable in the calculation of their corporate tax obligations) wouldn’t be dramatically higher if they weren’t spending an unknown amount of money price dumping their way to market share in 10+ industries?
Money is fungible lol. Money ‘lost’ buying market share is accounted for as loss against net profit. Documents like 10Q’s and 10K’s are to some extent a performance by the management of a corporation for the public. You want to take them at face value and assume that they tell the story of what’s really going on on the ground that’s your business. I don’t. I think the management at Amazon is very good at what they do.
This is kind of ridiculous. So one random skull that had spear thru head as cause of death proves your take on human nature?
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Dude it’s literally all of recorded human history. Let’s not do this.
Historians don’t bother recording peace.
The gaps between the wars are typically so short that for most of human history there’s been an annual war season… and when that isn’t the case it’s usually because there’s a VERY powerful and often very cruel empire scaring people into peace.
Yeah there’s no question that this country needs a 19th century style union movement at this point. The problem of course is that the top 40% of the income distribution is going at least good enough. The bottom 60% of course is the part they grind to dust to scare the 40%.
That doesn’t have anything to do with anarchism either… and ironically most of the existing unions are going to be the enemies of this. It’s the people at the bottom who don’t have any kind of collective bargaining that need it modern America. The poor people not the ‘middle class’.
It’s a big world and you can find war somewhere all the time. Supposedly the Chinese saying goes something like this “may you be blessed to live in uninteresting times.”
That doesn’t even get into the routine violence of life even up to today (although it has fallen over time). That’s where the study of unofficial violence comes in, which is probably more violence than the state sponsored stuff. Humans are literally just monkeys who can make tools.
And I’m sorry but most of human history was spent in a world of small states that were endlessly battling each other. I’d be shocked if the average was less than one war every 4 years on average including all the minor ones nobody remembers.