COGS for Casper is ~50%, which doesn't quite line up with your $50. I suppose if you mean $50 in raw materials, plus construction costs, then fine, but that doesn't get you to 20x markup. The margin isn't that crazy. Typical retail markup is 30%.
Lol, that's now how business works. No one likes paying taxes, you hire all of your friends and connections to be the executives and pay them millions to tens of millions of dollars a year so your network and reputation grow despite the fact that anyone else is also capable of having calls with other businessmen and sending emails out (and it's all basically a tax write off because it's no longer profit for your company, as these 'friends in college' executives join you for dinner at a 3 michelin star restaurant with a CEO at another company, and your friend tells the CEO with their $10M/yr credential how unbelievable you are at business and investment), and then you hire an accountant to destroy the rest of the income for you through any amount of loop holes. IE: Just make 10 companies and have your company contract that company for "consulting" and split up your profits among all of them and have the company stash the money away in its coffers causing the value of the company to grow, and then what would be 30-40% income tax turns into the much lower capital gains tax for owning your companies that "grew in value", and you can knock that down even further by claiming the companies aren't "worth very much" by selling stock for dirt cheap to your friend. Beyond even that, let's do better, be nice to the IRS and pay the taxes for your brand new 10 LLCs for the next 5 years in advance so that you can relieve them of the paperwork, and then find out a day later "wow these companies are so profitable" as the funds from your real company fly in because your LLCs are so good at "consulting" and "strategic analysis" - whoops! I already paid my taxes in advance hahaha
There's a reason wealthy politicians don't release their tax return... Neither Trump nor Bloomberg.
Just remember, profit is never what it seems, it's always far lower than what you think it is. The only time you spike it up is when you're ready to sell.
By what you linked from Casper: "we are not required to submit certain executive compensation matters to stockholder advisory votes", "we are not required to comply with certain disclosure requirements related to executive compensation, such as the requirement to disclose the correlation between executive compensation and performance and the requirement to present a comparison of our Chief Executive Officer's compensation to our median employee compensation.", but, but why wouldn't you tell them anyway, what are you hiding?
Especially when you manufacture in a poor country that's manufacturing a "high quality" product that justifies its high price by its "unique product" meanwhile you own the company the other country and it's impossible for the US to ever know that, not even as if they're even capable of taxing that foreign income that you use to take luxurious vacations in Macao with as you do business in Hong Kong, spending all of it tax free because you didn't make it in the US, even bringing a few rolex's home for cheaper that the market price is in the US to move the money over - you make money to bring your money from Vietnam to the US!
I might suspect your source is financially wealthy, and morally bankrupt - if I could follow 1/2 of what you said. But I was definitely entertained. Upvote.
Your average poor person will get in a fist fight over $100, and potentially shoot someone over $1000. They shoot people for nothing anyway. Give your average middle-class citizen $10M to cheat on their wife, and they will. Sometimes they pay $100 to do it anyway. Maybe you won't, but I'll show you how it scales up. And, I'm not saying that in any way these businessmen are immoral, I'll touch on morality at the end, but about avoiding taxes, I can convey to you how it works. Coming as someone who was very, very, pro-Bernie. (Who, by the way, Bernie did not opt to tax himself according to his own laws. I was upset, I told myself that's exactly what I would do, but I understand now). It's, it's just because the orders of magnitude are too large, when all you deal with in a daily basis is $10-$20 purchases, you can easily stand on the moral high ground, it seems absurd to exchange morality for your $10 chicken parm, it just doesn't matter. But say, for $200, it seems difficult to swallow going up to the cashier and saying the kiosk made a mistake, I mean you can just keep it right - it's their fault, right? Well, the voters don't seem to be arguing to increase the capital gains tax, isn't that their fault? You might just pocket the $200.
For $1000 in a wallet, will you search for who dropped it if there's no ID but you know it wasn't there a minute ago? A few seconds pass and they're lost in the times square crowd. If you had shouted "wallet!", everyone would have touched their pocket, and a man would have said "fuck!" and then ran over to you. But you paused. Now he's gone. Why? Why did you pause? You find the wallet again tomorrow, you look around as you put $1000 in your pocket. It seems, it seems this is normal you say. He keeps leaving this wallet. You tour Macao with your gf before coming home, and finding that wallet one more time in times square. Do you take it? You're loved now more than ever by your family, and your unbelievable vacation experience. You take it, you slowly walk away.
It's too easy.
The accountant gives you your tax return, and you saved $1000. You end up being bored and scroll through it, and you see something that's pretty dubious, it's legal I guess you say to yourself but you know it's moving the money around in a weird way. You talk to the account, but he already submitted it to the IRS. What do you do now? I mean, I guess maybe I'll think about it next time. Next time comes, you know what'll happen, but you never open the pdf. That's the wallet. The wallet with $1000 in it. You only cost each American, what, pennies? micro-pennies? nano-pennies? There's not even anyone to return it to, no one who will thank you. The IRS will say "Uh, okay I guess", as the federal budget squanders the money away anyway.
The next year, it's $10000. What do you do now? You've been doing it for years. The IRS already audited and said you're good to go. Do you do something? There's always the gateway drug, each step is easier than the last.
I agree, it's horrible, it's evil, you can feel it. But, but do you, personally, say no?
The middle class is no better, money makes you evil once you get it, you have no choice. Power makes you evil, even the priests can't stop molesting. There's no choice, when you're 7 orders of magnitude away from what things actually cost in day-to-day life it becomes much harder to swallow paying $100M more in taxes than you could be paying, especially when you can get the IRS to audit you and they begrudgingly agree that it's completely legal, by the same laws that the people can protest for and control if they care enough about it.
The other valid option is to make middle class life so enjoyable that you don't have the motivation to accumulate wealth, working 9-5 commuting and eating dinner means you have only 2 hours left to actually do something, that life sucks, it's horrible. Weekends are just enough time to recover for the next Monday, that's why ads on YouTube business videos will show someone throwing money around saying "Are you ready to quit your 9-5?", it's a dream. Europe mastered the art of making middle class life good enough to quell the desire for business, so much PTO, so many vacations and weeks off, so many people working "80%" or "60%" schedules where they take days off or work fewer hours, college free no debt, Singapore gave everyone a house now no one has to pay rent. But did the 512 million people in the EU invent the smartphone? We'd be stuck in the 1960s if America didn't exist, Europe didn't invent anything or innovate in any way. No one wanted to. So in a way, the system works, it keeps innovation running, when communism created something horrible for the people and socialism keeps them stuck in time forever. The deep desire to live the businessman's life is why the economy continues to improve by 2% year over year as Trains and Model T's turn into 747's and SpaceX, there's an extreme need for that life that socialism quells and communism obliterates.
It sounds so stupid to you too, why do they protest for PTO? I'll just take that money out of their salary. They're too stupid to save the money themselves? I had to save so much money to get here, from the same 9-5 that they are in. The sympathy disappears. If you were forced to take vacations that you didn't even want, you know you could've never became rich. The fucking hour break I had to take lunch off for in California was abuse for 4 months, I NEEDED that hour! I NEEDED it to grow the businesses, the startups, the credentials to network with! I ask - Can I have lunch at 4pm, ie just leave early? No. It's illegal. It's fucking agony to be shoved around by the bureaucracy, each law making harder for you to accumulate wealth, to buy freedom. I NEED that hour. I can't even use the fucking computers because they "think that's work" when you have the terminal open and they're terrified of the government and bad PR. You NEEDED that hour. These socialists just want to squander away what they need to actually live the life they want to live. The sympathy runs to zero, businessmen grow up as kids loving Sanders and people like Yang, it disappears as they become Republicans later in life, holding abortion in front of them like a carrot on a stick as a way to sway an easily manipulable audience.
But, you never feel bad. In Tech, they never keep it (The old money and traditional businessmen are the scumbags, fucking Waltons). After you retire, you're done working, you turn back into your old self, the way you were when you were 12 years old begging for people to vote for redistributing the wealth, begging to tax the rich, begging to close the loopholes. You calm down. The passion slows. You donate your money, you build universities, you create foundations and charities. Gates was ruthless for most of his life, but what does he do now? You obviously can't spend it. What the fuck do you even buy. There's nothing that costs that much! You just give it away, your friends, your family, most of it back to the people.
And, when you think about it, what do you have now? Paper? Paper means nothing. You created millions of dollars in value for all these people - the money is right there, you can see the value you generated. And you never actually made them work. They never had to work for it, at all. You gave them value, they gave you paper. You innovate the economy, you move it forward, you created jobs, and the people never had to pay for it. The people have a fake dream that redistributing paper will make them work less. No, who's going to spend the paper more? The businessmen who was addicted to accumulating it, or the middle class themselves. Overall, they just make themselves work more when you move the paper around. You can end your life burning the billions away. Well, it's on a computer, so that's more boring. But still, if it disappears into a black hole, the middle class never actually had to work for me. I worked for them. The economy runs because businessmen play the clicker game of their life, addicted to the number rising like its cocaine.
Just, imagine you were in a simple tribe. You used sea shells to trade. You make a hat, give him a seashell, and he gives it back to you only if you make him a table. But, this one guy seems obsessive, he'll collect all of them. He gives you technology in return. The man, never actually seem to do anything in response? You 'print' seashells, give it to him, and he tells people what exactly they have to do to optimize building houses, farming food, building computers hardware software, he positions the pawns to run optimally and most efficiently. The government fucks up and wastes $80M building a fucking elevator shaft. And, you, the tribe member, wait for the businessman to use the seashells in return, just like how everyone else makes a table for seashells, and you make food when people give you the seashells. You expect to have to work for him, you know you could end up working for life if he gave you enough seashells. But that never happens. The man just, keeps them. He loves them. He looks at how shiny they are. But mostly just keeps to himself. And then at the end, he uses the seashells to tell people how to build extravagant libraries, universities, charities, foundations, helping the needy. And, that's it, that's all that ever happens. You, make food for your fellow middle class'ers. You eat your food for 1/100th the cost it would take to pay a 1700s farmer, because the man told the farmer how to farm really well. But, you never actually need to give the mysterious man anything. He never spends his seashells.
The intellectuals are interesting, they invent circuits, they invent the internet. But nothing happens. A decade passes, and nothing. No one uses it. A few universities use it, a few nerds, but that's it. The USSR obviously does fuck nothing with it even though their nerds did the same thing. No, you brought it to the people. Now everyone has it. They have high bandwidth, low latency, billions of people have it, they have every type of website they could ask for. Before it was just a few nerds in a university, stuck for a decade doing nothing to get it into the masses. They'd be suck forever if Europe was the only country. Making flat-screen monitors was grueling research, it took millions of hours, none of it was fun like how playing with circuits was fun for Turing or Von Neumann, and it took another 50 years to get the research into public hands through the funding by for-profit AT&T into Bell Labs. Europe? They did nothing. No one would have ever invented the flat screen monitor if it wasn't for you - I'm talking to you - feel it -, no one would ever have put so much effort to improve the smartphone's screen so that it's at the quality that it is today. That research was not fun, no one in universities ever helped. If the world was Europe and the USSR, after a thousand years, no one would have ever invented and innovated these items. China might have came around, they're just copycats but that's our fault we were here first, China could've invented it themselves. But maybe, if they didn't see us, they never would've pivoted to capitalism. America's legal system is why we're in the modern world, no one else did it, and no one else was even making progress.
You end up, not really feeling bad about it. You did what you had to do. You give each kid connections, networks, not money. You know money is worth nothing in business, only credentials. So you have no reason to pass the money down. You just give it away to the people. You give it away, you don't spend it, don't give it to your kids, give it to the people! The morals feel great. (The people who setup trust funds for their children and descendants are bastards, the kids generate no value, they make the people work for them like slaves as the kids give the people useless seashells in return, and you miss out on the value that they could have generated if they were also businessmen, though that ends up reducing the average IQ of businessmen overtime which fucks everything up, there's a balancing act there)
That’s quite the fantasy you’ve costructed for yourself.
In it Europe hasn’t invented anything.
Quality of life is just a sham invented by politicians to keep the plebs from demanding... quality of life?
And since you mentioned a 747 as an example of Americas greatness. Well the 747 is but we have been witnessing the real life consequnces of the ‘greed-is-good’ approach to business on a once-great engineering company.
I'm not sure what you mean by "Quality of life is just a sham invented by politicians to keep the plebs from demanding... quality of life?". I don't think politicians invented anything like that? I remain confused.
I mean, I can be more lenient. Europe had good researchers. They were the Athens, between the Germans ones of the 20-50's, and Turing, there was a lot. The Russians got a lot done too. But again, all research. Nothing profitable. It was never self propagating. Rome was self propagating, they conquered. Athens, only sustained intellectualism until it bled away.
(I'm not counting the mathematicians of the 1700s that did amazing work, I'm referring to modern Europe and the US, 20th century and beyond)
It's kind of sad that a huge market for businessmen is taking an American business, and just doing the same thing in Europe or Latin America. It's, it's sad. There's uh, absolutely no foreign competition in most situations that we have to meet. The ratio is clearly wrong, and we compete with more companies than we can found so Europe should statistically be represented in the other direction. It's not even that profitable, American consumers are a gold mine they're so price insensitive. And the modern world is mostly what was invented in the roaring 20s in the US, and computing technology that was developed almost entirely in the US.
(The Japanese were trailing along in the 80s I guess, but they were mostly our China, they were just a factory line that we abandoned when China caught up and their GDP has stagnated for 20 years. They had a few great companies, and they still do. South Korea is the only actual one that goes toe-to-toe but they're too small to profit off 300 million people like we can, per capita I do think they are more entrepreneurial and inventive than us though)
There's not even VC money in Europe it's almost impossible to get funded, you need American or Chinese money which means they own most of the business anyway. Like in the US, take the money away, you can get started again. But in Europe? You better buy a plane ticket. No one will fund you. The non-tech companies are mostly incumbents. Or brands like WeWork that are much more expensive than other co-working spaces but they have the brand to hold them up.
This is kind of what I touch on at the end, with the getting the kids into business, there is a moral concern there. The first executives are intelligent, and caring. They're the engineers. Once you have MBAs flooding in, which HR doesn't know how else to hire people, it just becomes horrible. Feynmann famously ripped NASA a new one after asking the engineers "What's the probability of the Shuttle exploding?". They say: 1/100, 2/100. He asked the executives at NASA, they say 1/100000, 1/1000000. How, how is that even possible? You need the executives to be the engineer, or they fuck everything up. An engineer warned them about the o-ring, the executives ignored it because they were stupid. Same with the max:
Notably: "For the first time in my life, I’m sorry to say that I’m hesitant about putting my family on a Boeing airplane," Ed Pierson wrote to a company executive before the first tragedy.
This would never happen if the executives were engineers. Every time we, humanity, eventually gets stuck in a rut. The Romans invent the most unbelievably complex and well structured government of their time, while the gauls hunt like animals, and they conquer the world, they develop all of the technology (Well, the greeks were even better with their near idealistic Athens, but like the PhDs it never gets implemented or spreads). So the Romans do this, they win. Then...., nothing happens. It goes to shit. The Patricians murder the Plebians who protest, they become corrupt, the people have less and less control, it becomes awful. Then, dictatorship. Then, emperor. Who were the people who drafted the first setup of the roman government? They're 600 years dead, and those who replaced them made it shit. Took 1000 years to recover. The founding fathers. Compare George Washington, and his morality, to our modern politicians. No one had any reason to do anything other than create the perfect government, everyone helped, it was collaborative. Now they're cutthroat. It always goes to shit. Corporations are the new target. The founding fathers tried so hard to put every single failsafe they could, because they knew. They knew they knew. They knew those who would come after them would make it shit. While the founding fathers intentionally put failsafes - the entire article is a big ass fail safe you just read it (It just says exactly what the restrictions are - if people acted just like the founded fathers did they would never need restrictions in the first place), our modern politicians research every possible exploit to the system as if they're in infosec. Gerrymandering, oops! Jefferson forgot about that one, it took 300 years to discover the buffer overflow, but if it's discovered it's abused. Every metric becomes a target. The target of "leading the revolution" gave people who were intelligent and passionate about saving their country. The target of "becoming a politician" in 2020 is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Stone I highly suggest you read just the paragraph about high school. It shows what you need to be, what the selection criterion is. The only selection criterion that works is: Coming up with something new, a new business, a new idea, a new government. After that, they hunt. They get their MBAs to overthrow you with credentials so that they can squeeze themselves in, even though they didn't found Boeing. The patricians bribe who they had to to squeeze even, even though they never came up with the original government. The politicians cheat what they must to squeeze into what the founding fathers tried to prevent. Someone has their eyes on the prize.
Mind you, the French are just as intelligent as the Italians, they're nearly identical at birth, only culture separates them. A french man who grew up in italy is an italian man. It's the system that is what separated the gauls from the romans, and it's survival of the fittest, you're the first to have an opposable thumb then you win. Whoever figures out how to create a self propagating government wins, a couple people did, got a few thousand followers, and it propagated. Business is the new self propagating system, until stability is reached. Only the new people have what it takes. It's not really too genetic either, it is in some way have 4 kids one of them will work, what of the other three? Kahn couldn't stop it, Alexander the great couldn't stop it, Romans worked for 300 years because of adoption, but it was still bleeding. Go through the history. Each half century involved more failures by the plebians and more success from the corrupt patricians, it was slow but sped up, more and more restrictions were put on the people by the incumbents. You always need fresh people. Carnegie? Vanderbilt? Compare to the modern CEO of BP...., of Boeing, stability kills. In hackernews, for people in IT, no one knows shitty bosses and executives more than they do.
Every industry thinks they are the ones who run the world. Plumbers are reasonably sure the world turns to shit without them, but I'm not sure you use a toilet.
This rant is more sad than entertaining, though I was on-board at the start of the comment. Plug back into reality, even just a little bit.
Eh, I don't think so. There's too much interdependence, you can have anxiety over how many things your dependent on, especially in Tech. It's actually terrifying. If Azure closed down tomorrow I'd be fucked so hard, though any business will eventually try to be as independent as they can when they're big enough (Other than Netflix and AWS, I'm sure there's some under the table money making that happen as 50% margins apparently disappear from Netflix's wallet even though Netflix could just run it themselves). Too many companies and systems supply the whole world at a near monopoly, if epackets disappeared everyone would be fucked beyond belief. We all know that there's a lot of people involved, and we all do respect the workers too. Go to any area with businessmen, Grand Central Station or an international airport or something. And look at the section with books that are clearly targeted towards businessmen. At least 1/3rd of the selection is emotional support in response to having to fire people, and the emotional support of handling an economic downturn. People jumped out of buildings because of 1987 all over Downtown Manhattan, it was horrible. They know so many things need to be carefully in balance for them to continue.
You always have to be humble unless you're a billionaire because there's always someone vastly more powerful and rich than you are, by orders of magnitude. Your network's wealth and power as a normal distribution always ends up trailing behind you as you try to meet new people above you, but there's always the right tail end where you know a few people who could spend your net worth in a night because they want to.
Look at how humble the CEO of the Maverick's has to be as he meets Mark Cuban. It's somewhere in there, I'm not gonna find the time but it's in there.
I don't know if you've ever seen the Black Mirror dystopia about social media and kissing up to people. There's a lot of that. It sucks. That's why most business events involve drinking until tispy, it loosens everything up.
You’re making me hate my CPA. When I became wealthy, they barely reduced my taxes at all but they were very good at pressuring me into setting up convoluted schemes that turned out to be mostly useless and are a nightmare to unravel.
