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Comment by jacknews | Hacker News Reader

Presumably this very specific protection is paid for indirectly by the taxes Apple and Google pay.

Oh, I hadn't read anywhere that Google has changed its tax strategy to increase its effective rate beyond the 2.4% they've paid in recent years. But maybe so.

The Google employees being shot at almost certainly pay way more than that in income taxes.

2.4%? Their earnings reports say ~16%: https://abc.xyz/investor/pdf/2017Q3_alphabet_earnings_releas...

Still lower than you'd expect given that the corporate tax rate was 35%, but way different from 2.4%.

Sorry, I was looking at older data. Or maybe that's a 16% rate on 0.5% of their actual profits....

https://www.theguardian.com/business/ireland-business-blog-w...

https://www.zerohedge.com/article/how-googles-refusal-pay-us...

Municipalities don't levy corporate income taxes. Services like police would be funded through property taxes on the companies' campuses.

Actually, in California, property taxes make up only 14% of the average municipality's revenue, and 22% of the average county's revenue.[1]

But yes, I'll concede that Google probably does pay a share of the taxes required to pay for these services, though I doubt it is a share proportionate to its actual profits generated in the Bay area, since their tax accounting tricks are so sophisticated.

[1] For the ugly details: http://www.ca-ilg.org/sites/main/files/file-attachments/basi...

In the document you linked, city revenues are based on property tax, sales tax, utility charges, fees, and fines. None of those things are meant to be proportional to profit. 9% does come from state and federal grants; Google-the-corporate-entity is maybe not contributing its fair share towards those, but its employees certainly are, and then some (the progressiveness of the progressive income tax curve is not cost-of-living adjusted).

In case anyone is interested, Google's latest (2017 Q4) earnings press release is here: https://abc.xyz/investor/pdf/20171231_alphabet_10K.pdf

They quote, "Effective tax rate 138%".

So, if I understand you correctly, the cost of apprehending criminals should be borne by those who would benefit most from their capture (i.e. the victims)?

Does this mean that victims of stalking or criminal threats should pay extra for the extra police activity required to protect them? Should neighborhoods with higher crime rates pay a hefty tax hike to cover costs? We want to be fair, right?

That is not what I am suggesting at all.

My point is that google appear to be getting better-than-average protection (a whole fake bus to catch a BB-gun vandal), yet paying less-than-average (taxes) toward it, and are hardly a vulnerable member of society, where that might make sense.

So then, the suggested policy is to not offer novel solutions to catching criminals if the victim is a large corporation, unless they pay for it out of pocket?

My suggested policy would be to point out the exceptional service they receive from the state, and encourage them to pay for it fairly, rather than being dicks with their various legal-but-morally-questionable tax strategies.

Eg they could log sales in the country they were actually made, and pay taxes on them there - rather than paying "royalties" to a shell company in the British Virgin Islands or some other notorious tax avoidance hub.

I’m bitter about FAANG’s tax avoidance as much as the next guy, but these people are also under the protection of our laws. No one deserves to be shot at for working with Google; shouted at maybe, but never shot at. As a country we can’t accept that, and in any case, everyone on those busses does pay taxes.

I agree, a crime is crime regardless, but it raises a question nonetheless.

Additionally, if I as an individual were to go to the police claiming something similar I suspect they would tell me to claim on insurance, and to try to make myself less of a target by not advertising my identity. I doubt they'd be running fake cars on my commute to try and catch the perp.

Maybe I'm wrong, but the police seem to be going the extra mile (quite literally) in this case.

I think that's because it's been affecting a fairly large number of people (compared to the number of perpetrators) over a fairly long period of time. I think it's also because it's public enough that the police are worried about the message that would be sent if they didn't seriously try to stop it.

Suppose the shooter was shooting at public buses though. Would you still expect nothing to happen?

The key difference between your car and a bus is that with the bus the safety of thirty people is involved, plus the willingness of many more people to use buses which the city has an interest in. Your car is you and your family's safety which is a fraction of the importance.

911 calls for i.e. kids throwing rocks from overpasses are taken very seriously.

This is probably more about the BB gun(s) than anything else. These aren't deadly weapons, but police are acutely sensitive to any form of gun, deadly or otherwise, and they've got a case here where someone is regularly taking shots at these buses.

There was a dumb kid my age at a high-school party who thought he'd... I don't know what he thought.

But he shot a BB gun and it hit a girl in her eye, destroying the function in that organ and lodging itself in her brain, forcing her to have to relearn how to read and speak and other functions people take for granted.

I say this because even a BB gun can hurt someone in ways that are unanticipated.

Just like supporting an economic regime that hurts people in unanticipated ways. Better to be kind and generous to everyone so we can all flourish.

Why do Google employees deserve to be shouted at?

https://www.fastcompany.com/3051574/has-the-tech-industry-ma...

Just Google it.

I hoped that my wording wasn’t a ringing endorsement of shouting at Googlers. I was saying that protests are fine, shootings are not.

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