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Comment by yterdy | Hacker News Reader

Google could give it to schools with no heat or AC and outdated textbooks. Or help solve homelessness. Or fund fixing the country's bridges. "Sorry we really don't have the funds for more heads or ridiculous raises we're busy not being evil."

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Google is a public company. The money either goes to shareholders or to employing people. There is no conceivable world in which this money would have gone to any of those causes.

There's a conceivable world where we restructure incentives around our current form of capitalism and tax codes to encourage extra money going into humanitarian causes, instead of being spent on arbitrary capital maneuvers like stock buybacks.

Conceivable, but we probably won't get there anytime soon.

It’s very simple, that’s what the government should fund. That’s what our tax should pay for. If you really want to manifesto, then just read about land value taxes, don’t tax anything except what we want to disincentivize and land, which doesn’t distort the market. But this is entirely off-topic for this thread.

It sounds to me like you're explaining Tax Deductions through Charity which is already a thing.

I know that you probably meant to express that Google is the opposite to a public (= governmental) entity, but "private company" is not the term to express that. Google is a public company (= listed on the stock market for anyone to buy and sell), so the opposite of a private(ly owned) company.

Probably mixed up private entity and public company. Fixed.

For-profit companies do philanthropy all the time. There is no requirement to divert money to shareholders (further, Google's not payingany dividends right now)

Google does stock buybacks instead. The last yearly buyback authorisation was for $70b, so the "yield" is around 4-5%. It's very much in the blue-chip, return-cash-to-investors phase of its corporate life.

Well there's certainly a conceivable one, and it's one probably many would agree would be much nicer one to live in. But accepted, not a realistic one any time soon.

No conceivable world you say?

That is indeed what I say

Google has a large charitable arm called google.org, but your point is mostly correct, although the money they pay to employees (and to the government in the form of payroll taxes) isn't being destroyed. It's just cycling around the economy, and many employees donate decent amounts of their paychecks to charity (Google does 1:1 matching and encourages this)

CEO would get outsed if the shareholders feel he’s not acting in the best interest to make returns.

Capitalism is a best that needs insatiable ever growing revenue and profits.

Vote-holding shareholders in a two-class share company, ie, Schmidt, Brin, or Page. Pichai just has to avoid annoying Sergey and Larry, really.

That's not true. Google makes money for stockholders, and they do whatever they want with that money. Some of them also certainly give money to charity, etc.

I don't know if we prefer a world in which Google itself made these kinds of contributions and not the people who own Google.

> Or help solve homelessness

Google has tried building housing in Mountain View, but they can't permits easier than anyone else.

Too bad that's the only spot in the world

If only Google had an arm of the company dedicated to convincing politicians to do things it wants to see done legislatively.

There are 500k homeless people in the US alone [0]. Let's compare that to Google's net income (money gained after all expenses including taxes, etc.) for a quarter (quarter is 3 months with $70m on a good quarter and $30m on a bad one [1]). If we were to give every cent of Google's earnings to each homeless person in the USA then each homeless person could get a $46 pay check ((net_income_per_quarter / homeless_population) / 3 [2]) per month from Google on a good quarter and a $20 paycheck per month on a bad quarter [3]. But, you have to ask yourself what this sort of wild and crazy idea would cost to Google's bottom line. I'm no expert on that, but I assume it would not be good. This is just some simple back of the napkin math, but it shows how simply infeasible solving homelessness or poverty is even for a company as big as Google. This is why I usually believe solving homelessness can not be achieved by money alone, and just the scale of the problem makes it so intractable.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_the_United_Sta...

[1]: https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/GOOGL/financials

[2]: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%2870000000+%2F+500000%...

[3]: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%2830000000+%2F+500000%...

Homelessness is mainly caused by the physical reality of there being too few homes for the number of people.

The good way to change that is to add more housing (let's ignore the option of removing people).

Giving homeless people money doesn't end the physical reality at all. It can make some homeless people able to afford housing, but an equal number of housed people will replace them as homeless.

I might be misunderstanding what you are saying, but if there are less than 600k homeless people in America and over 15 million vacant homes, it doesn't seem to be "caused by the physical reality of there being too few homes for the number of people".

That 15m number may be true, but it doesn't mean what it seems.

It's mostly homes that are between occupants. A tenant or owner moves out, and it takes a few weeks or months for someone new to move in.

It's also homes in depopulated town where there are not enough jobs anymore.

Neither is a practical source of housing for the homeless in SF.

>It's mostly homes that are between occupants.

Citation strongly needed.

>It's also homes in depopulated town where there are not enough jobs anymore.

I'm not sure I need to explain what happens when people move to a depopulated area?

Google’s quarterly net income is in the $10 to $20Bn range. Take another whack at that math?

Okay I was wrong about that I was also wrong about the quarterly part the numbers were not per quarter but per year. Again back of the napkin and I’m glad to have people point out the flaws in my argument.

The yahoo link you reference in [1] notes “All numbers in thousands”

I think you might be off by 3 orders of magnitude and google could “afford” to pay every homeless person a thousand times more than you’re suggesting.

I further think that undermines your argument about the problem being fundamentally intractable due to the scale.

That is true it says all numbers in thousands also I noticed I accidentally was on years and not quarters. So 11k a month for example is the new number for a good year [1] and 5k a month is the example for a bad year [2]. So yes now it seems more tractable than it was before, but my argument was just supposed to show one reason why it was intractable there could be many other reasons, though my argument fell flat for that one reason there are still many other reasons it could be intractable.

So the question still remains is it tractable? The answer given my above argument is still up in the air, because the honest truth is there are many underlying assumptions in my argument so again it doesn’t really say much about it being tractable. It was only trying to say it was intractable which again it fell short of doing. For example in the per month. After Google dumps all or even some of their profit into that for even one month it is somehow going to still reach the same profit margins the next month the proof for that is up to someone trying to prove it’s tractable. There are too many other variables like this that exist and it really needs a much bigger burden to show that something like that is tractable.

[1]: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%2870+billion+%2F+12%29... [2]: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%2830+billion+%2F+12%29...

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