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Comment by kaashif | Hacker News Reader

> The way it stands now is that it’s a nice tax write of the the company and a great way to play the heads I win tails you lose game.

What do you mean by this? Can you elaborate?

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Corporations can fund research in ways that allow them to suppress results that threaten their profits. If science is conducted in these ways, corporations can fund science (for which they receive tax benefits) and if the results are positive, it gets published and the corporation wins because the research supports their business model (tails, I win). If the research results does not support their business model, they can decline to publish it (tails, you lose).

There are ways to do science that avoid this kind of corruption.

Name three academic institutions that would sign a contract that prevented them from publishing adverse results. You are at least fifty years out of date on this argument.

A) They don't have to have that in writing, it's very implicity understood that you don't bite the hand that feeds. B) Even if they do find adverse results, depending on what they are (e.g. actively harmful versus negative results) you may have a hard time publishing them since journals don't care much for negative results.

Presumably he means you can use company funds to donate to a pro-pesticide charity/NGO, and then use that donation to claim a tax credit (around 50%, subject to some limits). It's not really a "heads I win tails you lose" situation though. If you donate $100k, and claim the tax credits, you're still out $50k. You might get back more than $50k worth of monetary benefits from whatever the NGO/charity does, but that's not really guaranteed. It's like buying some junk on wish.com with a 50% coupon and saying that it's a "heads I win tails you lose" because if it turns out to be not junk, then you win, but if it's shit you still saved 50%. A far more straightforward and honest way of describing it would just be to say that they get a discount on their charity spend.

That's also money you're spending out of your "profit" instead of netting it off as an expense, so it's really a fairly minor discount on pre-allocating money over a multi-year horizon for purposes that can be structured as a charity.

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