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Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

You can bet that if the board of directors could show that unscrambling the omelet would result in greater shareholder value produced, it would suddenly be really easy to do...

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Happened with Dow-Dupont! A three-way split, even (from a two-way merger). Took roughly two years and was the shareholders' plan from the start. By most accounts it went very smoothly.

[1] https://www.investors.dupont.com/news-and-media/press-releas...

[2] http://www.dow-dupont.com/

Progressive corporate taxation could make it happen for reasons other than dodging the ghosts of chemical sins past!

Can we stop with taxing everything you don’t like? Taxes should be equal and used to fund the government, not as tools to make people do things you like.

I question the assumption that taxes you don't like will not fund the government

"Should" needs some unpacking; there's a subjective value lurking inside.

Personally, i prefer economic incentives over coercion. My starting point: there is a degree to which society must govern entities within it.

Can we stop with pushing all of the taxes into the work-consume economy and out of the invest-return economy? The latter is eating the world, would it really hurt it to help clean up its own messes for once?

Taxes used to offset the costs of undesirable activity are the most effective and efficient taxes, but you want less of that?

What type of taxes, state or federal? Because federal taxes do NOT fund federal spending.

https://mmt101.substack.com/p/an-explanation-of-why-taxes-do...

It is a key point... if splits are encouraged and made easier (and I agree it'd be healthier for the market if the largest companies did), then liability needs to be handled carefully.

One doesn't want to create a 'snake sheds its skin' scenario where Meta (for example), stuffs all its liability in a spin-off, yet keeps the profits those actions accrued in the other entity.

On a technical level it would still be a nightmare. But yes it would actually get done.

My first tech job was at HP, in 2015, started there just in time work and live through that split. That was a smoother one from what I hear but it was not a fun job to have at the time

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