It should be possible for WhatsApp to get "only" $18 billion and scientific research gets the remaining $1 billion. About a 5% tax.
That way, venture capitalists could claim to fund innovation and would actually be truth-tellers.
The actual transfer of equity isn't taxed, at least until they try to pull cash out.
It's time we got rid of this misnomer. Just because part of your company revolves around a piece of software you wrote doesn't mean you are a tech company. Writing software is not necessarily creating technology. Otherwise anyone who's written their own html site has just progressed technology.
Sometimes you have to be innovative just to implement simple ideas in those text books or to make it actually efficient. Its easy to use type 1 UUIDs as ids but if its not practical to store 128bit ids for every value or you need to pack it into 64bits or need better ordering guarantees. you build something like snowflake.
They also fund/maintain OS project they themselves use. Facebook, through their FriendFeed acquisition, obtained Tornado [1] and have maintained it very well since. I use Tornado every day.
I get your point but your anger is misplaced if you think the large "SV tech companies" don't "invent". You want tech companies that don't contribute anything to mankind? Look at purely closed source hardware companies.
http://twitter.github.io/ currently lists 101 public repositories. Highlights include a SPDY library for iOS, Zipkin (a distributed tracing system), flockdb (a distributed, fault-tolerant graph database), Finagle (their own highly concurrent RPC system)... a TON of stuff.
May be BMW is doing things on the back that make it a better choice. Same is the difference between twitter and its thousand clones.
The challenges of scaling to very high levels has presented engineering challenges and solutions. I'm not sold that they're net beneficial in the greater order of things, but to say that there's been no significant innovation would be false.
Welcome to the party, comrade! Want a beer?
(No, seriously, it's not bad being a socialist. Turn off the American anti-applause-lights that are designed to make us look eeeeeeviiiiil and examine what our actual positions are. We're an ideology like more-or-less any other, with plenty of valid points even outsiders acknowledge.)
What you are advocating is populism. You see a large transaction, and say "we could use some of that!", without thinking about the relative efficiency of different kinds of taxation.
They've done a good job filling a niche in a broken market, and delivered real value for consumers, I admit.
There's value to a system where plausible things get funded, even if only 1 turn out to pay for the 9 that suck.
It doesn't mean that obscure scientific research has the same market value as almost everything.
Of course not. Food, for example, has much more immediate use.
But it does mean that science is pretty valuable, and more valuable over longer periods.
Market value is a measure of many things. Net benefit to civilization isn't one of them.
Don't tell that to the atmospheric gas industry.
What's the size of the global food industry?
To a rough approximation: everyone who eats must pay for food (at least some of it).
To a rough approximation: nobody who breathes pays for oxygen.
I'm not saying there's no market at all for oxygen, nitrogen, CO2, etc. But that the vast amount of use for these gases is done without the mediation of a market, or the imposition of a market cost or fee.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the industrial gases industry shipped products valued at nearly $9.5 billion in 2007
http://business.highbeam.com/industry-reports/chemicals/indu...
For agriculture, wheat alone accounted for $10.6 billion, corn $48.7 billion, soybeans $32.4 billion. . The total value of U.S. wheat production in 2009 was $10.6 billion.
As was traditionally the case, in 2009 corn far surpassed other U.S. crops in value at nearly $48.7 billion. For comparison, soybean crops, the second leading field crop, were valued at about $32.4 billion.
http://business.highbeam.com/industry-reports/agriculture/wh...
http://business.highbeam.com/industry-reports/agriculture/co...
Total food expenditures? Somewhere north of $600 billion:
http://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2011-september/food-spen...
Your atmospheric gasses industry represents 1.6% of the value of food spending in the US. And again, virtually nobody who uses oxygen directly actually pays for that privilege. Which is to say: there is no market value.
And while most people don't pay for their use of atmospheric gasses, those who do are paying for something mission critical. You might as well say there is no value to sunlight because I can go lay on my roof deck.
You're being obtusely blind to my point. It is a rounding error. Those who do pay (and, incidentally, with the reliance of most ag on industrial nitrogen fixation, that's probably pretty much all of us, indirectly) are doing so because the need they have cannot be met through the nontransactional atmospheric supply.
What you're missing with your fixation on the atmospheric gasses bit is the remainder of total economic output ($70 trillion, give or take rounding errors of a few trillion), every last dollar of which requires humans, animals, plants, factories, fires, and god knows what else to have access to an atmosphere. Your $9.5 billion? 0.013% of the total.
Again: air has, to any reasonable approximation, zero economic value. It has tremendous utility value.
Scientific research is not (by design) excludable property, so attempting to assign a market value to it is actually a category error. Markets can only assign prices after definitions of ownership and trade are given.
Oh give me a break.
\o/
So, short answer: because politics.
Currently we just let politicians spend it as they see fit.
On what basis are you making this claim? Since you are familiar with the term deadweight loss, you must be familiar with the economic theory associated with taxation, and therefore the standard claim that the least distortionary tax is income tax. Taxes other than income tax are usually justified in terms of negative externalities.