Yep, ad money has suddenly dried up and auction prices have plummeted so might as well give away the ad credits to inflate the auction prices allowing both a higher tax deduction and better looking performance.
The "might as well give away the ad credits" part makes sense to me, but the part about inflating prices and getting a higher tax deduction doesn't make sense.
I'm not an accountant by any means, but I don't see how there even would be a deduction here. From what I could quickly dig up, even if you donate your services to a nonprofit, you can only deduct your costs, not the price you'd normally charge a paying customer. And of course this isn't even a nonprofit; it's just a freebie to a business.
So while cutting supply might create higher auction prices for paying customers (than you'd otherwise have), the grants themselves don't seem like they'd do anything advantageous for taxes.
Of course, there are expenses with serving ads that they can take out after revenue to reduce how much profit they'll be taxed on, but I'm not sure there are many expenses coming from this giveaway. Seems they would have incurred most of the expense without doing the giveaway because they've already got the computer hardware up and running to serve ads. This is just a way to try to get some value out of the expense that you're going to pay anyway.
You're being downvoted but it wouldn't surprise me if this was discussed while they were coming up with this. While I highly doubt it is their main motivation, I'm sure they've acknowledged it as a benefit.
It doesn't have to. This is a choice Google is making on how it wants to conduct charity.
>The federal government should be providing interest-free working capital and guaranteeing the sale of every glove and mask
Sale at what price? It has to be bounded or else it sounds ripe for fraud (people are monsters).
> anyone can produce.
So is the loan for anyone that wants it? Or just for companies that have proven they can make gloves and masks? If the former, what stops people from just using the loan to fund salaries while making a ritual display of making masks for a few months and then declaring bankruptcy after collecting salaries during that time?
I think you are misunderstanding the parent's point. The basic gist is that any glove, mask, and ventilator manufacturer should at the very least get immediate working capital loans/grants from the government to expand production.
Guaranteeing the sale means that the manufacturer will assume no risk for overproduction. The price would be whatever the prevailing market price was before the crisis or maybe with a slight premium.
In essence, the government should remove all business risk for manufacturers of needed equipment.
The government can, in an emergency like this, set prices. They could set prices at the previous price for bulk PPE and order companies to fulfill it and if they refuse, eminent domain them and sell them to someone who will.
As much as this will annoy civil libertarians, the powers of the state are vast and in emergencies should be used to protect people when justifiable and without harming people. The takings clause will ensure that whatever companies are affected will be monetarily compensated and they have recourse through our courts.
>It's like when people build a house next to an airport, and then complain about all the damn airplane noise.
Not really. Buying near an airport requires explicit acknowledgement that you're doing it and that's why homeowners don't really have a leg to stand on when they complain to their local government. IIRC last time I looked at a home near a bunch of transmitters, there was no such disclosure required.
Oh, people complain about airport noise all the time. You even hear about it in the news: so-and-so investigating 10,000 complaints about noise. Interestingly (though in retrospect unsurprisingly), the vast majority of complaints come from a very small handful of squeaky wheels. For example, of 8,760 complaints about DCA, 1 home was responsible for 78% of them!
Source: https://www.mercatus.org/system/files/dourado-airport-noise-...
Disclaimers notwithstanding, noise abatement requirements continue to become stricter and stricter across the U.S.
Most STEM courses aren't vocational training and aren't super specialized. I think you might have a biased negative view for what STEM courses are?
Edit: Let me state it a different way that might shed more light on my point. A CS major can pass all of his/her classes with a perfect GPA and still be incapable of writing software ready for a production system (even at small scale).
The STEM degrees emphasize fundamentals that are rarely (if ever) used in day-to-day "real jobs".
For some value of 'super specialized' you are correct. For a value that includes the bigger perspective on our culture and what it means to live a good life, an exclusive focus on STEM is indeed 'super specialized'.
>For a value that includes the bigger perspective on our culture
Sure
> and what it means to live a good life
That's just self-aggrandizing bullshit. There is no class that will tell you what it means to live a good life. Anyone who thinks so is dearly lacking perspective.
>an exclusive focus on STEM is indeed 'super specialized'.
An exclusive focus on STEM will include the philosophy of science and what it means to seek truths about the physical world. IMO that has immensely more value in a philosophical sense than you seem to imply.
I believe you are proving my point. For example, the goal of much ancient philosophy was exactly what it meant to live a good life, and the theory of such was very well developed. Most of the culture you take for granted as 'common sense' is directly based on this philosophical development.
STEM at best tells you how to do something, but can never tell you what to do, or why to do it. For that you need philosophy, much more than philosophy of science.
Well nobody tried to use lead-acid batteries for storage of anything on the significance of grid base-load and replacing a huge chunk of transportation energy capacity.
For decades we have used lead-acid batteries in close to every backup power solution of any size, plus at least one lead-acid battery per vehicle. Of course we expect lithium-ion to surpass lead-acid in market size and number of deployed batteries, but the amount of lead-acid batteries in the world is nothing to sneeze at either.
This requires a lot of the investment environment that isn't a given. Capital loses its feedback loop if inflation outpaces economic growth or if the quality of investment opportunities declines significantly.
There is no given that just having $10 million dollars means it will be easy to outpace inflation and not end up with less.
