byrneseyeview's comments

I always get the feeling that what they're really supposed to do is grovel--to admit that it wasn't an honest mistake, but that they really were being evil, and that they've finally been caught and forced to own up. I don't think people are comfortable with diversity when it means that some people think it's totally okay to do something that other people would find horribly offensive.

I'm sorry if that's offensive. But that's all I'm sorry for.

I haven't heard of situations where someone refers a bunch of garbage applicants for the referral bonus--and I'm sure the usual referral agreement has some legal caveats that allow the company to cut off particular referrers if they're abusive.

It's not necessary for every company, but it's not as toxic as it sounds. From working as an actual recruiter: recruiting is really hard. Doing part-time recruiting for a fee well below the industry standard is a waste of effort; if you can make good money doing that, quit your dev job and start recruiting full-time.

So no, it doesn't look legit.

Whenever I find myself thinking this way, the klaxons start going off. I'm basically saying "My mental model of a clearly smart person, surrounded by clearly smart people, who has made more money than I have and raised money from other smart people who have also made more money than I have--is that he's an idiot."

And then we get to:

So here Zynga finds itself, sitting atop a group of popular games and bracing itself for the next Draw Something to come onto the market so it can swallow it up...So the matchup is Zynga against the field, the field being every person in the world who knows how to, and has the will to create a social game.

Another way of looking at this is that Zynga is building a competitive advantage in social game monetization: if you have a given audience, Zynga can do more with it than you can. Meanwhile, giant deals like OMGPOP create a tournament dynamic, where everyone wants to build the next Draw Something. If Zynga is making their raw material cheap while putting their competitive advantage at a relative premium, that's great for their future.

It's also a more solid theory than just assuming that Pincus doesn't know what he's doing.

"If we all behaved the way corporations do" doesn't really mean anything. Corporations are people. It would be much more accurate to say "If all people behaved like the people who work at Apple, the world would be a worse place," but I don't think that's defensible at all.

If it does become a social norm to obey the law you wish Congress passed, instead of the law they actually passed, you're subsidizing people who ignore this norm. I wouldn't want to live in a world where RIMM out-competes Apple because Apple scrupulously follows good, imaginary rules, and RIMM scrupulously follows actual rules instead. This would all be a lot less meaningful if the US had lower corporate tax rates, but ours are effectively the highest in the world. Since the corporate tax rate is also the subsidy for hiding a given amount of income, it's no wonder that we lead the world in tax avoidance, too.

You could theoretically borrow against those assets, but only if your lender expected you to be paid. That's the beauty of the plan: it means that the only taxable event is the one that materially benefits you.

Meanwhile, corporations:

a) Get taxed on their profits

b) May pay lower notional levels, but only by paying people to game the rules

c) Get taxed on their dividends (essentially a 15% surtax on the 35% tax on their profits)

d) Also get taxed through capital gains--which is a change in the (un-inflation-adjusted) net present value of future dividends (which, remember, are taxed when they're earned, then taxed when they're paid).

If you give our tax code enough credit, the 35% tax rate is a lower bound. If the government is willing to let you pay $X less in taxes for doing Y, they're saying that the benefit of Y exceeds the forgone tax income of $X. So if I get a $5K tax credit for installing solar panels, the amount of tax-equivalent benefit the government has derived from my behavior is at least $5K.

You could argue that the tax code is imperfect, and that action Y is not always worth $X. But then you're suggesting that we transfer money from a competent rule-follower to an incompetent rule-writer. If governing skill is constant across tax collection and other government behaviors, then exploiting tax loopholes is just in proportion to how exploitable they are--a government so screwed up that it can't manage to legally tax you for anything is a government that definitely shouldn't have its hands on your money.

Obviously, the government has other core competencies besides taxation. But corporate taxes are worth reconsidering. I'd much rather have dividends taxed as regular income--turning corporations into a pure savings vehicle. Taxing corporation-generated wealth four times--when it's generated, when it's calculated, when it's distributed, and when ownership is transferred--is at least three times too many.

Oddly enough, New York has implemented an effective Henry George-esque tax system: to merely exist in the city, you have to live in fairly pricey real estate, and the taxes your landlord pays are effectively passed through to you by market rents. Other places have much cheaper real estate, so they don't have the same dynamic.

Just like Apple, in this case. Under the current legal regime, they have successfully deferred taxes, not evaded them. It's the same way I carefully evade sales taxes by saving some of my money instead of spending every paycheck.

(Incidentally, can anyone think of a case where you've smacked your head and said "Wow! If only I'd given more credence to the people who are most emotional about this stuff, I would have made objectively better decisions!")

I'm pretty bored of bro culture in general, and startup bro-culture in particular, but the dialogue here seems broken.

So we have to look at this from first principles. When you have a less diverse team, you don't just have short-term communications latency. You also have the advantage that really similar people can push each other more, because it's easier to tell if you're doing 1% better than someone else if you're both doing the same thing.

I don't know how valuable "tolerance" is. That depends on what you're tolerating. If diversity trains your ability to "tolerate," it sounds like a bad thing, the way having a broken air conditioner teaches you to tolerate heat. The belief that it creates broader understanding is also up for debate--in my experience, people express a wider range of thoughts in a more homogeneous environment, because they're less worried about offending people.

One last thing: "its arrogance is not excused by success." That's not very Bayesian. If someone has an unusual opinion, puts it into practice, and beats the competition, shouldn't you lower your estimate of their arrogance, and raise your estimate of your own arrogance?

Part of the problem is that "Diversity" is being misused. It's not "diversity" if a company of 100 people has exactly the same demographics as the city it's in. That's homogeneity: diversity would mean that each company's demographics are wildly skewed in unpredictable directions.

Thomas Sowell has written about how intra-company diversity has harmful economic implications. For example, factories in New York used to segregate on religious lines--because if your Catholics are all off on Sunday, and your Jewish employees are all off on Saturday, then you can only work five days per week; all-Catholic or all-Jewish factories could do six days.

Groupon is not a bet on the coupons business--that doesn't justify the current valuation. Groupon is a bet that if you can reinvent the Yellow Pages, at scale and online, you can make a ridiculous amount of money. It's probably one of the largest companies around with such a high probability of failure, but their value if they end up being the winner in local is just staggering.

ComScore. Yahoo gets an enormous amount of traffic: Alexa also considers Yahoo as a whole the #4 site (behind Google, Facebook, and Yahoo). And Y recently hired a White House correspondent (http://news.yahoo.com/yahoo-hires-first-white-house-correspo...) and has made some other fun hires in the reporting space.

My friends who work in tech don't visit Yahoo. But my extended family in the Midwest sure does!

Full disclosure: I work at Y, but definitely don't speak for Y. If you have ComScore access, you can double-check the "#1" stat I cited.