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Cupertino's mayor: Apple 'abuses us' by not paying taxes

169 points by Libertatea 10y ago

alfl23 10y ago
Is the money better in the hands of a super overgrown and overstaffed organisation like the US government when most of it goes to paying interest to the lovely central banks folks and the public has almost 0 transparency over its expenditure? The perfect portrayal of profound inefficiency and over-bloated corporate structure. It's fun and easy to point fingers, and while tax avoidance should by no means by encouraged, why is 35% of your money the direct property of a government who does superb things like conjure into existence some of the most criminal oligopolies in the medical industry? Maybe demand Apple to build the infrastructure themselves at their own expense, and let them manage it, seems they can actually get things done. Uncle Sam's virtues seem to end with insane taxation used to bomb other countries and slowly but surely kill its citizens through rudimentary medical care bills in the hundreds of thousands, maybe leave real work to other people, who don't spend 600 mil of taxpayer dollar on a website.
- dragontamer 10y ago
  > Is the money better in the hands of a super overgrown and overstaffed organisation like the US government This is the municipal government complaining. Municipal governments are in charge of education, local police, and water supply... to name a few things. The federal government barely does much at the local level. The USA is a very decentralized system. So how about you at least complain about the right thing? If Cupertino's municipal police forces were locking people up unnecessarily or were an ineffective municipal government, that'd actually be relevant to the topic. But methinks you're just ranting about unrelated subjects.
- krisdol 10y ago
  Apple has yet to provide me with food stamps or public housing, both of which saved me when I was a refugee. I can check with my spouse but I'm pretty sure the public hospital she works at was not an apple product. The rest is just ridiculous. If you want an effective government, you have to take privatization out of it, not rely on it as we have.
  - adventured 10y ago
    Apple paid $46 billion in just income taxes over the last three fiscal years. The majority of that was likely in the US market, where they're more heavily taxed and have a very large market share. I don't know where you live, but if it's in the US, then you're wrong: they did in fact help pay for food stamps and public housing. Last fiscal year, Apple generated $72.5 billion in income before income taxes, and paid $19.1 billion in income taxes ($53.3b in net income). That's a 26.3% rate. That rate is higher than corporations pay in almost any other developed nation (Europe typically has the lowest corporate income tax rates for example), and that's after they go out of their way to try to avoid paying taxes. That $19 billion in taxes pays for a lot of welfare state benefits.
    - NLips 10y ago
      The parent's point is precisely that: The welfare is paid by the government, with money that it takes in taxes from e.g. corporations.
Shivetya 10y ago
So Apple is already contributing nearly twenty percent of the city's budget? I think the real problem is not enough diversification. Apparently there is also an agreement where the city refunds sales taxes back to Apple? Originally 50% and now down to 35%? Why does this even exist? The way to get Apple to pay for infrastructure improvements is simple, don't do any near their campus and their own employees will be impacted and that will get Apple to agree to help redevelop the area.
- demarq 10y ago
  > The way to get Apple to pay for infrastructure improvements is simple, don't do any near their campus and their own employees will be impacted and that will get Apple to agree to help redevelop the area. And whatever they build they will control. I think you might be slowly giving away the city to a corporation.
  - dragontamer 10y ago
    That'd only happen if you ceded zoning regulations over to Apple though.
sourcd 10y ago
> Barry Chang barely made it into the lobby when Apple’s security team surrounded and escorted him off the property. I had to read it again to make sure I'm not making a mistake. Its unimaginable in some geographies. Evokes mixed feelings like : "cool, they can do that?" to "that's quite arrogant" Also reminds me of a video where Steve Jobs met the council. The mayor was delighted like a teenager, showing off his iPad to Steve, asking for free Wifi : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gtuz5OmOh_M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gtuz5OmOh_M ( t=19:54 )
- dragontamer 10y ago
  I agree. This is... worrisome behavior of a Mayor. > Getting local politicians to battle Apple is hard, Chang said. He recently proposed that Apple – which is building a massive new campus its own employees nicknamed the Death Star, or more favorably, The Spaceship – should give $100m to improve city infrastructure. To move on the proposal, Chang only needed to get a single vote ‘yes’ among the three other eligible council members. He failed to get that vote. What's his logic for this special Tax on Apple? It sounds like this guy is an anti-corporate loon, drinking too much Sanders juice or something. Sounds like the other council members are more rational.
  - demarq 10y ago
    >What's his logic for this special Tax on Apple "You’re helping create the problems, so you have to help solve the problem" - Chang
    - dragontamer 10y ago
      Maybe if he described what these problems were, he's get my support. But considering that he can't even get the support of his own citizens at Town Hall meetings, nor the support of his fellow council members, methinks he's simply incompetent. And that the problems he describes are made up in his imagination. I can't imagine it to be too difficult to come up with a budget that says "We have to pay for X Million Dollars in the next year to fix the bridges and roads... or to upgrade our water pipes, or to deploy municipal gigabit-fiber. So here's a special +5% tax on all corporations in this Town" And if the fellow citizens and council members think the plan is worth the tax, then they'll probably agree with him. On the other hand, if citizens are balling up his agendas and throwing them out during meetings... there's clearly a problem here. And it isn't with Apple. Its with the Mayor.
dragontamer 10y ago
> At a recent Cupertino city council meeting, some residents protested about a lack of funding for public projects, Chang said – even crumpling up meeting agendas and throwing them. “They ball up the paper and throw it, and they say ‘You’re making all the wrong decisions’,” Chang said. “In the meantime Apple is not willing to pay a dime. They’re making profit, and they should share the responsibility for our city, but they won’t. They abuse us.” Is it just me, or does this Mr. Chang just sound incompetent? His citizens are saying he's making the wrong decisions. He's walking onto Apple's property and being forced out. He's asking for special taxes against Apple without saying why Apple deserves these taxes. How about Chang makes the right decisions that pleases his citizens? Has anyone actually been to a Town Hall meeting? People don't just crumple-up the agendas because your budget sucks. They crumple-up agendas because the meeting was a waste of everybody's time. I think this Mayor can't run a Town Hall, doesn't have much support of the citizens, and his only "big idea" is to increase taxes against Apple (and maybe some moonshot projects no one gives a care about) A REAL Mayor would have said something along the lines of "The highway leading to Apple Headquarters is full of potholes, and I don't have the budget to fix it!". Or maybe "Teachers deserve a higher salary in this town" (or something... connected to reality, you know?). This guy just seems jealous of Apple's cash.
- adventured 10y ago
  If Apple is meant to pay a new tax based on their net income, then every business that operates in Cupertino should obviously pay the same tax. Let's see how that goes over.
  - dragontamer 10y ago
    Exactly. Although really, Apple would just change headquarters and Cupertino would be in a bit of a mess if you made an corporate-level income-tax
    - auntienomen 10y ago
      They wouldn't have to physically move. Only legally. It'd be easy enough for them to arrange so that the corporate entity in Cupertino is a subsidiary which only ever makes a loss. No profits, no tax for Chang. Actually, I wouldn't be surprised if Apple is already structured this way.
martinald 10y ago
In the UK we have the concept of "Section 106" payments which allow a development through planning by the developer paying the local government some amount of money to redress the cost of dealing with congestion, public relam, affordable housing, etc. For large skyscraper developments in London, this can be many many millions of pounds. Does something similar exist in CA?
- mdasen 10y ago
  I'm not sure there's an official code for it in the States, but it definitely happens. In this case, Apple is spending in excess of a hundred million - $66M on things like infrastructure and low-income housing, $35 incentivizing alternative transit to work, and $15.4M annually to the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority (http://venturebeat.com/2013/06/04/apple-campus-2-7k-employees-32m-in-property-tax-9k-construction-jobs-66m-in-public-improvements/ http://venturebeat.com/2013/06/04/apple-campus-2-7k-employee...). In some cases, companies get sweet deals from locations to move there - Tesla is getting a whopping $1.2B from Nevada. But in Apple's case, they're paying.
- Lazare 10y ago
  Yes. But it's usually handled at a higher government level than the local council of a 60k person town. :) California, in particular, is somewhat famous for having an enormous number of state agencies; I rather assume one or more of those made the deal with Apple.
- djschnei 10y ago
  Wow... outstanding haha. So in bringing more business to an area, they need to pay twice? At what point do people actually own the land they own?
  - awinder 10y ago
    Uh, yeah, they have to cost-share the burden of upsetting the current infrastructure. Say you owned a piece of property adjacent to where all this new building is going on. Is it your responsibility to chip in? Is it your responsibility to shoulder the cost burden of what is effectively a zoning-related issue? I mean, god, when do you really own the property you're standing on? You didn't even ask for all this development, but now you've got to pay for expanding the infrastructure because a new developer wants to reap financial reward by developing up his land? Yeah. It's not a property freedom issue, it's a cost ecosystem issue. As time goes on and life changes, owning property is going to have fluid costs, and tax assessments on people who come in to develop land is one way to defray those costs from disproportionately hitting people who have lived in an area for a long time. Frankly, those people would never really plan for that kind of thing to happen, so you're avoiding a lot of nasty repercussions by taxing the person upsetting the ecosystem, rather than the members of the ecosystem itself.
mdasen 10y ago
Absolutely terrible article. In an article about property taxes paid or unpaid, it doesn't even mention property taxes. Is Apple's campus under-assessed? A little Googling shows Cupertino's tax rate as $7.96 on a thousand which would value Apple's campus at $1.16B. Is that a lot? Is that a little? What are other companies assessed at in Cupertino and surrounding cities? The article talks about income taxes which are totally irrelevant to the situation and Woz's assertion that Apple should pay 50% income tax. The article talks about money earned offshore that Apple doesn't pay standard US income tax on, but fails to mention that pretty much every other country in the world doesn't tax foreign earned income as income earned locally (just letting it be taxed in the country it was earned). Plus, it's irrelevant to Cupertino. This is just "you should hate on Apple. Why? Um, they're not paying taxes. What taxes aren't they paying? Um. . . the taxes." Really, my simple Googling of Cupertino's tax rate and then trying to come up with an assessment off that isn't good journalism. But I'm just writing a comment on HN at 8am. I'm not a paid journalist - but that paid journalist hasn't researched the simplest questions possible. If Apple were replaced by hundreds of companies that added up to the same number of desks, would Cupertino get more money? If the answer is "no", then there's no story here. http://venturebeat.com/2013/06/04/apple-campus-2-7k-employees-32m-in-property-tax-9k-construction-jobs-66m-in-public-improvements/ http://venturebeat.com/2013/06/04/apple-campus-2-7k-employee... The simplest Googling comes up with a much more useful article. Apple paid $25M in property tax in 2012 and that is going to grow by $32M annually with Campus 2 to over $56.5 annually. Apple is funding $66M in local public improvements and $35M on transportation demand programs. Plus, Cupertino is getting $38.1 in one-time construction fees and taxes and Apple is going to pay the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority $15.4M annually. The caption of the image on the guardian article says the mayor wanted $100M from Apple for infrastructure - beyond the more than hundred million the VentureBeat article notes. It kind of sounds like the Mayor is incompetent, hated by voters who are trying to recall him, trying to salvage his career by running for state assembly, and trying to blame his incompetence on Apple. It seems to be more an article about how Cupertino has a terrible mayor. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/sep/27/business/la-fi-apple-company-town-20130929 http://articles.latimes.com/2013/sep/27/business/la-fi-apple... Here's another, much better article. It notes that Apple's original campus was 856,000 square feet and that Apple has bought (which they would pay tax on) or leased (which their landlord would pay tax on) another 2M square feet. That makes it hard to say exactly what the property should be assessed at given that we don't know what proportion of the 2M they own, but let's say half. At $500/sq ft, 1.856M square feet would come out to $928M in property value. That's pretty close to $1.16B. At the very least, it seems like Apple's taxes are in the ballpark - especially when you consider the amazing deals that companies regularly negotiate to move to locations. Tesla negotated a 100% property tax and sales tax abatement from Nevada for 10 and 20 years respectively, $12,500 for every job, 10 years of 100% business tax abatement, discounted electricity rates for 8 years, plus $120M - totaling $1.2 Billion. Again, it sounds like an incompetent mayor that voters are trying to recall attempting to save his career.
Lazare 10y ago
I can't believe Apple is wilfully not paying property taxes on their headquarters! That's quite illegal, and I'm sure... ...oh, they are paying their property taxes? I see. So which taxes, precisely, are they not paying the Cupertino government? Oh, there aren't any taxes, but you sort of wish someone with the authority to do so would pass a law making new taxes, but they won't, so you're mad at...Apple? 'k.
- golergka 10y ago
  He isn't trying to make new taxes exactly, he just wants his $100 million. Apple's so big, they shouldn't mind parting with $100 mil for no good reason, right? It's not like they have responsibilities to shareholders or something.
  - twinkletwinkle 10y ago
    You must not get it: they have money and he doesn't. They ought to give him the money. This is a weird shill piece, why bother printing it?
- slantaclaus 10y ago
  They're called impact fees, and the dumb shmuck should have created laws to levy them beforehand
  - gumby 10y ago
    He tried and failed, which makes his position even more absurd, regardless of what you think of the merits of his case.
    - slantaclaus 10y ago
      If I remember correctly, that was a special assessment tax for the particular development in question which Jobs ripped to shreds by threatening to move Apple's operations elsewhere in the valley. What they would have had to have done was to create a catch-all impact fee law to apply to all developments based on the number of new traffic they would create. This would probably be bad for business though.
rdlecler1 10y ago
You might argue that the mayor is abusing us because of the cities housing restrictions.
- slantaclaus 10y ago
  PREACH
apeace 10y ago
> Apple pays a 2.3% effective tax rate on its $181bn in cash held offshore... > ...shield themselves off from the theoretically 35% federal corporate tax rate Something seems wrong here. I don't think companies are expected to pay 35% yearly on cash reserves. Am I confused, or is the article? If anyone is knowledgable about this I'd be interested to know the deal!
- mdasen 10y ago
  Basically all countries tax companies on income earned in that country. So, if you're a UK company and you earn $1B in the UK and $500M in France, you pay tax on $1B to the UK government and tax on $500M to the French government. The US taxes companies on their worldwide income when they re-patriate that money to the US. So, if you earned $500M in France and want to bring that money back into the US, you owe US taxes on it (in addition to the French taxes already paid). If you don't bring the money back to the US, you just pay the French taxes. People have called the ability to hold the money overseas a loophole, but given that basically no other country taxes companies on their worldwide income, it seems more that the US is the outlier. Let's put it this way. A UK-based firm earns $1B in the US and $1B in the UK and has to pay the American tax authorities on $1B and UK tax authorities on $1B and it can then bring the profit back from the US. That seems fair. By contrast, a US-based firm earns the same amount in each country and must pay the US tax on $1B, the UK tax on $1B, and then the US tax on whatever they bring back from the UK (which has already had UK tax paid on it). This encourages companies to reinvest their profits overseas rather than bring the money back to the US where it would get taxed again. It's partly because the US is so large and has been more isolated than most countries. Likewise, it's basically the only country that taxes individuals based on citizenship rather than residency.
  - seanmcdirmid 10y ago
    This isn't entirely accurate. First, You can deduct foreign taxes paid, so $1B earned in the UK could would come back only in paying the difference of higher US and UK taxes. But tax systems in different countries are different, deductions are different, as are fees and such....it leads to a huge mess. The other hard thing to reason about is where the value was added. If the IP was developed in the states, technically, it has to be sold through, so profits on it are still taxed here, to the foreign branch, where only retail profits are taxed...or something like that. It gets really messy when you are also doing R&D abroad...and you can see why tax games are possible and even necessary.
Eduard 10y ago
Question towards Steve Jobs on a Cupertino City Council Meeting in 2011: "[How do] city residents benefit from [Apple's new campus]?" Jobs: "Well, as you know, we're the largest taxpayer in Cupertino. So we'd like to continue to stay here and pay taxes. [...]. Because if we can't, then we have to go somehwere like Mountain View [and] the largest tax base will go away. This wouldn't be good for Cupertino." https://youtu.be/gtuz5OmOh_M?t=11m1s https://youtu.be/gtuz5OmOh_M?t=11m1s
- drzaiusapelord 10y ago
  Can you blame him? There's nothing sleazier than municipal governments, at least once they reach a certain size. They all see the business class as a gravy train to ride instead of finding ways to do a better job with the already large budgets they have. Chicago doesn't have a Jobs to control it, so its endless tax raises to pay for sweetheart public union pension deals and other backroom corruption. I think the internet-friendly narrative of government being bullied by evil corporations is a fairly unrealistic. Its usually the other way around. I find it amusing that so many have an undying love for Jobs' judgement in business, technology, etc but his political dealings give them pause because it goes against the left's idea of how the world works. Jobs didn't act like this to be difficult, he said and did these things because its one of the more effective ways to control a city government that can hurt or even destroy your business trivially.
  - tamana 10y ago
    Size has nothing to do with it. Plenty of small sleazy munis too
  - PavlovsCat 10y ago
    While we're talking generalities, here's something more serious. > What has been created by this half century of massive corporate propaganda is what's called "anti-politics". So that anything that goes wrong, you blame the government. Well okay, there's plenty to blame the government about, but the government is the one institution that people can change... the one institution that you can affect without institutional change. That's exactly why all the anger and fear has been directed at the government. The government has a defect - it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect - they're pure tyrannies. So therefore you want to keep corporations invisible, and focus all anger on the government. So if you don't like something, you know, your wages are going down, you blame the government. Not blame the guys in the Fortune 500, because you don't read the Fortune 500. You just read what they tell you in the newspapers... so you don't read about the dazzling profits and the stupendous dizz, and the wages going down and so on, all you know is that the bad government is doing something, so let's get mad at the government. -- Noam Chomsky
yalogin 10y ago
This is such a crappy hit job on Apple. The mayor green lighted a bunch of projects in Cupertino and the people hated it. The congestion is not happening because of Apple but because of the new home developments that are approved. He wants to protect himself by getting free money from Apple to make his people happy with some infrastructure construction. Apple is not obligated to give the guy free money.
jamespitts 10y ago
Perfect article while the Life and Death of Cities is in mind. Apple could be a better citizen, and contribute a lot more than money to the city around it. If the company fully subscribes to shareholder theory, they will contribute only what the law requires. But Apple seems to stand for higher things such as design excellence and human dignity. The company can contribute to making Cupertino a functional and wonderful "city". It is neither of those things now with its car-centric configuration and lack of enough housing construction. The actions taken by Cook regarding issues such as protecting privacy indicate that he stands for values beyond serving the shareholders. Those values could be developed for the community immediately outside the campus. Apple's ability to design such great things and manufacture them in vast numbers indicates that it has the ability to address very difficult problems. Those skills could be applied to the problems 25 feet away from their windows. The people at Apple might think of Cupertino as a source of design challenges, and start by understanding the shape of the city and the people who interact with it. Take a look at the aggregate data coming in from the watch, or hang out by one of the main stroads. Try to take a walk to various useful places some time, or get three things done in a morning without a car. All of us have the capacity to be more than a minimal tax payer. Being more starts with noticing.
- stephencanon 10y ago
  > The company can contribute to making Cupertino a functional and wonderful "city". It is neither of those things now with its car-centric configuration and lack of enough housing construction. The car-centric configuration is what most of the current residents want (if they wanted something else, they would choose to live somewhere else). Since they control a majority voting block in city politics, there's very little that Apple can do to change that; significant changes to the status quo will be blocked by the city residents.
  - jamespitts 10y ago
    What is "want"? And why does it have to be so immovable? We can't always walk away from what we do or where we live. Car-centric, earth-wasting behavior is ostensibly what we want, because most of us engage in it every day. So is sugar soda and processed food, lack of exercise, and any number of unhealthy things we do. So is paying huge amounts of money for a house, then fighting any new development near our neighborhood out of self interest. It is possible for people to essentially be trapped in a situation in which rational choices are a bad ones. How might we break out of that?
imgabe 10y ago
Slightly off topic, but is that really the design for Apple's new headquarters, a giant ring? So if you want to get from a place on one side to the other, you have to walk halfway around the circle or cut through the giant park in the middle? That seems horribly inefficient.
- pluckytree 10y ago
  Related teams tend to sit close to each other in any case, so this is a worst case scenario. Which isn’t really that bad anyways. It’s good exercise and a rectangular building holding 14,000 people would also require a lot of walking. Sure, it could be many, many rectangular buildings which everyone else does, which would require even more walking. Not to mentain there’s a huge benefit in productivity for 14,000 people to all get abundant natural sunlight, which is available to only a fraction of the people in a standard campus. Vitamin D is deficient in many people and engineers typically don’t get out much. I’d say it’s a win-win for everyone. Finally, the campus is pretty compact, leading to a ton of open space, which, combined with natural light, will likely lead to greater productivity and also be a great attraction to new employees who value the look and feel of their work environment very highly.
- Bud 10y ago
  You might need to think more about what "efficient" actually means. Apple did.
  - imgabe 10y ago
    If you can move in a 2 dimensional plane, such as inside a regular building, you can go in a straight line between any two points. If you're constricted to moving around the circumference of a circle, you necessarily have to go in a curved line. Curved lines are longer than straight lines. So the average distance between any two points is necessarily going to be longer in the Apple building than in a normal building with the same floor area. Add to that, normal buildings have cores where the utilities are run in the center and radiate out to the edges. Running wiring, plumbing, and ductwork around a circle will involve miles of additional material that would otherwise be unnecessary. I think maybe you and Apple have a definition of efficient that differs from the rest of the population.
based2 10y ago
http://9to5mac.com/2016/05/02/apple-campus-2-drone-flyover-may/ http://9to5mac.com/2016/05/02/apple-campus-2-drone-flyover-m...
GBond 10y ago
Another example of "High Tech is the new Banking"... in the bad public perception sense.
discardorama 10y ago
What's forgotten in this discussion are the property taxes in Cupertino. The property values in Cupertino are among the highest in the Bay Area, and with that comes more property taxes. I doubt Cupertino would be this desirable were it not for Apple (and the school district). So once again Apple, albeit indirectly, helps pad city coffers.
- kumarm 10y ago
  Most residents of Cupertino pay very little property tax due to prop 13. Some residents pay 3000$ for the same house when their neighbors pay 18000$.
  - discardorama 10y ago
    "Most" requires some hard data; and whether the fraction is higher or lower than the neighboring areas. Prop 13 is California-wide, so it's not specific to Cupertino.
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lewis500 10y ago
This reporter is credulous, because the Guardian is just awful. "Barry Chang barely made it into the lobby when Apple’s security team surrounded and escorted him off the property. “They said ‘you cannot come in, you’re not invited’. After that I left and have not gone back,” said an exasperated Chang." Uh huh. Yeah I bet it happened just like that. What buffoon of a reporter prints a politician's self-serving and incredible story as plain fact? If you buy this story, I've got a pile of Trump steaks and a bottle of hot sauce from Hillary's purse to sell you. So, Barry takes a couple steps into the lobby, and the security just leaps out from behind a plant and says, "Whoever you are, you're not invited. You cannot come in." Sure. Was it the main public entrance lobby or like did he walk in behind someone else into an office building? If he wanted to talk to a higher-up, had he made an appointment? Is it that crazy that local politicians can't just walk into corporations without making an appointment and say, "I want to talk to the man in charge! Several thousand people voted for me!" Did a whole "team" really "surround" him? He makes it sound like it was a hostage situation.
- pluckytree 10y ago
  What happened was he tried to get in and the one security guard told him he dad to be escorted by an employee, just as the sign said. Hundreds of people do this every day, thinking they will be able to see the campus on the inside. The only people that get escorted out are protestors who storm the lobby.
  - wutbrodo 10y ago
    > Hundreds of people do this every day, thinking they will be able to see the campus on the inside. During my time at Google, I had multiple people come up to me and ask me from where they could catch a guided tour of the campus. I always felt bad telling them there was none...
- deleted 10y ago
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- tptacek 10y ago
  Nit: Hillary Clinton is apparently an authentic fiend for hot sauce; she has a giant collection of them, takes it with her everywhere, and puts it on everything, including foods where it's kind of gross to eat with hot sauce.
Loque 10y ago
It's not just apple, it is every company that dodges taxes. Making an example of apple is not fair - everyone should pay their taxes... who knows how the systems we have in place would actually work if people used it the way it is designed (instead of finding loopholes for their own benefit).
- icebraining 10y ago
  Which taxes is Apple dodging? I'm not sure you read the article carefully. The mayor wanted to pass a new tax, but the other council members voted his proposal down.
  - Loque 10y ago
    Ah, thanks - it seems I was talking about something else; https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jan/15/apple-european-commission-ruling-back-taxes-ireland https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jan/15/apple-eur...
    - icebraining 10y ago
      That's not Apple dodging taxes either; they were just caught in the crossfire of the tax war that's been happening in the EU. Ireland, the Netherlands, etc try to lure companies by competing on tax rates, which the rest of the EU doesn't like, so as in any cartel, they forbid member states from dropping them too low. Since Ireland's was found to be in infringement, the companies have to pay the difference.
guelo 10y ago
Regardless of the politics, Apple and Google and all the other Peninsula companies should be willing to help fund public transit because it is directly affecting their ability to recruit employees.
- tamana 10y ago
  They are. The people who control the munis don't want to bother building transit.
- ascagnel_ 10y ago
  Public transit has a huge NIMBY problem. It raises value in a radius around transit stops, but decreases the value of anything along it's route.
DannyBee 10y ago
So, uh, the city is already highly dependent on one payer, and the solution proposed is to increase the proportion that payer pays? I guess i never understand why people think the solution to something having too much influence due to money is to become more dependent on their money. I can see no magic way to accomplish this without an increase in influence from that payer, and to think you can seems ... pretty pie-in-the-sky. The real solution is to diversify where your money comes from, at pretty much any cost.
- jsprogrammer 10y ago
  By "one payer" you mean the thousands of people on hundreds of acres in Cupertino?
- shwouchk 10y ago
  (I'm not addressing the article at all, just your logic): By that logic, the simplest way to get rid of the dependence is to decrease their tax to 0%...
  - DannyBee 10y ago
    Yes, or increase the amount you get from others. If you don't need them, and they aren't providing anything for you, they have less influence on you. The way you be less dependent on people is ... to be less dependent on them. Not by being more dependent and trying to set up magic firewalls or whatever.
nxzero 10y ago
Unable to find a source, but I thought Cupertino City Council approved this; if true, the Mayor blaming Apple for the City Council's actions seems a bit twisted. Is anyone know if what if any role the Cupertino City Council played in the situation and provided a source to back this up?
linux_girl 10y ago
"Barry Chang barely made it into the lobby when Apple’s security team surrounded and escorted him off the property. “They said ‘you cannot come in, you’re not invited’. After that I left and have not gone back,” said an exasperated Chang, who’s been mayor since December 2015 and had approached the computing firm when he was serving on the city council three years ago." I have a business in Sunnyvale, just about 1.5 miles from Apple Infinite Loop HQ. And I certainly wouldn't like it if Sunnyvale elected officials marched in uninvited. Goons from the city already march in once a year to see if my Compliance Notices are posted (Minimum Wage signs, some stupid sign about "If You Are Being Human Trafficked" and my business license--all for a 8 person software company.)
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HarryDevlin 10y ago
The real issue with Apple Inc, and taxes, is about sales tax revenue. When Apple was close to bankruptcy, in the 1990's, the City of Cupertino agreed to refund Apple 50% of the sales tax revenue to which the city was entitled. This is sales tax revenue from online and phone sales on purchases shipped to addresses in California. This arrangement continued unchanged even as Apple emerged from the dark days of John Sculley and Gil Ameilo, and became one of the most profitable companies in the world. In 2013, Apple agreed to change this agreement so that Cupertino would give Apple only 35% of the sales tax revenue to which Cupertino is entitled, rather than 50% On the surface, this is crazy. Apple does very little for Cupertino in the way of community benefits, AND they expect Cupertino to refund sales tax revenue to them! However the alternative would be far worse for Cupertino. Apple could move online and phone sales out of California completely and then Cupertino would get no sales tax revenue at all. What Apple is doing is not illegal. Companies pressure cities for tax concessions all the time. It may be unethical, but that is not Apple's concern. That said, Mayor Barry Chang is widely considered a nut case. He attacks residents at City Council Meetings, creates fictional stories about those that disagree with him, is illegally running for a state assembly seat in a district where he is ineligible to run, and has gone on the radio and made disparaging comments about Mexicans. He is in the process of being recalled by residents. If I were Apple security, I'd escort him off campus too!

169 points by Libertatea 10y ago

Is the money better in the hands of a super overgrown and overstaffed organisation like the US government when most of it goes to paying interest to the lovely central banks folks and the public has almost 0 transparency over its expenditure? The perfect portrayal of profound inefficiency and over-bloated corporate structure. It's fun and easy to point fingers, and while tax avoidance should by no means by encouraged, why is 35% of your money the direct property of a government who does superb things like conjure into existence some of the most criminal oligopolies in the medical industry? Maybe demand Apple to build the infrastructure themselves at their own expense, and let them manage it, seems they can actually get things done. Uncle Sam's virtues seem to end with insane taxation used to bomb other countries and slowly but surely kill its citizens through rudimentary medical care bills in the hundreds of thousands, maybe leave real work to other people, who don't spend 600 mil of taxpayer dollar on a website.

dragontamer 10y ago
> Is the money better in the hands of a super overgrown and overstaffed organisation like the US government This is the municipal government complaining. Municipal governments are in charge of education, local police, and water supply... to name a few things. The federal government barely does much at the local level. The USA is a very decentralized system. So how about you at least complain about the right thing? If Cupertino's municipal police forces were locking people up unnecessarily or were an ineffective municipal government, that'd actually be relevant to the topic. But methinks you're just ranting about unrelated subjects.
krisdol 10y ago
Apple has yet to provide me with food stamps or public housing, both of which saved me when I was a refugee. I can check with my spouse but I'm pretty sure the public hospital she works at was not an apple product. The rest is just ridiculous. If you want an effective government, you have to take privatization out of it, not rely on it as we have.
- adventured 10y ago
  Apple paid $46 billion in just income taxes over the last three fiscal years. The majority of that was likely in the US market, where they're more heavily taxed and have a very large market share. I don't know where you live, but if it's in the US, then you're wrong: they did in fact help pay for food stamps and public housing. Last fiscal year, Apple generated $72.5 billion in income before income taxes, and paid $19.1 billion in income taxes ($53.3b in net income). That's a 26.3% rate. That rate is higher than corporations pay in almost any other developed nation (Europe typically has the lowest corporate income tax rates for example), and that's after they go out of their way to try to avoid paying taxes. That $19 billion in taxes pays for a lot of welfare state benefits.
  - NLips 10y ago
    The parent's point is precisely that: The welfare is paid by the government, with money that it takes in taxes from e.g. corporations.

Shivetya 10y ago

So Apple is already contributing nearly twenty percent of the city's budget? I think the real problem is not enough diversification. Apparently there is also an agreement where the city refunds sales taxes back to Apple? Originally 50% and now down to 35%? Why does this even exist? The way to get Apple to pay for infrastructure improvements is simple, don't do any near their campus and their own employees will be impacted and that will get Apple to agree to help redevelop the area.

demarq 10y ago
> The way to get Apple to pay for infrastructure improvements is simple, don't do any near their campus and their own employees will be impacted and that will get Apple to agree to help redevelop the area. And whatever they build they will control. I think you might be slowly giving away the city to a corporation.
- dragontamer 10y ago
  That'd only happen if you ceded zoning regulations over to Apple though.

sourcd 10y ago

> Barry Chang barely made it into the lobby when Apple’s security team surrounded and escorted him off the property. I had to read it again to make sure I'm not making a mistake. Its unimaginable in some geographies. Evokes mixed feelings like : "cool, they can do that?" to "that's quite arrogant" Also reminds me of a video where Steve Jobs met the council. The mayor was delighted like a teenager, showing off his iPad to Steve, asking for free Wifi : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gtuz5OmOh_M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gtuz5OmOh_M ( t=19:54 )

dragontamer 10y ago
I agree. This is... worrisome behavior of a Mayor. > Getting local politicians to battle Apple is hard, Chang said. He recently proposed that Apple – which is building a massive new campus its own employees nicknamed the Death Star, or more favorably, The Spaceship – should give $100m to improve city infrastructure. To move on the proposal, Chang only needed to get a single vote ‘yes’ among the three other eligible council members. He failed to get that vote. What's his logic for this special Tax on Apple? It sounds like this guy is an anti-corporate loon, drinking too much Sanders juice or something. Sounds like the other council members are more rational.
- demarq 10y ago
  >What's his logic for this special Tax on Apple "You’re helping create the problems, so you have to help solve the problem" - Chang
  - dragontamer 10y ago
    Maybe if he described what these problems were, he's get my support. But considering that he can't even get the support of his own citizens at Town Hall meetings, nor the support of his fellow council members, methinks he's simply incompetent. And that the problems he describes are made up in his imagination. I can't imagine it to be too difficult to come up with a budget that says "We have to pay for X Million Dollars in the next year to fix the bridges and roads... or to upgrade our water pipes, or to deploy municipal gigabit-fiber. So here's a special +5% tax on all corporations in this Town" And if the fellow citizens and council members think the plan is worth the tax, then they'll probably agree with him. On the other hand, if citizens are balling up his agendas and throwing them out during meetings... there's clearly a problem here. And it isn't with Apple. Its with the Mayor.

dragontamer 10y ago

> At a recent Cupertino city council meeting, some residents protested about a lack of funding for public projects, Chang said – even crumpling up meeting agendas and throwing them. “They ball up the paper and throw it, and they say ‘You’re making all the wrong decisions’,” Chang said. “In the meantime Apple is not willing to pay a dime. They’re making profit, and they should share the responsibility for our city, but they won’t. They abuse us.” Is it just me, or does this Mr. Chang just sound incompetent? His citizens are saying he's making the wrong decisions. He's walking onto Apple's property and being forced out. He's asking for special taxes against Apple without saying why Apple deserves these taxes. How about Chang makes the right decisions that pleases his citizens? Has anyone actually been to a Town Hall meeting? People don't just crumple-up the agendas because your budget sucks. They crumple-up agendas because the meeting was a waste of everybody's time. I think this Mayor can't run a Town Hall, doesn't have much support of the citizens, and his only "big idea" is to increase taxes against Apple (and maybe some moonshot projects no one gives a care about) A REAL Mayor would have said something along the lines of "The highway leading to Apple Headquarters is full of potholes, and I don't have the budget to fix it!". Or maybe "Teachers deserve a higher salary in this town" (or something... connected to reality, you know?). This guy just seems jealous of Apple's cash.

adventured 10y ago
If Apple is meant to pay a new tax based on their net income, then every business that operates in Cupertino should obviously pay the same tax. Let's see how that goes over.
- dragontamer 10y ago
  Exactly. Although really, Apple would just change headquarters and Cupertino would be in a bit of a mess if you made an corporate-level income-tax
  - auntienomen 10y ago
    They wouldn't have to physically move. Only legally. It'd be easy enough for them to arrange so that the corporate entity in Cupertino is a subsidiary which only ever makes a loss. No profits, no tax for Chang. Actually, I wouldn't be surprised if Apple is already structured this way.

martinald 10y ago

In the UK we have the concept of "Section 106" payments which allow a development through planning by the developer paying the local government some amount of money to redress the cost of dealing with congestion, public relam, affordable housing, etc. For large skyscraper developments in London, this can be many many millions of pounds. Does something similar exist in CA?

mdasen 10y ago
I'm not sure there's an official code for it in the States, but it definitely happens. In this case, Apple is spending in excess of a hundred million - $66M on things like infrastructure and low-income housing, $35 incentivizing alternative transit to work, and $15.4M annually to the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority (http://venturebeat.com/2013/06/04/apple-campus-2-7k-employees-32m-in-property-tax-9k-construction-jobs-66m-in-public-improvements/ http://venturebeat.com/2013/06/04/apple-campus-2-7k-employee...). In some cases, companies get sweet deals from locations to move there - Tesla is getting a whopping $1.2B from Nevada. But in Apple's case, they're paying.
Lazare 10y ago
Yes. But it's usually handled at a higher government level than the local council of a 60k person town. :) California, in particular, is somewhat famous for having an enormous number of state agencies; I rather assume one or more of those made the deal with Apple.
djschnei 10y ago
Wow... outstanding haha. So in bringing more business to an area, they need to pay twice? At what point do people actually own the land they own?
- awinder 10y ago
  Uh, yeah, they have to cost-share the burden of upsetting the current infrastructure. Say you owned a piece of property adjacent to where all this new building is going on. Is it your responsibility to chip in? Is it your responsibility to shoulder the cost burden of what is effectively a zoning-related issue? I mean, god, when do you really own the property you're standing on? You didn't even ask for all this development, but now you've got to pay for expanding the infrastructure because a new developer wants to reap financial reward by developing up his land? Yeah. It's not a property freedom issue, it's a cost ecosystem issue. As time goes on and life changes, owning property is going to have fluid costs, and tax assessments on people who come in to develop land is one way to defray those costs from disproportionately hitting people who have lived in an area for a long time. Frankly, those people would never really plan for that kind of thing to happen, so you're avoiding a lot of nasty repercussions by taxing the person upsetting the ecosystem, rather than the members of the ecosystem itself.

mdasen 10y ago

Absolutely terrible article. In an article about property taxes paid or unpaid, it doesn't even mention property taxes. Is Apple's campus under-assessed? A little Googling shows Cupertino's tax rate as $7.96 on a thousand which would value Apple's campus at $1.16B. Is that a lot? Is that a little? What are other companies assessed at in Cupertino and surrounding cities? The article talks about income taxes which are totally irrelevant to the situation and Woz's assertion that Apple should pay 50% income tax. The article talks about money earned offshore that Apple doesn't pay standard US income tax on, but fails to mention that pretty much every other country in the world doesn't tax foreign earned income as income earned locally (just letting it be taxed in the country it was earned). Plus, it's irrelevant to Cupertino. This is just "you should hate on Apple. Why? Um, they're not paying taxes. What taxes aren't they paying? Um. . . the taxes." Really, my simple Googling of Cupertino's tax rate and then trying to come up with an assessment off that isn't good journalism. But I'm just writing a comment on HN at 8am. I'm not a paid journalist - but that paid journalist hasn't researched the simplest questions possible. If Apple were replaced by hundreds of companies that added up to the same number of desks, would Cupertino get more money? If the answer is "no", then there's no story here. http://venturebeat.com/2013/06/04/apple-campus-2-7k-employees-32m-in-property-tax-9k-construction-jobs-66m-in-public-improvements/ http://venturebeat.com/2013/06/04/apple-campus-2-7k-employee... The simplest Googling comes up with a much more useful article. Apple paid $25M in property tax in 2012 and that is going to grow by $32M annually with Campus 2 to over $56.5 annually. Apple is funding $66M in local public improvements and $35M on transportation demand programs. Plus, Cupertino is getting $38.1 in one-time construction fees and taxes and Apple is going to pay the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority $15.4M annually. The caption of the image on the guardian article says the mayor wanted $100M from Apple for infrastructure - beyond the more than hundred million the VentureBeat article notes. It kind of sounds like the Mayor is incompetent, hated by voters who are trying to recall him, trying to salvage his career by running for state assembly, and trying to blame his incompetence on Apple. It seems to be more an article about how Cupertino has a terrible mayor. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/sep/27/business/la-fi-apple-company-town-20130929 http://articles.latimes.com/2013/sep/27/business/la-fi-apple... Here's another, much better article. It notes that Apple's original campus was 856,000 square feet and that Apple has bought (which they would pay tax on) or leased (which their landlord would pay tax on) another 2M square feet. That makes it hard to say exactly what the property should be assessed at given that we don't know what proportion of the 2M they own, but let's say half. At $500/sq ft, 1.856M square feet would come out to $928M in property value. That's pretty close to $1.16B. At the very least, it seems like Apple's taxes are in the ballpark - especially when you consider the amazing deals that companies regularly negotiate to move to locations. Tesla negotated a 100% property tax and sales tax abatement from Nevada for 10 and 20 years respectively, $12,500 for every job, 10 years of 100% business tax abatement, discounted electricity rates for 8 years, plus $120M - totaling $1.2 Billion. Again, it sounds like an incompetent mayor that voters are trying to recall attempting to save his career.

Lazare 10y ago

I can't believe Apple is wilfully not paying property taxes on their headquarters! That's quite illegal, and I'm sure... ...oh, they are paying their property taxes? I see. So which taxes, precisely, are they not paying the Cupertino government? Oh, there aren't any taxes, but you sort of wish someone with the authority to do so would pass a law making new taxes, but they won't, so you're mad at...Apple? 'k.

golergka 10y ago
He isn't trying to make new taxes exactly, he just wants his $100 million. Apple's so big, they shouldn't mind parting with $100 mil for no good reason, right? It's not like they have responsibilities to shareholders or something.
- twinkletwinkle 10y ago
  You must not get it: they have money and he doesn't. They ought to give him the money. This is a weird shill piece, why bother printing it?
slantaclaus 10y ago
They're called impact fees, and the dumb shmuck should have created laws to levy them beforehand
- gumby 10y ago
  He tried and failed, which makes his position even more absurd, regardless of what you think of the merits of his case.
  - slantaclaus 10y ago
    If I remember correctly, that was a special assessment tax for the particular development in question which Jobs ripped to shreds by threatening to move Apple's operations elsewhere in the valley. What they would have had to have done was to create a catch-all impact fee law to apply to all developments based on the number of new traffic they would create. This would probably be bad for business though.

rdlecler1 10y ago

You might argue that the mayor is abusing us because of the cities housing restrictions.

slantaclaus 10y ago
PREACH

apeace 10y ago

> Apple pays a 2.3% effective tax rate on its $181bn in cash held offshore... > ...shield themselves off from the theoretically 35% federal corporate tax rate Something seems wrong here. I don't think companies are expected to pay 35% yearly on cash reserves. Am I confused, or is the article? If anyone is knowledgable about this I'd be interested to know the deal!

mdasen 10y ago
Basically all countries tax companies on income earned in that country. So, if you're a UK company and you earn $1B in the UK and $500M in France, you pay tax on $1B to the UK government and tax on $500M to the French government. The US taxes companies on their worldwide income when they re-patriate that money to the US. So, if you earned $500M in France and want to bring that money back into the US, you owe US taxes on it (in addition to the French taxes already paid). If you don't bring the money back to the US, you just pay the French taxes. People have called the ability to hold the money overseas a loophole, but given that basically no other country taxes companies on their worldwide income, it seems more that the US is the outlier. Let's put it this way. A UK-based firm earns $1B in the US and $1B in the UK and has to pay the American tax authorities on $1B and UK tax authorities on $1B and it can then bring the profit back from the US. That seems fair. By contrast, a US-based firm earns the same amount in each country and must pay the US tax on $1B, the UK tax on $1B, and then the US tax on whatever they bring back from the UK (which has already had UK tax paid on it). This encourages companies to reinvest their profits overseas rather than bring the money back to the US where it would get taxed again. It's partly because the US is so large and has been more isolated than most countries. Likewise, it's basically the only country that taxes individuals based on citizenship rather than residency.
- seanmcdirmid 10y ago
  This isn't entirely accurate. First, You can deduct foreign taxes paid, so $1B earned in the UK could would come back only in paying the difference of higher US and UK taxes. But tax systems in different countries are different, deductions are different, as are fees and such....it leads to a huge mess. The other hard thing to reason about is where the value was added. If the IP was developed in the states, technically, it has to be sold through, so profits on it are still taxed here, to the foreign branch, where only retail profits are taxed...or something like that. It gets really messy when you are also doing R&D abroad...and you can see why tax games are possible and even necessary.

Eduard 10y ago

Question towards Steve Jobs on a Cupertino City Council Meeting in 2011: "[How do] city residents benefit from [Apple's new campus]?" Jobs: "Well, as you know, we're the largest taxpayer in Cupertino. So we'd like to continue to stay here and pay taxes. [...]. Because if we can't, then we have to go somehwere like Mountain View [and] the largest tax base will go away. This wouldn't be good for Cupertino." https://youtu.be/gtuz5OmOh_M?t=11m1s https://youtu.be/gtuz5OmOh_M?t=11m1s

drzaiusapelord 10y ago
Can you blame him? There's nothing sleazier than municipal governments, at least once they reach a certain size. They all see the business class as a gravy train to ride instead of finding ways to do a better job with the already large budgets they have. Chicago doesn't have a Jobs to control it, so its endless tax raises to pay for sweetheart public union pension deals and other backroom corruption. I think the internet-friendly narrative of government being bullied by evil corporations is a fairly unrealistic. Its usually the other way around. I find it amusing that so many have an undying love for Jobs' judgement in business, technology, etc but his political dealings give them pause because it goes against the left's idea of how the world works. Jobs didn't act like this to be difficult, he said and did these things because its one of the more effective ways to control a city government that can hurt or even destroy your business trivially.
- tamana 10y ago
  Size has nothing to do with it. Plenty of small sleazy munis too
- PavlovsCat 10y ago
  While we're talking generalities, here's something more serious. > What has been created by this half century of massive corporate propaganda is what's called "anti-politics". So that anything that goes wrong, you blame the government. Well okay, there's plenty to blame the government about, but the government is the one institution that people can change... the one institution that you can affect without institutional change. That's exactly why all the anger and fear has been directed at the government. The government has a defect - it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect - they're pure tyrannies. So therefore you want to keep corporations invisible, and focus all anger on the government. So if you don't like something, you know, your wages are going down, you blame the government. Not blame the guys in the Fortune 500, because you don't read the Fortune 500. You just read what they tell you in the newspapers... so you don't read about the dazzling profits and the stupendous dizz, and the wages going down and so on, all you know is that the bad government is doing something, so let's get mad at the government. -- Noam Chomsky

yalogin 10y ago

This is such a crappy hit job on Apple. The mayor green lighted a bunch of projects in Cupertino and the people hated it. The congestion is not happening because of Apple but because of the new home developments that are approved. He wants to protect himself by getting free money from Apple to make his people happy with some infrastructure construction. Apple is not obligated to give the guy free money.

jamespitts 10y ago

Perfect article while the Life and Death of Cities is in mind. Apple could be a better citizen, and contribute a lot more than money to the city around it. If the company fully subscribes to shareholder theory, they will contribute only what the law requires. But Apple seems to stand for higher things such as design excellence and human dignity. The company can contribute to making Cupertino a functional and wonderful "city". It is neither of those things now with its car-centric configuration and lack of enough housing construction. The actions taken by Cook regarding issues such as protecting privacy indicate that he stands for values beyond serving the shareholders. Those values could be developed for the community immediately outside the campus. Apple's ability to design such great things and manufacture them in vast numbers indicates that it has the ability to address very difficult problems. Those skills could be applied to the problems 25 feet away from their windows. The people at Apple might think of Cupertino as a source of design challenges, and start by understanding the shape of the city and the people who interact with it. Take a look at the aggregate data coming in from the watch, or hang out by one of the main stroads. Try to take a walk to various useful places some time, or get three things done in a morning without a car. All of us have the capacity to be more than a minimal tax payer. Being more starts with noticing.

stephencanon 10y ago
> The company can contribute to making Cupertino a functional and wonderful "city". It is neither of those things now with its car-centric configuration and lack of enough housing construction. The car-centric configuration is what most of the current residents want (if they wanted something else, they would choose to live somewhere else). Since they control a majority voting block in city politics, there's very little that Apple can do to change that; significant changes to the status quo will be blocked by the city residents.
- jamespitts 10y ago
  What is "want"? And why does it have to be so immovable? We can't always walk away from what we do or where we live. Car-centric, earth-wasting behavior is ostensibly what we want, because most of us engage in it every day. So is sugar soda and processed food, lack of exercise, and any number of unhealthy things we do. So is paying huge amounts of money for a house, then fighting any new development near our neighborhood out of self interest. It is possible for people to essentially be trapped in a situation in which rational choices are a bad ones. How might we break out of that?

imgabe 10y ago

Slightly off topic, but is that really the design for Apple's new headquarters, a giant ring? So if you want to get from a place on one side to the other, you have to walk halfway around the circle or cut through the giant park in the middle? That seems horribly inefficient.

pluckytree 10y ago
Related teams tend to sit close to each other in any case, so this is a worst case scenario. Which isn’t really that bad anyways. It’s good exercise and a rectangular building holding 14,000 people would also require a lot of walking. Sure, it could be many, many rectangular buildings which everyone else does, which would require even more walking. Not to mentain there’s a huge benefit in productivity for 14,000 people to all get abundant natural sunlight, which is available to only a fraction of the people in a standard campus. Vitamin D is deficient in many people and engineers typically don’t get out much. I’d say it’s a win-win for everyone. Finally, the campus is pretty compact, leading to a ton of open space, which, combined with natural light, will likely lead to greater productivity and also be a great attraction to new employees who value the look and feel of their work environment very highly.
Bud 10y ago
You might need to think more about what "efficient" actually means. Apple did.
- imgabe 10y ago
  If you can move in a 2 dimensional plane, such as inside a regular building, you can go in a straight line between any two points. If you're constricted to moving around the circumference of a circle, you necessarily have to go in a curved line. Curved lines are longer than straight lines. So the average distance between any two points is necessarily going to be longer in the Apple building than in a normal building with the same floor area. Add to that, normal buildings have cores where the utilities are run in the center and radiate out to the edges. Running wiring, plumbing, and ductwork around a circle will involve miles of additional material that would otherwise be unnecessary. I think maybe you and Apple have a definition of efficient that differs from the rest of the population.

based2 10y ago

http://9to5mac.com/2016/05/02/apple-campus-2-drone-flyover-may/ http://9to5mac.com/2016/05/02/apple-campus-2-drone-flyover-m...

GBond 10y ago

Another example of "High Tech is the new Banking"... in the bad public perception sense.

discardorama 10y ago

What's forgotten in this discussion are the property taxes in Cupertino. The property values in Cupertino are among the highest in the Bay Area, and with that comes more property taxes. I doubt Cupertino would be this desirable were it not for Apple (and the school district). So once again Apple, albeit indirectly, helps pad city coffers.

kumarm 10y ago
Most residents of Cupertino pay very little property tax due to prop 13. Some residents pay 3000$ for the same house when their neighbors pay 18000$.
- discardorama 10y ago
  "Most" requires some hard data; and whether the fraction is higher or lower than the neighboring areas. Prop 13 is California-wide, so it's not specific to Cupertino.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

lewis500 10y ago

This reporter is credulous, because the Guardian is just awful. "Barry Chang barely made it into the lobby when Apple’s security team surrounded and escorted him off the property. “They said ‘you cannot come in, you’re not invited’. After that I left and have not gone back,” said an exasperated Chang." Uh huh. Yeah I bet it happened just like that. What buffoon of a reporter prints a politician's self-serving and incredible story as plain fact? If you buy this story, I've got a pile of Trump steaks and a bottle of hot sauce from Hillary's purse to sell you. So, Barry takes a couple steps into the lobby, and the security just leaps out from behind a plant and says, "Whoever you are, you're not invited. You cannot come in." Sure. Was it the main public entrance lobby or like did he walk in behind someone else into an office building? If he wanted to talk to a higher-up, had he made an appointment? Is it that crazy that local politicians can't just walk into corporations without making an appointment and say, "I want to talk to the man in charge! Several thousand people voted for me!" Did a whole "team" really "surround" him? He makes it sound like it was a hostage situation.

pluckytree 10y ago
What happened was he tried to get in and the one security guard told him he dad to be escorted by an employee, just as the sign said. Hundreds of people do this every day, thinking they will be able to see the campus on the inside. The only people that get escorted out are protestors who storm the lobby.
- wutbrodo 10y ago
  > Hundreds of people do this every day, thinking they will be able to see the campus on the inside. During my time at Google, I had multiple people come up to me and ask me from where they could catch a guided tour of the campus. I always felt bad telling them there was none...
deleted 10y ago
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tptacek 10y ago
Nit: Hillary Clinton is apparently an authentic fiend for hot sauce; she has a giant collection of them, takes it with her everywhere, and puts it on everything, including foods where it's kind of gross to eat with hot sauce.

Loque 10y ago

It's not just apple, it is every company that dodges taxes. Making an example of apple is not fair - everyone should pay their taxes... who knows how the systems we have in place would actually work if people used it the way it is designed (instead of finding loopholes for their own benefit).

icebraining 10y ago
Which taxes is Apple dodging? I'm not sure you read the article carefully. The mayor wanted to pass a new tax, but the other council members voted his proposal down.
- Loque 10y ago
  Ah, thanks - it seems I was talking about something else; https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jan/15/apple-european-commission-ruling-back-taxes-ireland https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jan/15/apple-eur...
  - icebraining 10y ago
    That's not Apple dodging taxes either; they were just caught in the crossfire of the tax war that's been happening in the EU. Ireland, the Netherlands, etc try to lure companies by competing on tax rates, which the rest of the EU doesn't like, so as in any cartel, they forbid member states from dropping them too low. Since Ireland's was found to be in infringement, the companies have to pay the difference.

guelo 10y ago

Regardless of the politics, Apple and Google and all the other Peninsula companies should be willing to help fund public transit because it is directly affecting their ability to recruit employees.

tamana 10y ago
They are. The people who control the munis don't want to bother building transit.
ascagnel_ 10y ago
Public transit has a huge NIMBY problem. It raises value in a radius around transit stops, but decreases the value of anything along it's route.

DannyBee 10y ago

So, uh, the city is already highly dependent on one payer, and the solution proposed is to increase the proportion that payer pays? I guess i never understand why people think the solution to something having too much influence due to money is to become more dependent on their money. I can see no magic way to accomplish this without an increase in influence from that payer, and to think you can seems ... pretty pie-in-the-sky. The real solution is to diversify where your money comes from, at pretty much any cost.

jsprogrammer 10y ago
By "one payer" you mean the thousands of people on hundreds of acres in Cupertino?
shwouchk 10y ago
(I'm not addressing the article at all, just your logic): By that logic, the simplest way to get rid of the dependence is to decrease their tax to 0%...
- DannyBee 10y ago
  Yes, or increase the amount you get from others. If you don't need them, and they aren't providing anything for you, they have less influence on you. The way you be less dependent on people is ... to be less dependent on them. Not by being more dependent and trying to set up magic firewalls or whatever.

nxzero 10y ago

Unable to find a source, but I thought Cupertino City Council approved this; if true, the Mayor blaming Apple for the City Council's actions seems a bit twisted. Is anyone know if what if any role the Cupertino City Council played in the situation and provided a source to back this up?

linux_girl 10y ago

"Barry Chang barely made it into the lobby when Apple’s security team surrounded and escorted him off the property. “They said ‘you cannot come in, you’re not invited’. After that I left and have not gone back,” said an exasperated Chang, who’s been mayor since December 2015 and had approached the computing firm when he was serving on the city council three years ago." I have a business in Sunnyvale, just about 1.5 miles from Apple Infinite Loop HQ. And I certainly wouldn't like it if Sunnyvale elected officials marched in uninvited. Goons from the city already march in once a year to see if my Compliance Notices are posted (Minimum Wage signs, some stupid sign about "If You Are Being Human Trafficked" and my business license--all for a 8 person software company.)

deleted 10y ago

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HarryDevlin 10y ago

The real issue with Apple Inc, and taxes, is about sales tax revenue. When Apple was close to bankruptcy, in the 1990's, the City of Cupertino agreed to refund Apple 50% of the sales tax revenue to which the city was entitled. This is sales tax revenue from online and phone sales on purchases shipped to addresses in California. This arrangement continued unchanged even as Apple emerged from the dark days of John Sculley and Gil Ameilo, and became one of the most profitable companies in the world. In 2013, Apple agreed to change this agreement so that Cupertino would give Apple only 35% of the sales tax revenue to which Cupertino is entitled, rather than 50% On the surface, this is crazy. Apple does very little for Cupertino in the way of community benefits, AND they expect Cupertino to refund sales tax revenue to them! However the alternative would be far worse for Cupertino. Apple could move online and phone sales out of California completely and then Cupertino would get no sales tax revenue at all. What Apple is doing is not illegal. Companies pressure cities for tax concessions all the time. It may be unethical, but that is not Apple's concern. That said, Mayor Barry Chang is widely considered a nut case. He attacks residents at City Council Meetings, creates fictional stories about those that disagree with him, is illegally running for a state assembly seat in a district where he is ineligible to run, and has gone on the radio and made disparaging comments about Mexicans. He is in the process of being recalled by residents. If I were Apple security, I'd escort him off campus too!