8 ms·

Partially, but only partially if you take this sentence literally: "our town is essentially a corporation where the citizens are the investors and stakeholders

by netcan 5y ago

Partially, but only partially if you take this sentence literally: "our town is essentially a corporation where the citizens are the investors and stakeholders.. We are a real estate development company that also provides services... with holdings totaling $1.29 billion," Apple is essentially the stakeholder in the Apple ecosystem. Some decisions are made as you suggest. Apple price phones and laptops such that costs are covered and profits are made. Some decisions are "strategic." There's no direct revenue from their photo app, but a photo app helps sell phones and (more importantly) if Apple doesn't provide one then FB or Google will. A lot of Apple's decisions are like this. Some, currently very important decisions are all about leveraging power to extract revenue. Apple charge Google $15bn to be safari's default search option. They apply similar logic to all activity on iphones. As in-app purchases emerge, subscriptions, digital goods, physical goods or any other category emerges... Apple study that market and determine how much they can charge. It has nothing to do with how much these cost apple to support. IDK if this applies to Galesburg, but I think most towns/governments/municipalities have the power to generate a lot more revenue than they do... certainly during a building boom. What Apple would be doing in this position is (a) determining where real estate profits are being made (b) moving to claim the majority of those profits as revenue. I'm not saying they should do this, but the point of difference is worth noting.

sokoloff 5y ago
Maybe banning the import of anything from the outside and charging a 30% sales tax is the answer?
- netcan 5y ago
  Possibly, depending on what the question is. My point wasn't that an analogy to commercial businesses should be made, but that since an analogy is being made...
mellavora 5y ago
Please, this idea that business is universally better at producing value than any other form of social organization has to die. I'm pro business. I founded my first money-making venture when I was 4 years old (selling "art" to strangers on the street-- the business was quickly closed by the regulators-- Mom). But business is best when the value created by an investment can be (mostly) captured by a single entity, and also generally when the ROI is short term. Why shouldn't businesses provide i.e. (K-12) education? Because, unless every single student goes to work for the company, then the value they create is lost to them. So you cannot align the interests of the business with providing quality education. NOTING that the diffuse value created by government is often many orders of magnitude greater than the value which can be captured by a single organization. Another example: value of the internet vs value of Google. Google is an insanely valuable organization, but a) it wouldn't exist without the internet, and b) the other FANGS also derive their value from the internet. So clearly the internet's value is many times greater than that of any internet-based company.
- acdha 5y ago
  > Why shouldn't businesses provide i.e. (K-12) education? Because, unless every single student goes to work for the company, then the value they create is lost to them. So you cannot align the interests of the business with providing quality education. The charter school industry is the textbook example of this: what usually happens is that some school will have a good couple of years, and we’ll get some Slate piece about how they’ve discovered the secret of cost-effective education. Unfortunately, over time regression to the mean usually sets in and results start to look statistically similar to public school students of similar socioeconomic status while the few which maintain a performance edge inevitably turn out to have found a way to cherry-pick higher SES students and exclude the most expensive students because that’s what they’re incentivized to do.
  - sokoloff 5y ago
    I think they often skip the first step of even bothering to outperform after correcting for socioeconomic differences. If you can cherry-pick students, education can be both more effective and cheaper for those whom you decide to serve.
    - acdha 5y ago
      Often, yes, but sometimes it does happen because they got the most enthusiastic staff (not yet worn down) and attracted the most prepared poor kids with the most motivated parents (the ones who’ll take a chance on a new school pledging higher academic standards). The one I really wish the United States was better at accounting for is assistance for students with special needs. That hammers public school budgets and also means that those kids are discouraged from trying a new school because that’ll reset their support plan even if the new school offers services.
      - dantheman 5y ago
        It's very simple, just attach the money to the child and then let the parents determine what school they go to.
kristjansson 5y ago
Tying property tax to market value is a form of this, I think. The town doesn’t realize substantially more costs when property values go up, but wants to participate in the growth of ‘its’ property. So it structures its relationship with its users to capture some of the growth in value. Unfortunately the leverage of a small town is relatively low, so they don’t have much power to capture their users growth
mark-r 5y ago
> What Apple would be doing in this position is (a) determining where real estate profits are being made (b) moving to claim the majority of those profits as revenue. In the real world it's just the opposite. Apple has a monopoly on the Apple ecosystem, but nobody has a monopoly on land. Corporations will play one city against another to see which will give them the biggest subsidies and tax breaks.

by netcan 5y ago

sokoloff 5y ago

Maybe banning the import of anything from the outside and charging a 30% sales tax is the answer?

netcan 5y ago
Possibly, depending on what the question is. My point wasn't that an analogy to commercial businesses should be made, but that since an analogy is being made...

mellavora 5y ago

Please, this idea that business is universally better at producing value than any other form of social organization has to die. I'm pro business. I founded my first money-making venture when I was 4 years old (selling "art" to strangers on the street-- the business was quickly closed by the regulators-- Mom). But business is best when the value created by an investment can be (mostly) captured by a single entity, and also generally when the ROI is short term. Why shouldn't businesses provide i.e. (K-12) education? Because, unless every single student goes to work for the company, then the value they create is lost to them. So you cannot align the interests of the business with providing quality education. NOTING that the diffuse value created by government is often many orders of magnitude greater than the value which can be captured by a single organization. Another example: value of the internet vs value of Google. Google is an insanely valuable organization, but a) it wouldn't exist without the internet, and b) the other FANGS also derive their value from the internet. So clearly the internet's value is many times greater than that of any internet-based company.

acdha 5y ago
> Why shouldn't businesses provide i.e. (K-12) education? Because, unless every single student goes to work for the company, then the value they create is lost to them. So you cannot align the interests of the business with providing quality education. The charter school industry is the textbook example of this: what usually happens is that some school will have a good couple of years, and we’ll get some Slate piece about how they’ve discovered the secret of cost-effective education. Unfortunately, over time regression to the mean usually sets in and results start to look statistically similar to public school students of similar socioeconomic status while the few which maintain a performance edge inevitably turn out to have found a way to cherry-pick higher SES students and exclude the most expensive students because that’s what they’re incentivized to do.
- sokoloff 5y ago
  I think they often skip the first step of even bothering to outperform after correcting for socioeconomic differences. If you can cherry-pick students, education can be both more effective and cheaper for those whom you decide to serve.
  - acdha 5y ago
    Often, yes, but sometimes it does happen because they got the most enthusiastic staff (not yet worn down) and attracted the most prepared poor kids with the most motivated parents (the ones who’ll take a chance on a new school pledging higher academic standards). The one I really wish the United States was better at accounting for is assistance for students with special needs. That hammers public school budgets and also means that those kids are discouraged from trying a new school because that’ll reset their support plan even if the new school offers services.
    - dantheman 5y ago
      It's very simple, just attach the money to the child and then let the parents determine what school they go to.

kristjansson 5y ago

Tying property tax to market value is a form of this, I think. The town doesn’t realize substantially more costs when property values go up, but wants to participate in the growth of ‘its’ property. So it structures its relationship with its users to capture some of the growth in value. Unfortunately the leverage of a small town is relatively low, so they don’t have much power to capture their users growth

mark-r 5y ago

> What Apple would be doing in this position is (a) determining where real estate profits are being made (b) moving to claim the majority of those profits as revenue. In the real world it's just the opposite. Apple has a monopoly on the Apple ecosystem, but nobody has a monopoly on land. Corporations will play one city against another to see which will give them the biggest subsidies and tax breaks.