| ▲ | prmph 7 days ago |
| This. It's weird how most of the top tech companies are all morphing into amorphous blobs that want to get into everything and are indistinguishable from each other. |
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| ▲ | patrickthebold 7 days ago | parent | next [-] |
| One thought I had recently: Their shareholders are probably mostly the same people. So why even compete? |
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| ▲ | vel0city 6 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Aren't every big publicly traded companies shareholders pretty much the same large index fund managers? | |
| ▲ | dullcrisp 7 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Don’t give the FTC any ideas. | | | |
| ▲ | treyd 7 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Because that's all they know how to do. |
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| ▲ | Izikiel43 7 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Isn’t this something like how everything ends up evolving into a crab? |
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| ▲ | lazide 7 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Carcinisation [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carcinisation], yeah. Or ‘why every large public company tends to suck the same ways in the US eventually’ | | |
| ▲ | miltonlost 7 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Also got to love the linguistic coincidence of Crabs and Cancer and how tech companies grow ever larger (monopolistic) to the detriment of their host (the greater economy/humanity) | | |
| ▲ | jounker 7 days ago | parent | next [-] | | It’s not a linguistic coincidence. The disease is named after the animal. | | |
| ▲ | bee_rider 7 days ago | parent [-] | | The coincidence is that all animals evolve in a crab-shaped direction (as the meme goes), and all tech companies evolve in a cancer-shaped direction. That these two “inevitable endpoint things” would happen to be linguistically closely related was unlikely. |
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| ▲ | Ygg2 7 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | It's not a coincidence. Cancer means crab, because the earliest known physicians saw tumors and thought they looked like crabs. |
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| ▲ | nsriv 7 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | In the US it seems like every company eventually turns into a bank. | | |
| ▲ | Spooky23 7 days ago | parent | next [-] | | My father in law was an IRS Revenue Agent. His quip was that about 20-30% of the civilian economy has tax avoidance as a primary business objective. Real estate is probably the greatest example. Since financial engineering is in many ways more essential than the actual business. His best example was a chain hotel. In the majority of cases, a typical hotel is a tax vehicle that happens to rent rooms. So no wonder everything becomes a bank. :) | | |
| ▲ | lotsofpulp 6 days ago | parent [-] | | A typical chain hotel (by which I assume you mean a Marriott/Hyatt/Hilton/IHG/Choice/etc brand) is a franchised “small” business. The franchisee typically pays 10% to 20% royalty to the franchisor (the aforementioned companies). Otherwise, they rent hotel rooms and pay staff to clean them and rent them again. What is the tax play? That the hotel owner can 1031 into bigger and better hotels? Anyone who owns real estate can do that. | | |
| ▲ | lazide 6 days ago | parent [-] | | Well, one could argue the entire setup is a means of structuring investments and organizing/attracting Capital eh? Hotel owner (aka franchisee) puts in capital in a specific way under license, gets help operating it, in exchange for the 10-20% licensing fee paid back to the main corporation. In many cases, the owner/operator is nearly turnkey, and it’s an effective way of setting up a defacto managed business investment, almost like a LP. Many of the franchised hotels are actually owned/operated by LPs setup for the purpose. Also in many of these cases, the franchiser provides contacts for financing, may directly facilitate/recruit Capital, and may even provide loans to the franchisee directly. For most of these larger hotels, the actual act of renting out rooms, etc. is pretty much all automated/managed through the central system anyway, and the majority of the operating costs are structured in such a way as to minimize tax liability. Is it clearer now? | | |
| ▲ | lotsofpulp 6 days ago | parent [-] | | Not at all. The poster I responded to claimed this: > a typical hotel is a tax vehicle that happens to rent rooms. >In many cases, the owner/operator is nearly turnkey, What does this even mean? Hotels can be turnkey, which in industry terminology means that everything is working sufficiently well such that you can start renting rooms immediately. An owner/operator being turnkey makes no sense. > setting up a defacto managed business investment Also makes no sense. >Also in many of these cases, the franchiser provides contacts for financing, may directly facilitate/recruit Capital, and may even provide loans to the franchisee directly. Even if true, what does this have to do with taxes? >For most of these larger hotels, the actual act of renting out rooms, etc. is pretty much all automated/managed through the central system anyway, No, the actual out of renting out rooms involves housekeepers, maintenance staff, guest service agents, cooks, and management making sure rooms are clean and habitable. Reserving a hotel room is mostly automated, but even that requires a person to manage conflicts of reservations (e.g. unexpectedly needing to extend a stay causing overbooking, changing room types, room locations, etc.) >and the majority of the operating costs are structured in such a way as to minimize tax liability. Who doesn't structure their operating costs to minimize their tax liability? If you file married joint instead of married separate or head of household, are you "structuring" your operating costs as a way to minimize tax liability? The question of how a hotel is used to gain an tax advantage that would otherwise be unavailable remains unanswered. | | |
| ▲ | Spooky23 6 days ago | parent [-] | | Most properties are syndicated. Hotels are interesting because they are mix of different asset types. The GP operates the place and LPs contribute capital. Accelerated and bonus depreciation passthrough to the LPs entity. | | |
| ▲ | lotsofpulp 6 days ago | parent [-] | | What does syndicated mean? And how is a hotel a mix of different asset types? What does GPs and LPs have anything to do with using a hotel to gain a special tax advantage that is not available to any other commercial real estate? | | |
| ▲ | lazide 6 days ago | parent [-] | | You should probably do some research. You’re basically asking the equivalent of ‘what is a stock? And why is it different than a bond?’ | | |
| ▲ | lotsofpulp 6 days ago | parent [-] | | I am doing research, asking the person who made the claim. How stocks and bonds come into play is beyond me, unless I am being trolled. But to summarize, zero evidence of how a hotel is a “tax vehicle”, nor any clarification on what a tax vehicle even is, nor why any other business wouldn’t be able to use the same strategy (if it even exists). | | |
| ▲ | lazide 6 days ago | parent [-] | | Dude, look up corporate partner structures. General partners. Limited partners. Etc. Do some basic reading so you can ask informed questions from the answers you have already been given, instead of insisting someone is an idiot when they point out you are not asking useful questions. And frankly, no one owes you these answers. |
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| ▲ | lotsofpulp 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Can you give examples? I thought becoming a bank in the US is famously difficult and regulated, so much so that most businesses who can avoid it do so by partnering up with existing, tiny banks. See almost any “fintech” solution, from startups all the way up to Apple. As far as I understand, becoming a bank is inviting a ton of overhead with little profit potential. | | |
| ▲ | pests 6 days ago | parent [-] | | I don’t think they meant a literal bank, but finance games become a bigger part of their core strategy. For example, AirBnB for a while made a majority of its profits by investing the money guests paid during the gap between booking and actual stay (paying the host). | | |
| ▲ | lazide 6 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Correct - at some point, the enterprise revolves around either finding better return on excess Capital they have, or finding additional Capital. Which is the core premise of a bank, even if the business doesn’t say ‘Bank’ on the side of the building. | | |
| ▲ | pests 6 days ago | parent [-] | | Agreed but elsewhere in threat people are assuming a literal bank with all the regulations that go along with it, etc. | | |
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| ▲ | beAbU 6 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Tesla has huge crypto holdings. |
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| ▲ | kelvinjps10 7 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | This is kind of true I never thought about it until now |
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| ▲ | dragontamer 7 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Nit: Trees/Grass are even more of this than Crabs. The two strategies for plants are to grow super tall to absorb the sun, or super wide (and small) to.... absorb the sun. Tall needs wood or other 'strong' polymer to support height. Short and wide is perhaps weak from an individual level but far more efficient. And trees and grass respectively have such genetic diversity that it's clear that none of these damn plants are of the same genetic line. | | |
| ▲ | thethethethe 6 days ago | parent [-] | | Nit: grasses are a distinct genetic lineage, the Poaceae family. There are a few other linages outside of Poaceae that have convergently evolved to look like grasses, sedges and rushes, but they all fall in the same clade, Monocots. Trees, on the other hand, are a growth habit, exhibited by species in a wide variety of plant families, even grasses (e.g palm trees). |
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| ▲ | makeitdouble 7 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | There's no point in discussing a meme, but carcinisation doesn't occur in that wide of a range, and of course the reverse phenomenon (decarcinisation) is also observed. It's a fun image, but just as Facebook isn't becoming Apple, and Amazon won't become OpenAI, evolution phenomenons are more complex than "everything becomes X" |
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| ▲ | lovich 7 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| They’re just turning into conglomerates. It was common in the post wwii era in America and its Asian allies like Korea with its chaebols and Japan with its somethings I can’t remember the name of. The Asian countries forms were normally based around a single family, we’ll need more time with the current US form to see if they are also dynastic |
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| ▲ | sehansen 6 days ago | parent [-] | | The Japanese, family-owned, generally pre-WWII conglomerates were called zaibatsus. After WWII they were (nominally) dissolved and the now more loosely connected groups of companies are called keiretsus. |
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| ▲ | epolanski 7 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Stakeholders expect (and price assets for) endless growth. |
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| ▲ | gxs 7 days ago | parent [-] | | This is the unfortunate answer to a lot about why companies do We are all addicted to growth - everyone is chasing the hockey stick curve which means a business that provides a stable business and grows modestly is seen as a failure in some parts |
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| ▲ | tonyedgecombe 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I don't know, there doesn't seem to be much overlap to me. Apple is a hardware business, Microsoft is software, Google is search, Facebook is social media, Amazon is distribution and compute. They do have their fingers in each other's pies but not to a large extent. |
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| ▲ | raincole 7 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Which is a godsend for the users. Can you imagine a world where there is only one big cloud provide, say AWS, and all the big companies with the infra just sit out? Can you imagine how expensive AWS would be and how much power it has over the users? |
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| ▲ | tehjoker 7 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| They'll just buy the competition once it seems like it's at a good price. Capitalism leads to concentration. |
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| ▲ | taneq 7 days ago | parent | prev [-] |
| That’s what happens when you print trillions of dollars. Suddenly investors have too much Monopoly money and they want to spend it on something, anything, that might not make as much of a loss as holding cash during the subsequent inflation. |
