This isn't a good take.

> If you do the work but undervalue it, it's likely tax fraud.

A company can value it's services as it chooses. If the work is performed for $1 or $5000 the government doesn't get a say in that.

> you do the work but overvalue it, it's likely investor fraud.

Quite possibly. Assuming this was done with the intention of misrepresenting your revenue and gaining investment.

>The vendor may have been chosen not by merit, but by its willingness to accept an exchange of services. Saying you have $X in revenue implies you won that revenue by merit.

Vendors are chosen all the time because of their willingness to accept specific payment terms and a whole bunch of non-merit pipelines via family, via golf course deals etc.

If that is fraud then company evaluations are fraud too. Case in point SpaceX and it's smorgasbord of other companies rolled into it to save them.

Who protects the consumer when they have been gutted of any power?

And who chooses how to value unique, innovative and visionary work?

It's a cool little analogy, one I'd never heard of before

https://www.econlib.org/archives/2012/01/an_answer_to_a.html

> True, at the beginning each resident has a $100 liability. But each also has an offsetting financial asset of $100. At the end, they all have neither. So the $100 bill acts as a clearing mechanism

You can't put your finger on it because money is merely an accumulator and medium of exchange of economic performance. The performance of services in exchange for other services without money is a perfectly valid economic exchange that can and should be booked to revenue of each of the parties, if actually performed.

Loans without any economic performance of services generate circular meaningless cash flows yeah, but that's not the case when services are actually performed.

Loans are promises to pay. Business deals are promises to perform services or deliver goods. The difference is easily lost in the details even for accountants and economists.

The man who saved Pumplesdrop By W. J. Turner

> No paperwork, no contract.

Two adults, a legal subject, sufficiently specified, offer, acceptance, consideration, mutual assent… a contract.

I think the fact that it's treated as income is the point.

My company builds your company a website, and "charge" $1,000,000 for it.

Your company mows my company's lawn and "charge" $1,000,000 for it.

Both companies now have $1,000,000 in revenue from this transaction.

Yeah, just a few hundred billion dollars, basically the same...

It depends if your goal is to sell the company or evade taxes, of course.

> You also have to pay taxes on that $5000 like other revenue.

Businesses do not pay taxes on revenue, they pay taxes on profit.

Other taxes may be applicable though (such as VAT or sales taxes).

> You also have to pay taxes on that $5000 like other revenue.

What taxes are owed on revenue? Tou pay taxes on profit only.

You net zero if you pay $1 and make $1.

Of course you have to pay taxes!

"Any comparison to OpenAI is totally valid"

VAT is a regressive tax. It hits everyone along the way, rich or poor. It hits the poor especially hard proportionally.

VAT is trivial for businesses to deal with. You add x% onto every invoice you issue. The VAT due to be paid to the government is a simple sum of the amounts distinctly shown on each invoice you issue minus the sum of the VAT amounts on invoices you’ve paid. Income/employment taxes, corporate tax, import taxes, etc are orders of magnitudes more complex, dynamic and subject to legal interpretation. I was a small business owner for a while years ago and did the VAT myself. But there was no way I would even attempt employment or corporation taxes - covered by endless legislation and changing every year - that was a job for the accountant.

I've multiple times done a minor dive into why a VAT tax is seen as a reasonable tax? It... seems as regressive as a sales tax with even more layers of intervention? I've always eventually lost interest in trying to make sense of it, but they sure seem popular in Europe so there must be something to them?

My current belief is that there should really just be a wealth tax on assets (Federal) and a land value tax on land (States); nothing else.

Source for the "5%"?

Maybe the IRS didn't get like the joke?

I'm on firefox on windows.

They're already ahead of you; you have to consistently book revenue (accrual or cash basis) which means they both go at the same time (which would offset) or that real money is being exchanged. You can't accrue the 100 you're (supposedly) giving me now and THEN accrue the 100 I'm giving you next year.

> They have no scalable business model that yields profit outside of raising more investment

Yeah that doesn’t sound Ponzi-adjacent at all

I heard they started a hardware unit operating in stealth, but the rumor is they’re working on a box.

Except the GP quote actually happens.

For example, if you've ever wondered why useless art trades at such eye-watering valuations, the answer is that the high valuations are fictions that governments will accept for tax purposes, from which you can derive a variety of exciting tax consequences: https://naturalist.gallery/blogs/journal/understanding-the-f... more-or-less because they agree among themselves what the art is valuated at for their own benefit.

Well while the pile of shit makes it a joke, isn't there a real advantage here of legibility?

Like you have a measure (GDP) and it can't accurate measure things unless a sale occurs. So even if the money is a wash there was an actual activity occurring in the economy and now it's recorded.

That scenario does not work for this discussion because the first economist has no reason to expect the second economist will ask him to eat shit for $100.

It’s a funny joke because it is truly happening (without the fraud as a service middleman). This sort of trade has been rampant the last few years in the AI and GPU space, as you can see from the link above, which details people doing exactly this in the real world with armies of accountants to make it appear legal.