Notably they'd reveal less than the accounts I'm already having to file, that are public in lots of countries.
The truth is that in any mature industry, companies have a very good idea of each other's "exact cost structure, sales, etc". Talk with a restaurateur about the competition, for example, and they'll be able tell you in great detail about how they operate. The sale prices are right on the menu. They're buying from the same suppliers, hiring from the same labor pool. And anybody can figure out how busy they are with a a quick look in the windows. But restaurants are somehow not "an absolute disaster".
And of course you're focused here on empathy for corporations. But the whole theory of functioning marketplaces is that companies shouldn't be comfortable. It's best for the world when they compete vigorously.
What drives me is far simpler than that: We (I'll use that to mean the US and Europe) are in a straight path to being economically decimated by China. Nobody understands this more than those who have been intimately involved in manufacturing for a non-trivial amount of time. In my case, over thirty years.
Someone devoid of this perspective isn't equipped to understand where we are (again, Europe and the US), where we came from and where we are going.
Capitalist, socialist, communist, Martian. I don't care. The simple fact is that the ONLY thing that can give us (US and Europe) any hope of reverting the unrelenting path we have allowed ourselves to navigate is an almost unreasonably intense shift to being pro-business and pro-entrepreneurship.
Nothing else. NOTHING. Can slow this down, much less revert it.
Well, you could have a war. Great.
No amount of social programs, infrastructure rebuilding or, the great oxymoron "government money" is powerful enough to give us the tools and opportunities necessary to avoid what's coming.
You think things are bad in terms of unemployment and income inequality today? Continue on this demented path and see just how much worse this becomes.
There are people like me screaming at the top of our lungs. Have been for years. No political affiliation. Just math and facts.
Simple math/facts: Right now, today, we are allowing people to freely enter the US through the southern border at a rate of about TWO MILLION per year.
Anyone, please, kindly name where in this nation we are generating 150,000 ADDITIONAL new jobs every month.
Because, if we are not, what we are importing is deep unemployment. By the millions. The unemployment rate in black and Hispanic sectors in the US is in the order of 20% at this time. How can we possibly justify making it worse?
If we (US and Europe) want to have a chance to not lose even more industries we need to focus intently on the things that matter. Today. Immediately. No more bullshit.
So, yes, companies should pay no taxes. We should NOT throw money at nonsense "infrastructure" (don't get me started on that) and, instead, invest in technology, semiconductors, entrepreneurship, anything and everything that can possibly rebuild the ecosystem we relinquished to China. Not all of it. Enough of it.
In other words. Invest in business.
Some corners of industry are gone forever. As a simple example, I used to buy specialized hardened glass from a company in NY. They got killed by the Chinese. That was the last US-based company for that product. I then switched to buying from the only company left in Europe for this product, it was in Germany. That lasted about a year. They could not compete with government-subsidized Chinese companies ripping through the market at 50% of their price. Gone.
I then had no choice but to buy from China. A year later they doubled their prices. About 18 months later they doubled them again. At that point nobody outside of China would, unless they were stupid, dare to re-enter the market. They knew exactly what would happen with regards to predatory pricing. A chemical company isn't something you spin up with an Ansible script. It requires time and investment. And so, the Chinese ended up killing all competition and owning that industry.
I don't hate China at all. They are doing exactly what we should be doing. They focusing on what matters for them. And they are doing an amazing job of it.
So, you see, my intensity with regards to these matters doesn't come from some theoretical indoctrination received in school. No sir. It comes from, as they say, having had skin in the game for quite some time.
The simple fact is: We are focusing on nonsense while the Chinese are focusing on advancement.
Businesses are not evil. We need them in order to survive and advance. Destroy them at your own peril.
I have a contract right now that I am hoping to close this week. It will require designing a device and then manufacturing 5K to 10K units per month.
I was initially looking at this and though: Great! We'll invest in developing a fully automated assembly line. Hire engineers and technicians and a few operators. We'll make them right here in the US.
Now I am looking at our politicians talking about raising corporate taxes and all kinds of other nonsense. They should be doing exactly the opposite. But, no, let's go out of our way to put as many competitive barriers as possible in front of our own businesses.
So, I'm looking at this and thinking: Fuck it! I'm done. Atlas Shrugged moment. It is SO EASY to manufacture in China. If they don't want my business in the US I am done. I am not going to bang my head against the wall trying to be a good citizen if my own country and government will actively try to kill me and refuses to support my efforts and sacrifice. Why should I?
Sorry, this ideology is 100% demented, will drive away business, grow unemployment and income inequality.
If businesses are evil. Fine. Go figure out how to earn a living not working for one. And don't complain when people like me give up and offshore even more layers from our economy and you can't find a job.
I'm just going to leave the rest of your China panic aside. It's deeply reminiscent of the 1980s panic about Japan's impending takeover of America. That you wind up your screed with a favorable reference to a fantasy novel elevating a "genocidal prick" [1] convinces me you're too far wrapped up in your fictions. I'd rather spend my time on the people who read the one about orcs. [2]
[1] https://whatever.scalzi.com/2010/10/01/what-i-think-about-at...
[2] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/366635-there-are-two-novels...
The fact that you bring up Japan tells me you don't really understand what has been going on. Which is fine. I get it. Most people don't. I wish I didn't. I have no choice but to see reality across my desk each and every single day. I can buy semiconductors from China for a third of the best price I can get in the US. Asking "Why?" you start navigating the many layers of the multivariate business equation in order to understand.
Insulting me isn't going to change reality. Insulting me does not explain how we are where we are...a moment in time when we can't even make simple masks because we don't make the thread, cloth, rubber and machinery in the US and Europe. That's not a fantasy. And that didn't happen because of some imaginary character in a novel. And that will not stop because people like you prefer to respond to someone like me by insulting and ignoring them.
Remember what you said here and re-evaluate in a decade or so. I don't see anything changing any time soon. Sadly, you'll have the opportunity to understand. It will likely be too late to do much about it.
Just look at what happened to almost every single country in Latin America for a convenient time machine. My father used to manufacture products at scale in Latin America. In fact, I was with him this weekend and he told me the story again. The Chinese came in and made it impossible to operate at anything resembling a profit. Every single factory in his industry shuttered. That was about four decades ago. None of these industries have returned.
Again. Fantasy vs. reality. Living in the former does not change the latter.
Never mind that I have lived the issues I speak of. I have been in manufacturing in the US for over thirty years. I have far more examples than what I have posted here. My family has been in manufacturing for at least two generations, on both sides, both my father and my mother were in manufacturing and my grandparents, on both sides, were in manufacturing, in at least two continents. The industries my family was exposed to spanned textiles, clothing, hard good, pharmaceuticals, consumer and industrial products/electronics and aerospace.
Never mind that during this time I have worked with an associated with other manufacturers in all kinds of industries, not just mine. No. Never mind any of that.
Never mind that I hear these cries from other manufacturers. A good friend of mine has a 100,000 square foot contract manufacturing facility in the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles. He has been in manufacturing for a decade more than I have. He used to manufacture the entire line of Hewlett Packard servers and, if I remember correctly, quite a few of their higher end workstation products. He is also yelling at the top of his lungs at what has been going on and just-about ready to give up, shrink down to a small office and make everything he is manufacturing today in China.
Never mind any of that.
I'm just a guy quoting stupid books and looking at the world through a lens of fear and threat.
Sure. No problem. Go with that if it makes you happy.
I should remind myself that most people have never held these cats by the tail. They can't possibly know or understand that reality. There's almost only one way to understand it, and that is to grab onto that tail and go for that ride.
"leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world."
Insulting someone through links. I think that's a new one. Clever. And now you try to take the an invisible high road. Brilliant really.
Once again. Attack the person, not the argument. While my college course in Logic dates back a few decades, I think that logical fallacy pretty much says, paraphrasing: Reality isn't changed by attacking the messenger.
Hey man. Live long and prosper. Enough.
This is the sort of thing that sounds interesting but would be an absolute disaster. This is particularly true in the context of a globally competitive marketplace.
Simple example: If I want to enter your market and know your exact cost structure, sales, etc. I can engineer a viable competitive entry, secure IP and financing/investment come into the market and destroy you. If, for example, I know your margins are running very thin and funds low, I can squeeze you out of existence.
Put in simpler terms, this is the reason you don't tell your opponent what you are thinking and what your strategy and concerns might be during (and even after) a chess game.
Same reason armies don't publish their battle plans either. Business isn't a vacation in paradise. Every single competitor (and other actors) is actively trying to kill you. If they are not, they aren't a real competitor.
Public corporations are a very different story. Until the advent of SPACs (aka: Ponzi Scheme) a company was very careful about when to go public and had to achieve a certain mass and scale to be able to justify and endure the scrutiny and exposure.
The world of successful businesses is paved with stories from entrepreneurs and companies who went to the very edge of insolvency in pursuit of a dream, mission or objective and came out of the other end with a massive success.