Hacker News Reader

Comment by MrTonyD | Hacker News Reader

Just to throw another rock at WalMart - they also arranged to own offshore companies which provided loans to themselves to run WalMart - turning profits into loan payments and avoiding taxes. Estimates are that they hid double digit billions offshore without paying taxes. Sadly, it is perfectly legal - and it is consistent with what I've seen in the software and hardware industry. Several companies and executives where I've worked freely talked about how they transferred money offshore before taxes, so that it would never appear as income to them in US accounting.

View on HN

As jacquesm pointed out, you've been posting outrageous (if true) stories about famous companies and executives to HN for years. The first several times I read those, I thought 'holy shit!' But then—maybe it was the one where you told about Steve Jobs' collusions with Bill Gates that took place on an airplane so nobody would know?—something started to feel a bit off. Anybody can post anything on the internet, after all. We have no way of knowing whether such stories are tall tales or not, and alas, sometimes users make things up.

On Hacker News, we start from an assumption of good faith (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), but we also care about substantive discussion. Our goal is good conversation—a forgiving medium—but eventually you need to substantiate what you're repeatedly posting.

I don't assume that your stories are false, but by now you've built up a lot of narrative debt. So please don't post any more incredible claims to Hacker News without a significant reason for readers to believe them.

Well, I'm sorry that you feel that way. Really.

I have spent an entire career in Silicon Valley, and I have held a lot of different positions and worked with many executive teams. It reminds me of when I worked at NeXT, and told someone that we were using the Leffler library in NeXTStep. He insisted that we weren't, since a company like NeXT and someone like Steve Jobs would never allow such a thing - Steve wouldn't allow a public library inside our product. He just couldn't believe it was true - and I had no proof to offer.

I guess old-timers like me just need to be quiet and let you learn about these things over your 40 years in the business - I hope those lessons don't come too late for you.

No problem with old timers, there are plenty of those here. But their stories check out and if they accuse someone it is as a rule backed up by some evidence. See the thread about Jerry Pournelle recently and some of the people commenting in it. But if you start making stuff up or making baseless accusations then you are devaluing your experiences. And the experiences you do have a probably far more interesting than the things that you throw out there to make it all look better than it was. To me it makes no sense.

On another note, chances are that you'll run into people here that already know you from other places on the net or that know who you are in real life and who know for a fact that the things you write aren't the whole story. IT back then was a very small world and a lot of those old timers are now HN'ers, just like yourself.

I'm really beginning to wonder where you get your info. This is not the first - but hopefully it is the last - time that you make these incredible accusations against large companies, enough to put their execs in jail, only of course there is never any substantiation, just your allegation.

Previous examples of stuff I suspect you either made up in part or whole:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15059549

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14053716

And plenty of others besides.

> turning profits into loan payments and avoiding taxes

To loan any money from an offshore entity they would have to transfer the money to the offshore entity first, and to initiate that transfer they would have to earn that money elsewhere, which would generally involve paying taxes.

Isn't that an antiquated view of the way that the economy works? I can name a lot of counter-examples - but even the current articles in the press about bank assets vs outstanding loans is inconsistent with the view of credit being somehow related to currency transfers.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com