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Comment by tlholaday | Hacker News Reader

> Among the mechanisms Netflix is using to achieve its next-to-nothing tax liability are accelerated depreciation (which appears to have cut the company’s tax expense by $148 million); deductions for stock options for Netflix executives and other employees ($339 million); and research and development tax credits ($113 million).

These are straightforward deductions.

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> and research and development tax credits ($113 million).

This is why you fill out your timesheets people!

It seems wild to me that this R&D credit is probably targeted towards new technology that will improve the world, and not Netflix working out how to reduce video lag by an additional 0.2%

Have you ever heard of Chaos Monkey?

https://netflix.github.io/

>> Among the mechanisms Netflix is using to achieve its next-to-nothing tax liability are accelerated depreciation (which appears to have cut the company’s tax expense by $148 million); deductions for stock options for Netflix executives...

Remember the corps used to get in trouble for not deducting stock options. Now it has turned into a "mechanism to achieve its next-to-nothing tax liability"

Journalists just trying to make them look like tax dodgers.

Which they are, as discussed elsewhere in this thread, but the journalist doesn't know enough to point to the actual problematic behaviour.

They are. I’d be pretty upset if I wasn’t able to deduct such expenses from my taxes.

It’s almost predictable which “hot takes” will get clicks/attention.

I don't think it's almost predictable, I think it is predictable and that's why editors do it.

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