Business Pundit

> Easily overcome by simply having reasonable minimum wage laws. Whereby corporations are required to provide a living wage.

You are proposing fixing a negative externality caused by government policy with more government policy, which also happens to actively harm citizens.

Minimum wage laws add barriers to entry into the labor market for citizens. It ensures that laborers whom cannot provide utility at or in excess of the minimum wage cannot get a job in the first place.

It also actively prohibits private citizens from making voluntary, private transactions that pose no harm to third parties.

> Failing to provide support for citizens _does_ actively harm citizens. The choice you're proposing is between "maybe harm" and "we know it harms". They're not equivalent.

My point was that there was harm induced, definitively, upon Peter when you rob him to pay Paul. The only "maybe" about it was in the event that Peter wanted to give Paul the money anyway. But we know that is a specific case and not general.

> For the third and final time - Where?

I don't have a good charity to recommend. I do most of my giving through the local church and it's partner organizations. They release spending profiles, and I can see the difference my dollars make in the local ccommunity.

It appears you are correct about SA, which I didn't know
https://www.businesspundit.com/10-infuriatingly-greedy-charities/

Look, you were just wrong, and you know you were wrong. The substance of your comment was that multinationals just consider tax a cost of doing business, and that new taxes alone wouldn't motivate them to consider moving operations overseas.

That's flatly wrong. The distinction between US and Irish tax code is and was indeed highly material. And one you were not aware of, despite being an "international tax lawyer". Moreover, the Double Irish is by no means the only workaround. Microsoft has a pretty sweet thing going with Puerto Rico:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/07/28/microsoft-tax-havens-profit-bill_n_911779.html

And there's a lot more where that came from:

http://www.businesspundit.com/25-corporations-that-pay-less-taxes-than-you-do/

Clearly there actually are a myriad of strategies which multinationals can use to minimize their tax bill by exploiting differences between countries, and even more clearly those countries with the most favorable tax regimes are the ones chosen as places to expand. Which is exactly the phenomenon whose existence you denied:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3565426

So tell me this: why anyone would want to engage you as an "international tax lawyer" if you don't have the knowledge to actually, y'know, help them minimize their tax bill?

>[Citation needed]

As I stated I am working with them, so I have some non-public information regarding specific store numbers which I can't disclose under NDA, sorry.

However, here is some public data, the average WM shopper is a 50 year old white women with a household income of $53,125. [1] Another article showing 10% of WM shoppers make $75k-$99k and 15% of WM shoppers making $100K+, though this is based on a survey of 4,000 shoppers, so I don't know how accurate this data really is. [2] You can find other odd facts about their demographics floating around, such as a greater percentage of $100k-$150k households shop at WM than percentage of <$15k households. [3]

100,000,000 customers/week is obviously a ridiculous amount of people and reflects a giant cross section of society. Annually 80% of American shoppers will shop at WM at least once this year, see [3].

Anecdotally, I would say the newer model Walmart Neighborhood Markets are nice and clean, and I would say on par with groceries such as Publix, Meijer and Kroger.

[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/meet-the-average-wal-mart-shopper-2014-9
[2] http://www.businesspundit.com/heres-a-breakdown-of-walmart-shoppers-by-demographic/
[3] http://brandongaille.com/41-interesting-walmart-shopper-demographics/

This is wrong. A burger is bread, meat and vegetables, maybe with some cheese or another meat. Between carbohydrates, protein and some vegetables an all burger diet is unlikely to lead to any noticeable health effects compared to a normal Western diet. Fries are vastly worse for you than burgers or pizza, whether you’re looking at macronutrients alone or tracking vitamins and minerals as well.

http://www.businesspundit.com/the-mcdonalds-weight-loss-program/

> A US woman claims to have lost 33 pounds by eating nothing but McDonald's for 90 days.

> Merab Morgan, of Henderson, North Carolina, began her diet because she found the Super Size Me film insulting.

> In the documentary, film maker Morgan Spurlock put on 25lbs after eating excusively at McDonald's for just one month.

> Ms Morgan, 35, memorised the calories in almost every menu item, and limits herself to 1,400 calories a day, reports the Detroit Free Press.

> "It's kind of like the poor man's diet," said Morgan, who has tried Weight Watchers and Atkins but failed because of the time and money those plans required.

It's questionable how directly Versailles caused WW2.

WW2 was caused in no small part by the Wall St Crash, which was a direct cause of hyperinflation in Germany, and by delusional industrialists who thought that financing Hitler would be a good way to avoid a revolution.

At least one of them - Thyssen - ended up in a concentration camp. So that didn't work out so well for him.

The others have never been held accountable.

Weimar could easily have been rescued if the Nazi party hadn't received literally millions in external funding and other forms of corporate support. In a counterfactual reality, Europe would probably have united more quickly and peacefully. Technology wouldn't have developed as quickly, but there would have been an arms race and perhaps a war with the Soviet Union sooner or later.

Some background:

http://www.businesspundit.com/10-global-businesses-that-worked-with-the-nazis/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Thyssen

I have great respect for Garry Tan. However, I find the key quote on "how profitable Hollywood can be at best" a bit strange, and want to correct his statement below based on specific data. Here's the quote "...11X return on capital. That's the highest grossing film ever made, and a good proxy for how profitable Hollywood can be at best."
Since 3,800X return on capital for Peter Thiel's FB investment is an obvious outlier/best case scenario, let's compare apples to apples and take the best case for Hollywood-type investments:
"Paranormal Activity With just $15,000, the visionaries behind this project created a movie that took in a worldwide gross of almost $197 million." That sounds like 13133X return to me, which is even greater than 3800X...
See http://www.businesspundit.com/10-most-profitable-low-budget-movies-of-all-time/