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by jason46 2798 days ago
$33,500 if you bought them from amazon right now, plus whatever it costs to ship 79 hard drives.
1 comments

Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze.

> $33,500 if you bought them from amazon right now

About half of all of the money that flows into Backblaze from customers gets spent on the datacenter, and the largest component of that is drives. I think sales tax and property tax is the second largest datacenter component. It turns out you don't just owe property tax on buildings and land - if you own something of significant worth like $10 million worth of hard drives in a large pile, you owe the government "property tax" every month for owning that property.

Yes, called "tangible personal property tax" (even though it's used for business). Some states have it and some don't, with various exceptions and whatnot in all of them.
if you own something of significant worth like $10 million worth of hard drives in a large pile, you owe the government "property tax" every month for owning that property.

If you're Intel, you potentially owe "property tax" every month on all the equipment in multi-billion dollar fabs. That's why those fabs only get built in states where the tax doesn't apply or where the state/county agrees to forego it.

I had never thought of income on capital vs income before Piketty made it the center of his theories, but since then realised that it is exactly what property tax is, which is weird that it is only in one type of capital.