<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>metaphor</author><text>&amp;gt; &lt;i&gt;I suspect its just a tax break related policy&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;1. What publicly-traded companies report to investors and what they report to the IRS are more different than you might initially suspect.&lt;p&gt;2. This $73.2B figure was pulled directly from their 2022 10-K filing[1] under an ops expense line item labeled &lt;i&gt;technology and content&lt;/i&gt;, which includes R&amp;amp;D and then some. The devil in the details is buried in a footnote on p. 26:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt;&amp;gt; &lt;i&gt;Technology and content costs include payroll and related expenses for employees involved in the research and development of new and existing products and services, development, design, and maintenance of our stores, curation and display of products and services made available in our online stores, and infrastructure costs. Infrastructure costs include servers, networking equipment, and data center related depreciation and amortization, rent, utilities, and other expenses necessary to support AWS and other Amazon businesses.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;At face value, to handwave this figure as just R&amp;amp;D and purport that it&amp;#x27;s directly comparable to other publicly-traded companies who report disaggregated &lt;i&gt;research and development&lt;/i&gt; strikes me as somewhere between shotgun analysis and hoodwinking.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.sec.gov&amp;#x2F;Archives&amp;#x2F;edgar&amp;#x2F;data&amp;#x2F;1018724&amp;#x2F;000101872423000004&amp;#x2F;amzn-20221231.htm#icc32c5c732854b7f9975929c57cd5bd4_97&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.sec.gov&amp;#x2F;Archives&amp;#x2F;edgar&amp;#x2F;data&amp;#x2F;1018724&amp;#x2F;000101872423...&lt;/a&gt;</text><parent_chain><item><author>lnxg33k1</author><text>I suspect its just a tax break related policy, ive been doing the same shit at US companies (still in EU), and some European companies (in EU) and the US one were the only one asking me to file reports for hours classified as R&amp;amp;D, maybe european ones have no incentive to do that&lt;p&gt;Id say, considering that, and considering that for these corps taxes are lava, i’d go to look at incentives on taxes about R&amp;amp;D filing</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>Amazon R&amp;D spending is more than that of all companies and government of France</title><url>https://twitter.com/emollick/status/1746254000914092480</url></story>
<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>wharvle</author><text>Can confirm, filed some “R&amp;amp;D” hours at a company some years back that did software development but nothing I’d call “R&amp;amp;D”. They straight-up told us it was a requirement for some tax benefit or other. Like they did have us do it only on non-client work, but… it was not really R&amp;amp;D the way anyone means that.</text><parent_chain><item><author>lnxg33k1</author><text>I suspect its just a tax break related policy, ive been doing the same shit at US companies (still in EU), and some European companies (in EU) and the US one were the only one asking me to file reports for hours classified as R&amp;amp;D, maybe european ones have no incentive to do that&lt;p&gt;Id say, considering that, and considering that for these corps taxes are lava, i’d go to look at incentives on taxes about R&amp;amp;D filing</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>Amazon R&amp;D spending is more than that of all companies and government of France</title><url>https://twitter.com/emollick/status/1746254000914092480</url></story>