Washington's constitution says: "The word 'property' as used herein shall mean and include everything, whether tangible or intangible, subject to ownership". That is extremely broad, and there is 90 years of precedent affirming income is include here as something intangible and "subject to ownership."
Washington State’s constitution limits a tax like this to no more 1% and requires it to be uniform; this law meets neither requirement.
I am uncomfortable that supporters of the income tax are so unbothered by it being unconstitutional. So few are insisting we amend the constitution to allow or not do it at all, on the grounds that violating the constitution (or flexibility construing it to match our desired ends) is bad.
I think this is right, in part because I've been told exactly this from people who work for Google and their job is to sell me cloud stuff- i.e., they say they have so much internal demand they aren't pushing TPUs for external use. Hence external pricing and support just isn't that great right now. But presumably when capacity catches up they'll start pushing TPUs again.
There are almost always obvious conflicts of interest. In a normal startup, VCs have a legal responsibility to act in the interest of the common shares, but in practice, they overtly act in the interest of the preferred shares that their fund holds.
I once worked somewhere where I found some evidence that the offsets we were considering buying were probably junk. The CEO agreed, bought them anyway, and proudly proclaimed to all staff how we were now a net-zero company. Junk offsets are cheaper.