If I sell burgers, and it costs me roughly $1.00 per burger to purchase the burger ingredients, pay rent on the kitchen/vending location, pay for employees etc, and I sell the burgers for $1.05 each, The thing that gets taxed is the left over profit, ie $0.05. Same principle applies here. Only difference is the progressive tax on corporation profit is virtually non existent (roughly a flat 20% based on the fiscal year). Now, the problems/tax evasion comes from what is considered as part of a business’s overhead. Often, these are exaggerated due to the incentive of being taxed less.

Wasn’t that mechanic technically introduced in the 2011 book? That would mean GoT ripped off Avatar (obviously it didn’t, hiveminds are just a common fantasy motif).

The speed of light isn’t just a difficulty or minor inconvenience, it’s a physical fundamental of the universe, in the sense that the minimum amount of time something could travel from Earth to Alpha Centauri and back to Earth would be 8.5 years in Earth time, and there’s no getting around that. The objects/people aboard the ship/the ship itself could experience that entire trip in as little as 0.00001 seconds, but from Earth’s perspective, this ship would be traveling at 99.99% the speed of light there and back.