P-Necromancer
No bio...
User ID: 3278
P-Necromancer
10d ago
Ah, that is part of what makes it appealing, for sure. But communes have strong Exit rights too, so I don't think it's obviously biasing the comparison. Is the argument that Exit is more important for anarcho-capitalism-lite given reduced Voice? I'm not actually sure Voice is reduced in ancap societies -- you have all the tools of persuasion and politics to get your way and you can pay to get it too, whereas in ancom you only have the former.
This might seem superficially counterintuitive: Sure, in ancom you don't have money, but you also don't have to work for money. Doesn't it cancel out? But in fact theory predicts this result: You are rewarded for your service to the interests of others with influence over others' actions in turn. This has the natural effect of maximizing total utility, as each individual makes money doing what most efficiently enables them to help others and spends money on the help they most want. In other terms, trade is positive sum: both parties are better off for it, both get more value out than they put in. So forbidding (or failing to adequately facilitate) trade reduces total utility.
The communist ethos may be 'from each according to his ability, to each according to his need,' but getting one's needs (and wants) satisfied is the whole incentive for providing one's ability. If you remove that incentive, people just aren't going to try as hard. Auth-left can force them (which is just slavery, and is inefficient and destabilizing in the same ways, but isn't completely unworkable), but lib-left can't, really. So the only way it can ever really work is if people want it to.
P-Necromancer
10d ago
It might not be truly autonomous and stateless, but you can join a commune today and get 80% of the way there. Many people have... and almost all them gave it up when it proved unworkable and dumb, and not because of the compromises they had to make to exist within a capitalist society. I have no issue with voluntary communities living in (just about) any way they please, and I'm happy for the people who can find happiness there... but the evidence is that it just doesn't work for the vast majority of people even after self-selecting for the people who want to make it work the most.
(The community that's similarly 80% of the way to anarcho-capitalism is... pre-Civil War America, I think? Not no public spending or government action, but much, much less. Though it looks so good in comparison I'm afraid I've put my thumb on the scale somehow.)
P-Necromancer
10d ago
Just like a gun control advocate can advocate for changing the laws with regards to who can own which gun, he can obviously also advocate for actually forcing the cops to protect people.
I mean, he can. Does he? Could be my own ignorance talking here, but I don't think I've ever heard this point from gun control advocates. It ought to be a lot easier to get passed than gun control, since the committed opposition is... the police union, I guess? Not half the country; you can see the rightists in this thread agree cops should have that duty. And by doing so first they'd make gun control more likely by neutering this argument against it. So where is the advocacy?
P-Necromancer
12d ago
I would argue that the IRBO only really emerged during the cold war.
The Atlantic Charter, signed 1941, called for:
[N]o territorial changes that do not accord with the freely expressed wishes of the peoples concerned
(It called for several things that didn't happen, actually, but if we're looking for the emergence of the principle, I think this counts.)
Now, the USSR didn't sign it (not that version, anyway), but America did (before actually entering the war, even). Most of the involved parties decided they didn't really mean it within the next few years (it didn't go over terribly well in Britain's colonies, for one), but that kind of makes my point that such promises were hard to take seriously. The UN Charter, 1945, expressed the same sentiment, but of course was careful to grandfather in the allies' recent conquests, and in fact would compel the signatories to condemn e.g. Finland trying to take back the territory the USSR stole in the unprovoked Winter War.
Contrary to common belief, nukes are not the "I win" button. Japan's war had gone very badly and they were facing an invasion, getting nuked was simply the last straw. "The killed 100k Russians when they nuked Leningrad, better make peace before they kill another 100k of my poor countrymen" would not have persuaded Stalin out of all people.
This is true, especially for fission bombs, especially given the very tight production bottlenecks they had at the time. It would still have been a huge advantage -- less so for bombing cities than for discouraging any concentration of force, I would think. MacArthur was general then, too. It'd have certainly been expensive in blood and treasure, but it's hard to imagine it's a fight the US actually loses, provided they had the will to see it through. It certainly didn't get any cheaper for the next 40 years.
(The USSR did ultimately dissolve without a fight, but not before doing an enormous amount of damage around the world. Their efforts to undermine Western dominance were quite successful in tying anti-imperialism to socialism in the public imaginations of much of Africa and South America, arguably immiserating those nations to this day and for who knows how long to come. You could fairly blame that on the Western Imperialism too, but the British and French colonial empires would have dissolved regardless; there's no USSR making Britain pay Mauritius a fortune to rent islands Mauritius never actually occupied today.)
If the US could have defeated the USSR by prolonging WW2 for a year or so, I think they would have done so, not for the right of self-determination of anyone but because any fool could see that the USSR would become their rival superpower. But they had just spent a lot of lives and productivity on winning a big war. Telling the Americans "change of plans, you already freed France from the Nazis, no you get to free Poland from the Soviets" would not have been popular, especially if you consider that plenty of intellectuals were leaning communist.
My point is not that it would have been easy or even smart (though I not-very-confidently believe it would have been), just that it casts a lot of doubt as to just how committed the US (or anyone else) really was to the principle.
P-Necromancer
12d ago
Presumably after WW2, what preserved the borders in Western Europe (say between Belgium and the Netherlands) was less a deep respect of the IRBO learned overnight and more the fact that everyone knew that if they tried to make war the US would come down on them like a million pound hammer.
What about Eastern Europe? The notion that the US was truly interested in the principle of national self determination is difficult to credit in light of the enormous support they offered the Soviets in conquering half the continent. America was the world's sole nuclear power for years after the war; didn't do Poland or Czechoslovakia or Karelia any good. They said they'd keep the borders right where they were... while simultaneously allowing Stalin to redraw them as he pleased in the areas he controlled. Why would anyone take those commitments seriously?
P-Necromancer
13d ago
Sure, I don't disagree with anything here. Or really anything in the OP; just adding my two cents and offering a couple tips for making productive use of LLMs.
For the example of fixing some OS issue, imagine I didn't have really any technical knowledge of how things work (say, I don't really even know what the registry is unless a tech/LLM tells me something about it). Maybe I'd take my computer to a human tech. Could even be a corporate IT guy. Perhaps, knowing that I don't have a clue, I just give it to him. "Here's my problem; please fix it Ralph Rufus."
Who knows what he'll get up to? What stuff he'll mess with along the way. Things he'll try just because, and then maybe leave it in a changed state, even though it didn't progress toward a solution to the actual problem. This cruft can build up. After years of having this corporate IT guy and that corporate IT guy and the other corporate IT guy just doing who knows what, maybe at some point, things get bizarre enough that the next one says, "Dude, stuff is wild here; we probably should just wipe it and clean install."
I think there are two different use cases here it makes sense to distinguish. This is an example of allowing the LLM to act 'directly' (not actually directly, there's a human in the loop, but it's giving you commands to execute, not writing a script) on a complex, persistent system. Which, yeah, that can absolutely build up cruft that's difficult or impossible to clear away without starting fresh. But even the most careless vibe coding has a serious advantage, in that the actual operations are recorded and auditable. If you put in a tiny bit of effort and use version control, you (or someone else, or another LLM) can even audit how the code changed over time. And, better, you can separate out tasks into different, independently tested scripts to be sure there isn't some complicated interdependence issue. It's the difference between manually tinkering with a machine and writing a dockerfile. It's still certainly possible to build up technical debt to the point you're better off starting fresh, but it's a lot harder. At least for small personal projects, which I hope are most of the things people do make this way.
Careless vibe coding carries real risks; I haven't caught a model trying to do anything dangerous (as opposed to dumb), but I believe the people who say they have. I'd be very leery of running code I can't understand at least well enough to tell if it's making web calls or deleting things it shouldn't be. (But I'd say the same for StackOverflow.) I double check the library names. I wouldn't let it touch anything security-critical, or any files I care about and don't have backed up. I haven't pushed any generated code to a public repo, but if I did, I'd be very careful to ensure there aren't any api keys or passwords or other secrets anywhere in history.
It is... concerning that same tools are available to people less cautious and knowledgeable than me, and I'm certain that will lead to problems. (On the other hand, I'm sure there are people who'd put me into that group.) Enough to make the whole endeavor net-negative? Hard to say, but I'm pretty sure the answer is 'no.' At least, I think someone smart enough to get Antigravity or Claude Code or whatever running ought to be smart enough to understand the big dangers and a few basic principles of good, maintainable code with a short crash course-- which, actually, the LLM is very capable of providing, even if it can't (perfectly) reliably avoid those pitfalls.
P-Necromancer
13d ago
I think there are three things going on here, all with the same (somewhat inconvenient) solution:
- LLMs have a tendency to get stuck on certain ideas, even if they acknowledge they're wrong. Once something is in context two or three times, it can be very hard to get it to let it go.
- LLMs advertise huge context limits, and, technically speaking, you can run Gemini Pro 3 on a million tokens... but you definitely shouldn't. Models get way dumber at high context, and noticeably dumber even at relatively modest context (anecdotally, it's significant even at 32k)
- Models tend to get dumber/less obedient the longer a conversation goes, even if the total context is still short*
The answer to all three problems is just to start a new session frequently and copy only the relevant and correct details into the new chat. It can be a pain if you're in the middle of something, but it gives the best results.
This is... somewhat redolent of good coding practices, I think; encapsulation and abstraction, at least. If you break a problem into smaller parts and keep the boundaries between those parts strict, it's easier for both humans and LLMs to conceptualize the totality of what they need at any given time. Ideally, structuring a project this way will not just result in better LLM performance but in more maintainable code too.
On the other side: having an LLM write code at all (rather than, say, directly making system calls) is already a big step towards legibility (and thus maintainability). Such a system is obviously insane, but it's perfectly possible for your program to be a particular internal state of an LLM. For that matter, it's perfectly possible (and indeed ubiquitous) for your 'program' to be the internal state of a human mind. By analogy, 'human vibe coding' is telling the human to design a set of legible policies rather than using their own judgment directly, which does actually have the expected advantages of consistency, comprehensibility, and interoperability.
I guess the takeaway is that we should look to normal management strategy for clues on how to manage LLMs, which might be obvious.
* This at least I think is mainly a training issue: most RLHF/DPO is done on single-turn responses.
P-Necromancer
13d ago
Coincidentally, you can relate this to how Locke defines a ruler tyrannical: he who rules not by law but uses power "for his own, private, separate advantage" and "makes not the law, but his will, the rule"
I haven't read Locke, so apologies if I'm misunderstanding, but this seems pretty obviously false to me? Or at least a very non-standard definition of tyranny. If the USSR under Stalin were less corrupt and arbitrary, would it have been less tyrannical? It would have been more thorough in its oppression. In 1984, no one actually benefits from the system: the more power you have in the party, the less freedom it permits you. It's pure Molochianism: the party accumulates all the power it can and crushes all opposition not because anyone actually wants that, but because the party that prioritizes winning over all else is the one that wins.
I suppose such a system would be less tyrannical in the sense of having less of a tyrant? Not necessarily: if the law permits absolute rule by an individual, which many systems of law through history actually do, the tyrant need not override the law to exercise power capriciously. And again, in such a case, I'd see an absolute ruler who uses his position to enrich himself as less tyrannical than one that uses it in support of sincere authoritarian ideology. Hitler's corruption must have had a (very) small but real impact on the efficiency of the Nazi state, and a less efficient Nazi state is less able to pursue the Nazis' tyrannical aims.
P-Necromancer
15d ago
Huh, why offer lower interchange fees for category 3? After all, the businesses they're charging don't care about how the customer is using their card -- if anything I might expect group 3 to be more free with their money, justifying a higher fee -- and they're not going to offer a discount for using a lower-fee card (or at least I've never seen that). I suppose there might be marginal businesses that'd refuse higher fee cards? But at most I've seen businesses refusing whole brands, not the products within those brands that are meant for group 4 instead of group 3.
You say this like it's shameful. Protecting citizens from banditry is among the most noble duties of a nation. It's not an 'open secret,' or at least it shouldn't be -- it's a far more honorable casus belli then ideology or great power politics or rumored possession of WMDs, to be sure.
Countries that invoke might-makes-right to rob foreigners have no room to complain when those foreigners' nations invoke might-makes-right to seize restitution and inflict punishment. In fact, the world would be far more prosperous if those norms were consistently and strictly enforced. Not like it's ever a good idea, just some combination of stupidity (ideologically motivated or otherwise), short-sightedness, and corruption, as Venezuela's poverty demonstrates: they own their oil now... but they can't refine it and no one who can is dumb enough to invest in the nation.
No, the whole problem is that the US didn't do enough to punish the theft. Individual criminals tend to be dumb, high time preference, and low executive function, and that seems like an apt analogy to me. Studies show such people respond best to rapid, consistent and highly visible punishment. Letting things drag out for decades and using such indirect methods as funding protestors sends the wrong message and only multiplies the misery of the population.
P-Necromancer
22d ago
I also can't imagine stepping in front of a running car
... What do you do at crosswalks?
Walking in front of cars that, while running, are currently stopped isn't actually dangerous in most situations, and most(?) everyone does it all the time. It was a mistake in this instance, obviously, but I hardly think it proves the officer doesn't believe getting run over is dangerous(? Is that really your argument?), just that he didn't think she'd suddenly accelerate.
P-Necromancer
25d ago
It's obvious why officers like it as a tactic. Most people are probably not willing to make contact with a person with their vehicle to flee a crime, so it effectively prevents the obvious way someone might escape. If they are wrong about that individual's willingness it lets them escalate to shooting.
I continue to have mixed feelings about it. I don't like it as a means of manufacturing an excuse to use deadly force where you wouldn't normally be able to but it is not clear to me what reform of it as a tactic would look like.
This logic strikes me as dubious. Are cops (or ICE agents) really so dedicated that they're eager to put their lives on the line -- and the danger of standing in front of a car that might abruptly accelerate is very real -- for marginally better clearance rates? Isn't the standard leftist line that cops are so quick to escalate to lethal force because they're cowards unwilling to accept the risks associated with de-escalation? I'm not sure that's true, but it's at least not obviously contrary to their individual interests.
(I could envision a version of this scheme -- leaving out an unloaded gun in easy reach of a suspect, maybe -- where they could try to manufacture an excuse to escalate to lethal force without any substantial personal risk, but this certainly wasn't that. If we're arguing about tire angle, then the officer's life was in the suspect's hands.)
As to why the cop did step in front of the car? I think incompetence is more likely than suicidal malice; the latter exists, but the former is vastly more common.
P-Necromancer
26d ago
Actually, modern financial instruments enable you to profit off low volatility too; look into iron condors and calendar spreads. I imagine this is one of the more common insider trading opportunities, in fact: if you know beforehand that this quarter's earnings report looks a lot like last quarter's (or the same quarter from last year, depending on the business), for instance, which it often will.
What you really profit from is not volatility but surprise. If you know better than market, you should be able to find a way to monetize that knowledge. Of course, your profit depends on degree of surprise, so it's hard to make much money when the market is already close to right.
P-Necromancer
1mo ago
Why do the Jews never look at George Bailey or Harry Potter or Luke Skywalker and say "That's me! Yes, he may not be canonically Jewish, but he's obviously just a stand-in for a Jew in this fictional setting."
They do, however, say that about Superman, who's the furthest thing from those stereotypes.
I don't think the fictional characters you identify with really say that much about you. At most it says how you'd like to be perceived, or how you fear others do perceive you. Wasn't there a thread a week or two ago about how real identity comes from what you do, not how you feel?
P-Necromancer
1mo ago
This is a more complicated question than it sounds.
It's true health insurance companies have very thin margins: almost always <5%. And it's even true that the ratio of premiums paid out to revenue collected (the 'loss ratio') is rather high across the board: >80%. ...But the reason it's strictly >80% is that that's the legally mandated minimum per the ACA. If they fall below that number, they have to issue rebates to customers to meet it.
On the face of it this sounds like a good thing, right? I've argued in the past that corporations aren't always eager in practice to maximize profit (principal-agent issues where employees and not owners are making most of the decisions), but they largely do try to maximize their own size. The law limits administrative bloat!
Except... it doesn't. It limits bloat to a percentage of payouts. If they negotiate well and push prices down, they reduce their profit/operating budget! Unless it's compensated by more custom, of course; the normal competitive pressures do still exist. But this rule absolutely acts against that pressure.
This is a classic example of Goodhart's Law. Without this requirement, loss ratio is a good measure of efficiency; since a company will always try to minimize their expenses (the ones that involve sending checks to other businesses and don't benefit any employees, anyway), high loss ratios just mean there's adequate competitive pressure to keep them lean. But now? Who can say? The number is going to be >80% no matter how much or little competitive pressure they're under. If competition is insufficient, they'll just throw money at doctors and hospitals, because that's the only way they're allowed to raise profit/operating budget (via higher premiums). And if they were, it would exactly like you're describing.
But are they? I'm really not sure. Loss ratios were often lower before the ACA (sometimes as low as 60%), but a lot has changed about the healthcare market since 2011. Health costs are going up everywhere, not just the US. It's a murky subject and I don't think there are many easy answers to be found.
P-Necromancer
2mo ago
It's a much worse point than that -- what do porn site age limits have to do with Grindr? Porn isn't generally a social activity that leads one to go out and meet new, potentially dangerous people. Hookup sites are, obviously, but why group them together? It's like commenting
THIS IS WHY AGE VERIFICATION ON GUN PURCHASES/VIOLENT VIDEO GAMES YOU MAROONS YOU MAY NOT LIKE IT BUT THIS IS THE HELL WHY.
when discussing a shooting.
P-Necromancer
2mo ago
Women have a very strong revealed preference for valuing motherhood above almost anything else, for the simple reason that women who have children overwhelmingly choose to do so again.
I don't think this is a great argument because the marginal cost of additional children when you already have one is comparatively tiny. Your first kid is an enormous commitment, demanding a massive amount of time, energy, and money. Hell, before you even get started you need to find a suitable partner, which can be hard enough on its own. But if you've already got a toddler, what's one more? You can dress them in hand-me-downs and you were going to stay home to watch the other one anyway. It means another year or two of supporting kids on the backend, but that's a long time from now, and late adolescents aren't that hard to support regardless. The additional costs aren't zero, obviously, but they're much smaller.
So even if additional kids are worthwhile, that doesn't prove that the first was. Fortunately, we don't have to wonder: The natural revealed preference argument for how much women value motherhood is the rate of motherhood. Which is decreasing.
P-Necromancer
2mo ago
I'm not sure I'd say 'similar;' 5700 over 4 years (1425 a year) out of not all American citizens but only the 73 million American children is nearly 40 times more common!
But sure, I at least am willing to bite the bullet and say that neither of these are real problems. Could they become problems if they become vastly more common? Sure. ... But realistically, is that going to happen? Given, as you implicitly agree, these events are so rare an order of magnitude isn't nearly enough to elevate them to a substantial risk, ICE is going to have to massively accelerate operations before this becomes something genuinely worth worrying about. I'd personally put the floor for even considering a given risk at around 1/50,000 per year -- your odds of dying in a car crash in a given year are about ten times that, all-cause mortality for a 30-year-old 100 times that -- and it's got a long way to go to get there.
Actually, given the current ratio of detained citizens to deported non-citizens (about 170/500,000), they're going to run out of people to deport well before crossing that threshold; well before even breaking 5700. Their error rate could get much worse, I suppose? Well, again, I'm surprised it's as low as it is now, so that definitely seems plausible. Still, it's an enormous gap.
P-Necromancer
2mo ago
... So about 1 in 2 million American citizens? Are you genuinely concerned you'll be one of them? You weren't in the past year. I'll hazard a guess you also weren't struck by lightning in the past year and that is the more surprising fact (about 1/1,222,000 per year).
I'm actually shocked the number is so low; this isn't deportations, just detainment. I'm pretty sure the normal police have a much worse record of detaining innocents (though my attempts to look it up only give results about ICE, perhaps predictably).
If this number is accurate, it's just not a real problem: it's not going to happen to you and it's not going to happen to anyone you personally know. In fact, it happens just enough the media can make it seem like a common occurrence. The fact you're aware of it at all is the Chinese Robber Fallacy in action.
P-Necromancer
3mo ago
If you're arguing that lethal force is necessary in cases of unarmed attacks (and with no special circumstances) where the victim is not injured on the theory that you don't know what is going to happen and the attack could result in serious injury or death, you're saying that the amount of apprehension the victim of such an attack suffers is comparable to that of someone who was shot at but not hit.
Obviously the apprehension is greater in the latter case. It's also greater if one is shot at with an anti-materiel rifle than with a pistol. My argument is that all three cases clearly exceed the threshold that (morally) justifies lethal self defense: that it is plausible that your (criminal) assailant will kill or seriously injure you, given your (lack of) knowledge of the situation and their intentions. Allowing yourself to be tackled to the concrete is very likely also allowing your head to be repeatedly slammed into the concrete, if that's your attacker's intentions, and you ought to have the right to assume that is your attacker's intentions, given their demonstrated criminal disregard for your wellbeing.
As for where the line actually is? I agree with u/self_made_human that a slap does not meet this threshold. A light shove or shoulder check doesn't. Any attack that neither carries any meaningful risk of serious injury or death nor puts your attacker in a substantially better position to seriously injure or kill you if they wanted doesn't meet the standard. If the attack has ended (and it's reasonable for you to realize that it has), there also ends your right to self defense. If the assailant is defending themself from your criminal violence, you have no right to self defense.
It's reasonable for the court to distinguish between these levels of apprehension of injury, provided the assailant is alive to be judged, just as it is reasonable for them to distinguish between premeditated and unpremeditated murder: that does not imply that unpremeditated (attempted) murder doesn't justify lethal self defense, nor does it imply that simple assault can't meet that standard either.
P-Necromancer
3mo ago
“Very few other reasons” is also not a good standard for regular use of deadly force.
This is the evidence by which we, as individuals without any privileged information, must judge the situation. It's not (I very much hope) the sum-total of the evidence by which the administration is making these determinations. They haven't presented that evidence to the public... but they obviously wouldn't if its means of acquisition was at all circumspect. This administration has proven... erratic on certain matters, but they presumably would at least consult military intelligence regarding their targets, and I have pretty high hopes the NSA is capable of identifying genuine cartel vessels; is their security better than Iran's nuclear program?
None of which is to say we should just trust the process -- they've certainly made mistakes before -- and that's not to say the strikes are justified conditional on the targets being as described. Just that, pending evidence to the contrary, I think these likely are cartel vessels.
P-Necromancer
3mo ago
I think you're missing the critical element here: the court's judgements are made after the fact, when the incident is resolved and all the consequences are clear. And in particular, the relevant point is not the distinction between simple and aggravated assault, but whether the attack resulted in injury or death. In that context it makes perfect sense to only charge the attacker for what actually occurred. If there's no injury, then that'll be assault (of one flavor or the other), but if precisely the same actions resulted in death, as you acknowledge is possible, then much more serious murder/manslaughter charges come into play.
But the victim of an attack doesn't have the benefit of hindsight. The probability of those outcomes depends on the nature of the assault, but it's certainly nonzero for punching or tackling. And past that, how could the victim possibly know their attacker means to leave things there and not cave their skull in once they're beaten? I mean, probably not, but what faith should the victim of a violent assault have in the good intentions of their attacker?
So it's wrong to say that Hayes was merely assaulted and it was thus inappropriate for him to respond with deadly force: it was impossible for him to know whether he was being merely assaulted or if the attack would result in his injury or death, whether by accident or intention.
But that is what the self defense rules try to adjudicate, and I still feel the outcome here is wildly unfair. I suppose the sticking point for me is that I think that by virtue of choosing to engage in criminal violence, the attacker has (morally) forfeited their right to have their intentions judged charitably by their victim. That is: once it's established that the attacker was in fact unjustified in their attack, self defense should be judged with the presumption that the attacker was trying to kill their victim.
I'm struggling to see the downside to this rule: if you don't want to get shot for assaulting someone, you can just not assault them. If you choose to anyway, why should society value your wellbeing over your victim's, however disproportionate the ratio? If you think it's unfair to get shot over a simple punch, you can, again, just not punch anyone, and thereby avoid the unfairness. I wouldn't support the death penalty for such violence after the fact, but self defense is different in that it can prevent the criminal harm from occurring at all, which has a much stronger moral case than the normal deterrence/retribution/incapacitation justifications for punishment.
(Well, I suppose I could see an exception for minors and perhaps the impaired, provided the victim is aware of that state.)
P-Necromancer
3mo ago
In theory I guess the general stockholders could all come together to do it, but they're so disorganized that it never happens.
Well, this is primary mechanism in play. Board members are elected, but I'm sympathetic to the idea democracy doesn't really work. Principal-agent problems do happen. Many companies do have stock ownership requirements for board membership, but I guess the financial consequences of poor choices here could be cancelled out by your executive price-fixing conspiracy.
Fortunately, it's not the only mechanism: you can just choose not to invest in companies that you think overpay their executives. If you think that leadership doesn't really matter/extra CEO pay doesn't get you much better CEOs, that's profit just sitting on the table, and companies that don't do that will do better, all else equal. This information is publicly available, nothing's stopping you or anyone who agrees with you from creating a 'low CEO to worker pay ratio' fund. This doesn't instantly solve the problem, but it does mean it's not your problem. It's the shareholders who are getting cheated here, not the general public or the employees who, after all, have not been deceived: they were offered a certain product/wage for the money/work and accepted it. It's only the board's betrayal of their fiduciary duty to the shareholders that's dishonest.
also worth noting that the ratio of CEO pay to average worker pay has massively increased over the last few decades.
Not totally clear to me why this is the case, but I don't think it's strong evidence of corruption. Maybe they were underpaying them before, or maybe something about the corporate landscape has changed that makes leadership that much more important, or suitable applicants have become that much more rare. The increase alone is insufficient to demonstrate there's a problem.
So it may well just continue to increase until they're taking home some large fraction of the company's total revenue as their personal salary.
If this does happen, I think it'll result in massively worse performance. There's some leeway for inefficiency in successful companies, but enough to divert 10%+ of revenue into an empty pit? Either the executive really is that great (which maybe isn't impossible, but most certainly aren't) or they'll get outcompeted by companies that don't do this.
I wonder if he was awarded 1% of all the USSR's money as a reward for his services? That should be fair, right? Or did he not get anything at all? Our intuitions for what's fair really fail at this kind of scale. (edit: he was not rewarded. it was seen as an embarassment for the entire Soviet system and was quietly swept under the rug)
The USSR indeed had infamously dysfunctional incentive structures. His treatment was not even particularly bad by their standards. That's really not an argument for adopting them.
That said: not like any other nation would have paid out that kind of money for equivalent actions. A medal would have been entirely appropriate; hell, he'd have been a far better candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize than most of its recipients. (And he did in fact receive various lower profile rewards from some Western organizations.) But a cash prize comparable to the amount of value he preserved? No way. The Soviets did spend an enormous amount of money on nuclear launch detection (the fact it didn't work notwithstanding), but offering huge rewards for correct judgements in these situations would provide the wrong incentive: why would you ever say the detection was genuine? Either it's a false alarm and you get the award, or you've got half an hour to live and it's not going to matter to you either way.
(And there's a more generally applicable takeaway: there's a difference between fulfilling a prior agreement and dolling out rewards case-by-case after the fact. The latter can be worth doing, but the former is obviously far more reliable, and reliability is the most important thing in leadership.)
P-Necromancer
3mo ago
Surely there should be some limit where we decide that a CEO is just too expensive, but there doesn't seem to be any mechanism in corporate America to limit it.
There is, obviously, or every CEO would already be making a trillion dollars a year. Specifically, they need to convince the owner(s) or their representatives to pay them that much. And the more money they pay the CEO, the less profit they make. Why do you think the board is any less incentivized to cut staffing costs than managers? They're the ones applying that pressure!
As for the actual reasons why the market looks like it does: I'm pretty sure the thinking is much more about ensuring you've got someone who's experienced and reliable enough to avoid any major corporate screwups (which can easily run into the billions) than attracting some business genius to lead the company to glory. But if everyone wants experienced executives with a record of reliability and no one wants to take a chance on someone who isn't there yet... Well, that's how prices get bid up.
They mostly bring it up to disparage it, saying how history is far more complicated than just what people like Caesar and Alexander did. They'd be laughed out of the room if they tried to give all credit for an entire country to just one person. But apparently corporate leadership still believes in this line of thinking- they value the CEO far more than anything else.
These are not at all the same thing. They value the CEO over any other individual in the company, yes. But, as OP pointed out, they're paying him less than half of one percent of their total payroll. Sure, you can't reduce all of Roman history during Caesar's reign to Caesar... but I'm pretty sure you can attribute 0.5% of it to him. He did actually make a lot of decisions that impacted the lives of many Romans, many as a result of his particular circumstances. Upwards of 2-3%, I'd bet.
In general, the strong form of the case against the Great Man Theory is clearly false. Stanislav Petrov and Stanislav Petrov alone prevented nuclear war. Many times events don't neatly follow from the choices of any one (or even several) specific individuals, and sometimes when they do those choices would probably have been made by someone else in their place, but it's ridiculous to insist that's always the case. But I don't think most actual historians push the strong case; the point is just that other factors matter too, and often matter more. Which is in no way incompatible with thinking good leadership really does matter.
Musk is an outlier, for sure. But he's an even bigger outlier in terms of success. You can say he just got extremely lucky (twice, since SpaceX is an incredible success too), but I don't think that's where the balance of probability lies. Now, I'm not sure his compensation is reasonable even given that fact... which is why I haven't put any money into Tesla. (Well, I mainly haven't because I think other companies are quickly catching up, if they're not already there.) If more people thought like me, Tesla's stock would drop and he wouldn't get those huge bonuses... So there's your limiting factor. Clearly the people with skin in the game do feel he's worth it. They might be wrong, but it's their money they're betting.
This is not in fact how the word 'execution' is used in any other context. Your definition would include killing in justified self defense too. If a man kills a home invader rushing at him with a knife, do you think his defense attorney would call that killing an 'execution?' If you look up how many Germans were executed by the allies during and after WW2, you will get a number in the thousands, not the millions; the allies -- allied soldiers tasked with violence on behalf of the state -- killed millions of German soldiers in the war, but absolutely no one calls those deaths 'executions.'
'Execution' implies deliberation and, most critically, control over the situation. Killing in the course of an altercation can be (and is in this instance, I think!) manslaughter or murder, but it is never an execution. If your definition of 'execution' is co-extensive with 'killing,' why insist on the former? Is it because 'execution' sounds worse because no one else uses your definition?
(ETA: After considering it a little more, I think 'execution' particularly requires that you kill because you believe the victim deserves to die (as a necessary but not sufficient condition). Killing out of confusion or fear of someone's current behavior can't qualify. 'Extrajudicial summary execution' refers to cases like occupying soldiers hanging or shooting civilians on suspicion of sabotage, not those same soldiers firing into a crowd of rioting partisans.)
This sounds good, sure. Have you actually considered the implications? US (non-ICE) police have acted incompetently in high stress split second situations before -- I expect you're familiar with at least a few examples -- so should we abolish the police? US soldiers have absolutely made mistakes like this before; do we need to disband the military? Unfortunately, while 'no lethal mistakes, ever' is a laudable standard, it's one that no group tasked with exercising the state's monopoly on violence has ever met or ever will.
I certainly agree Pretti's shooter, specifically, shouldn't have a gun or the power to exercise the state's monopoly on violence, and in fact should be tried for homicide. The shooting is cause to update in the direction of ICE being incompetent thugs... but update how much?
Out of 50,000(? Organizers claim, anyway) protestors in Minneapolis, ICE has only actually killed two of them. I happen to think that Good's shooter would have been easily acquitted had it gone to trial, but allow that that was murder too: is the failure rate per violent encounter here actually worse than average? I'm not sure, but you haven't even tried to make the argument that it is.
More options
Context Copy link