domain:papyrusrampant.substack.com
ChickenOverlord
23hr ago
airlines are a cutthroat awful industry to be in with 3% net income margins (5% operating) which can be seen by them constantly getting bailed out
One of my favorite jokes:
What's the easiest way to become a millionaire?
Start out as a billionaire and buy an airline
BurdensomeCount
Unable to escape TheMotte's cycle of Samsara...
23hr ago
Each day I think my opinion of people has hit rock bottom but somehow they manage to drill further into that bedrock. Such a person being given the vote is the root cause of I'd wager at least 50% of modern evil.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
23hr ago
I can't tell if there's some massive moral hazard involved, or just plain incompetence on the part of the board.
It's just politics on a very small scale. In theory the shareholders should keep them in check, but unless someone has majority ownership, it's a lot harder for them to coordinate than it is for the board.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
23hr ago
Should governments have some sort of enforcement mechanism to prevent offshoring? Specifically first world governments, where offshoring is mostly profitable in the first place.
Thinking of this after reading this post on X which details how a CEO basically took the U.S.'s major manufacturing of rare earth elements or refiner or whatever, and sold it off to China. This seems like a huge issue for all sorts of reasons, but especially national security.
However, obviously this offshoring has happened in many industries over the last few decades and seems to present a bad equilibrium. If all your competitors slash their labor prices by offshoring, how can domestic manufacturing compete at all? Tariffs seem like a way to do this, but apparently everyone and their mother who has any economic understanding says they're evil and bad. I really don't know.
That being said I mean... are there ways to legislate outside of tariffs to prevent this sort of major sell off of strategic business to adversarial nations?
quiet_NaN
23hr ago
Personally, I would not put any more stock into that announcement than in the announcement about the autism-paracetamol link. Trump has been known to chicken out before.
I am also unsure what the CCP really wants. Perhaps getting full access to ASML products is really the hill they want to die on. Or they could be satisfied with a bunch of AI chips. Or it might be about Trump's tariffs.
My understanding is that REE refining infrastructure is something the US could easily sink a whole lot of money in before getting anywhere, even if the goal is just strategic and not competing on the REE world market.
That is kinda the difference between REE and chip manufacturing: if you can only build chips which have a feature size 10x larger than the latest TSMC fabs, there are still a lot of niches you can compete in. If you can only refine REE at 10x the costs that China has, you will not be able to compete once they undo their embargo.
I think the market-based way the US could handle this is to commit to buying a certain amount of REE which is refined without tech from China per year for their defense sector for the foreseeable future. Of course, future presidents may not honor such a commitment. The alternative is that the US directly invests in such firms.
Personally, I think Trump will try to give the CCP what they want, especially if it is just some AI chips instead of the capability to build their own.
NullHypothesis
23hr ago
Sounds like McDonald's should've sold a 1/5 burger for the same price then.
pigeonburger
23hr ago
Yeah, but if you were to have to explain to someone why CEOs compete for 7-8 digit salaries while "normal people" compete for 5-6 digit salaries, even if you accounted for time spent in education and risk taken, it would be hard to make it seem fair. And if you told them that in the end, everyone ends up with more if they just shut up about fairness and let the market do its thing, it'll be hard to convince them it's not self-interested rich capitalist propaganda (or bootlicking), because, again, of how unfair it seems.
birb_cromble
23hr ago
A bad CEO can absolutely destroy a company
What's your opinion on the CEOs that seem to continuously get hired after driving companies into the ground?
I can't tell if there's some massive moral hazard involved, or just plain incompetence on the part of the board.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
23hr ago
I really enjoy getting downvoted on Reddit for doing the "CEO pay"/"# workers" = "incredibly small number"
It's always a good laugh
Another fun one is when people get shitty about airplane ticket prices, insist on how airlines are ripping them off and how "back in the day" flying was luxurious and nice.
Shockingly, pointing out 1) airlines are a cutthroat awful industry to be in with 3% net income margins (5% operating) which can be seen by them constantly getting bailed out, 2) "back in the day" airplane tickets were something like $10,000 in today dollars, and 3) if you want the "back in the day" experience, you can actually have a better version of it right now by flying first/business class results in screeching and downvotes.
TheDemonRazgriz
23hr ago
However, the biggest instance of joinmastodon.org is mastodon.social, which is left-wing and blacklists other instances that its admins don't like. Commentators often fail to explain this distinction, leading to confusion among onlookers.
Thanks for this, I’ve noticed my own confusion about this distinction occasionally when people were talking about Mastodon, but had never bothered looking into it. Makes much more sense now.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
23hr ago
The thing people mess up the most is that the CEO isn't competing with them for their salary, the CEO is competing against other CEOs. A bad CEO can absolutely destroy a company, so a company will pay as much as it can afford to have a good one.
One question would be how related not paying a lot to the CEO is to the CEO destroying the company. I mean, there have been CEOs which have made disastrous business decisions, but are their cases where we can say "if only the company had been willing to pay 100M$/year instead of settling for the kind of incompetent fool you will attract if you offer only 50M$/year"?
More options
Context Copy link