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naraburns
nihil supernum
1d ago
Designed to be perfect, but disturbingly generic.
That's the movie's whole shtick. It's the emotional equivalent of ludicrously empty calories. This takes real skill to accomplish, and I'm genuinely impressed with how well the movie and the music really present as the apotheosis of pop. It's the perfect emotional dessert--utterly devoid of nutritive value.
phosphorus2
1d ago
As opposed to wildfires, which apparently pose no danger at all to the apparently fireproof plant....
It's funny, because Braunton's milkvetch relies on wildfires to reproduce. "The beanlike seeds require scarification from fire or mechanical disturbance to break down their tough seed coats before they can germinate."
are there ways to legislate outside of tariffs to prevent this sort of major sell off of strategic business to adversarial nations?
The classic way to do this is just subsidies. If you want strategic resources or production capabilities to stay domestic, you can always just pay for it. This has - across many different nations and decades - worked mostly OK, especially for strategic essentials like food and energy production. Most western nations spend around 2% of GDP on that.
You could double that spending and easily get everything from domestic batteries to chips, from steel to rare earth metals for it. It's an absolutely enormous amount of money, after all.
And while it's probably not the most efficient way to do it since you distort/steer the market (that's the whole point), and if you overdo it you might need some export tariffs (you probably do not want to use tax dollars to subsidize foreign consumers - unless you're China and want to bankrupt your competitors production capability), it will get results.
zPvQINBQvfFR
1d ago
Not if it comes with risk of being sanctioned for violating EU environmental regulations and losing access to the cash money.
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
1d ago
I have been absolutely addicted to the song "Golden" from k-pop demon hunters on Netflix.
It sounds to me like one of these songs that parody a genre by ticking every box. Designed to be perfect, but disturbingly generic. Like a "house style" PonyXL face.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1d ago
Later on in the thread it brings up the closing of Mountain Pass for environmentalist reasons, one of the richest rare-earth mines in the world.
Lizzardspawn
1d ago
Probably because being CEO is heads I win, tails you lose. There is no downside, no penalties, no risk and no repercussions for doing their job poorly. If we had a tradition of skinning the CEOs alive if the company was not doing well, I would be ok with their obscene pay.
Drinniol
1d ago
Companies producing weapons and military vehicles already have tons of laws on them that would prevent them from being purchased or suborned by a foreign power.
Literally all that needed to happen was for the government to identify that REE was critical to defense and apply the same rules to them that they do to other defense critical industries.
Unfortunately, the time to do that was around 30 years ago. But in 1995, with the Soviet Union having fallen, and the Tiananmen Square demonstrations in recent memory, and HK still under British control, the government just wasn't thinking about China as a strategic level threat. Thinking ahead 30 years? Eh, they'd probably collapse like the Soviet Union by then anyway, right? Mid/late 90s US was on top of the world, why worry about some rinky dink mining company or two getting bought out by the Chinese?
pigeonburger
1d ago
But profits go up, share holders are happy, so every year it continues. At least on paper. It's almost impossible for me to reckon that this can continue forever. That they aren't eating their seed corn in some fundamental way. That at some point the tech debt they continually accumulate won't cause the Microsoft ecosystem to be such a risk to run, that there is an institutional push to abandon it.
The hard part, though, is that if that is true, if you know for certain that they are eating their seed corn, then my friend you have tremendous alpha and should put all your money betting on Microsoft going belly up.
These risks are not separate from the valuation, they are priced in. And while I also really, really dislike the direction Microsoft has taken, they are making a killing on cloud licenses, especially Office 365. Pretty much every company I work with and for has to pay a monthly per employee tax to Microsoft.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
1d ago
This is missing the point. Do you think anyone complaining about starbucks unionizing would be satisfied if starbucks stock instead grew at 10x the rate of the s&p500?
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2d ago
Really, Starbucks is your example? Starbucks? In the year of our Lord 2025, Starbucks?
The CEO of Starbucks has been around for a year. Starbucks has lost 16% of its value in a year that the SP500 has gained 13%. Relative to just parking your money in an index fund, the CEO of Starbucks has during his regime lost you 30%.
Same store sales sank year over year continuing a downward trend. 70% of customers plan to visit less. Corporate plans to emphasize Starbucks as a 'Third Place' have fallen as pearls before swine. Starbucks' customer base is getting older, cutting their spending, and less committed than they used to be. Starbucks is closing locations at the same time that competitors, from Dutch Bros to Wawa (sieg heil!) are expanding their espresso offerings to take bites out of Starbucks' market. Dutch Bros stock is up 65% year over year. Starbucks is cutting jobs and locations at a time when their competitors are growing.
So sure, the CEO's pay has little to do with the hourly pay of workers. But, what kind of boot licker looks at a $95mm salary and says he earned it without asking what his VORP is? Because I'm sure they couldn't have done too much worse for $50mm.
It's one thing to talk about Elon Musk's pay package, as without Elon Tesla's valuation probably halves overnight. It's one thing to talk about Jeff Bezos' wealth, who built a dominant and revolutionary company. But Starbucks? GM? HP? It's hard to justify what these guys are getting paid to be mediocre.
No one has quite solved these kinds of incentive problems.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
2d ago
I think it's all of the above, but is largely operationalized as a gut reaction/feeling versus a conscious choice. Person doesn't like thing, person chooses the "negative" option, whether that's a downvote, 1 star, or whatever. I think it's almost entirely a system 1 decision though.
It's also really funny because that behavior in endemic here as well. It's a very human reaction.
"But where is a social network for the people who aren't sewage?"
"The what now?"
MollieTheMare
2d ago
I had an apartment with almost the same layout as your build. Very functional and reasonably comfortable for two. Of course we only had windows on one side, unlike your build. We did host another couple for a total of four for a while, and it was fine. Probably could have squeezed another person in if needed. I wouldn't want to live that way long term, but seems very reasonable for two for now, hosting up to five.
Given current construction prices and the size of your build, you either got a great deal or live in the middle of nowhere or both. If you really are staying for a while, I think the splurge is worth it. We can't all build a Monticello, but there's something to be said for living in a house of your own design.
Opening a window is a good option for ventilation as long as the weather is good and there's not too much outdoor pollution. Unfortunately the number of places that have good weather most of the year, don't have wildfire smoke or car exhaust outside, and are affordable is pretty small. For a house that small though, you probably are fine with just exhaust fans and some makeup air to a small air handler. The extra energy cost over an ERV/HRV is probably pretty small given the small square footage.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
2d ago
I really enjoy getting downvoted on Reddit for doing the "CEO pay"/"# workers" = "incredibly small number"
This is like 50% of what drives me crazy. What are people clicking downvote even doing? Do they think you're making the very easily checked facts up? Are they mad that you're spoiling a good circle jerk? Have you simply signaled that you're a member of the outgroup and must be destroyed? This is a fact that should cause a complete crash to their worldview and it does. not. register.
NewCharlesInCharge
2d ago
Many possibilities.
Maybe driving the company into the ground was the goal, they're raiding it for its assets.
The CEO has off-the-scales charm and is able to snooker a board into hiring him despite his poor track record.
The board isn't offering enough and is only able to attract bottom tier candidates for this kind of role.
The board is corrupt and is getting some personal benefit.
pigeonburger
2d ago
I kind of feel like you're someone entering a cult, eyes wide open, saying "Sure, I see their game, but it won't work on me," even as the bait is perfectly obvious. But there are worse cults to fall in with, I guess.
Is it that, or "Sure, I see their game, and honestly? I wanna be taken in. It's mostly upside compared the status quo."
cjet79
2d ago
I have been absolutely addicted to the song "Golden" from k-pop demon hunters on Netflix.
I'm not the only one, apparently it's a huge chart topper.
The story of the lead vocalist is pretty fascinating. She was part of some k-pop training academy but they never launched her career cuz she was "too old" 7 years ago. She left them and went into composing songs. She was good at that, got some of her songs picked up by other famous k-pop groups and then got tapped to write the songs for the k-pop demon hunters movie. Well she was demoing the songs for the studio, and they thought "you sound great" so she got the lead role. Now she is the biggest (maybe second biggest) k-pop star ever.
The group just recently did their first live performance on jimmy Kimmel.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
2d ago
I'm still wrestling with this one personally.
Sometimes you see CEOs that roll into a company, drive it completely into the dirt, but in a way where all the board members get filthy rich. Weird structured mergers that saddle the brand with insane amounts of debt, and then it declares bankruptcy and then the board makes a killing selling it piecemeal. There is a suspicion this is what Intel's board/CEO are planning on doing. Just rip the company to shreds and make themselves filthy rich selling the x86 license, the fabs, the business to business contracts to the highest bidder.
You see this constantly with Indian CEOs and their ruthless value extraction. Every year, Microsoft for example, gets exponentially worse. Every year they shitcan more Americans, hire more H1Bs, treat customers more adversarial while offering a worse product. But profits go up, share holders are happy, so every year it continues. At least on paper. It's almost impossible for me to reckon that this can continue forever. That they aren't eating their seed corn in some fundamental way. That at some point the tech debt they continually accumulate won't cause the Microsoft ecosystem to be such a risk to run, that there is an institutional push to abandon it.
But I suppose the phrase "There is a lot of ruin in a nation" goes for trillion dollar companies too. There is a lot of value left to extract, and a lot of enshittification yet to pursue with a trillion dollar market cap. But I'm sure they'll find some way to convert all $1,000,000,000,000 into H1B Visas.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
2d ago
Even if the math did work, there’s always the CEO’s perfect out— outsource their front-line labor to a company that does staffing and then only be compared to the C-Suite officers who make 80% of what he does. And I can’t imagine putting all coffhouse staffing under a temp to hire company is going to improve conditions let alone pay as it now makes wage competition nonexistent.
Reminds me of a bit from back when I read a biography of Lewis "Chesty" Puller. General C.A. Willoughby, MacArthur's intelligence chief, had come to X Corps HQ in Wonsan from Tokyo, along with his staff. Evidently, when Willoughby asked General Almond how things were, Almond told him about the seventh division fighting the Chinese, and that both sides had taken casualties, to which Willoughby replied, "that's another goddamn Marine lie." Almond promptly led him out to the POW stockade and showed him around 80 Chinese POWs that the 7th had captured. Willoughby reportedly departed without saying another word and that evening, the situation map from Tokyo that showed detailed positions of the troops suddenly showed 500,000 Chinese troops scattered around the map. It was clear from Puller's point of view that the issue was political. Quoth Chesty:
Now that's the fastest damned troop movement in the history of the world, gentlemen. You'll never see another such. And don't forget this lesson: Tokyo wouldn't admit that we had Chinese fighting us even after the Eight Army was in flight, because some damned staff officers hundreds of miles away willed it to be so. You can't will anything in war.
ThenElection
2d ago
You can require the military to purchase only e.g. equipment made of rare earths that are mined and processed in the USA or its allies, with a rigorous supply chain verification. Expect to pay out of the nose for it. (And if you don't get any takers with your initial offer, you're not paying enough.)
quiet_NaN
2d ago
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"?
ChickenOverlord
2d 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
Rallying the lower class requires simplifying things. It is easier to rally people around CEO pay than the more complicated “if you unionize you can redirect more of Starbuck’s yearly profit to its 4 billion workers, giving each worker an extra $11,000 per year”. Starbuck’s should not have a high profit margin as it has maxxed its expansion in America and it is a predictable business that doesn’t need to “innovate”. Literally just sell the pumpkin spiced latte. It should have the profit margin of a grocery store.
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