domain:parrhesia.substack.com
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
3hr 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
3hr 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
3hr 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
3hr 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
3hr 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
3hr 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
3hr 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
3hr 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
3hr 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...
3hr 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
3hr 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
3hr 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
3hr 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
3hr ago
Sounds like McDonald's should've sold a 1/5 burger for the same price then.
pigeonburger
3hr 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
3hr 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
4hr 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
4hr 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
4hr 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.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
4hr ago
LOL
I actually didn't realize it was a different word. How fun(ny).
No_one
4hr ago
It pretty much seemed like a done deal except recon somehow missed the 200k Chinese who were doing a creditable effort at not being seen and mostly marched at night iirc.
ThenElection
4hr ago
To a first approximation, everyone is bad at math, and it's a rare person who applies it thoroughly to all parts of their lives. As a more immediate demonstration than abstractions around compensation, just pay a Starbucks worker cash for your latte and see them figure out the change.
For this particular case, union officials are absolutely aware of this, and I don't think it's common for a bargaining committee to push a fix to this as a demand during contract negotiations. Or, honestly, that it happens at all. Union staff have plenty of people who can do math. But it is an effective rhetorical move: it's evergreen and will always be true, so once the disparity becomes a true-ism among workers, it can be called on in any situation. The alternative would be to focus on e.g. profits. In which case, the rhetoric would entirely lose its potency: if high profits mean workers should get higher pay, then low or nonexistent profits would undercut any argument for improved pay.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
4hr ago
Bluesky is Twitter for people who hate Elon. I assume it’s a cesspool.
Mastodon is a bit more complicated. It was federated from the start, meaning it was always intended to let groups opt in/out of entire swathes of the broader sphere. This allows blacklisting without leaving the platform. It also supports numerous witch covens. I assume they’re all cesspools.
Truth social is Twitter for people who think Fox News is captured by anti-Trump wreckers. I don’t actually know how it differs in features, and I am okay with that. I assume it’s a cesspool.
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.
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