domain:nfinf.substack.com
hydroacetylene
13hr ago
The HVAC union(OK, technically a plumbing union, but whatever) raises costs by a lot, but it's never short of work. Yes, construction and the trades are a bit of a different market. But at some point people are willing to pay more for fairly nominal benefits. In the case of the HVAC union it's mostly guaranteeing good techs on a jobsite to customers who don't care about the cost very much; think hospitals and the like. I can easily imagine starbucks being a premium provider because all of their workers make six figures. It would be smaller though.
anon_
14hr ago
Yes, that is the law in Tennessee and about half the rest of states.
There was actually news about Trump trying to take over bases in South Korea, although it was not last week. I also found this article about Trump wanting to take over a base in Afghanistan, but Afghanistan would not be useful against China. That wasn't last week either, though it was more recent.
Vietnam has a defense policy which would not allow foreign bases, although it's questionable how serious they are about it.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
14hr ago
People's value functions are based on envy/their relative position. A lot of people would be objectively happier being upper middle class in 1925 than lower middle class in 2025 despite the latter being materially a lot better off, happier living poor in a poor neighbourhood over living average in a rich neighbourhood, and happier earning $50k under a CEO earning $60k than earning $60k under a CEO earning $80m.
quiet_NaN
14hr ago
One possible way to explain exorbitant CEO salaries would be conspicuous consumption on the part of the company, especially to attract investors.
"Look at us, we are paying 100M$/a to our CEO, not necessarily because we believe that the marginal dollar of his salary is a good investment, but simply because it is a performance expected of us, and paying less would signal to our investors that we are not a solid company to invest in."
If you are king, and there is a widespread belief that good kings keep war elephants, then that is a great reason to spend huge sums to keep war elephants, even if you privately believe that spending the money on infantry would be more efficient.
Shrike
14hr ago
because they know that they're not that great at building airplanes.
I'm not really sure how much it matters how well your aircraft is "built" when it's hit by a missile, but I am given to understand that Russian aircraft are actually designed pretty well - the Flanker, for instance, is pretty commonly acknowledged to be a peer to the F-15 (and of course the Russians equipped their aircraft with equipment such as high off-boresight dogfighting missiles and electronically-scanned arrays before the States during the Cold War and today continue to develop capabilities not fielded by the West, such as the Felon's cheek radar arrays and of course the favorite weapon of comic book villains everywhere, nuclear-tipped air-to-air missiles).
The major game changers have been the Russians introducing their equivalent of the JDAM (allowing them to drop far more tonnage for far less money from outside the range of Ukrainian air defenses)
Yes. From what I can tell, the (embarrassing) lack of glide bombs was more important to the lackluster support provided by the Russian air arm than any sort of aircraft quality issues.
However, I'd suggest a third thing where the VKS has stood out - perhaps not a "major game changer" in the course of what is primarily a ground war, but their employment of the MiG-31 and Flankers carrying long range air-to-air missiles seems to have been relatively effective, with the Russians scoring at least one kill with the R-37 in excess of 100 miles. Being able to threaten Ukrainian aircraft even when they are able to mask themselves from the Russian surface air defenses seems to have created real problems for the Ukrainians, and of course despite receiving F-16s more than a year ago the Ukrainians don't seem to have been able to seize air superiority, which I would guess is due partially to the effective Russian SAM network but also partially to the fact that the F-16/AMRAAM combo is just outsticked by the MiG-31/Su-35 and R-37 combo.
I could be wrong as I haven't looked into the Mainstay's situation very much, but from what I can tell the Russian airborne early warning fleet is too small for them to consistently keep them on station providing situational awareness, which is also embarrassing but if anything makes what their fighters seem to be able to achieve more impressive.
quiet_NaN
14hr ago
Regarding pensions, I think having private companies pay out pensions to employees is silly. It also distorts incentives, with the state more willing to rescue a company because the pensions of a lot of former employees depends on it.
Instead, the retirement part of the paycheck should be invested either by the employee directly or by a specialized company (under strict regulations, basically "hang all the C-level executives if the company folds during a finance crisis" or something). I am fine with an insurance model, where people who live to 100 get their pensions subsidized by people who died half a year into retirement. I am not particularly fine with my deductibles directly paying for current pensioners (which is the case in Germany), and all I get in return is a vague promise than politicians will make future generations pay for my pension in turn.
quiet_NaN
14hr ago
You could double that spending [e.g. 2% GDP] 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.
While I do not doubt that for 2% of the US GDP, you could get some batteries, a decent range of chips and possibly REE refining, I think that for full independence from foreign markets at near-equal performance, even 100% of the GDP would not be enough.
Modern production chains are incredibly complex. A lot of products which are viable if your target market is a few billion people are not viable when your target market is just 300M. Remember when the 2011 floods in Thailand drove up hard disk prices for a year or two, because HDD manufacturing had naturally clustered in the Pacific rim?
Gains from scale are real and significant, they are what is powering the global economy. If someone in the US decides to build a game console which is made out of ore mined in America and manufactured and assembled in the US, that would require investments of many billions and result in a product which would be 10x as expensive as its international competitors.
If you want full autarky, join the Amish.
A better question would be which parts of the production chains you see as strategic important and especially vulnerable, and then think whether it is feasible to onshore these (or subsidize a friendly country building them). At the end of the day, the American people will survive if China will refuse to sell them the latest iPhone, after all.
zeke5123a
14hr ago
People want nice stuff—especially housing. Bing that cost down and other things like the above won’t matter
Zephyr
14hr ago
I won't go into specifics but most people figure it out by their late 20s
I'm kind of stupid, can you DM it to me? I am fairly certain I failed to figure it out.
Sunshine
14hr ago
If the defense industries can't function without Chinese support then they're useless and should be destroyed. What were they planning to do if war with China ever came?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
15hr ago
Smart leadership solves this.
China doesn't explicitly have a policy against offshoring (though they have been trying to keep India from getting the tools and capital to compete), they have a strategy of fostering industry in their own country. They have smart leadership.
It's not just offshoring that matters, what about foreign countries paying large sums for key workers to come over and share skills? China did this to South Korean shipbuilding when they were in a slump, paid the best people to come over for a few years. And now they have the biggest shipbuilding sector in the world.
And why is offshoring a thing? Energy costs are lower, environmental regulations less severe. Smart leaders would lower the cost of energy and industrial inputs by relaxing the most onerous renewable/environmental/planning restrictions. Smart leaders would make the labour market more flexible (US hasn't done too badly here compared to other rich countries), would prevent ridiculous anomalies like caps on doctor training, would invest more in R&D, would modernize infrastructure, would shamelessly steal other people's IP as they see fit.
Individual policies are ineffective if the leadership is stupid. Subsidies just encourage inefficiency and corruption without discipline. Tariffs can be very harmful for imported components and cause uncertainty if they're raised and lowered willy-nilly.
Subsidizing R&D can also just result in people relabelling things as R&D, reducing energy costs can encourage inefficiency... Everything has a 'perverse incentives' evil twin. Sanctions on exporting sensitive technologies can just be busted or third-party routed around, as the US has discovered with AI chips. Any smart person could tell you that it's dumb to sell rare earth mines off to China, whether it's 1995 or 2025. But smart people do not run the US government.
Individual policies must be well-implemented and precisely targeted by a responsive, dynamic bureaucracy in accordance with a coherent long-term vision. It's a crisis of intelligence, not policy.
BahRamYou
15hr ago
i mean, i'm happy to take my salary in the form of corporate stock if that would 10x my compensation... but regular employees don't seem to get that option.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
15hr ago
My understanding is that contrary to stereotype the Russian Air Force has been extremely risk averse in how they employ their aircraft because they know that they're not that great at building airplanes.
The VKS basically did nothing other than relatively ineffective close air support with frog foots and helicopters (which, on a side note, proved quite effective at using anti-tank missiles at the extreme of their range against Ukrainian armor during the '23 counteroffensive) or lob missiles from outside the range of Ukrainian air defenses for the first year and a half or so of the war (notably expending a large number of them to little effect during Surovikin's campaign against the Ukrainian energy grid).
The major game changers have been the Russians introducing their equivalent of the JDAM (allowing them to drop far more tonnage for far less money from outside the range of Ukrainian air defenses) and their development of the Geran series of suicide drones. The latter has provided a cost-effective way of attacking into the teeth of Ukrainian air defenses and saturating them such they more frequently achieve hits with their ballistic missiles.).
hanikrummihundursvin
15hr ago
Paying out the nose for it would in theory be fine. Since you're paying to your own citizens. Funding infrastructure and human capital and more.
But in reality, implementing anything of the sort would is hazardous at best. As the global marketplace would slowly siphon these gains out of the economy. Resulting in a very similar process to the direct selling of natural resources, just by a thousand cuts.
Loquat
15hr ago
I knew the songs were big online, but I was still surprised to hear one of the other neighborhood moms singing "Golden" to herself while we were cleaning up after a recent block party.
Sunshine
15hr ago
I had the same thought when I read that first line. How can the 'nuclear option' for a nuclear power be anything except using nuclear weapons? Surely that's the nuclear option.
Loquat
15hr ago
I do believe there's some space in between, "dog is trained enough to respect the invisi-fence" and "dog is trained so well it can be trusted to stay in an open yard regardless of how many squirrels, kids, etc may come running by".
Celestial-body-NOS
We are all human beans. Together, we will rice.
15hr ago
Nah, if anything scrap the $100 and $50 bills
The total at US grocery stores can easily go into the triple digits.
larger denominations just help with money laundering
And with being able to buy food without needing the approval of one's bank.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
15hr ago
It's not missing the point, it's bringing up another separate point that bears on the argument.
It doesn't bear on the argument because it's got nothing to do with the argument. The argument is that CEOs are parasitizing comp that should be going to the barista, and the barista union will undo this injustice.
Trying to shoehorn in concerns about CEO performance is missing the point at best and quokkadom at worst ("wow, the union and I both think the CEO is overpaid, we must have a common cause! Comrades, what do you mean you don't care about the stock going up?")
Costco, for example, doesn't have this problem. Costco is well run, pays its people well, treats them well, and has had an excellent run of fairly compensated CEOs. Costco pays a total of $20mm including stock. Is Starbucks doing better than Costco? (No) Is Starbucks more complex than Costco? (No)
Okay, but Google, for example is (reasonably) well run, has vastly outperformed the S&P over the past five years, pays its employees pretty well, and people still bitch about the CEO comp. "Well, he screwed up when he laid off all th-" "but google employees don't get paid at top of ma-" no, this is a competitive business, nobody does everything right, the point is that the company is doing well and employees are paid fantastic amounts.
Why are Starbucks baristas and Google engineers alike complaining about this? It's because of leftism. Nothing to do with CEO performance.
CEO overpayment is an obvious and manifest injustice, so of course people are going to latch onto that. Saying well it's a big company with a lot of money sloshing around so stealing a few bucks is no big deal is the morality of the shoplifter and the lazy employee, not the profit maximizing shareholder or the diligent corporate steward.
Yeah, agreed, bad CEOs should get the boot. The mistake is to think this has anything to do with the amount of comp that the rank and file get.
Bad CEOs are bad for the rank and file because if your employer goes out of business it's bad news. That's about it. The other points you mention are much more relevant for investors than employees who stand to gain about tree-fiddy a week if the CEO takes a 50% paycut.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
15hr ago
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.
The 2019 RSMeans book indicates that the cost multiplier of my new house's location is 0.92. (Some states have locations as low as 0.74.)
For a house that small, you probably are fine with just exhaust fans and some makeup air to a small air handler.
It's an interesting idea. I see that, according to the Architectural Graphic Standards for Residential Design: "Most new residences are too tightly constructed to provide adequate leakage ventilation. Therefore, manual and mechanical ventilation are recommended."
stuckinbathroom
15hr ago
I would even settle for a tradition of requiring the CEO to invest a material percentage of his liquid net worth in the company’s stock on his first day on the job, precisely to put the fear of God downside risk in him. Or, more or less equivalently, a tradition of letting shareholders pierce the corporate veil and personally sue the CEO in civil court for securities fraud or breach of fiduciary duty in the event that the share price declines too much (perhaps relative to a broad market index, or a basket of competitors’ stocks or something)
And this is why unions are historically organized as locals with membership policies to generate a scarcity in a particular market.
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