domain:nfinf.substack.com
TitaniumButterfly
15hr ago
Plenty of people can't produce anything, so how does that math work out?
I'm pretty sure Elon Musk and Warren Buffett produce more than 1000x the value I produce.
???
What exactly is the instantiation of value that you think Elon Musk and Warren Buffet “produce”? Scrimshaw?
I am, I suppose, an Elon fanboy in the sense that to get to Mars I would ride with Satan himself, but he doesn’t produce anything; he is at best a Schelling point around which (as @SubstantialFrivolity describes below) an engineering Old Boy’s Network rotates, but if it wasn’t Elon it would have been somebody (anybody) else, to no material detriment to the Mars project.
veqq
16hr ago
the great man model
For context, 18th century enlightenment universalism focused on "socioeconomic factors" and described people as interchangeable stereotypes. Romanticism/counter-enlightenment pushed back with worship of genius (elevated by Eduard Young in 1759) and great men's ability to overcome fate. Carlyle praised hero-worship for teaching the necessary lessons of heroic leadership men need to stand up when the occasion arises to be great. While our lifetimes have seen the prior model reign again overall, in business the concept of heroic leader survived even the managerial revolution.
Bingbong
16hr ago
Yeah. My daughter keeps playing it and to me it's like fine but like a portmanteau B- version of the Blackpink style of KPop.
gattsuru
16hr ago
AB 1127 has passed the state legislature and is going to Newsom's desk, where he's expected to sign it
TIRM
16hr ago
Indeed, but, when we try something similar, such as a lithium mine in the wasteland around Thacker Pass, Nevada, there are years of protests. Indigenous sacred land everywhere.
TIRM
16hr ago
It hapoened before. SR71s were made using Soviet titanium. Schemes involving 3rd world shell companies.
stuckinbathroom
16hr ago
triple digit salary
Uh, what currency are we talking about?
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
17hr ago
I'm pretty sure Elon Musk and Warren Buffett produce more than 1000x the value I produce.
Personally, I don't believe it's possible for one person to produce 1000x the value of another. I think that CEO pay is not driven by actual value provided, but from the fact that CEO compensation is set by boards of directors who are... executives themselves, so it's just a good old boys' network. But certainly whether you think the arrangement is fair depends upon if one thinks it is indeed possible for one person to provide that much more value than another.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
17hr ago
I hear this a lot, and I can appreciate that it's probably true to an extent, but "milspec electronics" and "next gen process nodes" don't really overlap as much as you'd expect, as best as I can tell. I can imagine some things it matters for (radars and such), but I don't think process node differences within the last decade are really driving, say, artillery battles or even drones in Ukraine. Maybe in a few years we'll be talking about mostly-autonomous targeting systems with ML, but half of the impact of drones seems to have come from how they became commercially ubiquitous in ways that drove the price down into the "expendable" regime.
Generally I don't see this claim with listed categories of weapons systems, but maybe there is something I haven't thought of. What can you do at 3nm that you can't at, say, 65nm?
EvanTh
17hr ago
At the end of the day, the American people will survive if China will refuse to sell them the latest iPhone, after all.
Modern military equipment also uses high-performance computer chips. We need some way to get that even if China doesn't want us to expand our military.
2D3D
17hr ago
The Gazipur level industrial waste heap is just one small section of the REE plant.
2D3D
17hr ago
The kill chain for antiair starts at detection and current air ops favor terrain hugging with popup approach for strikes. As such kills are almost predetermined by baiting bandits to an ambush location, not one to one fights in the air. Operation Sindoors furball is textbook what NOT to do, and the Ukrainians lacking cueing radars to allow extreme range missiles without using ones own radar. Plus, the F16s Ukraine received are all ancient block A MLU so they have no AESA radar at all. Maybe link16 but that's still useless without a cueing platform.
In any case industrial capacity doesn't matter as much as legacy stocks because you can't just whip up a thousand eurofighters on demand. This isn't WW2 where tractor factories could make T34s and piano makers could make planes Spitfires. A modern combat platform is far more advanced and just the factory to make one is a dedicated multiyear investment to get operational let alone the rate of production. Inventories are nice to have but those take up space and are either tempting targets for sabotage or logistical nightmares to get to the front.
Celestial-body-NOS
We are all human beans. Together, we will rice.
17hr ago
Maybe driving the company into the ground was the goal, they're raiding it for its assets.
Okay, but that's worse. You do get how that's worse, right?
Bingbong
17hr ago
It's not like a CEO just comes in and develops absolute mandate of heaven control, though. Most of the rest of the internal bureaucracy/information-sourcing infrastructure will remain the same which is ultimately what drives the CEO's actions.
erwgv3g34
17hr ago
Precisely.
The resentment workers feel towards the CEO is exactly the same they would feel if they saw Gruk take 1000x their share of mammoth meat in the ancestral environment. Okay, maybe Gruk is exceptional hunter who contributed more to the hunt than most, and deserves 2x the regular share, or even 3x if he is wise and respected and high status, but 1000x?! Nobody deserves that, it's unfair!
And in the ancestral environment, it really is unfair. Nobody is 1000x a better hunter than average. But in a modern economy, it is perfectly possible for an exceptional man to produce 1000x the value of a regular man. I'm pretty sure Elon Musk and Warren Buffett produce more than 1000x the value I produce.
YE_GUILTY
17hr ago
It can go along with the million dollars that every American could have gotten from Bloomberg's campaign.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
17hr ago
I mean you can play "bigger fool" and say everyone who gets offered CEO of Starbucks probably has some other pendejo company that will offer him $94mm, but I think that just tells you lots of companies are pendejos. Marrying a whore is stupid even if she has other proposals. Now answering your question as asked, me personally:
If I'm given creative control to turn the company around the way I would do it, $5mm/yr plus long term stock options tied to performance. Operating under the assumption that I'm also getting expense accounts for flights and other costs that go into being CEO, So higher total compensation.
If I have to follow the board's cockamamie operation plan and I'm taking the wheel on the Titanic to take off steam before the iceberg? $20mm per year cash, that's enough after a few years to walk away and work on my memoirs in some New England shore spot.
Now realistically I'm not at that talent level to run that organization. But we know there are guys at that talent level who will run similar organizations for $10-20mm, and if you can't find one on the street poach a runner up from Costco.
Brgp12
18hr ago
I feel like a much better target are the hordes of laptop-class, bullshit email jobs these giant companies seem to employ in droves. I worked at a grocery store that paid a triple digit salary to a 'Graciousness and Hospitality Coordinator' whose primary job consisted of slapping together poorly made PowerPoint Presentations which might have been titled 'How Not to Have Aspbergers Syndrome', meanwhile they can barely get product on the shelves because the place is so understaffed.
I have to imagine Starbucks has hordes of these silly positions whose jobs consist largely of sending emails and having Zoom meetings that have little to no effect on the overall functioning of any individual coffee stand. As a laborer who felt underpaid, these are the people I'd direct my ire towards. But in the framing of the political left, they're all a part of the 99%, and the Ceo isn't.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
18hr ago
Your mistake is thinking that this has anything to do with math. People aren't upset because the CEO's pay causes them to get underpaid, they are upset because it is ludicrously, wildly unfair to pay someone over 1000x what you pay the people who actually drive the company's ability to make money. It's a question of justice, not one of "how much would we benefit from cutting this guy's salary".
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
18hr ago
Well. How much would you demand to be CEO of Starbucks?
I would do it for a paltry $1m/year, almost 1% of what they are paying the current guy. I don't promise to be a great businessman who can turn the company around, but it sounds like he isn't either. So if they're going to have someone who is bad at the job, they may as well at least have someone who is cheap.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
18hr ago
Mastodon itself
You're perpetuating the confusion. Your article specifically applies to the joinmastodon.org instances pawoo.net and mstdn.jp—not to mastodon.social.
Even granting that, don't you need rare earths to produce lower-grade chips for ubiquitous drones and all sorts of other things too?
More options
Context Copy link