domain:nfinf.substack.com
roystgnr
20hr ago
$/hour, I'd guess.
(But yeah, normally when someone says "N-figure salary" they're talking about $/year)
Thoroughlygruntled
21hr ago
This has always struck me as a self-flattering urban legend people trot out to mock the burger-eating proles. Turns out the only evidence we have of this anecdote is a quote from the memoirs of A&W's former CEO, years after the fact, attempting to deflect blame for running his company into the ground. "I didn't fuck up; the customers were just too stupid to understand how superior our product was!"
So it might be true, but I'd take that story with a grain of salt.
https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2014/07/great-third-pound-burger-ripoff/
grendel-khan
i'm sorry, but it's more complicated than that
21hr ago
To be clear, the construction union situation in California is not what you might expect; about an eighth of workers are unionized (the builder organization refers to "merit shops" rather than "non-union shops"), and are concentrated in cities. Requirements for union labor can sometimes make it simply impossible to get workers to build the project if it's not in a central location.
grendel-khan
i'm sorry, but it's more complicated than that
21hr ago
Great question! There's still uncertainty here, and it varies by city. Despite all the state laws, there's a lot of local control, and cities will, to various degrees, fight the state. Consider the history of ADUs; despite being essentially legalized in 2017, the legislature continues to adjust rules and close loopholes. (This year: SB 9 (different from the other SB 9; authorizes the state housing department to void bad ADU ordinances) and AB 1154 (clarify rules around Junior ADUs).)
Tariffs and the resultant high commodity prices are a problem, as is a tight labor market. Local governments still absolutely love inclusionary zoning, which is essentially taxing new housing to provide subsidized housing to poor people; see the graph on page 9 here. And the construction industry is remarkably cyclical, so real chances won't happen until the next boom cycle.
A lot of things have to go right for a project to happen, and only a few need to go wrong. It took us decades to get into this mess, and there's still reluctance to let go of all of the bagel toppings (union set-asides, inclusionary zoning, various extra review nonsense) that have accumulated over the years. And yet the two biggest impediments, CEQA and base zoning, have been swept away. Note also that these reforms are cumulative; density bonus law means that cities have lost pretty much all discretion over the aesthetics of projects, and the Housing Accountability Act provides impressive fines if they manage to block a valid-zoned project, and there's a department enforcing that.
I think it'll have a significant effect, especially in San Francisco and the Bay Area; in Los Angeles, it'll depend on how dysfunctional their city government remains, though AB 253 should help there. But that effect will be delayed until commodities become cheaper and labor becomes more available, and at that point, there will be the usual temptation to make it so projects just barely pencil out, and to "capture" the "developer profits". I think the state of the law makes that very difficult at this point.
I wish I had numbers, and I know this isn't very specific. Hopefully there will be some clear analysis out soon from groups like the Terner Center.
That is true but its also relatively rare. The vast majority of senior managers are extremely replaceable/interchangeable (not by anyone, of course) and the arguments for why their compensations is as high as it is could as well apply to anyone responsible for a system which's continued operation affects a lot of money, from something as lowly as system administrators to say the commissioner of the IRS (that apparently only makes some 200k a year).
A lot of the excessive senior managment compensation is friendship/class corruption and there are reasons beyond "justice" to care about this as well, like why the money isn't going to shareholders or reinvestment in the business.
Excessive compensation for labour is a bad idea. Driven and capable people should be incentiviced to start businesses and compete/disrupt markets, not capture positions for what essentially is rent extraction.
2rafa
21hr ago
When AI kills the outsourced WITCH tech sector the consequence on the domestic middle class, consumer spending and so on in India is going to be grim, surely.
Very good points, but the small absolute volumes of REEs required means that effective transshipping will be very hard to stamp out unless all exports anywhere are curtailed, which would draw the ire of most of the regional trading partners that the CCP actually wants to continue to keep onside. The Chinese century is inevitable because western countries will descend into civil chaos due to mass immigration and for no other (major) reason.
hydroacetylene
21hr ago
To note- when mildly overhydrated, I'm still a hard stick, and my blood donation attempts result in short draws that can't be used. Is there some way to fix this?
Thoroughlygruntled
21hr ago
Why? If I buy a junker of a car in order to scrap it for parts, who has a right to complain? The CEO works for the shareholders, not the employees, and the shareholders are under no obligation to lose money on a failing company as some act of charity to the workers.
If a company isn't worth the sum of its parts, and there doesn't appear to be much low-hanging fruit to pick in an effort to turn things around, hiring a CEO for the express purpose of liquidating its assets in a way that protects the interests of the shareholders is 100% the right call. When someone dies, you don't blame the executor of their will.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
21hr ago
I literally can't imagine how bad the coffee would be from a company using pure temps.
hydroacetylene
21hr ago
Indeed, the unions exclude lots of people for arbitrary reasons to generate an artificial shortage. In my industry they exclude hacks pretty well so using union labor might be worth it for some people, despite its high costs- hospitals will pay any amount to just not have problems, for example(I'm pretty happy to let someone else deal with that). I don't think they're any more racist than regular HVAC(which is... not politically correct). But there's definitely lots of guys with stories about the union not letting them in, good commercial techs.
zeke5123a
21hr ago
I regularly take the train (NYC metro area). I could easily afford to drive. But train is a lot easier and I can work etc.
Most of the people on the commuter train are not poor or college kids. Maybe ant one point they are jurors but I imagine that was a typo.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
21hr ago
Germany and Japan both feel like they would qualify.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
21hr ago
barriers to entry which effectively exclude the lowest-quality providers(and lots of others, it needs to be acknowledged
The extent to which 20th century unions were also racial/ethnic spoils systems is, IMO, underappreciated for political reasons. Not saying it always worked that way, but there isn't a shortage of "and then they hired/imported (across state or sometimes country borders) minority scabs workers to break the strike" tales. But it's inconvenient to observe this because "union labor" and minority workers are supposed to be part of the same big tent.
Maybe people will start noticing more if union labor keeps swinging right.
Thoroughlygruntled
21hr ago
That may not seem like a lot, but even as a relatively comfortable middle class office worker, 5X more expensive airfare would have a massive effect on my wellbeing. Going from being able to visit friends and family spread around the country three or four times a year to being able to swing a single family reunion every two or three years. Entire years at a time not being able to see my parents. I would have been an adult before getting on my first plane, because there's no way in hell my parents could have swung $6000 on airfare for a family vacation. As much as I grumble about 17-inch-wide seats, I'll take that over forced isolation any day.
Quantumfreakonomics
21hr ago
What is this supposed to prove exactly? The Italian locations look pretty, but the Californian infrastructure is more useful.
Throwaway05
21hr ago
Who can actually draw blood with some skill is pretty variable, usually a hospital will have a formal or informal plan for how to do this ("call the ultrasound guided IV team" or "get Agnes") and hospital blood draw quality has worsened in recent years because of various healthcare problems. Most hospital staff also don't like working with police and will probably not put in an effort to be independent about fixing the issue in a case like this.
Of note one of the biggest factors impacting ease of blood draw is hydration - someone who used meth and passed out in a car is probably dehydrated and going to a hard stick.
yestrusocialist
21hr ago
For my stocks, at the moment they vest (a taxable event) a fraction of them are sold and the proceeds are given to the IRS as tax withholding. This is pretty common in the US.
No extra forms. It goes on my W2.
hydroacetylene
21hr ago
But part of the US bargain is we celebrate random black women for repeating the achievements of more capable people. Bessie Coleman seems like an unobjectionable example- using a different non-activist mildly notable black woman doesn't make much difference.
hydroacetylene
21hr ago
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
I think the critique is that Russia's industrial output isn't capable of building that many planes. But they don't seem notably worse in that regard than other major powers- as you correctly note, throughput limits on aircraft manufacture are very very real.
erwgv3g34
22hr ago
Our instincts are a lot more adapted to the vastly longer time we were hunter-gatherers than to the measly 6,000 years we spent as farmers.
hydroacetylene
22hr ago
The lower blue collar labor market has also gotten a lot tighter- there's been a greying of the population, lots of people got addicted to welfare during covid and aren't willing to work anymore, illegals don't work at starbucks but labor has a certain amount of fungibility, etc. Conditions/benefits/pay at starbucks-type jobs have just genuinely improved everywhere, it's harder to stand out. I've seen the desperate competition for workers.
hooser
22hr ago
Personally, I don't believe it's possible for one person to produce 1000x the value of another.
Here are some examples:
-
X enters data from PDFs into a database manually. Y writes a script for it.
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X creates a homebrew game that only he and his best mates like to play. Y creates a similar game, then finds niche markets for it, selling a few thousand copies.
-
X sells Girl Scout cookies by offering them to her family and neighbors. Y sets up a Girl Scout Cookie stand outside of a popular pot shop.
hydroacetylene
22hr ago
The median ancestral human was a peasant farmer, and, inasmuch as we know the attitudes of the historical peasantry, they loved the nobles with 1000X their fair share. What they seem to have hated have been middlemen, merchants, etc.
Maybe the CEO is a specialist in managing decline.
A regular CEO might be able to extract $10B profit from a declining company, but he can extract $15B before it dies. If I were on the board of a declining company, I would surely want to hire this guy.
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