domain:parrhesia.substack.com
YE_GUILTY
22hr ago
It can go along with the million dollars that every American could have gotten from Bloomberg's campaign.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
22hr 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
22hr 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
22hr 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
22hr 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
23hr 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.
hydroacetylene
23hr ago
Getting banned from cathedrals actually happens a lot, because cathedrals are a) a magnet for cantankerous idiots and b) usually near other, lower profile Catholic churches, so no one feels guilty about it at all.
No_one
23hr ago
Mastodon itself supposedly has a large presence of lolicon enthusiasts who went there after getting purged from twitter during a rules change.
https://ethanzuckerman.com/2017/08/18/mastodon-is-big-in-japan-the-reason-why-is-uncomfortable/
grendel-khan
i'm sorry, but it's more complicated than that
23hr ago
California YIMBY, "Governor Newsom Signs Historic Housing Legislation: SB 79 Culminates Eight-Year Fight to Legalize Homes Near Transit" Also covered in Politico, LA Times, CalMatters, SF Chronicle, SF Standard, Berkeleyside, Streetsblog SF... this is a big deal. (Part of a long-running series on housing, mostly in California. Now also at TheSchism.)
To quote the Governor's press office, "HUGE NEWS!! YIMBY'S REJOICE !!". Signing statement here, press release from Scott Wiener here. Bill text here.
For more details about how we got here, see this recap from Jeremy Linden, the vote lists from CalMatters, and my previous recap from when SB 79 first made it out of committee. This was the last of ten veto points this bill had to pass, and it changed markedly over the process: most counties were exempted, ferries and high-frequency bus routes without dedicated lanes no longer count, projects over 85 feet must now use union labor, there are now below-market-rate set-asides, and other such bagel toppings. It only applies to "urban transit counties", those with more than fifteen rail stations; that's only eight of California's fifty-eight counties: Los Angeles, San Diego, Orange, Santa Clara, Alameda, Sacramento, San Francisco and San Mateo, but those counties contain sixty percent of the state's population.
But of those ten veto points, it passed five of them by a single vote. (It depends exactly how you count.) Every compromise, every amendment, every watering-down was necessary to get this across the finish line. Aisha Wahab, Senate Housing chair and villain of the previous post, switched her vote to support SB 79 in the final concurrence in the Legislature, as did Elena Durazo, Senate Local Government chair, who had also opposed it originally. This has, as noted above, been eight years in the making. It will largely go into effect next July 1.
Newsom also signed a variety of other housing bills, though none were specifically as important as SB 79: AB 253 allows for third-party permit approvals if the city drags their feet, for example.
This completes a remarkably victorious legislative cycle for the YIMBYs. Along with surprise CEQA reform, Jeremy White of Politico called it: "from upzoning to streamlining to CEQA exempting, the biggest housing year I've seen in 10+ years covering Sacramento".
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
23hr ago
It's not bad, but doesn't come close to this soul cover of "How you Remind Me" by Nickelback. Fair warning I believe it's AI: https://youtube.com/watch?v=BFaK-uBsrl8
hydroacetylene
23hr ago
Sell it on a slight discount as the 'really big deal for a really big meal' or something.
Shrike
23hr ago
Afghanistan borders China, seems funny potentially helpful to have an airfield there!
hydroacetylene
23hr ago
Sticking your nose up Trump's ass so he makes the NRLB do whatever you want is easy though.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
23hr ago
Starbucks used to be a well regarded employer. I think what changed was the macroeconomic conditions. They went from being a novel third place coffee house with charming exposed duct work and chill vibe to being kind of a place that serves something you can get at five other stores in the vicinity and they want you out the door ASAP.
Perhaps they can be blamed for not having a monopoly on the chill coffee shop vibe forever, but the fact remains most coffee shops don't make much money. No barista anywhere is buying a 3 bedroom 2 bathroom house.
hydroacetylene
23hr ago
And this is why unions are historically organized as locals with membership policies to generate a scarcity in a particular market.
hydroacetylene
23hr 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_
23hr 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
23hr 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 $80m.
quiet_NaN
23hr ago
One possible way to explain exorbitant CEO salaries would be conspicuous consumption on the part of the company, especially to attract investors.
"Look at us, we are paying 100M$/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.
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.
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