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solowingpixy
the resident car guy
20hr 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
20hr 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
20hr 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
20hr 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
20hr 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.
21hr 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
21hr 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
21hr 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
21hr 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)
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
21hr ago
After tariffs I don't think I can handle becoming an expert on rare earth metals this year too. I'll just go to production with your opinion.
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
21hr ago
So plane travel was not nearly as affordable for poor and lower middle class people as it is today
I suspect this has something to do with air travel in the past being romanticized as the good old days.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
21hr ago
I don’t think that’s true, or at least not necessarily true. Microsoft has a huge advantage in “lock in”, meaning that you run into a lot of problems if a company decides to go with other software platforms. The files they depend on to run their business are made in Microsoft products and thus in many cases, unless the company had the foresight to enforce a rule that ensures that they didn’t all save all their stuff in formats that only Microsoft can use, switching to something else imposes a burden. That’s before considering the learning curve for switching to a new company. It’s enough of a PITA that most don’t switch unless the software is really bad.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
21hr ago
yes that's in stock, not cash, if that makes a difference
Yes, that's a huge difference, mostly because the stock is only worth anything if the CEO does a good job of running the company. This can cause problems as well, such as CEO taking measures to juice short term sugars process at the expense of long term corporate health, but is a standard way to align incentives.
Tesla is also a special case because the CEO is also the principal founder and largest shareholder by a considerable margin, so it is to be expected that his interests and the company's will align.
Shrike
21hr ago
My understanding is that close air support was always understood to be extremely attrition heavy in a peer war - supposedly, the USAF expected to lose 60 A-10s against the Soviets daily.
Other sorties are much lower risk - while the Russian Su-34 and Su-25 fleets have been hit hard, the MiG-31s and strategic bombers have been quite safe in the air.
(Frankly if anything the Su-25 losses are lower than what we might expect from Cold War projections, the Russians have been using them for close air support - and I think continue to do so, Wikipedia lists one as lost in February to a MANPADS, which suggests a CAS role, and they've lost around 40, it looks like, over the course of years, not weeks. However without knowing the total number of sorties I can't compare to the supposed USAF projections for the A-10.)
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
21hr ago
So the book is Marine! The Life of Chesty Puller, but being a biography of Puller, there isn't anything else to explain Willoughby's motives at all. There might be more insight to be had from a good bio of MacArthur on that front.
Goodguy
21hr ago
I think the cost of plane tickets back in the day is exaggerated. Based on my reading, I think they were about 10 times more expensive than the most budget airline deals of today, but still affordable for the average upper middle class person. In the early 70s you would have paid the equivalent of about $1000-$1500 in today's money to fly from coast to coast in the US. So plane travel was not nearly as affordable for poor and lower middle class people as it is today, but it also wasn't something that only the upper class could afford.
BahRamYou
21hr ago
Then you should also consider that part of his high pay is also in keeping expenses low, so there is in fact an antagonistic relationship there. If starbucks was forced to use all of their profits to pay employee salaries, the board would probably expect to pay the CEO a lot less.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
21hr ago
To be clear I'm not saying the CEO of Starbucks earned his pay. That's a separate topic. I'm saying it really has nothing do with how much baristas are being paid. The localized economics of the individual Starbucks location matter much more and the union, which presumably wants to improve pay for baristas, is barking up the wrong tree by making the conversation about the CEO's pay. The reason baristas aren't paid more is because the work they're doing is not that valuable, and no amount of collective bargaining will make value spontaneously appear.
I am not saying you cannot criticize the CEO's pay package. I'm simply saying his high pay is not at any realistic expense of the rank and file employee. It's irrelevant to the economics of the Starbucks barista's local monkeysphere. You may as well be complaining that athletes get paid too much for playing sportsball.
FeepingCreature
21hr ago
So we're at "Neutral vs Progressive"?
This feels like a Pascal's Mugging type of argument though. Or more specifically the petersburg paradox
Is there any specific reason to pay the CEO $95 million? It's not like there's a standard market rate for CEOs. It varies wildly and depends heavily on the subjective opinions of the board members. Why not go out and find another CEO for $200 million? A $200 million CEO should be even better than a mere $100 million one, right? Starbucks makes about $36 billion in annual revenue right now, so even $200 million is (like you said) a drop in the bucket. A mere 0.5%. If the new, better CEO can increase performance even 1%, he's worth it.
But then you can play the game again, and again, and again. There's no upper limit for CEO pay! Where does it stop? Their stock is kind of struggling right now- would a $10 billion CEO lead them to greatness? Or should they just cut costs and try to remain in their nice, small, profitable niche? Most sane people would say they should just stick to selling coffee, but you could do the math and imagine that even a 1% chance of becoming the next hot tech stock is worth gambling the entire company on.
Starbucks is admittedly a weak example for this. They have a lot of part time hourly employees, and they all get health benefits, so their biggest expense by far is already employee compensation. It just doesn't go as much to salaries.
For a different extreme, look at Tesla. 125,000 employees right now. Market cap 1.3 trillion. Elon Musk right now earns about 8$ billion a year under current conditions, but it goes up by 1% of Teslas total market cap for each additional trillion in their market cap. If he hits just the easiest goals, he gets $36 billion a year. If it goes up to 8 trillion, he clears an eye watering $878 billion in 10 years, almost $90 billion a year. (yes that's in stock, not cash, if that makes a difference)
Doing the same math as you, that could be ($90 billion)/(125,000 employees) = $720,000 per employee, per year. Is that still just a trivial cost? I dont' think so. In that case he's being given a large chunk of the company as his compensation. (And that's just the CEO, non including any of the other executives who also get paid a lot)
You could argue that in that situation he deserves it since the stock went up so much. But like... how do you know? How does anyone know? If some Tesla employee delivers full self driving while the government decides to tax gas cars and promote EVs, does Elon really deserve that much credit? Surely there should be some limit where we decide that a CEO is just too expensive, but there doesn't seem to be any mechanism in corporate America to limit it. Meanwhile, managers are very much incentavized to cut expenses, which heavily includes limiting employee salaries. There isn't any mechanism in the corporate structure to say "OK our stock didn't grow much. But on the plus side, we were able to consistently raise salaries for all our employees every year."
in history they sometimes talk about "the great man model," where history is heavily shaped by a few exceptional individuals. They mostly bring it up to disparage it, saying how history is far more complicated than just what people like Caesar and Alexander did. They'd be laughed out of the room if they tried to give all credit for an entire country to just one person. But apparently corporate leadership still believes in this line of thinking- they value the CEO far more than anything else. I can't help but worry that our largest corporations are under the control of middlebrow business majors who vastly oversimplify everything.
So sure, the CEO's pay has little to do with the hourly pay of workers. But, what kind of boot licker looks at a $95mm salary and says he earned it without asking what his VORP is? Because I'm sure they couldn't have done too much worse for $50mm.
Well. How much would you demand to be CEO of Starbucks?
EDIT: I'm not trying to be flip. Being the CEO of Starbucks sounds terrible. They're in decline, having been badly mismanaged, and competition is becoming more fierce than ever. And a ton of their stores have become unionized and the NLRB is saying shit like you must re-open closed stores. Figuring out how to stick your nose up Trump's ass is almost certainly in your future.
If I'm hot shit enough to be taking interviews with boards of directors of $100 billion companies I would not come to Starbucks for cheap.
Again, none of this is to say my OP is about what the CEO deserves. That's separate.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
22hr ago
It's not missing the point, it's bringing up another separate point that bears on the argument.
If Starbucks paid I-beam X Kendo $200mm per year for a sinecure as grand czar of diversity equity and inclusion it also wouldn't have anything to do with worker pay, but it would be manifestly unjust and many people would point it out. The CEO is manifestly overpaid and everyone is going to point that out to their own ends.
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) Why does he make 5x for a worse performance? Why do GM and Ford perpetually pay their CEOs multiples of what Toyota and Honda pay while Toyota and Honda completely muscled Detroit out of the car market?
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.
Starbucks probably had problems under Howard Schultz, but no one ever really complained about his pay in the same way, because the company was growing like a weed and treated its workers better at the time.
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.
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