domain:archive.ph
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
15hr ago
He already has the downside risk of losing his job.
This isn't actually a downside risk - a lot of CEOs have incredibly lavish golden parachute pay clauses. If the company goes to shit and disintegrates because he outsourced the management to CEOgpt while fucking his secretaries and writing racist screeds on the internet he will be rewarded for causing immense damage to the lives of the people working there with financial compensation far in excess of what the average employee earns.
Pigeon
coo coo
16hr ago
The hard part, though, is that if that is true, if you know for certain that they are eating their seed corn, then my friend you have tremendous alpha and should put all your money betting on Microsoft going belly up.
Surely even if this is true, predicting when this will happen is still incredibly difficult?
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
16hr ago
In any case, I don’t understand why they should help. Help me or I’ll envy you and make things difficult sounds like extortion.
Because the obscene concentration of wealth that allows those elites to exist requires the existence of a coherent and functioning society. You can't have millionaire layabouts and the idle rich without somebody to actually do the work, and if those people believe that current social arrangements have lost their legitimacy then things can change very, very fast. The French aristocracy didn't give a shit about the concerns of smelly peasants and didn't want to help them out at all, but that famously did not end particularly well for the aristocracy.
Eetan
16hr ago
Can someone please steel-man the American system of making individual citizens responsible for filing their taxes
MODE OF STEEL ON
In a free democratic republic, citizens should be aware about the true cost of state, and if they think it is too high, they should organize and vote for smaller and leaner government.
MODE OF STEEL OFF
Yea, it looks, walks and talks like mob extortion, but, unlike most parts of the system, can be steel manned. Not that it was ever deliberately designed for this reason.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
16hr ago
This is in no way a barrier to a competently written tax code. How, exactly, does the money get to said foreign subsidiary? There is always going to be a point at which the financial resources leave the country and that's where enforcement can happen.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
17hr ago
It's just a question of higher familiarity then.
anon_
17hr ago
My city permitting department will inspect the work done according to code. YMMV.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
17hr ago
You can't have a wrong opinion, that's not how it works. You can only be wrong about facts like 'X is richer than Y', not opinions like 'I don't like X'.
the EU is just an expression of the Europeans' native urge to bury everything in layers of bureaucracy
White Americans are British and European in ethnic background. There is no 'native urge' in Europe that does not also exist in America, only social, economic and political differences. Going on a boat did not create a new people.
bonsaii
17hr ago
Can someone please steel-man the American system of making individual citizens responsible for filing their taxes in a hopelessly complex tax code, then punishing them for making mistakes? From where I stand, it all just feels like racketeering by H&R Block et al. to extort fees year after year.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
18hr ago
Yes, I'm sure there are techniques for reducing noise between dwellings, or even between dwellings and commercial units.
Chance of them being used and/or holding up are pretty low, except in luxury buildings (and sometimes not even then). And I wouldn't trust anything but concrete for between-floors. Nothing converts a person to single-family detached living like having someone noisy living above them -- there's been shootings over failure to install carpeting.
Rov_Scam
18hr ago
To attempt an actual answer, I think it's because cycling is an individual sport with clear rules and an adjudicative body. Armstrong not only broke the rules, but took active measures to conceal his rulebreaking. And there was no question about what he did. Contrast this with the MLB, where no one is discussing whether or not the wins were legitimate, rather whether the records should have an asterisk. And the only case where anyone is really talking about that is with respect to the Barry Bonds home run records, which already have their own problems. The Aaron record is the most defensible one to revert back to, but the McGwire one can't be done because he was juicing too, which takes us back to Maris, who had his own asterisk discussion because he had a longer season to work with than Babe Ruth did. Plus there's the issue that if you officially strip Bonds and others of home runs for record purposes, then shouldn't you make them not count for games, either? It gets complicated real fast.
And add to that the much thinner evidence that Bonds was juicing. It's one of those things where people who were sort of paying attention to the scandal at the time are aware of the broad strokes, but no one remembers the actual evidence. Bonds never admitted doing anything illegal, and it basically comes down to a crooked doctor and that his head got bigger (which is an effect of HGH, which wasn't banned at the time). It isn't a 1–1 comparison but they do this all the time in auto racing for cars that don't pass post-race inspection. A few years back they disqualified the winner and the runner up of the Pocono race because they had an illegal piece of tape on the front of their cars. One can make the argument that this had real-world implications rather than merely historical ones because they lost the points they would have earned for the season and got zeroes instead, but that seems to be more severe than not being recognized on Wikipedia (which they aren't). And for what it's worth, the official NCAA coaching wins lists don't include wins that were stripped by the NCAA. For the 2004 USC team, it merely gives an asterisk, but that's understandable since the BCS wasn't run by the NCAA and the NCAA does not award a championship.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
18hr ago
Americans don't seem to believe this today but there are many outsiders who visit America and really dislike the country, not out of jealousy or poverty but genuine dislike for how society works.
Of course there are. They're just wrong.
Europe is stagnating. Why is this? In large part its due to US influence, US NGOs, US foreign policy.
No, Europe has agency of its own. Its stagnation is of its own device. Unless the Law of Jante was a CIA invention and the EU a State Department plot... but really, not even then, as the EU is just an expression of the Europeans' native urge to bury everything in layers of bureaucracy.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
18hr ago
iprayiam3
18hr ago
But that aside, it seems to me like "have you asked AI" is the 2025 equivalent of "let me Google that for you", and is just as annoying as that was.
At one of my first professional jobs, I had a very knowledgeable teammate who I relied on for a lot of advice and information. Constantly asking, have you tried googling it, what actually one of the most helpful pieces of mentorship I ever received.
On the other hand, your boss doesn’t realize it, but he’s digging his own grave. You respect him now, but you won’t still when you realize he’s outsourced his job to ChatGPT, while getting paid more than 20$/mo.
I’ve had this with several of my senior leadership, including a C-level or two. The folks who are doing their jobs, specifically the leadership parts and insight-providing parts, withAI have lost the troops.
While I use AI constantly behind the scenes, I absolutely never let it mediate communication with my team or peers.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
18hr ago
If you asked me to list the top 1000 people who might be the Antichrist...
Larry Ellison is at least 4 of the top 10, right?
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
18hr ago
Can’t imagine a woke HR overlady doing that.
Yeah, her dungeon would be extremely inauthentic.
teleoplexy
19hr ago
Not the OP, but it's insane to me in a way that I can understand, unlike The Reptile, whom I don't understand.
P-Necromancer
19hr ago
In theory I guess the general stockholders could all come together to do it, but they're so disorganized that it never happens.
Well, this is primary mechanism in play. Board members are elected, but I'm sympathetic to the idea democracy doesn't really work. Principal-agent problems do happen. Many companies do have stock ownership requirements for board membership, but I guess the financial consequences of poor choices here could be cancelled out by your executive price-fixing conspiracy.
Fortunately, it's not the only mechanism: you can just choose not to invest in companies that you think overpay their executives. If you think that leadership doesn't really matter/extra CEO pay doesn't get you much better CEOs, that's profit just sitting on the table, and companies that don't do that will do better, all else equal. This information is publicly available, nothing's stopping you or anyone who agrees with you from creating a 'low CEO to worker pay ratio' fund. This doesn't instantly solve the problem, but it does mean it's not your problem. It's the shareholders who are getting cheated here, not the general public or the employees who, after all, have not been deceived: they were offered a certain product/wage for the money/work and accepted it. It's only the board's betrayal of their fiduciary duty to the shareholders that's dishonest.
also worth noting that the ratio of CEO pay to average worker pay has massively increased over the last few decades.
Not totally clear to me why this is the case, but I don't think it's strong evidence of corruption. Maybe they were underpaying them before, or maybe something about the corporate landscape has changed that makes leadership that much more important, or suitable applicants have become that much more rare. The increase alone is insufficient to demonstrate there's a problem.
So it may well just continue to increase until they're taking home some large fraction of the company's total revenue as their personal salary.
If this does happen, I think it'll result in massively worse performance. There's some leeway for inefficiency in successful companies, but enough to divert 10%+ of revenue into an empty pit? Either the executive really is that great (which maybe isn't impossible, but most certainly aren't) or they'll get outcompeted by companies that don't do this.
I wonder if he was awarded 1% of all the USSR's money as a reward for his services? That should be fair, right? Or did he not get anything at all? Our intuitions for what's fair really fail at this kind of scale. (edit: he was not rewarded. it was seen as an embarassment for the entire Soviet system and was quietly swept under the rug)
The USSR indeed had infamously dysfunctional incentive structures. His treatment was not even particularly bad by their standards. That's really not an argument for adopting them.
That said: not like any other nation would have paid out that kind of money for equivalent actions. A medal would have been entirely appropriate; hell, he'd have been a far better candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize than most of its recipients. (And he did in fact receive various lower profile rewards from some Western organizations.) But a cash prize comparable to the amount of value he preserved? No way. The Soviets did spend an enormous amount of money on nuclear launch detection (the fact it didn't work notwithstanding), but offering huge rewards for correct judgements in these situations would provide the wrong incentive: why would you ever say the detection was genuine? Either it's a false alarm and you get the award, or you've got half an hour to live and it's not going to matter to you either way.
(And there's a more generally applicable takeaway: there's a difference between fulfilling a prior agreement and dolling out rewards case-by-case after the fact. The latter can be worth doing, but the former is obviously far more reliable, and reliability is the most important thing in leadership.)
BahRamYou
19hr ago
I grew up in a town that used to be a streetcar surburb 100 years ago. Looking at those old photos, it's almost like looking at a steampunk fantasy. All the streets that I know as sort of grungy, run-dow stripmalls, are full of very dapper gentlemen and their elegant female companions. They must have had to walk a bit to get there, but that's no problem since they were all (apparently) quite thin and fit. They don't seem to have any concern at at all for crime.
I would dismiss this as just some historical quirk, except that I've also experienced the same thing in real life- in Japan. Pretty much the same thing- low crime, low stress, low car ownership areas with mass transit, high trust, and lots of people walking in fancy fashions. They have other problems too of course (getting groceries every day with no car in a declining economy is no joke), but they still manage to make it work.
Conversely, I've experienced the opposite, living in a somewhat wealthy neighborhood in Mexico. There, razor-wire fences and private security guards are the norm. Plenty of cars and material comforts, but absolutely no social trust.
I feel like (economic wealth) and (social wealth) are almost two independant variables, with very little relationship to each other. In the US, we've gained the former at the expense of the latter. It didn't have to be this way.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
19hr ago
They can keep telling themselves that
Americans don't seem to believe this today but there are many outsiders who visit America and really dislike the country, not out of jealousy or poverty but genuine dislike for how society works. This was before Trump too.
New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco... they came, they saw, they don't like it.
Europe is stagnating. Why is this? In large part its due to US influence, US NGOs, US foreign policy. For better and for worse, the US leads the West. Yet there's this kind of schizo American attitude about their role in the world.
One day America is the best and greatest country ever, leader of the free world. The next day the lazy Europeans won't pay for their own defence (suppression of Russia) - they need to buy more weapons from America. Oh and go deal with Russia by yourselves, we're not interested in that anymore. Now it's time to bomb the Middle East and stir up some chaos there. Next, pivot to Asia - the vassals must enforce sanctions against China. Who cares whether this is in their economic interests. Australia needs to buy some submarines (we won't actually hand them over though because after taking their money to build the docks, we're still too clueless to build the damn subs). After that, everyone needs to copy American cultural norms and racial hysteria. Import some sub-Saharans, get some diversity (the refugees from our retarded wars we make you join will do for starters). Copy everything down quickly, you need to be woke... no now you need to be anti-woke. And why are you so poor, unlike us?
Europe and other US allies may well have retarded and despicable governments but the US has a special, higher level of responsibility for how it wields power.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
19hr ago
I kind of like Thiel, but you have a point. If it came out in five years that Peter Thiel had been abducting wayward teenage boys and keeping them in a lovingly accurate recreation of a 13th-century Burgundian dungeon under his mansion, I’d be mildly surprised but not shocked.
Can’t imagine a woke HR overlady doing that.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
19hr ago
It was either his Twitter or a Substack note. I'd look it up if it wasn't 3 am on a Monday :(
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
19hr ago
Thiel is not saying all three are luddites, he's saying that the reason Marc Andreesen cannot be the Antichrist is because he's not popular like the luddites are.
Speaking of which, why is Marc Andreseen in the running to be the Antichrist again? I feel like I missed something. If you asked me to list the top 1000 people who might be the Antichrist...
If somebody gets murdered, with intent, then you actually do start looking extremely closely at the people who get to profit massively from their death. When the executor of a murder victim's will stands to gain vast sums of money from their will, people will absolutely and instinctively blame said executor - and in this specific case they're actually correct to do so given that the company was driven to the ground on purpose.
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