domain:lesswrong.com
quiet_NaN
21hr ago
One question would be how related not paying a lot to the CEO is to the CEO destroying the company. I mean, there have been CEOs which have made disastrous business decisions, but are their cases where we can say "if only the company had been willing to pay 100M$/year instead of settling for the kind of incompetent fool you will attract if you offer only 50M$/year"?
ChickenOverlord
22hr ago
airlines are a cutthroat awful industry to be in with 3% net income margins (5% operating) which can be seen by them constantly getting bailed out
One of my favorite jokes:
What's the easiest way to become a millionaire?
Start out as a billionaire and buy an airline
BurdensomeCount
Unable to escape TheMotte's cycle of Samsara...
22hr ago
Each day I think my opinion of people has hit rock bottom but somehow they manage to drill further into that bedrock. Such a person being given the vote is the root cause of I'd wager at least 50% of modern evil.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
22hr ago
I can't tell if there's some massive moral hazard involved, or just plain incompetence on the part of the board.
It's just politics on a very small scale. In theory the shareholders should keep them in check, but unless someone has majority ownership, it's a lot harder for them to coordinate than it is for the board.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
22hr ago
Should governments have some sort of enforcement mechanism to prevent offshoring? Specifically first world governments, where offshoring is mostly profitable in the first place.
Thinking of this after reading this post on X which details how a CEO basically took the U.S.'s major manufacturing of rare earth elements or refiner or whatever, and sold it off to China. This seems like a huge issue for all sorts of reasons, but especially national security.
However, obviously this offshoring has happened in many industries over the last few decades and seems to present a bad equilibrium. If all your competitors slash their labor prices by offshoring, how can domestic manufacturing compete at all? Tariffs seem like a way to do this, but apparently everyone and their mother who has any economic understanding says they're evil and bad. I really don't know.
That being said I mean... are there ways to legislate outside of tariffs to prevent this sort of major sell off of strategic business to adversarial nations?
quiet_NaN
22hr ago
Personally, I would not put any more stock into that announcement than in the announcement about the autism-paracetamol link. Trump has been known to chicken out before.
I am also unsure what the CCP really wants. Perhaps getting full access to ASML products is really the hill they want to die on. Or they could be satisfied with a bunch of AI chips. Or it might be about Trump's tariffs.
My understanding is that REE refining infrastructure is something the US could easily sink a whole lot of money in before getting anywhere, even if the goal is just strategic and not competing on the REE world market.
That is kinda the difference between REE and chip manufacturing: if you can only build chips which have a feature size 10x larger than the latest TSMC fabs, there are still a lot of niches you can compete in. If you can only refine REE at 10x the costs that China has, you will not be able to compete once they undo their embargo.
I think the market-based way the US could handle this is to commit to buying a certain amount of REE which is refined without tech from China per year for their defense sector for the foreseeable future. Of course, future presidents may not honor such a commitment. The alternative is that the US directly invests in such firms.
Personally, I think Trump will try to give the CCP what they want, especially if it is just some AI chips instead of the capability to build their own.
NullHypothesis
22hr ago
Sounds like McDonald's should've sold a 1/5 burger for the same price then.
pigeonburger
22hr ago
Yeah, but if you were to have to explain to someone why CEOs compete for 7-8 digit salaries while "normal people" compete for 5-6 digit salaries, even if you accounted for time spent in education and risk taken, it would be hard to make it seem fair. And if you told them that in the end, everyone ends up with more if they just shut up about fairness and let the market do its thing, it'll be hard to convince them it's not self-interested rich capitalist propaganda (or bootlicking), because, again, of how unfair it seems.
birb_cromble
22hr ago
A bad CEO can absolutely destroy a company
What's your opinion on the CEOs that seem to continuously get hired after driving companies into the ground?
I can't tell if there's some massive moral hazard involved, or just plain incompetence on the part of the board.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
22hr ago
I really enjoy getting downvoted on Reddit for doing the "CEO pay"/"# workers" = "incredibly small number"
It's always a good laugh
Another fun one is when people get shitty about airplane ticket prices, insist on how airlines are ripping them off and how "back in the day" flying was luxurious and nice.
Shockingly, pointing out 1) airlines are a cutthroat awful industry to be in with 3% net income margins (5% operating) which can be seen by them constantly getting bailed out, 2) "back in the day" airplane tickets were something like $10,000 in today dollars, and 3) if you want the "back in the day" experience, you can actually have a better version of it right now by flying first/business class results in screeching and downvotes.
TheDemonRazgriz
22hr ago
However, the biggest instance of joinmastodon.org is mastodon.social, which is left-wing and blacklists other instances that its admins don't like. Commentators often fail to explain this distinction, leading to confusion among onlookers.
Thanks for this, I’ve noticed my own confusion about this distinction occasionally when people were talking about Mastodon, but had never bothered looking into it. Makes much more sense now.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
22hr ago
The thing people mess up the most is that the CEO isn't competing with them for their salary, the CEO is competing against other CEOs. A bad CEO can absolutely destroy a company, so a company will pay as much as it can afford to have a good one.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
22hr ago
LOL
I actually didn't realize it was a different word. How fun(ny).
No_one
22hr ago
It pretty much seemed like a done deal except recon somehow missed the 200k Chinese who were doing a creditable effort at not being seen and mostly marched at night iirc.
ThenElection
22hr ago
To a first approximation, everyone is bad at math, and it's a rare person who applies it thoroughly to all parts of their lives. As a more immediate demonstration than abstractions around compensation, just pay a Starbucks worker cash for your latte and see them figure out the change.
For this particular case, union officials are absolutely aware of this, and I don't think it's common for a bargaining committee to push a fix to this as a demand during contract negotiations. Or, honestly, that it happens at all. Union staff have plenty of people who can do math. But it is an effective rhetorical move: it's evergreen and will always be true, so once the disparity becomes a true-ism among workers, it can be called on in any situation. The alternative would be to focus on e.g. profits. In which case, the rhetoric would entirely lose its potency: if high profits mean workers should get higher pay, then low or nonexistent profits would undercut any argument for improved pay.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
22hr ago
Bluesky is Twitter for people who hate Elon. I assume it’s a cesspool.
Mastodon is a bit more complicated. It was federated from the start, meaning it was always intended to let groups opt in/out of entire swathes of the broader sphere. This allows blacklisting without leaving the platform. It also supports numerous witch covens. I assume they’re all cesspools.
Truth social is Twitter for people who think Fox News is captured by anti-Trump wreckers. I don’t actually know how it differs in features, and I am okay with that. I assume it’s a cesspool.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
22hr ago
This "squeeze" has been happening since checks were invented during the Song dynasty. It turns out that people find it useful and convenient to make transactions without carrying cash or bullion.
This happens because labor theory of value is rather instinctive, as it appeals to our innate sense of fairness, even if it's wrong and inefficient. In which, of course, there is no realistic way a CEO could be doing thousands of times the amount of labor that his subordinates do, so there is no fair way in which they should be taking home thousands of times the pay as these subordinates.
Once people realize that there is no fair objective way of pricing goods and services, including labor, then they can understand why they should accept the inequalities created by a market.
*EDIT : Of course, that matters for mistake theorists. Conflict theorists that do know better than to believe in labor theory of value will still gladly invoke it to agitate against their opponents.
failure to reason through 9th grade math
Famously, the Third-Pound burger failed horribly, for the same price as McDonald's Quarter-Pounder. In focus groups investigating what went wrong, A&W discovered most people thought 1/3 is smaller than 1/4 and were thus getting less meat for the same price...
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
22hr ago
It never occurs to anyone to learn to do something more valuable. Just that they need to win the fight against the classists. How much unrest is actually caused by failure to reason through 9th grade math regarding your personal conditions?
Perhaps there's a cause and effect here. If you can't reason through the 9th grade math, you can't find anything more valuable you're capable of doing.
But probably not; it's just the politics of envy. You can always point at some fatcat you claim is getting all the value. Or if that fails, blame the customers for not paying enough. After all, if you by law increase the cost of coffee so every employee can afford a house, you've eliminated the problem of direct competitors eating your lunch. The idea that people might say 'fuck it, I'll make my own coffee' can just be dismissed out of hand.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
22hr ago
I never heard of her before today. But I had elementary school in one of the older states, not Texas. Maybe they were too busy.
I have a really hard time with CEO vs worker pay discussions. It kind of drives me crazy. Lets take Starbucks, since I'm currently hearing unions complain about the disparity right now. The argument mostly feels like math blindness, but maybe my problem is that I'm bringing an abacus to a knife fight.
The Starbucks CEO makes $95 million a year. They argue this is outrageous because their employees only make $20/hour or whatever.
Why not complete the math? What if we took the Starbucks CEO, fired him, and redistributed his $95 million a year a salary to the workers? Well, the 361,000 workers would see their pay bumped by about $1 per day. It's really hard to get across that the workers at each Starbucks already capture a huge portion of the value of the cup of coffee they serve (aside from real estate costs, cost of goods, etc). The Starbucks CEO takes perhaps a 1 cent from that cup.
This is a simple economic fact that seems almost impossible to communicate. Unionization won't improve worker pay on this front because there isn't much on a per unit basis that can be squeezed to give to workers.
I mean, the union could say lets increase the cost of coffee at Starbucks by 2.5x so that every employee can now afford a 3 bedroom 2 bathroom house in their neighborhood but then their competitors would eat their lunch. And customers might actually be pretty outraged by the idea of paying $18 for a blended coffee plus tip. So, the unions don't try this angle.
In my town a particular annoying version of this argument is happening regarding a company that distributes Pepsi products in the region. They somehow ended up with a union 50 years ago which includes a pension. The company recently announced they can't fucking afford to give employees a pension anymore for the very not valuable job of delivering cases of Diet Pepsi to 7-11s all day and they want to switch them over to an 401k. This was an enormous outrage and the delivery people have been on strike over this for a year now. Going by the town's reaction, they seem to believe thousands of dollars per case of soda being delivered are waiting to be wrestled away from the evil classists who run the company.
It never occurs to anyone to learn to do something more valuable. Just that they need to win the fight against the classists, a fight that could not change anything if they won.
How much unrest is actually caused by failure to reason through 9th grade math regarding your personal conditions?
Is any of this even about actually improving worker conditions? I know it's cliche to be skeptical of unions but I honestly don't understand their modern presence at all.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
23hr ago
The only place I've ever been that used $2 bills was a local strip club that gave them to you as change rather than singles.
You can require the military to purchase only e.g. equipment made of rare earths that are mined and processed in the USA or its allies, with a rigorous supply chain verification. Expect to pay out of the nose for it. (And if you don't get any takers with your initial offer, you're not paying enough.)
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