domain:nfinf.substack.com
hydroacetylene
22hr ago
But baristas don’t make anywhere near the minimum wage.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
23hr ago
"arbitrarily small" is really just the hypothesized "this person accomplishes nothing" with different wording. That sort of mathematical language makes sense if you're doing a proof, but we aren't.
2rafa
23hr ago
The Chinese certainly have naturally isolationist tendencies but I think even they know that in the era of engineered global pandemics, nuclear weapons (whose proliferation is an inevitable consequence of the end of Pax Americana) and A(G)I, they will have no choice but to be involved, especially given their location at the edge of ongoing potential conflict zones between India and Pakistan, the Koreas etc.
The British and Dutch also started with purely mercantile aspirations, but the trouble with that is that eventually tribe #2 decides it wants to destroy tribe #1, and all your valuable ports and factories and mines are in tribe #1’s territory, so before you know it you’re a colonial power.
sun_the_second
could survive a COD lobby and a gay furry discord server
23hr ago
The usual response is that in the cases where the CEO is bad, their quality of life won't really fall like a worker's quality of life falls if a worker fucks up and is fired.
TIRM
23hr ago
There are some quite specialized CEOs. John J. Ray III is the grim reaper for dying companies. He extracts what value is left and pays creditors as best he can. He did this for Enron and FTX. Not that Starbucks is in such dire situations, but their CEO may indeed be tasked with managing and slowing decline, trying to preserve what he can.
sun_the_second
could survive a COD lobby and a gay furry discord server
23hr ago
As mentioned elsewhere in the thread, it's downvoted because splitting up that money is not the point. The point is that the money is undeserved and unfair.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
23hr ago
It really just sounds like they want a minimum wage increase so that barista served coffees cost $20. But that has other problems.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
23hr ago
It seems strange to believe that someone can have zero or negative marginal product, but not arbitrarily small positive marginal product.
Ioper
23hr ago
Which is of course why there were more or less constant peasant rebellions until the industrial revolution...
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
23hr ago
I imagine they differ from you about what the evidence backs.
You imagine wrong. See for example the recent drama with Gordon Guyatt, the father of Evidence Based Medicine, who's own studies show the lack of evidence. He's still pretty freaked out about these laws being passed.
TIRM
23hr ago
You can transfer them to an etrade account or similar and sell them using the web interface. The mechanics of self-service stock selling are trivial.
Taxes can be automatically handled by selling a portion of the stock at vest for taxes. This is again a button on a brokerage web interface.
anon_
23hr ago
I imagine they differ from you about what the evidence backs.
Ultimately the government does get to decide what the line is between permissible and impermissible medical advice. This is viewpoint discrimination, no matter where the government decides to draw that line.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
23hr ago
Most of the left are the laptop class doing bullshit jobs. Which I find rather hilarious. They act like email jobs are so stressful and demand even more money, but never really did anything honestly productive where results matter. It’s even funnier when you realize that most of these people who consider themselves working class have jobs that they couldn’t fail if they tried.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
23hr ago
Link???
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
23hr ago
I think there is a tipping point where the cost of migration and training and related expenses would be worth it just to get a better production environment. But the cost of switching is high so the cost of continuing to work in the Microsoft environment has to be high than that.
It’s the stupid recall equation from fight club. The probability of a failure from using the product times the projected loss from that failure < cost of replacing the product = we don’t replace it.
TIRM
23hr ago
Yeah I shop regularly at Costco. There's no "walkable Costco infrastructure". I'm not carrying a small bag with one day of groceries. I use my car instead.
P-Necromancer
23hr ago
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.
There is, obviously, or every CEO would already be making a trillion dollars a year. Specifically, they need to convince the owner(s) or their representatives to pay them that much. And the more money they pay the CEO, the less profit they make. Why do you think the board is any less incentivized to cut staffing costs than managers? They're the ones applying that pressure!
As for the actual reasons why the market looks like it does: I'm pretty sure the thinking is much more about ensuring you've got someone who's experienced and reliable enough to avoid any major corporate screwups (which can easily run into the billions) than attracting some business genius to lead the company to glory. But if everyone wants experienced executives with a record of reliability and no one wants to take a chance on someone who isn't there yet... Well, that's how prices get bid up.
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.
These are not at all the same thing. They value the CEO over any other individual in the company, yes. But, as OP pointed out, they're paying him less than half of one percent of their total payroll. Sure, you can't reduce all of Roman history during Caesar's reign to Caesar... but I'm pretty sure you can attribute 0.5% of it to him. He did actually make a lot of decisions that impacted the lives of many Romans, many as a result of his particular circumstances. Upwards of 2-3%, I'd bet.
In general, the strong form of the case against the Great Man Theory is clearly false. Stanislav Petrov and Stanislav Petrov alone prevented nuclear war. Many times events don't neatly follow from the choices of any one (or even several) specific individuals, and sometimes when they do those choices would probably have been made by someone else in their place, but it's ridiculous to insist that's always the case. But I don't think most actual historians push the strong case; the point is just that other factors matter too, and often matter more. Which is in no way incompatible with thinking good leadership really does matter.
Musk is an outlier, for sure. But he's an even bigger outlier in terms of success. You can say he just got extremely lucky (twice, since SpaceX is an incredible success too), but I don't think that's where the balance of probability lies. Now, I'm not sure his compensation is reasonable even given that fact... which is why I haven't put any money into Tesla. (Well, I mainly haven't because I think other companies are quickly catching up, if they're not already there.) If more people thought like me, Tesla's stock would drop and he wouldn't get those huge bonuses... So there's your limiting factor. Clearly the people with skin in the game do feel he's worth it. They might be wrong, but it's their money they're betting.
TIRM
23hr ago
Pre-car urban design is indeed quite different from post-car urban design. The US had walkable "streetcar suburbs" in the early 20th century. Most middle class and above people left them with great haste once car based suburbs were invented and they degenerated into slums.
I think we should legalize building more such places and I'm very skeptical about how many and what sorts of people will occupy them. They may turn into yet more brighted urban slums. But we should accept that risk rather than building so little so rarely in cities.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1d ago
This might work, but I doubt stores that close together can match the selection of the one I have to drive five minutes to. It probably takes a minute or more just to walk across the store. Some of it is duplicative (multiple brands of milk), but you'd still lose selection pretty fast.
phailyoor
1d ago
I don't wanna go to a tiny ass overpriced bodega. I want Walmart. Unfortunately due to physical limitations it's impossible to have everyone live 2 minutes from a decent sized store.
10-15 minute walk is doable depending on the urban layout but that's pushing the distance where you start considering driving.
grendel-khan
i'm sorry, but it's more complicated than that
1d ago
That's interesting. I thought it had a lot to say about how shame can fester and turn into something worse, about how you don't really accept someone if you try and cover up the unsavory parts of them, about how when you lie to your friends because you're afraid of what they might think, the LIE is much more important than what you originally were afraid of them judging you for.
Maybe these seem really straightforward or trite, but it's a kids movie, and those are pretty good kids movie morals.
LazyLongposter
1d ago
Sounds like Los Angeles to me. I grew up in the Los Angeles area during the best time to grow up there (I might make a top level post about this some time) and it is essentially unrecognizable. I'm no stranger to city living, but whenever I go back, it's almost an anxiety attack as every street, every home, every parking spot is filled beyond its natural capacity in every sense of the word. Small streets are covered in towering luxury apartments that replaced the more meager (and more charming) buildings that preceded them. Single family homes are filled with people, leaving 3-5 cars to somehow fill out the driveways and street parking to the point that visiting is almost impossible unless you coordinate in advance with the people that you are visiting. Shopping centers, as you mention, are plopped down in areas that cannot support them, and the traffic (and light pollution, which is never something I thought I'd care about) make the entire area unpleasant. I know Los Angeles hate has been low hanging fruit for decades, but the city is in such an unlivable state these days I can hardly believe it.
Celestial-body-NOS
We are all human beans. Together, we will rice.
1d ago
I suspect that there would be less envy in the world if people got the impression that those above them were trying to pull everyone else up to their level rather than trying to keep them down.
If you try to productively use an empty spot of remote land, they'll suddenly recall it is sacred.
https://www.civilbeat.org/2015/12/peter-apo-let-there-be-light-on-the-tmt/
The unsupported assertions that it has always been sacred will be credulously repeated by journalists and bootstrap a legally protected "sacred" spot that cannot be mined or have a telescope on it. Major news publications will assert that the spot is sacred since ancient times. The lack belief of sacredness predating the attempt to build something on the remote empty spot doesn't concern journalists or activists.
Same, I've got nothing against the occasional pop banger, k or otherwise, but didn't land with me at all
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