domain:mattlakeman.org
ABigGuy4U
27m ago
China intensively polices any kind of capital or resource outflow. Chinese businessmen have sometimes gotten in trouble for just moving 40 million dollars out of the country to buy an overseas business.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
30m ago
Nature abhors a discontinuity. You already agreed that an employee can accomplish nothing. How can it be that producing zero is possible, producing X is possible, but it's impossible to produce x/1000?
Effort, productivity, hours worked, talent - all these things are continuous variables. It's trivially obvious that someone who has little talent, low productivity, and slacks off on the clock can produce arbitrarily less than someone with talent, drive, and focus.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
35m ago
How do you think sports leagues should handle past wild-west-type PED usage when discussing historical records?
My preferred competitive spectator sports growing up were baseball and football, with a sprinkling of MMA/Boxing. So I was used to the ways that those sports dealt with steroids. Baseball whinged about it, drummed Barry Bonds out of the sport over it, and everyone stopped talking about Barry Bonds and Mark McGwire and the homerun record (suddenly people started talking about the AL home run record, which is theoretically clean), steroid users are mostly being kept out of Cooperstown, but it's still understood that records and stats accumulated by enhanced players "count." Football and boxing occasionally toss a suspension or a fine or a ban at somebody for steroid use, but mostly sweep it under the rug and ignore it. But those aren't the only methods!
Lately I've been enjoying recreational cycling, and listened to Nige Tassell's Three Weeks, Eight Seconds about the 1989 Tour De France while riding. It was exactly the kind of tightly written sports history book I love, from the title I knew it would end with a tight race, having no knowledge of cycling I didn't know who would win. The EPO era hangs over the historical narrative, looming "in the future" according the speakers who all deny that PED use was common at the time. Indurain and Lemond take star turns in 1989, between the two of them they carry the yellow jersey to 1995 and just before the Lance Armstrong era. But Lance has suffered complete damnatio memoriae from cycling authorities, and it's kind of fascinating how much cycling journalists and writers accept this politically correct erasure. Wikipedia lists the seven tours between 1999 and 2005 as having "no winner." And that weirdly Stalinist turn continues throughout cycling media, even in unrelated publications like the Wall Street Journal. This summer I followed the Tour casually, reading the articles in the WSJ, that kind of thing. Something I noticed was that people talk about Pogacar having the potential to match, and then beat, the record mutually held by Jacques Anquetil, Eddy Merckx, Bernard Hinault, and Miguel Induráin of five tour wins. This ignores Lance's record of seven consecutive tour wins. Then they go on to talk about Pogacar being maybe the GOAT, surpassing Merckx or Indurain, with no mention of Armstrong. Tbh, on wikipedia, it's pretty hard to figure out Lance Armstrong's resume, because the sidebar with his "major accomplishments" just lists a couple relatively minor wins [Grand Tours: Tour de France 2 individual stages (1993, 1995) Tour de Luxembourg (1998) Tour DuPont (1995, 1996)] while refusing to list the seven consecutive tour de France wins. Indurain, by comparison, is listed in the first sentence as the only 5-time winner to win them consecutively. It just seems to be an absolutely bizarre way of treating the topic, and I have to assume that this is the result of some serious pressure from UCI to threaten any journalist who talks about Armstrong as a winner with such severe loss of access that writing about cycling would be impossible. Part of me wonders if this is the result of the European origin of TPTB in cycling lead them to particularly want to forget the period when an American came in and dominated the sport.
This seems like a bad way to handle things. Baseball fans acknowledge that Bonds lived and hit home runs, even if most of them hate him for various reasons. They might talk about the clean home run record, or the AL home run record, but they don't ignore the real home run record. My generation of fans, our memories are of Bonds and Sosa and McGwire and we're getting those memories back into play, I'm not sure why cycling fans don't feel the same way. Cycling fans seem to want to ignore the real TDF records, and make them impossible to compare, and pretend Lance Armstrong in particular never happened. I wonder if we'll see him readmitted to the fold if and when Pogacar wins eight, as then he will be a less threatening figure to cycling history and can be rehabilitated.
A third point for comparison: olympic weightlifting has twice shifted the weight classes in concert with new testing rules, so that the old records "don't exist" in the sense that the old records are from old weight classes and the new records are for new weight classes. We might be able to squint and say "gee they used to be a lot fucking stronger;" but there's never an unbreakable record for a current weight class the way no one will ever hit 80 home runs without steroids.
What method do you prefer? How should sports leagues deal with steroid records?
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
42m ago
problem with the idea that CEOs produce 1000x the value the employees is that the CEOs are 1000x compensated as a rule, including those CEOs who don't oversee enermous successes but stagnation or drive the company to the ground. All well-paid until the end.
I think it is strongest argument that executives are not highly paid because their value is competitively assessed. It is a combination of a principal-agent problem and some kind of scope issues: executives are placed at the top of company hierarchy and control its day-to-day functioning whereas stock-owners are numerous and have relatively little direct input, which causes the principal agent problem. Because the executives are few in number, humongous compensation to few executives is only a drop in a bucket to large company, so they can get away with it.
It is a problem that probably can not be fixed in joint stock company capitalism, but perhaps benefits of capitalism are worth the costs.
Musk and Buffett, for the record, are not only CEOs. Neither is rich man because of their CEO compensation, but because they hold significant amount of shares in their respective companies. Buffett owns something like 30% of Berkshire Hathaway. Musk owns 15% of Tesla and majority of SpaceX.
chooky
58m ago
Nah, Golden is just Heaven by DJ Sammy redux - a quintessential feel good house song. Like Heaven, it is great, though admittedly not inspired like the best Daft Punk, for example.
sohois
58m ago
Same, I've got nothing against the occasional pop banger, k or otherwise, but didn't land with me at all
hydroacetylene
59m ago
But baristas don’t make anywhere near the minimum wage.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
1hr 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
1hr 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
1hr 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
1hr 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
1hr 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
1hr 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
1hr ago
It seems strange to believe that someone can have zero or negative marginal product, but not arbitrarily small positive marginal product.
Ioper
1hr ago
Which is of course why there were more or less constant peasant rebellions until the industrial revolution...
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1hr 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
1hr 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_
1hr 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
1hr 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
1hr ago
Link???
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1hr 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
1hr 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
1hr 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
1hr 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.
It's a bit different though. The pressure to cut expenses comes from the top down. But there's no one above the board of directors who can hold them accountable- they're already at the top! Many of them serve on multiple boards at once, and rotate in and out of CEO or other C-level jobs at other companies, so they have a strong "class interest" in pushing up CEO pay in general. They might get some bad press or worker grumbling about unfairness, but there's no one that can actually fire them for setting the CEO pay too high. In theory I guess the general stockholders could all come together to do it, but they're so disorganized that it never happens. The only practical way to force them out is for some corporate raider to do a hostile takeover, and even then there's golden parachute clauses designed in part to preevent that sort of thing.
also worth noting that the ratio of CEO pay to average worker pay has massively increased over the last few decades. 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.
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.
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