domain:mattlakeman.org
Pongalh
7m ago
Interesting because it's been much, much harder for me to hold on to fake email jobs than my jobs delivering pizza and flowers. I left all the latter, the former left me (save for one).
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
8m ago
People aren't being overly literal. Including that comparison without making it explicit isn't a reasonable thing to do, because it brings it in without leaving it open for challenge.
BahRamYou
9m ago
I think your response actually supports my point. In theory "we" the stockholders could cut their CEO's pay, or "we" as voters could pass a law limiting all CEO pay. But in practice, no one is organized enough to actually be able to do anything about it. The CEOs get their pay not because some perfectly efficient market is finding the correct value for them, but because they have more political power where it counts.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
17m ago
The newer Russian planes are fine compared to anything short of an F-22/35, but they can't build them quickly enough or at all (in the case of MiG 31s, or non-Flanker strike aircraft like the Su-22s and 25s, Tu-95s, etc.) to afford chucking them into the teeth of Ukraine's air defense network Gulf War style and they didn't start the war with huge numbers of them thanks to having next to no procurement budget during the 90s and 2000s. Does the Su-57 do anything that an Su-30/35 or MiG 31 can't also do (The R-37 is indeed clever.)? Who knows, because they've only built ~30 of them.
Mind you, even before being provisioned with Patriots and so on Ukraine started the war with a very good ground-based IADS thanks to being either the second or third-largest operator of the S-300 and other 80s era Soviet SAM systems in the world, especially given an all you can eat buffet of NATO recon. It would've been a tough nut to crack for anyone not named the USAF.
Jiro
24m ago
In order for it to be possible, all you need is zero, you don't have to have arbitrarily small, because it is certainly possible to produce 1000 times zero.
But it's still nonsense either way because people here are depressingly literal. "Produces 1000 times as much as another employee" implicitly compares an employee to another employee whose production is acceptable. The fact that the words "... whose production is acceptable" are not literally there doesn't change this.
Pongalh
34m ago
"Jurors." Interesting choice. Hm, is this literally true or is it meant to signify anti-sprawl boomer liberals who value civic participation or something? (Or possibly unsuccessful albeit decent, basic people with nothing better to do with their time? But even those folks mostly have cars.)
Pongalh
37m ago
Some writers have begun intentionally introducing mistakes into their writing in order to not be thought of as using LLMs. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/sarah-waller-1b967671_i-recently-read-an-article-where-the-writer-activity-7381594464328359936-6dNO?rcm=ACoAAAIRfjcBLt5fKoXIZEwnmoXzpmaEixqxsJ8
Why do you think the board is any less incentivized to cut staffing costs than managers? They're the ones applying that pressure!
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. Or maybe the CEO ends up with all of the company's stock (making it harder and harder for regular shareholders to oppose them) and they become a private company, like SpaceX already is.
edit: most of the starbucks board members are current or former CEOs of other companies. They directly benefit from raising CEO pay, since that sets a higher baseline for themselves to justify their own pay. This isn't some abstract "class consciousness thing," there's a very small group of CEOs and board members who are tightly connected.
Stanislav Petrov
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)
ABigGuy4U
1hr 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
1hr 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
1hr 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
1hr 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
1hr 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
1hr ago
Same, I've got nothing against the occasional pop banger, k or otherwise, but didn't land with me at all
hydroacetylene
1hr 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
2hr 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
2hr ago
It seems strange to believe that someone can have zero or negative marginal product, but not arbitrarily small positive marginal product.
There's some places where people whose output is zero or near zero are quickly rooted out and fired (assembly lines?) but in many fields ZMP workers learn to camouflage themselves and fly under the radar from management's perspective.
Or, if you like, NMP and ZMP workers can have de facto "acceptable production".
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