Slashdot Mirror
US Bosses Now Earn 312 Times the Average Worker's Wage, Figures Show (theguardian.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The chief executives of America's top 350 companies earned 312 times more than their workers on average last year, according to a new report published Thursday by the Economic Policy Institute. The rise came after the bosses of America's largest companies got an average pay rise of 17.6% in 2017, taking home an average of $18.9m in compensation while their employees' wages stalled, rising just 0.3% over the year. The pay gap has risen dramatically, with some fluctuations, since the 1990s. In 1965 the ratio of CEO to worker pay was 20 to one; that figure had risen to 58 to one by in 1989 and peaked in 2000 when CEOs earned 344 times the wage of their average worker. CEO pay dipped in the early 2000s and during the last recession, but has been rising rapidly since 2009. Chief executives are even leaving the 0.1% in the dust. The bosses of large firms now earn 5.5 times as much as the average earner in the top 0.1%.
"Last year, McDonald’s boss Steve Easterbrook earned $21.7m while the McDonald’s workers earned a median wage of just $7,017 – a CEO to worker pay ratio of 3,101 to one."
$7,017 is less than half the federal minimum wage. Clearly this "study" includes part time workers.
I personally believe that U.S. Americans are unable to do so because some people out there in our nation don’t have maps and, uh, I believe that our education, like such as in South Africa and, uh, the Iraq, everywhere like such as and I believe that they should, our education over here in the U.S. should help the U.S., er should help South Africa, and should help the Iraq and the Asian countries so that we ill be able to build up our future for our children.
It's fine. The average boss works 312 times harder than their average employee, so it's all good.
And this is why capitalism will not be around for much longer. It totally puts the world upside down.
And what is the alternative? The benefit of capitalism is that it harnesses how people already are: greedy. For myself, I don't care that some people have much more than me, I am more worried that I don't have more. The biggest problem in the US right now is access to healthcare, but no one has a reasonable plan.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
We haven't had capitalism in the US for decades.
We have cronyism. If we enforced our laws this would not have happened. But every business wanted extreme laws and an exception for themselves.
And because of this I support treating lobbyists as a denial of service attack. They take up all the time, every day until they are satisfied nobody can get a word in with lawmakers except business.
Actually, the prices don't need to really go up that much to compensate for increased wages because the lowest paid workers don't actually control a significant percentage of the economy in the first place. With increased minimum wage, people are able to spend more money, creating a healthier economy that actually *helps* business.
Obviously, there's a limit to how far this can be taken, but as I said, in practice it works for minimum wage and low wage earners because such a small percentage of the overall economy is actually controlled by those earners, even though they represent a majority of the population (I think it's called the Pareto Principle). As long as low wage earners control such a tiny percentage of the economy, this characteristic will endure.
The increase in prices that objectors often allege needs to occur to compensate for increased wages is not anywhere close to the amount by which the low wages are actually increased... it's more than an order of magnitude in difference.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
The main "benefit" of capitalism is that it reinforces political conservatism (that is, the rule of the current elite) with relatively little violence, by heavily discounting the future. It is a peaceful tyranny over progress.
You're right that it was an improvement over what was in the past before it, when the hold on progress was much more violent, but had you lived at the times when Capitalism was emerging, you'd have been vehemently against it, because it was the new, radical and scary thing.
And yeah, it is obvious that given the scale of human technology today, Capitalism, at least on a planetary scale, has exhausted itself. Capitalism is prone to producing exponential solutions. The problem is, these are unfeasible in a world governed by the laws of physics. You need someone to put, so to speak, limits to growth on this solution if you don't want to die in your own poo. And that isn't something Capitalism can do.
The path is clear, and Asimov guessed it in the 50s already -- Gaia -- a global consciousness, where the individual greed doesn't mean so much. It is a Communism on a telepathic level, if you will.
And it is coming.
Make the World Venezuela Again!
The McDonald's and Walmart CEO's make about $10 per employee per year.
The US Government taxes those employees far more.
CEOs make more money because they have far more employees working for them. Small business owners don't make nearly as much as large companies with thousands of employees.
Work Safe Porn
What we have now is an oversupply of labor. Supply and demand is a two way street, but it's tough to get folks to acknowledge that because nobody like to think of themselves as a simple commodity. We're all precious, irreplaceable snowflakes.
I think you are slightly off the mark here. What we have is suboptimal distribution of labor. We have a huge oversupply of unskilled labor and well educated laborers without a specific skill set (think liberal arts majors), while we have a severe shortage of highly skilled laborers (doctors, airline pilots, engineers) and a moderate shortage of skilled trades (construction, electrical, plumbing, steelworkers, welders, etc.).
The reason for the shortage of highly skilled professionals is because of market distortions (e.g., prohibitive cost of malpractice insurance for doctors, or abysmal pay and terrible work/life balance of practically all pilots who don't fly long haul international) and for the shortage of skilled trades the reason is that for the last 30 plus years every kid has been told "you have to go to college to get ahead unless you want to end up with a crappy job as an electrician or construction worker." It turns out that those jobs pay reasonably well and a plumber who gains sufficient experience and starts his or her own business would not have much trouble netting six figures. But that is seen as an "undesirable" occupation.
It doesn't help that there's a small group at the top (math majors, surgeons, top athletes) who are. There's a lot of folks who don't want to see those productivity gains distributed more equitably because it's a point of pride for them. At least that's the only explanation I've come up with why so many oppose things like single payer healthcare.
I'm afraid you lost me here. Also, what does single payer healthcare have to do with any of this? Could you explain?
Then again I've also noticed a lot of those single payer healthcare opponents qualify for Medicare and/or the VA....
Well, those programs aren't freebies. For Medicare, you are forced to pay into it your entire working life and for VA medical care it is a benefit given in exchange for military service. Most jobs in the military are rather underpaid when compared to their civilian equivalents, which is part of why military veteran benefits are as generous as they are. That and being constantly deployed and away from your family sucks.
Now, if you don't like Medicare benefits or the benefits offered to veterans, you are free to lobby to reduce or remove them.
but it's the large companies that employ the masses and exploit the fuck out of them. and these stats compare the big companies of yesterday to the big companies of today. so apples vs apples, unlike you wanting to compare a fortune 500's ceo salary vs their workers' to what the 'ceo' and owner of a mom-and-pop operation earns and 'pays' themselves.
one mcdonalds ceo making 20+ million, while 200,000 work in corporate-owned stores earning close to minimum wage, and forced to accept part-time work schedules so no insurance benefits need be provided.
the ceo of walmart also makes 20+ mil and exploits 2 MILLION workers worldwide. does the same thing. pays as little as legally possible while also denying the vast majority of their million+ u.s. workforce health insurance and other benefits by only offering part-time work. if you manage to sneak in the requisite number of hours needed to legally require them to offer you insurance, they WILL find some reason to fire your ass, and then fight your unemployment claim. they will spend on legal fees to avoid allowing any sort of precedence that could come back to bite their profit margins in the ass.
There are certain words and phrases that have no fixed definition, so the use of them usually says more about the person using them, than the object they are being used to describe. Like “fascism” in modern times, the term “feudalism” was mostly a term of disparagement in the 18th and 19th century. According to scholars of the subject, the word “feudal” was first used in the 17th century, as in feudal order. It later came into more common usage in Marxist political propaganda in the 18th and 19th century.
Just because feudalism was largely used as a meaningless epithet, it does not mean it did not exist. Scholars generally agree that feudalism was “a set of reciprocal legal and military obligations among the warrior nobility, revolving around the three key concepts of lords, vassals and fiefs.” The lord owned the land, the vassal was granted use of it by the lord. The land was the fief. In exchange for legal and physical protection, the lord expected service, usually military service, but also food rents and labor from the peasants.
Marxists later pointed out that the codes and customs that we associate with this period relied on the lord owning the one thing of value, the land. The person at the top of the feudal order had a monopoly on the one store of value and that gave him a monopoly on the law. The old saying about the golden rule is true. The man with the gold makes the rules. This is why as coinage made a comeback in the medieval period, kings took control of the mints. It was both a source a wealth, seigniorage, and a source of power.
A useful example of this is the decision by Henry VIII to dissolve the monasteries of the Catholic Church. By seizing church lands, which constituted about a quarter of the national wealth, and redistributing them to favored aristocrats, Henry fundamentally altered English society. He weakened the power of the old nobles, by filling their ranks with new members loyal to Henry. He also eliminated an alternative source of economic power in English society. Henry was supreme power because he controlled the land.
Feudalism only works when a small elite controls the source of wealth. Then they can control the exploitation of it. In Europe, as Christianity spread, the Church required lands, becoming one of the most powerful forces in society. The warrior elite was exclusively Catholic, thus they had a loyalty to the Pope, as God’s representative on earth. Therefore, the system of controlling wealth not only had a direct financial benefit to the people at the top, it had the blessing of God’s representative, who sat atop the whole system.
That’s something to keep in mind as we see technology evolve into a feudal system, where a small elite controls the resources and grants permission to users. The software oligopolies are now shifting all of their licencing to a subscription model. It’s not just the mobile platforms. Developers of enterprise software for business are adopting the same model. The users have no ownership rights. Instead they are renters, subject to terms and conditions imposed by the developer or platform holder. The users is literally a tenant.
The main reason developers are shifting to this model is that they cannot charge high fees for their software, due to the mass of software on the market. Competition has drive down prices. Further, customers are not inclined to pay high maintenance fees, when they can buy new systems at competitive rates. The solution is stop selling the stuff and start renting it. This fits the oligopoly scheme as it ultimately puts them in control of the developers. Apple and Google are now running protection rackets for developers.
It also means the end of any useful development. Take a look at the situation Stefan Molyneux faces. A band of religious fanatics has declared him a heretic and wants him burned. The Great Church of Technology is now in the process of having him expelled from the internet. As he wrote in a post, he inves
The real issues is not in the number.
It's in the fact that these guys basically decide their own salaries. Mr. Boss is the CEO of company A, and sits on the board of company B and C. Mr. Big, meanwhile, is CEO of company B, but sits on the board of A and C, and Mr. Greedy is CEO of C and on the board of A and B.
Guess what they will decide when it comes to yearly reviews and salary adjustments.
The system is broken because a relatively small in group decides amongst themselves, instead of the independent outside review that the system is intended to have. It doesn't even need to have all companies working like that - company D which has a clean board and CEO, will not be able to resist the upwards pull of the others, because the CEO of D one day will get an offer from A, or just look at it, and see that the CEO there gets 200% more, and he will ask his board why he doesn't and what they will do to stop him from going there.
This kind of built-in dilemma is exactly where government oversight and regulation comes into play, when the system is broken and needs outside interference to right itself. Because no publicly traded company will start with the change, because doing so just isn't a rational decision.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
What really ticks me off is when loser CEOs get big compensation, and/or golden parachutes.
Table-ized A.I.
The thing you call "cronyism" is the inevitable last stage of capitalism in a society that started out as more or less democratic. Also known as oligarchy, it happens because any random distribution of resources and means of production, if left unchecked, will have some firms that will produce more than the economic profit, and they will quickly realize that investing those in subverting the political process to their benefit is the best investment strategy.
The "invisible hand", left to itself, simply fails to maintain "free markets" as a straightforward consequence of the basic economic laws.
To my mind this is pretty simply - a person should be paid a sliding scale based on how many people their work directly impacts, combined with how close they are to affecting customers.
You will not be able to define that clearly.
The work of the cleaning crew, for example, impacts everyone in the company. The work of your genius inventor, on the other hand, impacts nobody directly.
And, quite honestly, the work of the CEO most of the time affects very few people.
What you mean is potential impact. The CEO could make a decision that affects everyone greatly, while the cleaning crew cannot - they do their job but don't make decisions.
But between the extremes, you won't be able to define the scale cleanly. Who is more meaningful, the developer or the sysadmin?
A mail guy or someone working a front desk? Come on, they are not offering much real value
Really? Do without them for a month and see how well that goes.
Every job in a company is important, otherwise the company would not pay someone to do it.
The problem of fair payment is not a simple one, and a blanket solution will not work. What we have right now is actually not that bad (a market system), except that it is skewed on both ends - on the low end, people are forced to accept bad conditions because unemployment is high and very undesireable, and on the high end, people get ridiculous salaries and aren't reviewed properly because they are all part of the same circle-jerk group.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
You're really deluded if you think the CEO "runs" a large company.
We're all precious, irreplaceable snowflakes. It doesn't help that there's a small group at the top (math majors, surgeons, top athletes) who are.
You touched upon the real problem there, but didn't grab it.
This, exactly, is the problem. Every CEO of every major company these days is paid like a precious, one-of-a-kind, irreplaceable snowflake. Very few actually are. Thanks to my career choices I've worked directly with a good number of top-level executives in several companies from small to 5000+ employees.
Many of these people are very competent and very hard-working. Some of them are brilliant. Most of them could not be replaced without a considerable change in the company direction and culture as their personality influences everyone down the chain.
Most of them deserves to be paid several times what I earn, and I earn not bad.
But not one of them is irreplaceable. Not one of them needs to have his salary take up its own position in the company budget. Not in one case would the entire company crumble if he left. There would be a shock wave, sure. There would be changes, sure. But after some adjustments, business would go on.
There are some iconic leaders who are or would be missed. Steve Jobs, Elon Musk - you can barely imagine their companies without them.
But the number of CEOs is far larger than the number of iconic CEOs. Too many of them believe that they are irreplaceable, and too many boards think the same (because guess who sits on those boards?).
The 20x figure is a number you can justify on a rational basis. The 300+ times is a system spiralling out of control, because too many snowflakes think they are individually important, and refuse to admit that to the person throwing the snowball, they really don't matter one bit.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Sure, Bob. Just don't get a heart attack trying to lift all that lard on your carcass from the couch when you reach for your rifle.
"The biggest problem in the US right now is access to healthcare, but no one has a reasonable plan."
Bullshit! Medicare For All is a very, very reasonable plan...unless you suck on the Fox News tit, in which case "you should have worked harder, loser!" is a reasonable plan.
The main "benefit" of capitalism is that it reinforces political conservatism (that is, the rule of the current elite) with relatively little violence, by heavily discounting the future.
I don't know if that's true, but any system based on predicting too much into the future is bound to fail because the future is hard to predict.
The path is clear, and Asimov guessed it in the 50s already -- Gaia -- a global consciousness, where the individual greed doesn't mean so much. It is a Communism on a telepathic level, if you will. And it is coming.
Uh......case in point.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Aye! The mark of today's moron: "Venezuela! Nuffsaid!!" Fucking idiots....
This, exactly, is the problem. Every CEO of every major company these days is paid like a precious, one-of-a-kind, irreplaceable snowflake. Very few actually are. Thanks to my career choices I've worked directly with a good number of top-level executives in several companies from small to 5000+ employees.
OK, but why didn't you take the job then? You could have made dramatically more money.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I personally believe that U.S. Americans are unable to do so because some people out there in our nation don’t have maps and, uh, I believe that our education, like such as in South Africa and, uh, the Iraq, everywhere like such as and I believe that they should, our education over here in the U.S. should help the U.S., er should help South Africa, and should help the Iraq and the Asian countries so that we ill be able to build up our future for our children.
Thank you for posting, Miss Ocasio-Cortez. I see that your degree in economics and international relations has served you well.
math majors? Really?
I agree with you there. The Great Game of Business is a good starting place and proves it's viable. All you need is respect for your employees.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
The benefit of capitalism is that it harnesses how people already are: greedy.
The problem is that it rewards being greedy, and it rewards higher greed with higher rewards. This way, a questionable trait is amplified.
The biggest problem in the US right now is access to healthcare, but no one has a reasonable plan.
Funny how the rest of the world has that one figured out. It is not a lack of plan, it is a lack of want. Too many people profit from the current situation.
The same happened in Germany, just the other way around. We had a perfectly workable pension system, which had survived both world wars and was doing ok. There were some issues that needed adjustments, and a problem of money being squandered on non-pension issues. But it was a state-run system and thus generated no profit for anyone. So in a two-decade campaign, the public was convinced that the system was utterly broken, would fail real-soon-now and they themselves would receive tiny pensions if it is not completely reworked. Then it got completely reworked and turned into a hybrid system where you get minimal payout from the state-pension system (that anyway you pay in as much as before) while having additional private insurance-based pensions with tax incentives to make people go there. Ten years down the road it turns out that people now get exactly what they were threatened with: Tiny pensions even after a life-time of work. The whole thing makes absolutely no sense until you realize that the main thing that changed is that the insurance industry has a new market and is making really nice profits from it.
Same with your healthcare system. Follow the money. Someone would make less money if you had proper healthcare, and that someone is fighting tooth and nail, before and behind the curtains, to keep the system as it is.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Unless, as a person, we want to pay them enough money to eat food, etc. I suppose food stamps can provide some assistance, but it seems most people who oppose paying a living wage also oppose food stamps.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
The work of the cleaning crew, for example, impacts everyone in the company.
You can easily define that, by roughly calculating how many bathrooms a worker takes care of, and what percentage of the day employees visit them.
You've also forgotten the customer metric, which a janitor scores zero on.
Under my system, a janitor would be paid much the same, because they may impact a fair number of employees but only lightly.
And, quite honestly, the work of the CEO most of the time affects very few people.
That is insane. They are making choices that affect the EXISTENCE of every department, what every customer sees, even the location of the building they are in. It is all on them and they should be paid according to that degree of responsibility.
Who is more meaningful, the developer or the sysadmin?
That's a more interesting question but I'd put them about the same level, as in "very high" because of the generally high customer touch - well, depending on if they are taking care of internal or external systems.
Really? Do without them for a month and see how well that goes.
It's not that you can do without them as a function; it's how much you can replace one with anyone else and no-one really noticing or being affected (although frankly lots of companies ARE doing away with front desk greeters, and mail rooms are becoming more automated leaving fewer employees affecting more people and getting paid more...).
Every job in a company is important,
We all know that is false, I have seen way to many imbeciles working at companies to claim every job is important. You have never seen someone let go, the job remaining unfilled and it doesn't really end up mattering?
Even if some job matters many jobs matter. lot less. Moving around physical mail is at this point laughably useless in a world where anything important is electronic, or someone can easily go down and collect a package.
The problem of fair payment is not a simple one, and a blanket solution will not work.
It's not simple but the system I propose would work a lot better than what happens now, and lead to a lot more fair pay. Mostly for me of course; but that's because I have made good life choices.
on the high end, people get ridiculous salaries and aren't reviewed properly because they are all part of the same circle-jerk group
Thus if you want to guard against this you MUST implement a system, blanket or otherwise, that flattens out jerks self-selecting other jerks for high paying positions of great actual importance because they are at a high level (though there again, we all know from experience some high level positions sometimes do absolutely nothing at all for a company or customers)
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
A mail guy or someone working a front desk? Come on, they are not offering much real value and pay should be commensurate with that basic fact.
People do crappy jobs because they lack the option to not do crappy jobs. However, if we had UBI that let people survive without a job then I have a feeling that all the those "unimportant" people would suddenly become far more scarce. Naturally clowns like you would scream that you need to import more labor because of a "labor shortage" when the reality is that you just aren't offering enough money for positions.
The severe depression of wages has resulted in a wage slave economy where you either work for the peanuts they offer or you die.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
This is actually restoration of the status quo. In nature, regardless of species, differential between successful and unsuccessful is a very deep chasm.
Over last couple of centuries, humans in Western world faced a massive transformation of the very basics of the society. The kind that saw selection pressure reduce the difference between successful and unsuccessful significantly. It culminated in the age of post-WW2 generations, when rapid growth of everything from knowledge to economy was mainly limited by availability of capable workforce to do the work.
But now, the low hanging fruit has been picked, and the process is heading back toward natural equilibrium. It's a shame that naive people who have been brainwashed by folks with massive anti-capitalist axe to grind attribute the natural state of things to "capitalism" and divergence from it to "not having capitalism", "communism" and "socialism", depending how far they have bought into the cult of Marxism.
Because as we have observed in most of the world, capitalism has been by far the most successful force to eliminate poverty ever conceived and attempted in human history. It just needs to be managed to moderate the peaks of the same natural cycle that all life on this planet follows, the cycle of boom and bust.
But when all you have is extremist marxists on the other side, who are willing to use everything from authoritarianism to violence to shut down anyone who so much as dares to suggest that their cult is the answer to world's problems, both real and imaginary, everyone else gets polarized just to be able to resist their advances, and everyone is worse off as a result.
It's not the case that capitalist money corrupts government, but rather government power corrupts capitalists.
Nope, it is the other way around, and I explained what the drive is: capitalists see that "investment" in politics (i.e. political bribery) has higher returns than investing in production improvement. This is why you have, in the US, a business system for influencing the government.
You'll have a lot of trouble to explain how "government power corrupts the capitalists" starting from a true capitalist democracy.
The Founders wanted a
The founders were people without proper understanding of economics, simply because it didn't exist when they were alive. You cannot expect they had the answers to your problems back then. They had a good grasp of the principles of making smart decisions, though, and these are valuable. They knew how to use the tools they had in hand to improve the society they lived in.
Today, we have many more tools at our disposal, and they are infinitely more powerful. The problem is, using them requires learning them, and people don't want to learn, because it is hard work. People like you take the easy way out, and fall back on solutions of a different problem from a past age.
You should do better.
Venezuela is being run as one large company wtih a stupid and dictatorial CEO who got it by way of inheritance. For example, the Trump business "empire".
So, communism failed in Venezuela not because communism is a failure but because the guy in charge was a failure? How do you propose putting people that know how to run things in charge? An election every 2, 4, or 6 years perhaps?
But how do we make sure that we pick the right person? Maybe have a law that people are assured a freedom to speak. People should be able to hand out papers, with news of the day on them, so that the people voting in the elections know what's going on in the world.
Then we need to make sure that the people elected doesn't just strong arm everyone to keep voting the same people into office. I think we should do that by making sure the people can defend themselves from the government, that the government can't just poke their heads into people's houses announced, or keep soldiers in people's houses either.
Since there will be cases for the government to come into houses to investigate crimes then there should be a means to do so, maybe have a kind of court system? Like a judge has to issue a writ or warrant, or whatever that word is for government permission to do something they normally should not.
We can't have a government keep political prisoners. So let's make the judge have to do what a bunch of people in the community should be done. I think that's called a jury. Oh, and the judge can't just hand down any sentence for a crime, it shouldn't be like wicked and over the top or something.
I think these are all good ideas for a government. I wonder if someone wrote them down somewhere before?
If you want a wider wealth disparity and weaker middle class, you mean?
I don't care that some people have much more than me, I am more worried that I don't have more.
Um... since we live in a world where resources are finite, isn't that just two ways of expressing the exact same thing. I mean I don't care about a yacht or a mansion either, but we are all still pulling from the same limited resource pool.
?
Make America Great Again harkens back to earlier times, when things seems "great" for the average person. So when was it at it's "greatest"? Perhaps in the 1960's, when the CEO/worker income ration was closer to 20/1? It's probably not the only factor, but I'm willing to bet it is a significant one. At least for the average worker.
yeah, but as you say, the time when "capitalism" did the best at reducing poverty was during that non-standard period. If reducing poverty is the goal we're wanting (and your phrasing indicates that it is, or else you need to find something else that capitalism is best at) then we either need to keep the situation non-standard or we need to find something better than straight capitalism at leveling things during the more natural times.
Part of the difficulty is not capitalism. It's plutocracy. _Some_ of those most wealthy earn much of their wealth through theft. Look carefully at the career of Bill Gates as a classic example.
We don't. That's why those front desk personnel have been been replaced by web forms, and knowledgebases.
Your $10 figure is right for Walmart but it's closer to $100 for McDonalds. In any case, the tax reference is bizarre. CEO pay is not a tax on employees. Yet considering that the average McDonalds employee makes $7000 a year, they don't pay any federal income tax. They probably receive money through the EIC along with any other programs they are enrolled in.
What we have now is an oversupply of labor.
Not quite. We have an oversupply of "managerial class" "labour" but not so much of vocationally-trained labour.
It shouldn't come as a surprise that the snowflakes aren't to be found in vocational schools, but in liberal arts and humanities colleges. Lots of college debt and not so much of job prospects.
At least that's the only explanation I've come up with why so many oppose things like single payer healthcare.
You're assuming they must be perfectly rational on the issues at hand. Many people aren't.
Consider there's an aspirational element to it. It's good for the top, I'd like to be on top, so I'm going to be a good little sheep, be publicly loyal to the top, and hope I get promoted to the top one day. And there's propaganda. Lots and lots of propaganda. Coming down from the top. Telling you to toe the line. And you do, because it's easier than thinking, which is hard.
So when was it at it's "greatest"?
In all honestly it's pretty great still. MAGA is just about re-tuning the bits that have gone flat, like job creation or the flow of money through the system. Trump has very much re-tuned a lot of that to good effect which is why the economy, jobs, and stock market have all greatly improved under Trump.
Anyone who is not willing to admit those basic facts will lose to Trump until they do.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
This should be modded up but I think a lot of people will miss the reference and joke here.
It was a world famous speech from a US beauty pageant contestant and made headlines around the world showcasing how stupid Americans can be.
Unfortunately, without that government, they are simply tempted to buy jackboots of their own and there's nobody to stop them but other corporations and their jackboots. HELLO FEUDALISM!
I'm curious, does your stockpile prevent the poison slipped into your drink, or the throat being slit in the middle of the night? Also as a maker, I assume you have to go to work, so I guess I can grab your children as excellent hostages.
Or you can just pay some welfare and prevent any of the above from happening, which is what happens when people get fucking desperate.
The only extremists here are the Capitalsts. Even Whisper that perhaps healthcare should be handlef differently and they screech about Communism. Just look how they continue to hiss and snarl over Obamacare even though the plan was modeled after one of their own.
For the most part, the Marxists here are just in the fevered minds of the Capitalists.
The Nazis didn't start Germany's social welfare system—Bismark did that back in the 1880s, before most of those guys were even born.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
What you see as "productivity" of the "bosses" here is actually an inability of the boss to delegate properly.
No, if you think it's a zero sum game, you need to read fewer conspiracy sites and read a book about economics.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
But how do we make sure that we pick the right person? Maybe have a law that people are assured a freedom to speak.
Like this prevented people like GW and Trump being elected in the US.
Everyone knew who Trump was when they voted for him. He's been living a very public life for at least 40 years. If someone didn't know who he was by the time they were old enough to vote then they've been living in a hole. Trump hosted his own TV show for 15 years, right up until he announced his intention to run for POTUS. No one can claim that Trump was some kind of mystery.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Who determines the CEO's salary? Not the mum and dad share holder. Not even the institutional ones unless the salary is completely outrageous. It is a board. And who is on that board? A bunch of mates that nobody really knows.
That is what creates the high salaries. Nobody is really accountable for them. And the CEO is probably on the board of other large companies.
So, the CEO needs to be basically competent, at least at managing the board. But nobody knows who is or is not good at managing the company. Whether it is doing well because or despite the CEO.
The exception is probably CEOs that actually built the company. Bill Gates comes to mind. Love or hate him, he was clearly competent.
I don't think you would be satisfied with Medicare. You'd constantly be complaining.
Everyone 65 or older has Medicare. Do they complain, of course. Can there be improvements, certainly. But it's a system that is working for millions of americans and there is no reason that it can't be expanded.
Fast Federal Court and I.T.C. updates
Bill Gate's won his fortune through very aggressive business tactics, destroying any competition through means that were borderline illegal - and in a few cases crossed over that line. Deliberate incompetibilities to break rival products, the use of bundling to destroy entire markets, OEM exclusivity agreements to prevent new competitors gaining even a sliver of market share. His tactics were so underhanded that Microsoft under his rule became the epitome of the corrupt mega-corp, earning the nickname Micro$oft. It hasn't changed too much since he left.
He's done a lot of charitable work with his ill-gotten gains, but they were still ill-gotten.
Stupid fucking idiots, like you, fuck everything up.
https://www.snopes.com/news/20...
The claim that the Nazis actually were leftists or socialists in any generally accepted sense of those terms flies in the face of historical reality.
Or you could have paid attention in your high school world history class, and not been so fucking clueless for your life. Fat, drunk and stupid is no way to go through life.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
The McDonald's and Walmart CEO's make about $10 per employee per year.
The US Government taxes those employees far more.
You're saying this as if it's justified and fair. Why should a major CEO's compensation be proportionate to the number of employees they have? Shouldn't it be valued at the value they bring themselves? That's how everyone else works.
Fast Federal Court and I.T.C. updates
That's $21M that goes back into the economy instead of an offshore hedge fund.
But I bet you can find someone who can run that company for $500,000. Now, you've got $20.5million to redistribute to employees, and $20.5million that goes back into the economy to create other jobs instead of an offshore hedge fund.
That's the problem with CEO salaries: While there are formulas and charts explaining exactly how much you should pay a line worker at McDonalds (and it happens to be "just enough so that desperate people will apply"), there is no formula for figuring out how much you should pay a CEO. For all we know, you could get a competent CEO for a couple of hundred thousand a year and a company car. It'll look good on the resume and people like titles. No one really knows the true market value of a CEO. What you have is this unspoken "minimum wage for CEOs" that boards of directors are convinced they need to pay based on absolutely nothing. And the reason boards of directors have this unspoken rule is because many of them are CEOs of other companies or former CEOs or golfing buddies of everyone who will ever be considered for the job. It's all "scratch my back and I'll give you a big sloppy blowjob".
You are welcome on my lawn.
It probably would if people actually sat down and used simulations and computers and science to come with a better system, instead of trying to force one that proven over and over again being even worse than capitalism.
I'd hazard that if one individual is worth 312x any other individual in the company it's pointing out a fundamental problem with the structure of your business.
Well that's true, but it's a problem that will continue to exist as long as people don't educate themselves. When people spend all their time worrying about "more regulation vs less regulation" or "should James Remote be fired?" They stop paying attention to corruption. Like while everyone was worried about the Russians, Congress pushed through a lot of cuts.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
While economics is not a zero-sum game, productivity is. Everything that's consumed must be produced. So prices are just the sum total of everyone's wages (how much money they get for producing stuff), divided by the sum total of what everyone produces. If aggregate productivity holds constant while a greater percentage of total wages are going to CEOs, then that leaves less money for everyone else to buy the same amount of stuff. And prices as a proportion of disposable income go up.*
For a minimum wage in particular, economic activity is maximized when the wages people receive is proportional to their contribution to productivity.
* The catch is that we're assuming aggregate productivity holds constant. If you look at GDP per capita, the U.S. is near the top despite having high income inequality. Likewise, Communist countries (which strive for extreme equality) are near the bottom. So some income inequality is necessary to maximize average productivity. The question becomes how much inequality you're willing to tolerate in order to achieve higher productivity. Or conversely, how much productivity you're willing to give up in order to achieve greater equality. There's no single "right" answer here - some countries will want greater equality, some greater productivity.
It's kind of how like countries that put 'Democratic' in the actual name of their country are anything but.
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
I would do the fucking math.
Capitalism works great when there are protections and limits applied. We need to figure out where the soft and hard limits are and codify them in away that can't be exploited. UBI would need to be a fundamental part of whatever the new system is.
If you earn more than 100 times salary, your taxes are 70% per dollar above that.
Earn above 200x, taxes are 80%
Earn above 300x, taxes are 90%
How much is enough!
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Assume the CEO goes from $21M to $0 and redistribute among the 235,000 employees. Everyone gets less than $100 a year.
That's not the point.
What the inequality of wealth brings is inequality of power. Those at the top of the food chain can make and enforce decisions that benefit them financially. They can get laws passed, tax breaks, government restrictions lifted and politicians elected to suit their needs, and the resultant damage to everybody else is worth far more than $100.
Exactly. It's meant to fool the stupid, and obviously works.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
All that proves is that one should be wary of you would-be do-gooders. Get off my property.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
Just tax 2% more of all rich asses, in the top 1% bracket.
There is so much assets in the 1%er club, that taking just 2% of it will fix your problems.
Thats just pure evil, when they KNOW they have the cash to fix it.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
"It is the temptation of governmental coercion that corrupts capitalists into non-capitalist cronies."
What you don't understand is that there are no "capitalists" to start with: all of them already are "non-capitalist cronies". The only difference is if they already got their desires or they are only on their way to them. Heck! that's they key of capitalism success: that it understands that 'man is wolf to man' and *tries* to use that to the system's (i.e. overall's well-being) advantage, keyword "tries".
If there's a strong government that would stop them from achieve their goals on a legal way, they take their money to bribe the government; if not, they take their money to just make it happen (i.e.: they build a private army -it's not just an imagination but a reality: a strong enough government? USA-style cronyism; not a strong enough government? Somalian-style war-lords... and, of course, all shades of gray in the middle).
Now, it's up to you to consider what you understand to be a desirable social contract and review how tools and processes are laid out to make it happen and, after that, check results to tune the system as it goes. That's the burden of democracy.
"Ok then, send them a Pinochet. He did wonders for Chile!"
Given that Pinochet was put in place by CIA ingerence, you can say that Pinochet is the result of the most advanced democracies in action.
That's $21M that goes back into the economy instead of an offshore hedge fund.
Perhaps that's a good argument for reducing the tax rates in those brackets in order to make it more profitable to reinvest the money in the American economy as opposed to overseas.
That's the problem with CEO salaries: While there are formulas and charts explaining exactly how much you should pay a line worker at McDonalds (and it happens to be "just enough so that desperate people will apply"), there is no formula for figuring out how much you should pay a CEO.
There aren't nice formulas and charts for many other things as well. CEOs are worth whatever they can charge. You'd hardly disparage any other employee of a company from asking for and getting a raise, so why should a CEO be any different? Also, unless you own stock in a company, why do you care what they do with their money. Whether you believe they are overpaying a CEO does not change your life. If you do own stock, go to a shareholders meeting and present your case for why the CEO should be compensated less.
If CEO pay is going up, I suspect it is because the largest companies are themselves becoming larger as well as international players. It doesn't make much sense for the CEO/owner of a 20 person company to make 300x the salary of the average worker. It's probably not possible financially. However, get a company that employs tens or even hundreds of thousands of employees and it's not difficult to imagine, especially if most of those employees are low skill or do not command high wages. What you should really look at is CEO wage growth relative to revenue growth of companies. Companies like Apple, Microsoft, and Google are all earning above $100 billion yearly. Even seemingly exorbitant CEO pay is a drop in the bucket and probably a much smaller percentage of company revenue than the CEO pay for smaller sized companies.
There's also a mistaken belief that if a CEO were not paid as much that other workers would receive more. This is unlikely to be the case as the difference would likely be paid out to shareholders as dividends or reinvested by the company. The only thing that will result in wage increases for the rank and file is greater demand for their labor. Unless another company is willing to pay more, you're unlikely to see an increase in wages for those positions.
The only thing that will result in wage increases for the rank and file is greater demand for their labor.
Or unionism. But successive governments have done their damndest to eviscerate unions over the past couple of decades.
Fortunately we're also seeing a weakening of the major political parties (at least in Australia) and the rise of minor parties and independents. I look forward to this trend continuing.
showcasing how stupid Americans can be
...when faced with inappropriate trick questions in highly stressful situations. Setting aside the comedic value of this answer, I don't think many people would be able to yield a usably better one in that girl's place.
Ezekiel 23:20
If you do own stock, go to a shareholders meeting and present your case for why the CEO should be compensated less.
Good luck with that. As long as a CEO is managing the company adequately (i.e. causing the stock price to go up), the large institutional investors who form the overwhelming majority of shareholders don't care what they earn.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
What the inequality of wealth brings is inequality of power. Those at the top of the food chain can make and enforce decisions that benefit them financially.
The reason some people have influence over government is not that they are wealthy, its because some people in government are for sale. The solution to that is not to create more government, you fucking retards.
Yes, clearly the solution is to get rid of all governmental checks and balances, however inadequate, as once they are free from constraints, the wealthy only ever act for the public good.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Perhaps that's a good argument for reducing the tax rates in those brackets in order to make it more profitable to reinvest the money in the American economy as opposed to overseas
No, it isn't. Tax rates have been reduced "in those brackets" since the 70s, and that has only lead to enormous increases of offshore holdings. Time to face the facts and accept that your cliches are not supported by empirical evidence.
If CEO pay is going up, I suspect it is because the largest companies are themselves becoming larger as well as international players.
Wrong again, CEO pay is mostly a result of a principal-agent problem in corporate governance. The CEOs are agents of the stockholders, but they usually hold more power, and can extort higher pay. Activist investors Employees are not in that position, hence the employees are getting paid hundreds of times less.
There's also a mistaken belief that if a CEO were not paid as much that other workers would receive more. This is unlikely to be the case as the difference would likely be paid out to shareholders as dividends or reinvested by the company.
Yeah? It was the case 30-40 years ago, before the resurrection of the race-to-the-bottom culture on Wall street.
Weâ(TM)re reaching the point where we all stand together or we all fall. Great Wealth is more the sign of a predator class than of wisdom and accomplishment. None of us live without the farmer, the truck driver, the mechanic, the road crew. Their places in society must be respected and not exploited by those in simple management power who all to often have no real skills of their own except cannabslism, ruthlessness, and lack of empathy. Humanity is at a very low point in critical ways right now.
'Make the lie big, keep it simple, keep saying it and eventually they will believe it' (Goebbels).
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
The terms "left" and "right" refer to the political persuasions that popped up in revolutionary France: "right wing" meant "in support of the Old Order, namely the Monarchy and the Church", whereas the left grew from marxist philosophy, and called for the overthrowing of the Old Order and the creation of a New Man as part of the lifting of the proletariat out of oppression.
Nazism and Fascism were squarely grounded in the leftist movement.
In America, the "left" is basically the same idea, and the "right" supports conserving the Old Order, which was the founding principles of individual liberty, not collectivism. Indeed, Mussolini loved FDR and his New Deal, and the Nazis liked the Democrats' collective protection of the White Race and various eugenics programs. JFK was enamored with both Hitler and Nazi Germany.
Fuck the Left. You're lying weasels.
Wow, calm down.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Who will be along promptly to excuse this with some spurious claims. It never ceases to amaze me how some people are prepared cooperate in their own oppression. They are no different to the victims of domestic violence that continuously return to their abuser.
Me neither, but I don't think those "many people" would appear live on TV on a high level competition.
If you get there and you're not prepared, you deserve the flak.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
It is a truism that new systems arise due to a failure of the old...
... but had you lived at the times when Capitalism was emerging, you'd have been vehemently against it, because it was the new, radical and scary thing.
Capitalism, as in private ownership of the means of production, arose, partly, as a result of the "Tragedy of the Commons". (c.f. The "Inclosure Acts".) Certainly this is one 'solution' to the problem, but it's a solution that comes with its own bag of problems, notably the enriching of a few at the expense of the many.
Funnily enough you mention political conservatism as a beneficiary of capitalism but, while you're not wrong, it's only since the late 1970's that the landscape of the political right morphed from being social conservatism, i.e. those elites considering and caring for the plebeian masses - albeit partially only because it was in their self interest to do so (vive la revolution still being somewhat fresh in people's minds), to free market conservatism, i.e. dog eat dog, may the 'best' man win. Of course the problem with the latter is that capital grows capital: if you're at the top it's relatively easy to stay at the top; if you're at the bottom it's extremely difficult to climb out from under all those lying on top of you.
And yeah, it is obvious that given the scale of human technology today, Capitalism, at least on a planetary scale, has exhausted itself. Capitalism is prone to producing exponential solutions. The problem is, these are unfeasible in a world governed by the laws of physics. You need someone to put, so to speak, limits to growth on this solution if you don't want to die in your own poo. And that isn't something Capitalism can do.
Perhaps not quite how I'd have phrased it, but, yeah, pretty much spot on!
Is it working, or are they complaining?
People complaining about shit doesn't mean that shit ain't workin'.
Hell, there are CEOs complaining they don't make enough.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
Not sure what you are on about as far as conspiracies go. I didn't mention any. If you have found a way for everyone to have exactly what they want without negative consequence, then goodie gumdrops. I am all for it.
Otherwise, you might want to clarify what you are on about.
?
They're only looking at the CEOs of the largest companies. Actual Average CEO salary is $162K, not $18.9M, and that doesn't count failed CEOs.
Their comparison is like saying "Average basketball player salaries are $10M/year" by just looking at the salaries of the top players in the NBA. Like sports stars, Hollywood celebrities, famous artists, etc.... there are some occupations which are lottery-like in structure, where only a few of the people who attempt them get paid the big bucks at the top of the professions. If you average in the risks of ending up being just a guy who ran a bankrupt company, or a basketball player who plays for free in the local league, or a "waiter" instead of actor, the occupations don't seem nearly as lucrative.
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
Essentially by trading and economic activity we end up with more in aggregate than we had at the beginning. Thus your boss pays you to work, and you give him whatever, and each is better off than you were at the beginning of the day. It goes much deeper than that but I'm sure you can follow the trail if you want to.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Pinochet was installed by the CIA, which works for the USA. What's that got to do with advanced democracies?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Hitler himself publicly proclaimed the 25-point program
Because at the time he was the official party spokesman. And yes, he was also there when they decided on the plan. But it was not his politics yet, it was Drexler's.
Hitler (and early member) won the rest of the party over to his particular politics.
Which as I noted above, is better found in the pages of Mein Kampf, (where he explains his personal politics at length) than it is in the 25-point plan (drawn up when he was a relatively minor party functionary). Why resist this obvious truth? What's your motivation here?
As for the implementation of the socialist policies, Hitler's goal was to first to secure a strong Reich, and then to fully implement the socialist agenda
Nonsense. He clearly spelled out his intention to leave German industry alone, going so far on one occasion as to describe the large Industrialists as Übermenschen as well. Although your 'alternative history' claim is inherently unknowable (the Reich was not successfully established), there seems close to zero chance that Hitler would have embarked on a soviet style collectivisation of German industry. That's an untenable assertion completely without any documentary support (and no, the 1920 25-point Plan won't do here).
Either way, Hitler was a socialist.
Not just bullshit, but obvious bullshit.
As I've already pointed out, it was extremely clear, at the time, what side of the political divide Hitler was on: the anti-socialist side. Indeed, it is just as clear to every serious historian of the period. It is not serious scholarship to call Hitler a "devoted socialist," it's shameless propaganda.
As far as skimming Wikipedia, while it may not be the equal of my history education, it might do you some good. At least your argument would not need to rest on a single document, drawn up before Hitler was the leader of the party, and soon abandoned in practice.
This is something Henry Ford (clearly a marxist-leninist theorist) already knew. He paid his workers roughly twice the salary they could get anywhere else because he knew that not only he would easily get the best workers that way (since everyone wanted to work for Ford at those conditions, he could easily hijack the best workers from other factories), his retention was near perfect (who'd want to lose that job?) and moral was of course high. And on top of all that, he knew that everyone wanted his products, so workers did actually save up their money and could eventually buy a Ford car themselves, essentially meaning that Ford paid his workers in his own products, turning them in turn into his biggest advertisers since, well, if people working there want to have one, it has to be a good car, who'd know better than the people making it?
You will notice that countries that have minimum wages, or at least where low wage earners can still afford more than the bare minimum needs, got hit a lot less heavily by the 2008 recession blow, simply because there was still money around to be spent and to keep the economy going. Because it does not matter how cheaply you can produce, what matters is that you can sell what you produce. If the amount of people who actually have money to buy your products is low, the price of your product doesn't matter at all, you still won't sell much.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Why would I want to make more money?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
So you don't have to wear those dirty old shoes anymore.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
You call someone swindling government and investors out of money with empty promises an enabler?
I call that a con man.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Probably for the same reason I, over here in Europe, are happy with earning about 1/5 or even less of what I'd make in the US with what I can do: Comfort.
You know, I enjoy being able to go out on the street and know that I won't get mugged just because I went to the wrong part of the town. It's also comforting to know that if I get sick, I will be treated and I will be treated in any hospital I go to, not just whatever my insurance company has a contract with. I also enjoy a month or more of paid vacation time. I also enjoy working in an environment that isn't more like a prison than an office. I enjoy the occasional beer for lunch in the office with my boss.
I did work in the US for a while. A short while. The US is a bit like Disney World for the average European. A great place for a vacation and you can easily spend a fortune there on fun, but you don't want to work there if your life depended on it.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I once read the salary of an employee (or CEO) is based on their "replacement cost". There are of course other factors, like bargaining power, however it basically comes down to how much other CEOs make in a comparative market.
As long as CEO pay goes up nationwide, individual CEOs will also ask for (slightly) higher wages. And this will continue to feed in a never ending loop up an upwards spiral.
On the other hand the workers wages (especially for non-skill based positions) seem to be going down. As long as the trend continues, the "replacement cost" of workers would be very cheap for companies.
Even though these have become self fulfilling prophecies, the cycle can be broken by external factors. It probably won't be the government (since their good intentions do not fail to backfire, in miserable ways), but if the society as a whole demands the trends to move in the other direction, then they will slowly move the needles.
Allow me to clue you in how these boards work. What you find in those boards are usually three kinds of people: Those that founded the company, they get increasingly rare in most older corporations. Then there's politicians that did something for the corporation and received this as a thank-you for a relevant law change. They're basically there to get money, you rarely really get to see them at board meetings.
And finally you have a few CEOs from other corporations. And your CEO sits in a few boards of those corporations.
Can you probably guess why CEO salaries go up WAY beyond any kind of inflation?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
What does this have to do with anything?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I don't think many people would be able to yield a usably better one in that girl's place.
Are you fucking kidding me?
Probably not many beauty pageant participants, or high school drop-outs, or athletes that rode a railroad to fame based on their talent, and education was a distraction, but believe it or not, there are many of us who have to answer far more difficult questions on the spot on a daily basis. Fortunately, high school generally preps you for being able to do that. Or at least it did "back in my day"
I mean no disrespect toward, or intent to generalize the women in beauty pageants, but do you for some reason think that particular program selects for education or intelligence?
Tsk. Tsk.
The 25-point platform of the NSDAP was back when the scary folks in there still had to share power with the socialists. Then this thing called The Night of the Long Knives happened.
You see, this dude named Röhm was in control of this thing called the Sturmabteilung. They were the socialists with guns.
Röhm was unhappy that by 1933 the Nazi party had complete power, but hadn't implemented any of the socialist points in the 25-point program.
Hitler never had any intentions of doing so, because the doctrine of fascism, which Hitler subscribed to, didn't really hinge upon socialist ideals.
So he killed Röhm, and every other socialist in power in the NSDAP and seized power for himself, and removing any socialist elements from the party he had usurped.
Now, I'm not saying the SA and Nazis of the '20s were great chaps themselves, but when you misleadingly lump the Nazis who started WW2 with the socialists of the 1920s, which is exactly what you're trying to do, you're being a misleading pile of shit. Or stupid. Never can tell which whenever I hear people throwing around the "Nazis were socialists" tripe.
With Tesla, as with any religion, Poe's Law is in full effect.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Do you have a faint idea how long it takes me to find comfortable shoes? Fortunately I know a good shoemaker so I don't have to wear those atrocities you get in shoe stores, but even though he's a magician and can actually fabricate shoes that fit, it's still not "my" shoe for quite a while.
Besides, I hate shopping for clothes.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Ah, so kinda like how "bringing freedom" took on the meaning of "creating a breeding ground for ISIS"?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
This, exactly, is the problem. Every CEO of every major company these days is paid like a precious, one-of-a-kind, irreplaceable snowflake. Very few actually are. Thanks to my career choices I've worked directly with a good number of top-level executives in several companies from small to 5000+ employees.
OK, but why didn't you take the job then? You could have made dramatically more money.
I've worked with people in sales who earned a lot more money than me. It doesn't mean that I could do their job, even if I wanted to. The point is that there are plenty of other people who could. They have a specific skill set, but they are not uniquely talented geniuses like Albert Einstein (or George Clooney or Usain Bolt).
Same with CEOs.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
So tell us, what actually is his salary? Actual salary, not the stock and options compensation typical of start-ups. It's a public company, it should be out there. Or are you yourself hand-waving to imply that he's one of those evil rich guys draining the business dry with his salary while his workers starve?
Ah yes, the old "CEO agreed to only pay himself $1 salary this year" gag.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
I hope they're comfortable for you.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
By demanding some insanely high minimum "living wage", what you are really doing is killing millions of small part time jobs that would otherwise exist and let people choose to work at the level they desired. Your train of thought is literally forcing people into full time jobs (since full time work are the only kind of jobs left beyond a certain minimum wage), the ones that can find them that is as lower end jobs shut down... truly you are a monster, nearly on the level of Stalin but honestly more cruel to your fellow man. You are forcing more people than ever before to be cogs at a time when everyone could truly be free, you seek to shackle and enslave them forever more. A pox on both your houses.
Well, here in the UK "living wage" refers to the hourly rate, just like "minimum wage". Obviously, if you only work 10 hours a week you're not going to be on the same as someone working 40 regardless.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
But I bet you can find someone who can run that company for $500,000.
This is the problem with you lefties, It's like you don't care that this $56M CEO has brought in $1 Billion in new business.. Or maybe he's hired 20,000 new workers at a really good wage to run the new factory in Utah... Or maybe he dumps a billion dollars a year into R&D that results in a thousand research scientists with a job they love.. No.. you simply care that he makes a gob more money than regular employees... Even if those regular employees have top paying jobs for their field.
When I worked at AT&T, the CEO was making something like $20M. I couldn't have cared less if he was being paid $100M. I had a great paying job that I loved doing. I was making about $120K a year and the work was, mostly, fun and interesting. Why should I care what Randall Stephenson (CEO) was making? There were days when I worked at double and a half rate and made $1000. Why would I be so petty as to care that another person was rich?
None of those CEOs are being paid a dime more than the shareholders allow. 50.1% of voting shareholders can fire his ass or choose not to fire him if they think he's doing a good job.
These are publicly traded companies.. They are run by a Board of Directors.. Another voting situation. They decide how much the CEO is paid. Those Directors are ELECTED by voting shares.
You don't like how much a CEO is being paid? Then vote for a Board of Directors that will fire him.
You can't vote because you don't own stock? Then why the fuck do you care how much he's making?
This idea that it doesn't matter if the bottom is being lifted up if the top is being lifted higher... it's wrong. The US is in the top 20 "highest quality of life" list. We have it great here. Most people are not in poverty.. Every year even less people are in poverty.. The bottom is being lifted up.. Quit worrying about the speed at which the top goes up and worry about the speed at which the bottom goes up... Work to improve that.. Don't waste effort on trying to slow the top... That is a waste of energy..
Tell that to the North Koreans who are afraid to accidentally crumple a newspaper in case Dear Leader's face is pictured somewhere.
Tell it to Chinese Muslims in their prison camps.
OK, but why didn't you take the job then? You could have made dramatically more money.
I've actually been CEO of a (small) company for a few years. I don't want to do it again. I am much more happy in information security, which is more interesting, more challenging and more rewarding on a personal level to me.
Would I refuse if someone offered me a two-digit million salary for the job? Of course not. But half of that salary would be paying me for doing something I'd rather prefer not to do, and a good part of it would go to coaches and other support to enable me to do it at all.
People think that those millions are for sitting on your ass and playing boss. I've seen how some of these guys actually work and for my current salary, or even twice that, I wouldn't work like that. That's why I say a 20x factor is justified, because at that level, your job becomes your life.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
That is actually a great point and should be modded up.
The vast majority of those CEOs couldn't do squat without the network and a vast array of support, both internally and externally, and that justifies the seemingly insane tax rates of a fair tax system. The network effects that lead to millionaire salaries would never exist without the society that enables them.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Sorry to burst your bubble, but the initial assumption of your argument is wrong, and if you had read my posting, you would have noticed that I said the pension system survived both world wars. Which means it came into existence before the first one, which means the nazi party did not even exist, much less had anything to do with it.
The last part of your posting is such a pure gibberish that mumbo franco blubbo "macho" negative attitude, crap began because inlcuding long care so the sense mumfto babble AND THATS WHY!
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Economic inequality is inevitable, crucial and obligatory element of any healthy economy.
It is fair that Bezos has $100B and a lot of people have million times less. Exponential distribution of wealth is natural consequence of a free market economy.
Another crucial part of economy that the bottom of the pyramid has in some sense satisfactory economic state: a basic material state (food, shelter, sex, entertainment). That part does not come naturally, it requires deliberate ideological and material intervention from society in form of government subsidies, maintaining high social status of charitable people, etc.
Combining two of these things is the essence of regulation. It is much more difficult, more complex than two extreme historic alternatives: free market society and it's opposite we observed in Soviet Union, China and North Korea. There is a wide spectrum of societies that try to combine these two obligations with sometimes very inventive ways with very different degrees of success. This, again, proves a very simple fact: regulation is very very difficult and complex.
The idiocy of modern situation is that instead of focusing a lot of intellectual resources on researching and improving the regulation, the society is bent over backwards into maintaining a vicious circle of partisanship in United States (Europe is much healthier than that) where constructive dialog about what level regulation is impossible.
This roots in intrinsic absence of ideology in United States which results in corrupt politicians with "all I need is to be re-elected" written all over their narrow foreheads.
United States is ideological cemetery. The country where materialism have won.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
> That's $21M that goes back into the economy instead of an offshore hedge fund.
That's not the only consequence. The other consequence is that nobody decent and enterprizing wants that job anymore, and company tanks. Everybody gets zero. The money dissipates entropically.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
> The problem is that it rewards being greedy, and it rewards higher greed with higher rewards
That's absurdly wrong statement. Green is not enough to get a reward, aren't you forgetting something?
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
No, "clowns like him" would figure out how to automate the crappy jobs like mail room attendants, front desk reception, burger flippers, people in the warehouse who carry boxes, etc. Don't blame businesses for gaining efficiencies through the application of technology -- that's been a core tenet of human civilization since ancient times.
It turns out that those jobs pay reasonably well and a plumber who gains sufficient experience and starts his or her own business would not have much trouble netting six figures. But that is seen as an "undesirable" occupation.
At a past job where I was a vanilla and fairly inexperienced network administrator, we were replacing all the premise wiring from Cat-3 to Cat-5 in conjunction with a major overhaul of our first generation network plant.
I spent a lot of time coordinating with the electricians who were doing the work and got to know them pretty well. I was fascinated with the union aspect of their job and as it turned out, they were making more money than me and had some desirable benefits.
But I gotta tell you, I wouldn't have switched jobs. And not that their actual day-day tasks were bad, either. It was the *supervisory structure* that sucked so hard for them. They had a total jerk of a supervisor and many of their work rules were kind of severe. The whole setup seemed extremely confrontational, as if their bosses felt like they had to dick them over at every opportunity and they in turn felt like they had to resist/foil management at every opportunity.
We had some demanding executives and annoying users, but none of them made my work experience quite like the stuff the electricians had to put up with.
I think the whole blue collar trade thing would solve much of its labor shortages if they quit treating the workers like "blue collar workers", like they were slightly dangerous animals that needed a regular whipping and strict rules to be kept in line.
Discussing some of the projects they worked on, there was a lot of complexity in some of their high voltage work in addition to some tricky and very good materials estimation. I saw them show up to do some high voltage work for us and I was like "that's not nearly enough conduit" and low and behold they had barely enough leftover material to fill a lunch bag. Had I done a similar task at home, there would have been much more scrap.
That is actually an interesting position.
There is indeed a common denominator between fascism and socialism and that is the denial of the individual in favor of a class (socialism) or national (fascism) identity. There is also a common denominator in how both wish to excert control over the economy and society.
However, you have been utterly caught up in a false dichotomy. The left-right painting of politics is an oversimplification and real-world political positions have multiple dimensions. Fascism and socialism are near to each other only on one of them, the liberty axis.
There are many differences between the two. For example, fascism wants the means of production in the hands of few (who are easily controlled and ideally should be party members), while socialism wants it in the hands of everyone. Then, of course, there is communism which adds an organisational layer to that, and Stalinism which centralises that so the end result is again control in the hands of few.
Your idea is interesting. Your conclusion is simplistic, and misleading.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Kylie Jenner
A 21 year old billionaire.
Do you really think she runs her company? Or did her family set her up with good people who manage the money, control expenses and deal with operations so all she has to do is sit back and go yes no that one and then run off for a couple of weeks while the real work gets done.
CEOs of large companies don't do any work. That is why they get so much vacation to get them away from the place so real work can get accomplished.
Now CEOs of small and even mid size companies they really do work
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
You? :p
Requiem for the American Dream
Because as wonderful as Ben Shapiro's reasoned arguments are, a lot of his premises are flawed and do not work in the real world. If opportunity was equal everywhere then much of the Libertarian ideals would be valid, but sadly we don't live in a world where people start off equally. We live in a flawed world where much of what one achieves is based on where you are born, who raised you and who you are allowed to hang around with. Democracy and Capitalism cannot survive monopolies, and yet that is exactly where we have been heading for ages. Just look at Amazon to see where unbridled abuse of monopoly power is heading. American retail is in free fall collapse without a whiff of competition. Food production has already for the most part been captured by 6-8 international mega companies. In Australia banking has been captured by 4 companies, telecommunications by 3 companies (1 of which basically doesn't compete), Electricity approximately 4 companies, Grocery Retail by two companies, Mining by 5 companies. It's a nation of monopolies and crony capitalism. What's urgently needed is a break up of most major companies, especially Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, Coles, Woolworths, All 4 Australian banks (which a Royal Commission is currently finding all conducted gross fraud that threatens the economy). Capitalism is completely broken without strong regulation and a government that's willing to trust bust. CEO compensation is just the canary in the coal mine. None of the companies should be getting this big.
It doesn't matter. If you want to be at the top, start your own business and set your own salary. I'd bet a lot of the readers of this site make decent, possibly above average wages.
OK, what is the first small change you would make to get there? Something big enough to make a difference, but small enough that it can be fixed if it causes too much damage.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
And another fucking idiot that doesn't know shit. Seriously, are there any conservative on /. that doesn't have their head up their ass? You go tell some of the neo-nazi groups here in the states that they're left wing socialists, and let them teach you how much it costs to have your broken jaw wired up.... assuming you live through the experience.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
But, if you're really bothered by it, how about making stock options part of every employee's compensation package?
The idea that the top executive is an employee of the corporation has long ago faded. Now the top executive is more like a mafia don getting "a cut of the take," like the corporation is a criminal organization.
E Proelio Veritas.
These numbers are based on the Top CEO's and comparing them with their average employees, not All CEO's with their employees.
There is a still wage gap issue which should be addressed. But that can be addressed with minor tweaks such as profit sharing, and not by changing the entire economic system.
Currently there isn't a good tested replacement for Capitalism. Socialism is still capitalism, there are just more regulations. Communism has shown not to scale well, without having to bring in a lot of Capitalism elements to it.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
CEO's also get big rewards with golden parachutes when they fail at their job, so I'm unsure what your point might be. Much more likely they don't care what the CEO gets because, one day, that's a job may of them want.
"The biggest problem in the US right now is access to healthcare, but no one has a reasonable plan."
No, every other first world nation has already figured out a reasonable plan. Socialized medicine has shown itself to be massively cheaper then our current system and is available to anyone regardless of their personal wealth and impoverishes no one. There are even very different models for socialized healthcare in different first world nations and they are all better than our current system.
I ignore Anonymous Coward posts. If you want to discuss something, that's awesome. Log in.
Usually when they talk about executive "pay" they mean total compensation. Much of that compensation comes from stock options.
Since the market is way up, so is total executive earnings.
Maybe they should give some stock options to the rank and file?
Plan is simple. Government leave Healthcare completely or completely take over. Pick one. The fence straddling hands us the worst parts of government intervention and the worst parts of free market economics all rolled into one runaway mess.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
As mininum wage has not actually kept pace with either inflation or worker productivity for at least the past 40 years, minimum wage workers are more often not getting fairly paid than are.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
The Nazis didn't start Germany's social welfare system—Bismark did that back in the 1880s, before most of those guys were even born.
This.
The Nazis cut back the social programs put in by previous governments going back to the formation of the German state. Socialism was the first declared enemy of the Nazi party, long before they started on Jews they beat up and killed known Bolsheviks.
The closest thing the Nazis came to implementing a social program was Action T4, the forced euthanasia of anyone considered a burden to the state. People like the elderly, the infirm, the feeble (mentally handicapped), the deformed, so on and so forth.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
"They're only looking at the CEOs of the largest companies. Actual Average CEO salary is $162K [payscale.com], not $18.9M, and that doesn't count failed CEOs."
That's great and if the CEOs of the largest companies earned a wage that was in line with the average (obviously scaled up due to the larger size of their companies) no one would be talking about this. But they don't so we are. ...and we are all aware that figure doesnt count failed CEOs. Anyone can lose their job due to a company failing and none of their post layoff zero dollar wages count towards averages for their profession. In fact, CEOs of failed companies are typically the best off relative to their other employees.
I ignore Anonymous Coward posts. If you want to discuss something, that's awesome. Log in.
The price of milk certainly would go up 20% or even more if the USA didn't susbisidize its dairy to create a surplus (it would probably nearly double in price, in fact.... there's a reason why USA dairy is so inexpensive compared to most other countries)..
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
"The solution to that is not to create more government, you fucking retards."
Sorry but from over here you're the "fucking retard". What "more government" should we not create that will solve this problem (your language here, not mine)?
Maybe you mean government should be smaller? Great so we'll get rid of the EPA and FDA? No, that would have the exact opposite effect that we want as now companies can act in a completely unrestrained manner. In other words, even more power is allowed to the wealthy.
I ignore Anonymous Coward posts. If you want to discuss something, that's awesome. Log in.
For myself, I don't care that some people have much more than me, I am more worried that I don't have more.
It's funny that you don't see the connection between the two. This would please our C-suite overlords.
Recently Elizabeth Warren came out with a brilliant plan to make capitalism viable for the 99% for a while longer that could correct this madness:
https://www.theguardian.com/us...
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
It's funny that you don't see the connection between the two.
I do see the connection between the two. The CEO of Walmart makes about 0.2 cents per hour per employee. The CEO of Home Depot makes about $20 per year per employee. The CEO of ManPower makes about 6 cents per hour per employee, or $120/year per each employee.
There's something to be said about having 1.5 million employees.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
That's the problem with CEO salaries: While there are formulas and charts explaining exactly how much you should pay a line worker at McDonalds (and it happens to be "just enough so that desperate people will apply"), there is no formula for figuring out how much you should pay a CEO.
This is definitely part of it. Consider the government analog: the President of the United States: "Effective January 1, 2001, the annual salary of the President of the United States was increased to $400,000 per year, including a $50,000 expense allowance, a $100,000 nontaxable travel account, and a $19,000 entertainment account." (https://www.thoughtco.com/presidential-pay-and-compensation-3322194)
If we combine the salary with the expense allowance, that gives us $450,000 that the President can spend on anything. Compare that with a government employee working 40 hours a week and earning the minimum wage: $7.25 per hour * 40 hours per week * 52 weeks per year = $15,080 per year.
$450,000/$15,080 = 29.84; the President of the United States earns roughly 30 times the lowest-paid full-time federal government employee.
So I ask you this: is it hard to find qualified people who want to be President of the US? Of course not. Now I'm not saying the people who end up getting the job are qualified, but there are plenty of qualified, interested candidates even though the President makes *only* 30 times more than the lowest-paid full-time federal government employee.
The point here is that CEO wages are insanely inflated and for poor reasons.
While a minimum wage is a good thing to have, it's measured in absolute, not relative, terms. In addition to or instead of a minimum wage we should impose a rule that says something like: in all forms of compensation (salary, stock options, health coverage, etc) the highest-paid employee of any company employing more than 30 people cannot earn more than 20 times what the company's lowest-paid full-time employee earns.
Then the company can appropriate compensation as it wishes, abiding by this rule. It would be truly revolutionary in the changes it would bring about to the US economy by enforcing some level of equality, while still allowing for great differences in pay so that people with more education and skill, or a rarer education or skill, still get rewarded.
I would love to see democratic socialists pushing a policy like this.
This is the problem with you lefties, It's like you don't care that this $56M CEO has brought in $1 Billion in new business.. Or maybe he's hired 20,000 new workers at a really good wage to run the new factory in Utah... Or maybe he dumps a billion dollars a year into R&D that results in a thousand research scientists with a job they love.. No.. you simply care that he makes a gob more money than regular employees... Even if those regular employees have top paying jobs for their field.
Horse-fucking-shit he did all that on his own! He made a few high-level decisions and left an army of likely underpaid workers to actually *DO* all of that stuff. High-level decisions are not that valuable.
When I worked at AT&T, the CEO was making something like $20M. I couldn't have cared less if he was being paid $100M. I had a great paying job that I loved doing. I was making about $120K a year and the work was, mostly, fun and interesting. Why should I care what Randall Stephenson (CEO) was making? There were days when I worked at double and a half rate and made $1000. Why would I be so petty as to care that another person was rich?
Today's amazing insight, it's easy not to care about economic problems when you're a well-paid happy worker swaddled in privilege, thus solving inequality once and for all!
For the rest of us, that CEO's pay is a drain on the economy that is hurting us. That is why we care. That money comes from our paychecks and goes into overseas economic oubliettes, starving out the economy on both ends.
None of those CEOs are being paid a dime more than the shareholders allow. 50.1% of voting shareholders can fire his ass or choose not to fire him if they think he's doing a good job.
These are publicly traded companies.. They are run by a Board of Directors.. Another voting situation. They decide how much the CEO is paid. Those Directors are ELECTED by voting shares.
You don't like how much a CEO is being paid? Then vote for a Board of Directors that will fire him.
You can't vote because you don't own stock? Then why the fuck do you care how much he's making?
Only certain shareholders who own a large portion of the stock (which is madly expensive) can vote. They elect other CEOs to the board of directors who decide on the CEO's pay. You don't see a problem with this incestuous conflict of interest among a bunch of rich dudes that's led to runaway CEO pay?
The US is in the top 20 "highest quality of life" list. We have it great here. Most people are not in poverty.. Every year even less people are in poverty.. The bottom is being lifted up.. Quit worrying about the speed at which the top goes up and worry about the speed at which the bottom goes up... Work to improve that.. Don't waste effort on trying to slow the top... That is a waste of energy..
I've already explained why CEO pay matters - slowing growth at the top can directly aid growth at the bottom. Curious that you don't care about what's happening to most of the middle class at all though...but I guess a $120k/yr job will do that.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Do you think she'll run for president?
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
There's over 100,000 businesses in the US and this article focuses on 300 of them. Less than 1%. It's a rounding error. That's not how the majority of businesses are run.
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
There are plenty of decent and enterprising people who will happily do the job of CEO for a decent 6-figure salary. Good riddance to the psychopathic greedmonsters who demand to be paid like gods.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Right, the only alternative to our current system has to be Venezuela. What a clever genius you are.
I ignore Anonymous Coward posts. If you want to discuss something, that's awesome. Log in.
People complaining about shit doesn't mean that shit ain't workin'.
So people complaining about the current executive pay scale doesn't mean it's not working, right?
Use a universal dividend. It's a demogrant, but it's not basic income: it won't pay for the things you need and it's not guaranteed to go up or down. It tracks our productivity, essentially: if we have more income per capita, then the dividend increases by that same amount--no tax adjustments necessary.
This solves basically every economic problem. You still use other social insurances because solving those problems directly is more-efficient.
Direct social insurances go away when you resolve the microeconomy: welfare money enters the local economy, gets spent, creates job demand, and then vanishes when people become employed, reducing the supportable jobs and causing unemployment. You stasis with your city in poverty, but not in the worst possible poverty.
A dividend keeps paying, so you transition support for those first service-level jobs (selling things to the local economy, which doesn't draw outside income) onto that basis. The economy continues to strengthen, and can eventually transition to stronger service jobs and greater reach, stabilizing itself.
I designed the American Citizen's Dividend in such a way as to have the greatest impact on the poorest, and to reclaim as you move up from there. In 2016 it turned out to be an overall tax cut: I restructured $1.1 trillion of Federal spending into $2.0 trillion, with the Dividend itself paying benefits offsetting $1.2 trillion of taxes (the person receiving the benefit paid some amount in taxes, and we deduct up to the full benefit from that amount; you count up $1.2 trillion or so). That's +$0.9 trillion, -$1.2 trillion, a net $0.3 trillion reduction in tax burdens.
Meanwhile your overall general tax rate is a bit higher as you go up through middle-class. That means you're getting $6,000 of Dividend, but only coming out $4,000 or $2,000 ahead. The poorest people don't have much income to tax, so they're coming out $5,500 ahead. The rich end up breaking even (the rough model includes a 3.4% tax cut at the top tax bracket, which we can backfill with taxes to cover universal healthcare, college, and social security--universal healthcare is about a 1.6% FICA on all personal income, seriously).
That means wherever you have concentrated poverty--lots of poor people, sudden unemployment--you have the biggest absolute and relative impact. For the poorer, the Dividend represents a greater dollar increase in take-home income over 2016 tax policy, and the Dividend represents a greater percentage of their spendable income.
That's an automatic, perfect economic stimulus without deficit. It starts repairing recessions before a recession comes in. These things are considered impossible under modern economic theory, so of course I figured out how to do it in two hours on a weekend.
Don't worry, I'm not just ranting on Slashdot. It seems the most-influential people in the field have taken sudden interest in my research, so this is all quickly becoming somebody else's problem. By September, it will be too late: once I pass the new theory on to more-competent and well-placed interests, it can no longer be stopped.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
Disclaimer: she is from South Carolina
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
Well, that's what the questions are supposed to be about. See, it's not all bikinis! We care about the girls' minds too!
She ended up coming third, so... success?
What was inappropriate or a trick about the question? 1/5 of Americans can't find the US on a world map. What do you think?
And yet Apple is still going. As you say, it may well not be the company it would have been if Jobs were still alive and fit to run it, but he wasn't irreplaceable either.
Capitalism has been the best system by far so far in reducing poverty. For example, we beat the most optimistic UN projections of beating world hunger by several years, and we're well on track to eliminate it right now.
Problem is, mass media in the West is utterly penetrated by marxists who have no interest in telling you this. Instead they tell you about "poverty of the rich". People who are poor and who's biggest problem is that they're eating too much, and as a result, have an "obesity crisis".
A fitting description for poor in a capitalist system. Their problem is that there's so much excess, that even the poor can afford to get fat.
The alternative is properly harnessed capitalism. You want to preserve rewards for people who are productive, but you need to keep those rewards in check. The modern social democracies seem to have found the right balance. The US has been pretty close in the past, but seems to be migrating more and more away from it recently.
When the gap between rich and poor gets too big, heads roll.
There's research that shows the more you pay a CEO, the poorer they perform. That $500,000 a year CEO (better, get one for $250k) is likely to do better than the one you're paying $30 million.
Dear ignorant socialist. I would like to explain something very basic to you, that will shock you. Sit down for this.
Western countries are not planned economies. They're not socialist, nor are they communist. What you're attributing to government due to your planned economy biases is not attributable to government in capitalist systems.
There was no "capitalist revolution" dear ignorant socialist. I understand that you being an ignorant socialist, "revolution" is something you're utterly indoctrinated to view as a positive thing. In reality, as opposed to marxist dogma, revolutions are generally rather bad for economy, because they take a huge chunk of resources and disrupt many of the existing systems of the society. Result is usually that country loses decades of progress just to recover.
Capitalism simply did what it does best. It allowed people with capital to finance people with relevant skills to get to the top, motivated by profit. And as a result, made most industries more efficient than planned economy priests in socialist economies could ever dream of. Which is how we effectively ended world hunger for example. In spite of all the doom and glood, we beat the most optimistic UN targets for eliminating world hunger. We've also pulled, and keep pulling record numbers of people out of abject poverty, right now.
Poverty often associated with "curbing capitalism too much", as is the case in "revolutionary" countries like Venezuela.
"Socialist" is an odd term, and basically meaningless. Americans have been convinced that it's a synonym for communist. The National Socialist Party rose to power in Germany in no small part because of a fear of communists.
If you think most people cannot form a coherent sentence in the form of an answer when under some level of stress? There is a pretty big difference between saying something while sounding nervous and talking gibberish.
A lot of C level executives made their pay in the form of stock since it is much more tax efficient.
Not necessarily.
The mere fact X complains about Y is not sufficient for Y to be screwed up.
The fact alone that CEOs earn more and more isn't necessarily a bad thing through itself. For example, if my salary would double and my CEO's earnings would quadruple, I wouldn't care, but if my salary is raised by 1% and my CEO's salary doubles, then I have a problem with it.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
It is a zero sum game. He said "resources."
Modern economic theory is founded on the idea that economics (the money/production kind) is not a zero sum game. That's true to an extent, but it requires ever more efficiency since real resources, at least up to this point in time, ARE finite. Problem is, there are physical limits to how much efficiency can be increased.
The economic run we've had since WWII has been about both increasing resource availability and efficiency, shading more and more into the latter as it got harder and harder to open up new oilfields, mines, etc. Now we're approaching both the limits of efficiency and the limits of our resources. People are starting to have to think creatively to keep the train going.
That's $21M that goes back into the economy instead of an offshore hedge fund.
To be fair, you're assuming that the $21M doesn't go back to the economy.
Contrary of what many people think, millionaire and billionaire doesn't kept all they assets liquid and/or dormant. Their either invest it, or spend it.
I'm not trying to defend the 1%, but as a single person, they help the economy more than a single McDonald employee. Of course, they doesn't help as much as 235,000 employees combined and, for me, it's the main issue.
But as long as they send (read lend) their money to the global economy, indirectly it have a positive effect. The company that employ me exist because people invested in it. And we receive contract from company that received their own investment.
It's easy to find the flaws in our system but, like it or not, capitalism made wars much more expensive for a country than trading and this is a pretty hard advantage to beat.
Elok
Not to mention that all this discussion is about AT&T, a company that historically was supposed to be a frickin' PUBLIC UTILITY and now can't be bothered to invest in their infrastructure until some other company either is an upstart or decides to break the gentlemen's agreement. I can't even get a f'ing answer to the question of "how many rooftops need to sign up for service for a fiber line to be pulled 1 mile of pre-existing pole" nor can I even get an answer to "why does my address magically not qualify for the ancient ADSL service even though I'm within 6000 feet of the DSLAM and the folks two properties away from me have it. And not less than 2 linemen on the poles have told me that I qualify". That Randall Stephenson, he's quite the visionary. Worth millions and millions.
a ruling class has always been able to obtain a disproportionate amount of wealth relative to the value they add. Whether it's kings and queens or the heads of mega-Corporations.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
"The biggest problem in the US right now is access to healthcare, but no one has a reasonable plan."
Bullshit! Medicare For All is a very, very reasonable plan...unless you suck on the Fox News tit, in which case "you should have worked harder, loser!" is a reasonable plan.
Unless you are one of the millions left unemployed due to the government taking over the entire industry. Or if you want any kind of choice.
Best evidence for "marxists don't like the poor, they just hate the rich" I've seen in a long time.
Here's a thing. Kardashians haven't become super rich because someone gave their riches to them. They worked hard, doing some really harsh, nasty things that most people wouldn't be willing nor able to do to get where they are for many years. After that, they trained their younger siblings to do the same thing. Who did those harsh, nasty things when they were still children, with ultimate goal of becoming rich.
It's the nature of capitalism. When you have a talent, and have the perseverance to capitalize on it, you overwhelmingly tend to succeed. If you lack either talent of perseverance, you probably won't succeed, because one of the aforementioned people will succeed in your field instead.
Kardashians may be some of the most outwardly vain, nasty people. And they're also among the most hard working, most sacrificing and most successful as a result. If you think they don't work, you're not just ignorant. You're plain stupid. Their work day starts when they wake up, and it ends when they fall asleep on a good day. On a bad day, they're working while they're asleep. Because no matter what, they must continue being what they built themselves to be. Idols for people who pay money for them being their idols. And that means no time off. You're always on the clock. Always being what you're expected to be. If you think this isn't work, you've never worked a day in your life. Because this is the kind of work that is so awful, most people wouldn't do it. And I include myself here. I've worked on the fields several summers of my life, and I would not be able to do work this hard.
Anyone who worked with most successful people knows this. CEO's don't have vacations or time off. If they get a call in the middle of the night while they're on what you think as a vacation, they answer it, and must provide a complex resolution to problems presented to them within a very short time span. Doesn't matter if the child is sick. Doesn't matter is the spouse is angry. Doesn't matter if you are dizzy from being awoken in the middle of the night. If you don't work, there are a hundred newcomers under you who will do this work with pleasure and you will be fired within a few days for failing to meet your obligations.
And they get such calls quite often if they're CEOs of large companies.
What is needed is to restore some of the regulations that we put in place after Great depression, but reagan removed. In particular, it is long past time to block executives from buying/acquiring publically traded stock in the industry they are working. Iow, if they jump into a publically traded company, then no more obtaining stock/options, etc. They can, and more importantly, should, get employee stock. In addition, time to quit taxing corporate profits, but all dividends, bonuses, etc will be taxed at same rate as all else. Why? Because right now, corporations attempt to hide perks like cars, limos, etc.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
His death had a major effect on the company and industry. You can't say that about most CEOs.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Don't like it? Quit and start your OWN company. No one said life is fair, no how many times your indoctrination instructors in school told you. Yes, it's not right that a owner of a company makes that much, but life isn't fair. The quicker you figure that out, the EASIER life will be. Socialism just brings down the achievers to the level of the non achievers, with the RULING CLASS the only ones with any wealth.
Neo-Nazis are not Nazis. They have very little in common besides racism and everyone else in the world hating them.
It's supply and demand. Your typical IT guy would stand no chance of leading a 20,000 person organization. The big CEO needs those skills and then has to be willing to work 85 hours a week and never be home.
IT aside, there are tremendous exponential gains in working hours before burnout. If you can actually sustain 85 hours a week of work, you don't get twice as much done as somebody who works a solid 40, you get 20 times as much done.
Most "overworked" IT guys have shitty schedules but aren't exactly hyperproductive. That's fine but a good CEO doesn't have time for /. or YouTube - he's constantly working.
So few people have both the skills and willingness to have a machine-like life that the pay is commensurate. It's reasonable to think that lifestyle is crazy. What's also crazy is to expect anybody to work like that for a normal salary or to expect to be paid like that for normal work.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
A coherent sentence is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for a more useful reply in this case.
Ezekiel 23:20
"what good does it to do raise your wages since if seems like prices will just go up to compensate. If the Union gets a 20% raise then the next day the cost of milk goes up 20%, right?"
That would be true if the cost of the product of milk was 100% from that Union's wages. It isn't though so this isn't true at all. In fact, if we assume you're referring to a grocery store union, their wages make up only a very tiny portion of what you pay for a product.
I ignore Anonymous Coward posts. If you want to discuss something, that's awesome. Log in.
Seriously, "high level competition"? "Prepared"? Are we talking about Jeopardy here?
Ezekiel 23:20
Just look how they continue to hiss and snarl over Obamacare even though the plan was modeled after one of their own.
We'll leave out the argument about how something might be good for one state or region but not good for all 50 states since you are not capable of seeing that.
But addressing the hiss and snarl.... for the most part all the republicans that were involved the Massachusetts were not in power by the time ObamaCare rolled out and had every right to complain. If Trump tries to bring back "Don't ask Don't tell", should the democrats stay quiet because, at one time, they supported that legislature?
there are many of us who have to answer far more difficult questions on the spot on a daily basis
Well, good for you. If fixing the US education system can be easily done by asking questions to random teenage girls on a time limit, why hasn't it been already done? And while you're at it answering far more difficult questions, could you please go and fix it?
but do you for some reason think that particular program selects for education or intelligence?
Why are they asking them such questions, then? It just doesn't make any sense to me. It sounds like a completely random thing thrown in for fun.
Ezekiel 23:20
You mean, off the top of my hat? I have no idea. Is the number comparable to other countries? In absolute terms or relative to development levels? Is the number getting worse or getting better?
Ezekiel 23:20
Thank you for posting, Miss Ocasio-Cortez. I see that your degree in economics and international relations has served you well.
Why are you so threatened by a woman who actually cares about representing constituents? Could it be that you are afraid she might actually be on to something? The voters in her district certainly seem to think so.
It's amazing how when a woman comes to the fore, wanting to make government work for the common person, some people lose their fucking minds.
Come on, where's your sense of humor. I thought that post was funny - not nearly as funny as the grandparent post though. And there's a sliver of truth to it. Miss Ocasio-Cortez response to questions recently makes one wonder if she got anything out of those college degrees.
I give her big kudos for beating the 10-term incumbent in the primary. I predict that she'll lose in the general election to the same guy as he's running in a different party.
Let's be real. Most everyone would take the CEO/Boss/Owner pay any day of the week. This comes back to jealousy.
Why doesn't anyone complain about what Congress gets paid and the benefits? Talk about royalty!
Also, if you want to be the person who takes very little compensation for working a top job in a company, go for it. It's up to you, just stop trying to force everyone else to do what you want.
That's true in the same sense that the sun will one day explode. It will all end, but not in my lifetime. Not even close.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Warren’s “Accountable Capitalism Act” would require that corporations that earn more than $1 billion in revenue a year (note “revenue,” not “profits”) would need a federal “charter” in order to operate. This charter would obligate these companies to consider all “stakeholders,” not just shareholders, when making decisions. The bill would also require these corporations to permit employees to elect 40 percent of the company’s board of directors; a super majority of 75 percent of directors and shareholders would have to approve political donations. (Gee, I wonder if somebody will propose something similar for unions?) Shareholders would be permitted to sue the company if they felt its actions were driven purely by profit and did not reflect the desires of its many “stakeholders.”
Lots of vague sounding language in there. Who/what defines what a stakeholder is and how they "feel" about profits. Sounds terrifying to me. What if Donald trump proposed this. How would you feel about that? Would you agree whom he named as stakeholders and how they should feel about profits?
It's 55% - and that's on income that's already been taxed once. So how much higher should it be?
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Should have put that in quotes. The question was: (not sure if this is an exact quote) "1/5 of Americans can't find the US on a world map. What do you think?"
Since US national beauty pageants are at least theoretically supposed to have an intellectual component, and the winners do become kind of celebrities, and people listen to celebrities (for some reason), a mild question about the state of education in the country doesn't seem unreasonable. I don't really see how it's a trick question.
She was clearly flustered at getting something approaching a real question, but someone who is supposedly a paragon of poise and grace, and is going to be a national role model, really should have been able to muster a "we clearly have serious challenges regarding education in this country" possibly followed up with "I think education, particularly regarding the place of our nation in the world, is an area my generation can improve."
I bet a significant number of Americans could have answered it far better.
Possibly, but you'll always find people like this in many populations. They're hardly representative of anything meaningful.
were being held up as icons, champions, and role models for the American people.
Well she wasn't, as was obvious from media reactions. Trump, on the other hand...
Ezekiel 23:20
You are in denial of basic economic facts. Marx didn't deny it, but you do.
You are truly a modern socialist imbecile, uneducated moron.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
McDonald's has about 1.9 million employees, and pays about $2 billion in income taxes. So that's about $1000 income taxes per employee.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
So, a platitude was expected. That doesn't exactly improve the image of the whole affair in my eyes.
Ezekiel 23:20
Aye! The mark of today's moron: "Venezuela! Nuffsaid!!" Fucking idiots....
It works doesn't it? Every time someone you consider a moron uses that logic, you have a conniption. Must be hitting a nerve.
"lottery-like in structure"... Well, there goes the myth of the meritocracy.
Why does it matter if the CEOs make more? How does that hurt you?
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
Not to mention how "each is better off than at the beginning of the day" glosses over the massive advantage capital holds over labor in the modern day,
This is an interesting point: it's not nearly as true as it was even 50 years ago. The value of money as a loan (capital) has decreased over the years until it is almost nothing. In some cases we've actually seen it have negative value, as more and more people become capitalists. To the point that the majority of the people in the USA are in fact, mini-capitalists, owning stock, or the means of production.
At this point, money has value, but being able to correctly recognize good investments (like Lyft, what a steal from Andreeson-Horowitz) has much, much more value.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
and it's not that Venezuela's government are angels, but we kind of ignore all the sanctions the United States put on it. We're also ignoring that they were a dirt poor country until the oil bonanza hit and that they were really only a functional 1st world country for about 50 years. It's not surprising their institutions couldn't survive the double whammy that was their only commodity's price collapsing and Sanctions imposed by the most powerful country on plant earth...
Incidentally the United States has used Venezuela's collapsing economy to seize a ton of their oil assets. If you think that's a coincidence, especially given North America's history with South America then, well, I'm not sure I'd call what you have naivete. There needs to be a stronger word for it. Maybe the Germans have one, they're good at that sort of thing...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
And yet in the '60s (and likely stretching back to the '40s) in the US, CEOs did work for such sums of money. Making you a denialist of both basic economic facts AND history in addition to being a greedmonster's bootlicker.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
To gain the experience and education and work ethic needed to be a CEO is much more rare than people like you seem to think.
I really don't think it's rare, and I don't see why it should be if you look at what's required of the job. It's just high-level management with some sales and PR mixed in. The idea that it's rare seems to be supported only by circular reasoning: CEOs get insane pay because they're rare skilled workers because they get insane pay. Ignoring the good ol' boys club of CEOs and directors jacking each other's pay up simply out of self-interest.
Most CEOs don't work their way up from the bottom of a company and are hilariously out of touch with lower-level work. Certainly not ideal but nobody complains about the results. I think hiring more mere mortals for the role could bring more real-world experience to the job and improve results.
There are famously terrible CEOs out there who don't get nearly as much flack as they deserve, and get punished for their awful performance with a golden parachute worth more than a good dedicated worker could make in several lifetimes. That's a terrible situation worth fixing, not an acceptable status quo.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
From this article it seems that stakeholders are the shareholders plus employees and local residents:
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/08/1...
Still seems brilliant to me. If Trump ever does something brilliant, I'll call it brilliant. For example I think it's good that he took some measures to pull the ladders of corruption up behind his menagerie of swamp monsters:
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/01/2...
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
"They have to agree that his pay and performance are in line. Even a CEO has people he has to be accountable to"
And who is on these boards of directors? Other CEOs. It's a big old boys network watching out for themselves.
It was a beauty pageant. But the answer is not necessarily a platitude. When someone asks you why 20% of your fellow citizens can't identify their own country on a map, the responsible, thoughtful person acknowledges there's a problem and resists the urge to prescribe the solution in twenty seconds or less.
From this article it seems that stakeholders are the shareholders plus employees and local residents:
What defines a local resident - state, county, or city? Maybe some gerrymandered "company district". There is so much room for graft and corruption here. I don't trust Progressives like Warren to implement it fairly if she were in control. I wouldn't trust Conservatives either. This whole thing stinks of appropriation of private property.
By the time my father retired he was master electrician, plumber, hvac and usually worked as a foreman (no inspections or fees required for electrical, plumbing, or hvac) and he made a little over $100k.
Trades do pay well if you put in the time.
with his SA troops, he was a possible threat to Hitler's own power.
Correct.
Socialist ideology had nothing to do with it.
Annnnnd, wrong.
Sure, Hitler didn't kill Röhm because he was a socialist- he killed him because he was capable of taking power from Hitler, the not-socialist, and had began openly expressing his discontent with the complete lack of socialist landmarks achieved by the Nazi party, which had at that point, essentially seized power of the entire country.
So in essence, Röhm was a thread because he was a socialist with a lot of guns, and the socialists had started to realize the Nazi party wasn't socialist anymore.
He was a threat, too
Dealing with the stress and confusion of answering a question on stage is a learned skill. If you do answer such questions "on a daily basis", you are far better prepared than she was.
TCP: Why the Internet is full of SYN.
Economics assumes for some reason that resources never deplete and growth can always continue. Ever since I understood that, I realized that people tellling me to "learn about economics" are not so different from people telling to "learn more about religion".
Avantgarde Hebrew science fiction
Yes, because being against socialism also means being anti women.
So is apologism.
The question asked was: "Recent polls have shown a fifth of Americans can't locate the U.S. on a world map. Why do you think this is?"
The answer given was: "I personally believe that U.S. Americans are unable to do so because, uh, some, uh, people out there in our nation don't have maps and, uh, I believe that our education like such as in South Africa and, uh, the Iraq, everywhere like such as, and, I believe that they should, our education over here in the U.S. should help the U.S., uh, or, uh, should help South Africa and should help the Iraq and the Asian countries, so we will be able to build up our future. For our children."
Bless that pretty girl, but she's dumb as bricks.
That girl was absolutely prepared to answer questions on stage. Just not questions that required her to think.
showcasing how stupid Americans can be
...when faced with inappropriate trick questions in highly stressful situations.
Dude, a high-level beauty pageant competition is expected to throw trick questions or hard balls at contestants. And what's so tricky about the original question?
"Recent polls have shown a fifth of Americans can't locate the U.S. on a world map. Why do you think this is?"
Truly, I want to know what's so tricky about this question? Is it the subject matter? The structure of the sentence?
I don't think many people would be able to yield a usably better one in that girl's place.
Maybe in this country, which is the richest in the world, quite capable of creating, funding and sustaining the most educated work force -slash- population the world has ever seen.
And that's a tragedy.
Would I refuse if someone offered me a two-digit million salary for the job? Of course not. But half of that salary would be paying me for doing something I'd rather prefer not to do, and a good part of it would go to coaches and other support to enable me to do it at all.
Ah, but then you'd be doing it wrong. Once you land the two-digit million salary the goal is you don't spend a penny of it. Muddle through it, make it a year and then walk away or get let go. Either way you'll never have to work for pay again. You can spend your time volunteering for something you're truly passionate about! :)
We have a huge oversupply of unskilled labor and well educated laborers without a specific skill set (think liberal arts majors), while we have a severe shortage of highly skilled laborers (doctors, airline pilots, engineers)
There is no shortage. We graduate 1.5 STEM students for every entry-level STEM job opening. Also, in an actual shortage, salaries shoot up quickly and that's not happening. Entry-level pilots are paid something like $20k-30k/year. That doesn't happen in a "severe shortage".
Lastly, the number of people who get degrees in "dumb" majors is tiny compared to the number of people who get degrees in "something useful". But that doesn't fit the narrative, so there's lots of people claiming all the college graduates who are underemployed must have gotten a degree in a useless field.
For Medicare, you are forced to pay into it your entire working life
You realize this phrasing is completely wrong, right?
You are not "paying into" anything. You are paying for the people who currently receive Medicare. When you retire, younger people will be paying for your Medicare.
The "Pay Into" phrasing is deliberately designed to misinform people, and make them believe that Medicare (or Social Security) is some sort of personal savings program instead of a wealth redistribution program. Because if people think of such popular programs as wealth redistribution, it's harder to malign wealth redistribution as a subject.
I've read that if min wage kept pace with inflation it would be north of $20 right now...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Yeah, I actually looked her up on Wikipedia before I responded.
First of all, the only good answer anyone who is not actively involved in education research can give on that subject is, "I don't know, I would have to do some research". As such, I agree with someone else in this thread who said it was a trick question.
Secondly, when given the opportunity to answer once she understood the question, she said:
That seems like a pretty reasonable answer to me.
But by all means continue to believe her to be dumb as bricks if it makes you feel better.
TCP: Why the Internet is full of SYN.
For some reason there a dozen or more posts here referencing this famous answer by the (as a result famous) contestant with no one mentioning her name, or providing a link to it. She is Caitlin Upton and this does not seem to have damaged her modelling career.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
random teenage girls on a time limit,
Those aren't random teenage girls on a time limit. These are girls, typically from a well-to-do background that have opted to compete into a beauty pageant contest that is known to use time-limited random questions of current as a prerequisite to qualify and win.
"Random teenage girl" would be like jumping in front of one coming out of a "Justice" store with her face glued on her iphone, to startle her to attention by asking her "Yo! With the Turkish Lira taking a beating, what are the consequences to the average stripper? You have 30 seconds, go!"
That's $21M that goes back into the economy instead of an offshore hedge fund.
Perhaps that's a good argument for reducing the tax rates in those brackets in order to make it more profitable to reinvest the money in the American economy as opposed to overseas.
Since money that is reinvested by a business is not taxed, this argument turns the actual logic of the situation on its head. Low tax rates encourage pulling money out for non-productive uses.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
You mean, off the top of my hat? I have no idea.
A short answer that might actually be sufficient on its own would be "education."
Is the number comparable to other countries? In absolute terms or relative to development levels? Is the number getting worse or getting better?
The remaining questions you asked as a follow-up are not necessarily related to the former (as they can stand on their own.) As for comparison, I can bet you that other developed countries (and many developing ones) do not have that type of problem.
The problem is insane. It is one thing to find a country *other than our own* in a map. It is quite another when it comes to *one own's* - this is the type of insane shit that you see only among illiterate people living up in the Khyber Pass or something.
And that we think this is a *tricky* question? That's insane. This is an insanity that stands on its own, and you can rest assure we stand unique among developed and (many developing) nations. No need to compare to analyze it.
" while we have a severe shortage of highly skilled laborers (doctors, airline pilots, engineers)"
This makes sense. If you're creating a business and you need to invest tons of cash into the company to make it work...and it doesn't...you can use bankruptcy to clear the debt and try again.
If you are trying to become a doctor and need to invest tons of cash into your schooling to make it work...and it doesn't...you are on the hook for that money no matter what. If you used financial aid, chances are the Government owns that debt and you're well and truly fucked.
When the only tool you have is a claw hammer every problem starts to look like the back of someone's skull.
My point was not that something else did better, because it didn't. My point was that there can still be room for improvement. An 89 can be the best test score in class without being the best possible score.
You should watch that interview you speak of. And then look up the rest of her career.
Call a spade a spade. Don't make it personal about her, be pissed off that our system is designed to produce that shit.
Many of the poor, yes. Some can't even afford that. Some can afford calories but not nutrition.
But my point was not to say that capitalism wasn't doing the best, it was to say that there's a time period when it did even better than it's doing now, and it would be good to find a way to get it to do that well again.
Instead of just seeing a headline on your twitter feed, watch an in depth interview. She can't answer the simplest of questions. EVERYTHING asked of her ends up with an "Aleppo moment."
Yet, she is still brighter than 80% of House Republicans.
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
As anybody ever figured out much prices would go down if CEOs were paid only 20-25 times the average worker's wage? That is a question I would liked answered.
"The Glass Ceiling is in you. The Glass Ceiling is conscience"
— Jakob Holtzbrinck, The Keys to the Planet.
When the only tool you have is a claw hammer every problem starts to look like the back of someone's skull.
Do you really think Steve Jobs and Bill Gates didn't do work?
I've read several pieces on both that basically described both guys as workaholics.. Gates was famous for being the first to get to, and the last to leave, MS headquaters every day. Did this happen the entire time he was at MS? Probably not.. I imagine he slowed down in his later years, but that guy absolutely made the big (and probably a lot of the medium) decisions that built MS into what it is.. Regardless of if you love or hate MS, Gates earned his money..
After Jobs was was rehired, he returned Apple from near bankruptcy to the most profitable tech company in the world.. Don't tell me he didn't make the decisions.
The same thing could be said about Ellison, Musk, and a whole bunch of other CEOs.
I don't know about Jenner.. Although I suspect you've picked one obscure CEO, who is more of an entertainment piece, for your example. I could name dozens of CEOs that do actual work and/or are directly responsible for starting the companies they run.
The CEOs responsibility is to his shareholders and, at the end of the day, most of these CEOs are running very profitable (good for the shareholder) companies.
You people whine and whine about pay... How many programmers worked at MS and left as millionaires? Or, if you prefer, how many left and were very comfortable financially? I bet it's more than you think...
You focus on the handful of companies that had financial issues and paid their CEOs ridiculous amounts of money.. Is that a problem? Sure... I'd call it fraud... If I ran things I'd have a law that said that the CEO couldn't be paid a bonus if the company lost money. I certainly wouldn't have any upper limit on pay if the company is profitable. Neither you, nor I, are qualified to decide what the appropriate level of pay is for a guy that takes his company from $1 billion a year to $5 billion a year in profits.... Or from $0/year to $1 million a year.. We don't know how many hours he put in, we don't know what risks he took...
Even if we toss out reality and decide that Gates does no real work and we lay the wreath of success at the feet of the executive VPs at MS, they were hired by him... He certainly approved the hiring of his direct subordinates.. He certainly approved their pay.. He certainly was the guy most involved in their hiring.. You don't go to H.R. and say "go hire me an executive". You might say "give me a list of qualified candidates", but the guy at the top absolutely does make some damned important decisions...
The question is, what performance difference does a $1M CEO bring vs a $21.7M one?
The real question is how much of the company results can be attributed to the performance of the CEO. That is not an easy question to answer in most cases. I have no problem with pay for performance but in a lot of cases their pay is negotiated long before any performance.
Best evidence for "marxists don't like the poor, they just hate the rich" I've seen in a long time.
Hear hear.. This is what it always boils down to. These lefties always pick some obscure example or two and think it defines the entire class.. They will refuse to acknowledge that, most of the time, high paid CEOs are running companies that are very successful and provide good jobs to, perhaps, thousands of people.. The only thing that matters to them is the gap..
I swear.... I suspect you could have a company where the CEO made $100 million a year, staffed by 1,000 employees making $1 million a year, and the left would still bitch.... All we'd hear is "blah blah blah, 100X". Not one of these commies would even care that every single employee was an actual millionaire...
I see a call for less capitalism in this thread, but that's about it. Of course, the screeching Capitalists that insist that even a hint of a social safety net is Communism have lead others to say "let's give that Communism thing a try then" when, in fact, they're advocating for a more balanced hybrid system.
I honestly have no problems with someone being paid 40000x what I am being paid - whatever, I agreed to work for however much the company was paying.
You agreed to it because you didn't have a better option. If you don't see a problem with someone getting paid multiple orders of magnitude more than you when they are not creating a similar amount of added value to the company then you have no self respect.
So a CEO is making choices that affect all of the customers, and staff - obviously they still get paid very well.
Define "paid very well". When is it enough? How many multiple millions are does one need before one no longer is value added and start getting into amounts that actually hurt the company? I agree that pay should in principle be commensurate with the value added to the company but at some point too many companies start paying the people in charge amounts well beyond any possible value the could add to the company. Furthermore they negotiate these pay packages (including golden parachutes) before they ever work a day. Some CEOs probably are worth many millions a year but not very many of them.
I guess my point was thought it pays well and they have developed some great skills which require a lot of information and intelligence, we treat some idiot office worker who's 20% of that so much better even when they make much less.
The "equivalent" office worker with as much skill as a master electrician is treated like a fucking deity at work, and not brownbeaten by their manager or made to toe a bunch of bullshit work rules.
Well, there is the fact that the GOP has been thoroughly in power for some time now, tried to repeal Obamacare 50 times or so and failed miserably even while holding the Presidency, House, and Senate since they couldn't come up with anything better.
It's still reducing the fuck out of my poverty.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
This fact has been generally accepted for thousands of years. See the Athens play about women in power implementing socialism.
This is not, basically, a problem with capitalism. It exists in every system where those who control payout control their own payout. If the control is indirect, then the feedback is less extreme. E.g., if the payment is decided by the board of directors, then the person paid benefits by being glib in front of the board of directors.
Think of it as a feedback system problem and you'll understand why it happens. And it doesn't only happen under capitalism.
That said, it is inherent in systems where one entity exerts strong control over the rest of the system. And capitalism is often one of those systems. Note that the article mentions that it is more extreme in larger corporations. This is just what this analysis would have predicted. In smaller groups other effects can dominate, particularly is the "boss" is also the owner. So on a small scale capitalism works, or can work, very well. And on the smallest scale there is little to choose from between capitalism, communism, and socialism. In fact, even anarchy seems to work at a small enough scale, unless there are exogenous stresses. (I've been referred to the yk tribe as an example, but I've never tracked this down. The reference was given during the 1940's about anarchy disintegrating under external stresses...but I don't know what kind of external stresses.)
That said, in this case I think your argument is against hierarchical systems with control at the top (i.e., almost all of them).
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
This is very bad for the U.S. healthcare insurance providers though who also have kids to feed, btw. What you hate kids and want them to starve to death is that it? No, like op said there's no reasonable plan available for a good healthcare system which will keep the healthcare insurance gravy train flowing and that therefore means THAT THERE IS NO REASONABLE PLAN! (emphasis there quite emphatically mine!)
Man that's A LOT of survivorship bias (and C-words, are you Australian?). You really believe that nobody has worked as hard and smart as you and failed to make it. Or that people have worked a lot less than you and made a lot of dumb mistakes, and made far more. But keep chalking it up to jealousy and communism, keep thinking there's no such thing as privilege, keep pulling the other crabs back into the bucket just as your wealthy overlords want you to...
Bullshit... If you took the CEO pay for the top 500 companies on Earth and compared it next to the amount of wages those companies pay out, it wouldn't amount to a hill of beans. Microsoft (as an example) employees 131,000 people.. What do you suppose those wages total up to? Apple - 121,000 employees.. Tesla, 37,000+ employees... I could go on and on..
Here you make the mistake of thinking that the damage doesn't exceed the CEO's pay. It does...massively. The money those CEOs are locking up could've been reinvested into workers or equipment where it would've produced even more value. Could've been spent by everyday people where it would've gone straight back into the economy and meaningfully improved people's lives, far more than anyone making $70K+ can even understand. The money the CEOs take home is just the tip of the iceberg of the damage they're causing.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
No wonder the US is trying to legalise weed all over the place! If the people weren't so dulled on weed and Netflix, they might think about throwing off their shackles.
What the inequality of wealth brings is inequality of power. Those at the top of the food chain can make and enforce decisions that benefit them financially.
The reason some people have influence over government is not that they are wealthy, its because some people in government are for sale. The solution to that is not to create more government, you fucking retards.
Yes, clearly the solution is to get rid of all governmental checks and balances, however inadequate, as once they are free from constraints, the wealthy only ever act for the public good.
That's a false dilemma, right there. For a productive and functional society, you need the right level of government regulation to promote a level playing field. Where we are right now is that the volume of regulation, and the costs of compliance, serve as a deterrent to competition and in some cases even ensure that businesses and entrepreneurs below a certain size / capitalization cannot even function. This serves to funnel money and power upward from small business to large, multinational corporations. That's actually worse because it means not only does it reduce competition and provide more power to the large corporations, but it means those corporations are not even beholden to a single government or people, and can exploit the cheapest labor in the least restrictive regulatory environment anywhere on the globe.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
I disagree.
Miss America needs not only be good looking. Let's be honest, bimbo chicks with perfect body and blank stares are a dime a dozen. Go to a club and it bursts with them. Miss $COUNTRY needs to represent that country in more ways than tits and ass. She should be witty, smart, composed, not easily thrown off by some weird question, etc. It's honestly, a step in the right direction of de-objectifying women.
Miss America (or any other country for that matter) needs to be the epitome of all positive qualities a woman could have.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
See my answer here: https://slashdot.org/comments....
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
The fact that they are dysfunctional doesn't mean they can't think ObamaCare was a terrible idea.
The problem is they want to replace it with something and they can't agree on what. They need to repeal it and force the issue but they do not have the nerve
That moment when the best you have is "well this system lets poor get fat, instead of hungry as they do in all other systems to this day, and that's the problem with the system".
How much hatred one must have for the poor to be able to produce a thought this pathological.
Considering your posting history, I understand why you think that calls in this thread are reasonable. When one is on the extreme fringe of the left, even marxists seem reasonable to you.
To most of us who actually exist in the political centre to centre left, they're butchers who have deep seated hatred for the world itself. Something we get evidence for every time a "balanced hybrid system" such as those practised in Venezuela get put into actual action.
It always ends in starvation of the poorest. Every single time. And every time, people on the fringe of far left like you dismiss it with "well they didn't do it right, now if I got to implement it, I'd do it right".
It's the same attitude that people like Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot had. And it's that exact attitude that made them by far the most bloody tyrants of our history. Cause and effect.
Or as infamous quote goes, "to do the same thing and expect a different result is a sign of insanity". Especially when it ends in people, including children, dying of starvation due to lack of resources every single time, even in modern world where we have such an abundance of resources due to capitalism, we have all but eliminated non-political hunger from the world.
Well, it's true that the first enemy of Socialists is always other Socialists who are doing it "wrong"
I'd say that's the second enemy of any group, with the first being someone who seeks to use your group's ideological following to become a dictator. This applies to literally every single political ideology that has existed, from the far left, to the far right, capitalist to communist.
but it's funny how many times people promising us Socialism have given us fascism.
No it's not, and it's surpassed only by how many times right wing capitalist nationalist governments have given us fascism. But that's not because either of them is predisoposed to such an end, it's simply an existing threat to all ideological power shifts, because of the above specified First Enemy, and the fact that successful left-wing revolutions are the minority in total revolutions, peaceful or otherwise.
You can say that's ancient history
I'd only say that if I were trying to invent a fallacious argument like you are.
which was once your go-to example of a Socialist success.
Sure wasn't. I've never thought the ugly revolutions in south america were examples of success of any dictatorship that arose from them, be they left-wing or right-wing.
I'd point to Scandinavia.
Now the only examples of it being successful are states that are subsidizing it by selling oil and investing the profits in the stock markets of capitalist societies.
Only if you exclude any of the very successful socialist states... but hell, I guess you could literally make any argument you wanted if those are the rules.
Congratulations, you're a fucking moron. Have a cookie.
I wouldn't know, since that's not the thought I had. But it seems you're not interested in addressing what I did mean, so we'll leave it at that.
What do you know, I mention a Social safety net and someone screeches about Marxism and crazy claims that Venezuela is balanced. I'm like totally shocked! But thanks for being such a fine exemplar!
They may or may not have agreed with it when Romney did it, but it didn't become evil socialism until Obama did it.
And, of course, Trump was full of bluster about the really great plan he had for healthcare and how everyone would love it right up until it came to put up or shut up time.
And your solution is a bunch of hand waving followed by a game of brinksmanship with millions of people's lives?
Then what was the thought you had? It's factual that alternative systems to one we have have caused starvation, to this day.
And you literally tried to spin a narrative of "well our poor are as badly off as those that are starving, because they lack nutrients". That was your thought. So, people in the West are dying of scurvy or similar disease, rather than hunger, are they?
You lied. People can afford nutrition just fine. Our poor are in fact able to afford too much nutrition just as well as too many calories. Which is why they're not dying of scurvy or similar diseases, and them being fat is a good thing compared to being starved by the other systems that currently exist and actively cause starvation of the poor within them.
Here's a thing. Just because you have a thought in your head that you didn't quite think through to its logical and historically well proven conclusion doesn't mean that your thought cannot be ran to this conclusion by others who saw you type it out.
The reason some people have influence over government is not that they are wealthy, its because some people in government are for sale.
The solution to that is not to create more government, you fucking retards.
The bigger a society gets, the bigger its government needs to get. Capitalism needs governing. If it's ungoverned, it devolves into feudalism at the drop of a hat. One rich nobleman and everybody in the vicinity has to do what he says.
The US federal government definitely is not big enough because it's not big enough to take on and BEAT massive cartels like Comcast/Spectrum/AT&T. Dealing with giant corporations requires a similarly giant government. There's no other way to bring enough hands and eyes and brains to bear. If they out-lawyer you, you lose. I don't want my government to lose to these assholes.
You can have your small federal government if and only if you enforce the Sherman Antitrust Act with vicious thoroughness. Any company starts to even smell too big to fail, bam, government breaks it up. Any company that big is a failure of government, because government's job is to keep things running, and monopolies and cartels gum up the works.
Even after you enforce antitrust to the full extent of the law, you will still need a fairly large government. It is guaranteed to be larger now than it ever has been in the past, because there are more people now than there ever were in the past. Automation has reduced the need of government to scale up along with the population quite so closely, but it has not eliminated the need to scale up. That's because government only works if it employs humans paying attention. Human attention can only be spread so thin, and computers can't pay attention. Not yet, anyway. So government has to be bigger.
There was no "capitalist revolution"...
King John would beg to differ.
There most definitely was a capitalist revolution. A whole series of them. They're what unseated the nobility as the sole holders of power the world over. It started by making it possible to buy your way into the nobility. Ultimately it dismantled the nobility. The Barons' War attempting to enforce the Magna Carta is acknowledged as the first capitalist revolution in England, and make no mistake, it was a capitalist revolutionary war, started, pursued, and funded by a bunch of wealthy landowners who didn't like paying feudal taxes to the Crown. Capitalism didn't have a name yet, but the shift from serfs to paid labor was happening right then. The economic system in the 16th century was morphing into what has been retroactively labeled "agrarian capitalism."
...dear ignorant socialist.
Your snide condescension is noted. Too bad you're even more ignorant.
When someone asks you why 20% of your fellow citizens can't identify their own country on a map, the responsible, thoughtful person acknowledges there's a problem and resists the urge to prescribe the solution in twenty seconds or less.
No, the responsible thoughtful person questions the statistic, because it's clearly bullshit. The fact that you just blindly believe it to be true makes you look just as ignorant as she did.
Of course a contestant in a beauty pageant can't really just yell out "CITATION NEEDED!". If put on the spot, a thoughtful person might answer with something along the lines of "I find it very difficult to believe that your claim is true, however, I would say that any nation whose citizens DO have such a poor familiarity with geography clearly has a dysfunctional educational system".
It turns out that those jobs pay reasonably well and a plumber who gains sufficient experience and starts his or her own business would not have much trouble netting six figures. But that is seen as an "undesirable" occupation.
It is an undesirable job. I do my own plumbing, because I'm a cheap bastard, and I wouldn't want to fish the things I've fished out of the shower drain for anyone else, six figures or not.
Some of the skilled trades are less icky than plumbing, but a great many of them are doomed to being marginalized because the Internet can tell you everything you need to know. I fixed my dryer myself last week. The Internet told me where to find the circuit diagram, told me what to check first, and let me order the replacement parts I needed. The hour of my time it took would have cost me $100 or more if I'd paid someone else to do it, and sorry, but I don't get paid well enough to pay someone else that well. Worse, when I did pay someone else, they failed to fix my refrigerator anyway.
Maybe there's a shortage of welders, but plumbers and handymen, not so much.
"The State Of The End Of The Millenium Adress", Bad Religion circa 1998
Neighbours, nobody loves you like we do.
Neighbors, your government has triumphed in finally making you a public fit for the 21st century.
Never before has a governing body shown so much concern for the economicwell-being of its subjects.
Today we have insulated you from countless factions who threaten your financial viability; such as the poor;
the idealistic foreigners still clinging to their childish notions of social welfare.
Why, you're even kept uninformed of useless propagandist journalism that reports alleged violations of
human rights (We all know they wouldn't have been punished if they hadn't been doing something wrong!!).
And who better to dispense such blatantly evident factoids but a self-appointed authority like myself?
Acid rain is a thing of the past... Too many possible causes, too little significance for our modern thinking public.
Besides, industrial manufacturing is at an all time low anyway, who needs those narrow minded
laborers. Too many mouths to feed, and to much burden on the pay roll!
Who needs 'em? Here in the land of the free-time.
Some other ass back-ward country will give us what we need by exploiting its uneducated children anyway.
The Internet has expanded our ability to pacify average Americans better than ever by offering fantastical adventures to
every corner of the imagination. Your home office is the window to your world and the heart of your social life.
Such reclusive behavior helps clear the roads and public works from overburden, like the lower middle-class and others who depend
shamelessly on their government.
Today you are freer than ever to do what you want, provided you can pay for it!
Remember, the first word in USA is US!
We have arrived neighbors, we are the privileged elite!
....but that's how capitalism works together with those who own the capital (i.e., the shareholders).
If you don't like that ratio, change it at the next board meeting.
Ferret
Sic gorgiamus allos subjectatos nunc
And here come the lies about what you actually said, as if everyone in this thread can't just read your original statement.
I'm not even sure how to address someone who manages to have knowledge of historic facts, but manages to bend them so utterly and completely out of any reasonable interpretation just to fit his prejudices.
I live in the world where historic facts happened, and no, Barons War was not a "capitalist revolution" in any sane interpretation of it. Frankly, your statement is so beyond idiotic, we're all dumber for having to read it. I award you no points, and may god have mercy on your soul.
Dude, there are only 8 posts in this thread including this one. What the hell are you reading? (or more to the point, tripping on).
Related link: Fewer Than Half of Young Americans Are Positive About Capitalism
A human would not have done better.
Economics assumes for some reason that resources never deplete and growth can always continue.
Economics doesn't assume that. You should learn about economics so you don't come up with such stupid ideas. When resources start to run out, economics will explain how the economy responds to that scarcity.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I don't think many people would be able to yield a usably better one in that girl's place.
Are you fucking kidding me?
Probably not many beauty pageant participants, or high school drop-outs, or athletes that rode a railroad to fame based on their talent, and education was a distraction, but believe it or not, there are many of us who have to answer far more difficult questions on the spot on a daily basis.
I kinda doubt that.
Listen to the actual question that was posed, Recent polls have shown that 1/5th of Americans can't show the US on a world map.
It's actually a really tough question.
The premise of the question suggests that Americans are dumb or ignorant, which is something you really don't want to seem to agree with if you want to be become "Miss Teen USA". But you're also supposed to set a good example and can't be seeming to excuse ignorance either.
So she actually starts out with what I think is a pretty clever approach, people know things that are relevant in their daily lives, which doesn't actually include a map of the world for a lot of people. It ends up being a bit of trivia they learned in school, but like many other "obvious" things they learned in school it gets lost in the subsequent decades (ie, Are you smarter than a 5th grader?). Sure you need to see a map if you travel internationally, or really like world news or history, but a lot of people just don't care about the things a map would tell them, so they just don't look at one.
Unfortunately that's a fairly abstract concept that's really hard to explain, so she ended up saying they don't have maps, which is kinda true but sounds even more stupid than the thing I typed out with a couple minutes to think about it.
Now, if it were you or me in a typical daily conversation we'd restart our explanation, deflect with a joke, pause for a while, or just shrug and shake our heads and everyone would quickly forget.
But she didn't have any of those options and needed to keep trucking to the time limit. So she tried to pivot to Education, other countries might do better with maps because they're in hostile regions of the world.... ok! time for another pivot! And... she has absolutely no place to go and it's all just gibberish.
I think the whole thing was good for a laugh, but it really doesn't say much about the contestant or her intelligence.
I stole this Sig
'Make the lie big, keep it simple, keep saying it and eventually they will believe it' (Goebbels).
That's Fake News!
I stole this Sig
Can't work in an 8+ billion person world. It's a great theory, don't mistake me I like the idea, but the system needs to be more flexible and more guarantees of the basics (the real basics not the "wish list"). It maybe desirable to decrease productivity to give more people work or incentivize non-productive tasks that help the environment or some other thing.
It's actually not a really tough question, at all.
You're either really overthinking this, or playing the apologist. Either way, good luck selling that tripe.
I think the whole thing was good for a laugh, but it really doesn't say much about the contestant or her intelligence.
Oh I disagree pretty whole-heartedly, and having watched her on The Amazing Race, and other interviews, I haven't questioned the assertion once.
Now one can say she's representative of a larger problem in general- that we're raising young women to be shit-for-brained beauty queens- and she's not any worse than average for her class of people, but I'm sorry, that's not a hard question, and we shouldn't be defending a human being making it to that age and being so unfit to handle such a softball question.
If the guy had asked her about the culturally driven socioeconomic differences between Haiti and California, I'd agree they threw a hardball at her, but it appears the girl was never taught to think for herself, which makes sense. These things are highly coached and rehearsed. Even her corrected response in the interview with Matt Lauer were delivered as if from a teleprompter with glazed eyes. She's damn lucky he didn't ask her any questions that required more than 'ya' or 'haha' from her.
I should clarify- I don't think the girl has a deficit in brain cells or any such misogynist horse shit. I think she was raised by some shitstains who wanted her to be dumb and pretty.
Well, good for you. If fixing the US education system can be easily done by asking questions to random teenage girls on a time limit
I find it funny that you even ask that. As if you expect the "random teenage girl" to be less intelligent than a "random teenage male".
why hasn't it been already done?
Because the problem isn't the US education system. It's ignorant fucking southerners.
She's from South Carolina, a state practically famous for its derision toward women who think they have a right to be outside of their kitchen, or not pregnant.
Did she seem uncomfortable in front of the camera while walking around in her bikini?
I agree. Like a politician, she came off as someone with very little going on in their head that wasn't written by a speech writer.
Yeah, this is why I don't get those kinds of offers. I'm just not enough of a sleazeball and my satisfaction in a job comes not from the paycheck, but from doing my job well. The paycheck is is nice, but I've taken better jobs for less pay before and I'd do it again (to be fair, I've also had considerable raises, so in the long run it evens out).
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Gates used his mother's connections to sell a product made by someone else to a large company. Then he hired people to work for him.
Big decisions? Wow.
Amazing how you turn 50 years of a company's progress into a 2 dismissive sentences. Please keep telling me how it isn't jealousy and hatred for the successful.
keep pulling the other crabs back into the bucket just as your wealthy overlords want you to...
Are you for real? Your whole philosophy is bucket-crab.. Nobody gets too much higher than anyone else because of feelz and privilege.
You seriously have to be delusional.. My philosophy is the exact fucking opposite of bucket-crab. Under capitalism you get to climb out of the bucket. You and millions of others. The rich get richer and the poor get richer too.
In the last 100 years we've lifted nearly 60% of the Earth's population out of poverty. Yet you continue to worry about CEO pay that does not, on the grand scale of things, matter a fuckbit.
See, most people work.. Most people want to keep what is theirs. They don't mind helping the less fortunate, but they aren't gonna be told that their success should make them feel guilty about it.
It's funny... you leftie assholes claim to want to help the less fortunate, but it's those on the right who are the most generous and give the most to charity... I have no doubt in my mind that you do want to help the poor, but the problem I have with you is that you don't want to do it with your own money. You want to do it with everyone else's. You are a fucking hypocrite and you have a superiority complex. You have decided what is right for everyone else.
I say let the market sort it out. Not total lassiez faire, but only as much regulation as necessary to prevent criminal activity. To keep and eye on things, as it were. I don't even think there should be a minimum wage. It's because of that bullshit that I can't hire the kid across the street to mow the lawn. He's too goddamn slow for our local minimum wage, but he's a nice kid. But because of your stupid exclusionary laws I can't pay him what he's actually worth. So, he gets nothing.
Furthermore, you assholes have actually decided that two grown adults of sound mind can't come to an agreement to exchange labor for wages if that agreement is below what YOU have decided is reasonable. You declare that that grown man is incompetent to decide for himself if he's willing to accept a job that pays $0.10 less that what YOU have decided he should be paid.
Minimum wage laws are the elites telling the masses that they are incapable of deciding their own value. Minimum wage laws are destroying the incomes of those who work for tips in our area. As the wages rise higher and higher, and the price of eating at a restaurant ever increases, servers are seeing smaller tips. Why the fuck should I tip someone, for handing me a plate of food, who's making just as much as some fella that busts his ass all day pouring concrete? Only problem was.. the tips were actually much higher, on average, than the minimum wage. But when the masses learn that the server is now paid exactly the same as they are, they are much less likely to leave a tip...
California, the 8th largest economy on the planet... Run by Democrats for nearly a half century, has the lowest quality of life of all 50 states... Why? If liberal policies are so good, why is the most liberal state in the worst shape? Why are the states with the highest quality of life mostly run by conservatives?
I can't wait to hear your logic on these questions...
Your original statement in context of this thread.
The only extremists here are the Capitalsts. Even Whisper that perhaps healthcare should be handlef differently and they screech about Communism. Just look how they continue to hiss and snarl over Obamacare even though the plan was modeled after one of their own.
For the most part, the Marxists here are just in the fevered minds of the Capitalists.
That one? Because that *IS* my original statement. Then you went on some crazy rant about Marxism and trying to claim I support Venezuela.
In other words, thank you for being such a fine exemplar to my original point.
Yes, this one. You literally speak of "capitalist extremists" and then went to dismiss it with "I advocate for marxist ideology, but you can't say that without being an extremist".
So I'm sure that in your mind, this is "an example to reinforce your point". Because the way you set up the narrative, to point out the issue with your opinion is "to be an extremist capitalist".
Funniest part of this entire discussion? I have almost two decades of voting history in my native Finland. I voted for social democratic party candidates every time, because they are the closest to my political views.
And I find your views reprehensible. Don't even remotely think that what you advocated for is something even remotely similar to social democracy we have, or that libelous claims of americans about "Nordic countries are socialist" have any ground in reality. Socialist parties here are on the political fringe, polling typically between 5-10%. In other words, they're barely above the legal limit for getting into the legislative assemblies, and in some cases, they even fail to do that.
I think everyone's got it now. You can take off the Napoleon hat and stop bobbling your lips now.
I'm pretty sure "you" does not equal "everyone" anywhere outside your mind.
But it's good to know where you stand on this issue as well.
Are you for real? Your whole philosophy is bucket-crab.. Nobody gets too much higher than anyone else because of feelz and privilege.
You seriously have to be delusional.. My philosophy is the exact fucking opposite of bucket-crab. Under capitalism you get to climb out of the bucket. You and millions of others. The rich get richer and the poor get richer too.
In theory, yes, in practice, LOLno. You're keeping everyone in the bucket for the purpose of maintaining access to some imaginary way out of the bucket. The numbers don't lie, economic mobility is way, way down, and only the world's very richest and very poorest are benefiting. For those of us who are doing worse than driving a Tesla but doing better than farming dirt in the 3rd world for a dollar a day, things have only been getting worse since the '80s, and we're just supposed to keep sacrificing ourselves for those other 2 groups. So try again. Maybe try the "hidden value in technology" theory, at least that has some intent to mesh with the economic numbers.
It's funny... you leftie assholes claim to want to help the less fortunate, but it's those on the right who are the most generous and give the most to charity... I have no doubt in my mind that you do want to help the poor, but the problem I have with you is that you don't want to do it with your own money. You want to do it with everyone else's. You are a fucking hypocrite and you have a superiority complex. You have decided what is right for everyone else.
Right-wingers donate more because they have the luxury of having more to donate. I may not have thousands to give away to assuage the guilt I don't have, but I know I give up way more of my time to helping the poor. More time than right-wingers spent making the money they gave away. I'm not a hypocrite, I put my effort where my mouth is. Unfortunately that doesn't show up on donation stats. On that note, what if it's just an accountability problem? If more leftists were giving away collectively greater amounts of money in small cash donations than giant tax-deducted right-winger donations, we'd never know.
Furthermore, you assholes have actually decided that two grown adults of sound mind can't come to an agreement to exchange labor for wages if that agreement is below what YOU have decided is reasonable. You declare that that grown man is incompetent to decide for himself if he's willing to accept a job that pays $0.10 less that what YOU have decided he should be paid.
Us assholes do that because if we don't, you'll pay adults like kids, allowing a person to work full-time for less than they can support themselves on, in effect allowing sub-livable-wage workers to be a conduit for a grand unaccountable corporate welfare system, for no reason other than the enrich the 1% (and I suppose those dollar-a-day dirt farmers). Nordic countries have figured this out and have prospered massively because of it. They have more automation and less poverty at the same time.
California, the 8th largest economy on the planet... Run by Democrats for nearly a half century, has the lowest quality of life of all 50 states... Why?
ght-wingers
In short, because the criteria used to create this ranking were nonsensical choices. That's basically the only way to generate such a BS-meter-redlining list that says that quality of life in Missouri, Alabama and Nebraska are better than in California, with North-freaking-Dakota at #1. It looks at 3 very specific areas of life, only 2 of which could be related to quality of life at all: natural environment (meaning environmental cleanliness/health), social environment (meaning social engagement) and voter participation(!?). This last factor alone is probably a major reason why infamous rural misery-pits full of bitter far-right-wingers look so good on the list - I'd expect that voter apathy would be greater in places with better quality of life, although looking at inter
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
"I haven't seen that particular poll, but I find it hard to believe. I would at least like to examine their methodology before drawing any conclusions" would be a perfectly acceptable answer.
You are correct, yelling "citation needed" or making personal attacks is not acceptable.
I have listened to the question posed. I listened to it as it was posed.
It's actually not a really tough question, at all.
You're either really overthinking this, or playing the apologist. Either way, good luck selling that tripe.
Ok, so what would your answer be then? And remember the constraints her answer had to satisfy.
such a softball question.
A softball question would be "what would you do to improve our education system?" All you need to say is "inspire children" or "hire more teachers" and virtually no one will find something objectionable.
I'm not saying she's going to be doing a PhD but I think you're wildly underestimating the difficultly of answering a question in that situation.
I stole this Sig
I guess that depends how old you are, and how optimistically (or pessimistically) you evaluate the planet's carrying capacity and the exponential growth demanded by our current economic system.
Either way, it's a pretty selfish outlook.
That is because my bosses are doing 312 times as many things as I do not want to do. God bless them!
I was a business owner and before that, I was a project leader.
As project leader, I could manage 7 people adequately as I had to know my projects status and to prevent things from going wrong.
Each of my teams took 15% of my time. I met with them briefly once a day. I had to review their questionst to me and obtain answers or get actions to be taken by other departments.
With my own business, I had the additional task of sales and to being a business guru. Again, I had to manage team leaders, accountants, etc. And again the rule of 15% was realistic. 7x15% is 105%. I had little time to meet a client for lunch or golf.
Was I worth 20 times the average salary? They did the work, I orchestrated. True I invested money, but I believe and practiced that I should receive a normal salary and dividends for my shares. My employees became shareholders and we prospered all. I don't need country estates, I just wanted what I was contributing to society and recognition for it.
These CEOs should earn their income with a good base salary, maxing out at 15 to 20 times the average of their employees, and the rest, based on share dividends or increase in share value.
I don't believe that the CEO with 350 times the average salary is truly contributing to society.
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
That's too much micromanagement. You need to train your reports to let you know when something goes wrong.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Yet, she is still brighter than 80% of House Republicans.
Setting the bar pretty low there, aren't you?
There's no time like the present. Well, the past used to be.
There are enough resources to handle exponential growth for a while, as long as we keep developing new technologies.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
It's by nation; and it doesn't guarantee anything except a share of per-capita purchasing power. This isn't "solve the individual human problem"; it's "solve the entire economic problem of recessions, poverty, and job availability". You use welfare and social insurances for the individual human problems.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
The difference between having government handouts under the democrats and having to work 3 jobs to make ends meet under the reps is that in the former case I have more spare time on my hands, I'm broke either way.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.