The question is, what percentage of computer science graduates are black. I can't believe that there are large numbers of unemployed black software developers.
Then the question is why?
If you click on the links above it specifically mentions that the NSF put out a grant to encourage black boys into the field, but the grantee did a marketing study which convinced them that black boys were just as interested in computer science as anyone else, and they should use their $Million to get girls of all races and incomes into the field.
I suspect the reason is a combination of hyper-aggrssive policing in black communities resulting in a lot more black boys (particularly the marijuana users) having criminal convictions that make college impossible, lower-average-incomes meaning college is difficult, overall lower education levels so mom has no clue what to do if the kid flunks out after a semester, and a complete lack of big Desktop computers in the lives of the black working class. Whether this analysis is correct, if so which of the four problems should be solved by government, and at which level, ir probably a pretty important debate to have.
If you have a report from every damn tech company saying "we're 1% black" you might be able to start that debate in Congress, and might get them to solve some of the problems. This is particularly true if somebody holds out, so you can keep the debate hot in the media for awhile.
How the hell is it the job of the governement to tell private companies who they should hire?
So if a private company refuses to hire you because it has enough white guys you don't want the government to intervene?
BTW, I really want you to say they wouldn't do that. Because a quick google will reveal more cases of white men winning discrimination claims then any other group.
The only people who care about this data just want to use it to harangue Apple for not conforming to some predetermined standard of workforce racial distribution.
Close. The part that's predetermined is "Apple isn't hiring enough minorities." The actual ratio or raw numbers are irrelevant. I hate Apple as much as anyone, but this is the government shaking them down.
Reread the post. This is the Congressional Black Caucus.
A Caucus is not the government. It has no Executive authority. It has Legislative authority to the extent it can win vote in the House, and they aren't likely to convince Boehner to allow a vote on this in the House.
The problem here is that the US System is so convoluted and iterative that one racist asshole can fuck things up for an entire race, and literally the only way you have to verify that shit is collecting data on race and fixing it post hoc.
For example, in the US it is pretty much impossible to give a convicted drug offender financial aid. Same with school loans, income tax credits for higher ed, etc. This is not inherently racist. So let's add a second factor. As a lower-income group, blacks tend to both qualify for and need financial aid at greater rates then whites. This is not racist in and of itself. I'm sure we could have an interesting debate on whether black low income is caused by racism, but for the sake4 of keeping the argument focused I won't argue that point. But even assuming it's not racist, it does mean that getting caught with weed is statistically more likely to doom a black kid to a life of GED-level jobs then a white kid.
Then consider the NYPD's policy of stop-and-frisk. Several years their stop-and-frisks of black men in the 18-24 age bracket were greater then the population of black men in that bracket. This meant that 100% of black potheads were ineligible for financial aid because they all got caught. probably more then once, because a) you're likely to act scared if you've been caught with weed by the cops once, and gone through the wringer, and a cop walks by (which is suspicious, and can be made to look like probable cause on the stop-and-frisk paperwork), and b) if a cop has brought you in for pot once, then the whole damn precinct knows that if they need a pot arrest to make their numbers frisking your ass would be a good idea.
De Blasio's stopped stop-and-frisk, so the current crop of High Schoolers should (in theory) be fine. But Police Officers nation-wide are under pressure to produce numbers, and they know they can get away with a lot of shit if they restrict it to black kids who dress a certain way, because their daddy is highly unlikely to have lawyer-money.
Now how do you detect that little nightmare I mentioned is playing out? One way is to see the employment figures of companies that hire pretty much 100% college grads. Companies like Apple. Which you know hire very few black people because you went to their campus in Cupertino. Then you give Tim Cook bad press, until he throws some money at the problem (minimum a six-figure donation to create a computer lab in a poor black neighborhood school), and you use that victory over a guy with more money then most states to intimidate Congress into doing something about the problem. Perhaps a jurisdiction that's routinely convicting black kids of these crimes at a much higher rate then white get6s the Ferguson treatment.
I really hate to be the one who breaks this to you, but affirmative action is the reason your daughter has a chance to get into Harvard.
I can say this conclusively because your name is Morris, not Chan. If they let people into Harvard purely on the merits, then no white people at all would ever get in because when white people hear a fifth grader ask "Mommy can I skip a grade in science?" they don't go "Thank God! She's finally showing some fucking ambition!" They think "Fuck! If I let her do this she'll try to skip a grade, her social development will be stunted, she'll be too small to make the basketball team, and she'll kill herself before she hits legal drinking age!"
Literally the only things she has going for her on her application are a) she's female, and b) they'll be tired of admitting Asians with 2400 SATs, 4.7 GPAs, and six courses to transfer in from the local community college.
It always stuns me that white guys (and they're almost always guys) think that the Affirmative Action programs implemented by Nixon, years before most of them were born, are still in place, with no changes whatsoever. It's like dude, do you have any idea how many Supreme Court decisions have been issued since then?
Except you're not. Negro (aka black which is really a color and not a race) is a race. Mexican isn't. Hispanic isn't. Hispanic is an ethnicity. They're really white people.
Most of them aren't. Mostly they're Mestizo, White Mexicans are a much smaller group.
Measuring either is an extremely difficult process, because Mexicans don't actually give a shit about race (the entire concept is basically a delusion invented by us White Americans to explain why we were treating certain immigrants worse then others, justify slavery, etc.), so there's no government statistic on the issue, and there's no uniform definition of Mestizo. Mexicans define themselves by culture, so Indigenous Mexican who use their natrive language are very well defined, but if one of them assimilates to the Spanish-stanard of Mexico, he'd probably be counted as a Mestizo.
So you entered the workforce in the mid 2000s, when it was $5.15, and are unhappy it got up to $7.25. Your 25% raise is probably the result of 2%ish raises over a period of roughly a decade.
Meanwhile the "40% rise" number is pretty much entirely a result of Congress ignoring poor people?
What happens is that inflation goes up. Since the minimum wage does not go up, it's buying power is reduced. Then every decade or two Congress has to go back and update the minimum wage to take into account the full decade's worth of inflation. They generally don;t make up for all of it, sop the actual buying power of the $7.25 minimum wage is less then the 1968 version ($8.24 in 2014 dollars). Heck, it would take an 8% jump to make up for inflation since 2009.
But don't worry. In 5 to 10 years they'll do another 25% raise of it, not index the new number to inflation to inflation, piss off a bunch of people who didn't get 25% raises that year (and don't realize that minimum wage earners hadn't gotten a Federal raise since 2009), and generally turn what should be a low-drama automatic process into a high-drama, high-BS debate about the Future of the Republic.
One of the things I loved about Ohio's one-term Governor Ted Strickland is that he linked his minimum wage hike to inflation, so that instead of being an opportunity for politicians to pretentiously pontificate, it just kinda happens.
He lost two good people. He's having to replace them, which is a pain because now everybody wants the gig. I suspect he was hiring through his church network or something like that before, so he didn't have to figure out whether the random applicant from three states away was lying on his resume or not.
He's also got loads of new business. Which is great in the next-year-term, but not great now because he has to spend money to get the accounts set up before they producing. And also makes the hiring problem much more acute.
His third problem is that his brother is suing him for a share of the profits. He probably needs to be both paid off, and bought out.
You'll note that all these problems are easily solvable by a simple combination of a) cash, and b) sensible hiring practices (ie: new hires go to probation, and if they don't produce quickly they get replaced quickly). The cash should be trivial to get in the form of a small business loan, because he can show the bank he has the revenue to pay it all back.
His main problem is that he's got too many customers and not enough people. In particular a couple of key people could not emotionally handle making near the same wage as their colleagues. But if he's overpaying at $70k he should be able to get the best people, assuming market theory is correct. It may take him a year or three, and he's probably gonna have to be a real Nazi about firing people who don't perform to metrics, but according to market theory he who pays the most has the first choice in potential employees.
This is exactly the problem every business ever has wanted to have.
His secondary problem is his brother (a 30% shareholder) is suing him. Which will cost money to deal with.
Both can be easily solved by a business loan. Which should be trivial to get, because he's got more customers, which means he can show that he'll be able to pay it back.
Translation: I got paid more because I negotiated with the boss better, and you have to believe I deserved it because on the internet nobody would be lying about being productive.
Long-term it's going to work out quite well for him. One of the major problems the article cites is that his customer-base is growing leaps and bounds, but he can't start making money from a new customer for a year-and-a-half or so. Other problems are that some of his higher-paid employees quit, and his brother/minority shareholder is suing him for wasting the company's money. The extra customers problem isn't really a problem, the employees can be replaced (probably by better people, because with this kind of press a lot of very good people looking for work in the Pacific Northwest will be sending him a resume), and the brother's lawsuit can be settled so the money from the new customers can start rolling in.
Which means any bank would be very smart to lend him whatever he needs, at a very competitive interest rate.
There is a very large untapped market of people who would prefer to give their money solely to companies that don't treat their employees like a cost center, and this company is tapping that.
Keep in mind that he is paying. If he thought you were worth more then $70k you got more then $70k. If he thought you were worth less then $70k he simply wouldn't hire you. I suspect that if you come to his business in 10 years times he'll have a lot of really really good direct employees, quite a few contractors doing unskilled work,and a whole lot of extra business because this is really good press.
BTW, your experience in Tech, with an office full of people who all make wildly differing amounts based largely on how good they were at negotiating their initial salary, is not typical in America. I work in retail. 10 years ago they paid people decent wages, and had an actual raises budget. Now they start at $9 ($9.25 if you negotiate), and give you $0.25. As a result pretty much the only people who make actual money are those who hired in a long time ago, or hired in under a special program (our store, for example, has two guys making $19-25 because they were Master Electricians hired into retail).
Colonel (O-6) in 10 years? More like a Major (O-4). If you're lucky. Most officers come in at O-1 (Second Lieutenant, for the branches with Colonels), two years later they get O-2 (Fist Lieutenant), in year four there's a promotion board that makes 90% of the O-2s into O-3 (Captain). Roughly 6 years after that (so pretty much exactly on the day of the 10 years) there's another promotion board, and 80% of the O-3s from that particular year get to O-4. Dates can change depending on what you're doing precisely (for example, an MD or JD brought into the Medical or JAG corps would start at O-3, and they might be to O-5 by year 10; during the wars the Army needed a lot more O-2s and O-3s with combat experience pronto so the O-1 to O-2 date was reduced to 1.5 years for combat branches, etc.).
An actual Colonel with 10 years experience would actually have a monthly pay rate of $7,623.30, plus a tax-free housing allowance, bonuses for specialties, probably some re-upping money, a real retirement with a defined benefit pension, etc.; and would probably be making the equivalent of the low six figures.
Which is roughly 50% more then the $70k minimum this CEO proposed. And remember that's a minimum. Everybody who made more then $70k did not have their compensation changed at all. So the analogy is probably more that at Gravity a buck private makes as much as an O-3 Captain with six years experience.
What was interesting to me was that it's apparently only 65 pence per license (£1.3 million for 2 million licenses). At 200 per staff member that means each staff member has approximately £130 worth of Oracle installed on their machines, which is $200 US given the exchange rate in the summary. I've never bought commercial database software, but $200 per user does not seem like that much.
It's not nothing, but in a department with a £2 Billion+ budget £1.3 Million is a rounding error.
If retirement plans are so easy to understand please explain to me why, precisely, Congress felt the need to create a) IRAs, b) 401ks, c) 403bs, and d) 457s. I can tell you precisely which groups each if those three plans applies to, but damned if I can figure out why the Federal tax treatment for those three groups is so different you need three separate sections of the IRC. Wouldn't a single section do, and much reduce the potential for confusion, while at the same time severely reducing people's need for things like tax lawyers and my other job at H and R Block?
What happened was these guys quit their jobs to come to Home Depot, so the old company cashed out their 401ks, and handed them checks. They may (or may not have) have been told to roll over the money into another qualified account, but as working class guys that particular turn of phrase is impenetrable jargon. You might as well talk to them in Klingon as in lawyer-approved legal language. All they know is they got a check with their name on it, and in almost every case but this one that means you have money to spend.
One of them did have a tax guy, and the tax guy was fully capable of speaking normal people English, but by the time this little talk happened the 60 days were over.
BTW, the fact you're talking about "borrowing against" it shows how little clue you have what life is like for people who think $15 an hour is a massive wage. Nobody at my store would even think that "borrowing against" a retirement account was a thing. Most of them don't know what the money going into their account is invested in. They know they save for retirement, so they talked to the HR lady to have some money taken out to save for retirement. They picked an option, and their money will go into that option until either a) they really need the money, or b) they retire and start taking distributions. If a) happens they'll take the money out (like I said, "borrowing against the account" is a concept they do not know exists), not know that they have to tell the administrator they intend to use it to pay for cancer treatments, and then I (my other job is H and R Block) will have to fill out the 5329 to explain to the IRS that the money was used for cancer and not a Vegas getaway.
Americans are so predictable. Somebody complains some ridiculously intricate policy set up by the US Congress is too complicated for people who, unlike members of the US Congress, are not upper-middle-class Anglos, and they say a) it's their own damn fault for not being upper-middle-class Anglos, and b) we need to reform the education system.
Well, my fine upper-middle-class friend, everyone has to use the retirement system. It is not an option. Legal Mexicans, illegal Mexicans, people who are actually mentally handicapped, your mother, everyone. This implies that a system designed with 8 different plan types (IRA, 401k, 403b, and 457; all of which also come in Roth varieties), most of which I cannot quite articulate the difference between despite having an 8-hour class on the tax implications of individual retirement accounts this Saturday, is probably too damn complex.
As for the education system, these guys are Baby Boomers. 401ks were not legalized until '78, and not "discovered" by the private sector until 1980. They were out of the school system before the rules existed. Relying on shit people learn when they're 17 to guide their retirement decisions when they're 67 is not a terribly wise plan.
You're exaggerating the cost of firing. And to be frank you;re delusional if you think "protected class" means protected from being fired for cause.
My retail store just switched managers, and the new guy decided to do the "get rid of the dead-weight" thing. Black women did worse then anyone else, probably because they have family obligations at home which makes Clopenings more difficult.
Literally the only guy who benefitted from being in a protected class is a guy who zips around on an electric wheelchair.
I'd assume he's referring to the fact that Executives are compensated largely in stock, and 401ks mean a lot more people own stock. That's another way to say demand for stock will be higher. Since lots of employees will also make a point of owning their own company stock, that means that demand for the stock of a corporation that has lots of 401ks will be higher.
Higher demand means higher stock price, means higher Executive Compensation.
It's much worse if you're not financially literate.
I work retail, at Home Depot. And some of my coworkers who actually have very good brains (one is a plumber), have made the interesting mistake of quitting their previous jobs, taking the cash from their 401k, and then not rolling it over to a new 401k within the 60 day period, which led to them a) paying full income tax on it, and b) paying a 10% penalty. One found out from his tax guy before he spent it, so he ended up with enough to pay off his house note and not much else; the plumber is still paying off the IRS.
This is a whole lot more complicated then operating a pension, and there's nobody you can call from your Union (who a) knows you personally because you worked together, and b) probably has a long history of dealing with the issues of people like you and your pension system) to talk to when you get confused.
The Russian official allegedly proposing all this is, Vladimir Yakunin, is under US Sanctions for the Ukraine/Crimea mess. Moreover it would cost Trillion$, during a time when they don't have $10 Billion to upgrade their air force to their latest fighter: the PAK-FA.
I will not be surprised to find out this is somebody at the Siberian Times idea of a practical joke.
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Depends on the time period.
Immediately prior to the Civil War they actually bullied states into handing free black citizens over to southern slave-catchers.
(1% black in a country that is 12% black)
The question is, what percentage of computer science graduates are black. I can't believe that there are large numbers of unemployed black software developers.
Then the question is why?
If you click on the links above it specifically mentions that the NSF put out a grant to encourage black boys into the field, but the grantee did a marketing study which convinced them that black boys were just as interested in computer science as anyone else, and they should use their $Million to get girls of all races and incomes into the field.
I suspect the reason is a combination of hyper-aggrssive policing in black communities resulting in a lot more black boys (particularly the marijuana users) having criminal convictions that make college impossible, lower-average-incomes meaning college is difficult, overall lower education levels so mom has no clue what to do if the kid flunks out after a semester, and a complete lack of big Desktop computers in the lives of the black working class. Whether this analysis is correct, if so which of the four problems should be solved by government, and at which level, ir probably a pretty important debate to have.
If you have a report from every damn tech company saying "we're 1% black" you might be able to start that debate in Congress, and might get them to solve some of the problems. This is particularly true if somebody holds out, so you can keep the debate hot in the media for awhile.
How the hell is it the job of the governement to tell private companies who they should hire?
So if a private company refuses to hire you because it has enough white guys you don't want the government to intervene?
BTW, I really want you to say they wouldn't do that. Because a quick google will reveal more cases of white men winning discrimination claims then any other group.
I don't think you understand the definition of Socialist. Actual Socialists ended up in Dachau, not the government.
The only people who care about this data just want to use it to harangue Apple for not conforming to some predetermined standard of workforce racial distribution.
Close. The part that's predetermined is "Apple isn't hiring enough minorities." The actual ratio or raw numbers are irrelevant. I hate Apple as much as anyone, but this is the government shaking them down.
Reread the post. This is the Congressional Black Caucus.
A Caucus is not the government. It has no Executive authority. It has Legislative authority to the extent it can win vote in the House, and they aren't likely to convince Boehner to allow a vote on this in the House.
The problem here is that the US System is so convoluted and iterative that one racist asshole can fuck things up for an entire race, and literally the only way you have to verify that shit is collecting data on race and fixing it post hoc.
For example, in the US it is pretty much impossible to give a convicted drug offender financial aid. Same with school loans, income tax credits for higher ed, etc. This is not inherently racist. So let's add a second factor. As a lower-income group, blacks tend to both qualify for and need financial aid at greater rates then whites. This is not racist in and of itself. I'm sure we could have an interesting debate on whether black low income is caused by racism, but for the sake4 of keeping the argument focused I won't argue that point. But even assuming it's not racist, it does mean that getting caught with weed is statistically more likely to doom a black kid to a life of GED-level jobs then a white kid.
Then consider the NYPD's policy of stop-and-frisk. Several years their stop-and-frisks of black men in the 18-24 age bracket were greater then the population of black men in that bracket. This meant that 100% of black potheads were ineligible for financial aid because they all got caught. probably more then once, because a) you're likely to act scared if you've been caught with weed by the cops once, and gone through the wringer, and a cop walks by (which is suspicious, and can be made to look like probable cause on the stop-and-frisk paperwork), and b) if a cop has brought you in for pot once, then the whole damn precinct knows that if they need a pot arrest to make their numbers frisking your ass would be a good idea.
De Blasio's stopped stop-and-frisk, so the current crop of High Schoolers should (in theory) be fine. But Police Officers nation-wide are under pressure to produce numbers, and they know they can get away with a lot of shit if they restrict it to black kids who dress a certain way, because their daddy is highly unlikely to have lawyer-money.
Now how do you detect that little nightmare I mentioned is playing out? One way is to see the employment figures of companies that hire pretty much 100% college grads. Companies like Apple. Which you know hire very few black people because you went to their campus in Cupertino. Then you give Tim Cook bad press, until he throws some money at the problem (minimum a six-figure donation to create a computer lab in a poor black neighborhood school), and you use that victory over a guy with more money then most states to intimidate Congress into doing something about the problem. Perhaps a jurisdiction that's routinely convicting black kids of these crimes at a much higher rate then white get6s the Ferguson treatment.
I really hate to be the one who breaks this to you, but affirmative action is the reason your daughter has a chance to get into Harvard.
I can say this conclusively because your name is Morris, not Chan. If they let people into Harvard purely on the merits, then no white people at all would ever get in because when white people hear a fifth grader ask "Mommy can I skip a grade in science?" they don't go "Thank God! She's finally showing some fucking ambition!" They think "Fuck! If I let her do this she'll try to skip a grade, her social development will be stunted, she'll be too small to make the basketball team, and she'll kill herself before she hits legal drinking age!"
Literally the only things she has going for her on her application are a) she's female, and b) they'll be tired of admitting Asians with 2400 SATs, 4.7 GPAs, and six courses to transfer in from the local community college.
It always stuns me that white guys (and they're almost always guys) think that the Affirmative Action programs implemented by Nixon, years before most of them were born, are still in place, with no changes whatsoever. It's like dude, do you have any idea how many Supreme Court decisions have been issued since then?
Except you're not. Negro (aka black which is really a color and not a race) is a race. Mexican isn't. Hispanic isn't. Hispanic is an ethnicity. They're really white people.
Most of them aren't. Mostly they're Mestizo, White Mexicans are a much smaller group.
Measuring either is an extremely difficult process, because Mexicans don't actually give a shit about race (the entire concept is basically a delusion invented by us White Americans to explain why we were treating certain immigrants worse then others, justify slavery, etc.), so there's no government statistic on the issue, and there's no uniform definition of Mestizo. Mexicans define themselves by culture, so Indigenous Mexican who use their natrive language are very well defined, but if one of them assimilates to the Spanish-stanard of Mexico, he'd probably be counted as a Mestizo.
So you entered the workforce in the mid 2000s, when it was $5.15, and are unhappy it got up to $7.25. Your 25% raise is probably the result of 2%ish raises over a period of roughly a decade.
Meanwhile the "40% rise" number is pretty much entirely a result of Congress ignoring poor people?
What happens is that inflation goes up. Since the minimum wage does not go up, it's buying power is reduced. Then every decade or two Congress has to go back and update the minimum wage to take into account the full decade's worth of inflation. They generally don;t make up for all of it, sop the actual buying power of the $7.25 minimum wage is less then the 1968 version ($8.24 in 2014 dollars). Heck, it would take an 8% jump to make up for inflation since 2009.
But don't worry. In 5 to 10 years they'll do another 25% raise of it, not index the new number to inflation to inflation, piss off a bunch of people who didn't get 25% raises that year (and don't realize that minimum wage earners hadn't gotten a Federal raise since 2009), and generally turn what should be a low-drama automatic process into a high-drama, high-BS debate about the Future of the Republic.
One of the things I loved about Ohio's one-term Governor Ted Strickland is that he linked his minimum wage hike to inflation, so that instead of being an opportunity for politicians to pretentiously pontificate, it just kinda happens.
You've got good karma, so +5 only means three people liked your post.
And it's not hard to get people to like a post calling Atlas Shrugged a poorly-written, contrived, overly-long mess.
Read the article.
He lost two good people. He's having to replace them, which is a pain because now everybody wants the gig. I suspect he was hiring through his church network or something like that before, so he didn't have to figure out whether the random applicant from three states away was lying on his resume or not.
He's also got loads of new business. Which is great in the next-year-term, but not great now because he has to spend money to get the accounts set up before they producing. And also makes the hiring problem much more acute.
His third problem is that his brother is suing him for a share of the profits. He probably needs to be both paid off, and bought out.
You'll note that all these problems are easily solvable by a simple combination of a) cash, and b) sensible hiring practices (ie: new hires go to probation, and if they don't produce quickly they get replaced quickly). The cash should be trivial to get in the form of a small business loan, because he can show the bank he has the revenue to pay it all back.
Reread the article.
His main problem is that he's got too many customers and not enough people. In particular a couple of key people could not emotionally handle making near the same wage as their colleagues. But if he's overpaying at $70k he should be able to get the best people, assuming market theory is correct. It may take him a year or three, and he's probably gonna have to be a real Nazi about firing people who don't perform to metrics, but according to market theory he who pays the most has the first choice in potential employees.
This is exactly the problem every business ever has wanted to have.
His secondary problem is his brother (a 30% shareholder) is suing him. Which will cost money to deal with.
Both can be easily solved by a business loan. Which should be trivial to get, because he's got more customers, which means he can show that he'll be able to pay it back.
Translation:
I got paid more because I negotiated with the boss better, and you have to believe I deserved it because on the internet nobody would be lying about being productive.
It's not.
Business is up. Profits aren't, because apparently it takes awhile for new payment processing accounts to pan out.
But all this is apparently great publicity, and he gets a bonus nice warm feeling from paying all his people enough to be happy.
Long-term it's going to work out quite well for him. One of the major problems the article cites is that his customer-base is growing leaps and bounds, but he can't start making money from a new customer for a year-and-a-half or so. Other problems are that some of his higher-paid employees quit, and his brother/minority shareholder is suing him for wasting the company's money. The extra customers problem isn't really a problem, the employees can be replaced (probably by better people, because with this kind of press a lot of very good people looking for work in the Pacific Northwest will be sending him a resume), and the brother's lawsuit can be settled so the money from the new customers can start rolling in.
Which means any bank would be very smart to lend him whatever he needs, at a very competitive interest rate.
There is a very large untapped market of people who would prefer to give their money solely to companies that don't treat their employees like a cost center, and this company is tapping that.
Keep in mind that he is paying. If he thought you were worth more then $70k you got more then $70k. If he thought you were worth less then $70k he simply wouldn't hire you. I suspect that if you come to his business in 10 years times he'll have a lot of really really good direct employees, quite a few contractors doing unskilled work,and a whole lot of extra business because this is really good press.
BTW, your experience in Tech, with an office full of people who all make wildly differing amounts based largely on how good they were at negotiating their initial salary, is not typical in America. I work in retail. 10 years ago they paid people decent wages, and had an actual raises budget. Now they start at $9 ($9.25 if you negotiate), and give you $0.25. As a result pretty much the only people who make actual money are those who hired in a long time ago, or hired in under a special program (our store, for example, has two guys making $19-25 because they were Master Electricians hired into retail).
Colonel (O-6) in 10 years? More like a Major (O-4). If you're lucky. Most officers come in at O-1 (Second Lieutenant, for the branches with Colonels), two years later they get O-2 (Fist Lieutenant), in year four there's a promotion board that makes 90% of the O-2s into O-3 (Captain). Roughly 6 years after that (so pretty much exactly on the day of the 10 years) there's another promotion board, and 80% of the O-3s from that particular year get to O-4. Dates can change depending on what you're doing precisely (for example, an MD or JD brought into the Medical or JAG corps would start at O-3, and they might be to O-5 by year 10; during the wars the Army needed a lot more O-2s and O-3s with combat experience pronto so the O-1 to O-2 date was reduced to 1.5 years for combat branches, etc.).
An actual Colonel with 10 years experience would actually have a monthly pay rate of $7,623.30, plus a tax-free housing allowance, bonuses for specialties, probably some re-upping money, a real retirement with a defined benefit pension, etc.; and would probably be making the equivalent of the low six figures.
Which is roughly 50% more then the $70k minimum this CEO proposed. And remember that's a minimum. Everybody who made more then $70k did not have their compensation changed at all. So the analogy is probably more that at Gravity a buck private makes as much as an O-3 Captain with six years experience.
What was interesting to me was that it's apparently only 65 pence per license (£1.3 million for 2 million licenses). At 200 per staff member that means each staff member has approximately £130 worth of Oracle installed on their machines, which is $200 US given the exchange rate in the summary. I've never bought commercial database software, but $200 per user does not seem like that much.
It's not nothing, but in a department with a £2 Billion+ budget £1.3 Million is a rounding error.
If retirement plans are so easy to understand please explain to me why, precisely, Congress felt the need to create a) IRAs, b) 401ks, c) 403bs, and d) 457s. I can tell you precisely which groups each if those three plans applies to, but damned if I can figure out why the Federal tax treatment for those three groups is so different you need three separate sections of the IRC. Wouldn't a single section do, and much reduce the potential for confusion, while at the same time severely reducing people's need for things like tax lawyers and my other job at H and R Block?
Who said anything about dipped into?
What happened was these guys quit their jobs to come to Home Depot, so the old company cashed out their 401ks, and handed them checks. They may (or may not have) have been told to roll over the money into another qualified account, but as working class guys that particular turn of phrase is impenetrable jargon. You might as well talk to them in Klingon as in lawyer-approved legal language. All they know is they got a check with their name on it, and in almost every case but this one that means you have money to spend.
One of them did have a tax guy, and the tax guy was fully capable of speaking normal people English, but by the time this little talk happened the 60 days were over.
BTW, the fact you're talking about "borrowing against" it shows how little clue you have what life is like for people who think $15 an hour is a massive wage. Nobody at my store would even think that "borrowing against" a retirement account was a thing. Most of them don't know what the money going into their account is invested in. They know they save for retirement, so they talked to the HR lady to have some money taken out to save for retirement. They picked an option, and their money will go into that option until either a) they really need the money, or b) they retire and start taking distributions. If a) happens they'll take the money out (like I said, "borrowing against the account" is a concept they do not know exists), not know that they have to tell the administrator they intend to use it to pay for cancer treatments, and then I (my other job is H and R Block) will have to fill out the 5329 to explain to the IRS that the money was used for cancer and not a Vegas getaway.
Americans are so predictable. Somebody complains some ridiculously intricate policy set up by the US Congress is too complicated for people who, unlike members of the US Congress, are not upper-middle-class Anglos, and they say a) it's their own damn fault for not being upper-middle-class Anglos, and b) we need to reform the education system.
Well, my fine upper-middle-class friend, everyone has to use the retirement system. It is not an option. Legal Mexicans, illegal Mexicans, people who are actually mentally handicapped, your mother, everyone. This implies that a system designed with 8 different plan types (IRA, 401k, 403b, and 457; all of which also come in Roth varieties), most of which I cannot quite articulate the difference between despite having an 8-hour class on the tax implications of individual retirement accounts this Saturday, is probably too damn complex.
As for the education system, these guys are Baby Boomers. 401ks were not legalized until '78, and not "discovered" by the private sector until 1980. They were out of the school system before the rules existed. Relying on shit people learn when they're 17 to guide their retirement decisions when they're 67 is not a terribly wise plan.
You're exaggerating the cost of firing. And to be frank you;re delusional if you think "protected class" means protected from being fired for cause.
My retail store just switched managers, and the new guy decided to do the "get rid of the dead-weight" thing. Black women did worse then anyone else, probably because they have family obligations at home which makes Clopenings more difficult.
Literally the only guy who benefitted from being in a protected class is a guy who zips around on an electric wheelchair.
I'd assume he's referring to the fact that Executives are compensated largely in stock, and 401ks mean a lot more people own stock. That's another way to say demand for stock will be higher. Since lots of employees will also make a point of owning their own company stock, that means that demand for the stock of a corporation that has lots of 401ks will be higher.
Higher demand means higher stock price, means higher Executive Compensation.
It's much worse if you're not financially literate.
I work retail, at Home Depot. And some of my coworkers who actually have very good brains (one is a plumber), have made the interesting mistake of quitting their previous jobs, taking the cash from their 401k, and then not rolling it over to a new 401k within the 60 day period, which led to them a) paying full income tax on it, and b) paying a 10% penalty. One found out from his tax guy before he spent it, so he ended up with enough to pay off his house note and not much else; the plumber is still paying off the IRS.
This is a whole lot more complicated then operating a pension, and there's nobody you can call from your Union (who a) knows you personally because you worked together, and b) probably has a long history of dealing with the issues of people like you and your pension system) to talk to when you get confused.
The Russian official allegedly proposing all this is, Vladimir Yakunin, is under US Sanctions for the Ukraine/Crimea mess. Moreover it would cost Trillion$, during a time when they don't have $10 Billion to upgrade their air force to their latest fighter: the PAK-FA.
I will not be surprised to find out this is somebody at the Siberian Times idea of a practical joke.