My mom and one close coworker have went through this in the past couple years, and in both cases they started a dialogue about this years before they were ready for retirement. Don't fool yourself into thinking that your employer hasn't already thought about the fact that a key employee is in his 60's. The best chance you have for this to work out in your favor is to open a dialogue with your employer.
Sure your employer could screw you over, but he could also hire someone in the next few months to cover his ass even though you intended on working a few more years. Unless you have an absolutely horrible relationship with your boss, this could likely be solved with a little communication.
People may be more willing to fool machines, but will they be as able to fool machines in the near future? Ringing up honeycrisp apples as java apples is easy enough now, but what about when the AI saw you picking out honeycrisp apples? It doesn't even have to be perfect, just good enough to flag you as suspicious so one of the few remaining employees can verify.
My guess is that these automated systems will be much better at reducing shrinkage than human employees are in the very near future.
No kidding, people are NOT thinking this stuff through.
People without jobs have no money to spend...
Only as long as income is so tightly coupled with your job. Technologies such are this are likely what will start the process down basic income which is not tied to your job. Or a much more dystopian future if we choose to ignore those who are displaced.
Intel stock price was only this high back in early Nov and has not reached $47 for a long time before that. This week was a good time to sell.
Thinking it is a good time to sell a stock is the same thing as thinking the stock won't keep up with the market for the foreseeable future. If you think the stock will beat the market, then it wouldn't be a good time to sell. If the CEO thinks the stock is at a good time to sell, it is because he doesn't foresee the stock doing much better in the future.
You know that there is a growing amount of evidence that suggests that performance-based compensation for executives leads to *worse* outcomes for companies over the long term, not better, right?
Jensen's agency theory of business was stupid when he spouted it from the lofty halls of Harvard in the mid-70's and it's still wrong today.
The CEO selling his stock is not a good indicator that he will be less motivated, because he still has $11 million in stock and he has stock options worth even more. It is only an indicator of his trust in the company's future success.
Pretty sure his compensation plan includes lots of stock options which will be only worth something if their stock price goes up. So there will still be tons of incentive to drive Intel's business, no worries about that.
Him selling his stock doesn't mean he doesn't have incentive, it just means he doesn't have faith in the company's success. This behavior doesn't indicate he will stop trying, just that he doesn't believe he will be successful (or at least less sure than he was earlier this year).
The other side of the argument is that the best way to diversify your investments is to not own your employer's stock. Because when that stock goes down, you are likely to get fired, so you have lost both paycheck and job.
That is very true advice for nearly any employee, but a CEO is expected to increase a company's value. If the CEO isn't confident enough to risk his own money, how can he expect others to trust his leadership?
Krzanich has sold a significant amount of his stock on regular intervals, but he has been increasing his total shares held by about 100,000 per year for the last two years. This shows an increasing willingness to risk his own money because of his faith in the company he is leading. Now he is reducing his shares held by half. He either became far less risk adverse overnight or he has far less confidence in the stock's ability to climb.
If the bet pays off all the stock options and the incentive pay will trigger and champagne corks will fly in the executive suites.
Didn't he just preemptively sell his stock yesterday?
Yes, Krzanich sold off the maximum amount of stock he could while still following Intel's corporate bylaws, which was about half of his stock. Essentially he now has the minimum skin in the game possible for an Intel CEO. It is the most prominent vote of no confidence that an executive can show towards his company.
I have never really thought of productivity as how many hours of work I was able to fit into the day. It has always been how much output can I get for a given amount of input. Essentially how can I get more done with less effort. I'm not saying that is a better definition, but it is always how I have thought of it.
Same shit as back then. A lot of people with more money than brains find something where they think for some odd reason that will generate money. How? They don't know. They don't understand it. But somehow that's gonna make money.
That is part of it, but mostly it is because they cannot find anything more worthwhile to invest in. Profits are way up but consumer income is not, so there isn't enough demand for investment in traditional sectors. So significant money gets thrown at anything which could be the next big thing, such as AI or crypto-currency. The only other substantive options are to buy back a greater percentage of ownership through stock buy backs or real estate investment.
Just because someone opposes a welfare plan in his city to city budget doesn't mean he has less empathy to the poor, down-trodden ones than the activists for the plan. He may be one Darwinistic libertarian, or he may be a humanist, but pragmatically opposing it due to it bringing undue burden on the city, which will bankrupt the city causing even more hardship to larger set of innocent parties. Though people tend to like putting other people into "categorizes" in broad brush and probably would classifying him under "conservative".
While I believe I see where you are coming from, I have a hard time agreeing with these comments in today's political climate (in the US at least). Income inequality, poverty, social mobility, safety nets, access to health care and education, etc. are so poor in the United States compared to other developed nations that I don't believe anyone who argues against what are considered leftist policies in the US has nearly no empathy for the poor and down-trodden. Perhaps a little sympathy, but not enough to do anything about it.
If your comments were directed towards fiscal conservatives in the EU I could agree with you more, but anyone who is against enhancing funding for programs which assist the poor and even working/middle class in the US has a strong lack of empathy for others. I still consider myself a fiscal moderate, but nearly all of the most "leftist" US politicians are fiscal moderates in my eyes (and in the rest of the world outside of the US's eyes). Liberals in the US may not always be pragmatic, but fiscal conservatives in the US simply lie and/or ignore the research which refutes nearly every claim they make about how to improve an economy and social mobility.
In fairness, people with a lifetime employment (and no opportunity for promotion) don't have the same worry about losing their job, their nice house, and other general loss aversion that GPs were talking about.
Agreed, which is why fear is a much better explanation for why older folks may become more conservative than more experience and wisdom is. That was the contention I was arguing against.
I own my house outright. It is one of nine homes in a small HOA in Miami FL that are worth about $400k to $450k. There are two rented for $3,500 per month wich sounds insaine considering the property value.
That seems like a very reasonable rent for a 450k house. If you had a $0 down mortgage on a $450k house with an HOA in Miami-Dade county your costs would probably be about:
$1600 mortgage interest + $480 property tax + $700 monthly repairs + $420 HOA = $3200 per month. That is a break even cash flow on a house with a 92% occupancy rate. Depending on the HOA rates those rental figures may be a couple hundred more than I would expect but they don't seem outlandish.
I was renting for a long time until a house in the neighborhood came on the market. We did the math and after mortgage, taxes, insurance, and other fees we came up with 300$ less than what we paid in rent.
Every area is different, but on average the math sides with renting being cheaper in most areas. I'm not sure if you factored in home repairs in your calculation, as that is the one that nearly everyone forgets when calculating the difference between renting and buying. For a $300k house that would be around $400 per month when amortized over 30 years, and that figure will rise with inflation. The only part of your home that is an appreciating asset is the land, which for most people is around a third of their home's value. The house I bought lost value from 1998 to 2013 mostly because it had never been significantly renovated over that time. It was very livable but needed $100k in upgrades before it could appraise at the $400k price most similar homes in the area sold for.
It is certainly not true that renting is always cheaper. After the housing crash you could buy foreclosed homes so cheaply that was nearly always cheaper than renting if you could qualify for a mortgage. But in a balanced market owning a home is a luxury item, not a sound investment. Investing in companies is usually the better investment, although that assumes you have the diligence to invest the money you save by renting instead of just spending it. In that case it is a much better idea to buy a house.
No, it's some experience and wisdom [that turns people conservative as they age]
Considering research shows even our supreme justices become more liberal as they age, I would say spending a lot of time having your believes continuously tested in a way that really gives you more experience and wisdom on these topics probably makes you more liberal over time.
Perhaps most people don't actually obtain usable and unbiased experience and wisdom over their lifetime, but instead let fear drive themselves towards conservatism, but it is a big stretch to think thoughtfulness is the cause of that.
As a general rule (an unresearched, unscientific gut-feeling kind of rule!), people do seem to get more conservative as they age. I think it's fear - fear of losing what they have accrued, fear of a lifetime of experience becoming less relevant as they age, and an unwillingness to re-examine things they think they got figured out decades prior.
I don't think becoming more conservative as you age has much to do with changing political views. In fact the only research I have seen who track actual individuals' views over time has shown that supreme court justices become more liberal as they age. (although that may be because they are already older when they become justices) From what I can tell it has more to do with the difference between social and fiscal liberalism and how societies become more socially liberal over time.
I for instance am a social liberal and fiscal moderate. This means in 2017 I clearly lean Democrat. But in 2047 all of today's socially liberal battles will probably have been won. Or at least not nearly as big of issues as they are today. So I will likely be a social and fiscal moderate in my 60's. My views of women's reproductive rights, LGBT issues, and safety net programs will not have changed, it will be society's views on them which have changed.
While I am a proponent of a basic income today, perhaps in 30 years I will be against it going up from $30k/year to $40k. Then I might consider myself a fiscal conservative.
You know, kinda like how 95% of reporters in the beltway are registered democrats and vote democrat.
You would think it would be easy to see that a profession with the goal of keeping people informed and exposing the truth, that also tends to lean strongly to one side of the political spectrum, is highly indicative of which side of the political spectrum aligns closer to the truth.
You are absolutely correct that my math on the profits was off, because I must have thought I already divided by 12 when getting the per month figures. I should have taken more time to check my math. That is still 10x more impactful than CEO salaries, but not as much as I would have thought.
There is no honest debate on whether a single payer system would save an enormous amount of money...
Is that because single payer advocates can't do simple arithmetic?
Although here are you taking a largely irrelevant math mistake and ignoring the more important part of the math I got right.
$1 Trillion per year / 12 months / 125 million households = $667 per month
The wasteful spending caused by profit seeking health insurance companies is still the largest caused of the inflated health care costs in the US.
Wasteful spending caused by how our insurance system works is harder to pin down, but it is clear that this drive for profits caused far more economic damage than just the profits it siphons off to shareholders. The total waste has been estimated by some to be $1 trillion per year That would save each household over $650 per month.
There is no honest debate on whether a single payer system would save an enormous amount of money for tax payers. It's too bad even most progressive politicians think enacting such a system is too politically unfeasible to get behind.
ABC, NBC, CBS, NPR, WAPO, USAToday, Boston Globe, and several dozen others = DNC news network!
Right?
It is surprising how effective it is to ignore the truth enough that nearly every news network spends significant air time pointing out your lies, so that you can then claim nearly every news network is biased against you. I wouldn't have believed it without seeing it, but actually works on people really well.
It's worth considering that the income inequality and centralization of compensation at the top is not only a financial problem. When a company decides to pay their executive 400-1000 times what their typical worker earns that's an implicit statement that the executive has 400+ times the value to add to the organization, and probably more when considering only value of understanding and decision making vs. day-to-day operations. It is explicitly false, that this could be the case on average.
That is a pretty bold statement that the leader of a company cannot add 400x more value to a company than its average worker. While a part of me would prefer to stay an individual contributor, I realized a while ago that management makes most of the decisions which really move the needle at a company. Just as the senior developer architecting an enterprise software platform has a much larger value add than a junior level programmer implementing some user stories, the executives setting corporate strategy and ensuring it is executed well have a much larger role in a company's success than its average workers.
The difference between a good salesman and a bad salesman is maybe a few million in lost sales at most. The difference between a good CEO and a bad one is the difference between Facebook and MySpace. That is obviously an extreme example, but a bad CEO really can cost a company billions.
Most people are not really paid based on their value add to the company. In the case of a CEO, it has more to do with how much a company wants to risk on its most important employee. Generally they want to hire the best person they can convince to take the job. Who wants to save a few million dollars per year when the result could be billions in lost stock valuation? To put it into context, if you are getting a Craniectomy (the riskiest medical procedure I could find on Google) do you want a bargain option or the most expensive specialist you can afford?
It's not how much they draw compared to each person, it's how much they draw in total. It is, in fact, obscene.
Considering this thread was started with the statement: "The reason health care is so costly in the US can be found at the top of the insurance companies.", the only thing that matters is how much they draw compared to each person. For the purposes of this discussion that is. Whether or not their pay is obscene has no bearing on whether or not it is the reason health care is so costly in the US, which is the contention which was being refuted by the post you replied to.
Based on the figures I found here the top 10 highest paid insurance CEO's made $159 million in 2014. That is about $1.30 per household. I don't think health care costs are so high just because of an extra ten cents per month we all pay extra to pay these CEO's.
If I use Amtrust Financial Services (home of the highest paid CEO above) as a model, the entire C-level suite including the CEO made 261% of the CEO's pay. So I'll estimate that the C-level suite at the 10 companies above were paid $415 million in 2014, which is about a quarter per household per month.
If you factor in every C-level executive in every insurance company in the US, I doubt you would come to more than a couple dollars per household per month. That is not why insurance is so expensive. I would still agree that private insurance companies are the number one reason why health care is so expensive in the US but it has far more to do with the stockholders who demand return on investment (gasp, the horror) than it does with obscene CEO pay.
As far as the Fantastic Four goes, apparently FOX leases that from a smaller company that acquired the rights long ago. So they won't be in Avengers 4 or anything.
Any confusion over whether or not Fantastic Four would be part of this deal was put to rest today by Disney. Read the actual press release and you will see Fantastic Four was included in this deal.
Actually Fox doesn't have Fantastic Four, they just have a deal with Constantin Film to produce films under their license. Constantin Film owns the license.
Read the actual press release and you will see Fantastic Four was included in this deal.
Slashdot Mirror
My mom and one close coworker have went through this in the past couple years, and in both cases they started a dialogue about this years before they were ready for retirement. Don't fool yourself into thinking that your employer hasn't already thought about the fact that a key employee is in his 60's. The best chance you have for this to work out in your favor is to open a dialogue with your employer.
Sure your employer could screw you over, but he could also hire someone in the next few months to cover his ass even though you intended on working a few more years. Unless you have an absolutely horrible relationship with your boss, this could likely be solved with a little communication.
People may be more willing to fool machines, but will they be as able to fool machines in the near future? Ringing up honeycrisp apples as java apples is easy enough now, but what about when the AI saw you picking out honeycrisp apples? It doesn't even have to be perfect, just good enough to flag you as suspicious so one of the few remaining employees can verify.
My guess is that these automated systems will be much better at reducing shrinkage than human employees are in the very near future.
No kidding, people are NOT thinking this stuff through.
People without jobs have no money to spend...
Only as long as income is so tightly coupled with your job. Technologies such are this are likely what will start the process down basic income which is not tied to your job. Or a much more dystopian future if we choose to ignore those who are displaced.
Intel stock price was only this high back in early Nov and has not reached $47 for a long time before that. This week was a good time to sell.
Thinking it is a good time to sell a stock is the same thing as thinking the stock won't keep up with the market for the foreseeable future. If you think the stock will beat the market, then it wouldn't be a good time to sell. If the CEO thinks the stock is at a good time to sell, it is because he doesn't foresee the stock doing much better in the future.
You know that there is a growing amount of evidence that suggests that performance-based compensation for executives leads to *worse* outcomes for companies over the long term, not better, right?
Jensen's agency theory of business was stupid when he spouted it from the lofty halls of Harvard in the mid-70's and it's still wrong today.
The CEO selling his stock is not a good indicator that he will be less motivated, because he still has $11 million in stock and he has stock options worth even more. It is only an indicator of his trust in the company's future success.
Pretty sure his compensation plan includes lots of stock options which will be only worth something if their stock price goes up. So there will still be tons of incentive to drive Intel's business, no worries about that.
Him selling his stock doesn't mean he doesn't have incentive, it just means he doesn't have faith in the company's success. This behavior doesn't indicate he will stop trying, just that he doesn't believe he will be successful (or at least less sure than he was earlier this year).
The other side of the argument is that the best way to diversify your investments is to not own your employer's stock. Because when that stock goes down, you are likely to get fired, so you have lost both paycheck and job.
That is very true advice for nearly any employee, but a CEO is expected to increase a company's value. If the CEO isn't confident enough to risk his own money, how can he expect others to trust his leadership?
Krzanich has sold a significant amount of his stock on regular intervals, but he has been increasing his total shares held by about 100,000 per year for the last two years. This shows an increasing willingness to risk his own money because of his faith in the company he is leading. Now he is reducing his shares held by half. He either became far less risk adverse overnight or he has far less confidence in the stock's ability to climb.
If the bet pays off all the stock options and the incentive pay will trigger and champagne corks will fly in the executive suites.
Didn't he just preemptively sell his stock yesterday?
Yes, Krzanich sold off the maximum amount of stock he could while still following Intel's corporate bylaws, which was about half of his stock. Essentially he now has the minimum skin in the game possible for an Intel CEO. It is the most prominent vote of no confidence that an executive can show towards his company.
I have never really thought of productivity as how many hours of work I was able to fit into the day. It has always been how much output can I get for a given amount of input. Essentially how can I get more done with less effort. I'm not saying that is a better definition, but it is always how I have thought of it.
Same shit as back then. A lot of people with more money than brains find something where they think for some odd reason that will generate money. How? They don't know. They don't understand it. But somehow that's gonna make money.
That is part of it, but mostly it is because they cannot find anything more worthwhile to invest in. Profits are way up but consumer income is not, so there isn't enough demand for investment in traditional sectors. So significant money gets thrown at anything which could be the next big thing, such as AI or crypto-currency. The only other substantive options are to buy back a greater percentage of ownership through stock buy backs or real estate investment.
Just because someone opposes a welfare plan in his city to city budget doesn't mean he has less empathy to the poor, down-trodden ones than the activists for the plan. He may be one Darwinistic libertarian, or he may be a humanist, but pragmatically opposing it due to it bringing undue burden on the city, which will bankrupt the city causing even more hardship to larger set of innocent parties. Though people tend to like putting other people into "categorizes" in broad brush and probably would classifying him under "conservative".
While I believe I see where you are coming from, I have a hard time agreeing with these comments in today's political climate (in the US at least). Income inequality, poverty, social mobility, safety nets, access to health care and education, etc. are so poor in the United States compared to other developed nations that I don't believe anyone who argues against what are considered leftist policies in the US has nearly no empathy for the poor and down-trodden. Perhaps a little sympathy, but not enough to do anything about it.
If your comments were directed towards fiscal conservatives in the EU I could agree with you more, but anyone who is against enhancing funding for programs which assist the poor and even working/middle class in the US has a strong lack of empathy for others. I still consider myself a fiscal moderate, but nearly all of the most "leftist" US politicians are fiscal moderates in my eyes (and in the rest of the world outside of the US's eyes). Liberals in the US may not always be pragmatic, but fiscal conservatives in the US simply lie and/or ignore the research which refutes nearly every claim they make about how to improve an economy and social mobility.
Do you think your landlord isn't factoring in home repairs in your rent???
Yes they are, which is why the rent seems high for people who aren't factoring those costs in.
In fairness, people with a lifetime employment (and no opportunity for promotion) don't have the same worry about losing their job, their nice house, and other general loss aversion that GPs were talking about.
Agreed, which is why fear is a much better explanation for why older folks may become more conservative than more experience and wisdom is. That was the contention I was arguing against.
I own my house outright. It is one of nine homes in a small HOA in Miami FL that are worth about $400k to $450k. There are two rented for $3,500 per month wich sounds insaine considering the property value.
That seems like a very reasonable rent for a 450k house. If you had a $0 down mortgage on a $450k house with an HOA in Miami-Dade county your costs would probably be about:
$1600 mortgage interest + $480 property tax + $700 monthly repairs + $420 HOA = $3200 per month. That is a break even cash flow on a house with a 92% occupancy rate. Depending on the HOA rates those rental figures may be a couple hundred more than I would expect but they don't seem outlandish.
I was renting for a long time until a house in the neighborhood came on the market. We did the math and after mortgage, taxes, insurance, and other fees we came up with 300$ less than what we paid in rent.
Every area is different, but on average the math sides with renting being cheaper in most areas. I'm not sure if you factored in home repairs in your calculation, as that is the one that nearly everyone forgets when calculating the difference between renting and buying. For a $300k house that would be around $400 per month when amortized over 30 years, and that figure will rise with inflation. The only part of your home that is an appreciating asset is the land, which for most people is around a third of their home's value. The house I bought lost value from 1998 to 2013 mostly because it had never been significantly renovated over that time. It was very livable but needed $100k in upgrades before it could appraise at the $400k price most similar homes in the area sold for.
It is certainly not true that renting is always cheaper. After the housing crash you could buy foreclosed homes so cheaply that was nearly always cheaper than renting if you could qualify for a mortgage. But in a balanced market owning a home is a luxury item, not a sound investment. Investing in companies is usually the better investment, although that assumes you have the diligence to invest the money you save by renting instead of just spending it. In that case it is a much better idea to buy a house.
No, it's some experience and wisdom [that turns people conservative as they age]
Considering research shows even our supreme justices become more liberal as they age, I would say spending a lot of time having your believes continuously tested in a way that really gives you more experience and wisdom on these topics probably makes you more liberal over time.
Perhaps most people don't actually obtain usable and unbiased experience and wisdom over their lifetime, but instead let fear drive themselves towards conservatism, but it is a big stretch to think thoughtfulness is the cause of that.
As a general rule (an unresearched, unscientific gut-feeling kind of rule!), people do seem to get more conservative as they age. I think it's fear - fear of losing what they have accrued, fear of a lifetime of experience becoming less relevant as they age, and an unwillingness to re-examine things they think they got figured out decades prior.
I don't think becoming more conservative as you age has much to do with changing political views. In fact the only research I have seen who track actual individuals' views over time has shown that supreme court justices become more liberal as they age. (although that may be because they are already older when they become justices) From what I can tell it has more to do with the difference between social and fiscal liberalism and how societies become more socially liberal over time.
I for instance am a social liberal and fiscal moderate. This means in 2017 I clearly lean Democrat. But in 2047 all of today's socially liberal battles will probably have been won. Or at least not nearly as big of issues as they are today. So I will likely be a social and fiscal moderate in my 60's. My views of women's reproductive rights, LGBT issues, and safety net programs will not have changed, it will be society's views on them which have changed.
While I am a proponent of a basic income today, perhaps in 30 years I will be against it going up from $30k/year to $40k. Then I might consider myself a fiscal conservative.
You know, kinda like how 95% of reporters in the beltway are registered democrats and vote democrat.
You would think it would be easy to see that a profession with the goal of keeping people informed and exposing the truth, that also tends to lean strongly to one side of the political spectrum, is highly indicative of which side of the political spectrum aligns closer to the truth.
You are absolutely correct that my math on the profits was off, because I must have thought I already divided by 12 when getting the per month figures. I should have taken more time to check my math. That is still 10x more impactful than CEO salaries, but not as much as I would have thought.
There is no honest debate on whether a single payer system would save an enormous amount of money...
Is that because single payer advocates can't do simple arithmetic?
Although here are you taking a largely irrelevant math mistake and ignoring the more important part of the math I got right.
$1 Trillion per year / 12 months / 125 million households = $667 per month
The wasteful spending caused by profit seeking health insurance companies is still the largest caused of the inflated health care costs in the US.
If we took all the profits away from the investors, how much extra health care could we buy?
The top six health insurers reported $6 billion in adjusted profits for the second quarter of 2017. That was a record quarter, but considering that isn't even all the insurance companies it could be argued that each household would save at least $200 per month on health care costs if not for that profit. That is a far more serious chunk of our health care dollars.
Wasteful spending caused by how our insurance system works is harder to pin down, but it is clear that this drive for profits caused far more economic damage than just the profits it siphons off to shareholders. The total waste has been estimated by some to be $1 trillion per year That would save each household over $650 per month.
There is no honest debate on whether a single payer system would save an enormous amount of money for tax payers. It's too bad even most progressive politicians think enacting such a system is too politically unfeasible to get behind.
Fox news = GOP news network!
So.....
ABC, NBC, CBS, NPR, WAPO, USAToday, Boston Globe, and several dozen others = DNC news network!
Right?
It is surprising how effective it is to ignore the truth enough that nearly every news network spends significant air time pointing out your lies, so that you can then claim nearly every news network is biased against you. I wouldn't have believed it without seeing it, but actually works on people really well.
It's worth considering that the income inequality and centralization of compensation at the top is not only a financial problem. When a company decides to pay their executive 400-1000 times what their typical worker earns that's an implicit statement that the executive has 400+ times the value to add to the organization, and probably more when considering only value of understanding and decision making vs. day-to-day operations. It is explicitly false, that this could be the case on average.
That is a pretty bold statement that the leader of a company cannot add 400x more value to a company than its average worker. While a part of me would prefer to stay an individual contributor, I realized a while ago that management makes most of the decisions which really move the needle at a company. Just as the senior developer architecting an enterprise software platform has a much larger value add than a junior level programmer implementing some user stories, the executives setting corporate strategy and ensuring it is executed well have a much larger role in a company's success than its average workers.
The difference between a good salesman and a bad salesman is maybe a few million in lost sales at most. The difference between a good CEO and a bad one is the difference between Facebook and MySpace. That is obviously an extreme example, but a bad CEO really can cost a company billions.
Most people are not really paid based on their value add to the company. In the case of a CEO, it has more to do with how much a company wants to risk on its most important employee. Generally they want to hire the best person they can convince to take the job. Who wants to save a few million dollars per year when the result could be billions in lost stock valuation? To put it into context, if you are getting a Craniectomy (the riskiest medical procedure I could find on Google) do you want a bargain option or the most expensive specialist you can afford?
It's not how much they draw compared to each person, it's how much they draw in total. It is, in fact, obscene.
Considering this thread was started with the statement: "The reason health care is so costly in the US can be found at the top of the insurance companies.", the only thing that matters is how much they draw compared to each person. For the purposes of this discussion that is. Whether or not their pay is obscene has no bearing on whether or not it is the reason health care is so costly in the US, which is the contention which was being refuted by the post you replied to.
Based on the figures I found here the top 10 highest paid insurance CEO's made $159 million in 2014. That is about $1.30 per household. I don't think health care costs are so high just because of an extra ten cents per month we all pay extra to pay these CEO's.
If I use Amtrust Financial Services (home of the highest paid CEO above) as a model, the entire C-level suite including the CEO made 261% of the CEO's pay. So I'll estimate that the C-level suite at the 10 companies above were paid $415 million in 2014, which is about a quarter per household per month.
If you factor in every C-level executive in every insurance company in the US, I doubt you would come to more than a couple dollars per household per month. That is not why insurance is so expensive. I would still agree that private insurance companies are the number one reason why health care is so expensive in the US but it has far more to do with the stockholders who demand return on investment (gasp, the horror) than it does with obscene CEO pay.
As far as the Fantastic Four goes, apparently FOX leases that from a smaller company that acquired the rights long ago. So they won't be in Avengers 4 or anything.
Any confusion over whether or not Fantastic Four would be part of this deal was put to rest today by Disney. Read the actual press release and you will see Fantastic Four was included in this deal.
Actually Fox doesn't have Fantastic Four, they just have a deal with Constantin Film to produce films under their license. Constantin Film owns the license.
Read the actual press release and you will see Fantastic Four was included in this deal.