Really? You still believe that bullshit propaganda.
Newsflash: Corporations hate the free market. From a business perspective, anything else is much better. If ever a true liberal party came to power and would, say, abolish any and all government subsidies, tax breaks, special excemptions and all that other government "interference" that everyone is so upset about, half of the corporations would file for bancruptcy within a month.
Of course corporations move away from any place that dares to actually charge them something for the infrastructure, education, security and services it provides. If you can get them elsewhere cheaper, it makes business sense to move there. That, exactly, is the "race to the bottom".
But, for some reason, you didn't get my argument one bit and turned it on its head with your troll response.
Right, because it's the government that steals from companies, not companies stealing from the government. Which world do you live in? In mine, companies do everything in their power to not carry their fair share of the burden (via taxes, etc.) while at the same time taking in as many advantages and benefits as possible, including lobbying of representatives to pass laws to get even more favours.
Maybe cities just don't have the right mix of amenities, price, space, parking, and other factors to make them better places to put certain businesses.
Or maybe business doesn't give a fuck about externalities and only wants to maximize its bottom line, no matter what.
The obvious solution is to solve this via costs. Make them pay extra taxes if they put up their headquarters somewhere inconvenient, where it causes trouble to the community (due to traffic, etc.)
Oh wait, all the communities have long lost their spine and are all joined in the race-to-the-bottom competition to attract companies...
Costs are almost always a cover reason. It's what you say when you don't want to put out the real reasons.
For example, Ford almost certainly has an ongoing business relationship with MS, for their office PCs, maybe they use Outlook, etc. - they probably don't want to sour that by saying in public that their car-OS is crap.
I get the impression we've discussed this particular question at least twice before on/. but I'm too lazy to search.
Like every tool, an IDE per se does not make you anything. It doesn't make you better if you're crap and it doesn't make you worse if you're good.
Overreliance however, does make you worse. If you are a good programmer, you can work with or without an IDE and depending on your style and habbits, it might or might not make you a bit faster or productive or reduce errors or whatever. Basically, it comes down to personal preferences - whatever works for you.
However, if you cannot program without using an IDE, then you are a crappy programmer. If you use a tool, that's one thing. If you require a tool (that's not required by the task per se) then your skills are lacking.
I wish you that one of those days you'll write for a small embedded system with a single LED for output, just so you'll understand that it wasn't a waste of time.
Every tool has its use. A true expert knows how to use them all, and picks the one best suited for the task at hand. The $99 does-it-all powertool from the late night shopping channel is the surefire indicator of an amateur.
That is true for photography, any craft, and programming, too.
I've spoken at a couple conferences, and due to that I still get invitations to send in papers to this or that conference about every other month. From the tone of those mails, they sound very much desperate for papers and I'm fairly sure I could pretty up some crap I'd otherwise post to a blog and send it in and it would get published.
I read that piece when it came out... uh... last week or so?
My immediate thought was the subject line. Someone has signed up with the Evil Empire and is now miffed that his friends don't talk to him anymore or something like that.
Look: You can't jump in bed with the mafia and then say you're only the driver. Microsoft is evil and always has been evil and the damage it's done to the world of computing is still current. We would be 10 years in the future without Microsoft. The billions of monopoly rent it has extracted from the market are not paid back yet, and never will because it's in the nature of monopoly rent that the damage done is much higher than the profit gained.
No. You just can't come in, shoot the dog, rape the wife and harm the children, and then put your weapons away, put three books back on the shelf as a symbol of helpfulness and demand we love you.
Especially to understand the difference between a theoretical ability to look at individual data and systematic large-scale data analysis.
You know, one is someone giving you the looks on the street - and the other is 24/7 stalking. As a society, we pretty much agree that one is fine and the other isn't.
If you're instant messaging someone on the company's IM platform on the company's time why the fuck would you have any expectation of any sort of privacy?
Because you're a human being and don't leave your humanity at the door when you show up for work. Yeah, I know that is a strange concept for americans, but in many other parts of the world, it is very much still alive. Employees are also humans - wow, what a revelation.
Your expectation of privacy should certainly be different, but there's no sane reason it should automatically be zero.
Real-world example: In a company I worked for a few years ago I helped write the policy on this very topic. The final agreement was that the company could look into your e-mail and stuff, but only if they went to the workers council (elected representatives of the employees) and made their case. So if they suspected you of wrongdoing, or you were ill and had crazy important documents in your mail or personal folders, the company could look through it - in the presence of someone representing your interests.
The important difference is the same as in real-life criminal cases: With a system like this or the real world "must get a court order first" approach, you are innocent until proven guilty and it requires at least some reasonable suspicion before someone can breach your privacy. In a blanket surveilance environment, we're all guilty, period.
I actually have a small set of passwords I use everywhere. Quite honestly, 90% of the forums, communities, blogs or whatever that I have an account on aren't worth having a different password for. If they get hacked, the password lost, you can post an irritating rant in my name - big deal.
It's all about thinking about the actual risk instead of applying one formula to everything. Yes, my PayPal account has a different password, as does my e-mail or my server account password and my root password - all of those have their own individual passwords not used anywhere else.
But for everything else, I have 3 or 4 passwords that I assign based on context and importance. All the online-games I play have the same password, for example. Go on, break into my LoL account. You can ruin my MMR until I find out, wow, I'm so afraid.
So in sum total I have about 10 passwords, and I can keep them in memory. I have an encrypted textfile (network-shared) where they're stored, just in case I have an accident or something. Since that's just for backup purposes, I have no need for any of the password management tools.
Long term thinking is what makes a majority of those who were not born rich, rich.
Even though I agree with you on the basic, this conclusion is wrong. Many people who share all of the traits you list never get rich. People who think long-term, who work hard and long, who take risks.
The reason is that they are focussed on different things than getting rich. Be it social change, creative or artistic endeavours, personal relationships, scientific curiosity - there are many, many ways to spend your time that society does not reward as well as, say, gambling on random fluctuations of artificial derivates of abstract financial key figure accumulators.
It is also a massive lie that the successful are because they failed and tried again and again. That makes for a good story, but it's wrong. It's a function of selection bias. You never hear of those who fail again and again. You hear about one guy who worked his ass off and got out of the ghetto with his 3rd company - but you don't hear about the 500 other guys who also worked their asses off and did everything else that the one guy did except that they missed the one opportunity or didn't get that one deal, or didn't have that right partner or whatever and they never made it and so nobody ever wrote a news story about them.
Opportunity and people who can see it and are willing to work hard and risk greatly to take advantage of it is what creates wealth. Government programs stifle that and move the money created around.
That is utter and total hogwash, sorry. It's the usual "government equals bad and evil" conspiracy theory.
Heck, the very Internet we're using to have this discussion wouldn't exist without the evil government stifling all the invisible commercial projects and moving some money around into military research.
Again, the free market is good for some things and horrible at others. Google "natural monopolies" for an example you usually learn in Economics 101. There are areas where public (government owned and operated) companies are more efficient than private companies, even on paper.
You really believe that the rich successful people are too stupid to understand what will and what will not make them money. Good luck with that thought process.
I think your mistake lies in one important word in that sentence. Here, I'll highlight it:
You really believe that the rich successful people are too stupid to understand what will and what will not make them money. Good luck with that thought process.
The rich understand to make themselves money. That doesn't mean anyone else or society as a whole profits from them doing so. On the contrary, the money they make is often taken from the rest of us (say, through monopoly rent, tax breaks or the recent financial "crisis").
If you want to improve society as a whole, the rich and their methods are not models to follow, because many of them are unsustainable on a larger scale.
If all jobs need to put out a living wage where will young people get there first jobs?
Uh, that's a non-sequitor. There was a time in this world when the first job could feed a family. Not brilliantly, probably not a home and a car, but you could make do.
And that was not 1357. When my father finished school, potential employers were standing in line in front of the school building to make offers to him and his friends. That was a regular school in a working class district, and it was common all over Germany at that time. They paid quite well, too, because if they didn't, people would go work to those who would. In those days, the market worked to the advantage of the employees, because demand was higher than supply. We don't live in that world anymore, granted. I'm not saying this is how it absolutely has to be, but your argument that it cannot be like this is obviously false because history proves you wrong.
Every study done on past minimum wage raises will show you the number of jobs it costs.
Funny. I live in a country (Germany) which is currently discussing introducing minimum wage since we don't have it at this time. So the topic is hot and lots of material is being published. All the studies I've read about from other european countries show that everywhere lobbyists argued with job loss, and nowhere did any significant job loss manifest. So please show me the sources that prove them all wrong.
You must think like a person that owns a business and what their reactions will be
I own a small business. Here's how I think: The only person I would hire for 10 bucks an hour is someone to mop the floor or clean the windows. Anything that requires any skill whatsoever is worth the money, and the savings you have in hiring someone for $10 instead of $12 are not worth it (that's about $300 a month - if that amount of money breaks me, I'd better file for bancruptcy).
Sure, if we're talking about hiring 100 people, then it adds up, and I could hire 100 for $12 or 120 for $10. However, I could also hire 80 for $15 and they'll probably be more productive, efficient and motivated and get the work of the 100 done.
Cost by itself is never the only factor you consider in a business decision unless you're a complete imbecile or you're answering Business Economics 101 quiz questions.
Giving poor people more money is good and therefore no bad can come of it.
Of course that's nonsense. However, real-world experience shows that if you have money to give away, one extreme works better than the other. Giving it to the rich does not benefit anyone but them in any appreciable way. The "trickle down effect" has been demonstrated to be so tiny that it's practically non-existent. Money given to the poor, however, will almost completely be spent on consumption, meaning it is cycled back into the economy almost instantly, and most of it into small, local business, i.e. other people that need money, too. "trickle up" is very real.
Nothing is perfect. The poor will probably not spend the money in the way that some armchair economist has determined would be optimal, but at least they will spend it.
When you price people that are only worth $8/hr out of the market they do not suddenly just make more money.
You assume that someone who can make $12 at a different job would go burger flipping instead. That is unlikely to happen.
but we have to think clearly before we put restrictions on a market based on what would make me feel like a better human being.
We also have to stop believing the free market is magical and will solve poverty, world hunger, cure cancer and make the girl next door fall in love with us. There are things a free market is great at solving, and there are things it sucks at. Like any tool, apply it to what it's capable of doing.
It sucks at creating a society, because companies can go bust, but we in general are not ok with letting human beings go bust like that.
Nothing the TSA does has anything to do with security.
We know that, the story was old years ago. The real question I don't see asked often enough and answered even less is: What does it have to do with? Why do they do this bullshit, and why does it get more transparent? Why have we reached the part where even regular people begin to understand the TSA is full of it?
Is it just stupidity? Really? While you shouldn't always look for malice, there's also a point where stupidity ceases to be the most likely explanation.
If I own a company and I hire someone I can pay them as much as I want.
Actually, no you can't.
Your company does not exist in a vacuum. It is part of and relies on society. The government, for example, provides laws of commerce that your company could not survive without, and will provide police if anything wants to illegally harm you.
In exchange for the advantages that being part of society brings, it also retains the right to restrict you in some of your decisions. For example, in most countries on the planet, there is a minimum wage - you cannot pay as much as you want, you need to pay at least $x.
Why is it unthinkable to have not only a minimum wage but also a maximum wage, for the same reasons - that it disrupts society to go below/above this limit ?
There's no free CEO market, even if you consider it as a market, it doesn't satisfy most of the requirements for a free market.
no one would take the risk or the very hard work like 70 hour work weeks
You've gotta be kidding. Millions of people work 70+ hours a week for a pittance compared to what these people make.
Doing so would make great talent do something else or not try as hard and everyone looses out.
Yes, that is the problem. Every large company pays $xxx mio. to its CEOs because - drumroll - everyone else does it, too. No single company can break out, because they've all chained themselves in a positive feedback loop. Which is why regulation is needed to make sure everyone complies.
If someone is paid too much the market takes care of that with something called a firing.
Which is total bullshit. Above a certain paygrade, you don't get fired, you get a golden parachute and the next job somewhere else.
You want that cash and job security then you ought to be a better worker and provide greater value. The sky is the limit and the CEO didn't start out like this overnight. It was not luck.
Ok, now I'm not even sure anymore if you are being satirical or not. Of course there's a ton of luck involved. For every Facebook or Apple there's another 10 or 100 companies with the same roots that you never heard about because they went nowhere.
Sure, I understand that sometimes those layoffs boost performance and what not
The later.
I've been through several cycles of acquisition - layoffs - restructuring and as I worked closely with the CEO and HR at the time... can't mention details, but the main reason for layoffs is rarely actual projected performance gains and more often political - like the pressure on the CEO to meet some higher-up corporate key figure. We once laid off workers from the call center even though nothing whatsoever was wrong with them because competitors in the same market had a "better" ratio of agents to customers. No other figure considered. Not quality, cost, time, customer satisfaction. Some corporate clowns had decided that the customers-per-agent ratio mattered.
The one time where the answer to a headline question isn't an automatic "no".
Yes.
Everyone who is paid more than 1000 times what a regular employee in the same company (and same country - to account for cost-of-living differences) makes is earning too much.
I'm an expert in my field, so I feel comfortable charging 10 times what a newbie could. If I had a big name, 20 times may be appropriate. If I'd be in demand and people would fall over themselves to hire me, maybe 50 or 100 times.
But 1000 times? That's just ridiculous. I don't think there' a sane argument for that, no matter how you skin the cat. The only reason CEOs, bankers, etc. take that much home is because they can. The primary argument why large companies pay their CEOs ridiculous amounts of money is that everyone else does it, too. It's a runaway positive feedback loop.
Again, "the odds" aren't as unlikely as you think, given how large the world is. In the words of Tim Minchin: One-in-a-million things happen all the time.
I wish for the bubble to burst, but I don't think it will.
Here's a dark secret of the advertisement industry: Not only are we not the customers of Facebook, but its product, but just the purpose of the advertisement industry is not to sell the products of its customers - it is to sell its customers more advertisement.
The main product of ad agencies are themselves - telling everyone that they need to advertise, and advertise more, and have you seen your competitors? you have to beat them...
So I expect the bubble to continue, because a billion-dollar industry has an interest in it. Not because the companies buying ad space on Facebook really make a profit doing so, but because the ad agencies selling ad space on Facebook do.
Slashdot Mirror
Really? You still believe that bullshit propaganda.
Newsflash: Corporations hate the free market. From a business perspective, anything else is much better. If ever a true liberal party came to power and would, say, abolish any and all government subsidies, tax breaks, special excemptions and all that other government "interference" that everyone is so upset about, half of the corporations would file for bancruptcy within a month.
Of course corporations move away from any place that dares to actually charge them something for the infrastructure, education, security and services it provides. If you can get them elsewhere cheaper, it makes business sense to move there. That, exactly, is the "race to the bottom".
But, for some reason, you didn't get my argument one bit and turned it on its head with your troll response.
Right, because it's the government that steals from companies, not companies stealing from the government. Which world do you live in? In mine, companies do everything in their power to not carry their fair share of the burden (via taxes, etc.) while at the same time taking in as many advantages and benefits as possible, including lobbying of representatives to pass laws to get even more favours.
Maybe cities just don't have the right mix of amenities, price, space, parking, and other factors to make them better places to put certain businesses.
Or maybe business doesn't give a fuck about externalities and only wants to maximize its bottom line, no matter what.
The obvious solution is to solve this via costs. Make them pay extra taxes if they put up their headquarters somewhere inconvenient, where it causes trouble to the community (due to traffic, etc.)
Oh wait, all the communities have long lost their spine and are all joined in the race-to-the-bottom competition to attract companies...
Costs are almost always a cover reason. It's what you say when you don't want to put out the real reasons.
For example, Ford almost certainly has an ongoing business relationship with MS, for their office PCs, maybe they use Outlook, etc. - they probably don't want to sour that by saying in public that their car-OS is crap.
I get the impression we've discussed this particular question at least twice before on /. but I'm too lazy to search.
Like every tool, an IDE per se does not make you anything. It doesn't make you better if you're crap and it doesn't make you worse if you're good.
Overreliance however, does make you worse. If you are a good programmer, you can work with or without an IDE and depending on your style and habbits, it might or might not make you a bit faster or productive or reduce errors or whatever. Basically, it comes down to personal preferences - whatever works for you.
However, if you cannot program without using an IDE, then you are a crappy programmer. If you use a tool, that's one thing. If you require a tool (that's not required by the task per se) then your skills are lacking.
I wish you that one of those days you'll write for a small embedded system with a single LED for output, just so you'll understand that it wasn't a waste of time.
Every tool has its use. A true expert knows how to use them all, and picks the one best suited for the task at hand. The $99 does-it-all powertool from the late night shopping channel is the surefire indicator of an amateur.
That is true for photography, any craft, and programming, too.
This.
I've spoken at a couple conferences, and due to that I still get invitations to send in papers to this or that conference about every other month. From the tone of those mails, they sound very much desperate for papers and I'm fairly sure I could pretty up some crap I'd otherwise post to a blog and send it in and it would get published.
I read that piece when it came out... uh... last week or so?
My immediate thought was the subject line. Someone has signed up with the Evil Empire and is now miffed that his friends don't talk to him anymore or something like that.
Look: You can't jump in bed with the mafia and then say you're only the driver. Microsoft is evil and always has been evil and the damage it's done to the world of computing is still current. We would be 10 years in the future without Microsoft. The billions of monopoly rent it has extracted from the market are not paid back yet, and never will because it's in the nature of monopoly rent that the damage done is much higher than the profit gained.
No. You just can't come in, shoot the dog, rape the wife and harm the children, and then put your weapons away, put three books back on the shelf as a symbol of helpfulness and demand we love you.
I would have expected better from the /. crowd.
Especially to understand the difference between a theoretical ability to look at individual data and systematic large-scale data analysis.
You know, one is someone giving you the looks on the street - and the other is 24/7 stalking. As a society, we pretty much agree that one is fine and the other isn't.
If you're instant messaging someone on the company's IM platform on the company's time why the fuck would you have any expectation of any sort of privacy?
Because you're a human being and don't leave your humanity at the door when you show up for work. Yeah, I know that is a strange concept for americans, but in many other parts of the world, it is very much still alive. Employees are also humans - wow, what a revelation.
Your expectation of privacy should certainly be different, but there's no sane reason it should automatically be zero.
Real-world example: In a company I worked for a few years ago I helped write the policy on this very topic. The final agreement was that the company could look into your e-mail and stuff, but only if they went to the workers council (elected representatives of the employees) and made their case. So if they suspected you of wrongdoing, or you were ill and had crazy important documents in your mail or personal folders, the company could look through it - in the presence of someone representing your interests.
The important difference is the same as in real-life criminal cases: With a system like this or the real world "must get a court order first" approach, you are innocent until proven guilty and it requires at least some reasonable suspicion before someone can breach your privacy. In a blanket surveilance environment, we're all guilty, period.
Preface: I am an IT security professional.
I actually have a small set of passwords I use everywhere. Quite honestly, 90% of the forums, communities, blogs or whatever that I have an account on aren't worth having a different password for. If they get hacked, the password lost, you can post an irritating rant in my name - big deal.
It's all about thinking about the actual risk instead of applying one formula to everything. Yes, my PayPal account has a different password, as does my e-mail or my server account password and my root password - all of those have their own individual passwords not used anywhere else.
But for everything else, I have 3 or 4 passwords that I assign based on context and importance. All the online-games I play have the same password, for example. Go on, break into my LoL account. You can ruin my MMR until I find out, wow, I'm so afraid.
So in sum total I have about 10 passwords, and I can keep them in memory. I have an encrypted textfile (network-shared) where they're stored, just in case I have an accident or something. Since that's just for backup purposes, I have no need for any of the password management tools.
Long term thinking is what makes a majority of those who were not born rich, rich.
Even though I agree with you on the basic, this conclusion is wrong. Many people who share all of the traits you list never get rich. People who think long-term, who work hard and long, who take risks.
The reason is that they are focussed on different things than getting rich. Be it social change, creative or artistic endeavours, personal relationships, scientific curiosity - there are many, many ways to spend your time that society does not reward as well as, say, gambling on random fluctuations of artificial derivates of abstract financial key figure accumulators.
It is also a massive lie that the successful are because they failed and tried again and again. That makes for a good story, but it's wrong. It's a function of selection bias. You never hear of those who fail again and again. You hear about one guy who worked his ass off and got out of the ghetto with his 3rd company - but you don't hear about the 500 other guys who also worked their asses off and did everything else that the one guy did except that they missed the one opportunity or didn't get that one deal, or didn't have that right partner or whatever and they never made it and so nobody ever wrote a news story about them.
Opportunity and people who can see it and are willing to work hard and risk greatly to take advantage of it is what creates wealth. Government programs stifle that and move the money created around.
That is utter and total hogwash, sorry. It's the usual "government equals bad and evil" conspiracy theory.
Heck, the very Internet we're using to have this discussion wouldn't exist without the evil government stifling all the invisible commercial projects and moving some money around into military research.
Again, the free market is good for some things and horrible at others. Google "natural monopolies" for an example you usually learn in Economics 101. There are areas where public (government owned and operated) companies are more efficient than private companies, even on paper.
You really believe that the rich successful people are too stupid to understand what will and what will not make them money. Good luck with that thought process.
I think your mistake lies in one important word in that sentence. Here, I'll highlight it:
You really believe that the rich successful people are too stupid to understand what will and what will not make them money. Good luck with that thought process.
The rich understand to make themselves money. That doesn't mean anyone else or society as a whole profits from them doing so. On the contrary, the money they make is often taken from the rest of us (say, through monopoly rent, tax breaks or the recent financial "crisis").
If you want to improve society as a whole, the rich and their methods are not models to follow, because many of them are unsustainable on a larger scale.
If all jobs need to put out a living wage where will young people get there first jobs?
Uh, that's a non-sequitor. There was a time in this world when the first job could feed a family. Not brilliantly, probably not a home and a car, but you could make do.
And that was not 1357. When my father finished school, potential employers were standing in line in front of the school building to make offers to him and his friends. That was a regular school in a working class district, and it was common all over Germany at that time. They paid quite well, too, because if they didn't, people would go work to those who would. In those days, the market worked to the advantage of the employees, because demand was higher than supply. We don't live in that world anymore, granted. I'm not saying this is how it absolutely has to be, but your argument that it cannot be like this is obviously false because history proves you wrong.
Every study done on past minimum wage raises will show you the number of jobs it costs.
Funny. I live in a country (Germany) which is currently discussing introducing minimum wage since we don't have it at this time. So the topic is hot and lots of material is being published. All the studies I've read about from other european countries show that everywhere lobbyists argued with job loss, and nowhere did any significant job loss manifest. So please show me the sources that prove them all wrong.
You must think like a person that owns a business and what their reactions will be
I own a small business. Here's how I think: The only person I would hire for 10 bucks an hour is someone to mop the floor or clean the windows. Anything that requires any skill whatsoever is worth the money, and the savings you have in hiring someone for $10 instead of $12 are not worth it (that's about $300 a month - if that amount of money breaks me, I'd better file for bancruptcy).
Sure, if we're talking about hiring 100 people, then it adds up, and I could hire 100 for $12 or 120 for $10. However, I could also hire 80 for $15 and they'll probably be more productive, efficient and motivated and get the work of the 100 done.
Cost by itself is never the only factor you consider in a business decision unless you're a complete imbecile or you're answering Business Economics 101 quiz questions.
Giving poor people more money is good and therefore no bad can come of it.
Of course that's nonsense. However, real-world experience shows that if you have money to give away, one extreme works better than the other. Giving it to the rich does not benefit anyone but them in any appreciable way. The "trickle down effect" has been demonstrated to be so tiny that it's practically non-existent. Money given to the poor, however, will almost completely be spent on consumption, meaning it is cycled back into the economy almost instantly, and most of it into small, local business, i.e. other people that need money, too. "trickle up" is very real.
Nothing is perfect. The poor will probably not spend the money in the way that some armchair economist has determined would be optimal, but at least they will spend it.
When you price people that are only worth $8/hr out of the market they do not suddenly just make more money.
You assume that someone who can make $12 at a different job would go burger flipping instead. That is unlikely to happen.
but we have to think clearly before we put restrictions on a market based on what would make me feel like a better human being.
We also have to stop believing the free market is magical and will solve poverty, world hunger, cure cancer and make the girl next door fall in love with us. There are things a free market is great at solving, and there are things it sucks at. Like any tool, apply it to what it's capable of doing.
It sucks at creating a society, because companies can go bust, but we in general are not ok with letting human beings go bust like that.
Nothing the TSA does has anything to do with security.
We know that, the story was old years ago. The real question I don't see asked often enough and answered even less is: What does it have to do with? Why do they do this bullshit, and why does it get more transparent? Why have we reached the part where even regular people begin to understand the TSA is full of it?
Is it just stupidity? Really? While you shouldn't always look for malice, there's also a point where stupidity ceases to be the most likely explanation.
Care to elaborate? Because right now, you are just making a statement with no supporting evidence.
If you need evidence of how valuable it is, merely look at our recent financial crisis when the flow of money froze up.
You mean the crisis caused by bankers?
We should seperate two different kinds of bankers here. The bankers who handle your savings account and give out loans - definitely useful, yes.
The Wall Street investment bankers? Much less sure about them.
If I own a company and I hire someone I can pay them as much as I want.
Actually, no you can't.
Your company does not exist in a vacuum. It is part of and relies on society. The government, for example, provides laws of commerce that your company could not survive without, and will provide police if anything wants to illegally harm you.
In exchange for the advantages that being part of society brings, it also retains the right to restrict you in some of your decisions. For example, in most countries on the planet, there is a minimum wage - you cannot pay as much as you want, you need to pay at least $x.
Why is it unthinkable to have not only a minimum wage but also a maximum wage, for the same reasons - that it disrupts society to go below/above this limit ?
It would distort the free market
There's no free CEO market, even if you consider it as a market, it doesn't satisfy most of the requirements for a free market.
no one would take the risk or the very hard work like 70 hour work weeks
You've gotta be kidding. Millions of people work 70+ hours a week for a pittance compared to what these people make.
Doing so would make great talent do something else or not try as hard and everyone looses out.
Yes, that is the problem. Every large company pays $xxx mio. to its CEOs because - drumroll - everyone else does it, too. No single company can break out, because they've all chained themselves in a positive feedback loop. Which is why regulation is needed to make sure everyone complies.
If someone is paid too much the market takes care of that with something called a firing.
Which is total bullshit. Above a certain paygrade, you don't get fired, you get a golden parachute and the next job somewhere else.
You want that cash and job security then you ought to be a better worker and provide greater value. The sky is the limit and the CEO didn't start out like this overnight. It was not luck.
Ok, now I'm not even sure anymore if you are being satirical or not. Of course there's a ton of luck involved. For every Facebook or Apple there's another 10 or 100 companies with the same roots that you never heard about because they went nowhere.
Sure, I understand that sometimes those layoffs boost performance and what not
The later.
I've been through several cycles of acquisition - layoffs - restructuring and as I worked closely with the CEO and HR at the time... can't mention details, but the main reason for layoffs is rarely actual projected performance gains and more often political - like the pressure on the CEO to meet some higher-up corporate key figure. We once laid off workers from the call center even though nothing whatsoever was wrong with them because competitors in the same market had a "better" ratio of agents to customers. No other figure considered. Not quality, cost, time, customer satisfaction. Some corporate clowns had decided that the customers-per-agent ratio mattered.
The one time where the answer to a headline question isn't an automatic "no".
Yes.
Everyone who is paid more than 1000 times what a regular employee in the same company (and same country - to account for cost-of-living differences) makes is earning too much.
I'm an expert in my field, so I feel comfortable charging 10 times what a newbie could. If I had a big name, 20 times may be appropriate. If I'd be in demand and people would fall over themselves to hire me, maybe 50 or 100 times.
But 1000 times? That's just ridiculous. I don't think there' a sane argument for that, no matter how you skin the cat. The only reason CEOs, bankers, etc. take that much home is because they can. The primary argument why large companies pay their CEOs ridiculous amounts of money is that everyone else does it, too. It's a runaway positive feedback loop.
Again, "the odds" aren't as unlikely as you think, given how large the world is. In the words of Tim Minchin: One-in-a-million things happen all the time.
I wish for the bubble to burst, but I don't think it will.
Here's a dark secret of the advertisement industry: Not only are we not the customers of Facebook, but its product, but just the purpose of the advertisement industry is not to sell the products of its customers - it is to sell its customers more advertisement.
The main product of ad agencies are themselves - telling everyone that they need to advertise, and advertise more, and have you seen your competitors? you have to beat them...
So I expect the bubble to continue, because a billion-dollar industry has an interest in it. Not because the companies buying ad space on Facebook really make a profit doing so, but because the ad agencies selling ad space on Facebook do.
I can't hear the "he started out poor" line anymore.
Yes, one in a million poor people make it. So what?