What we really need is a President who will tackle energy with the same kind of committment that JFK gave us for the space program.
It's not a question of the president, but of the times. Our parents had vision and were looking towards a bright future. With visible progress everywhere around them, the space program matched the dominant meme.
Todays dominant meme is fear. Zombies, terorrists, even global warming itself. We are mostly afraid of the future, not looking forward to it.
My university time included business economics and thus a part on marketing. The ugly truth is that even the advertisement industry has no clue if their crap works or not. Nobody has any reliable numbers, studies are hard to come by and nobody really wants to see the results. An estimate within the industry is that half of all advertisement dollars would've been spent just as well if you had burnt them to heat your home. The problem is that nobody knows which half. So you spend $100k on an advertisement campaign knowing full well that $50k of that is waste, you just can't figure out which so you can't save them.
The reason advertisers are constantly changing the game with new forms of advertisement, more banners, pop up under left right down beyond wherever crap and "new media" is that a huge part of the industry is basically scamming its customers - selling them advertisement that you have no indication of actually providing the value you claim and suspect strongly it doesn't.
There's a lot of monitoring going on, but there is also a strong disconnect - if you ran this campaign last quarter, and your numbers are up 5%, is that due to the campaign? The marketing agency will of course claim it is. But it could be the weather, stock market, economy, some competitor screwing up their campaign or five million other factors.
Advertisement does have an effect, true. But "works" is too strong a word as it suggests a lot more control than is real. And for the past decade or so, one main effect of advertisement has been to saturate the audience and thus reduce its own efficiency. That's why we are getting bombarded with more and more and more of the crap.
WP is a collection, and like all collections reflects the bias of the collectors. Including their pride and egos and and turf-wars and mood and a dozen culture artifacts such as "notability" and deletionism.
The problem is that WP is utterly unscientific, and thus a throwback to dark ages times. The requirement for "citation" is meaningless once you get to stuff like this - astroturfing, PR companies, etc. - there's nothing easier than buying an article in your favor and then "citing" that same article you bought in the WP page.
Let me guess - nothing will come of this. Because large corporations are above the law. Do something similar as a private individual, and you'll be bancrupted by legal proceedings.
Nice world we're living in. Wouldn't really be much of a shame if something happened to it, not anymore.
Nietzsche already wrote it, in his famously aphorism style: It is only thanks to the anarchists that the kings are sitting in their chairs solidly again. (no quote marks, because I cite from memory and it's probably not 100% correct).
That isn't quite true. The US produced the armies that helped end two world wars,
I'll stop at what is definitely true and ignore the parts that can be argued about.
You see, truth is never simple. Yes, the USA stepped in twice when Europe was destroying itself. But was it out of the goodness of its heart? Not likely. Think about what the main geopolitical effect of WW1 and WW2 was.
Yes, that's right. The end of the european nations as global superpowers and the rise of the USA as a superpower. That's not a coincidence. Book hint: "The Rise and Fall of the Great Nations" - excellent little book that'll teach you how closely economy and warfare are related.
Written in an alphabet not invented in the US, on computer technology co-developed in Germany (Zeise), in a language from a european island?
Just because you invented it once doesn't mean you're necessary for it anymore. The civilization that came up with the roman alphabet? Long dead. Arab numerals? Fractured. Writing per se? The way of the Dodo bird.
Sorry, but we will not see that in the coming decades.
People thought the same thought 50 years ago. But you see, being rich only means something if others are poor. In the Weimar Republic, everyone was a billionaire, it just didn't mean a thing because that was the price of bread.
There are people on this planet who have no interest in everyone being rich. Sadly, we have more and more given them control of the government. And if you think I mean humans by "people", you are less than half right, because the other kind of "people" - corporations - is even worse. They have no fear of death and no grandmothers to tell them they're mightily fucked up.
There's a reason for those international treaties, and they come from a time when mankind still had vision, not just credit lines.
Private enterprise is a medicine with side-effects. It brings much good, but it comes with a price-tag. One of them is the loss of the commons, the sell-out of the public to the private.
There used to be a lot of public goods. Spaces, streets, whole corporations owned by the people. Usually in the areas where we agreed that the benefit of everyone is more important than the profit of the few. The postal service, the Internet of our grandparents, is one of them. In private hands, it could have gone any way of many. Maybe similar, but maybe some analysts would have convinced the postal company/ies that higher prices would be more than offset by the lower amount of customers, resulting in higher margins and thus higher profits - and writing letters would have been reserved for the rich.
As a society, we decided it's not worth taking the risk and we'd rather have the ability to communicate for everyone.
So, which risk are we taking in giving private ownership of moons and planets to private enterprise, and why did our parents decide against it to the point of making a treaty about it in a time long before it was even near practical?
Don't think proposals made by the super rich are for the general benefit of humanity. Nobody ever became super rich by being selfless.
These aren't wannabe tyrants. They legitimately believe their ideas would make life better.
They are actually the worst kind. As another comment already pointed out, most of the tyrants in history belong to this category.
And they are bad, really bad. Because they are driven by conviction. They think they are right. Those who know they're only in it for the money/power/pussy also know to get out when the going gets tough. The idealists, on the other hand, would rather see the world burn than step down, because they think they are right.
If it is your position that you get to define what is & what isn't legal without using the law well then so does everyone else.
Legally speaking, you are entirely correct. However, we are not in a court of law, we are on an Internet blog. I can say "theft" here even if legally speaking it is tax evasion in the same way that corporate lawyers say "theft" or "piracy" in the media, but of course use the legally correct term "copyright infringement" when they are in front of a judge.
And yes, I am all for changing the laws. Don't forget that a lot of the stuff common today used to be illegal until neo-conservatives corrupted our governments and forced "de-regulations" through.
so how about keeping it simple. Set the corporate tax to 10% no ifs no buts and get rid of all the bs.
A professor of economics in Switzerland once did this excercise. He calculated what the tax level would be if there would be a flat income tax for everyone, at the same rate, with no exceptions.
It turned out that it was considerably below the level that most people pay today. How is that possible? Because the higher you get the more exceptions you can make use of.
A short-lived attempt was made to bring this revelation into politics and thus tax laws. It was extremely short-lived. I only heard about it second hand (I don't live in Switzerland), but I can imagine that you could've witnessed an incredible spectacle of overkill as everyone with money brought their lobbyism dogs to bite.
Corps are merely pass-through entities that can uproot and move with few strokes of a pen.
That's neo-conservative bullshit. A company does not move easily. It is far, far easier for you and me to move somewhere else than it is for a company. That is because while you and me lose friends and leave family behind, the company will lose business contacts and employees - a study showed that moving the corporate headquarters means you lose about half of your employees either immediately or within the first two years (a lot of them follow, but move back after a while).
The costs of moving are massive for a corporate entity.
I've read somewhere that the compliance with the US tax code costs
You've got it easy. I live in Germany. There's a legend that half of the tax laws world-wide are german.
Every large corporation does it, and there are tons of lawyers and tax consultants who specialise in exactly this kind of stuff.
It's probably the largest organized crime in the history of mankind, except that through lobbying or sometimes outright bribery, it's actually legal. Well, it's borderline legal, and you get cases like this every time a tax consultant became a tad too creative and crossed the line.
But it's theft, plain an simple, and every idiot who cheers the corporations should hold it for a second and think about who is going to pay for the missing taxes. Yes, that's right, same idiot. If you wonder why your taxes have been increasing, it's because corporate taxes are dropping. If not on paper (though in many countries there as well) than in reality through tax evasion.
Amazing how you turned away more and more from discussing an argument to personal attacks, ignoring and dropping the points you couldn't refute at every step, until there's just 3 lines left. Your next response, if you have one left at all, will probably be less than one sentence.
That I am biased doesn't make me wrong. It doesn't make me right, either. But it is stupid to attempt to derive truth out of the fact that someone - omg! - happens to have an opinion.
You admit that you are biased so your vision of right and wrong is by definition skewed
Merriam-Webster defines bias as ": a strong interest in something or ability to do something", among other things. There is an element of prejudice in bias. But wherever you get your definition from is a fantasy land of pure logic that doesn't exist. You are biased, too. Maybe less strongly, certainly less obviously, and definitely less openly.
You claimed that every Catholic was learning by example that pedophilia was "right".
You want to read that into my words. So are we here to win an argument and imaginary points or is this going somewhere?
A person can not learn by osmosis, which is what you are still trying to claim.
There's a difference between osmosis and example. Again, you are twisting my words in order to win an argument.
My original point was very simple: You don't have to read something from a book to teach it. Behaving in a certain way teaches people that this behaviour is ok, without anyone explicitly stating it.
In the catholic church, the fact that these crimes were covered up by the highest levels certainly sent the message that they were acceptable. I didn't say "good" anywhere - there is also tolerance. Here's a less political example: Everyone drives 10 above the speed limit where I live. Literally, everyone. You're honked at if you drive the speed limit. Nowhere in any book does it say that 10 above is legal. Few would go on record saying it's the right way to drive. But everyone does it, because it is widely accepted. And new drivers quickly learn it as being the norm.
When you're a catholic priest and you rape a dozen kids, and nothing at all happens, and ten years later someone learns about it within the church and their official reaction is to move you to a different country so you can't be prosecuted - that doesn't exactly teach you that you were wrong, does it? The rest of society pretty much agrees that the proper way to teach you this was wrong is 20 years in the slammer, not a promotion.
Am I biased? You bet I am. That doesn't mean I'm wrong.
I love food, and I love sharing meals with friends. But many of my meals are purely functional. [...] I hate everything currently on the market that I've tried,
This.
Love going out to share a meal with friends, hate having to eat alone at home. It just sucks, it's purely fuel intake, and if I can strip it down to a no-thought process, I'd do it in an instant.
The thing is that everything you can buy ready-made is crap. A look at the ingredients list and you don't want to eat it anymore if you know anything about food at all.
Do you realize that doubling the minimum wage will also result in a net loss of jobs?
For someone who complained about lack of citations and statistics the sentence before, you sure make bold claims with nothing to back them up.
Loss of jobs has been the #1 agenda item for those against... uh, actually pretty much anything that might help the low-income people, be it minimum wage, unions, employee protection laws or really anything else.
We live in a world where everything is interconnected.
If you think you can take from A and give to B and there is no causal connections between A and B, you are missing the complexity of the world.
Fortunately, even in complex systems, there are a few well-established facts. One of them is that monopolies are damaging to the system as a whole even if you count in the monopoly-rent collected.
No matter how much money he gives to charity, Gates total contribution to humanity is negative.
Yes, it is great that at least he's giving something to charity.
I will still continue to diss him, because calling him a good person now also means accepting how he acquired the money he now gives away. There's even a term for what Gates is doing: Whitewashing.
I stand by my words: The better thing would have been to not take this money first of all. Giving it away now is better than keeping it, yes, but only marginally so.
Why? Because it is not a zero-sum game. Economics tells us that monopoly rent disproportionally damages the economy. For every $ he gives to charity now, he has already causes several $ in damage. He's a criminal who took everyone's cow and now offers to give everyone a free chicken. Sure, better than having nothing, but not having your cow stolen would've been the better solution.
So, as long as Gates does not speak out against the monopoly-rent collection his company is still engaging in, his charity work is fundamentally dishonest.
I understand the role of a CEO. I've worked closely with the C-level executives in the #3 company in its sector in my country for 8 years.
The typical Cxx works long and hard and I've seen first hand that some have sacrificed family and marriages for the company. I never said they aren't worth a solid salary.
But what exactly does the CEO do that justifies one thousand times the salary of an average worker in his company? That's why the Switzerland proposal is interesting. They don't deny that the CEO is worth several times a low-grade worker. They just say that there's a limit. That he can be worth five, six, ten or twelve times as much, but not 200, 500, or 1000.
Think about it. Some of the CEOs of large companies earn more than an entire factory, combined. If you seriously claim that that's what they are worth, then you are the one making the extraordinary claim and thus you are the one who needs to provide evidence for his claim.
The worker seldom does anything not rote, and a mistake means he's broken a widget.
Only if your definition of "worker" begins and ends with burger flipping at McD.
I've been and worked with regular employees whose responsibilities and skills were essential to the company. I've been in a position were a company of 150 people could have shut down if me and two others had left. I've seen employees sweat over tasks because mistakes would cost the company seven-digit figures.
Oh, and next time you fly: That pilot who has your life in his hands, he's a "worker who seldom does anything not rote", too.
Slashdot Mirror
What we really need is a President who will tackle energy with the same kind of committment that JFK gave us for the space program.
It's not a question of the president, but of the times. Our parents had vision and were looking towards a bright future. With visible progress everywhere around them, the space program matched the dominant meme.
Todays dominant meme is fear. Zombies, terorrists, even global warming itself. We are mostly afraid of the future, not looking forward to it.
Advertising works
Says the advertisement industry.
My university time included business economics and thus a part on marketing. The ugly truth is that even the advertisement industry has no clue if their crap works or not. Nobody has any reliable numbers, studies are hard to come by and nobody really wants to see the results. An estimate within the industry is that half of all advertisement dollars would've been spent just as well if you had burnt them to heat your home. The problem is that nobody knows which half. So you spend $100k on an advertisement campaign knowing full well that $50k of that is waste, you just can't figure out which so you can't save them.
The reason advertisers are constantly changing the game with new forms of advertisement, more banners, pop up under left right down beyond wherever crap and "new media" is that a huge part of the industry is basically scamming its customers - selling them advertisement that you have no indication of actually providing the value you claim and suspect strongly it doesn't.
There's a lot of monitoring going on, but there is also a strong disconnect - if you ran this campaign last quarter, and your numbers are up 5%, is that due to the campaign? The marketing agency will of course claim it is. But it could be the weather, stock market, economy, some competitor screwing up their campaign or five million other factors.
Advertisement does have an effect, true. But "works" is too strong a word as it suggests a lot more control than is real. And for the past decade or so, one main effect of advertisement has been to saturate the audience and thus reduce its own efficiency. That's why we are getting bombarded with more and more and more of the crap.
sorry for rant.
I would consider the extinction of the North American megafauna during the pleistocene to be worse.
You have a strange definition of "in US history"...
This, a thousand times this.
WP is a collection, and like all collections reflects the bias of the collectors. Including their pride and egos and and turf-wars and mood and a dozen culture artifacts such as "notability" and deletionism.
The problem is that WP is utterly unscientific, and thus a throwback to dark ages times. The requirement for "citation" is meaningless once you get to stuff like this - astroturfing, PR companies, etc. - there's nothing easier than buying an article in your favor and then "citing" that same article you bought in the WP page.
Let me guess - nothing will come of this. Because large corporations are above the law. Do something similar as a private individual, and you'll be bancrupted by legal proceedings.
Nice world we're living in. Wouldn't really be much of a shame if something happened to it, not anymore.
You can go back even further.
Nietzsche already wrote it, in his famously aphorism style: It is only thanks to the anarchists that the kings are sitting in their chairs solidly again. (no quote marks, because I cite from memory and it's probably not 100% correct).
At this time, it's a cute idea, but not newsworthy unless you want to advertise the service.
Post an article when they have paid out the first bounty.
That isn't quite true. The US produced the armies that helped end two world wars,
I'll stop at what is definitely true and ignore the parts that can be argued about.
You see, truth is never simple. Yes, the USA stepped in twice when Europe was destroying itself. But was it out of the goodness of its heart? Not likely. Think about what the main geopolitical effect of WW1 and WW2 was.
Yes, that's right. The end of the european nations as global superpowers and the rise of the USA as a superpower. That's not a coincidence. Book hint: "The Rise and Fall of the Great Nations" - excellent little book that'll teach you how closely economy and warfare are related.
Written in an alphabet not invented in the US, on computer technology co-developed in Germany (Zeise), in a language from a european island?
Just because you invented it once doesn't mean you're necessary for it anymore. The civilization that came up with the roman alphabet? Long dead. Arab numerals? Fractured. Writing per se? The way of the Dodo bird.
Sorry, but we will not see that in the coming decades.
People thought the same thought 50 years ago. But you see, being rich only means something if others are poor. In the Weimar Republic, everyone was a billionaire, it just didn't mean a thing because that was the price of bread.
There are people on this planet who have no interest in everyone being rich. Sadly, we have more and more given them control of the government. And if you think I mean humans by "people", you are less than half right, because the other kind of "people" - corporations - is even worse. They have no fear of death and no grandmothers to tell them they're mightily fucked up.
'When there isn't law and order,' he said, 'there's chaos.'
Did someone just describe the financial crisis and how de-regulation caused it?
Look, the next sell-out is in the making.
There's a reason for those international treaties, and they come from a time when mankind still had vision, not just credit lines.
Private enterprise is a medicine with side-effects. It brings much good, but it comes with a price-tag. One of them is the loss of the commons, the sell-out of the public to the private.
There used to be a lot of public goods. Spaces, streets, whole corporations owned by the people. Usually in the areas where we agreed that the benefit of everyone is more important than the profit of the few. The postal service, the Internet of our grandparents, is one of them. In private hands, it could have gone any way of many. Maybe similar, but maybe some analysts would have convinced the postal company/ies that higher prices would be more than offset by the lower amount of customers, resulting in higher margins and thus higher profits - and writing letters would have been reserved for the rich.
As a society, we decided it's not worth taking the risk and we'd rather have the ability to communicate for everyone.
So, which risk are we taking in giving private ownership of moons and planets to private enterprise, and why did our parents decide against it to the point of making a treaty about it in a time long before it was even near practical?
Don't think proposals made by the super rich are for the general benefit of humanity. Nobody ever became super rich by being selfless.
These aren't wannabe tyrants. They legitimately believe their ideas would make life better.
They are actually the worst kind. As another comment already pointed out, most of the tyrants in history belong to this category.
And they are bad, really bad. Because they are driven by conviction. They think they are right. Those who know they're only in it for the money/power/pussy also know to get out when the going gets tough. The idealists, on the other hand, would rather see the world burn than step down, because they think they are right.
Germany is also a federation. We have 16 states that all have their own tax laws in addition to the federal taxes.
I do think it's exaggerated, too. But it's tricky to declare your yearly income tax without software or a tax consultant.
If it is your position that you get to define what is & what isn't legal without using the law well then so does everyone else.
Legally speaking, you are entirely correct. However, we are not in a court of law, we are on an Internet blog. I can say "theft" here even if legally speaking it is tax evasion in the same way that corporate lawyers say "theft" or "piracy" in the media, but of course use the legally correct term "copyright infringement" when they are in front of a judge.
And yes, I am all for changing the laws. Don't forget that a lot of the stuff common today used to be illegal until neo-conservatives corrupted our governments and forced "de-regulations" through.
so how about keeping it simple. Set the corporate tax to 10% no ifs no buts and get rid of all the bs.
A professor of economics in Switzerland once did this excercise. He calculated what the tax level would be if there would be a flat income tax for everyone, at the same rate, with no exceptions.
It turned out that it was considerably below the level that most people pay today. How is that possible? Because the higher you get the more exceptions you can make use of.
A short-lived attempt was made to bring this revelation into politics and thus tax laws. It was extremely short-lived. I only heard about it second hand (I don't live in Switzerland), but I can imagine that you could've witnessed an incredible spectacle of overkill as everyone with money brought their lobbyism dogs to bite.
Corps are merely pass-through entities that can uproot and move with few strokes of a pen.
That's neo-conservative bullshit. A company does not move easily. It is far, far easier for you and me to move somewhere else than it is for a company. That is because while you and me lose friends and leave family behind, the company will lose business contacts and employees - a study showed that moving the corporate headquarters means you lose about half of your employees either immediately or within the first two years (a lot of them follow, but move back after a while).
The costs of moving are massive for a corporate entity.
I've read somewhere that the compliance with the US tax code costs
You've got it easy. I live in Germany. There's a legend that half of the tax laws world-wide are german.
Every large corporation does it, and there are tons of lawyers and tax consultants who specialise in exactly this kind of stuff.
It's probably the largest organized crime in the history of mankind, except that through lobbying or sometimes outright bribery, it's actually legal. Well, it's borderline legal, and you get cases like this every time a tax consultant became a tad too creative and crossed the line.
But it's theft, plain an simple, and every idiot who cheers the corporations should hold it for a second and think about who is going to pay for the missing taxes. Yes, that's right, same idiot. If you wonder why your taxes have been increasing, it's because corporate taxes are dropping. If not on paper (though in many countries there as well) than in reality through tax evasion.
Amazing how you turned away more and more from discussing an argument to personal attacks, ignoring and dropping the points you couldn't refute at every step, until there's just 3 lines left. Your next response, if you have one left at all, will probably be less than one sentence.
It's been enlightening. :-)
You read what you want to read.
That I am biased doesn't make me wrong. It doesn't make me right, either. But it is stupid to attempt to derive truth out of the fact that someone - omg! - happens to have an opinion.
You admit that you are biased so your vision of right and wrong is by definition skewed
Merriam-Webster defines bias as ": a strong interest in something or ability to do something", among other things. There is an element of prejudice in bias. But wherever you get your definition from is a fantasy land of pure logic that doesn't exist. You are biased, too. Maybe less strongly, certainly less obviously, and definitely less openly.
You claimed that every Catholic was learning by example that pedophilia was "right".
You want to read that into my words. So are we here to win an argument and imaginary points or is this going somewhere?
A person can not learn by osmosis, which is what you are still trying to claim.
There's a difference between osmosis and example. Again, you are twisting my words in order to win an argument.
My original point was very simple: You don't have to read something from a book to teach it. Behaving in a certain way teaches people that this behaviour is ok, without anyone explicitly stating it.
In the catholic church, the fact that these crimes were covered up by the highest levels certainly sent the message that they were acceptable. I didn't say "good" anywhere - there is also tolerance. Here's a less political example: Everyone drives 10 above the speed limit where I live. Literally, everyone. You're honked at if you drive the speed limit. Nowhere in any book does it say that 10 above is legal. Few would go on record saying it's the right way to drive. But everyone does it, because it is widely accepted. And new drivers quickly learn it as being the norm.
When you're a catholic priest and you rape a dozen kids, and nothing at all happens, and ten years later someone learns about it within the church and their official reaction is to move you to a different country so you can't be prosecuted - that doesn't exactly teach you that you were wrong, does it? The rest of society pretty much agrees that the proper way to teach you this was wrong is 20 years in the slammer, not a promotion.
Am I biased? You bet I am. That doesn't mean I'm wrong.
I love food, and I love sharing meals with friends. But many of my meals are purely functional. [...] I hate everything currently on the market that I've tried,
This.
Love going out to share a meal with friends, hate having to eat alone at home. It just sucks, it's purely fuel intake, and if I can strip it down to a no-thought process, I'd do it in an instant.
The thing is that everything you can buy ready-made is crap. A look at the ingredients list and you don't want to eat it anymore if you know anything about food at all.
Do you realize that doubling the minimum wage will also result in a net loss of jobs?
For someone who complained about lack of citations and statistics the sentence before, you sure make bold claims with nothing to back them up.
Loss of jobs has been the #1 agenda item for those against... uh, actually pretty much anything that might help the low-income people, be it minimum wage, unions, employee protection laws or really anything else.
Rarely is there any evidence for it. Two recent papers show that there is no significant impact:
http://www.nber.org/papers/w4509
http://www.irle.berkeley.edu/workingpapers/157-07.pdf
Now pony up your evidence or accept you've fallen for cheap rhetorics.
We live in a world where everything is interconnected.
If you think you can take from A and give to B and there is no causal connections between A and B, you are missing the complexity of the world.
Fortunately, even in complex systems, there are a few well-established facts. One of them is that monopolies are damaging to the system as a whole even if you count in the monopoly-rent collected.
No matter how much money he gives to charity, Gates total contribution to humanity is negative.
I don't get why you weren't moderated up.
Yes, it is great that at least he's giving something to charity.
I will still continue to diss him, because calling him a good person now also means accepting how he acquired the money he now gives away. There's even a term for what Gates is doing: Whitewashing.
I stand by my words: The better thing would have been to not take this money first of all. Giving it away now is better than keeping it, yes, but only marginally so.
Why? Because it is not a zero-sum game. Economics tells us that monopoly rent disproportionally damages the economy. For every $ he gives to charity now, he has already causes several $ in damage. He's a criminal who took everyone's cow and now offers to give everyone a free chicken. Sure, better than having nothing, but not having your cow stolen would've been the better solution.
So, as long as Gates does not speak out against the monopoly-rent collection his company is still engaging in, his charity work is fundamentally dishonest.
I understand the role of a CEO. I've worked closely with the C-level executives in the #3 company in its sector in my country for 8 years.
The typical Cxx works long and hard and I've seen first hand that some have sacrificed family and marriages for the company. I never said they aren't worth a solid salary.
But what exactly does the CEO do that justifies one thousand times the salary of an average worker in his company? That's why the Switzerland proposal is interesting. They don't deny that the CEO is worth several times a low-grade worker. They just say that there's a limit. That he can be worth five, six, ten or twelve times as much, but not 200, 500, or 1000.
Think about it. Some of the CEOs of large companies earn more than an entire factory, combined. If you seriously claim that that's what they are worth, then you are the one making the extraordinary claim and thus you are the one who needs to provide evidence for his claim.
The worker seldom does anything not rote, and a mistake means he's broken a widget.
Only if your definition of "worker" begins and ends with burger flipping at McD.
I've been and worked with regular employees whose responsibilities and skills were essential to the company. I've been in a position were a company of 150 people could have shut down if me and two others had left. I've seen employees sweat over tasks because mistakes would cost the company seven-digit figures.
Oh, and next time you fly: That pilot who has your life in his hands, he's a "worker who seldom does anything not rote", too.