Honestly I don't think we even need to go that far; police should just use the laws that they already have at their disposal. Look at this shooting in Highland Park, here we have a guy who was known to police to be a danger to society to the point where his weapons were stripped in the past. How the hell does this guy pass a background check? Did no one do basic due diligence? Did no one use OSINT to find this guy's social media pages where he was advocating for violence? It seems like the vast majority of shootings feature people who were historically very problematic and yet they were able to pass bg checks. Why is this happening?
> Why are people so concerned with the salary of the ultra rich?
Two reasons. First it's because the left lets Twitter determine their messaging and so the economic problems facing the country have been framed incorrectly with an unnecessary moral slant. The economic problems facing the poor are not a function of "wealth inequality" (the delta between rich and poor), but instead are a function of the poor having insufficient resources and services regardless of how much money the rich have. When you frame the issue as wealth inequality, then bringing Bezos's wealth down without any concomitant increase in funding for the poor is a victory as the delta is being reduced. Certainly the rich will need to be taxed more to pay for additional services necessary to improve the lives of the poor and middle class, but explicitly lowering the wealth of the rich doesn't need to be in scope to solve the problems we are facing.
Second, no one wants to admit it and by saying it this comment will get flagged, but people care because they are jealous and misinformed. They have zero understanding of what an executive's job actually entails / they don't know anyone in such a role, and as such they (incorrectly) think anyone could do it. Therefore they don't understand why executives are receiving very high levels of comp or amassing massive net worths when they don't appear to be "doing" anything complex.
> they are jealous and misinformed. They have zero understanding of what an executive's job actually entails / they don't know anyone in such a role, and as such they (incorrectly) think anyone could do it. Therefore they don't understand why executives are receiving very high levels of comp or amassing massive net worths when they don't appear to be "doing" anything.
Yep. It's the same jealously when people are paid millions to just shoot a ball in a hoop. Like, no. You shoot a ball into a hoop and have people who will pay $1000 to watch you do it.
> We need hard limits on executive pay because if you adjust every other employees salary at a truly fair rate, Jassy should be lucky to make 10 million a year.
This makes no sense. Why should executive salary be tied or compared to the salary of any other employee role? Should my salary as a dev be a function of what a janitor makes? Should my Manager's salary be tied to my salary? I'm not sure where this idea originally came from but compensation should be based on the value the employee is adding , the rarity of that employee's skills, and how in demand that skill set it, not some arbitrary multiplier of another role's salary. I don't care if a CEO is paid NX the rate of the lowest paid role as long as they are adding value commensurate with their salary. Also, "truly fair rate" according to who, you? What makes you qualified to be the arbiter of corporate compensation?
> There is literally no job on earth that should command this price tag.
The people who have a vested interest in deciding this, namely Amazon shareholders, apparently disagree with you.
>Should my salary as a dev be a function of what a janitor makes?
Should definitely not be more than FIVE times what he makes. Because you're not 5x smarter, efficient, or important as FIVE (5) janitors. Period.
And if you think you are and you're using the "free market" as a factor, well then I'm sure you think BTC should of ever been worth 60k or that Tesla should be worth $900 a share.
It's incredible that people plant their morality within the confines of a "definitely rational market that's definitely not experiencing a bubble".
You're entitled to your opinion, and by all means share it—but in my earnest (peasant, non-leet) opinion, I think I can draw a straighter, truer, more direct corollary from a persons idea of what fair is (no matter how opaque) than I can from whatever bullshit he types in as a reply.
> Should definitely not be more than FIVE times what he makes. Because you're not 5x smarter, efficient, or important as FIVE (5) janitors. Period.
Again, it doesn't matter if I'm smarter, more efficient, or "more important" than 5 janitors; what matters is how much money I can help the company make and how hard I am to replace. If I'm enabling the company to make 10X more money than the efforts of a janitor could yield and I'm very hard to replace, then I see no reason why I shouldn't be paid more than 5 janitors combined (granted, this isn't a great comparison because a janitor is more of a cost center, but you get the point). It has nothing to do with who the janitors are as people or who I am as a person, it's purely about money. Also where did you get the number 5 from? Why not 6 or 4? This is what I mean when I say this is very arbitrary.
> but in my earnest (peasant, non-leet) opinion, I think I can draw a straighter, truer, more direct corollary from a persons idea of what fair is (no matter how opaque) than I can from whatever bullshit he types in as a reply.
You seem to believe that companies exist to provide good paying, "fair" jobs, when infact they exist solely to make money. People are paid based on their ability to contribute to this, full stop.
Hahaha, of course you don't see that. You're talents are rarified and frozen in amber (you work in an opaque, cut throat, morally bankrupt industry that headhunts just for the sake of taking talent off the market).
I 100% agree that's it's arbitrary, and my figure wasn't a source of categorical, universal truth, but guess what? The hardest questions in life resides squarely in a GREY area.
I'd even argue that your intense rationality and reliance on systems (no matter how ineffective, or even untrue) is a crutch because, in theory, you will always be at odds with the proletariat.
> Places that allow the rich to prevent themselves from being taxed by their home countries do not deserve existence.
You are falsely assuming that every country's tax policy is reasonable or fair. Look at the United States policy on foreign assets which effectively amounts to double taxation for no other reason than "we don't like rich people" / "we don't like our citizens not living here".
> We need to get this money back under our control - if only to prevent social unrest from the 2/3rd of the US which have less than 1000$ in liquid savings.
It's not your money to begin with, it belongs to the people who rightfully earned it, not the government, nor the poor. Peoples' assets don't exist to serve as piggy banks for social programs and redistribution.
> It's not your money to begin with, it belongs to the people who rightfully earned it, not the government, nor the poor. Peoples' assets don't exist to serve as piggy banks for social programs and redistribution.
It's up to debate if companies like Microsoft, Apple, AirBnB, Facebook or Uber "rightfully" earned their money - or if they did so by blatantly ignoring or skirting the laws for a long time.
Note that all companies I mentioned have a history of getting fined for violating labor, anti-trust or data protection laws.
> You are falsely assuming that every country's tax policy is reasonable or fair.
For that we have democracy. If you don't like the decisions taken by your countrymen, you should not get to extricate yourself so easily. A people has the right to tax its capital if it so pleases, and unless you can substantiate this being not right or unfair with, say, an equivalent to the human rights declaration, go ahead. But we both know this is not typically what tax havens are about; they are about not paying taxes. Besides, what's fair about being able to avoid taxes, where most people can't? Why do the rich get to pass the bill to others but the poor don't? Lotta holes in that line of reasoning.
> It's not your money to begin with, it belongs to the people who rightfully earned it, not the government, nor the poor.
Capital is not and should not magically be excluded from democratic control; and in fact fiat currencies, i.e. all of them, are precisely not your property. They are tokens distributed by a government within a context; the state and all its inhabitants. Speaking about fairness: merely having gathered many of these tokens does not mean you did so fairly or that you deserve them. It just means that you did.
I think you could take the opposite view as well. Yes, if they could treat employees poorly then they would, but they can't so they don't. There is more demand for talent than there is supply of talent. I work at a company that has both contractors and full time employees, and it is very obvious when looking at work product why the contractors are the contractors and the full time employees are the full time employees.
Contractor output is frequently technically shoddy or lazy; their reports are riddled with grammatical mistakes and frequently difficult to understand; and there is no way that they could take point when interfacing with a customer as their English skills simply aren't good enough.
Contractors often work for a business like any other. I've worked with companies where the contractors were better than the employees and vice versa.
But the quality of the contractors is ultimately irrelevant because we're talking about workplace protections and benefits. You SHOULD be blaming your company instead for taking cost saving measures that impact the rest of your organization. If your company is working with contractors that are core to your business then they should be treated the same as your employees. And we should be eliminating the middle area where companies want to treat contractors as lesser employees so they can pay them less for the same work.
> A counter is that other countries (Japan, Korea, Italy, ...) that enforce traditional values have had a collapse in the birth rate.
Yes, but the value systems (at least in Asia) are quite different than even conservative ones in the US so I don't think that's a fair comparison. In Asia there is an expectation that relationships will lead to marriage, that you will marry well before thirty, that women will exit the workforce following marriage, that married couples will have children quickly, and that enormous amounts of resources will be spent on raising those children (especially in terms of education).
The birth rate has gone down there because it is overly burdensome to be married and have children under these expectations. This is far different than even conservative expectations in the US which basically amount to the father should be able to hold down a job and show up.
I mean, sure, among the parents. Plenty of people in Asia love relationships for the same reasons young people do in the West: sex, money, status, comfort, etc. -- without needing an end goal of launching families.
The main difference is a lot of people here feel pressured by their families into a path to starting a family they don't want. Some balance those opposite forces, some just give in and have unwanted families while cheating to get what they really want.
Anecdotally, I've noticed a clear contrast since moving from the USA to Asia. Cheating is far more common here. I've dated a number of "taken" women here, and the common thread always seemed to be that they kept their unwanted partner around for appearances to placate family pressure.
> In Asia there is an expectation that relationships will lead to marriage, that you will marry well before thirty, that women will exit the workforce following marriage
I don't know about the rest of Asia, but the parts that were explicitly named (Japan, Korea) absolutely do not have this expectation.
I lived in Korea with my wife and while we were looking for work, she was told in several interviews that they didn’t want to hire her because she was married and they assumed she would have a child and stop working.
I don’t know where you are getting the idea that that isn’t the norm in those countries.
Preach! What we ultimately need is just a law that says it is illegal for companies to collect or store any data for marketing purposes, tracking, or resale. No opt ins, no exceptions. Unfortunately we can't fully kill targeted or unsolicited advertising at the root because of freedom of speech issues, but we can eliminate all the data it depends on.
People see "targeted advertising" as "I was thinking about buying a bike and it shows me ads for bikes", ie. it's showing me what I want to see. That is not targeted advertising. Targeted advertising is showing you what they want you to see when they want you to see it, or showing you the same products in a light that makes you more likely to buy them.
For example, showing you unlikely or imagined bike-related problems, to sell you useless protection gear or insurance after you get your bike. Showing you ads for motorcycles, because although you probably don't want one, someone who already likes bikes is more likely to buy a (more expensive) motorcycle, so that's where they'll direct their spam.
Targeted advertising is about manipulation, using knowledge of the customer to change their behavior. No one is going through those efforts to show you what you already want and save you a quick Google.
you have quite a low view of people's ability to make decisions for themselves if you think being shown ads is manipulation. And I struggle to see how targeted ads are somehow worse than the same sort of 'manipulation' inherent in using an algorithmic feed like HackerNews or Twitter. Both are exposing you to things they want you to see. Yet you don't seem to have such strong opposition to those as you do targeted ads.
I think it's less the targeted advertising, and more like I can't take 5 internet steps today without 40 people shouting at me to buy their diapers because my partner googled "diapers" last night.
Two because the ads are more relevant the advertiser makes far more money on them and therefore doesn't have to show you as many to fund their service.
You are viewing the experience as purely transactional, but they may view going there as a tradition and may think they have a relationship with the place (i.e. they are a regular). In addition, it sounds like they kick-started a tradition so they may even feel a sense of ownership. In other words, it is not just business, it is personal.
That's why you see those enraged 1 star reviews and why these people never came back. These aren't people who are offended at simple business transactions, these are people who feel personally wronged, and that will always generate a lot of negative emotion.
