csharpminor

A government’s source of revenue is working age taxpayers. Its biggest cost is the social safety net for the elderly. It seems natural for them to care about population growth? Where would they get the money for UBI if their tax base is contracting every year?

Immigrants (at the scale Spain needs) don’t want to move to a shrinking economy. Spaniards themselves are leaving the country to look for work. As an example, Central American immigrants will immigrate through multiple low growth countries specifically to get to the U.S. for work.

To GP’s point though, I think Spain’s population problems aren’t all that related to dense apartments and more tied to economic opportunities.

Do more short high effort intervals. Find a track to run at if you can and alternate easy/hard laps. The visual cues of a track will really help you feel confident pushing hard because it’s easy to see how much distance remains.

Also, check out your local running clubs on Strava. I know social running isn’t for everyone, but it’s a really good way to push your speed up. Every club I’ve run with has been psyched to get a new person.

Worn out shoes can cause pain after a few months. Any further diagnosis should probably be delivered by a PT.

I mean the actual worst is having the 4th highest tax burden in the nation and having a dysfunctional EDD that can’t efficiently give unemployment to people who need it.

Missing a timed transfer and having to wait 15 minutes is awful. Why did I miss my last timed transfer? Police activity on BART (again).

A respectful culture is needed for public transit to properly function, and the Bay Area doesn’t have that.

Some behaviors I’ve seen on public transit in the Bay Area: loud music, dumping beer and food on the floor, clipping toenails, smoking, jumping up and down on seats, drug deal, fighting, hitting the driver, attacking the bus with a machete. All in the past year. Granted I take transit more than most.

And people are generally afraid to speak out against bad behavior because you never know when someone has a knife/gun and is mentally unstable.

So I don’t think it’s just a frequency/headway problem. I wish it was better, but I also understand why many people are decide they’d prefer a private car.

Because understanding CEO pay as a product of organization incentives shows just how futile shaming companies into lower CEO pay is. Just tax the CEOs more and let companies pay what they want.

I have no illusions that they succeed, I can just tell you that they have a strong incentive to not price discriminate.

I don’t agree on your first point. I do think power and talent is highly consolidated among a small number of executives. Especially when you look at (as most boards do) executives within a specific industry vertical.

That’s not to say those people guarantee success, but it is less of a risk than picking someone unknown and without the established network and direct relevant experience.

Again all this to say I don’t think shaming companies into paying less will work, we should just tax CEOs more and let companies pay what they want.

I didn’t say anything about performance. What I said is that it’s untenable for a board to penny-pinch a few million dollars for someone managing orders of magnitude more in resources.

A board gains nothing from pointing to a 2005 Stanford GSB blog post if a CEO they hired runs the company into the ground.

Again, all this to say we should just tax CEOs more and let companies pay what they want.

I’m engaging in good faith, no need for ad-homonyms.

No, I do not expect a CEO to make those decisions on their own. They also usually bring a team (or make choices about who to keep/remove). So even if they’re not deciding directly, they’re only a step or two removed. Many of the multi-million dollar bets being placed might just be on who to hire to make a decision and execute.

Incidentally, those key hires are often why CEOs command such a price. Their price simply reflects that power in human networks is highly consolidated. CEOs absolutely leverage their position as gatekeepers here.

All this to say why I don’t think we’ll be successful in curbing CEO pay, and should instead just focus on taxation.

Curious to know, what threshold would not be fine and how did you get there? My point is that you’re implicitly using the same method most exec comp committees use to set CEO salaries.

Because it’s useful to understand the incentives driving higher exec pay. My point is that shaming organizations into reducing CEO pay is unlikely to work given the incentives, so we should just focus on individual progressive taxation and let companies pay what they want.

Did you not see my point about taxation?

I completely agree that it’s a crap-shoot, but again from the perspective of a board they’d rather cover their bases and over pay. Especially when this compensation is a fractional percent of the company’s revenue.

The other factor is that when you’re on an exec search team, you just look at other executives in the same industry. There might only be 5-10 total that have similar qualifications and are in your comp range. The core issue is that power and relationships within a given industry are typically very concentrated so there’s a limited pool to draw from if you want an exec (and most boards do) who brings that.

I agree with you. I’m not sure what the enforcement mechanism would be though. Boards suing CEOs more frequently over negligence? CEOs buying a certain amount of equity in a company before they join?

CEOs are highly leveraged. One wrong bet could cost the company/employees/shareholders more than a CEO (even a multi-millionaire) could repay.

In reality this leaves the board with recouping maybe a few million from the CEO on a shortfall that may be orders of magnitude bigger. I think pragmatically most boards just move on, let the CEO take the reputations hit, and focus on trying to find someone better.

I’m not sure I understand you, I believe we’re making the same point? I mean that there’s a strong incentive to offer competitive pay (as in pay more e.g. to poach from a competing company).

I like this as a more precise back-of-the napkin method than what I articulated. I’m not up-to-date with GM and Barra’s tenure.

What I can say is that I’ve personally seen bad leadership teams cost employees much more than $180/year. As a board, it’s hard to look at that prospect and and go cheap on someone with the potential to destroy or create that much wealth.

CEO salaries should be understood in relationship to the resources that they control. For example, this CEO chose to spend $85M on travel nurses to counter the union strike happening at a hospital in their network. Presumably the CEO thinks that this gamble is worth it in forcing the union’s hand.

That may be a terrible decision, but it shows the extent of resources a CEO of a $6bn organization commands. This is one choice out of tens to hundreds of 8-figure choices that this “super manager” will make in a year.

If you’re on the board of an organization like that, settling for a second-best CEO to save a 7-figure sum just doesn’t make sense.

I raise this for two reasons:

1) I find that people have no concept of how to consider whether or not executive pay is reasonable. One of my neighbors was outraged that our Mayor makes $450k. “Could she really be working 6x harder than me?” But our mayor oversees thousands of employees and makes decisions that influence hundreds of millions of dollars of spending. I’d consider her quite underpaid in proportion to what she manages.

2) Shaming organizations into lowering exec comp probably won’t work: there’s a strong economic incentive to pay competitively. Just bend the income tax contribution curve so that individuals who make more continue to pay more.

Obviously this sucks for those impacted, but it’s a relatively small cut (2% of employees). I wouldn’t necessarily read a major culture change at REI from this alone. It seems to be business-as-usual for a company operating at a modest loss in a high interest rate environment.

I have mixed feelings here. I’m a longtime REI shopper and I personally haven’t ever interacted with a “team lead” (role laid off). I mostly order online and sometimes browse their used gear section while in store. I rarely talk to the employees, and to be honest the ones at my store seem kind of annoyed most of the time.

On the other hand laying off senior team members is a speedrun nuke of employee morale. You’re taking a place where people thought they could work for years and basically showing them there’ll be no career progression.

The note to employees indicates the layoff is only about 2% of the company’s workforce so it would appear there’s a good deal of overlap.

There are so many examples of this in the auto world, e.g. the Big Motor scandal in Japan where the corruption was at both the dealerships and a major insurer: https://www.japantimes.co.jp/business/2023/09/08/companies/s...

The “better” car companies simply design systems that force more labor hours into regular maintenance. For example, BMW’s ingenious battery placement that allows them to bill $700-$900 for 5 hours worth of work. Oh, and changing your own battery will void the warranty. Fortunately for BMW most of their clientele has enough money to not care.

You might also be interested in the Oklahoma Surgery Center’s model: https://surgerycenterok.com/surgery-prices/

I knew someone at Department of Agriculture who tried to organize meatless Mondays for the employee cafeteria. Needless to say special interests had beef with that and shut them down.

I completely agree. As an aside, for .gov domains, the DMARC offenders are primarily at the state, county, and local level. I would personally be in favor of extending CISA’s DMARC requirements to anyone with a .gov domain (and revoking domains that are non-compliant).

Another misconception among many CIO/CISOs is that securing your individual subdomain with DMARC is enough. For example, dmv.ca.gov might have DMARC on its subdomain but not on the root, allowing a scammer to make up their own subdomain like “vehicles.ca.gov” and scam people into paying for fake vehicle registration. Of course there are other mechanisms inbox providers use to protect recipients, but without a DMARC policy on the root domain the door is left open.

This is especially prevalent at the state level where no one wants to own DMARC centrally.

Just so you know, this page became unresponsive in Chrome about 30 seconds after I opened it.

To be honest I found this article to be a bit blog spammy. It’s for developers because they used a startup accelerator analogy? I didn’t see anything particularly differentiated from the equivalent SendGrid/Mailgun/etc blogs that come up.

This is probably the best demo for understanding SPF/DKIM/DMARC that I’ve come across (I am not affiliated): https://www.learndmarc.com/

If you really want to understand DMARC check it out.

I think about this every time I see a cookie banner. It’s a 1-2 second delay that plays out millions if not billions of times per day. How many lifetimes have been wasted since those were forced into existence by GDPR?

I’d be curious to know how you arrived at this opinion, as it doesn’t match my experience as a competitive debater in college. Have you ever been on a debate team or is this from observing? I’m genuinely curious!

To refute your points a bit :) ->

1. Debate itself is highly stressful, but pressure makes diamonds as they say. My time in debate made defending my honors thesis much less stressful and I’m a very calm presenter as a result.

2. This is exactly what debate research forces you to do. You may not get to choose your side, but you’ve done your best to prep in either direction. You get very good at understanding if the evidence provided has any gaps, and if it supports the impacts claimed.

3. Debaters do read judge profiles to understand the audience and determine strategy.

4. This is a major part of prep, as naturally you need to prepare both sides and understand the counter arguments at least 2-3 levels deep.

5. This occurs often, as mentioned in the article linked above. Ks and counter plans allow debaters to reframe the topic in many ways.

On your last paragraph: I experienced the opposite. Debate made me realize how ambiguous most issues are. While one team does win, the decision basis is often nuanced.

I will say that for my part, debate had a profound impact on my life. It taught me how to research, consider unintuitive perspectives, and articulate a point.

My research in debate directly led to a fellowship, honors thesis, and mentorship - all outside of debate. I leveraged my academic success into a great career and owe a lot to the skills I picked up on my college debate team.

When I was first out of college I stayed at Green Tortoise Hostel for a week on about $250. Definitely not glamorous - the rooms are pretty packed and stuffy. But it was a lot of fun hanging out with a bunch of poor young travelers from around the world. Lots of wandering the city in the day and staying out late in North Beach.

Hacker Houses can be kind of intense - people are usually in grind mode. And also they aren’t as good of a deal as you’d think, because anything “tech” in SF gets a markup. You can find short term HH sublets on Craigslist sometimes but they’re usually meh.

Meetup and Eventbrite would be my go-tos for finding networking events.