On eve of bankruptcy, US firms shower executives with bonuses • Hacker News Board

Re: On eve of bankruptcy, US firms shower executives with bonuses

#301

Post by clairity » Sun, Jul 19, 2020, 5:02 PM UTC

darkerside wrote: post #298

clairity wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you've made a lot of assumptions to reach that conclusion. for counterbalance, women burn less energy per mass on average and are less massive on average, which means they'd last longer in the search, raising the likelihood of finding food.

I'm not educated on which sex would have truly had a better chance, and not totally concerned with it. Mostly concerned with illustrating more clearly the parent posters point. My assumption is men did more hunting and women gathering, and that in a starvation scenario, known gathering food sources would have been exhausted. Sorry for any Paleolithic women I may have offended with my post!

ah, ignorance is bliss, except when you're naturally selected away by implicit biases that lead to poor decisions.

no need to worry about paleolithic women, they were probably less fragile and better survivalists in comparison.

Re: On eve of bankruptcy, US firms shower executives with bonuses

#302

Post by lolc » Sun, Jul 19, 2020, 6:12 PM UTC

sokoloff wrote: post #197

lolc wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see why people who speculated on options should be be compensated for their loss. That whole argument doesn't make sense to me at all. They could have negotiated less options and more salary, if they were the risk-averse type, could they not? Or worked a job with less risk. It's just buddies taking as much as possible before they lose control. And everybody knows this. It's weird to read these invented reason…

They’re not being compensated for their loss. They’re being compensated to stay and try to fix the company going forward.

Sure that's what they would say. They may even believe it themselves. So in a way it can be said to be true!

But you know, we don't need to base our perception on their perception. We can look at the pattern and say: "they sure like to reward their buddies regardless of company performance."

Re: On eve of bankruptcy, US firms shower executives with bonuses

#303

Post by Zenbit_UX » Sun, Jul 19, 2020, 9:05 PM UTC

jonahbenton wrote: post #295

Zenbit_UX wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You pedantic rant aside, you didn't actually explain your point. How does paying large bonuses to executives protect the interest of creditors? I'm no expert but this sounds like how a person declaring bankruptcy might max out their credit cards at the apple store then sell them off for cash on Craigslist. I.e. Draining the bank so it doesn't go to creditors. This same pool of money used for gratuitous bonuses could…

Heh, no, I didn't say it was moral, and my point wasn't to explain, it was to redirect. But to explain- In fantasy world the money going to bonuses could go to severance, but in reality that is a misuse of cash, in some cases illegal. The owners are the only ones entitled to the cash in the business, well, after creditors are repaid. Reducing the debt owed to creditors is the function of bankruptcy. Workers are not o…

Thanks for finally making your point, when you use your words to support your arguments instead of ranting it helps people understand you better.

For the record everyone understands the concept of ownership from a very young age, it's the complexities of business and its jargon that confuses.

> Forgive me but you cannot talk intelligently about morality if you do not understand ownership.

Yikes, you're very inclined to rant aren't you?

Re: On eve of bankruptcy, US firms shower executives with bonuses

#304

Post by _v7gu » Mon, Jul 20, 2020, 3:00 PM UTC

marcianx wrote: post #194

_v7gu wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have a calculator on hand, could you post the n such that these two rules are equivalent? It’s wrinkling my brain.

How can you? One is taking about 80% of the work and the other is talking about half the work. You would need a distribution of the work impact across the employee population first.

The Pareto rule (at least my interpretation, due to its similarity with a power distribution) is recursive: 80% completeness from 20% work also implies 64% completeness from 4% work which in turn gives 51.2% completeness from 0.8% work (half of success is just showing up).

Accepting 51.2% as an approximation to half, the problem becomes 0.008 x = sqrt(x) which gives x = 125^2 = 15,625

Re: On eve of bankruptcy, US firms shower executives with bonuses

#305

Post by kortilla » Wed, Jul 22, 2020, 12:25 AM UTC

kelnos wrote: post #193

kortilla wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and I would never fire anyone to increase my own salary How about this instead? Your company is overstaffed due to a massive drop in sales. You will run out of money and will have to fire everyone including yourself in one month. Your other choice is to cut 80% of the staff immediately and your business will make enough to pay everyone’s salary who remains. The better choice for everyone is the surviving business,…

That's not what we're talking about, though. If you suddenly don't have the market you used to, then it makes sense to cut down your workforce to be the appropriate size for the market you do have. But that doesn't mean it's ethical to then throw money at your executives just to keep them around. If the business is viable with the smaller market and smaller workforce, then the executives should either stick around ba…

“Showering them with more money” in these scenarios is “give them some more stock” to try to offset the 90% of their income they just lost due to the stock becoming near worthless.

Re: On eve of bankruptcy, US firms shower executives with bonuses

#306

Post by darkerside » Wed, Jul 22, 2020, 10:40 PM UTC

clairity wrote: post #301

darkerside wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not educated on which sex would have truly had a better chance, and not totally concerned with it. Mostly concerned with illustrating more clearly the parent posters point. My assumption is men did more hunting and women gathering, and that in a starvation scenario, known gathering food sources would have been exhausted. Sorry for any Paleolithic women I may have offended with my post!

ah, ignorance is bliss, except when you're naturally selected away by implicit biases that lead to poor decisions. no need to worry about paleolithic women, they were probably less fragile and better survivalists in comparison.

Wouldn't doubt it!