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Congress Needs to Stop Day Trading, Says Sen. Mark Warner

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Re: Congress Needs to Stop Day Trading, Says Sen. Mark Warner

#121
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. Hell no. Elected office is a sacrifice and a duty. It is not a way to make a living. Thats how you end up with dinosaurs working those halls for 68 years. I have a better idea. 1)Fix salary at 2x poverty wage. 2) make house members 1:50,000 representation to their county (yes that means the house would explode to 8000 elected officials) 3) tax any earnings above their pre-office historical income avg, at say 98%.…

That's a great way to get corruption. Relying on independently wealthy people to sacrificially serve their country is not a reliable way of getting good quality talent. My father spent some time in Bolivia some decades ago, and people in government were paid practically nothing. So there were a lot of bribes expected. And government officials got a fantastic exchange rate on Bolivios -> USD, which after you go throug…

GP's idea is extreme but Salary has nothing to go with corruption.

Politicians take money not to enrich their lifestyle, but to spend on getting elected/re-elected

Re: Congress Needs to Stop Day Trading, Says Sen. Mark Warner

#122
post #110
post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are million dollar jobs in software, we are just not good enough to ... Or we didn't hear about them, or the candidate was chosen via networking rather than advertising. There are a million reasons that this is not a perfect market. My experience in fintech has taught me that people working for more money are not necessarily any better at their jobs, in fact a lot of them are worse, they just happen to know t…

It's not a perfect correlation but it's certainly easier to find better candidates if you can offer them more than they'd get elsewhere.

> It's not a perfect correlation but it's certainly easier to find better candidates if you can offer them more

Ah, but that wasn't the claim - the claim was that people who get the $200k jobs are not good enough to get the $1m jobs. My counter-claim is that the people who are actually in the higher paying jobs are not always better.

You may be able to attract better people by offering more, but that's not necessarily relevant to the hiring processes that result in the people who have those $1m jobs getting to where they are. I've seen flat-out useless sycophants holding on to high paid roles because of basically office politics and industry connections.

Re: Congress Needs to Stop Day Trading, Says Sen. Mark Warner

#123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen Senior Engineers who probably make $300K+ steal and bring home whole pizza pies from "Pizza Night For Late Workers". It doesn't matter how much you make, if they are fundamentally dishonest and see $100 sitting on the floor they're going to take it. EDIT: Correction--engineers, didn't actually see managers do it.

This is bizarre. I’ve had managers that used to bring donuts on their own dime for the whole team. Are you sure they’re stealing or just taking home a left over pizza?

No they are just dishonest:

"...This is what Steve Jobs did about the fact of how he tricked his best friend into working all night long for several days and then cheating him out of his paycheck. This proved to be only the first offense in a long litany of his penchant for pettiness and pointless cruelty.

The friend that I am talking about is Steve Wozniak, him and Jobs were working at Atari, one of the first video game consoles which revolutionized the video game market. The owner of Atari at the time was its actual founder by the name of Nolan Bushnell.

The first game that came out was “Pong,” a classic which many people remember. Due to its high success, Bushnell thought of making a sequel that would be only a single-player and call it “Breakout” in 1975.

...For this project, Bushnell was thinking of tasking Steve Jobs to be in charge and take care of the project. Jobs was considered (at the time) a low-level Atari technician with huge potential. As this game was expected to be much better than its predecessor, Jobs recruited Steve Wozniak, who was known on the market as the better engineer. ..

Jobs and Wozniak had been friends for quite some time at that point. They both were working towards the Apple 1 which would follow to become the most iconic computer around the world for four long years so they got to spend a lot of time together.

The way that Atari worked was by offering a monetary bonus for every chip fewer than fifty that was used when building a game. Wozniak was ecstatic when Jobs asked him to help with this big project.

This is when Jobs started to lie to Wozniak in order to use him for his expertise. He told Wozniak that the deadline was four days and that he had to use as few chips as possible. The truth is that Jobs was given a whole month for this project, not four days.

Jobs never told Wozniak about the bonus for using fewer chips and the four-day deadline was self-imposed by Jobs, as he needed to get back to his commune farm to help bring in the apple harvest. It is imperative to mention (for those who are not aware) that Steve Jobs came from a very poor background.

Wozniak was working for Hewlett-Packard at the time as well, so he had to balance his main job as well as this project. So he would end up going to his job in the day time and spending most of the night working on “Breakout”. The only thing that Steve did was implementing the required chips, making sure that there were less than fifty chips. Their herculean efforts succeeded, as they finished the game in four days and only using forty-five chips.

When payday came, Steve Jobs only gave Wozniak half the pay, he kept the rest of his pay as well as the bonus for himself. Wozniak only found out about this ten years later..."

https://historyofyesterday.com/steve-jobss-dark-past-55a9804...

Re: Congress Needs to Stop Day Trading, Says Sen. Mark Warner

#124
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is far more likely that they're insider trading, but the point is that the magnitude of the negative consequence is vastly different. If they insider trade and make $5 million, that's money stolen from other market participants. Bad, for sure, but the scope of the damage is limited to that stolen $5 million. If it corrupts policymaking by creating a conflict of interest, the scope of damage is uncapped.

I completely agree! The legislative capture of bad decisions is far more dangerous than them "stealing" from wallstreet.

I agree with what you said, except the part about stealing from "wall street". Most of that money is stolen from regular people's investments and pension funds.

Re: Congress Needs to Stop Day Trading, Says Sen. Mark Warner

#125
post #28

Members of Congress make ~$174k/yr. [1] It will be an unpopular opinion, but I believe that we should pay better (and demand better) for a job with that much responsibility. Otherwise, a congressperson will be forever tempted to align their incentives with service to causes other than their electorate. I'm fairly certain we should be paying our elected officials at least as much as our football coaches. [1] https://w…

I heavily disagree. We are already in a situation were poor people don't even fucking bother to vote anymore because none of the politicians live on the same planet as they do.

None of these millionaire douchebags are relatable at this point.

Re: Congress Needs to Stop Day Trading, Says Sen. Mark Warner

#126
post #88
post #28

Members of Congress make ~$174k/yr. [1] It will be an unpopular opinion, but I believe that we should pay better (and demand better) for a job with that much responsibility. Otherwise, a congressperson will be forever tempted to align their incentives with service to causes other than their electorate. I'm fairly certain we should be paying our elected officials at least as much as our football coaches. [1] https://w…

How much is fair compensation for a Congressperson? $250K? $500K? $1M? Why not even more? They certainly have a lot more power and responsibility than a CEO or sports coach who is paid many times that. The problem is that there isn't a free market which any politician's salary can be determined by. Someone can't decide they don't like the salary in the US Senate and apply to the Canadian Parliament instead. Plus, the…

I'm sure there are people who would be fantastic in politics but choose not to because of the pay.

Re: Congress Needs to Stop Day Trading, Says Sen. Mark Warner

#127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many state governments don't pay much or anything at all to their state legislators. Which is a great way to make sure that only rich well connected people can afford to serve.

Is being a legislator a full time job in the US? As in, you are legally not allowed to also have another job? (It isn't in my country. You can be a pilot, an actor or an engineer and still be a legislator)

To give an example, that may not representative: the Texas legislature meets for 140 days, every 2 years. The governor can call special sessions that are up to 30 days in length.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Legislature

So at least in Texas it does not have to be a full time job.

Re: Congress Needs to Stop Day Trading, Says Sen. Mark Warner

#128
post #28

Members of Congress make ~$174k/yr. [1] It will be an unpopular opinion, but I believe that we should pay better (and demand better) for a job with that much responsibility. Otherwise, a congressperson will be forever tempted to align their incentives with service to causes other than their electorate. I'm fairly certain we should be paying our elected officials at least as much as our football coaches. [1] https://w…

I heavily disagree. We are already in a situation were poor people don't even fucking bother to vote anymore because none of the politicians live on the same planet as they do. None of these millionaire douchebags are relatable at this point.

I think the problem is that if we don't pay them, someone else will. And the "someone else" always attaches strings.

Re: Congress Needs to Stop Day Trading, Says Sen. Mark Warner

#129
post #22

We will see a black hole evaporate via Hawking radiation before a bill such as this becomes law. The United States Senate is the body representing the capitalists/landed gentry/aristocracy/etc., and from my amateur reading of US history it always has been. The House is only slightly better. There may be politically powerful voices which speak out on issues such as these, but only briefly. Tomorrow will be a new crisi…

And the best HN can come up with is throwing more money at the problem making anyone in public office automatically a part of the gentry.

Re: Congress Needs to Stop Day Trading, Says Sen. Mark Warner

#130
post #63
post #28

Members of Congress make ~$174k/yr. [1] It will be an unpopular opinion, but I believe that we should pay better (and demand better) for a job with that much responsibility. Otherwise, a congressperson will be forever tempted to align their incentives with service to causes other than their electorate. I'm fairly certain we should be paying our elected officials at least as much as our football coaches. [1] https://w…

It has been proven multiple times, that already very well paid company managers, will accept bribes for small amounts of money and petty motives. Integrity is not connected to how well someone is paid. Reckless behavior for minor motives that makes people risk careers of years, family responsibilities, seems the norm for some individuals. I collect these cases, as they fascinate me on what they say about human nature…

But they should be paid fairly commensurate with their responsibilities. Some of them with spine will actually be demotivated to do corruption.
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