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Amazon investors nuke ethics overhaul and say yes to $212M CEO pay

theregister.com

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Re: Amazon investors nuke ethics overhaul and say yes to $212M CEO pay

#171

Post by RONROC »

dvt wrote: post #104
bigfudge wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But fairness without morality is just a nonsense. It’s an equilibrium. fairness requires some moral perspective.

> fairness requires some moral perspective It does not; you might be thinking of "justice." Even animals have a primal sense of fairness without the moral baggage (e.g. every dog gets one treat, etc.).

I think you don't understand the difference between equality and equity.

I don't believe everyone should get the same slice. I just believe that 200 million is a far cry from your salary. If that was untrue you wouldn't be talking shit on a message board.

Re: Amazon investors nuke ethics overhaul and say yes to $212M CEO pay

#172

Post by cbozeman »

Kerrick wrote: post #105
ctvo wrote: post #4

> Jassy's executive compensation package, which is tied to Amazon stock price and mostly delivered as stock awards over a multi-year period, was $212 million in 2021. They used "multi-year" here over the actual timeline: 10 years. It sounds a lot less outrageous that his pay is heavily based on the stock price and comes out to be ~21 million a year as the head of one of the largest tech companies in the world. Here a…

That $212 million was starkly contrasted by the next point in the article, that Warehouse workers typically make $15/hr. It would take about 7,000 years working that wage (full-time) to make the same $212,000,000. It's still a _huge_ gulf, whether the CEO's compensation is in one year or one decade.

I often hear this and let me just pose this question...

Damn near everyone in America, at least, has access to YouTube or other streaming services. I learned how to program in R from The Teaching Company Plus' (now Wondrium)'s "Learning Statistics: Concepts and Applications in R". 24 lectures. 12 hours of content. Resources available for download. It was the springboard that allowed me to seek out deeper resources and expand my knowledge. Total price, $10.81 for a one month subscription.

You can probably find a lot of equally good free courses at other websites.

My point being this. The information is out there for people willing to seek it out. I came up poor. Really poor. Like, we're having mayonnaise sandwiches tonight for dinner poor. And if you're wondering what's in a mayonnaise sandwich, it's in the name. Mayonnaise. Bread. Period.

Now maybe we need to cultivate a sense of curiosity in our students, so even the ones who end up as warehouse workers at an Amazon can one day aspire to something greater, but at some point, people have to take some responsibility for how their own lives are turning out.

It's really easy to point the finger to society, to the government, to the person next door to you, but at the end of the day, most people have the tools (smartphones, cheap laptops), and they absolutely have the time. But the drive is something that no government program or no private initiative can give them - that you have to pull out of your gut yourself. And if you can't do that, you're doomed to a life of mediocrity.

Choose your hard.

Re: Amazon investors nuke ethics overhaul and say yes to $212M CEO pay

#173

Post by cbozeman »

sjsdaiuasgdia wrote: post #142
Auracle wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, but if you were to take all $212 million and divvy it up to the nearly 1 million US Amazon employees it wouldn’t go very far.

I see this theme a lot when this topic comes up, and I feel it misses the point. Does the CEO provide 700x the value (based on $21.2M / 2000 hrs = $10600 "hourly rate") of a warehouse worker earning $15/hr? They absolutely provide critical input and decisions at the helm of a large ship, but if you break down their input versus the input of everyone under them...is it actually such a huge disparity of mental and phys…

I would be willing to bet the CEOs of these ultra-large, ultra-powerful tech firms provide far more than 700x the value of their average worker.

Re: Amazon investors nuke ethics overhaul and say yes to $212M CEO pay

#174

Post by RONROC »

bigfudge wrote: post #66
AcerbicZero wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably the crab at the bottom of the bucket? Limits on compensation are ineffective at achieving their goals under the best of circumstances, and the inevitable "unintended" consequences of further government manipulation in the market place would likely have negative effects.

We set the context in which these forms can operate though. We can decide that forms who pay >10m in comp to individuals are by definition not contributing to social well-being… they must be exploiting some assymetry, rent seeking etc. We don’t have to work out how and why in each case… just that in balance that is almost always the case and so we make that behaviour economically unviable through taxation.

Except that you rested your laurels on the last word: taxation.

Taxation is not and will never be in a place that serves the commonwealth, rather it will always align with those closer to power.

Have you not been paying attention?

Re: Amazon investors nuke ethics overhaul and say yes to $212M CEO pay

#175

Post by OminousWeapons »

RONROC wrote: post #165
OminousWeapons wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 origi…

>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…

> 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.

Re: Amazon investors nuke ethics overhaul and say yes to $212M CEO pay

#176

Post by MichaelZuo »

Clickbait title, 'nuke ethics overhaul' really means shareholders turn down activist proposal.

And this thread turned into mostly envious ranting pretty fast. A lot of folks aren't even trying to have actual discussions, just mindless ranting past one another, behaving like crabs in a bucket, etc...

It even makes me doubt if it's all organic or if their are paid trolls from competitors as well in the mix.

Considering that Amazon, and Jeff Bezos, are not known to give out lavish comp. packages willy-nilly, it seems like more could be learned investigating why this guy is worth $21 million a year.

Re: Amazon investors nuke ethics overhaul and say yes to $212M CEO pay

#177

Post by [deleted] »

RONROC wrote: post #171
dvt wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> fairness requires some moral perspective It does not; you might be thinking of "justice." Even animals have a primal sense of fairness without the moral baggage (e.g. every dog gets one treat, etc.).

I think you don't understand the difference between equality and equity. I don't believe everyone should get the same slice. I just believe that 200 million is a far cry from your salary. If that was untrue you wouldn't be talking shit on a message board.

[deleted]

Re: Amazon investors nuke ethics overhaul and say yes to $212M CEO pay

#178

Post by RONROC »

OminousWeapons wrote: post #175
RONROC wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

> 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 yi…

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.

And what good is that?

Re: Amazon investors nuke ethics overhaul and say yes to $212M CEO pay

#179

Post by justapassenger »

Krasnol wrote: post #145
justapassenger wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Or imagine this... they (athletes and CEOs) are ALL grossly overpaid. WOAH!! Pay is a function of scarcity and value they bring. > How out of touch with reality are you, if you think that's acceptable for any human to make that kind of money when majority of the world can hardly afford food. Livable conditions for all humans have nothing to do with how to compensate top of the of the top people in their profession.…

> Pay is a function of scarcity and value they bring. I seriously doubt those skills which are supposed to define scarcity at this point. There is too much management to require a seriously special person on that chair. I'm sure you could have someone from mid-management on that chair and it still wouldn't run worse. It would probably even run better. So what is the value there? It's almost like with a piece of art.…

> I seriously doubt those skills which are supposed to define scarcity at this point. There is too much management to require a seriously special person on that chair. I'm sure you could have someone from mid-management on that chair and it still wouldn't run worse. It would probably even run better.

Did you ever try to manage small org vs big org vs huge company? It's very naive to think that managing dozens of people requires same skills as managing some of the biggest companies in the world.

Re: Amazon investors nuke ethics overhaul and say yes to $212M CEO pay

#180

Post by evandale »

ciabattabread wrote: post #141
evandale wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>What aspect of “private company” do you not understand? The part where they're given more power than we give the government.

So… you want the government to interfere with the operation of private companies so they are forced to give a platform to people they don’t want to do business with… Last I checked, political beliefs are not a protected class.

I want the government to interfere with the operation of _specific_ private companies so they're forced to give a platform to everyone because of the sheer amount of traffic and eyeballs they get every single second of every single day. Facebook, Google, and Twitter come to mind first.

IMO they can't be trusted with having more power than the government. They have way too much control over what people consume on the internet.

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