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The myth of big salaries (it's all marketing)

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Re: The myth of big salaries (it's all marketing)

#151

Post by Gormo »

mullingitover wrote: post #37

Beyond a few million a year, the rest of the comp is really providing something that's more difficult to purchase with money: power. So, while there's a diminishing return on the benefits of additional money in a person's life, a certain subset of people have an insatiable desire for more power. It's problematic in what's supposed to be a democratic society with a fairly flat amount of power distributed among citizen…

Money only equals political power to the extent that the political power itself is up for sale. Attempting to suppress the acquisition of money via political power will ultimately just create an alternate elite that denominates power via something other than money. The only solution is to reduce the reach of formal political power such that even if it is easier to manipulate it with money, it still can't be used to conduct abuses.

Fundamentally, no one is qualified to make decisions for anyone else in the first place, and the way we ensure the fitness of our civilization is to disaggregate and decentralize power.

Re: The myth of big salaries (it's all marketing)

#152

Post by asadotzler »

wonderwonder wrote: post #64
n4r9 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the record, not everyone is like this. And - one hopes - many of the most talented are not. I've pulled out of an interview process for a job paying 3-4x (with upwards potential) the job I took, because I saw more meaning and social value in the latter. The content of the job can be more important than the salary.

I am not arguing that this is how you live and if you find meaning in it, more power to you. I find value in maximizing my salary, I view work as trading life hours for dollars. The more dollars I can extract from each working life hour, the less I need to work and the more things I can do in my non working hours. It also allows me to establish a higher base level future for my kids. I have no loyalty to a company I…

So you're pretending to disagree while also agreeing that the OP is wrong?

Re: The myth of big salaries (it's all marketing)

#153

Post by wmf »

krupan wrote: post #93
n2d4 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Company benefits are also a form of salary. If your company gifts you a free car, they have to tax it as such.

You'd think so, right? Look up why corporations started providing insurance to their employees. Look into why your compensation is not just a salary, but salary, bonuses, stock (options or RSU's), etc.

AFAIK health insurance is special-cased by law. I had to pay (a trivial amount of) tax on imputed income from IBM's life insurance. The IRS is wise to a lot of perks like company cars.

Re: The myth of big salaries (it's all marketing)

#154

Post by asadotzler »

krupan wrote: post #140
ZoomerCretin wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's pretty refreshing to see a whole lot of disdain for this article here :-) This is Hacker News. World peace and Star Trek-style wealth and post-scarcity could be achieved and we'd still have an overwhelmingly negative Hacker News comment section nitpicking the way peace was achieved, or lamenting that life was better with poverty and the threat of war.

I'm pretty sure it was hacker news roughly 15 years ago that introduced me to Seth Godin. Or maybe it was Slashdot. Either way, there was a time when engineers were excited about starting businesses and were drinking up everything they could about marketing because we knew we sucked at it (and probably because PG told us to).

That time is not now. Now HN is half corporate boot lickers defending the status quo, like the temporarily embarrassed billionaires they are, while the other half are using HN as a political soap box to rail against San Francisco or the current federal administration or last year's HN icons who have since fallen off of the pedestals HN put them on.

It's become mostly a joke where perhaps 1 of 10 comments are insightful and hacker-y, the inverse of what it was 15 years ago when intellectual curiosity and, you know, hacking, were seen as more important than preening and demonstrations of social status.

HN is becoming Instagram or Twitter. It's nearly fully degraded to NextDoor levels of discussion.

Re: The myth of big salaries (it's all marketing)

#155

Post by danbruc »

lex-lightning wrote: post #132
danbruc wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. If you work for 10 years and then just consume stuff for the rest of your life without lifting a finger, stuff for which other people work all day long to produce it while at the same time probably not enjoying a quality of life anywhere near yours, that is deeply unjust and I consider it immoral to desire such a life.

I would have paid double my taxes over my career if the US would spend it on elevating the poor. But asking me to not retire, to give away my savings to very few people? What, that’s not ethical. What if I made a lot, but spend very little? Shouldn’t that weigh in, if your issue is consumption level? What if in my early retirement, I go around lifting people up in non-monetary ways? What if my job earned me a lot of…

My point is very simple and we do not have to discuss all the edge cases. Working x hours and consuming stuff that took y hours to produce where y is much larger than x is unjust. All the rest are details.

Re: The myth of big salaries (it's all marketing)

#156

Post by cassianoleal »

jjcm wrote: post #122
lumost wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this over-estimates the amount required to live a luxurious life in perpetuity. Consider the case of someone wishing to live a luxury lifestyle in the trendy lower east side neighborhood of manhattan. We'll use a 1300 sqft 3 bedroom condo as a baseline. https://www.redfin.com/NY/New-York/455-FDR-Dr-10002/unit-B30... This condo will cost 8k/month with a 20% downpayment at todays interest rates, leaving our hyp…

If anyone wants an extremely simplified "when can I retire given x expenses and y income" calculator, I threw together one here: https://html.non.io/simple-retirement-calculator/ Screenshot with op's scenario: https://image.non.io/7865a80e-d1e7-4437-b983-9101ed023024.we... (assumes a 4% safe withdrawal rate, I suspect op is using 3%).

Thanks! It looks like I can safely retire in `null` years! I'll put the champagne on ice.

Re: The myth of big salaries (it's all marketing)

#157

Post by cvhashim04 »

bko wrote: post #127
lumost wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this over-estimates the amount required to live a luxurious life in perpetuity. Consider the case of someone wishing to live a luxury lifestyle in the trendy lower east side neighborhood of manhattan. We'll use a 1300 sqft 3 bedroom condo as a baseline. https://www.redfin.com/NY/New-York/455-FDR-Dr-10002/unit-B30... This condo will cost 8k/month with a 20% downpayment at todays interest rates, leaving our hyp…

A 1300 sqft apt isn't exactly lux with a family of 4. Plus public schools aren't great in most of the city and private will cost you 50k per kid, post tax. Then you have to ask what you're doing during the summer. Camp will cost you easily another 20-50k per kid. And your naive math of tax leaves out a lot city and state tax. There are a lot of expenses. The fire stuff you read about people retiring after a few milli…

Found the millionaire ;)

Agreed, nowhere near close to those numbers but kids, school, vacations, life, things just add up quickly.

Re: The myth of big salaries (it's all marketing)

#158

Post by asadotzler »

jbs789 wrote: post #53

“In fact, we need more private companies that innovate and pay their staff a ton. But if you're owned by shareholders..” Private companies are owned by shareholders. That’s just one of the internal inconsistencies. Bit curious. Leads me to question the whole argument.

What he's suggesting is that the massive public markets drive companies in ways that tiny groups of people who came together specifically to make a company plus perhaps their friends, families, and a few moneyed investors, simply don't. That you can't quite connect with that suggests you are not the target audience for this article.

Re: The myth of big salaries (it's all marketing)

#159

Post by xboxnolifes »

jeltz wrote: post #11
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #6

> After a million dollars or so in salary, the absolute amount that a person is paid has no real impact on their life. They can't eat more meals in a day or wear more shoes There is more to life than food and shoes? This is one of the dumbest things I’ve read.

The point still stands. Beyond some amount the absolute amount of money really stops to matter

And that point happens, at minimum, after you have enough money to no longer need to work another day in your life.

Re: The myth of big salaries (it's all marketing)

#160

Post by asadotzler »

captainbland wrote: post #103
AceJohnny2 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Work-life balance. Job perks. Working on projects that you consider valuable. Non-profits are particularly good at that last point.

> Working on projects that you consider valuable. Sometimes I imagine all the very wealthy people thinking about where to allocate their capital like "hm, hiring more people to do computational cancer research? nah. Let's try and invalidate people's insurance claims through their ad clicks instead."

Most corporations with any power are sociopathic institutions run by sociopaths competing with other similar corporations on who accumulate and deploy the most power. Punching down is always more lucrative than punching up and you don't change things or have breakthroughs without at least a little punching up. As you noted, that rarely happens because it's simply easier and more lucrative to fuck people over.
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