171–180 of 245 posts
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The point still stands. Beyond some amount the absolute amount of money really stops to matter
The ability to exert power and influence over things you value continues to scale with money. There's more to life than consumption.
The NFL is on my mind, as of course is soccer since there was a actual football player in one of the commercials during the recent game
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The point still stands. Beyond some amount the absolute amount of money really stops to matter
According to whom? The research I've seen on this confirms Bernoulli's intuition that happiness scales with the logarithm of income. Sure, the logarithm is slowly varying in the limit, but that seems like a very unusual definition of both "beyond some amount" and "absolute amount stops mattering."
Or more simply: most people want to retire.
I guess I'm not sure that there's a practical difference between "It's marketing" and "This is what the market rate is for a CEO." In other words, firms need to pay this much because that's what other firms are paying (at least.) That's not marketing - that's just the unfettered market at work. Which is why it needs to be fettered. I agree with the salary cap idea, because the market will naturally keep raising the p…
How about no salary cap but a maximum difference factor between the highest paid and the lowest paid in any company? Not sure what the figure should be (x10?, x20?, x50?, x100?). That way companies that want to pay higher saleries to their CEO would have to increase everyone's salary. But there would need to be a way of stopping companies just using shells and subcontracting all the real work to low pay subsidiaries.
The IRS rules went in that said that with the exception of your executives (that is a whole other conversation), everyone has to have the same plan for insurance and pensions. Since they did not want to give out that much money for janitors, they got kicked out of the companies.
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A salary cap doesn’t change the market rate! It just obfuscates it. Salaries for public companies locked at 10M/yr? Ok, now firms have to compete on amenities. (Your current firm gives you a free car? Ours gives a jet, a personal Michelin star cook, and complimentary beverages)
Caps work. If they didn't, they wouldn't be in massively expensive fields like sports.
This article is pretty shallow and sounds a lot like the people on Reddit calling for the removal of billionaires and how its the fault of the rich that they are struggling without acknowledging the amount of work it takes to become rich. The same people that minimize what people like Musk have accomplished. If I get paid more, I work harder. There is obviously a realistic limit on how hard I can work. The longer I s…
> ... without acknowledging the amount of work it takes to become rich Being rich has more to do with background, than work. > The same people that minimize what people like Musk have accomplished. The son of a property developer and part owner of an emerald mine, and a top model, no less. What I'm trying to say is that getting a jumpstart, while not guaranteeing a path to success, does provide a massive advantage ov…
> 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. What matters to the manager is the relative amount. Sure, nobody needs more than a million dollars in annual compensation (in 2024 dollars), but relative amount gets you to your never need to work again number faster or slower. You might still wo…
Perhaps counterintuitively, going from first class to charter/leased flights is a safety downgrade. Search for accident statistics on the NTSB site and you'll see that Part 135 flights (smaller aircraft, including business jets) have 3-4x the accident rates compared to Part 121 (large air carriers), arguably because Part 121 regulations are much more stringent. Here[1] is a very recent leased jet fatal accident, for example.
[1] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2024/02/09/plane-...
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Yeah, a million dollars a year is not anywhere close to where having more money doesn't impact you. If that's $600K after taxes, and a year of college for a single child costs $80K at an excellent school, and you've got two or three kids, and housing in a major metropolitan area... I mean you're definitely living very comfortably, but there are still lots of ways to spend money that have a big impact on your life, be…
From my personal experience in my circle of friends in my expensive west coast city, there are very impactful differences between the lower end of annual household income (400K) to the upper end (1.5M). While everyone lives fairly comfortably and doesn't have much financial stress, there are things the upper end can do that the lower end can't: - Send the kids to private schools (more and more important as public sch…
Psychopath
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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…
Is that lobster camp? What are kids doing in a 50k camp? I am regular European and 50k is like an annual salary. Kids go to camps though but they are more like 700 a week. Let’s call it a grand. For 50k you can get a helicopter pilot license not a summer camp
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> Salary is absolutely the key factor when people pick jobs. For people with poor reasoning - yes. Most people think of ROI, especially after COVID. A finish carpenter runs at $150 per hour, but your career is limited by your physical abilities. Going to a company like Bridgewater, where 50 hr workweeks onsite are expected, at $250k may be less valuable than going to Microsoft at $180k. > I can't believe this charact…
No, they didn't spend any time. That doesn't happen much here on HN any more. They took the headlines, perhaps a few other comments here, and ran with whatever their gut was telling them, often contrarian and usually wrong.
Yes I read the article, and yes I think it's a crock of shit written by a "marketing guru" in 2009 to capitalize on popular anger towards bankers.