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Samsung chip workers will get an average $340k bonus as AI profits soar

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Re: Samsung chip workers will get an average $340k bonus as AI profits soar

#151

Post by zozbot234 »

Rapzid wrote: post #99
arjie wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s actually a pretty good thing. Becoming a multi-millionaire is quite achievable in this country and if that means I provide a compounding ability to my kids to provide a large amount of value to a large amount of people and capture some amount of that, that’s a good thing. Since 2/3rds of American billionaires are from industry, if it is true that their parents were multi-millionaires, that is wonderful. The fa…

You are drawn to the multi generational accumulation of wealth and power? The societal ill our founders were concerned about that's currently giving us a high grade fever? Brings to mind a certain creature that thrives in festering wounds.. It's in the tip of my...

Yes, I'd rather people bequeath their wealth and power over the generations than they waste it in purely self-serving ways, such as by buying yet another luxury yacht. Of course many billionaires choose to donate much of their wealth to charitable pursuits as well.

Re: Samsung chip workers will get an average $340k bonus as AI profits soar

#152

Post by vrganj »

skybrian wrote: post #128
vrganj wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel the opposite. Looking at the yearly revenue of these companies and dividing them by the number of people that contributed, I clearly created much more value than my comp gave me. Labor is entitled to all it creates.

I learned pretty quickly that money in Silicon Valley has nothing to do with getting what you "deserve" after a co-worker sold a domain name at the height of the dot-com bubble and retired on the proceeds. Sometimes people get lucky and there's no point in getting angry about it.

Do you think it's reasonable Zuckerberg or Bezos get rewarded the way they do while Amazon drivers piss in bottles and barely paid contractors get PTSD from moderating Facebook?

The system is rotten to the core. We as tech workers are somewhere in the middle, simultaneously being exploited while also benefiting from the exploitation of others.

Re: Samsung chip workers will get an average $340k bonus as AI profits soar

#154

Post by antirealist »

onion2k wrote: post #95
ai_slop_hater wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is this absurd?

Two sorts of people become billionaires from share price increases. The founders and the early investors. Neither are thousands of times more impactful than the other early hires, but they get to keep billions of dollars while the early hires only get a handful of millions. And the slightly-less-early-hires who were too late to get equity usually get nothing more than their salary, regardless of their impact. I don't…

Society shares in the value because - insofar as the company is now worth say $X - that's because they have some way to create value that justifies a price of $Y per year for N people. And for those N people to be willing to pay $Y, they presumably have to be getting more than Y value (otherwise they wouldn't bother). So the real consumer value minus $Y is the 'value' created - the consumer surplus. Obviously there are exceptions but I think this is true in general.

And re the impact of the founders/early investors, I agree that they didn't contribute 1000s of times more. But like, if I bet a million dollars on a sports games and I get bet right and make 5 million would you say I ought to pay the players who really did the work? It's not about "adding value" its about property rights. The the second tier of engineers isn't happy they can (and sometimes do) found a competitor.

Re: Samsung chip workers will get an average $340k bonus as AI profits soar

#155

Post by xyzzy123 »

LPisGood wrote: post #148
xyzzy123 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These "unions" in high paying fields behave more like guilds or cartels than worker's unions - they generally restrict supply. Athletes and Hollywood unions are sort of special cases too, IMHO. I don't think it's reasonable to claim that top earners in those fields earn so much because of their unions - they benefit from natural supply restriction of outliers. For unions to be as effective in tech as for say pilots o…

I don’t think pilots unions do much to restrict supply.

Structurally the way it works is that the AMA or ALPA or what have you lobby for regulations that just so happen to limit supply, and heavily push back whenever anyone proposes regulations that would loosen it, usually on safety / quality grounds.

There are also revolving doors between the regulator and the relevant professional bodies.

I'm pro union in cases where employers are a monopsony and workers have few options - it completely makes sense for coal miners in a coal town to form a union to even things out. I just don't think US tech right now meets the conditions for it to make sense, the market is too liquid for employers to capture all the upside.

US tech workers have real problems and complaints - PTO, maternity leave, health care to start - but these feel to me more like structural features of the US labour market? It makes more sense to me that these should be subject to national regulation rather than specific advantages for tech workers carved out by a union.

Re: Samsung chip workers will get an average $340k bonus as AI profits soar

#156

Post by zozbot234 »

vrganj wrote: post #152
skybrian wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I learned pretty quickly that money in Silicon Valley has nothing to do with getting what you "deserve" after a co-worker sold a domain name at the height of the dot-com bubble and retired on the proceeds. Sometimes people get lucky and there's no point in getting angry about it.

Do you think it's reasonable Zuckerberg or Bezos get rewarded the way they do while Amazon drivers piss in bottles and barely paid contractors get PTSD from moderating Facebook? The system is rotten to the core. We as tech workers are somewhere in the middle, simultaneously being exploited while also benefiting from the exploitation of others.

Would you rather people not be allowed to do these jobs at all? That wouldn't leave them better off. Even paying them more must necessarily be weighed against the opportunity of expanded hiring at the prevailing market wage, lest you simply create a new privileged high caste of super highly paid Amazon drivers or Facebook content moderators.

Re: Samsung chip workers will get an average $340k bonus as AI profits soar

#157

Post by Danox »

Swizec wrote: post #12
bayarearefugee wrote: post #6

Meanwhile tech workers in the US spend all day online defending billionaires who wouldn't piss on them to put out a fire and arguing about why we can't have unions because blah blah blah rugged individualism.

> Meanwhile tech workers in the US spend all day online defending billionaires Tech pulled a great trick here: equity. America as a whole pulled a similar trick: 401k It’s hard to fight the billionaires when all your money depends on not fighting them.

401(k) and IRA’s were not a gift. It was a way for the companies to end the company pension plans in the early to mid 1980s. Half of the people who did receive them squandered them by cashing out before retirement to pay bills. If Social Security goes the same way most would squander it paying for necessities.

Most of the unionize workers still left in America get a better share of the pie than the non-Union workers not even close. It’s always good to work together in a union had to be footloose and fancy free by yourself.

Re: Samsung chip workers will get an average $340k bonus as AI profits soar

#158

Post by vrganj »

zozbot234 wrote: post #156
vrganj wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think it's reasonable Zuckerberg or Bezos get rewarded the way they do while Amazon drivers piss in bottles and barely paid contractors get PTSD from moderating Facebook? The system is rotten to the core. We as tech workers are somewhere in the middle, simultaneously being exploited while also benefiting from the exploitation of others.

Would you rather people not be allowed to do these jobs at all? That wouldn't leave them better off. Even paying them more must necessarily be weighed against the opportunity of expanded hiring at the prevailing market wage, lest you simply create a new privileged high caste of super highly paid Amazon drivers or Facebook content moderators.

I would rather not have people's dignity priced by the market, the same one that created the Zuckerbergs and Sacklers of this world.

Markets are fundamentally just a proxy for the interests of rich people. There can be no fair allocation of resources as long as the mechanism to do so is a figleaf for the oligarchy.

Re: Samsung chip workers will get an average $340k bonus as AI profits soar

#159

Post by jimbob45 »

Adiqq wrote: post #38
OsrsNeedsf2P wrote: post #25

That's literally insane for Korean living standards. Those people can basically retire

Imagine the world, where instead of making billionaires and trillionaires, we would actually share with society. Providing affordable products/services to common people. Decommodification of life. There's no money for public investments, but there is always money for wars. There's no money for raises and bonuses for workers, until workers show there's no company without them. So, if there's no money for public invest…

Is anyone really upset by billionaires having their money tied up in assets? It goes against the public good to force someone to break up a public company just so that the owner has less assets on their balance sheet. Aren’t you really just mad at leveraged assets? Even non-billionaires can damage the public good doing that.

Re: Samsung chip workers will get an average $340k bonus as AI profits soar

#160

Post by Danox »

anon291 wrote: post #19
Swizec wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Meanwhile tech workers in the US spend all day online defending billionaires Tech pulled a great trick here: equity. America as a whole pulled a similar trick: 401k It’s hard to fight the billionaires when all your money depends on not fighting them.

Well yeah America has achieved what the communists sought: public ownership of the means of production . Today most of the American public owns the largest means of production in government advantaged accounts. Marx ought to be proud

Actually, it’s the other way around in America the government and the people get to pay for the debt and the Robber Baron insiders get to scuttle away with the profit.
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