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Apple chief executive Tim Cook gets $750m payout

bbc.com

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Re: Apple chief executive Tim Cook gets $750m payout

#291

Post by bzbarsky »

beckman466 wrote: post #46

So according to this 2018 article by The Verge [1], Foxconn workers producing iGadgets in China earn on average $390.16 per month. Times that by twelve and we find that workers earn $4,681.92 per year on average. If we divide Tim's $750,000,000 bonus/payout this year by that $4,681.92 yearly Foxconn salary, we get 160,190 My question is: how is Tim so productive that he does roughly 160,000 people’s work, or 1/8th of…

> If we divide Tim's $750,000,000 bonus/payout this year by that $4,681.92 yearly Foxconn salary, we get 160,190

Why are we dividing a once-in-10-years (based on targets set 10 years ago) bonus by an every-year salary number?

As in, all your numbers are off by a factor of 10, as far as I can see.

Re: Apple chief executive Tim Cook gets $750m payout

#292

Post by howaboutnope »

rglullis wrote: post #59
beckman466 wrote: post #46

So according to this 2018 article by The Verge [1], Foxconn workers producing iGadgets in China earn on average $390.16 per month. Times that by twelve and we find that workers earn $4,681.92 per year on average. If we divide Tim's $750,000,000 bonus/payout this year by that $4,681.92 yearly Foxconn salary, we get 160,190 My question is: how is Tim so productive that he does roughly 160,000 people’s work, or 1/8th of…

When will we learn to stop making these silly calculations about "productivity" and understand that people are paid not by the value of their work, but by their scarcity? Any factory in China can replace most of their 160k employees overnight if they wanted to. How many Tim Cook's do you have lying around?

> people are paid not by the value of their work, but by their scarcity

So the less people there are who own the majority of the wealth on the planet, the more that is justified?

So their value is what, exactly? Scarcity by itself doesn't mean anything. There are diseases that are extremely rare, that doesn't make it more desirable to have them.

The rent seeking, wealth-siphoning people do need the people who build the stuff they live off. That's not true the other way around. You don't have to replace Tim Cook, you just have to get rid of him.

(edit: I don't mean Tim Cook personally, it's not intended as criticism of that particular person; but the amount of wealth such people (not to mention the people where the ratio is WAY more off) bind destroys so much productivity in the people that have to struggle as a result, that they would provide more value to the world and the people in it by not existing, than by anything they did or could possibly do)

Re: Apple chief executive Tim Cook gets $750m payout

#293

Post by rglullis »

ctvo wrote: post #289
rglullis wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can he turn Apple into a computer company that would focus on replaceable, modular electronics? Something like Fairphone, but on a bigger scale and with more resources, or that could have more runway without turning a profit? No, he can't. Apple is known for being a company that wants to integrate everything and needs to control all of its process. And for all the environmental talk, they would never sacrifice their…

When did Tim Cook become interested in those things? No he can’t turn Apple into a pizza delivery service either. And?

Apple is a hardware company that makes phones, pushes for a "green and socio-environmentally fair" agenda and also markets its computers to young people and the education market. Is it really that much of a stretch that this someone at Apple would be interested in working on these areas?

In any case, it's a sad state of the world when even the CEO of the richest corporation in the world can not be allowed to be interested in anything else that is perfectly aligned with the company's goals.

Re: Apple chief executive Tim Cook gets $750m payout

#294

Post by bzbarsky »

DSingularity wrote: post #218
vmurthy wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is just once again a case of philanthropic green-washing of what should be actually simply heavily taxed. Not being snarky but heavily taxed and then what? Expect the government to make the best decision on how to spend money?

I think if we go heavy handed against wealth inequality then we should also legislate conservative spending by governments. This money can’t go to the fund next Afghanistan or to Israel to fund another settlement. It has to go to simple but surely-helpful efforts like: feeding the poor, improving education, and building infrastructure.

Both improving education and building infrastructure, as they are actually practiced, are not "simple" and questionably "surely-helpful". See also bridges to nowhere and schools with top-of-the-line computers but broken heating/cooling systems.

Just throwing money at things does not mean it gets used to actually improve them, unfortunately... The question is when you have gotten to diminishing, or negative, returns.

Re: Apple chief executive Tim Cook gets $750m payout

#295

Post by Andrew_nenakhov »

SantalBlush wrote: post #223
Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm from former USSR and I can hardly stand this commie foolishness. Go to some socialist country like Cuba, Venezuela that have eliminated the inequality (like the USSR did before), then talk about 'moral failings of the society'.

Go to some country like the United States, where we have nice things like weekends and 40-hour work weeks because we had a rather successful labor movement in the early 20th century because of discussions like this. We used to have children working in coal mines, and now we don't largely because people spoke out. Thank god for them.

I think that the conditions of workers impoved in some countries after WWI because of Russia: politicians and entrepreneurs looked at what happened in Russia and decided to make the proletariat a bit less unhappy, because the alternative looked very very very bad

Re: Apple chief executive Tim Cook gets $750m payout

#296

Post by Andrew_nenakhov »

UncleMeat wrote: post #201
Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our world is unfair only when the corruption interferes, that lets you receive more money than you are actually worth. But in case of foxconn workers and Cook, everything is fair. Foxconn workers are not chained to the benches, that simply don't know any other place where they can earn more. And I think Cook doesn't bribe anyone to achieve such payouts. If anything, he's doing a great job developing a business.

> Our world is unfair only when the corruption interferes, that lets you receive more money than you are actually worth. What is corruption? A software engineer doing the same work gets paid way more in SF than in London. State policies prevent free movement of labor between London and SF. State policies do not prevent free movement of capital across nations, as clearly seen by the number of megacorporations actually…

Corruption is profiteering from occupying position of power, or from having ties with people in power. For example, getting a well paid job without necessary skills, because you are a nephew of a company vice president.

As for software engineers, recently so many people here are up in arms against the return to the office... But still want to get paid 3x the guy from Indonesia. I'm looking for them replaced with cheaper developers, and what they'll think then about the remote work.

Re: Apple chief executive Tim Cook gets $750m payout

#297

Post by bzbarsky »

avianlyric wrote: post #212
Invictus0 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why this criticism? Is HIV research not a good enough cause for you? Much better than a 10 billion dollar airport or 15 billion dollar Olympics in my opinion.

There’s no guarantee that Tim’s going to use his money for “good” causes, we’re entirely dependent on his good will. He may go down the evangelical Christian path and fund a war of sex, abortions, gays, trans and people’s reproductive rights. That’s not even a hypothetical outcome, there’s plenty of millionaires and billionaires (like David Green) already funding that war.

Tim funding a war on "gays" would be .... very surprising.

But also, there's no guarantee that _anyone_ including the government will use money for "good" causes. Bridges to nowhere, military adventurism, wars on drugs, personal enrichment of politicians and government employees, vanity projects of various sorts, the list of things governments mis-spend on is vast.

And of course we don't all agree on the relative merits of different causes.

Re: Apple chief executive Tim Cook gets $750m payout

#298

Post by rglullis »

UncleMeat wrote: post #283
rglullis wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If entrepreneurs can already do this, why the fuck are they paying so much money for engineers in the bay area? Because these people are scarce and companies can't automate that type of job. Yet . But, just look at what happened when Facebook decided to not pay SF salaries to those that moved out of the Bay Area. That was just Zuck saying "if you want be anywhere in the world to work here, then I can also look anyw…

> Because these people are scarce and companies can't automate that type of job. Yet. But you say that if we paid by productivity then entrepreneurs would simply bypass those people. Whether that is possible is independent of how we determine compensation. > It's not that hard. You allow yourself to provide a very loose mechanism for roughly determining scarcity but demand a very precise mechanism for determining pro…

> But you say that if we paid by productivity then entrepreneurs would simply bypass those people.

No. Entrepreneurs will bypass them anyway, whenever possible and whenever profitable. The difference is that your idea of "paying by productivity" would make cheap labour expensive, consequently increasing the profitability of automating work process and accelerating the pace of replacing labour.

> You allow yourself to provide a very loose mechanism for roughly determining scarcity but demand a very precise mechanism for determining productivity in the previous post.

No, I am being descriptive of the current reality. You want to be normative about your idealistic method. So, yes, you have the onus of coming up with a system that could replace the existing one and be at least as effective.

Re: Apple chief executive Tim Cook gets $750m payout

#299

Post by bzbarsky »

Ensorceled wrote: post #255
k__ wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"If every person used their resources for the best of society, the world would be a better place!" Sure thing. The problem is, many of those people also burn money for yachts and spaceships. Plus, to me all this charity stuff seems like a buyout. Gates basically made the world a worse place, before he started to make it better.

And then Gates fought against dropping COVID vaccine patent protection for months. Old habits die hard, I guess.

The COVID vaccine patent protections were not constraining vaccine supply, because they were being licensed to anyone with the capacity to produce the vaccines anyway.

It sure did make for good grandstanding to speak out against the patents and pretend like getting rid of them would change anything about vaccine availability in practice, though, and lots of people jumped up on that grandstand.

So given that dropping the patent protections would not actually help produce more vaccines and given the questions about long-run effects on drug research, opposing the people trying to score easy political points at the expense of actually doing something useful does not seem like a bad choice to me.

Re: Apple chief executive Tim Cook gets $750m payout

#300

Post by bzbarsky »

webinvest wrote: post #150
cjoh wrote: post #36

I am more interested to know how much of that payout he will be taxed on

If it’s mostly long term capital gains, he’s in the 20% LTCG tax bracket.

23.8%, because he would surely have to pay NIIT as well, right?

But also, that's just federal taxes. California adds 13.3% on top of that (for any income over $1 million, which is most of the income here).

But also, this is a stock grant, which generally get taxed as ordinary income, so I would expect 37% federal, 2.35% medicare, 13.3% California tax, adding up to 52.65% in taxes.

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