391–400 of 451 posts
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Time to also reconsider different kinds of corporations, specifically those that are wholly owned and operated by the people who work for them.
Coops, I'm not familiar with any in the IT space, care to share?
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You raise fair points about the spending of money on physical assets/consumption. Can you elaborate similarly on the potential problems with how saved/invested money is allocated?
Well, at a very high level, banks can use saved money to lend to businesses or individuals at a given multiplier. If a bank has insufficient deposits, it can't lend any more money. This is called fractional-reserve banking. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional-reserve_banking So when you make a deposit, you are effectively causing a fraction of that deposit to be available for lending. This is what you're getting…
And, if I understand the arguments, that's confirmed by Piketty's r (return on capital) > g (economic growth rate). My concern is that more money is getting tied up in chasing financial assets than in the real economy (houses, hamburgers, cows, etc.) If you have financial assets, that's good. If you don't, that's bad. Most people don't have financial assets. Sooner or later something's going to correct that trend. It'd be better to find a non-violent solution.
It’s interesting how much momentum there is in these processes. After several decades of big wage gains, during the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, the nominal increases could not be stopped, even as the economy weakened in the 1970s and 1980s. Back then all the wage cuts had to done through inflation. Nowadays there is no inflation, and no momentum to restart wage increases. This part of the article says it right: “””The u…
Well, yeah. This is fully intended. It keeps the proletariat in tatters. With threats to food and lodging, they won't protest and won't rise up. It's a very effective means of control. Bread and circuses, people.
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My advice is you make sure you have your savings in gear and then live paycheck to paycheck. That is you fund your 401k (IRA, HSA, ...), and set aside some emergency savings. However unless you have a specific short term goal in mind you should be spending everything else and enjoying life to the best of your remaining income. Of course that $8/month difference isn't much savings, but it is a lunch out vs heating lef…
>My advice is you make sure you have your savings in gear and then live paycheck to paycheck People don't live paycheck to paycheck by choice, usually. Savings first is not an option if it means not paying rent, bills, or food.
How much savings you need is an open question of course. To live as above without income doesn't require a lot of savings, so you start saving less and add some luxury.
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I've worked around in a couple of european countries and I can confirm that the freelance rates for software development today are the same or typically less than in 2001. The software developer golden age was in the mid-nineties here in Europe, and then the rates and salaries have stagnated (but not the inflation). Also, the contractual conditions are getting worse. We are now many times offered contracts with a ter…
How is that enforced on the employer side, keeping employees in their contract?
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> Now what's the dream for these workers? They can never afford to save up on their 500 euro a month. They can never get a loan to open their own business. Work harder. Make more money if you want to do your own thing. Surely there are professionals in Greece making good money working as employees for others. What are they doing that the lazy uneducated worker is not? Do more of that and less complaining that you're…
Let's ignore the fact that there simply aren't enough high paying positions for everyone that "tries hard enough". Let's simply discuss why people might not always go for the highest paying job they could get. What most people that aren't doing everything optimally to improve their situation is that they're succumbing to common human logical fallacies. People don't see that there are jobs that can potentially lead th…
And all it takes is one(!) bad/uninformed decision in your past: skip STEM.
One of most cirurgic comments I read in HN. It's a pity that is buried in the thread.
Expecting public companies to do anything except optimize for shareholder value, is pure folly. We can debate morality all day, but there's a more practical reason for this: shareholders hold all the power over management. Regardless of how unhappy you as a customer/employee are, you do not have the direct power to fire the directors/executives. You only have the indirect power of pressuring the shareholders, and hop…
It isn't that simple. A company that does "good things" for their employees can in turn reap results from those "good things". Better employees, or employees that stay long enough to have experience both have a value that returns back to shareholders. Of course how much so spend on those "good things" is an optimization problem.
You're making the argument that companies should be nicer to their employees, because that is in the best interests of their shareholders. The linked article is implying that companies should be nicer to their employees, despite the best interests of their shareholders. These are 2 completely orthogonal arguments. The first is a moral argument, whereas the second is a business-tactics argument.
Since you brought it up, I certainly agree with the business-tactics argument to some extent. Companies like Google have certainly done well for their shareholders, by keeping their employees happy. But then again, companies like Walmart have shown that in some markets, employee happiness is barely correlated with shareholder returns.
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But people have been working for a decade and a half to open up global migration of workers, as well as allowing China and others to export whatever it wants at any price (and several other "details", like IP theft of course). When 2 markets merge, prices converge. What are engineer wages in China, the Phillipines, India, ... ? Oh wait ... Second: with opening up markets, ... if there is one well-known fact in econom…
Engineers wages in China often surpass even SV wages. China is not cheap anymore if you live in Beijing or Shanghai for example.