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Your biggest vulnerability is your shitty compensation

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Re: Your biggest vulnerability is your shitty compensation

#41

Post by deaux »

cowanon77 wrote: post #12
tidewinner wrote: post #3

Ultimately, businesses offer poor compensation because they can get away with it and society has designed the economic model to support this. The economic model does not reward work, but rather ownership of assets, and this principle exists throughout every nation. It's a society modelled around protectionism of wealth, where the wealthy can hand wealth down to their children. In the United Kingdom, a third of people…

The core theories of economics seem correct, and in fact predict the current situation if used correctly. The problem is that the game has been systemicaly rigged. Employers have maximimized their legal leverage, while crushing all employee and subcontractor leverage. The central banks favors (and often rigs) the metrics that favor the rich (GDP, U3, CPI, etc), and ignore alteratives that favor labour. The government…

> The core theories of economics seem correct, and in fact predict the current situation if used correctly.

They can be use to predict and not predict anything depending on ones idea of "used correctly", which is why it's nonsense.

Re: Your biggest vulnerability is your shitty compensation

#42

Post by deaux »

tetris11 wrote: post #16

The 1830's reform of the UK, which begrudging wrestled power from the Lords and distributed voting power more evenly over the UK (rammed cities like Manchester had almost no voting rights), only happened when some of the Lords houses were close to being burned down. Thankfully the UK didn't follow France into the anarchy that was the French Revolution, and Earl Grey could make them see reason. But damn did we come cl…

> Nowadays, we don't know where the Lords necessarily live, the size of the Lords private armies don't need to be more than a handful of security guards

No, the real difference with back then is that "bread and circuses" and "divide and conquer" have been optimized to an extreme degree. A populace on opium isn't going to manage to band together and take it to the Lords.

Re: Your biggest vulnerability is your shitty compensation

#43

Post by _DeadFred_ »

munksbeer wrote: post #38
tidewinner wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The core foundation of society is built around work. We trade our time, skills and attention for a pay check that allows us to sustain ourselves, our families, and that we can use as a means to achieve our goals. The key problem is that society devalues this work year after year, as those with assets are rewarded simply for holding a legal deed. Creativity can get you far when you have nothing, but there is a limit a…

>In a healthy society, choosing to work to serve others 40 hours a week, should afford you the ability to acquire enough capital to buy a small house and start a family after 10 years. Unfortunately, this is now unachievable in many parts of the world I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you, but you seem to leap from "it is hard to buy a house these days" to "this is the fault of people accruing capital". I'm trying…

Bob has enough assets he can buy an additional rental property each year.

Tim has to save for 10 years in order to get a down payment on a house (and borrow half of it from mom and dad).

Tim rents from Bob.

Tim has to compete with Bob when it comes time to purchase his home.

It is easier for Bob to acquire a house, and during the time Tim has saved, Bob has been able to add 10 homes to his portfolio.

Wealth consolidates more wealth at the top over time. The more consolidated, the more the velocity of consolidation speeds up (The point we are at) via not only how wealth/assets work, but also as Bob has more and more power/influence and the benefit grows of ensuring the system is in his favor he starts to exert more political influence. An orthodontist with two homes isn't bothering with political influence other than zoning around those homes. His son that inherited multiple homes and now rents out 50 is going to every government meeting related to renting in the town, taking the country planner to lunch, knows the council members on a first name basis, and exerts much more political power than his father. As wealth accrues, the ability/desire/benefit for manipulating/abusing power grows almost exponentially.

Re: Your biggest vulnerability is your shitty compensation

#44

Post by antisthenes »

tidewinner wrote: post #21
card_zero wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neither of you mention creativity. The article too gives the impression that the world is made out of work (like turning a treadmill), and assets (inherently unfair). The point of it all is apparently to live, like a sessile sponge in the ocean, hence "living wage". > Now at some point, the humans involved in handing out currency decided that too many people were living too nicely. The origins of currency are mysteri…

The core foundation of society is built around work. We trade our time, skills and attention for a pay check that allows us to sustain ourselves, our families, and that we can use as a means to achieve our goals. The key problem is that society devalues this work year after year, as those with assets are rewarded simply for holding a legal deed. Creativity can get you far when you have nothing, but there is a limit a…

> I disagree with the commenter that your replied to directly, who seems to believe the world is a zero-sum game.

The world is multiple repeated games happening simultaneously all over the place. Many of them are zero-sum (e.g. purchasing a home in a certain zip-code) in the short term and medium-term, but not in the long term.

People using the "omg it's not zero sum" generalization are mostly incorrect. Not because everything is zero-sum, but because of how much of a gross simplification it is - so much so that it becomes useless without specifics.

Re: Your biggest vulnerability is your shitty compensation

#45

Post by danaris »

munksbeer wrote: post #38
tidewinner wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The core foundation of society is built around work. We trade our time, skills and attention for a pay check that allows us to sustain ourselves, our families, and that we can use as a means to achieve our goals. The key problem is that society devalues this work year after year, as those with assets are rewarded simply for holding a legal deed. Creativity can get you far when you have nothing, but there is a limit a…

>In a healthy society, choosing to work to serve others 40 hours a week, should afford you the ability to acquire enough capital to buy a small house and start a family after 10 years. Unfortunately, this is now unachievable in many parts of the world I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you, but you seem to leap from "it is hard to buy a house these days" to "this is the fault of people accruing capital". I'm trying…

Until the late '70s-early '80s, overall productivity tracked very closely with wage growth.

Then wage growth flattened out, at the same time that the wealth of the wealthiest few started to grow by leaps and bounds.

It is the fault of people accruing capital. They have taken a vast percentage of all the wealth created in the past 50 years, which would have otherwise gone to the rest of us.

Then they used that wealth as leverage to prevent the rest of us from having the power to do anything about it.

Re: Your biggest vulnerability is your shitty compensation

#46

Post by subscribed »

em-bee wrote: post #34
mettamage wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the Netherlands many senior SWEs make €85K+ at the moment and that is what $100k+ is right now. I'm writing this because I don't consider NL to be the top country in Europe where you can make a lot of money being a SWE. And I'm not talkin about FAANG salaries either, they are higher here.

which would be the top country then? i can't think of any country in europe that offers even that much. perhaps scandinavia, but life is more expensive there too.

Fintech in London pays fairly well if you're skilled for the role. £100k pa base is considered low (best companies pay £250k+).

Of course the downside are absurd taxes, up to 62% on a large part of that, so I hope people try to escape that as much as they can (considering the politicians and the wealthy do the same just orders of magnitude more and in the open).

Re: Your biggest vulnerability is your shitty compensation

#47

Post by insane_dreamer »

I really like how this was framed:

> This society has been arranged around using currency to purchase necessities, because some people decided that necessities are not guaranteed.

It's crazy to me that we've advanced to the point that we could guarantee necessities (we know how to grow enough food and extract enough natural resources to do so), we still hold to the above. And before you shout "Communism", guaranteeing necessities doesn't necessarily mean communism. It just means there's a floor that everyone is at, and then what you earn from your labor (which varies depending on the labor) is on top of that.

Re: Your biggest vulnerability is your shitty compensation

#48

Post by insane_dreamer »

xorcist wrote: post #8

This comes off as slightly on the entitled side. Yearly salaries at $100k+ is very high by Western European standards. I can only imagine what our Eastern European colleagues would feel about it. If you can live a comfortable life and send our children to school well fed perhaps broaden the horizons a bit before ranting off about how much better the world would be if you could be paid a bit more.

1. He's obviously talking about the US, you have to factor in COL especially in the cities where the employer wants you to be.

2. You have to take the numbers relative to corporate profits and shareholder earnings, which have ballooned

Re: Your biggest vulnerability is your shitty compensation

#49

Post by insane_dreamer »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #39
Havoc wrote: post #13

The pressures he describes seem correct and mirror what I’ve seen. Think he’s wrong about this being close to blowing up. Think that’s coloured by his own personal situation. I suspect unfortunately the powers that be correctly read the situation as significantly more room to squeeze. It might read as bad to usa ears but keep in mind there are people breaking down ships with zero safety, zero job security, low pay, b…

The election of Trump could be regarded as "blowing up". I recall someone saying, "I can't throw a molotov cocktail through the window of the White House, but I can throw a Trump." That is, at least some people voted for Trump as a deliberate attack on the powers that be. An effective attack? I would say, not really. (Has he improved the economic lot of the people who voted for him? No, he hasn't.) But the sentiment…

I think it was more of an attack on what was perceived as a "woke lib" system at odds with "true American values". If they were trying to change the system and balance of power of corporations vs employees (the topic here), they truly shot themselves in the foot by voting for the person who of all the candidates was the most likely to make the situation worse for them by further enabling corporations vs labor, and which is turning out to be even worse than anyone imagined in that respect.

Re: Your biggest vulnerability is your shitty compensation

#50

Post by Ancalagon »

tetris11 wrote: post #16

The 1830's reform of the UK, which begrudging wrestled power from the Lords and distributed voting power more evenly over the UK (rammed cities like Manchester had almost no voting rights), only happened when some of the Lords houses were close to being burned down. Thankfully the UK didn't follow France into the anarchy that was the French Revolution, and Earl Grey could make them see reason. But damn did we come cl…

> Nowadays, we don't know where the Lords necessarily live

I know of a big, white, home where a number of them keep showing up :)

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