471–480 of 1001 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why? It sounds good to me.
Just an example. Should teachers be judged on how a pleasant life they live, or how good they teach?
Nobody gets into teaching for the money—and, for that matter, there’s not a clear connection between doing it well and any kind of rewards at all, as it stands.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If coops could be more productive for less money they could beat out their competition without needing it outlawed. It should be easy for them if what you say is true, no Bezos means they have more margin to work with but they struggle to compete... Hmm..
"If companies who don't optimize for profit optimized for profit they would be the same as the companies who optimize for profit" is fairly obviously true, and also useless.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't want to be rude but you have no idea what you are talking about and clearly have 0 insight into the day-to-day of an actual CEO. It's fine to argue that a particular CEO is underperforming, it's often true, but very few of them are "underworking" by any reasonable definition.
How’s this for a definition: the average CEO gets paid 350x what the average worker gets paid, so unless they’re generating 350x the value of the average employee, they’re underworking.
Economics 101 has entered the chat
Earlier quoted context omitted.
To take over the market companies need to attract customers - i.e. make their lives better. Usually there are more consumers than employees - so I think that measure works quite well with optimising for humans. Profit is a side effect of taking over the market. But actually to have any employees companies need to optimize for workers lives anyway. And it seems that cooperatives are not any better in this area - other…
People like doing meaningful work that benefits their customers. I think that employee owned businesses tens to treat their customers better than companies that are owned by private equity, pension funds or other investors who never touch the product or interact with the customers.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/fotschcase/2017/04/17/uniteds-t...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is maybe an underappreciated point, an employee-owned company with in a monopoly (or near monopoly) market position will act just as aggressively to screw over their captured consumer base as any other private ownership model. The employees may be better off, but the rest of us will suffer the same.
Agreed, COOPs don't fundamentally change human behavior which has doses of greed. A large COOP monopoly will suffer the same fate as others'.
Monopolies are still bad either way, but I doubt that the failure modes at employee owned monoploes is the same as at outside investor owned monopolies.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"If companies who don't optimize for profit optimized for profit they would be the same as the companies who optimize for profit" is fairly obviously true, and also useless.
So are you conceding that an economy built entirely out of coops would suffer from reduced productivity?
Again, this is a culture thing, where I'm saying "I don't care about being productive, as long as I'm happy", and you're coming from a Protestant work ethic place of "but how can you be happy if you aren't productive?".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Unions should put their money where their mouth is and invest in cooperatives. Unions aren't structured for investing, and that's not their reason to exist. I don't know where you are from so I can't comment on how unions function in your society, where I live they're definitely not in the same realm as a potential investor for cooperatives. You are also asking for unions to compete against VCs, and banks, let's be…
> On top of that the union has responsibilities to provide benefits to all members, a bank or investor has none of that A bank has responsibilities to its shareholders.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Then maybe "taking over the market" is a bad metric, and we should be optimizing for making a company that makes the workers' lives better. The US cultural bias is showing here, as it's assumed that profit is above all else, and a company that forgoes profit to make workers happier must thus be less good. The vast majority of people in companies are workers. Let's stop optimizing for owner wealth and start optimizing…
> The US cultural bias is showing here, as it's assumed that profit is above all else I asked my Greek teacher what they biggest change she experienced moving to the US was, and she said that in Greece, her community prioritized happiness above all else, but everyone she met in the US prioritized making money. I also asked her what the financial crisis was like in Greece, and she said that you couldn’t find an empty…
You should have asked her why she came to the US
Employee stock options are not a new idea, obviously. If the story is "every company should offer stock options to its employees", then sure, that's often a good business plan. The reason not every company does it to all its employees is probably that for those employees, it wouldn't affect incentives much and it would make payment subject to the vagaries of the stock market. Your barista at Starbucks is not going to…
Not sure I agree. If all the baristas did a better job then I think that would positively affect company value.