Every company should be owned by its employees • Hacker News Board

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#701

Post by consteval » Thu, Jul 25, 2024, 5:50 PM UTC

Gormo wrote: post #411

aziaziazi wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Company profits is not always aligned with consumer interests, didn’t understand why you switched them.

Not always, no, but as the general case, they are. At the end of the day, people need to be willing to pay a business in exchange for its goods and services, and if they don't feel like they are obtaining net positive value from the transaction, they won't be.

I think key word here is "feel". The reality is that modern products are absurdly complex, and consumers truly don't know what is (and isn't) worth their money. Which is why marketing, making people "feel" a certain way, is SO important. Maybe even more important than the product itself.

I mean, do you know how any of your food is produced? If you wanted to verify that the ingredients are what they say they are, can you? If you're buying a car how confident are you the transmission is reliable? Do you actually understand how the transmission is designed OR... is it just brand name? It's brand name, right.

Ultimately companies don't need to, and are better off not, producing high quality and safe goods. It makes much more sense to produce lower quality goods and reinvest the savings into advertising. The consumer won't know the difference, and they couldn't find out even if they wanted to.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#702

Post by kbmckenna » Thu, Jul 25, 2024, 5:52 PM UTC

xivzgrev wrote: post #678

munificent wrote: post #656

> “It's hard to build true wealth for yourself if you don't have some type of ownership in something, and it's hard for most people to get ownership in something,” Ruger says. I think this is a really good insight. But it also touches on something that many of the HN crowd, especially in the Bay Area find uncomfortable: home ownership. One of the ownership assets that is most attainable by many Americans is a little…

Homes shouldn't be an investment. They've accidentally become that in the past few decades, and as a result, affordability is getting worse. The better it does as an investment class, the worse it will become. It's a self perpetuating spiral. I don't see the market solving this. I only see some regulation helping here - ie any tax filer can at most own 1 SFH (this includes married couples). So no second, third, tenth…

Restricting ownership may help but there are aren’t enough houses or apartments in the places people want to live.

Building more housing is the best answer. It lowers the price because there is more supply. There simply aren’t enough homes in the Bay Area, NYC and many other major cities.

If you could build many large apartments in the Bay Area you could fill it with people who’d rather live there compared to a tiny old overpriced house. Zoning and existing residents stop that from being built though.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#703

Post by everybodyknows » Thu, Jul 25, 2024, 5:53 PM UTC

xmprt wrote: post #18

I think the most surprising thing about trends in modern executive class pay is just how steep it is compared to the median employee. It makes me wonder why shareholders outside the company are happy with it. For example, the Boeing CEO made 22M in 2022 and 32M in 2023. I'd argue that he did a much worse job in 2023 than in 2022 but somehow got paid almost 50% more. Even Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, is "only" being p…

What did he do worse in 2023? Recall that Calhoun was brought in only after the MAX crashes, ostensibly to clean up after multiple decades of short-termist mismanagement by his predecessors.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#704

Post by overrun11 » Thu, Jul 25, 2024, 5:53 PM UTC

munificent wrote: post #656

> “It's hard to build true wealth for yourself if you don't have some type of ownership in something, and it's hard for most people to get ownership in something,” Ruger says. I think this is a really good insight. But it also touches on something that many of the HN crowd, especially in the Bay Area find uncomfortable: home ownership. One of the ownership assets that is most attainable by many Americans is a little…

Anyone can invest in public companies, how is it unattainable? I genuinely do not know what you or the article writer are referring to when you make this point.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#705

Post by carlosjobim » Thu, Jul 25, 2024, 5:53 PM UTC

xivzgrev wrote: post #678

munificent wrote: post #656

> “It's hard to build true wealth for yourself if you don't have some type of ownership in something, and it's hard for most people to get ownership in something,” Ruger says. I think this is a really good insight. But it also touches on something that many of the HN crowd, especially in the Bay Area find uncomfortable: home ownership. One of the ownership assets that is most attainable by many Americans is a little…

Homes shouldn't be an investment. They've accidentally become that in the past few decades, and as a result, affordability is getting worse. The better it does as an investment class, the worse it will become. It's a self perpetuating spiral. I don't see the market solving this. I only see some regulation helping here - ie any tax filer can at most own 1 SFH (this includes married couples). So no second, third, tenth…

> They've accidentally become that

There is no accident at all. The bankers decided that real estate should be the primary vehicle for new money to be created and released into circulation.

This means that the increase in total real estate monetary value will always be larger than the monetary value of total labour and trade productivity within a nation. It is a mathematical fact that won't change unless the monetary system changes.

In short: the landed gentry will always become richer while the non-landed will always become poorer, under this banking system. If you are both a real estate owner and a worker, then you should expect your main source of income to be the value increase in your real estate. If not already, then soon.

So no matter how much the people of a nation work and increase their productivity, they will always be short and increasingly indebted, because the monetary system works that way. This is why there has been a frenzied rush into real estate the past decades, because the odds are stacked against you getting ahead by working.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#706

Post by psunavy03 » Thu, Jul 25, 2024, 5:54 PM UTC

xivzgrev wrote: post #678

munificent wrote: post #656

> “It's hard to build true wealth for yourself if you don't have some type of ownership in something, and it's hard for most people to get ownership in something,” Ruger says. I think this is a really good insight. But it also touches on something that many of the HN crowd, especially in the Bay Area find uncomfortable: home ownership. One of the ownership assets that is most attainable by many Americans is a little…

Homes shouldn't be an investment. They've accidentally become that in the past few decades, and as a result, affordability is getting worse. The better it does as an investment class, the worse it will become. It's a self perpetuating spiral. I don't see the market solving this. I only see some regulation helping here - ie any tax filer can at most own 1 SFH (this includes married couples). So no second, third, tenth…

This is justifying tyranny using pie-in-the-sky thinking. God forbid someone have a little lake house their parents and grandparents built that they want to retire to while working elsewhere. Nope, The Party says you can't have that dacha, Comrade.

The proper answer is to accommodate the free choices made by others and regulate where they intersect with others, not paternalistically tell grown adults what they can and can't do.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#707

Post by kerkeslager » Thu, Jul 25, 2024, 5:55 PM UTC

throwaway7ahgb wrote: post #401

kerkeslager wrote: post #371

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. Quantity of people benefitted isn't the only measure: magnitude of benefit is also relevant. The customer at a 7Eleven benefits in that they get to... what,…

>All companies have to do is present a united front on keeping pay low and benefits nonexistent to prevent workers from having better options. I.e. USA 2024. Can we leave the cynical antiwork comments out? They aren't helpful. This is obviously not the case for a majority of companies and anecdotes don't help. Everyone is for the highest pay possible until they run their own company and have to provide payroll.

> This is obviously not the case for a majority of companies and anecdotes don't help.

That isn't obvious at all. The US has the one of the highest pay gaps of any developed nation. Our largest companies with the richest executives have employees on food stamps. I'm not being cynical, I'm talking about reality, and I'm not going to shut up about it just so you can maintain your comfortable naivete on this issue.

> Everyone is for the highest pay possible until they run their own company and have to provide payroll.

If you can't pay your workers a living wage your business has failed in the only way I care about.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#708

Post by tadfisher » Thu, Jul 25, 2024, 5:57 PM UTC

officeplant wrote: post #683

apwell23 wrote: post #664

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One of the ownership assets that is most attainable by many Americans is a little plot of real estate most attainable is buying stock through IRA account.

As someone who had their first stock based savings account gutted by the 2008 economy we really shouldn't rely on stocks. I was in college and my college fund vanished very quickly. It was a fund set up for me as a kid, managed by my petrodollar worshipping uncle. We're all just a collapse away from nothing while being desperate for line goes up behavior to save us. But this is just my point of view from someone on t…

Your scenario is an example of mismanagement; you were already in college, so those funds should have been moved to less-risky investments (bonds, money-market, or even a savings account).

For retirement, Fidelity and Vanguard offer "Target-date retirement" funds, which automatically rebalance to reduce risk as you age. This is a misnomer, though, as you could easily select one of those funds for college savings or whatnot.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#709

Post by lelandbatey » Thu, Jul 25, 2024, 5:57 PM UTC

janpieterz wrote: post #686

xivzgrev wrote: post #678

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Homes shouldn't be an investment. They've accidentally become that in the past few decades, and as a result, affordability is getting worse. The better it does as an investment class, the worse it will become. It's a self perpetuating spiral. I don't see the market solving this. I only see some regulation helping here - ie any tax filer can at most own 1 SFH (this includes married couples). So no second, third, tenth…

How do you suggest we handle the rental market?

I think they'd suggest something like: "single family homes cannot be rented, only bought or sold to individuals or families which must live there some minimum percentage of the time."

If zoning codes can make it effectively impossible to build anything but single family homes, we clearly have a legal framework for distinguishing single-family from multi-occupancy apartment buildings. Thus, apply this requirement to single-family homes (or at least homes in single-family zoned areas).

There are a lot of unintended consequences and edge cases to this though, clearly. For example, I live in a building that is "technically" an apartment building right in the middle of nothing but single family homes. You couldn't build an apartment building like this here, now. This is because it was originally a single family home but was converted into a duplex ~100 years ago (2 different electrical services) and has remained a duplex legally ever since. I purchased the land and home jointly with a family member so that each of our families could live in one half of the duplex, which is how we currently live. A home like ours could end up being classified in very different ways depending on the specifics of a law like we're discussing.

Regardless, I still want my home price to crater if it means everyone else I know can buy a home. I hope home prices go down massively and the residential speculative bubble in this country dies a violent death. The only reason we even bought this house was because buying a home cost so much money that we had to buy half a home to make it a possibility. Even if I'm upside down on this house, I'd still rather be stuck paying off the mortgage or going bankrupt than hold everyone else financially hostage. Housing is too important.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#710

Post by kerkeslager » Thu, Jul 25, 2024, 5:59 PM UTC

lupusreal wrote: post #469

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Can we leave the cynical antiwork comments out? They aren't helpful. This is obviously not the case for a majority of companies and anecdotes don't help. Major companies are regularly prosecuted for conspiracy to suppress wages. It if weren't for government intervention your wages would be much lower and there wouldn't be anything you can do about it. This blind faith that billion dollar corporations would behave e…

Most companies aren't "major companies". I'm for busting up the big monopolies, but I'm not for throwing the baby out with the bath water and imposing communist reforms on all businesses, most of which are small and generally well behaved, just because some big ones with pathological behavior exist.

So if you acknowledge that pathological behaviors exist, what's the problem with regulating against those pathological behaviors? Given you seem to think most companies are small and well-behaved, it won't affect those companies.