Bitcoin Forum

I was about to reply to this post and decided to make a new thread:


I keep reading this complaint about the "top 1%" controlling too much. How do we know this distribution is suboptimal? I personally have difficulties imagining an efficient human-controlled society where the "top 1%" does not manage large amounts of resources. Distributing large-scale resource management to over 70M individuals (1% of the planet's population) is not currently possible and managing resources in a non-capitalistic fashion leads to systemic degeneration. Most people currently alive are not educated enough for such a broad asset distribution to work.

The economy is not a cake that must be divided. We eat food cultivated, planned, farmed, transported and stored via markets that optimize through Capitalism. Wrecking the markets to try eat the dollars is not much of a plan. There are many problems for which more and less distributed solutions exist, with a different resulting wealth distribution and no simple answer on which is better. Take financial security: how much money should people hoard personally, how much should they pay to insurance? Insurance will give the insurance's manager tremendous power, hoarding will leave more to the middle class instead. But are they better off with the hoarded amount instead of insurance? Tail risks are bad, and you don't want to be the uninsured hospital patient who runs out of cash.

But more importantly, why is asset equality a goal? So people have no richer people to be jealous about? The problem of poor people is how well they can get out of poverty, not how the high-level part of society distributes wealth. Any redistribution in just Europe or the USA that decreases overall efficiency would just starve more people in poor countries. I don't remember seeing protest banners reading "We speak for the 1.29 billion", the people below the poverty line who are likely to die from lack of food and medicine. Is it not hypocrisy to call some exact distribution near the top "unfair" while neglecting over a BILLION people elsewhere?



A note on "slave labour" in the quoted post: Capitalistic slave labour in the West should be impossible by definition. Capitalism is roughly free voluntary human action; if a worker has no free choice of the best willing employer, this is not Capitalism. If he has that choice, he is not a slave worker. The only way to get classical slavery in Capitalism is to explicitly allow it. Poverty and slavery are not strongly connected: there could be a world with slavery but no poverty, as there could be a world with poverty but no slavery. It's not useful to mix up those two as they are totally different issues.

It's not necessarily irrational jealousy, it's just typical jealousy that people are trying to rationalise and they seem to take the view of  "If that guy has it then why can't I?" when confronted with this situation I find it's best to try and put them in the position of being the rich guy, I bet you the majority of the time they'd dodge the question :P if they had that sort of money they wouldn't like the idea of people taking it away from them by force either.

I even see this kind of logic in government departments and such, here in the UK as most of you probably know we're facing a lot of cuts and all I ever see from all the groups is variations of "You can cut anyone else but not us" and it's that case again where they're happy to take money from other people but if you do it to them you're a scumbag.

You substitute "control" & "manage" for the word in your quote, "own."  That's the cause of your  misunderstanding. 
A factory boss manages scores of people, he controls them, though he doesn't own them. I think the objection in your quote is to 1% owning so much, not simply controlling it.  Have i helped?


What is it you wish to distribute to 1% of the world's population?


You say "optimised," others say trashed beyond repair -- loaded words are loaded.


I agree, not much of a plan.  Why propose it if even you find it lacking?  Eating dollars is sillier than burning them.  I understand there are pricey drinks made with gold flecks, my guess is minced goldleaf.  So it's not that rich folks don't try :)


You're mixing thing up again.  When you pay insurance premiums, your insurance guy doesn't pocket the money.  He controls it, his firm might invest or loan it, but there's no concentration of wealth -- the money's not his.
As far as insurance being a good or a bad idea?  That's debatable, though has nothing to do with the 1%.


It's not a goal, really.  Some people just feel queasy when they have everything & others have nothing.  Latent religiosity maybe?  Or their folks taught them it's nice to share.  Some are just afraid that the poor might start sharpening pitchforks if the disparity got too great, so sharing becomes a cowardly act. 
And the poor are just jelly.  You know how those people are.


Absolutely.  "Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye."  And "cast the first stone," and all that stuff.  99-percenters are just as rotten as 1-percenters.  And some are whinier.


I'll save your footnote for later :)

While making this distinction is meaningful in theory, not giving a company's highest level decision-maker substantial ownership yields very bad results. Top-down organization works to some extent -- mainly through high intelligence by organizers -- but just degenerates at the top. The reason for this is corruption, or game theory on selfish actors if you want to put it that way.

So I'm not mixing things up, but reducing the problem to feasible solutions. You need someone who owns a company so that you have someone who really cares about it. While very high intelligence might in principle find other setups with favorable incentive systems, that appears to be too hard for us humans right now.

So to answer the question:


It's not me who wants to make an assumption on wealth distribution. The "99%" crew wants to distribute a large amount of it well beyond 1% of the population.

My argument is that control over resources and personal wealth are strongly coupled. To reach their goal, the "99%" protesters must either decouple resource control from wealth, which does not seem to work, or have a whole lot of people trained in resource control, which we don't seem to be able to. This leaves them with no realistic options to achieve their goal.

The distinction between control and wealth blurs on large scales anyway. Nobody can consume a billion dollars right now. One can waste it, but a politician can waste it on funny agriculture laws as much as an oil exporter can build a ski resort in the desert. The difference between a communist party leader and the owner of a giant monopoly of the same size is irrelevant to a human starving on the street. Whether the person at the top owns or just controls something -- and what ownership even means -- is a question of control structure optimization, not reality in terms of power accumulation.

It depends on what you mean by "substantial."  A .01% stake in Google would be substantial enough for me to pay attention, if that .01% happened to be 99% of my net worth.  OTOH, my mind may wonder if i owned Microsoft & Apple, so even 100% ownership of Google would not guarantee my decisions to be motivated by the welfare of Google, exclusively.

My interest would be in the cumulative value of my three companies, so bankrupting Google would be in my best interest, as long as my other two companies are enriched by a greater amount in the process.  


To me that's not immediately obvious, so i'd probably want a more reasoned argument -- based on empirical data & all that tedious stuff.  Corruption finds a way into every human enterprise, like rats find their way onto ships.  No rats?  Sailors panick -- sure sign of a sinking ship.
Once you agree that corruption is motivated by more than simple greed, the harbor rats scurry over the mooring lines, and there you are.


I'm guessing that you model your assumptions on ma & pa companies, where owners are also the employees & as such most attune to the company's business.  In reality, the owner is no better versed in the workings of his company than an investor in pork belly futures is at raising pigs.  This is important.  Your reasoning leads to a dubious conclusion:  A dictatorship is the best way to run a country.  On paper, i would agree.  In practice?  Not so much.


Agreed.  Your alternative fails likewise, see dictatorship above.


The difference being that the politician, at least in theory, is held accountable, while the billionaire is free to waste his money as he sees fit -- it's his to waste.  Other than his own ethics, which are already put in question by the simple fact that he has accumulated such a hefty sum, there is nothing to stop him from doing so.  As far as desert ski resorts, i'm sure the oil sheiks & their shiksas are planning one as we speak :D  Responsible ownership in action -- watch it go.


I'm not sure how this serves your argument -- both are seen as oppressors, who rose to their positions by cunning & corruption.  The "human starving in the street" would like to roast both over a slow fire, smother them in BBQ sauce & chase them down with a cold brewsky.  


If the difference is simply rhetorical, why is actual ownership (and not merely control) important to you?  I assume the 99-percenters are fine with the control part, it's the ownership that rubs them the wrong way.

Hah, when I read this topic, I at first thought you would be talking about Bitcoiners being jealous of Winklevoses  ;D

This 1% thing is really just cultural. When you point out to the 99% that this 1% wealth isn't money bags, but companies and businesses that those 99% work for and buy stuff from, and then ask them if they would have the knowledge and experience to run those things, and be willing to take on the responsibility for the lives of millions who work for them, they typically clam up, and resent you for such questions.

When you said a ski resort in the desert, were you referring to the ski resort in Dubai?

Digging it up since I didn't answer anymore:


I did not say the difference is rhetorical. It is a difference of control structure optimization: ownership optimizes because the owner has an incentive to optimize. Plain control lacks this optimization and thus requires an actual optimizer on top to prevent corruption.

It might fail at times but this is part of the competition -- and thus evolution -- amongst investors. If they have others conduct their business their job becomes ensuring the productivity of these executives. If they close one company to strengthen another in excess of the loss, this is still a net benefit.

Not quoting more than this since the answers would either boil down to the same argument or dilute the discussion.




Heh, I guess that's where the thought came from. I admit I don't know much about it and whether it's profitable, if it's a bad example take excessive personal cruise ships or jets instead.

I second everything, first of all the 1% owns 40%, not 90%, secondly read Atlas Shrugged, if you are a lazy c*nt no one owes you squat!

It's pretty scary how people seem to think that someone owes them anything for no apparent reason, to put this into perspective:

You have person A (we'll call him Kanye West) and you have person B (Bob), Bob has hurt his knee and unable to work for a month and support himself in a theoretical society without welfare, Kanye West has more money than he could EVER spend in a lifetime (spending money is his fulltime job!), is it moral to take 300$ from Kanye West and give it to Bob so he will be able to support himself for the month?

I don't think so, I don't think that it would be moral to even take a cent from Kanye even if Bobs life depended on it, because putting your hand into someones pocket in order to save another persons life is no better or nobler than theft and it reduces Kanye to slavery, after all the working definition of slavery is precisely that: the forcible use of one person to serve the purposes of another.

Plus no laws are as strict and as true as the ones written on the hearts of men, chances are Bob would still survive the month because the rich are also givers and he would likely be supported by his community as long as they aren't poverty stricken too and they see that Bob is NOT a slob who's doing tattoos with their money.

/thread

The exact right question.

Socialists (basically all parties in my country) regularly intermix 'equal' and 'fair' and call for a 'fair' distribution of wealth, while meaning 'equal'. This really "grinds my gears" as to me, an equal asset distribution is as unfair as it gets.

 ;D We have a Pyramid human society struture , it's true. 99% people can't get to the top.

A society with only hero's doesn't work. We need many people doing 'normal' labour :)

Problem in my mind is that are we possibly yet in point where regular person or tad below average can get reasonable living for working 40 hours a week? And by reasonable, I mean sufficient nutrion, living space and healthcare without many very special luxuries. In my mind we should be there in west, with current productivity... Though somehow it just doesn't seem to work out...

Yeah, the leftist have way too much money, they should give 90% of their income to poor africans. Not so fun anymore?

tl;dr:  ITT bitcoin millionaires talk about why the 1% isn't bad

"Control structure optimization"?  You start with the dubious assumption that since [partial] ownership increases a party's interest, and thus work performance (a doubly dubious notion:  Surgeons do not do surgeries on their family members, actors get stage fright during performances (in which they're fully invested), not rehearsals (in which they're not), etc., etc.).  As i pointed out earlier, incentivising work (oh, let's say a salary) improves performance, but the law of diminishing returns kicks in early, and, as i've pointed out, .1% of Google would be enough to keep me *riveted* -- at 50% my ego might get the better of me & i'd start treating the company as a toy (i wouldn't be able to spend that much money in my lifetime anyhow, so why not?)
  

Net benefit?  To whom?

[...]

lol, you realise I have fuck all right in my Bitcoin wallet right now? :D either way, my opinion won't change on this, not until the people screaming about taxing the rich say it's okay to tax themselves as well.

You realize that outside of Ayn Rand books, the poor protecting the rights of the rich to get richer are just dupes to be laughed at, right?

You realize that many of the rich use the government (ie. the average taxpayer's money) in order to protect their wealth.  Right?

you realize that the same goes for the poor and everyone on between right?

What's your point?

I guess: All poor support government + All rich use government to protect their rights to get richer = All poor support the rights of the right to get richer. Whether they realize it or not.

Not that you specifically mentioned flat tax per se, but I'd still like to point out that taking $100 tax from somebody who makes $1000 a month might make it so they can't eat, while taking $1000 from somebody who makes $10000 a month will not put that same pressure on them.

I think you may be forgetting that the $10,000 isn't just sitting in a money bag somewhere, but is likely being used to invest in something else, which in turn gives someone a job or a place to live. For example, my parents make about twice that a month, but only get to use about $1,000 of that on themselves, the rest going to pay for places for others to live in.

Your rents make 20k & only get 1k to live on?  $1,000 a month?  $500/mo each?  You should help out your parents, bro, that's no way to live. >:(

Why?

There will always be examples of people doing crazy things just because they're people -- that's human nature. But rationally, there is no limit to the usable amounts of assets. You can pass them on to children, or use them to secure your future against increasingly unlikely problems.

It's hard to tell how to better organize things. Owning 0.1% of Google when it was a start-up wouldn't have motivated people much. The prospect of randomly losing one's share has the same effect. We don't know if full private ownership is the optimal solution, but it is a solution better than other plans people come up with. As for people wasting the funds or going nuts: remember they can do this exactly once, then other investors take over. The market systematically removes such actors and the problem with them.



To the total of any type of party involved... I don't get the question. ??? If the total efficiency of the result is higher, society gets a net benefit. Since it's capitalist by assumption, the resulting company produces something people want. If the market pays more profit margin for the new company configuration, it seems that either many people or other companies find it more useful.



Quoting this too, because it is the core point I don't believe. IMO the correct statement would be "The poor who protect the rights of the corrupt and fight the productive rich are digging their own grave".

In being driven by jealousy instead of rational thinking, people think in categories of "rich" and "poor" instead of "productive" and "counterproductive". This clouds their judgement and produces major inefficiencies.

I'm not talking about people going crazy -- merely that there is a point at which having greater stakes in a company ceases to add extra incentive, think in terms of law of diminishing returns.  Adding progressively more fertilizer yields better crops -- up to the point where adding more makes no difference, and past that -- kills the crop.  Another thing to keep in mind is you're playing a nearly zero-sum game -- by giving the uberboss total ownership, you're taking away potential incentive from his underlings, and their underlings, etc., etc.  Is it better for the captain to own the whole ship, or might it be safer for the crew to have a stake in it too?  They'd certainly be less likely to mutiny :)  The same thing holds for startups -- offer employees shares in the company they can't unload 'till the IPO -- you got a captive workforce.  Keep the whole nut?  you ain't.   


People are not driven by dispassionate greed.  If lone leaders solely controlled large corporations, the world would be full of (Spruce Geese?  What an awkward plural), and almost no Cessnas.  Wealth would become even more concentrated -- elite making extraordinary toys for the elite, with 0 interest to make toilet paper. 
Of course, following your reasoning to its logical conclusion gives us a world of monopolies -- if economics of scale hold for some industries -- what's to prevent them?


No, i stand behind what i said.


I think they may be driven by something more naive, like infantile sense of fair play.  They are simpleminded & irrational enough to feel that it's not right for one baby to be born rich, while another's dirt poor.  They feel that it may be nice to share, if only amongst babies.  Do you sort-a understand, or does it take a sharp pitchfork to get such commie faggot  notions through to you? 

Many of the 99% are in the 1% globally.  When we see our burden as tormenting those above rather than aiding those below...jealousy is greed.

Absolutely.  Ideally, the 99% should not only take from the 1%, but distribute to those below them.


Those are saints, very rare both in the 99% and the 1%.  Being poor is no assurance of sainthood -- people are poor by birth, through circumstance & all sorts of personal shortcomings.  Being wealthy, otoh, nearly precludes sainthood -- a (Christian) saint who happened onto wealth gives it away.  This is in no way a sermon, i don't advocate sainthood or shoot for it myself -- simply an analysis:  If you want to find a saint, looking among the 1% is impractical.

Rather look among the narcissistic wretched filth that takes upon themselves the role of God.

Scammers, addicts, liars, the streets are full with them, I think that what makes you either a good person or a bad one depends on your personality traits rather than your financial status.

Not sure what point you're trying to make.  "The world is full of lousy people"?

Most every flat tax I've seen proposed had a minimum level below which no tax is extorted.

And yet in the .0001% is where you find most of the funding for our enduring charitable foundations.  More so in the US than elsewhere though.
Andrew Carnegie, a century ago, declared it disgraceful to die rich.  Benjamin Franklin, perhaps the founder of modern philanthropy in the USA, wrote in 1740, the goal of philanthropic giving is to change society so as to do away with the need for charity.
Some examples
George Soros has devoted $10 billion—half of his total fortune over the last 20 years—to helping dissidents in Central Europe, financing drug-rehabilitation programs in Baltimore, and educating the persecuted Roma people of Hungary.
Bill and Melinda Gates give $4 billion annually to develop African agriculture and to eradicate malaria.
Matched by Warren Buffet (who is leaving less than 1/10000th of his wealth to his heirs and the rest to charity).
New York financier John Paulson gave $100 million for the upkeep of Central Park,
Stephen Schwarzman, a Wall Street investor, donated $100 million to renovate the New York Public Library and another $100 million to finance scholarships for American students in China.

Private giving underwrites almost all American cultural institutions and major universities. By contrast, in Europe, such institutions rely on public money more commonly.

I remember the disaster relief giving for tsunami and such, how there would be lists circulated about what countries gave what money.  Folks were calling the US stingy because the government money was not considered high enough.  But in the US more was given by private donation than any single nation, including the US, but that doesn't make the papers internationally.  Folks like their stereotypes.

In other words, "enduring charitable foundations" were not started by beggars?  You understand that when you have nothing, it's metaphysically ... difficult to give? :D  As far as charity amongst the poor, since sharing crumbs of bread (or crack) is neither tax-deductible or newsworthy, such sharing seldom makes it into the annals of history.


The unfortunate man died in utter disgrace, unable to turn himself into a pauper.  Let's show some largesse & not draw attention to his failings.


His poor grasp of logic (philanthropy *is* charity) was corrected for by communists and socialists, who pointed out that in an ideal society there is no need for charity or philanthropy -- both are products of class disparity.


...leaving him with a measly 10 billion dollars.  How does he manage on such a pittance?  Is there a way we can help?


...their selflessness should be a lesson to us all.  Did you know that Bill saves the remains of soap bars, wadding them together into balls which he later reuses?  Melinda never tires of finding new & creative ways to stretch the Gates family dollar, upgrading her private fleet to thrifty Gulfstream G650s.


You don't know how inheritance works, do you?   :D  No matter, help me with my math:  Would 1/10000th of 60 billion dollars make me a pauper?


No matter how many times i hear this argument, it never loses its freshness or fails to entertain.  If your logic works for the rich, it works equally well for taxes:  let the government tax the shit out of you, and in return you'll get some of it back in "charities" like better roads, schools, libraries & aht mooseums. :)

It's true that all of those people did have a lot to give away, but if you had billions of dollars, would you want to part with it? Also, if I remember correctly, Bill Gates convinced dozens of the richest people in the world to give away half of their fortunes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Giving_Pledge (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Giving_Pledge)

Would you give away half of your money? No, of course not. Not all of the 1% are greedy money hoarders. 50% is much more than anyone would agree to be taxed... And this was 50% of their total wealth.

Giving away or taxation really does actually fuck all to help people, maybe it's because I'm British ( we live in a country filled with charity muggers who are basically con artists that guilt trip you into giving money where only a tiny percentage goes to helping their causes ) but I think if you want to make a difference in the world it's far better to set up your own organisations rather than just give it away to extremely shady people. I think a better spend of money would be giving people knowledge. You can't do much in warzones because anything people build is going to get blown up, but teaching them survival skills or how to actually build pipework, filters and even generate basic electricity is going to do a lot more than just giving them useless paper or building them a well that will eventually break down because none of them know how to fix it.

Lol! Sure, instead of growing the pie, let's just keep it as is and spread it all around. Let's ALL be poor!  ;D

In all honesty, it's hard for me to think in terms of having or giving away billions -- i never had that much money, and don't personally know anyone worth more than ~45 mil.  What's more, i'm not even sure that i'm a nice guy -- certainly not an ideal for others to aspire to :D  So the answer is a definite "maybe."

I'm betting that when you say "of course not," you're simply not scaling correctly.  To put things into terms plebes like us could comprehend, imagine sitting at a diner with a crate of 100 toasted English muffins next to your cup of coffee when 50 starving people walk in.  Would you give up half of those hot buttery English muffins to feed 50 total strangers?  I would, though i like English muffins :)

I'm not arguing *how well* charity or taxation helps people.  Optimising rewards of charity & taxation is an entirely different topic. 
If the guy in charge of divvying up delicious caek is

a)giving it to lardasses,
b)eating too much of it himself in the process, or
c)dropping big delicious slices on the ground & wasting it,

does it mean he should just keep all the delicious caek to himself? 

I see some people are still making the mistake of thinking that when someone has $10billion, they have that as just bags of money sitting in a pile somewhere.
A better analogy would be you sitting at a diner with a machine that is worth 100 muffins that makes English muffins at a rate of 18 an hour (3 every ten minute), and which only you know how to operate. If you had 50 starving people walk in, you could only feed 18 of them every hour. If you just give them your machine, then you have nothing, and they have no muffins because they don't know how to operate the machine.
Owning lots of money (even if just cash) is also similar to owning a machine: if you don't know how to operate that money, all you'll have is that money (like having a muffin machine without knowing how to use it), which you can at most just keep trading for something until it's gone. On the other hand, someone who knows how to operate the money will be able to keep making (creating) more and more. That's really the main difference between rich and poor - rich know how to operate the money to make more of it, while poor only know how to spend it. Good example of this is the so-called "Millionaire's Curse," where lottery winners who win millions of dollars often soon find themselves even more broke, destitute, and in debt than they were before they won the lottery.

If those English muffins were the only food I had, then no, I would probably not give away half of them. Maybe 25%, and even then that's a stretch if that was the food I had. Maybe they could have my coffee though, since I don't like coffee anyways.

But you don't have to think in terms of billions, millions, or muffins. Take whatever you have now, and imagine giving away half of it. Whether you have one thousand or one million dollars you can now only afford half of the things you could before. Your house can only be half as big, you can only buy half as much gas, half as much groceries, etc. You don't have to make up analogies because you can contribute the exact same amount as Gates: he didn't ask for 1 billion dollars, he asked for 50%. If you donate 50% of what you have right now, then you're equal to Gates in terms of charity.

Now, for you me and me, this is a big thing to do because I doubt either one of us could "afford" to give away our money. But much like Bill Gates isn't going to go hungry after donating, you and I wouldn't either. There are plenty of people who live on far less than you or I and make it along fine. Technically, we could survive, even if our lives are half as good. I think that it's still very generous of the people mentioned in that fund to give away half of their money, regardless of how much they have.

Ahh, the ever-popular "some people" defence.  Who?  I certainly don't think of it in terms of piles.  Learn to logic.


ORLY?  My analogy is fine by me, your analogy is some weird furlogic.  


There is no machine.  There is a crate of delicious muffins.  Work with what i gave you, or don't bother replying.


To a blind horse.


In that case, the FED sure knows how to operate money.  Long live the printing press.
And the difference between the rich and the poor is the amount of money held by each.  Stop being stupid.


If you ever win the lottery, send the $$ to me.  Problem solved.

I do.  The Buffet endowment is premortem.  Is your goal that all ought be paupers?  
He paid for his kid's educations, + they get about US$1mil.
So if they are going to be jet-set, they have to earn that on their own.
He lives a relatively modest life himself as well.

You are entertaining me as well.  Visit a library yourself, and you might have learned that most of the libraries in the US are not from taxes, but from private donation (Carnegie did the most there).  Most of the best Museums also bear the names of their endowing patron.  (Getty, Ahmanson, Smithsonian, etc).

Your Government tax and spend preference is the more wasteful means of redistribution and creates the most corruption, the difference is not small.  It is not "equally well" at all.
They can't take it with them anyhow, and most of the US super-rich prefer to use a more reasoned method of redistribution rather than shift the decision-making to politicians that must seek re-election through special interest funded advertising spending.  They skip your middlemen and end up doing more good, voluntarily.
The US does not have the tradition of honoring the Aristocracy in the same way as other geographies.  The Marx model and class jealousy is a poor match for contemporary US.  It was born in the industrial revolution and tied closely to that historical period's particularly odd changes.

I won't call you greedy, but you may not be cautious or wise.  The 50 hungry guys might do more than simply look longingly at your delicious English muffins.


That's why i said that your problem is scaling -- assuming that having $1 Trillion is just like having a dollar, only better :D  It's not, and that's why i offered the muffin example.
The law of diminishing returns applies to money, too.  When you have $100k to play with, and you gave away half of it, you can no longer buy the car you want, for instance.  When you have billions of dollars, that's no longer the case -- you can no more spend all your money than eat all the muffins before they spoil.  Sure, you may not be able to afford as many islands or corporations, but that's like arguing that you may want to gorge yourself on the muffins & throw up at the vomitorium.  Things don't scale well :)


If a woman making minimum wage gives 50% to charity, she and her child starve to death.  If Bill gives half of his wealth to charity, only his accountant will know the difference.  See?


As i said, i'm not an ideal to aspire to, though please understand that ... see the mother example above. :)

No.  According to you, that was Andrew Carnegie's goal.  He failed.  A great man, nonetheless.  B+ for trying.


Either you do not know how inheritance works, or you assume that i do not.  The goal, my friend, is to pass on much while, on paper, appearing to pass on nothing.  In his case, nothing is not plausible, so he *claims* that he's *planning* to leave the minimum creditable amount.


I'm sorry, but i'm not interested in having the same discussion for the Nth time -- i'm sure you'll regale me with tales of kindly, wise & charitable rich, and stupid & wastefull governments, amirite?

hey we agree on something

Yaaay! :)

I doubt Bill Gates has much to fear from the muffin-hungry masses. After all, he chose to start this fund. No one forced him to, and if they tried I doubt they would have a very easy time.


While it's true that Gates could just decide to live a "normal" life, that's some high expectations for anyone. I'm sure that there was a drastic change when he got rid of half of his money, even if to us it seems like he would be incredibly happy either way. If I had billions of dollars I wouldn't want to give it away, at least while I was alive.

And also, I make almost minimum wage and I would still be able to live even if I cut my money in half. Even those who live paycheck to paycheck would still be fine, as even if they have one dollar saved up all they have to give is 50 cents. It's all about using your money wisely, and investing in the right things (bitcoins for example).


You can say that but it isn't much of an excuse. You can't criticize people for doing something that you yourself aren't willing to do. Although maybe you didn't criticize them, because we've gone back and forth for a while and I forgot the original post that was quoted.

You could be right, and Bill could be a genuinely nice guy.  I do not know him personally, and figuring out why or what he has donated would require a team of accountants & business law experts.


Other than showing that it's possible that Bill is a nicer guy than you, what else are you trying to show?  Certainly not that giving away half of one's money is the same hardship to minimum-wage mom (Death) & Bill (having to look at less pleasant financials)?


Are you going to try?  You understand that's not the (realistic & plausible) scenario i've presented, right?


I'm not suggesting that surviving at 50% of US minimal wage is a metaphysical impossibility -- though forget about 1 dollar saved up:  Those losers are neck-deep in debt.  If only they could give half of it away, i'm sure they would :D


I'm not criticizing anyone -- i'm simply not lionizing them, either.  They're people, just like the poor.  Given money, luck & intellect, the poor would be just like them.  The worst i've said about the rich is Christian-style saints are not among them -- if that sort of a saint ever became rich through luck or chance, he would give away *all* of his wealth.  That's all.  If it logically follows that saints could be found only amongst the poor, that's just dumb logic, not i. :)

Non-sequitor?  Apropos of nothing.  (Unless you are imagining that I am saying Carnegie was trying to impoverish the nation by endowing libraries Hint:I am not saying that)

Much lower than the minimum creditable amount according to current tax law, in fact.
Your assumption that your goals and his are the same is your error here, you assume invidious motives in him which are not in evidence other than your imagination about how people with more money than you *must* think.
Instead he is less evil than you are, apparently, as it appears were all of these .00001%ers under discussion.  Fascinating.  Have you checked out the Bill and Mel Gates fund and their work?  The same ruthlessness and business acumen that brought his wealth being used to target some of the biggest problems worldwide is a marvel to behold.  As an NGO, they do far more than any government could on these matters.  He is doing it with his own money and his time and energy.  This is how he spends his life, giving and making a difference. 

You keep comparing these people that gained wealth by doing things that the world craved, and then giving back what they made...with people that are less innovative and less energetic and less creative as if they merit the same decision making power (money).   Some folks might image that people who make really good decisions over and over and over, might be better than average at doing that.  Why not let them spend it on doing good... rather than take it at gunpoint, and have the highest bidder for government favor make that decision instead?

Non-sequiturs are always apropos of nothing, redundant.  This, OTOH, was not a non-sequitur.  Allow me to quote your earlier post:
"Andrew Carnegie, a century ago, declared it disgraceful to die rich."  Unless you're suggesting he was poor (a pauper) when he died, he has died in disgrace.  By his own standards.  I thought it was cruel of you to speak ill of the dead, and called him "a great man nonetheless."


I meant credible to humans.  I didn't realize you couldn't legally disinherit your kinfolk :)


Beg your pardon?  I simply pointed out that motives can not be determined from claims that you plan to leave next to nothing to your kin.  He may wish to only leave a mil ea, or he doesn't want the tax man's grubby paws on his monyz.  That's all.  Stop reading bad stuff into everything people say, it's unbecoming.


I still find the "got your nose" trick more fascinating, but that's just me.


No, but i have a feeling you'll tell me about it & i'm in for a big surprise.


I'll be darned...  Doing more with his money than any government could.  Color me impressed.  You should write to Bill & Mel and see if they could do something about all the taxes you have to pay on your minimum wage.  I'm sure if he finds you a worthwhile cause, he'll help out. :)
 

In Bill's case, you're confusing IBM with the world.  IBM wanted a 16-bit OS in a hurry, the world didn't even ask :)


Not quite following, but if you're suggesting that Bill is smarter than minimum-wage mom, i agree 100%.  I just don't think minimum-wage mom should give 50% of what she makes to charity & starve to death.  You obviously think that she should.  To each his own, i suppose.  One less dumb bitch & one less hungry brat -- they didn't support major charities anyhow. :)


Unless you personally practiced your gun-fu on Bill, i doubt he had many guns pointed at him in his life.  Further, i never heard him bitch about taxation -- that's your gig, stop projecting.

God damn you're an idiot...

Did you know that Bill Gates, Peter Thiel, and Sergey Brin started out with approximately the same amount of money as you? Why are they rich and you are poor? And do you honestly think that if you were to take away all their money so that they are as poor as you, that you all will have the same equal chance of becoming rich? Man you're deluded...

I wouldn't call it a failure (nor did I, you did).  He was the richest man on the planet and managed to give away about 95% before sickness over trying to prevent WWI took his life.  He founded over 2500 free libraries, and spent many millions trying to prevent the war.  It was only in this last effort to which he gave his life that he could have been said to have failed, and there are few more noble efforts one could consider.

I haven't been able to parse this for any meaning.  
What is it you don't realize?  A million isn't enough to keep a fool well fed for their life, but a wise person can do much with it.

People on minimum wage pay tax?  Not income.  You mean sales tax or all the random fees and such?  Minimum wagers get more in EBT than they pay in tax, so probably not high on the crisis list.

You are right about one thing.  You are not following at all.  You keep comparing these people.  Equating them.  I am not.  Min-wage mom vs Billionaire?  They are not the same.  At the risk of redundancy: They do not expect the same of themselves.  Further I am not asking anyone to donate anything or even suggesting that anyone "should", much less the hungry, (though some do anyway).  
All I am doing here is pointing out your ignorance about the generosity of the ultra-rich.  Your stereotypes don't match history.  These people all tell the same story about how after making their money, the second chapter of their life, the philanthropic chapter, is the more rewarding.  Why should it be so surprising that those that can do so much more to help humanity, often do just that?

He's a disgrace by his own standards, what part of "[it is] a disgrace to die rich" don't you understand?  When quoting from "Lives of the Saints Rich" leads to an untenable position, you break into a silly tap dance, in hopes that your fail gets lost in all the commotion.  It doesn't.
"One can consider" many things, though i carefully stick to the edifying factoids you give me.  As far as stereotyping, nowhere in this thread have I stated "All rich are X," while you... I have to quote.  The line is too hideously appalling to type it myself:

"Min-wage mom vs Billionaire?  They are not the same.  At the risk of redundancy: They do not expect the same of themselves."

                         Slaves, too, are not the same as the slaver.  At the risk of redundancy: They do not expect the same of themselves.  

Congrats.  Your reasoning justifies so much more than you have bargained for.  U are winrar!

I am not poor by any standards, furfag.  In my entire adult life, i haven't lived on $500 a month you claim your poor parents live on ($1000 jointly) :D :D

You seem to think that you have a point. 
Would you like to attempt to make it?

The point has been made.  If you are unable/unwilling to see it, i'm afraid we've reached an impasse.  I suspect my cat is far more educable than you.  He's also more pleasant & full of win. No hard feelings, bro -- it's all good. :)

My parentsv aren't poor, either. They earn a combined ~$25,000 a month. It's just that all but $1,000 of it goes to support their various properties and investments (just as all but ~$450 of mine goes to investments) - things that give people a place to live and a place to work. You have one again missed my point entirely, which is that rich people that make a lot of money, such as my parents, aren't just sitting on bags of money, and can't just give up half their wealth without doing some serious harm to other people (one of their tenants is on government assisted housing, so hurting them directly hurts the poor, too).
As I said, you're too much of an idiot to recognize these things, even when I spell them out for you: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=247874.msg2802864#msg2802864

You're either a troll or you haven't left the basement since early 90s.  Your parents, who make 25k, live on 1k a month?  500 bucks ea?  Out of that, they pay taxes (assuming they own a house & not living out of cardboard boxen), heat, maintenance, electricity, gasoline & auto insurance (or do they thriftily bus it?), car expenses, cable, phone, medical (or do they sneak in through the emergency room?), toiletries, clothes (or do they rifle through the boxes left for Good Will?), and -gasp- food?  Just how wretchedly do you live?  

*To bystanders:  This is all happening in US of A, folks!  These people are living on $16 and change A DAY!  I used to spend more than that on smokes :D :D :D

You are still missing the point, but besides that, you've just pointed to the exact reason you'll likely remain living from paycheck to paycheck while the people who spend their money wisely will be working when they feel like it, and on projects they enjoy.

in general ppl are negative by nature, those that arent and see the light are in 1%

Yep, pretty wretched. This $1,000 is after the thousands they pay in taxes. They don't smoke, they buy cheap food and cook most of it to save money, they live in their investment property, and are putting more into it to increase its sale value. They only use one car, which is over ten years old, mom dropping dad off at a bus station for him to go the rest of the way. They keep the house warm, opening windows, they very rarely buy new clothes and typically shop at thrift stores. They don't have smartphones and only basic cell service. They get health coverage through work, so I didn't include it in the $1,000, but they borrowed a few grand for my grandmother's hospital expenses, and are paying that, too. And yes, they find freebie furniture and other things on Craigslist and when others put them out to the curb. In short, they live very similarly to how other extremely productive millionaires live in the mansions close to their neighborhood. That's how you tell that someone is a millionaire BTW: plain clothes, worn jeans, and shitty old car. Those driving fancy new cars aren't millionaires typically.

By contrast, my poor friends are driving nice cars, have new fancy clothing, dine out at restaurants all the time, have every game system in existence and tons of games and toys, and have almost no money to their name. And THAT is what the difference between rich and poor is in it's entirety.

Edit:  So let's see, your poor friends drive nice cars, have fancy clothing, dine out & generally have a blast.  Your wise rich friends live as if they were on welfare.  Let's see...  Hard to decide...  Which would i like to be?
I never knew  Ebenezer had a kid :o
http://s18.postimg.org/8md8s9gl5/Untitled_1.jpg (http://postimage.org/)

Judging by your tone, you would prefer to live like my poor friends, correct? So, where do you think you and my poor friends will be when you hit 65?

http://patriotstatesman.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/walmart-greeter.jpg

Where do you think my parents will be when they are 65, or where I'll be when I'm 50, spending the rest of our lives doing what we want without ever needing to work again?

http://www.ellieharovitz.com/image/sunny-isle-beach.jpg

Let me think this through again...  I can have a blast from now 'till i'm 65, at which point i'll be forced to live like you will have enough money saved up to live out the rest of my life in the luxury i've grown so accustomed to, or...
I can scrimp & scrounge until i'm 65, and have a heart attack when some gold-diggin' vixen plants herself on my withered... eww.  I think i'm sticking with what i got, Rassah, thanks for the heads-up :D

I see you still don't get it, so I FIFY. Besides, you wanted to know what rich people were like. Or, more specifically, you were misrepresenting what rich people were like. And it seems it's impossible to win with you: Either you are an asshole because you are rich and greedy, and are keeping all your money so you can retire safely, or you're an asshole because you give up all your wealth, and end up dependent on the state.

Oh, also, I forgot, did you say that you will give up at least half of your wealth when you are 65 because you will be wealthy? (You said you will be able to live out your life in the luxury you are accustomed to, which would mean you have over a million dollars at that point) Or will you be a self-hating rich hypocrite?

You know, thus far i've no regrets.  If i wind up with way too much money & my guilt starts quarreling with my greed, perhaps i'll see the virtues of the scrambled apologia you call "worldview," and make it mah own.  Sound like a plan?  :)

This whole 1% vs 99% thing is bullshit. The problem is *not* the 1%, and most people who clamor for these "rich" paying "their fair share" are surprised to learn how much more the 1% pays in taxes as a proportion of their income.

However, there is a much much smaller group of super-wealthy people who have influence with the government. And "influence" is too weak a word. I think I mean collusion. There are a handful of these people and they have tremendous amounts of money and they pay next to nothing for taxes. Many might not remember Ronald Reagan talking about how it was unfair that a multimillionaire would pay a lower portion of taxes than a janitor, but yes, he said it.

Anyway, the super-rich with influence and the politicians scratch each others backs and manipulate us. They control Fox and MSNBC and set them up to point fingers at one side or the other and get us whipped up into a frenzy against one another. "It's the damn rich people that are ruining everything, and the government should do something to stop them" says one group and "no, wealthy people are great, it's the government that needs to be stopped" says the other.

And as we go back and forth pointing fingers at each other, each side takes PR flak from time to time and it makes it look like we sometimes actually reveal the ugly underbelly. But it's all a sideshow, a misdirection away from the fact that the two groups we're fighting to decide to demonize are on the same team. They've divided us to conquer us and they are super-rich without having earned it.

Deregulating crony capitalists so that they can wheedle their way into more wealth doesn't help. Neither does giving government more power over us all.

We do sort of need deregulation, but we need to have strong enforcement of the regulation that remains. We need fewer laws, but laws which are enforced, and enforced fairly. Undermining rule of law doesn't help, and neither does passing more laws.

Each side has half the picture and won't listen to the other side because they know they are right without understanding that the other side is right too. It's a bit more complex and nuanced than that, but dammit, I'm already long-winded.

TL;dr: if you're arguing whether the "1%" or the government is the problem, you've been hoodwinked by the real villains.

PS Ayn Rand's villains all had much more money than her heroes. How does that fit in with the idea that she idolized the rich?

In Ayn Rand's universe money is considered the function of existence - in reality it's genetics.
The most successful people in the world are not those with the most money, but those who are able to pass on their genetic material.
A personal living in a trailer with 8 children is more successful than than a billionaire.
The whole concept of a rich elite is an American myth - nature will totally ignore this myth.

The elite are those who survive in the most difficult circumstances - not those who manage to survive with a silver spoon in their mouth.

None of what you say about "Ayn Rand's universe" is supported by what Ayn Rand wrote, so I have to assume that you haven't read any of it.

"Only the man who does not need it, is fit to inherit wealth, the man who would make his fortune no matter where he started."

"Money is the barometer of a society’s virtue."

"Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil. That sentence is the leper’s bell of an approaching looter."

No real mention of Darwin in her work - no real science actually. She believes in money above all else.
All these quotes are irrelevant to the palpable reality of our existence as animals.
We are animals. (I believe in science not second rate pseudo literature)

"Reason is not automatic. Those who deny it cannot be conquered by it. Do not count on them. Leave them alone." - eh - ok.
I'll leave alone all living things other than those who have had a formal mathematical education in symbolic logic.
Will she let me stroke my cat though? - I love my cat despite his lack of formal education in mathematical logic.

OK, at least you brought source material to the discussion. You've missed some critical context though.


It means that trust fund babies shouldn't receive an inheritance unless they can make a living without it. That is perfectly in keeping with your belief that people who struggle to succeed are the real heroes and that wealthy layabouts are a scourge.


Yes, but her entire body of work denounced the corruption of money and government systems that subvert the effectiveness of money as a barometer. If you read the whole passage this is from, it ought to be clear: she's speaking out that money ought to go to people who earn it, not to people who have "connections." She's describing the true purpose of money and explaining how it is being abused and misused.

Again, people get this backwards every time. Rand wrote that if you deserve it you should get money. She did not write that if you have money that you deserved it. Look at causation, not just correlation.


Try this: "run for your life from any poster on Bitcoin Forum who tells you that Bitcoin is worthless. That statement means that person wants to buy it at a lower price."

Note: the people who say money is evil are always trying to take it away from us. What might that mean?

Also (though Rand never made this distinction) "money is evil" is itself missing context. Jesus reportedly said The apostle Paul wrote that the love of money is the root of all evil. When you value money more than to use it as a tool, that is the difference between ambition and greed. Opinions may vary, but I do not believe he Jesus, whose ideas Paul trying to spread, was intended to suggest that money is evil. The whole bit about rendering unto Caesar seems to suggest he Jesus was somewhat indifferent to it. He Paul suggested that greed (again, as distinct from ambition) was evil.

Again, Rand never made that distinction, so I'm not claiming she was defending Jesus' Paul's words. However, I am claiming that what she was attacking was a corruption of Jesus' Paul's words.

It sounds to me as though you and Ayn Rand agree on a lot more than you believe. That is why I am led to assume that you have not read any of Ayn Rand's writing except in one- or two-liners you can find by googling. If you have read any of it, I am surprised at the profound difference in interpretation of its meaning you and I have.

No one worth mentioning ever attributed those words to Jesus.  You're thinking of Paul.  :)

That's really embarrassing. I think my point still stands but I stand corrected on the citation. Or rather I slink into the corner and curl up into a little humiliated ball, corrected.

You know, I had a voice in the back of my head that made me go back and add the word "reportedly" there. I thought, "oh, that's not a 'red letter' quote; I ought not claim he said that." I confess that anything that isn't "red letter" kind of blurs together for me. I should have listened more closely to that voice.

Thank you for correcting me.

It's just nitpicking on my part.  The Bible is worth a read-through if for no other reason than to realise how often it is misquoted :)

If you're talking about evolution and propagation, I think we have moved on beyond procreation/survival of a single genetic line, and into survival of a social group a long time ago. As such, a rich person living in and being a part of a wealthy society (contributing wealth to the surrounding area) creates a society that is able to pass on its genes much more effectively than a poor society. We hear a lot about Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Persian, English, and American empires and their respective lineage, but pretty much never about the poorer tribes that never really went anywhere and died out. Also, it takes two people to create one child in a wealthy society to propagate their genes, while it may take two people to create five children before the child survives into adulthood for a parents in a poor society to do the same. So in that way, money and wealth does have a real impact on existence. On a larger scale, we have money, wealth, and the resulting scientific and medical advancement that it funded to thank for the massive global population spike of the last century.

I live on a 7-8$ a day, and I must say my life is quite enjoyable as of today. And European prices are much higher than in US in many aspects. Talk about jealousy.

Well if you count only food that I can easily live on $8, but then rent + bills.

rent and bills included

food is 2.5$
rent is 2.5$
electricity/communications/etc = ~1.5$
some everyday stuff like toothpaste, toiletpaper, detergent = ?
and there's always extra stuff like beer, condoms, chocolate.

Where do you live, PrintMule (what country)? 

Here in California, $75/month ($2.5/day * 30 days) rent might get you a cardboard box under a bridge if you had three roommates with whom to split the rent.

His profile says Latvia, which could be about right? Though I thought Latvia was a little more expensive than that.

It all depends on your priorities. You can always move to Idaho, Michigan or Nebraska. And about a cardboard box - saw a little clip month ago, about people wiling to rent a closet (!) in someone's apartment, in prestigious parts of New York. For 600$ IIRC. Also state of infrastructure in some urban regions of USA is shocking to say at least. Leaking roofs, dangerously bad wiring, bridges collapsing, streets full of cars/fumes. And people still choose that.


I live in the capital, and while our prices are largely unfriendly(and if you are a naive tourist, make them 200%), it all boils down to priorities. Different parts of town - different prices. Although it's also about greed - homeowners sit with their empty properties unwilling to lower price by 20-30%, for months and years. It's much easier to own a luxury shop with huge price margins - you sell 1 item, count your profits and call it a day, rather then sell 100 things for a "honest price".

Ah don't get me started, I could rant all day about this shithole, but there are much worse places on earth.

Rassah, it might be that you're own experiences have disillusioned you about the state of the rest of the 1%.  Most of the wealth that is acquired by the upper level of society does not trickle back down to others.  There are various documentaries out there that attempt to elaborate on this position.  There are also statistics that 1% of the population controls some 85% of the wealth.  The middle class the comprises approximately 70% of the population, controls just 5% of the wealth.

When there are CEO's making millions upon millions in their respective companies and their are lower level employees going to work every day and making a fraction of what the CEO makes it spins the whole concept of work and reward on it's head.  I would suggest you look up the story of HP's failed CEO Lee Apotheker http://money.cnn.com/2011/09/22/technology/hp_ceo_fired/index.htm (http://money.cnn.com/2011/09/22/technology/hp_ceo_fired/index.htm).  This little gem took over HP for 11 months and performed dismally.  When he was fired, he walked away with a $25million severance package.

I'm not sure what you mean by me being disillusioned. How? what am I not understanding or not thinking right about?

When you say "middle class," do you mean the old middle class, referring to a limited pool of workers only in USA, Canada, or Europe? Or do you mean the new middle class in a globalized economy, which includes third world countries we outsource to? If the later, I'd suspect many of us "middle class" types are actually in the 1% now.

What do you mean by trickle down? Specifically, what is it that you are expecting to trickle down? $20 bills? Increased wages? Improved quality of life? People who say that are often vague, at times saying "I meant that other thing" when you point out one of the things that does trickle down.

People who can do CEO type work are very rare and highly sought after, while people who can do low-level jobs are everywhere, especially now that we can hire labor all over the world. It's just supply/demand. Blame low wages on people willing to work for cheaper than you.

Exactly. If a company/board of directors are willing to pay that much to a certain individual, then maybe he is worth it? Although a thing I don't understand is - how did it get that way?

Your average joe works for 10$/hour, then some poor chap comes along and is willing to work for 2$/hour. Joe is fired. I get that. But why on the other end of that spectrum, salaries are so big. Why doesn't some poor chap come along to work as CEO for less?

Also how much could you possibly want? If they offer you a job for 2 mil $ a year, could you keep a straight face and say: "my services require better than that, make it 3.5 mil" ? And if they disagree - screw them, and those 2 mil, right?

That's not how it works. Joe comes along and says he'll work for 10/hour. He's hired. Bob comes around and says he'll do it for 9. Bob replaces Joe. Someone comes along and says they'll do it for 8, replacing Bob It goes down until the wage is at the lowest anyone will pay. This is assuming everyone is equally qualified, which is pretty much true for low wage jobs.

The same happens with CEOs. Just add 6 zeros. Keep in mind however that most people are not hired immediately for a CEO position... They've worked their way up, so that's why their salary is so big. In addition, their workload is more specific and intense. People would like to paint CEOs as having an easy job- they don't. Anyone can work at McDonald's, so there's a low wage. Very few people can be a successful CEO. No one is going to be a CEO for $10 an hour, because it takes many years of working their way up to even be considered for the position. Working that cheap makes no sense. The kind of person who would take a million dollar job and get paid 10 an hour is not smart enough to be a successful business owner.

Also, keep in mind, a CEO might earn 2 million a year, but if he rakes in 50 million a year for the company it's a worthy investment.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGdH7iGNqlY#at=2404

Not sure if this has been posted, but I thought it was pretty funny.  My forehead hurts.

No CEO has ever done that alone.

Do you have proof? Would Microsoft exist without Bill Gates? Would Apple have existed without Steve Jobs? Would Facebook have existed without Mark Zuckerberg?

Looks like you missed the point, we aren't discussing existentialism.
Though each made great contributions, none of those are alone in those contributions.
On the existence question, would any of those companies exist without the folks in the trenches?
The CEO that claims they are making all the difference has more hubris than leadership.

[/quote]

True, but no non-CEO has ever done that, period.


Of course they haven't done that alone, but the things they contributed, no one else could. Those companies could exist without those specific folks in the trenches, because there are plenty of other folks ready to fill those trenches. The trench folks are common, widely available, and although contribute, don't contribute much. So they get paid for that level. Those companies would not exist at all without those CEOs, because CEOs are not very common, and the bad ones can drive a company out of existence way faster than bad employees in the trenches. So the good CEOs get paid a different amount for their level.

It seems your argument boils down to "both, CEOs and low-level workers, are doing similar kind of work, so should get similar pay," which is just not true.

Looks like I missed the point? Maybe you can argue that Bill Gates and Steve Jobs sat around twiddling their thumbs, and just by chance they made billion dollar companies, but Zuckerberg made Facebook. Without him, it would not exist. So how could Facebook make a dollar let alone millions if it never existed?

I see two points missed. First, no, you can't argue that either Bill Gates or Steve Jobs sat around twiddling their thumbs. I know that wasn't your point but it should be said. It's easy enough to demonize Bill Gates as the monster behind the Microsoft monster or whatever, but the guy wrote BASIC for the 8080 without having a 8080. And Jobs didn't become a marketing guy until after he and Woz built computers from his garage.

All this misses the point doubly, however, as all three examples are or were not just CEOs but founders. Anyone who claims you don't need a genius idea and the technical chops to make it happen is a fool. But there is a long way between saying that Gates/Jobs/Zuckerberg deserve to be billionaires and saying that most corporate executives bring anything at all to the table. There is a huge difference between starting with no guarantee of a salary and using one's vision to build something and taking on a multimillion dollar job with a multimillion dollar golden parachute, making a few decisions and then taking credit for the short-term success of the company which, if it can be directly linked to that persons actions, are usually because that person did long-term harm to the company.

There are a thousand James Taggarts for every one Dagny.

I picked those examples because I could think of them off of the top of my head. But I fail to see why they don't count. Because they were founders? So what is your point, then? That if a CEO comes out of nowhere (which doesn't happen), and sits there doing nothing at an already established business he doesn't deserve the money? I agree, and so will the board of directors when they fire him and get him replaced. CEOs have to do something beneficial. And since they run the company their decisions and actions are going to million dollar decisions. It doesn't matter whether they were founders or not, or whether they can cover losses from the beginning.

If Zuckerberg had had a "million dollar parachute", but still came up with Facebook, would he not be deserving of money? Why is it a prerequisite that someone be poor (Zuckerberg wasn't poor anyways)? If an individual already personally makes millions, why can't they make their company millions?

Take Elon Musk. Using the success of PayPal, he has founded SpaceX and co-founded Tesla, using partly his own designs. He had a safety net, but SpaceX's success (which is groundbreaking) and Tesla's would not happen without him. If that pneumatic train idea works, he will have yet another successful business.

Heck, even Donald Trump who's no doubt an ass personality-wise still has made a ton of money for his various companies. He also started with a safety net.

Starting with your own personal safety net is no problem at all. But "golden parachute" refers to the huge sum of money that an executive gets as a reward for doing a shitty job. I once got two weeks' severance pay, and that was at a job with a six-digit salary. When I hear about people getting $15 million dollars for having their $30 million contract terminated early, I have to suspect that they weren't worth either the $30 million or the $15 million.

I'm just making a value judgment, not calling for legislative or any kind of correction (other than for boards of directors to use some fucking common sense). It just seems ludicrous that executives are so important to the success of a business that they can command to be paid huge sums even when they fail. Someone starting with their own money to back them up? Not an issue. They already had that money one way or another. But no one is so important that they ought to be paid millions to fail, and paid even more millions when they get fired.

At the very least, I can't show a lot of admiration for what a hired executive "risks" when the reward for failure is so high. A founder of a business risks everything and deserves enormous rewards if successful.

Obviously Jobs was both kinds. When he returned to Apple he was paid only in Apple stock. The way Apple looked at that time, it was a huge risk but obviously paid off big. If he'd driven Apple into the ground, he would have gotten next to nothing.

Just to clarify, a "golden parachute" isn't something that just gets "paid when someone fails." The payment is included in the contract when the CEO is being hired. It's one of the CEO benefits, like the "benefits" the rest of us get, that is used to entice CEOs to work at a company and take a position that a CEO might think is risky, or that may waste their time. And often, the company was failing before the CEO was offered the job, and the CEO simply failed to fix the problem, and needs that money due to the huge risk that being a "falling CEO" presents. Believe it or not, CEOs don't just take every $15 mil job offered to them. I'm sure you and I would take it gladly, but at that high of a level it's like a decision for us whether to take a $25k job with lots of benefits, or a $45k job with none. But with more zeros.

I absolutely get that it is part of a negotiated contract. I was being a bit flippant when I said that it was a reward for doing a shitty job. If you do a great job, you get to come back for another year at $30 million per year. If you do a shitty job, you get $15 million and get to take the rest of the year off.

But the assumptions made in entering into those agreements are flawed. Removing the risk (and I don't agree that there is any substantive risk to taking an executive job—it's being an employee with no skin in the game, especially if your worst-case scenario is walking away with a fortune and having a negative article written about you in the WSJ) invites poor decisionmaking. And the short-term criteria they are judged on often puts them in a position where their best choice is the one that is worst for the long-term health of the company.

Even if none of that was true, there is still a world of difference between being a founder/stakeholder and a hired executive.

I could argue that, but that would be stupid wrong made up nonsense and would just look foolish.  If you want to argue against things that no one is arguing for, you risk looking like that too.

Some CEO are overpaid, some aren't.  My point was that none succeed alone, they tend to be CEOs of companies (which have employees that individually contribute).

For what its worth, Gates, Jobs and Zuck each famously owe much of their success to stealing seminal ideas from others, and then successfully developed and sold them.

It annoys me that those 3 are mentioned (and zuckenberg should not even be mentioned at all). They are founders of their own companies, they had X of the shares, they could set whatever salaries they want, even work for free as a gimmick. We need better examples.

Why are these bad examples? Because they prove my point? I've listed 5 CEOs that have major companies, and their companies would not succeed let alone exist without them.

And for the record, Jobs and Zuckerberg have (had in Jobs' case) salaries of $1 per year, in order to maximize profits. Most successful CEOs use this method in order to make sure that the company can succeed, which in turn will increase the value of the stock that they hold (although Jobs' wealth was based mainly in Pixar, not Apple).

People look at that $15 mill, and think, "Man, if I had $15mil, I would..." comparing their income and lifestyles to CEOs directly. CEOs don't live or work the same way we do. Sure, a lot of that money is spent on luxuries, but much more is spent on investments and other businesses they run. Those people are in the business of "making money," not earning money and spending it away. It's also why they get hired in the first place.

So, instead of thinking, "Holy crap! They still get to keep $15mil! I could do so much with that in my own life style/situation!" think "Where would I be if my salary was cut in half, and I had a very public bad record in my resume that was published in a bunch of newspapers?"


That is an actual problem, and corps are starting to fix that, with things like performance based salaries and stock options that can only be exercised in the future.


Where do you think executives come from? (Not a rhetorical question, actually wondering)

CEOs tend to be Strong ENTJ types, though there are many exceptions.
When you have just an ENTJ alone, you don't have a company, you just have a frustrated asshole looking to order people around that aren't there.  :)

BTW this isn't meant to be mean spirited at all, I greatly enjoy the company of CEOs.  They get the humor of this.  The ability to be bothered by all the right things, and to maintain self-knowledge is part of what drives them to success.

No, if I do a shitty job, I get my salary cut by 100%. You're not going to make me cry over someone getting their salary cut 50% WHEN THEY GET FIRED. What planet are you writing from?


California, mostly.

I don't even know how to answer that. I doubt that many of them worked their way up from the mailroom. Almost all, I assume, held other executive positions prior to being Chief Whatever Officers. Some founded their own businesses. Some are just good at liquidating a business's assets before dumping them and moving on to the next. You probably have a few YSOM dropouts in the mix too. What kind of answer are you looking for?

So you think that most CEOs just became executives out of nowhere? The point Rassah was making is that they worked their way from the bottom, whether it was in the company they're a CEO of or somewhere else. No CEO has became a CEO without any experience. It's not like a new baby is born, and it is christened as the new CEO of a company.

Oh right, because "Almost all, I assume, held other executive positions prior to being Chief Whatever Officers" COMPLETELY means they were born CEO out of nowhere.

Why do I even bother writing replies? I think I must just be a masochist.

You said "I doubt that many of them worked their way up from the mailroom." Guess what? Most did.

No, I'm going to ask that you back that up with statistics, and I'm certain that you will not be able to without defining "mailroom" to mean something other than the lowest level of responsibility in a given company.

http://www.statisticbrain.com/ceo-statistics/

74% of chief executive officers have at least a four-year college degree. "Entry level" for college graduates in almost any industry translates to having more responsibility than sorting mail. I suspect most of them started out in lower-to-mid-level management and worked their way up. I have no doubt that a very small number of them did indeed "bootstrap" their way from janitor to the corner office. But it's a very small number.

* of course, in the shipping industry the "mailroom" could be anywhere.

So straight out of college they're hired as an executive? I don't think so. They may not be sorting mail, but I don't see how they could possibly have a higher level job than anyone else in the company. And a janitorial job is a dead-end one. You don't get promoted from janitor to anything else. Plus, what were they doing in college and high school? I'm guessing they had some sort of job.

I'm going to define mailroom as the lowest level job that still allows for promotions that could lead to CEO. Because a truck driver or janitor will never become a higher level employee because they aren't proving themselves to the company. Maybe they'll become head truck driver or head janitor, but you can't jump from there to an executive position.

In a trucking company, a truck driver could become CEO. 
What you are looking for (by "mailroom") is the lowest level rung within the core competency of the company's enterprise.

Yes, that's what I'm looking for. You worded it better than I did.

Sorry, you're right, I messed up. I meant "get fired, have fairly small severance pay compared to their salary, and have their poor job record in the public, possibly preventing them from getting another job."

One job I worked at laid me off, and the severance package was 6 month's pay. But it wasn't a cut in salary, you're right.

Why "within the core competency of the company's enterprise"? Many CEOs arrive from advanced positions well outside the core competency of the enterprise. I don't know if Don Thompson ever made burgers after grad school. He was an electrical engineer.

But all this is irrelevant. I don't know why either of you are so defensive about this. I'm not saying that true leaders don't deserve generous rewards. I'm saying two totally different things: First, the majority of CEOs are cronies, who get their enormous salaries due to their ability to manipulate politicians into creating legislation that is favorable to their specific enterprise while increasing the regulation on their competition. They are second-handers jockeying for the drippings of a thoroughly corrupted government. This is pandemic, and our admiration ought to be reserved for the true captains of industry, who create new things that make our lives better. The division between "leech" and "creator" is not a class distinction; there are both at all levels of society—even in government there are perhaps two or three honest people striving to make things better.

Second, you can take a risk or you can negotiate a golden parachute that will pay out regardless of job performance, not both. I can't blame someone for not taking a risk, but I will not talk up how brave and ballsy it is for someone to take a job where they will get millions of dollars if they screw it up so badly that they are fired in the first six months. I will admire their negotiating skills, but no more. I admire people that put their own time and/or their own capital into a business venture they believe in, but if you're playing with other people's money and have nothing to lose you ain't no entrepreneur; you're an employee.

Finally, if you want to pick on someone who thinks that rich means corrupt and poor means honest, find someone else. That just is not me, no matter how hard you twist my words to make me sound like some kind of pinko redistributionist.

…and I haven't had enough (or any) sleep and I'm likely to be a bit cranky myself. So forgive me if I'm sounding like some kind of pinko whatever. It was not my intent.

Sounds like an extremely valuable and useful skill that any corp would pay top dollar for. Though the problem here isn't with CEOs working within the system in an attempt to do their job, which is to make a profit. The problem is the politicians being able to give out such legislation and favors.



I'm having a hard time coming up with names of CEOs who are not those things. Most I know came from lower level positions working their way up, or founded companies themselves. What's your opinion of Jeff Bezzos, who built his company from scratch, and is not trying to get legislation that would force sales tax on internet sales?

Also, why should be have admiration for CEOs in the first place? Most of them never ask for it, yet are forced to be raised in the public eye, and then vilified for it :/


Why not both? Why can't someone take a risk, while having some insurance at the same time? There's nothing wrong with it. And why would you admire someone taking on an extremely risky venture without taking all possible precautions? I would think a person like that would be thought of as a careless idiot, not an admirable expert at negotiating their field. And, again, why would you talk about how someone is brave for doing (or attempting to do) their job? You don't talk about how brave a janitor is, so why a CEO?



Uh, CEOs are't entrepreneurs, they are employees. They don't even own the company they work for (typically). It's why they can get fired. And they do have stuff to lose. Seriously, is losing your job, with your performance and life becoming public, and with greatly decreased prospects of getting another job, and only a much smaller severance "consolation prize" no big deal for you? (pretend we are not talking about millions before you consider this one)


An oft problem on forums of this sort, one I am often guilty of as well :D

Why?  That seemed to be what was meant by working up from the mailroom.  I understood that to mean the metaphorical mailroom and took that meaning to be from the lowest rung of the company on a path to CEO.


Arguably Micky D's is a manufacturing management company.  They run production lines in mass.


We agree


We agree


Its all good.
I have run companies from the C level, and have worked as the lowest rung.  When I have started companies, these are the same position.

Lately I've been engaged in starting new alternative currency enterprises and having a blast.

The Cold Hard Cash enterprise is one I've been hoping to do for a while, and the bitcoin marketplace seems just like the perfect storm for it.  Most folks don't even know what a QR code is, much less what to do with it on their money.
The bitcoin users are a unique sector.  Adventurous, forward thinking, risk-takers, these are the people in whose company I find I have no enemies so even if your were a pinko we'd have enough other things in common that we'd probably enjoy a meal together without coming to blows.

For my part here, all the arguments are in fun and among friends.  It is the nature of online discourse, for most folks when you agree, you nod silently and read on, but when you disagree even slightly it generates that urge to contribute words to the discussion for better or worse.

If yo were to ask them, they would tell you that they are a real estate company. Buying and owning the best real estate is priority one, and the stores will make money themselves