I feel like it would be more fun to respond to you with songs from my favorite albums. It doesn’t really answer a question since you didn’t have one.

Nothing lasts forever.

Not even capitalism.

You say the merket will decide my worth. The people will decide yours!

A Master of Business Administration (MBA; also Master in Business Administration) is a postgraduate degree focused on business administration. The core courses in an MBA program cover various areas of business administration such as accounting, applied statistics, human resources, business communication, business ethics, business law, strategic management, business strategy, finance, managerial economics, management, entrepreneurship, marketing, supply-chain management, and operations management in a manner most relevant to management analysis and strategy. It originated in the United States in the early 20th century when the country industrialized and companies sought scientific management.

You seek to write-off in one stroke what has been built-upon over many centuries and siphoned into scientific disciplines. You suffer from Dunning-Kruger.

I’m not saying that you need every employee to make a company run. There is a lot of waste. I’m just trying to help you understand how CEO’s work. The don’t necessarily keep their job either. The board can remove then if they aren’t making the company money. Sure, I’d like to get paid more than my quarter million or so. It really isn’t enough, but I’m working my ass off to get to the top of my ladder. It’s not necessarily the CEO at my current company, but it could be close to it somewhere else. You just don’t want to play the game. If you want a good listen, my favorite albums of all times are The Kinks - Preservation: Act 1&2. It’s a great social commentary on workers rights and getting manipulated for profit. The answer is somewhere in the middle where commerce is regulated appropriately, but not by throwing the baby out with the bath water and eating the rich. If you go too far social left, you end up in the territory of a restrictive regime. It’s confusing how that works. There are plenty of terrible governments in history that swung the socialist banner.

No. You live in a capitalist economy. This is how that system works. Market movers make money. CEO’s are the company’s superstars.

The market will dictate your worth. Have fun asking for too much money and not getting it.

I am an MBA and agree that buybacks are fine. The problem is toxic anti-capitalism from my perspective. People are not really educated well on these topics. I find your comment funny that an army of accountants come to explain things and help everyone understand the nuances and why this is needed, but all the experts are somehow shills.

As an MBA, I will simply state that you all do not understand capitalism. A CEO is kind of like a sports star. They make what they make because they are making all the hard shots and keeping the team afloat. They are like the captain and coach of the team in one. It takes many years to curate the skills required to be a good CEO and there are only so many people good enough in each industry to take on the challenge. 21M is modest compared to Ford’s profits. If they provided less, he would simply move to a competitor in the same way that sports stars shop around. The idea that everyone in the company should have their salaries compared in terms of orders of magnitude of the CEO is insane. It’s like attempting to say that the janitor at a doctor’s office should have to make tens of thousands above the going rate of what a janitor’s output is worth on the open market simply because the star of the business is able to bring in a lot of money. In general, the idea that the CEO doesn’t work as hard as the line workers is incorrect. They CEO meets all day with direct reports and investors and steers the ship.

On having no money and being a slave to your children’s needs for the next 30 years or more.

I only go to Reddit for porn since they lose money when I do that.

This is why I don’t have children.

I’m going to be a year away. I remember smoking sections in restaurants and a world without the internet. I was probably less than 10 taking bike excursions around town without supervision . It was a different time.

It’s hard to imagine a time when you could smoke a cigarette on a talk show.

I feel so old because Pokémon was neat and all, but it was late to the party. We already had years of MTG and even Star Wars CCG. We played the RYB carts on GB, but I was rocking my Nightmare and Leviathan well before my Mewtwo and Charizard.

I recently moved my wiki notes to a different platform and wanted to build a Python app to read each article and add a list of keywords and categories describing it, so things would be easier to find on the new site. I ended up attempting to create a natural language model, but literally every unique word in each article kept becoming a keyword and category. After hours of toil and StackOverflow, I realized that I was essentially trying to recreate ChatGPT or at least an aspect of what it could do seamlessly. Instead of just pivoting to its API’s, which would have only cost a few cents, I spent a few more hours trying to use a wrapper around Bard that was broken because the service didn’t want people to build free automation atop it. I finally wrote a script that used ChatGPT/OpenaAI API’s to feed the articles and it worked almost perfectly. Had to run some parsing, but it got where it needed to be. TL;DR: I tried to write an AI in a day that is difficult for seasoned experts, failed pretty gloriously, realized I should use an existing AI, then wasted a few more hours trying to save a few cents, then did it correctly. I hyper-focus when coding, which can lead to these rabbit holes.

This is a fair take.

What you said is not wrong. Each economic lever is a negotiation with sentiments. The government could impose more stringent regulations. I believe it has to with regard to monopoly-busting and possibly doing some salary-policing, but I don’t feel that the system should be thrown out. It has spawned countless innovations by providing the incentive that people can be rewarded handsomely for their creativity and entrepreneurship. If you don’t like corruption, vote it out.

He played the game correctly. The American dream is capitalism. We can improve the rules across industries, but the idea that we should remove the winners is no fun. If you spend years building a business and exposing yourself to calculated risk, you should reap your reward.

He is being defended indirectly. I am defending capitalism. Sure we can make some reforms to improve salaries across industries, but the ultra wealthy serve a purpose too. People are claiming that they sit on their money, but they clearly do reinvest in new entrepreneurial ventures. The more wealthy, the more groundbreaking. It is great that Bezos invested in civilian space tourism. That will only strengthen innovation in the space sector, which is needed. The US space program results in many innovations that we use across other industries today. Elon is revolutionizing tunnel digging and maybe rail transport. Bill Gates is either trying to stave the spread of disease or working on thinning the population depending upon the content you read.

You don’t give him enough credit. He worked extremely hard to make Amazon what it is today. Additionally, he took major risks to his credit where he convinced investors to fund a new form of supply chain. He is reaping the reward of taking entrepreneurial risks and creating something innovative. I don’t know how you can say that Amazon doesn’t help people. Their prices are in-line with the market and no one can touch their shipping costs. Their warehouse jobs are demanding, but they explain that to anyone getting into it. In time, the people will mostly be replaced by robots anyways. The employees want more money, but robots work for free. If anything, we should be very interested in potentially implementing UBI and a VAT on automation per Andrew Yang.

workers don’t have to be paid the minimum possible

Ideally, the market dictates salary in capitalism. This means that a worker can shop themselves around if you are not paying them enough. Where this has broken down a bit is in corporations intentionally and unintentionally colluding on appropriate pay for positions across an industry. The get consulting groups to indicate whether they are in line with industry practices. This can also result in employees getting pay bumps if a company has is having trouble retaining talent. If the government tries to break the organic model by imposing minimum pay rules, then it will hurt small businesses. If it creates a percentage system based upon company profits then you end up having your talent retire early. It is not really a tenable model to keep a business afloat. You would end up with these companies that exist and then go away because the employees have extracted all the wealth they need, so you wouldn’t have prolonged enterprises like Amazon that offer an extremely useful service because their wild success means that it becomes impossible to figure out how to hire people to new positions because the revenue share for one employee would far exceed what other companies could offer, so you have to somehow either find the best person ever for that position or some kind of hereditary system forms. The use-case doesn’t make much sense. If you simply cap the CEO’s salary and say that they are not allowed to make many multiples of standard employees and standard employees cannot make many multiples above the standards for their roles in the industry then maybe that would work, but it seems like an overreach of government.