Be cognizant of the impact of ratios at work here, Google’s parent company Alphabet looks pretty good with only 29:1, but that is because its median worker pay is so high comparatively. I’m also seeing Accenture on the “naughty” list at 1526:1 but that could be because Accenture has a significant employee base in lower income countries (such as India) while its CEO is in a high income country. It may not be indicative of equal standards of living for where each resides.
You have to pay tax on income
You have to pay tax on realized capital gains too (of which Buffet makes most of his spending money I’m guessing), but at a lower rate than income.
These are great points, and looking at some of the other responses I get the sense that it’s a time and skills issue. So, what exactly do communists and socialists imagine will happen when “workers seize the means of production”?
I admit I’m not a scholar in this area, but my college reading of Marx and Engels they were taking about nation-state levels of “seizing the means of production”. As in, the entire nation’s ability to produce goods, grow and transport food, facilitate communications, etc. Doing so on such a grand scale that the elites/bourgeois would be forced to cede control of the levers of power because society effectively halts with the means of production in the hands of the working class (proletariat).
Marx wasn’t talking about a socialist group starting up a competing grocery store to the entrenched established players in that market space.
I don’t want to discourage anyone from pursuing these ideas, I think at least in the U.S. it might be cool to have a consultancy or non-profit which helps connect such founders and provides them with education, training and startup resources.
There are educational resources for starting non-profits organizations (and I’m assuming co-ops). The real resource any org (for-profit or nonprofit) needs to start up is: large amounts of money. In for-profit ventures (assuming your business plan is respectable) you can get bank loans or outside investors. Both of these groups expect a return on the money they’re giving you to get started up.
With a co-op, I’m guessing the only sources of startup capital are: government grants, philanthropic donations, or a founder that already has amassed their own fortune.
Edit oh and some of the other points are that one wouldn’t get rich doing this. So what?
At those really dark times for your business you ask yourself “why the hell am I even doing this?” for most business owners the answer is “so that at some point in the future my life will be much easier”. For a co-op, there has to be a very deeply held belief that what you’re doing is extremely meaningful and your sacrifice will be “worth it” somehow. While those people exist with almost a religious level of obligation to their cause or their community, I think they are extremely rare.
I don’t envy the leadership in a struggling co-op. Running an organization is hard enough at the best times as a single owner. Having to run it by committee when it is crumbling sounds like a painful death.
I’ve already seen people look down on wealth accumulation, so I think it’s fair to say that the motives for someone who’d start such a business venture are different, which is valid and reasonable.
You may already have your answer. In your first post you said: “I’d also like to see more childcare co-ops, or community shared pre-k schools.”
What is stopping you from you creating a child-care co-op?
Secondly, I don’t think market forces will impact such businesses because if you’re creating communities around them, then people will choose what they know and trust.
This is naive. Market forces (and other externalities) can have massive impacts on your organization irrespective if you’re a for-profit or co-op. Just think of what COVID did to many organizations. Though nothing change in the business model or service offering, thousands of companies went under because the conditions of the market changed through no fault of the organization owners/leaders.
In short, co-ops are the closest socialist/communist business model that’s actually implemented in the U.S., so why are more leftists not doing this?
Starting a business (that is based on a sound and viable business plan that has even a snowball’s chance of surviving its formative early years) is really REALLY hard. It takes massive amounts of money or debt, the early years promise years of having no income for yourself (or paying yourself below minimum wage), it means a staggering amount of hours you need to put in to keep it going, forgoing vacations and important family events, loss of friendships because you’re having to put all your time and energy into the business without socializing, having to work when you’re incredibly ill, incredible amounts of stress (which increases by 10 times when you have employees that now depend on you for their livelihood) and even if you do everything perfect your business can fail leaving you with nothing for the years that you put into it, and potentially also with tens of thousands or millions of dollars in debt. It means many times being force to make decisions that massively affect other people’s lives (your employees or your customers). It can be versions of the Trolley Problem time and time again.
“According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), approximately 20% of new businesses fail during the first two years of being open, 45% during the first five years, and 65% during the first 10 years. Only 25% of new businesses make it to 15 years or more.” source
So ask yourself if you want to go through all of that, and instead of wealth you can live on and support your family with at the end of it, you get simply a “thank you” for building a co-op.
The USA grudge against Iran wasn’t because of the storming of the embassy. It was holding Americans diplomatic staff hostage for 444 days and threatening to “put them on trial” if Iran didn’t get what it wanted from the USA.
I haven’t heard any reports of Syrians holding Iranian diplomatic staff hostages yet.
There is no victory here that should be celebrated. It’s just Stalin replacing Hitler in East Germany. Everyone else who lived there lost.
You’re talking as if there was ever a point in human history that wasn’t like this. This is geopolitics. This is humanity. Yes, it sucks. However, there is a version of “sweetness” here, but this is the bittersweet kind. Its the periods of general peace between the hot wars of destruction and revolution where humanity has the chance to lurches forward a bit.
If the end of the Syrian civil war means a few decades where people in Syria can generally live in peace without bombs or artillery falling on their homes and their families, thats a win. That may be as good as it gets, but its a win.
Of course by international law they shouldn’t be doing that.
International law is a product of, and supported by, nation states. If the previously ruling government has fallen, it effectively doesn’t have a nation that respects the binding of international law. When a new government forms, that government will most likely take up the mantle of support for international law in exchange for international recognition. Right now on the ground its a bit of a free-for-all, I’d imagine.
They also use the higher taxes argument. They lean on the decades of anti tax propaganda and tell people your taxes have to go up for it to work.
This is a rephrasing of their zero sum argument. As in “for the poor to gain healthcare, you, the middle class, must lose wealth”.
You say that, but when the Dems had a filibuster proof super majority in Congress for a handful of weeks over a decade ago, we got the ACA.
The ACA barely passed in its original form (219-212) with a bunch of democrats voting against it too. A few aligned themselves with big business however many other democrats voted against the ACA because they believe it didn’t go far enough.
The ACA was still the biggest win for the American people on healthcare in decades.
I can’t imagine why USA hasn’t introduced something similar yet, but prefer all that bureaucracy that only makes the whole process way more expensive. Just to make sure some unemployed poor guy doesn’t get free treatment!!
(concepts stolen from a very insightful reddit post from years ago) Nearly all modern conservative positions can be explained with two idea.
So apply this to healthcare:
Most arguing against medical-treatment-for-all view it as zero-sum. So for most its not just because they don’t want some unemployed poor guy getting free treatment, but rather, “if the unemployed poor guy gets free treatment, then treatment won’t be available at some point in the future when I need it”. This is silly of course.
For others arguing against medical-treatment-for-all, the suffering is the point. The unemployed poor guy should suffer because that is his station in life. A life of comfort is reserved for those of higher classes. They believe, alleviating his suffering would go against the class he’s in and should in. This is, of course, also silly.
You’re ignoring what it is communicating with the order:
Los Angeles Chargers (playing) AT (Kansas City) Chiefs.
The rest of the list below communicates the same information, the location the game took place.
Housing costs don’t go away when you own a paid-off home. You still have to pay for property taxes and insurance in addition to the costs of upkeep on the home. This is part of the reason its so difficult to get ballot measures passed that rely on property taxes. Fixed income seniors aren’t getting any more money, and they are trying to make their money last for the remainder of their lives (with no idea when exactly they’ll die and it will be okay to be out of money).
They also get to watch their savings drop in value over time as inflation chips away at it.
All of this happens at a time of life when your medical costs are sky high from your body failing from age or treatment to continually treat chronic conditions.
Getting old isn’t for the faint of heart.
It’s not like Europe doesn’t have good software engineers, so the fact that so many of Europe’s carmakers are having so many problems competing on software is jarring. It has to be some kind of institutional/cultural clash within these organizations.
I think the problem with software for European cars comes from the fact that so much of it is outsourced to so many suppliers (Bosch is one example). One supplier makes an HVAC module and the software for it. Another makes a braking system module, and the software for it. Another makes the drive train control modules, and the software for it. Then the car maker is required to build a car with all these disparate pieces and approaches with yet another outsourced company that makes the over all UX and UI software. Each company’s design philosophies, update mechanisms, and testing vary leading to a patchwork quilt of a final product. Yes a patchwork quilt will cover you, but upon usage and washing it will wear differently or fade.
VW specifically ran into just this problem. source
“To do that, the VW Group needed, for lack of a better term, a Tesla-like approach to software and digital technology. Historically for the entire auto industry, “software” means things like engine management, or driver-facing bits like infotainment and navigation, or numerous components made by different suppliers with different software standards who often didn’t talk to one another. It was piecemeal and old-school, compared to the smartphones and tablets that have become an integral part of our lives over the past two decades.”
Contrast this to the highly vertical approaches of many of the Chinese EV companies or Tesla. These companies build nearly all of their own modules (or at least contract manufacture them) then wrote all their own software for stitching the car together into one experience. There is one software update team. There is one team responsible for the bus and communications standards and protocols. If a team handling the HVAC needs to capture heat from the electric motor team (for energy efficiency and motor performance), these teams are in the same building or at least in the same company.
For better or worse, its cars built like software instead of parts from various disparate manufacturers like one would building a PC.
China has very few petroleum and methane reserves so there’s no real industry in China to subsidize for those. China does have lots of coal reserves though. They have the 4th largest in the world right after the USA. Yes, China heavily subsidizes their available fossil fuel.
“The GSI identified around USD 18 billion (CNY 121 billion) of subsidies given to the generation of coal-based electricity in 2015.” source
This is a huge loss for Russia too. Any smaller country considering joining (or staying in) Russia’s sphere of influence for security just saw one of their peers get exiled from their country by its populous.
I believe Syria also has Russia’s only friendly port in the Mediterranean. If that base falls to rebels that would be a huge blow to Russia’s ability to project power over the region.
Then you’re making more than that millionaire household (remember thats at least two people), and that’s after they’ve spent their entire life working and saving.
You are more “rich” than those millionaires because you’re one person, and likely have decades more to earn increasingly higher salaries and save. For them, its over. That is the most amount of money they have for the rest of their lives. There’s no more income from salaries after retirement.
And he was “just” a millionaire
This term “millionaire” being synonyms with “rich” really needs to be updated for 2024 with all of the inflation by now. A household that saved $1m by the time they retire at age 65 would technically be “millionaires”. That would give the household $81k/year. $81k/year to spend for a household in retirement isn’t bad, of course, but I don’t think anyone would look at that household and think that the couple living there would be considered “rich”.
now what about billionaires…
Now that one is absolutely still “rich” by every measure.
So like, 1% of his annual salary?
Not even that. He earned $10.2m/year. So $50k would be .49%. Don’t miss the decimal point there. $50k is slightly less than 1/2 of a percent of his annual salary.
If he never took PTO and worked 5 days a week and 8 hours a day for the entire year (admittedly, CEOs can frequently need to work more than than 40 hours a week) he would be earning $4903/hour. So this $50k bounty offer represents slightly more than 10 hours of what they pay the CEO in salary.
Is it you or the alcohol talking?
Sorry to disappoint you. I don’t drink or use drugs, but just because I choose that I don’t think everyone else should be forced to follow what I decide for my own body. Adults should have the choice to put those things in their bodies as long as the risks are known. With both drugs and alcohol, the risks are well known a published. Irrespective of my opinion, history is a good teacher of how miserable bans would fail. Humans are going to choose to drink and use drugs for the foreseeable future. Destroying their lives with laws or wars is not productive for our society.
So those respondents are saying when a Democratic president is in power, election results are fair, and when a Republican president is in power, the election results are suspect?