Diogenes

It’s my opinion that the CEO pay is bait to draw attention away from the dividends and stock buybacks.

Fight those and the shareholders will no longer vote for exorbitant CEO salaries. Unless we’re talking about companies that do something else that’s highly unethical and need a fall guy. To me, CEOs are almost patsies. They’re the people the board can fire when the peasants start revolting, or when the company gets caught covering up a toxic chemical spill, or whatever.

Reduce their value to the shareholders, and their pay packages WILL start to go down.

I’m just saying, the fact that you’re worried about CEO pay means they’ve fulfilled their purpose. They’re meant to be bait for us.

Imagine how good an investment it is to pay a guy 95 mill so you (the shareholders as a whole) take essentially zero heat while you get paid several billions.

There’s about 500 companies in the S&P 500 and on average their CEOs earn 19 million a year. That’s just under 10 billion per year on CEO salaries.

Total dividends and buybacks from these companies added up to about 1.6 trillion in 2024. This doesn’t include normal (non-buyback related) stock price increases which also improve the theoretical value shareholders receive. Just the money that literally exists as actual money on the company balance sheets and is wasted on making the owners happy instead of improving working conditions, raising salaries, etc.

And as long as we make a fuss about CEO compensation packages, they will continue to rise. Ignore them and start annoying shareholders and the ridiculous CEO compensation packages start lowering again.

What really needs to happen is that stock buybacks need to become illegal, or at least highly limited. And there needs to be a way to have a cap on dividends linked to median employee salary. Then there’s not only an actual incentive to increase salaries, but the CEO pay problem will take care of itself naturally. There’s no point in paying them this much if the dividends you receive in return aren’t as high as they used to be.

Hell, if all you want to do is reduce the inequality, link dividends directly to income inequality within the company. (lowest paid employee salary) / (highest paid employee salary, this being the CEO generally) * (some coefficient) = max % of profits that are allowed to be paid out as dividends. This is actually not as great because now there’s no incentive to raise the lower end salaries, only an incentive to lower the higher end salaries.

The genie’s out of the bottle now, you can’t feasibly take all the guns away anymore. Best you can do is improved gun control for NEW firearm sales, and perhaps buyback programs. But your countrymen will never accept being disarmed forcibly. Plus with all the shit going on, perhaps it’s time for more left-leaning people to arm themselves too. Idk, I’m not from around there.

Now the question is what to do next. A sane country would invest in mental health, generally improving people’s overall well-being (health, financial, etc), and rooting out all the right-wing propaganda.

The USA is not that country.

I’m just saying that is a tiny problem compared to the much more pressing problem of “employees aren’t being paid shit”.

I don’t much care if the CEO is making 250x as much as the average employee if the average employee is getting paid well.

The time spent worrying about the CEO’s salary is time that the shareholders can spend laughing all the way to the bank, because distracting everyone using the CEO worked. Matter of fact, that’s the real job of the CEO and the reason they get paid so much. They take the heat off the people earning the real money. The fact that negative articles are being written about him instead of the board, shareholders, dividends and stock buybacks, means that he’s doing his job exactly as expected, and has, in the eyes of the shareholders, earned his paycheck. The same people making billions off the backs of Starbucks employees are the ones that have decided he’s worth this much to them.

I’m not saying it’s right, I’m saying that focus on bigger problems first, then the small ones. The CEO’s pay package will magically stop increasing every year when the shareholders aren’t happy with the results anymore (dividends and massive buybacks in this instance).

Ah I thought that the problem was that employees should be getting paid more.

I’m more of the opinion that elevating the floor is more important than lowering the ceiling. Sometimes the latter needs to be done, but the former should be priority.

That’s barely a problem at this point. It’s a problem, but not as big as you think. There’s an even bigger problem. The reason the CEO gets paid so much is to facilitate this, and also to protect the beneficiaries here.

Starbucks currently pays roughly 60 cents a quarter in dividends, so 2.40 a year. They have 1.14 billion outstanding shares, so that makes ~2.74 billion in dividends this year. That’s 28 times the CEO’s total comp. They also spend a billion or two on stock buybacks every year last few years. Call it 1.6 average (2023 was 2+ billion, 2024 was 1.3). Roughly speaking, that’s 4.3 billion spent purely on pleasing shareholders. Use just 2 billion of that on payroll and the employees can now get a 5k annual raise, or around 2.5 dollars an hour. THAT is life changing money at the low income levels Starbucks employees have to operate at. Not “I can now buy a house” life changing, but “I can now buy groceries whenever I want” life changing.

Fuck, my numbers aren’t as bad as Starbucks’s own expectations from 2022:

Between dividends and share buybacks, the company expects to return approximately $20 billion to its shareholders in the next three years.

That’s almost SEVEN billion dollars a year, but I don’t think they reached it quite.

He seems to be one of the less accurate ones, yes. Turns out when you use really wide brackets for numbers predictions, that makes it easier to get things right (who’d’ve thunk) and even then he only gets like 50% of claims right.

Wait till you hear about Coffee Stain Studios (Goat Simulator, Satisfactory), Paradox Interactive (I’m not gonna name any games lol, they’re literally a genre unto themselves), Iron Gate Studio (Valheim), Ghost Ship Games (Deep Rock Galactic)…

Oh and if you’re into mobile games at all, maybe you’ve heard of Rovio (Angry Birds), Supercell (Clash games) or King (Candy Crush)

And this is all just Nordic countries. There’s a lot of stuff coming out of Poland (CD Projekt Red), UK (Rockstar North), France (Ubisoft’s been kinda meh the last decade+, but if you only play every 3rd or 4th iteration of Assassin’s Creed, they’re still kinda fun) and if you consider Iceland to be European which it is, that’s where EVE Online is from!

We have a very healthy video game industry, spread across many countries, with many developers with their own unique styles. Indie, AA, AAA. It’s lovely.

I mean if you escape the US, it won’t matter as much… Just don’t ever go back lol

How do you like Uruguay? Would you recommend it?

I don’t think I can move out of Estonia any time soon, but sometimes I would like to escape to a warmer, but not super hot place… and Montevideo looks beautiful

Pretty sure it means you get to vote in the primaries, aka the election to choose who’s in the election

You don’t have to vote for the party you’re registered for.

This is coming from a non-American, but that’s how I understand it

I haven’t read the book myself, but apparently it was outsourced to Nedry’s company and they weren’t being paid anymore as the project went over its due date or something. So that’s why Nedry was alone and it’s also why he sabotaged the whole thing and stole company secrets

This is how

Hasn’t it been in a gradual slow down for like a decade? Peak player count was in 2013 apparently.

Throwback to rddit mold mayhaps?

Well, for interactive use it’s fully deprecated. Usually when someone just posts a command with no context, I assume it to be meant to be used in an interactive session, not pasted into a script file.

But overall, yes, you’re technically correct.

Good, I was too lazy to elgoog and trusted OP’s research too much it seems

I’m pretty sure you CAN do it because from everything I see, the new BMW i cars (so not the 3 or 8) are pretty great?

But it would still phone home though? It’s not like great firewall blocks all traffic, it blocks traffic the CCP doesn’t like.