Some time ago I used to work in a large organization on the very bottom of the food chain. I was making, say, $100k a year, which was quite decent money. Sitting there, doing same thing I could've grown to a "senior bottom of the food chain" of $150k. That was the limit. A soft one, but still the limit.
The organization was quite picky in selecting their workforce. Think FAANG. So in every team you have a bunch of quite smart opinionated folks, who somehow have to be steered in the same direction. With that I see it kinda reasonable for the team lead to make at least $200k a year. Give or take.
Now we move one step up. Someone has to pull all these "creme de la creme" cats together and herd them, so that at the very minimum teams don't work against each other. Ideally work together for some common goal. And I can understand team leads who is not willing to go to this snake pit for 30% salary increase. Why would they? 50% - may be. 70% - that sounds interesting and worth consideration.
Bottom line: according to my humble experience in "the organization", the salary roughly doubles each time you get up the ladder. And being on different steps of this ladder I can understand why.
Can a family of 4 purchase a home within walking distance of the office? Is the CEO of the company making 1000X more than those at the bottom? How much equity do the execs have and how much is it worth?
Devs are very underpaid, it's just so much value is captured by those at the top that we're all used to fighting for the scraps that happen to fall off the real dinner table.
You could argue that devs are being paid the money that is being extracted from lower-class workers, too. Companies get to underpay for physical production labor, construction labor, etc., and some of that gets fed into developer salaries.
More gets fed into their profits and the executive salaries, but I think you get the idea.
I don’t think you can make the argument that devs are extracting money from lower paid employees when:
1. Exec pay is 100-1000x that of dev pay. I’d also include huge war chests of cash and stock buy backs as evidence that devs aren’t the problem.
2. The vast majority of “high paying” dev roles don’t pay enough money to buy a house in the real estate market that their office is in. A metric that I’d consider bare minimum to call someone adequately paid.
I guess my point is more that devs are a symptom, not the problem. We get the runoff from their exorbitant hoards, which are derived from whole swaths of people getting hosed.
I think if you account for inflation, devs are basically one of the only roles that have been treading water to keep a middle class lifestyle while everything else has dropped through the floor. I do think it's debatable that even developer pay gives you a middle class lifestyle if you can't afford housing.
I do agree that the entire system is broken and devs are mostly working on things that add negative value to humanity but effectively hoover up capital from the masses and deposit it in the accounts of the wealthy.
Because the capital market is opaque and corrupt. Execs aren't selected based on their ability to perform, they're selected based on how acceptable they are to the upper classes that control the capital. Even for those (few) who work their way up the ranks, jumping up levels will be based on politics and ability to be perceived as upper class and not based on performance (which is basically impossible to measure in a managerial role unless you want to give all of the credit of the worker's output to the manager).
So shareholders are dumb and execs are overpaid because they are good at duping them out of their money? Wouldn't a company that does NOT overpay their execs outcompete a company that does?
Shareholders are not dumb, but they have created a rigged game of castles in the sky paid for by greater fools. They look for execs that will successfully con the next bag holder, not people who create innovation, great products, healthy teams...
There's a lot of backscratching going on at that level as well. As an example, more often than you would think, VCs will invest in the parasitic children of potential LPs despite their terrible startup idea because they know it will make raising their own funds easier.
So the CEO is the face of the company, and companies are willing to pay a lot for a face that projects a certain image? If that's the case, then couldn't you argue that it's worth a lot for the company to pay to improve its brand image?
It's worth a lot to the shareholders to manipulate the stock price upwards, that's of no benefit to the customers though. Quite the contrary, choosing executives based on how well they sell equity opposed to how well they can operate a company produces worse results for the market (of goods/services, not of capital -- that's the distinction).
You're confusing the market for equity with the market for the goods and services produced by the company. The shareholders are optimizing for the former at the expense of the latter.
Well, all developers should be WFH so that shouldn't be an issue. For those companies backward enough to force their devs onsite, if there aren't enough homes to house the workforce local to the office, then the office is in the incorrect location.
If people need supervision from someone so extraordinary they will be paid half a million a year, in order to stop them from working against each other, maybe they're not really la "creme de la creme", and maybe organizations should be picky about the right things when selecting their workforce.
Or maybe developers are being overpaid compared to most workers, but underpaid compared to most "decision-makers" (most workers being so vastly underpaid it's not even funny anymore). Overpaid / underpaid is relative.
There's this ridiculous idea that management is partially responsible for the productivity of every developer, which means their salary should be increased commensurately.
You could just as easily argue the reverse: every developer is partially responsible for the productivity of management (whose productivity is zero if the devs get nothing done), so the devs' salary should be increased commensurately.
A hierarchy based on promotion and with increasing salaries isn't based in ironclad logic.
(In fact, you can see this in (in my opinion) two of the most important roles on a development team: the agile lead and product manager! Neither of them are hierarchal managers, yet both influence the direction of the team in critical ways. It works really well; far better than if either or both of those roles is filled by a hierarchal manager.)
This is like pure corporate propaganda, "of course execs do much harder work than devs so they of course they deserve 10x the paycheck!"
It's completely silly, if the average employee at google is generating $1.5M in revenue per year but only gets paid $250k then there is a massive delta in value missing in that equation that is going to Sergey Brin or Sundar Pichai instead or some other Stanford MBA in the massive web of "totally useful and productive" middle management at Google. Surplus value 101.
It's not that complicated, legally speaking. The rightful owner gets to get their stuff back, and the new "owner" has a claim against the purveyor of stolen goods for the purchase price.
The new "owner" will keep the bike as he has bought it in good faith.
The shop will claim that it cannot check every used bike.
The rightful owner could try to get money from the person who stole it (if found), but they most likely don't have any money.
It's the perfect crime and the reason why we cannot have nice bikes. People are literally sleeping with their expensive bikes in a room.
I can't believe the law works like that. Are you telling me that if I buy a yacht in Austria "in good faith" from someone who doesn't own it, I can just sail away on the yacht, original owner be damned?
However as soon as you as the buyer feel something is off, you aren't protected anymore because only good faith buyers are protected. For example if you go to the black market or something seems to be extremely cheap you definitively aren't protected anymore.
It's a conflict of interests. This law is trying to do a tradeoff. Imagine you went to Walmart and bought a bike and everything seemed fine but it turned out that an employee stole the bike and sold it to you in the name of Walmart. In this case you can keep the bike.
Surely we can trust hundreds and hundreds of small business owners to be very strict about law enforcement when it pushes against their financial interests, in a country with more bikes then people.
No stolen bikes end up in shops, no siree. Yeah right.
We’re living in an era where people regularly use tracking devices to retrieve their stolen bicycles. If they turn up in a store the owner should run into trouble even without regular checks.
Of course this depends on the police not being lazy which clearly is a big ask but if that is too much any law is pointless.
It seems it depends on the jurisdiction. In the US you can’t launder title for stolen goods like this. If you bought a stolen bike, well it sucks to be you. The bike goes back to the rightful owner.
Yeah, the problem here is that leaving syringes on the floor, urinating in flower beds and talking shit is insufficient to arrest the person. But is sufficient to drive a lot of tenants away from the house.
Because as soon as it happens, I will be first in the line with the question: okay, what should I do to get a free house? Do I need to consume drugs? Would weed do, or it has to be some heavier stuff?
Well, the problem is that the defendant has a right to competent representation, and ineffective assistance of counsel fails to fulfill that right.
(Your hypothetical includes a fine, so it isn't clear whether the offense in your hypothetical is one with, shall we say, enhanced sixth amendment protections under Gideon and progeny, or even one involving a criminal offense rather than a simple civil infraction, but...) in many cases lack of a competent attorney is considered structural error, meaning automatic reversal.
In practice, that means that judges (who are trying to prevent their decisions from being overturned) will gently correct defense counsel and guide them toward competence, something that frustrated me when I was a prosecutor but which the system relies upon.
Seems like the solution is clear then. If the judge gently corrects defense counsel and guides them towards competence, they can just do the same with AI. Then the company can use that data to improve it! Eventually it will be perfect with all the free labor from those judges.
>Judge: that case does not exist. Ask it about this case instead
>AI: I apologize for the mistake, that case is more applicable. blah blah blah. Hallucinates an incorrect conclusion and cites another hallucinated case to support it.
Judge: The actual conclusion to the case was this, and that other case also does not exist.
Isn't that the same thing? Seems fine to me, I know the legal system is already pretty overwhelmed but eventually it might get so good everyone could be adequately represented by a public defender.
Speaking of, I remember reading most poor people can only see the free lawyer they've been assigned for a couple minutes and they barely review the case? I don't understand how that is okay, as long as technically they're competent even if the lack of time makes them pretty ineffective...
Ehhh... the judge's patience for that kind of thing is not unlimited. At some point they're going to reopen the inquiry about counsel (there's also the issue that an AI probably can't be your counsel of record, since it hasn't passed the bar; more likely the court would view it as you representing yourself with the assistance of research software).
BREAK BREAK
My jurisdiction (the military justice system) is a bit of an oddball, but I generally (softly) disagree with your last paragraph.
In jurisdictions with good criminal justice systems, most cases don't take that long to review. Possession of marijuana case, the officer stopped you for a broken taillight, smelled or claimed to smell marijuana, asked you if it was okay if he takes a look. You said okay. He finds a tiny amount of a green leafy substance in a small plastic bag. He says, "Hey look, marijuana is not that big a deal but lots of this stuff is laced with other things. This is just marijuana, right?" and you respond "Yes, sir, just marijuana, I don't mess with any real drugs." Prosecution is offering a diversion deal with probation and no permanent criminal record.
The correct answer in that case is to take the deal. We are not going to win by arguing that Raich was wrongly decided or that the officer lied about smelling it (because we're probably talking state court, so Raich doesn't matter, and you consented to the search, so the pretext, even if it was pretextual, also doesn't matter). We also aren't going to win attacking the chain of evidence, because the drug lab results don't matter, because you admitted it's marijuana.
In that case, yes, I'm going to take all of about 4 minutes to strongly advise the client to take the deal.
Oh, that's actually a relief that the reason they take so little time with clients before telling them to take the deal is simply because the cases are generally clear cut. Although like many things, I'll bet this can vary by region significantly.
The rest of my comment I dropped the '/s' for. I think it's wild some people think current LLMs can replace lawyers... The absolute best I would think they could currently do is maybe speed up research for paralegals. I was just imagining expecting a judge to QA a private companies software and thought it was really funny.
A huge, huge number of cases are extremely cut and dry. Probably 80+% of the misdemeanor docket is drugs and traffic. You know what evidence is required to prove you were driving while your license was suspended? That you were driving (police cam) and that your license was suspended (certified DMV record).
I know it sounds scary when stats get thrown around like "Over 90% of defendants plead guilty without a trial!" but that's usually pursuant to a generous deal from an overworked prosecutor's office who absolutely does not want to do a freaking jury trial because you were desperate to get to work and couldn't get a ride.
Obviously, if the underlying reason your license was suspended is extreme (vehicular manslaughter, 3rd+ DUI) then their tune will probably change, but that's an extreme minority of cases. Those are the ones that go to trial.
"Counsel, I'm unfamiliar with the case you've cited. Have you brought a copy for the court? No? How about a bench brief? Very well. I am going to excuse the panel for lunch and place the court in recess. Members of the jury, please return at 1:00. Counsel, please arrive with bench briefs including printouts of major cases at 12:30. Court stands in recess." bang
That’s not how the legal system works. You aren’t slipping anything through. Either the judge knows the case, they don’t know all the cases, or the judge will research or clerks will research and you will be sanctioned if you try to do so thing unethical.
IANAL, but I'd think in this case this is prosecutor's job.
Also, the original post is about the traffic ticket. I'm pretty sure if the judge hears a reference to something he had never heard before, he'll be like "huh? wtf?"
Many legal things are evaluated lazily: the law may not specify exactly what the vehicle is, but if such need arises, there are tools, like precedents and analogy, to answer this question.
The way to think about it is like a logical evaluation shortcut:
if not ADA_EXEMPT and IS_VEHICLE:
DISALLOW_IN_PARK
Since wheelchairs are ADA exempt, a question of whether it's a vehicle will probably never be risen.
Using the IT analogy, it's less like C++, where each statement must pass compiler checks for the application to merely start, but more like a Python, where some illegal stuff may peacefully exist as long as it's never invoked.
None of ADA_EXEMPT, IS_VEHICLE, or DISALLOW_IN_PARK can be easily formally defined. And the mere mention of "wheelchair" adds an additional ADA-related logic exemption. What about bicycles? Strollers? Unicycles? Shopping carts? Skateboards?
And even if IS_VEHICLE was formally defined, that doesn't help, because the concept isn't reusable. It's perfectly normal for "No vehicles allowed in park" and "No vehicles allowed in playground" to have different definitions of what counts as a vehicle, based on what would seem reasonable to a jury
I don't know if I've misread some people here, but it's silly to insist that the law be a formal system. It's impossible. Common Law uses judicial precedent to fill in ambiguities as they turn into actual disputes. If you had to formally define everything, then a) it would run into the various Incompleteness Theorems in logic (like Goedel's) and the Principle of Explosion, so it would go hilariously wrong b) No law would ever get passed, as people would spend years trying and failing to recursively define every term.
Appropriately enough, Gödel had this very problem when getting US citizenship, where he tried to argue that the law had a logical problem:
"On December 5, 1947, Einstein and Morgenstern accompanied Gödel to his U.S. citizenship exam, where they acted as witnesses. Gödel had confided in them that he had discovered an inconsistency in the U.S. Constitution that could allow the U.S. to become a dictatorship; this has since been dubbed Gödel's Loophole. Einstein and Morgenstern were concerned that their friend's unpredictable behavior might jeopardize his application. The judge turned out to be Phillip Forman, who knew Einstein and had administered the oath at Einstein's own citizenship hearing. Everything went smoothly until Forman happened to ask Gödel if he thought a dictatorship like the Nazi regime could happen in the U.S. Gödel then started to explain his discovery to Forman. Forman understood what was going on, cut Gödel off, and moved the hearing on to other questions and a routine conclusion"
>Many legal things are evaluated lazily: the law may not specify exactly what the vehicle is, but if such need arises, there are tools, like precedents and analogy, to answer this question.
That's how common law and precedents work in the US system. Case A from 1924 said cars were vehicles, but bikes weren't. Case B from 1965 said e-bikes weren't vehicles. Case C said motorcycles were vehicles. And then the judge analogizes the facts and find that an electric motorcycle is a vehicle so long as its not a e-bike.
But the administrative law side of things works the opposite. They publish a regulation just saying "e-bikes above a certain weight qualify as vehicles under Law X."
I believe so. But do please recall that your consciousness supervenes on a maschine made of meat, and spent several billion years wiring itself to get a dopamine hit from, yes, nutrients.
It's called walking the gradient ;D There's no cure, alas, for being a neural network
Feel-good rallying cries like this make for cheap virtue points but are completely meaningless in a reality where pretty much nothing is a binary choice with a low number of variables.
For example, it's easy to sit in an air-conditioned office and say "thou shalt not overload the trucks" but when you actually drag your ass to somewhere you can observe the conditions in which the per-load work is being done it becomes clear that much analysis must be done to figure out if more trucks at 80k is in fact safer than fewer trucks at 120k.
Being that braking distance will increase around 250ft at 65mph I would say it makes a pretty massive difference. That is unless you want to limit the 120k LB truck to 55mph which causes its own issues.
Does it? A lot of the events involve China’s influence over Taiwan and the impact on the semi-conductor industry. E.g. China disrupting the chip supply chain in Taiwan and the U.S. responding by supporting the domestic chip industry. What is the conspiracy there exactly? That Pelosi conspired with China to create the pretext for a bill that would support the domestic chip industry to profit off the stock market?
> China disrupting the chip supply chain in Taiwan
The US started the trade war and 'sanctions'. Just like the long-running low key trade war it started against the Eu in 2005. Its not China doing anything.
The US even violated or rejected many of the WTO rules it previously backed in enforcing on all other countries when it had the market advantage. Which is one reason why practically every single country outside various European ones are converging around China, India, BRICS etc - they see the US and its satellites as unreliable partners who would renege on any word anytime its convenient for them.
Insider trading is not a conspiracy. I think insider trading is bad, and the laws should be amended so that congress is forbidden from insider trading. But if the only “smoking gun” is insider trading then this is a non-issue. It’s legal for members of congress to trade with non-public information, and many members in both parties do it.
Clearly people find it distasteful when politicians do legal but immoral things. It's a non-issue legally speaking, but one wonders why this gaping source of misaligned incentives remains.
I agree. But it’s not something that requires a “special prosecutor to investigate the allegations”, which is the statement that started this conversation.
If the point of allowing trading is better price discovery, then banning insider trading doesn't make all that much sense, because the insiders are contributing information by improving the price.
(Also makes you wonder why analysts bother meeting with CEOs since the CEOs can't share non-public information.)
Some time ago I used to work in a large organization on the very bottom of the food chain. I was making, say, $100k a year, which was quite decent money. Sitting there, doing same thing I could've grown to a "senior bottom of the food chain" of $150k. That was the limit. A soft one, but still the limit.
The organization was quite picky in selecting their workforce. Think FAANG. So in every team you have a bunch of quite smart opinionated folks, who somehow have to be steered in the same direction. With that I see it kinda reasonable for the team lead to make at least $200k a year. Give or take.
Now we move one step up. Someone has to pull all these "creme de la creme" cats together and herd them, so that at the very minimum teams don't work against each other. Ideally work together for some common goal. And I can understand team leads who is not willing to go to this snake pit for 30% salary increase. Why would they? 50% - may be. 70% - that sounds interesting and worth consideration.
Bottom line: according to my humble experience in "the organization", the salary roughly doubles each time you get up the ladder. And being on different steps of this ladder I can understand why.