> Democratically elected politicians versus central party that allows no dissent and has complete control over information and actions of its citizens to the point of genocidal assimilation.
You're saying the Chinese government is so powerful and competent that they have complete control over information and actions of over one BILLION people? Wild claims like this one should be substantiated.
Although your name is wildly sinophobic and racist so I doubt there is any evidence you can pull up.
I believe what is being said is that in non-Western/fully isolated nuclear families you have a lot of people and experiences you can rely on. So having a child at a younger age like your mid-20s is not that big of a deal.
De Beers certainly had government help. The paper used by Wikipedia to support the claim that they are considered a monopoly[1] acknowledges this:
> In addition to the structure of the De Beers cartel, the main force behind this dominance for many years has been the role played by governments. It is possible for a cartel to continue if there is a governing body above that can enforce agreement. Through continuously changing its stance toward corporations, the South African government and other governments essentially protected the companies that were providing them with easily and centrally collected tax revenues. Governments have frequently imposed output quotas and have used legislation, such as the Illicit Diamond Buying laws (IDB), to protect these companies from black markets and their effects on pricing. (As a comparison, one of the weaknesses of OPEC is that it is a cartel of governments over which no other actor can impose control, whereas De Beers has formed a cartel of companies and has often successfully lobbied governments to enforce cooperation on its behalf).
> This argument of government-forced cooperation held while Africa was the dominant supplier of diamonds, but it no longer has the complete stranglehold that it once did. As the cartel has not yet disintegrated, however, other reasons must also exist. Researchers believe that De Beers exists as a monopoly to maximize profits, not just to maintain them. Hence, it is in the members’ interest to stay within the cartel rather than go it alone.
It's however conceivable that a monopoly like De Beers could survive even in a free market because they seem to be the optimal solution to a coordination problem where everyone's (including the consumer's and the prospective competitor's) incentives are aligned. The paper explains:
> Second, the demand for diamonds is not typical and must be analyzed using Veblen’s theory of conspicuous consumption. This theory replaces the traditional downward-sloping demand curve with one that is upward-sloping, suggesting that the higher the price of an item, the higher the demand. This phenomenon would imply that higher prices have a dual effect on the profits of a company, first, through higher margins and, second, through increased sales. Therefore, it is in a company’s best interest to maintain high prices. For diamonds in particular, this means that the perception of desirability associated with diamonds is critical to the life of the industry as a whole and that if the price of diamonds falls, the overall demand for them will follow. Therefore, it is again in the interest of the individual players in this industry to “play nice” and cooperate, since cheating the cartel will actually lower their profits instead of raising them.
The reason people struggle with the idea of 10x programmers is that people are very bad at evaluating the impact of others. Obviously we can all agree on a select few but for those who are just "regular" workers there is often not enough context.
I think it's also because we have a lot of ego. Let's admit it. There are some people who have a rare insight or mobilize people and code in a way that provides 10x value to the company and people.
Think about all the kickass Python libraries people have wrote. Those provide 10x value across the board to entire industries.
Has it gone up? Cheap hardware and comms, free tutorials everywhere and a thirst for more tech talent can't hurt.
If you think it was easier when you had to study at or work for a wealthy university, and also everything had to be done painstaking by punched card instead of today's instant feedback on a free, beautiful tutorial website, then I'm not sure what to tell you.
You are assuming that FAANG companies are offering "fair" compensation for the output of their engineers. How would anyone ever make a profit doing that?
Employees are very rarely the exploiters and almost always the exploited.
It can simultaneously be true that 1) FAANG employees (including myself) are compensated and rewarded well above the national average, and potentially better than any other stable option available, and 2) FAANG employees are not adequately compensated for the value and revenue they generate for the company.
Amazon does not get the richest CEO in the world by truly compensating employees what they are worth to the company. Facebook literally tells employees that they target 90-95% of "market rate" for engineering salaries, based on location of the office they work in, and they refuse to negotiate with competing offers, resulting in massive compensation disparities between London and Seattle/Menlo Park.
I'm 35 and compensated far and above what I ever could have dreamed of making as a teenager, but when I look at the tens of millions of dollars I've personally saved the company through my actions and work, I don't consider my compensation "fair". A pat on the back, an "exceeds" rating, and a 15% increase in my bonus for that half is peanuts by comparison.
Yes, but where it goes off the rails is when people expects the corporation to act against their own incentives. When people complain about compensation they get confused about how compensation is set.
Pay is not about the value you bring as much as it is about your leverage in negotiations. There’s many ways to get leverage like being the only person who can solve the problem, or systemic levers like unions.
If people aren’t getting paid adequately it’s usually because they don’t have the negotiation leverage to fix it. Conversely, we all probably know people who are of dubious value yet can command handsome salaries because they have some unique leverage.
Yes, unions and coordinated negotiation are the correct answer, but that's very difficult to pull off in companies this large with employees compensated so far above the cost of living.
100% agree that it's not easy, but it's almost certainly easier than the fight for collective bargaining during the industrial revolution. The idea that people just have too much to lose by fighting for it just underscores the point about negotiation leverage.
> but when I look at the tens of millions of dollars I've personally saved the company through my actions and work, I don't consider my compensation "fair"
This is a failure in reasoning about how pay works.
Pay (salaried jobs, not commission) for a role is related to the difficulty in hiring (replacing) and retaining an employee for that role. A role's impact in terms of dollars changes over time. The safety in this is that if you don't happen to save $10mm this year, you still probably have a job. And your company can have roles like R&D (where many projects don't generate money at all), internal tools, etc.
> when I look at the tens of millions of dollars I've personally saved the company through my actions and work
I would hazard a guess that this work wasn't 100% yours. Ops, oncall, infosec, accounting, etc etc all participate. This is Obama's "you didn't build that alone" argument.
The question isn't how much did you save, the question is could your employer hire someone else to drive the same outcome for less (or more).
Why go out of your way to judge what he said based on global socioeconomic conditions instead of on the local context? What good does it do other than emotional reinforcement and cultural signaling?
He wasn't asking for your sympathy, he was trying to contribute to a discussion and not every discussions needs to be immediately relevant to all seven billion people to be constructive.
Even shareholders have a historically unusual inability to participate in corporate governance at Facebook. The closest comparison I have found is the oil trusts from the 19th century. But that's not a good comparison, because they were trusts, not corporations.
I seriously can't believe Delaware allows Facebook's voting structure. Corporate law has evolved in a really strange direction over the past few decades.
Interesting, I don't know much about FB governance. I would venture to say it's probably (and unfortunately) becoming the norm rather than the exception that employees have little input into governance. This is another area where I think unions have benefit.
My point about being a tech "underclass" was more about avoiding conflating FAANG employees with those who have little opportunity or options. FAANG employees generally have more portable skills than, say, an uneducated immigrant employee and I don't know that I agree they could both be "exploited" in the same way. While it may be rooted in valid points, it's a bit cringey to use the same language to describe both.
> You are assuming that FAANG companies are offering "fair" compensation for the output of their engineers. How would anyone ever make a profit doing that?
Are you saying companies should have no profits in order to be fair? Profitability doesn't really reflect ethical pay, just look at Amazon, they had no profits for years.
You're saying the Chinese government is so powerful and competent that they have complete control over information and actions of over one BILLION people? Wild claims like this one should be substantiated.
Although your name is wildly sinophobic and racist so I doubt there is any evidence you can pull up.