The Rich and Powerful Who Abuse the System: the contempt topic

[polishgenius]

 

 

Imagine feeling bold enough say that out loud, on camera, and being quite right about the boldness coz no consequences whatsoever will come from saying it.

 

Exactly the same attitude as the studio owners about the writer's strike, though- openly waiting them out till October coz they think that when they have to turn the heating on the strikes will cave.

[Zorral]

Bossism! We are bold and we break shit coz we're the smartest on the planet! We rule!  All others must genuflect, prostrate, bow, crawl, beg, sit up, roll over, scrape, kneel and most importantly, suffer!

[Heartofice]

I saw this online and was immediately outraged.

Of course making unemployment higher is a terrible idea and most of what he's saying is bollocks.

However there is an element of truth in there. I do think there are fields and sectors where employees feel a bit arrogant about their position and get quite demanding, where they don't deserve it. I work in the digital field and there are fuck ton of people who don't really do very much, get paid pretty well and get upset if you ever even acknowledge it. I'm sure there are a lot of office jobs where that is pretty much the case, and it's aligns pretty well with those 'bullshit jobs' that don't really add a lot of value. That's one of the reasons that a lot of digital firms are letting workers go, with very little loss in productivity, because they realise they've over hired and haven't been paying attention.

Obviously worker wages are generally stagnating, workers have very little actual power, and there are sectors where people are treated like shit, overworked and underpaid, which is why his ideas are just nonsense. But there are so sectors where things have been cushy for a while and we are all taking the piss a little bit. 

[Spockydog]

Come work for Lazyscrog Technologies. 

A four-day-week is standard. Along with profit and equity share schemes for all employees.

Seriously, fuck this guy. 

 

Edited September 13, 2023 by Spockydog

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

CEOs do very little work and make tremendous sums of money for it, meanwhile the people at the bottom work their asses off for scraps. This is basically a let them eat cake comment and eventually people will revolt. We're seeing it in different ways across the world. And it's worth noting the people at the top are not any smarter on average than the general public. 

We need to rethink the entire way economies work. Right now if we change nothing, the logical game theory likely leads to horrific outcomes. It's very hard to see on a macro level how things aren't going to go to shit and the people with the most power don't really seem to care at all because it won't affect them until a 21st century French Revolution happens. And let me be clear, it needs to happen. 

[LongRider]

12 minutes ago, Spockydog said:

Come work for Lazyscrog Technologies. 

A four-day-week is standard. Along with profit and equity share schemes for all employees.

Seriously, fuck this guy. 

 

Can I work at home from across the pond?

[Rippounet]

Leftist folks will have to realize they need to look at the neo-liberal economy like Republicans look at the US government: it's terrible and must be broken. It can't be reformed or regulated, because its very principles were always bad, it can only be destroyed.

[Ran]

12 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

CEOs do very little work

Surveys of Fortune 500 CEOs and a study by the Harvard Business Review found that the average CEO worked between 58.5 and 62.5 hours per week (per the BLS, the average American worker works 44 hours a week). 75% of ta CEO's work time runs to a schedule, so it's basically a series of meetings with various teams (legal, financial, research, whatever) and boards, making decisions and so on. 

It's white collar executive office work, but still, it's work.  That they're overpaid seems true enough, in some places anyways -- other countries have more reasonable executive payment packages than the US.

Edited September 13, 2023 by Ran

[Heartofice]

11 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

CEOs do very little work and make tremendous sums of money for it

Well yes some CEOs don't do much, but many also work incredibly long days and give up basically all life outside of work at the same time. I don't see any benefit to painting such a simplistic picture.

[Spockydog]

I've been working eighteen hour days for months now.

From the moment I wake, to the moment I go to bed, I am working. 

Edited September 13, 2023 by Spockydog

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

45 minutes ago, polishgenius said:

 

 

Imagine feeling bold enough say that out loud, on camera, and being quite right about the boldness coz no consequences whatsoever will come from saying it.

 

Exactly the same attitude as the studio owners about the writer's strike, though- openly waiting them out till October coz they think that when they have to turn the heating on the strikes will cave.

He’s pretty certianly a bastard.  But I don’t know that anyone who is “wealthy” is a bastard.  Further… I have no idea how you are defining “wealthy”…

[Spockydog]

14 minutes ago, LongRider said:

Can I work at home from across the pond?

We are just about to post ads for COO, CTO, and CFO. 

I am open to resumes. 

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

10 minutes ago, Ran said:

Surveys of Fortune 500 CEOs and a study by the Harvard Business Review found that the average CEO worked between 58.5 and 62.5 hours per week (per the BLS, the average American worker works 44 hours a week). 75% of ta CEO's work time runs to a schedule, so it's basically a series of meetings with various teams (legal, financial, research, whatever) and boards, making decisions and so on. 

It's white collar executive office work, but still, it's work.  That they're overpaid seems true enough, in some places anyways -- other countries have more reasonable executive payment packages than the US.

The bold is the rub. I've been in some of these spaces and often times a two hour meeting is scheduled for what could be done in 15-30 minutes. Meetings also include golfing and going out to lunch. The actual hands on work they do is minimal in most instances. And even when it's a real meeting that is focused they still contribute very little to it. The entire point of climbing to the top of any large organization is to get paid as much as possible while doing as little work as you can.

13 minutes ago, Heartofice said:

Well yes some CEOs don't do much, but many also work incredibly long days and give up basically all life outside of work at the same time. I don't see any benefit to painting such a simplistic picture.

Not exactly. What you're describing are people grinding as they're on the come up. Individuals trying to create something work their asses off otherwise they'll probably fail. Likewise with people seeking that big promotion. But once you reach the top that behavior changes more often than not. Some people never lose that dog in them, but my guess is most just relax, look like they're working hard and enjoy the benefits of it while complaining about how those much lower down on the ladder aren't working hard enough while being too greedy just like the fuck head at the top of the thread. 

[LongRider]

Of course they work hard @Tywin et al. here's what they work at:

Roughly 150,000 auto workers are preparing to launch what may be the biggest strike in decades this Thursday over their employers’ refusal to provide adequate pay and job security. Meanwhile, in the past twelve months, the Big Three automakers — General Motors, Ford, and Stellantis — have authorized $5 billion in stock buybacks, effectively giving billions of dollars to shareholders that could have gone to autoworkers.

On top of the stock buybacks, the Big Three have reported $21 billion in profits in just the first six months of 2023. Despite the enormous gains, the companies have cried poverty in response to union demands for wage increases to make up for decades of pay stagnation.

Automakers Hand Billions To Shareholders While Stiffing Workers (levernews.com)

edt: missed the money quote:  In a statement released last month, General Motors (GM) claimed that the United Auto Workers’ (UAW) demands “would threaten our ability to do what’s right for the long-term benefit of the team.” 

Edited September 13, 2023 by LongRider

[Rippounet]

It's not that the wealthy don't work hard - many of them do, in fact, because a good work ethic is part of a bourgeois education.
It's that they don't exactly work harder than the average worker, including a huge proportion of the population which will have 40-hour or 50-hour weeks - often for barely more than minimum wage. And of course, the job of a CEO is "comfortable" in that it involves no physical risk, and barely any physical labor, unlike many jobs out there.

[polishgenius]

1 hour ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

He’s pretty certianly a bastard.  But I don’t know that anyone who is “wealthy” is a bastard.  Further… I have no idea how you are defining “wealthy”…

 

Please don't #notallmen this, Scot, I feel like it's pretty obvious this topic is about the rich and powerful who use the system and their place in it to exploit and punish those less well-off than them. 

[Zorral]

According to a Bloomberg News analysis, Burgum is spending $30.6 million per point. Which makes sense. If Burgum has spent in the neighborhood of $15 million on advertising and his national polling numbers are stuck in the 0.5% range, the math is easy. He is, as they say, getting the least bang for his buck.

Nobody in the world wants or cares about him being POTUS, yet here we effin' go.  And even with this spending he's getting and going nowhere.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

1 hour ago, polishgenius said:

 

Please don't #notallmen this, Scot, I feel like it's pretty obvious this topic is about the rich and powerful who use the system and their place in it to exploit and punish those less well-off than them. 

I’m glad Ran changed the title.

[Zorral]

From noted, thoughtful sf/f columnist, reviewer, and critic, Abigail Nussbaum. 

Quote

 

.... Here’s where things, once again, get a bit tricky. The late-Xer and millennial CEOs who have become—or who aspire to become—the prophets of the new technological era grew up watching and reading the same media as the rest of us. They, too, have Thomas Edison and Tony Stark embedded in their minds. And it is increasingly clear that they spend as much (and perhaps even more) of their time on self-invention as they do on creating new technologies. This is in no way to excuse the writers and producers who went along with it, but it’s now commonly accepted that Musk paid for that Star Trek: Discovery namedrop. And one of the things that strikes you while reading Jon Carreyrou’s Bad Blood (2018) or watching The Dropout (2022) is how badly Elizabeth Holmes wanted to become Steve Jobs. How she modeled her physical appearance on his, hired designers from Apple, and even employed Apple’s advertising film, all in an effort to cargo cult the same success he had, without ever possessing a working product to justify the hype.

At the same time, the tech billionaire iconography’s real-world stock was plummeting. Zuckerberg’s attempts to present himself as a Gates-esque public policy leader ran aground on things like the Cambridge Analytica scandal or revelations about Facebook’s enabling of genocide in Cambodia. Musk was suppressing labor organizing, and enabling racist abuse, in his factories. And Elizabeth Holmes, of course, was exposed as a fraud. Pop culture suddenly realized that it had spent a decade bigging up hucksters and bad actors. A correction was in order. ....

.... It’s not surprising, therefore, to learn that the animating philosophy of so many of these figures, the creed that they more or less commissioned from like-minded academics, has more than a whiff of science fiction about it as well. Like Elizabeth Holmes’s belief that “what if medicine worked like it does on Star Trek” was a viable business plan, Silicon Valley’s favorite new movement, longtermism, is rooted in the assumption that what science fiction imagines must be inevitable. That there will one day be trillions of humans—either living in far-flung space colonies or in vast simulated worlds—whose existence dwarfs the mere billions living right now on Earth. And, like all philosophies of the rich and powerful, what this is really in service of is an ethos of selfishness, capitalistic excess, and the rampant concentration of power in the hands of a select few. . . .

 

 

[polishgenius]

2 hours ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

I’m glad Ran changed the title.

I'll be honest, I thought I was showing restraint by not titling the topic 'eat the rich', but whatever: the title isn't that important. 

 

 

On the hard work question - I feel like how hard a CEO or whoever works is basically entirely unrelated to how evil they are. Some insanely hard workers will be proper bastards, some moochers will be moochers and not much else. Rather have a moocher whose company is as close to 'basically alright' as this system allows a big corporation to be than a hard worker heading up Union Carbide.