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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 24th, 2023

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  • I feel like the problem with bail is that you have to actually come up with the money. Can’t they get the same effect with just the promise of a fine?

    So like you say… “Ok… You’re released pending trial, but if you skip out and run, you’re going to have a fine added that’s equal to $10,000 or 50% of your net wealth, whichever is cheaper”…

    That’s all bail is really doing. Bail just forces people to come up with the money in advance and this creates an inequity. If it’s just a fine for if you don’t show up at trial or something, you no longer have that problem.




  • This is a common sentiment of course, but I wish more people understood how totally unrelated CEO salaries are to normal staff pay and how unrelated they are to what drives this. If you want to make progress on this, you need to focus on a different part of the problem.

    First, even highly exorbitant executive salaries don’t go very far when applied to the kinds of costs they’re talking about here. I think Disney has a bit more than 200k employees… but let’s say you have 200,000 employees and you pay them all 5k more… That’s a billion dollars. Bob Iger makes something like 25 or 30m a year. Sure… It’s a lot of money… But of course big companies fight this stuff. Iger’s salary is a drop in the bucket.

    Second, Iger reports to shareholders. You might hate that, but it is how it works. And it’s shareholders who agree on executive compensation. So it’s a bit like he’s in a different bucket than normal people. It’s kind of like he doesn’t even work for the company. Shareholders just pay him to run the company efficiently.

    Now I’m not saying any of this to get into some grand debate about the nature of this stuff and whether it’s right or wrong really… It’s just worth noting that none of these kinds of arguments really matter to any of the decision makers involved.

    The thing that does matter is making a case that this makes Disney better or more money or whatever. Costco, for years, has paid their people well and had good benefits packages. In large part that’s because the CEO and company have made the case to shareholders that it actually saves them money on turnover, theft, etc.

    A convincing argument here is more that the strike will cost more over time than the new package and/or that paying people better will result in better and more valuable content.


  • I’m pretty sure that most of what Neosporin is is Vaseline… And it makes sense. It’s basically Vaseline with a mild antibiotic.

    Vaseline is awesome for preventing scars too: when the wound is still open, use Neosporin, but after it closes up a bit and is just healing, switch to Vaseline and just keep it in Vaseline until it’s totally gone.


  • This comes up all the time for student loans. The answer is pretty straightforward: if people could discharge student loans, nobody would ever lend money for student loans.

    If you had some money and a 17 year old with no income and no credit history wanted to borrow 300k from you… Would you let them? Of course nobody would. The inability to discharge the debt was basically a way for the government to help improve the risk equation for banks lending that much money in such a risky way.

    The real answer for this stuff is to instead focus on fixing the college funding model - probably through some voucher system or by making state schools free for undergrad. Once that’s done, you can worry about lessening existing debt burdens for people who need the help.