Quoting: Mountain ManOkay, so that's the fantasy version of running a business. In reality, it's often not possible to move unproductive employees into a more productive role, and things can change that can cause a potentially profitable department to become a financial anchor dragging down the rest of the company, and when that happens, you gotta cut people loose.

And award yourself three times their salary for your genius in cutting them loose--gotta do that too, apparently. You keep evading that bit.

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Quoting: 14There is a problem with the CEO making more money after cutting all those people. But guess what, it's exactly how CEO pay incentivizes them to make decisions. Say your base salary is $1M with the potential to make $2M when the company meets certain annual profit goals. Guess what you're going to do when the profit numbers don't look good.

Yes, there is a problem with the model. And yes, there are other business models that share more of the wealth, so solutions already exist to CEO caps. But why don't those other companies hold much market share?

Your explanation is possible. Or, it's possible that firms with models that promote exorbitant CEO pay and short-term-oriented management practices actually outcompete firms without. But the explanation I find the most plausible is that the people who decide on how the models for CEO pay will work . . . are mostly either CEOs, or at least wealthy people who spend much of their social time interacting with CEOs. So for instance, boards of directors for company A are often staffed with the CEOs of companies B, C and D, who in turn have the CEO of company A on their boards of directors. So, I wonder what kind of compensation model those boards of directors will choose?

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Quoting: Mountain ManYou mentioned your son is a business owner. Tell me, would he continue to pay a team of employees who are costing his company literally more than they're worth? Would he cut his own salary in order to keep them around? I suspect the answer to both questions is no.

I suspect he'd get them to do something else that wouldn't cost the company more than they're worth. Probably he isn't stupid enough to hire a team of employees to do money-losing stuff in the first place. But I'm definitely sure that if he managed his company into a money-losing situation and really had to cut employees, he would tighten his belt too--he would not tell the remaining employees "Yeah, you know those guys we had to let go to save money? I took their salaries for myself, actually three times that, because screw that 'saving money' stuff."

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How well does Mono actually work these days? I remember when an awful lot of people were of the opinion that it was basically pointless--that it would, much like Wine, find it impossible to really approach parity or real compatibility with that Microsoft thing it was imitating and would be forever chasing taillights. And, like with Wine, back when there were not a lot of resources put into it there was a lot of truth to the idea. But with Wine + Proton that is now pretty much not the case for games, basically because certain parties found it worthwhile to pour quite a bit more resources into it, so that Wine could improve faster than the taillights could recede. So did that ever happen with Mono? Is it good now?

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Quoting: 14I don't participate in review bombing games, but if Sony does not look at Discord, do they look at the Steam forum? So, I can sympathize that it may be the only effective way to get attention unfortunately, even though the gameplay does not deserve bad reviews.

There comes a point where even if the gameplay does not deserve bad reviews, the game does.

Certainly for people in regions that can't have PSN accounts, if they bought the game and then retroactively get hit with a requirement to have a PSN account, that they can't have, in order to play it . . . then for them the game has no gameplay. I think a game that cannot be played at all is worth a bad review. The fact that it's an evil corporate decision causing it, rather than say poor design that makes it crash automatically, does not make the game any more playable.

If it's just that you have to pointlessly do an annoying thing to play the game . . . well, arguably that still makes the overall experience worse. I'd say if it was a result of technical problems people would still give bad reviews until the thing causing it got fixed.

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Quoting: Mountain ManLike I said, if increasing profits was as easy as handing out raises like candy, then everybody would be doing it.

Funny nobody told the CEO that. How are you managing to not see that your argument is utterly inconsistent?

Look, there's two basic kinds of bosses of a company. There's the kind that people who wish our system worked as advertised think about: People like my son-in-law, who started from nothing or not very much and built up a business from nothing and who know it inside and out. They do exist, there are even quite a few of them, although they tend to be the bosses of small companies. And then there's the kind that was born either rich or well-to-do, went to a prestigious university and got an MBA. They know how to schmooze with other rich, connected people and how to maximize stock price next quarter so they can make a bunch of money from their stock options. They know a bit about how to move money around in companies. They know nothing about the specifics of any given company or how its business actually works, because they have been taught that money and people are completely universal and exchangeable and the specifics of the business don't matter if you know how to move money. They tend to move from company to company, often in quite different kinds of businesses because they think the specifics don't matter. And when they lay people off, it is usually because although in the long run those people probably contribute to the bottom line, in the short term dumping them will goose the stock price because most of the investors are ignorant and they only see (reduction in expenses == bigger dividends next quarter, or money plowed into share buybacks). And that second kind, is the kind that give themselves $26 million-a-year raises. And they are the kind that are most influential in the economy.

Also the kind that gives you situations like Boeing, where the product goes to shit because of all those years getting stratospheric stock prices from the visionary cost-cutting. Of course by that time a few people have made a stack of money--all the layoffs and outsourcing and elimination of quality control did create that result, so in that sense it wasn't stupid. But it wasn't good for the company, or the workers, or the customers, or the people who got killed in the planes, or the murdered whistleblowers.

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Quoting: Mountain Man

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: Mountain ManPeople who assume that if CEOs were paid less, then the workers could be paid more, have a rather simplistic and naive understanding of how business and the economy works.

And yet, going by history it seems to work out in practice. Look at places and times where the CEOs are paid less, and you find workers who are more prosperous and have better working conditions.

Perhaps, but there's no hard and fast rule that says better paid employees are necessarily more profitable employees. If raises were guaranteed to increase profits, then every company would do it, but it's rarely as simple as that, and the harsh reality is that sometimes layoffs are necessary to keep a business solvent.

I think I'd want to claim that when times are tough enough that layoffs are necessary to keep the business solvent, the CEO should not be increasing his pay by more than the money the layoffs save. Really, how hard is this?

And that's before you even get to the part where the people laid off were not just costing wages, they were presumably making the business money, whereas a raise to the same CEO, as a reward for business failure so far, is unlikely to cause more money to exist in any way. So if you lay people off, you may have a net gain if it was a money-losing area, but it will be smaller than the money saved on salary unless the idea of hiring them in the first place was an example of lunatic incompetence in the first place. So the CEO raise, which is pure loss, isn't just several times as large as the savings, it overwhelms them to a ridiculous degree.

But I guess it's justified because the CEO, from his yacht, makes the tough decisions and takes risks--what if his decisions led to the company going under and he had to make do for a while on just those 26 million smackers? Oh, the humanity!--while ordinary employees laid off face no risks at all . . .

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Quoting: TherinSPerhaps I'm pretty dumb on word meanings, but I have always considered a genocide to be a situation where there is an effort to eliminate an ENTIRE race/class of people.

An effort, yes . . . but if you look at the definition under international law, you'll find it doesn't have to be as extensive as you might imagine to qualify. So for instance, killing a bunch and ethnic cleansing the rest seems to qualify. Trying to starve them all to death qualifies too. Since top Israeli officials have repeatedly stated their intentions to do all those things, I'm not sure the fact that they have not yet succeeded means they're not trying to commit genocide. Should we wait until they're all dead before taking issue?

Quoting: TherinSAccording to https://apnews.com/article/israel-hamas-gaza-war-statistics-95a6407fac94e9d589be234708cd5005 [External Link] as of April 6th, about 35,000 Hamas and Hamas supporters have been killed since the events of October 7.

Ah, yes, all those vicious Hamas-supporting babies and toddlers.
In any case, that figure is not really accurate, for two reasons. The first reason is that most of the people buried under rubble aren't counted--they're just "missing" until someone digs them out, which is hard when you're likely to get bombed or sniped in the attempt. The second reason is that it doesn't count indirect deaths, such as from disease, failed surgery due to no working hospitals, or starvation. We are reaching the point where that last one will start to kill in quite large numbers, due to Israel systematically murdering aid workers trying to bring food.

Quoting: TherinSShouldn't a genocide be achieving much higher death numbers? Why aren't more Gazans dead if the goal was to eliminate them via genocide?

Mainly because it is actually quite difficult to kill truly massive numbers of people using non-nuclear bombs. Bomb supply is limited, and the victims tend to be unwilling to all stand grouped together in the open for your convenience. Although the systematic starvation is capable of causing much more widespread death. I seem to remember previous cases where a group was trapped in a ghetto and food was systematically stopped from getting in, and although it's slow it does tend to kill them.

So tell me, do you have any idea how callous you're being or is your turning of a blind eye so successful that you're unaware?

Why are we even talking about this? I thought the topic was layoffs by obscenely wealthy CEOs.

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Quoting: Mountain ManPeople who assume that if CEOs were paid less, then the workers could be paid more, have a rather simplistic and naive understanding of how business and the economy works.

And yet, going by history it seems to work out in practice. Look at places and times where the CEOs are paid less, and you find workers who are more prosperous and have better working conditions.

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Quoting: redneckdrow

Quoting: ssj17vegeta

Quoting: PublicNuisance"Incorporates 3rd-party DRM: Denuvo Anti-tamper"

While i'm glad it has a native Linux version this will be a pass for me.

I think it does not on Linux, only on Windows.

Yup, that's why we don't always get feature parity.

I think Denuvo is more of a feature parody.

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