boonhet

I'm just saying that is a tiny problem compared to the much more pressing problem of "employees aren't being paid shit".

I don't much care if the CEO is making 250x as much as the average employee if the average employee is getting paid well.

The time spent worrying about the CEO's salary is time that the shareholders can spend laughing all the way to the bank, because distracting everyone using the CEO worked. Matter of fact, that's the real job of the CEO and the reason they get paid so much. They take the heat off the people earning the real money. The fact that negative articles are being written about him instead of the board, shareholders, dividends and stock buybacks, means that he's doing his job exactly as expected, and has, in the eyes of the shareholders, earned his paycheck. The same people making billions off the backs of Starbucks employees are the ones that have decided he's worth this much to them.

I'm not saying it's right, I'm saying that focus on bigger problems first, then the small ones. The CEO's pay package will magically stop increasing every year when the shareholders aren't happy with the results anymore (dividends and massive buybacks in this instance).

Ah I thought that the problem was that employees should be getting paid more.

I'm more of the opinion that elevating the floor is more important than lowering the ceiling. Sometimes the latter needs to be done, but the former should be priority.

lol. lmao even

That's barely a problem at this point. It's a problem, but not as big as you think. There's an even bigger problem. The reason the CEO gets paid so much is to facilitate this, and also to protect the beneficiaries here.

Starbucks currently pays roughly 60 cents a quarter in dividends, so 2.40 a year. They have 1.14 billion outstanding shares, so that makes ~2.74 billion in dividends this year. That's 28 times the CEO's total comp. They also spend a billion or two on stock buybacks every year last few years. Call it 1.6 average (2023 was 2+ billion, 2024 was 1.3). Roughly speaking, that's 4.3 billion spent purely on pleasing shareholders. Use just 2 billion of that on payroll and the employees can now get a 5k annual raise, or around 2.5 dollars an hour. THAT is life changing money at the low income levels Starbucks employees have to operate at. Not "I can now buy a house" life changing, but "I can now buy groceries whenever I want" life changing.

Fuck, my numbers aren't as bad as Starbucks's own expectations from 2022:

Between dividends and share buybacks, the company expects to return approximately $20 billion to its shareholders in the next three years.

That's almost SEVEN billion dollars a year, but I don't think they reached it quite.

He seems to be one of the less accurate ones, yes. Turns out when you use really wide brackets for numbers predictions, that makes it easier to get things right (who'd've thunk) and even then he only gets like 50% of claims right.

YouTuber, Jewish one at that, who creates kids videos and has dared call for the end of bombing Gaza. Now she's suddenly a Palestinian terrorist to the zionists.

Wait till you hear about Coffee Stain Studios (Goat Simulator, Satisfactory), Paradox Interactive (I'm not gonna name any games lol, they're literally a genre unto themselves), Iron Gate Studio (Valheim), Ghost Ship Games (Deep Rock Galactic)...

Oh and if you're into mobile games at all, maybe you've heard of Rovio (Angry Birds), Supercell (Clash games) or King (Candy Crush)

And this is all just Nordic countries. There's a lot of stuff coming out of Poland (CD Projekt Red), UK (Rockstar North), France (Ubisoft's been kinda meh the last decade+, but if you only play every 3rd or 4th iteration of Assassin's Creed, they're still kinda fun) and if you consider Iceland to be European which it is, that's where EVE Online is from!

We have a very healthy video game industry, spread across many countries, with many developers with their own unique styles. Indie, AA, AAA. It's lovely.

I mean if you escape the US, it won't matter as much... Just don't ever go back lol

How do you like Uruguay? Would you recommend it?

I don't think I can move out of Estonia any time soon, but sometimes I would like to escape to a warmer, but not super hot place... and Montevideo looks beautiful

Pretty sure it means you get to vote in the primaries, aka the election to choose who's in the election

You don't have to vote for the party you're registered for.

This is coming from a non-American, but that's how I understand it

I haven't read the book myself, but apparently it was outsourced to Nedry's company and they weren't being paid anymore as the project went over its due date or something. So that's why Nedry was alone and it's also why he sabotaged the whole thing and stole company secrets

This is how