250,000 people (includes student employees) at the university of California can just go online and look up their co-worker’s salary, for the past 10 years! Yet, it doesn’t cause problems. In fact, salaries are public for all government workers in California (UC just makes it very easy to look someone up). The entire country of Finland posts all salaries of the entire population online!
The angst over these laws is, IMO, blown way out of proportion. The only thing I can think is the real underlying issue is that there must be massive pay disparities in some industries…
> It should be obvious that freely knowing salaries will improve the employee's ability to negotiate the wage they deserve.
I would argue that for high performers, it could become an excuse not to pay more. "Sorry, we know you did XYZ, but we can't give you a further raise because you're already 4% ahead of your colleagues." And of course, everyone thinks they're a high-performer, so this policy would be unpopular with actual high-performers + the people that think they are (but aren't, and wouldn't be affected anyway).
> I would argue that for high performers, it could become an excuse not to pay more.
This is already used as an excuse, except that right now you can't easily check whether that's even true, so I think transparency would actually be better. If you're a high performer, switch to a company where you feel rewarded suitably, which is easier to do with transparency.
> everyone thinks they're a high-performer
That's again a problem with less information: nobody really knows so they just assume.
But then you can just look up a company that does pay their high performers more, and apply there. And if that happens often enough employers have to consider if paying top talent more money isn't a worthwhile strategy after all (maybe they decide it isn't, but employees will be free to react appropriately)
Knowing what other people with the same title at current, and similar, employers will definitely improve people’s ability to negotiate. But that’s not the real information employees need. What is really secret is the true value of the labor the employee is producing to the company.
Imagine salaries are completely public. A team of co-workers finds out that they are all being paid $200k each, and are happy with that. But if they only knew that their labor generates $2 million in profits for the company, each. They should be getting paid something like $1.8 or $1.9 million per person. The execs are ripping them off big time.
> A team of co-workers finds out that they are all being paid $200k each, and are happy with that. But if they only knew that their labor generates $2 million in profits for the company, each. They should be getting paid something like $1.8 or $1.9 million per person. The execs are ripping them off big time.
That is not how pricing works. How much of your budget is spent on food? How much profit does food generate in your life?
Supply and demand curves. If the team or coworkers thinks they can make more than $200k each without their employer, they are free to start their own business and pay themselves $1.9M each.
Not the person you are replying to, but I agree with him/her.
The definition of a free market has to do with it being free from regulation, not that information is free [0][1][2].
The same thing applies to the claims you made in this post, but maybe you mean that all of these things have to be true for a free market to work well, rather than for it to exist?
Again, I still think this requires proof, especially with regards to information having to be free.
First, just to make sure we are on the same page, I am not some kind of free market radical, and I was not arguing for free markets, only arguing the definition.
> Youu believe that a Free Market can exist when buyers don't have access to information and amidst is rampant fraud and violence?
Existence? Sure. The only thing I was pointing at here is your very non-standard definition of a free market.
For the fraud and violence, your original statement was "no fraud", not "rampant fraud". I think you would agree that there are very few markets without any fraud, no?
Such a strong claim definitely requires proof.
To get back to your original claim about free information, I think some amount of regulation would be required for information to be freely availble.
Otherwise, why should someone give away their competitive edge (ie. the information), without any gain? Would be interesting to hear you take on that.
And then you end up exactly where the company I work for ended up, and where a ton of other companies end up: The same people, doing the same work, with very similar experiences, getting paid drastically different salaries. It can get so bad, that the company then has to hire an outside agency to review salaries, and then make company-wide adjustments. Running a business is very, very expensive and involves lots of things (like proper HR) that have nothing to do with the business for which the business exists. If you don't want to actually run a business, then maybe give it up.
People can’t seem to get enough of science fiction, but every time something is presented that would move the needle in that direction, the detractors line up in droves. With attitudes like this, it really will be the 25th century before humanity does do anything of significance (if we even live that long).
I sure hope not. We know that the future of Star Trek only becomes possible after our current society totally collapses, culminating in World War III. TBF, razing everything to the ground and rebuilding society with modern tech in mind is probably a lot faster and more efficient, but I still wouldn't want to live in the "transition" phase.
Just because the Star Trek universe had WWIII doesn’t mean we have to. I would like to live in Star Trek via the path of least suffering, but whatever path, it is the future I wish for generations to come regardless the struggle I personally have to endure.
To wish the current system upon children and children’s children is selfish and cruel beyond imagination.
If people wanted, we could all wake up tomorrow and begin building that better future. It is literally a state of mind at this point — the technology and intelligence necessary is within our current evolutionary form.
That's easy to say if the bombs are not falling on your head. And I'm also not so sure that the current system can save itself from within. Evolution has navigated us into a dead by favouring immediate benefits over long term ones, now that our influence on the planet transcends our own lifetime. Getting out of that will require something pretty radical.
It’s easy to think of things as a dead end but the optimization landscape is huge, so there is usually some options open. Take say retirement incomes, love it or hate it Social Security was supposed to provide a minimal benefit for elderly workers who already had the option for private savings.
But soon enough we added Medicare, 401k, IRA, etc as independent systems for similar reasons. While I doubt anyone would have ever created the current system from scratch, it’s just one of seemingly endless possibilities.
I served in war time in Iraq and live a very different life than most. A hot world war would not change my quality of life by much; it may even improve it (less rules in the wild).
I understand the weight of what I say. The trillions of thriving future lives spread throughout our solar system and galaxy are easily worth our suffering.
I agree that the current system has little hope of saving anyone from anything, save a small minority from discomfort for the short term future at the cost of oblivion for everything else in the long term.
This really wouldn't move the needle in that direction, it's a complete waste of resources. The only thing we'll learn from this thing is what a bad idea it is.
Given the number of upvotes this has, and I would guess, too, that people who upvote a story don't always comment, I would say there is pretty strong agreement with posting salaries. Like, everyone, just get over yourselves, and post salaries. Then we can go on to debating other aspects of hiring, work culture, work-life balance, etc. I am not saying that to diminish the salary thing, but of all of the issues surrounding hiring and working somewhere, the posting of salaries seems like a no-brainer.
And since the Teslas are self driving, they can just roam the public roads while people work, an endless TS (Tesla Stream) cycling between two superchargers.
Have a Manager Booth halfway between the two charging stations for checkins, in addition to video calls. Biobreaks (exercise, waste removal, nutrition ingestion) can happen during charging if the Teslas remain unmodified.
I just realized that the Tesla could eject the worker a couple miles before the charging station, calculating the workout and charge duration so that the employee would have to run at the correct rate to retrieve their car before it was done charging. The vehicle could self clean while empty on the way to the charging station.
I fully expected to see this in SF eventually. Wifi equipped buses set up like coffee shops that drive around SF all day. Cheaper than commercial real estate, at the time. I'm sure COVID has changed the calculus considerably.
They do this with billboards. It's somehow cost effective to have a big truck that is nothing but a rolling billboard drive around the city all day. By definition that means that it's cheaper or somehow better than a fixed billboard on real estate.
How about in wet, hot environments (or even cold ones), like on a boat? Watermakers are very expensive and use a lot of electricity. If one could do this on a boat to generate clean drinking water, that would be pretty amazing. Especially if one could use a tube solar oven to heat up the substance.
> The research builds on previous breakthroughs from the team, including the ability to pull water out of the atmosphere[1] and the application of that technology to create self-watering soil[2]. However, these technologies were designed for relatively high-humidity environments.
The angst over these laws is, IMO, blown way out of proportion. The only thing I can think is the real underlying issue is that there must be massive pay disparities in some industries…