mugen. - Masters? Really? Where?

Too bad there's no real way to listen to you "pause" as you hurriedly Google up the info.

Bah. I would give mugen a poke with a stick, but people have made some good points in this thread and I don't wanna be the guy to ruin it.

23 Enigma
Unions are necessary to ensure that the working class obtains a fair share of the fruits of their labor. The Corporation and the State are both corrupt, if the two are locked in eternal struggle, then and only then might the people advance, both materially, mentally and spiritually.

bblustein
Name me a single nation that has cut wages and achieved prosperity.

Ex UAL employee here. When CEO Glenn Titlon finished killling the pension plan at his former company, he went to UAL and killed that pension plan. He is a well paid hatched man. Now my pension will be doled out by the gubment for about 40 percent less.

ComicBookGuy

Not a fantastic choice of argument. If I assert I am completing a masters, I either am and know a shiatload more than you and any of these other ZOMG CORPORATIONS EAT BABIES!1!1! motherfarkers, or I am a googlemonkey. You on the other hand, are purely a google monkey.

Therefore, we are either on equal footing, or you should stfu.

Why would they encourage the people who steered the company into bankruptcy to stay?
I don't see many
"Executive With Experience Bankrupting A Company Needed"
ads in the paper this morning.
Maybe they should learn a trade or run for President.

mugen.: ComicBookGuy

Sure, right after I finish my masters in finance ya farkin douche. Get a clue and stop gushing mental diarrhoea until you have even the faintest idea what you're talking about.

/hurrah for populism

Got some news for ya....Capitalism (as it currently is) will not make it. 23 Enigma was fairly accurate.

Capitalisms downfall will be its inability to distribute wealth.

Weaver95
I have no problem with rewarding talent at any level in a company. What I cannot tolerate is rewarding asshattery in the board room and people who get huge financial bonuses for running a company into the ground.

Spot on. Then there's the added insult of seeing such executives getting their grossly inflated severance packages while the rest of the staff get unceremoniously escorted to the door by security.

It's my job to design and build websites. If I do that well, I expect to get paid. If I don't, I expect to get fired without reward. It's their job to run a successful company. If they do it well, pay them. If not, fire them without reward.

If a corporation defaults on its pension plan, it should generate by this action bonds that automatically become more senior than any other bonds issued by that corporation.

You see, the pension is part of an agreement the corporation made with its workers. Isn't breach of contract something even the most hardcore Libertarian Capitalist Individualists get up in arms aboot?

CEOs are infinitely replaceable. We have graduated more MBAs and lawyers in the last five years than in any other 5 year period previous.

It is just that the current system of the "old boys club" is making all the decisions regarding their own salaries and the salaries of the laborers.. so are you surprised.. they give them selves all the wealth and screw the common man.

Damn, it is sooooooo refreshing to vote Democratic and not have to bear any responsibility for the disaster that BushCo has wrought on this country.

/Hyperbolic, yes. Absolutely wrong? Heck NO!

SchlingFoThey simply aren't as replaced as labourers. Croneyism (sp?), namely the incestuous board relations among companies, ensures that executives are always protected.


I would love to see this outlawed. I swear there is a conspiracy out there (when I wear my tinfoil hat) consisting of old silver-haired white-men. When the Board of directors for copany A and Companies B through Z are all made up of the same basic pool of people and they are all in the same industry (*cough* defense military-industrial complex).

Pocket NinjaI would like to see laws passed making mandatory a "scale of 20" rule for determining pay. As in, the highest-paid executive of any corporation can not earn more than 20 times what the lowest-paid employee receives. International employees included.

I would like to see that except, we would end up with every rich mother farker leaving our country and living somewhere that didn't have that rule (and taking all their money with them) which would be bad. If we made that rule part of being able to do business in the US at all... that might have worked 20 years ago, but I think lots of people would just not do business here at all.

In my experience most executives tend to be worthless (Upper Upper management). They leach off the rest of the company and provide very little and often hurt companies in the long run just for a short term increase in stock value (so they can retire sooner). They are often very replaceable, and their only qualifications being "who they know." I've sat through employee meetings where they explain to us how great that general "x" is going to be such a great new President or CEO b/c they have such good contacts. Then they parade him through and he has absolutely no farking clue wtf we do.

Enough ranting... though seriously how much cash does one person need? The CEO for Cost co has the right idea. If this type of thing continues for another decade or two, I'll be shocked shocked if the streets are not full of blood and the American Empire's fall isn't complete.

For some reason, guys like mugen think that there are only two choices: Unbridled capitalism or capital-C Communism.

RandomExcess
Good point, noticing the surfeit of MBAs and lawyers.

The CEO class whinges, constantly, about our supposed lack of scientists and engineers.

It seems, from the salaries the CEO class are willing to pay, that we have a greater need for Project Managers and Marketing (Wo)men than we have of scientists and engineers.

mugen.: Not a fantastic choice of argument. If I assert I am completing a masters, I either am and know a shiatload more than you and any of these other ZOMG CORPORATIONS EAT BABIES!1!1! motherfarkers, or I am a googlemonkey. You on the other hand, are purely a google monkey.

Therefore, we are either on equal footing, or you should stfu.

Tsk tsk. And yet you have done ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to prove you know more than anyone else in this thread except ASSERT that you do...and hurl insults. Very convincing.

Wow... so many headlines like these... is Fark becoming the next metafilter?

spamdog

Poke me with a stick? What, you, your B.CS and 30k a year job, staffing the ISP helpdesk? lol. Good one. Stick it to me, show me who's boss.

Neurochemist

Thanks for informing me. Did they tell you that when you were moving figures from one column to another and learning about fantastic material like Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, so that you may better manage the people who'll hate your middlemanagement ass irrespective?

If you don't like it move to Russia.

Joe Six-pack laborer=50 percent pay cut. Executive=50 percent+ bonus, stock options and a salary increase

Yes, and...? It's called trickle-down. You folks wanted this, so why not go back to you Bible and pray some more?

A-farking-men. Sometimes I think christians can't live without a life of pain and suffering. Things actually get good, society prospers, and they need to edify a jackass to high office in order to wreck the country enough to maintain their 'religion'.

And before the next knee-jerk Republican asshole decides to flame me, please take a quick look at what your leader has done to our country: http://www.uuforum.org/deficit.htm.

BTW, take a look at DCN (Dana Co, another auto parts maker that's had to restate the last few years of earnings) and RCX (Refco, a Wall Street playa whose CEO used the company as his personal slush fund.)

RCX might be tied into some serious derivatives shiat.

I'd be cheering for complete collapse, except that would (1) cause me and other people great inconvenience and (2) out of the ashes of the collapsed Management Capitlism system would arise something possibly even worse.

So change within and of the system is our only hope.

ComicBookGuy

Like I said, if that is indeed the case then at worst I am on equal footing with you. However if you care to raise a single economic argument, I'll happily counter.

mugen.: Therefore, we are either on equal footing, or you should stfu.

/I'm a senior w/ dual major in Accounting and MIS.
//Mugen is misguided.
///And he's flaming at 7:30am on a Tuesday morning.

Delphi pays 4,000 employees to punch in and do nothing for 8 hours. This is part of the union contract that does not allow for layoffs. Based on $25 an hour, that will cost 205 million a year. The laborers that do 95% of these tasks are a dime a dozen. It doesn't take a great deal of skill to use an air ratchet 3000 times a day. These kind of jobs shouldn't be paying more than $10/hour.

I would say that 50x would be the right multiple to use. No executive in any organization should be allowed to take home more that 50x the compensation of the lowest paid person in the organization. Seems about right to me. They can pay people $20,000 a year, which is just about the poverty line in many places, and still take home a cool million if they are so inclined. It would still be a drastic pay cut for the vast majority of executives, and then you wouldn't need to worry about having a fixed minimum wage anymore. (Although some provision would be required to prevent a company from contracting out its lowest paying jobs, and probably there are one or two other loopholes you can drive a truck through). But in general, what is the downside to this plan? (As I sit here previewing my comments, I do see one significant downside: decreased tax revenue. Might be a flaw in the plan. Will require more thought.)

mugen. What, you, your B.CS and 30k a year job, staffing the ISP helpdesk?

Clearly success for you is measured in dollars and the number of letters after your name.

Have fun in your soulless job.

Wytchocolate
If everyone became Joe Dom Perignon, who would clean up our garbage?

The idea that everyone can be part of the CEO Overclass is opium peddled to the masses to keep them quiescent as the CEO Overclass loots this nation's economy.

Life is like a shiat sandwhich. The more bread you have, the less shiat you have to eat.

www.antichimp.com

My dick is also huge.

Bow down.

Linger: Corporate executives make waay too much money. Even when they screw up.

To be fair, Delphi was a spin-off with an insane amount of debt load for pensions of workers that had never worked for them, but had been part of that division and part of GM's mis-management.

yaksplat
But your job, it's worth every penny, right?

Because you're a Self Made Man, Educated and Highly Skilled!

mugen.: Like I said, if that is indeed the case then at worst I am on equal footing with you. However if you care to raise a single economic argument, I'll happily counter.

You start. Give us something all nice, complicated, and technical that someone genuinely working on a Master's in financing could present.

spamdog

lol the only people who say things like that are losers who need to avoid objective measurements because they know, if measured on such grounds, they will inevitably be shown to have achieved nothing.

Time for a caffeine run!! Brb.

ComicBookGuy
This depends, on whether mugen. is a genuine entrepreneur (in which case, his MBA is unnecessary) or if he is a PowerPoint monkey who sees cutting wage packets as the surefire solution to all corporate ills.

As long as we don't have gays getting married or any French flip-flopper types in the White house, I'm satisfied with the way things are.

If you want to earn a living making auto parts, move to farkin' China.
We don't need your blue-collar ass here.
It's not like you bastards buy cars and trucks.
Your seven minute morning piss break is now over.
Shut up and get back to work.

mugen.: spamdog

lol the only people who say things like that are losers who need to avoid objective measurements because they know, if measured on such grounds, they will inevitably be shown to have achieved nothing.

lol the only respond to things like that are losers who need to avoid objective measurements because they know, if measured on such grounds, they will inevitably be shown to have achieved nothing.

spamdog: For some reason, guys like mugen think that there are only two choices: Unbridled capitalism or capital-C Communism.

That's because you're either with us, or against us. There is no middle ground, you should know this by now. Or if there is any middle ground, it's more like a no-mans land mined with high explosive.

mugen: dribble dribble dribble...

Or maybe they realise there is more to life than money and status.

stpickrell: Unions are necessary to ensure that the working class obtains a fair share of the fruits of their labor. The Corporation and the State are both corrupt, if the two are locked in eternal struggle, then and only then might the people advance, both materially, mentally and spiritually.


It seems to be unions were the reason we lost manufacturing, automotive and electronics to overseas competition. I'm just sorry, it's hard for me to listen to any unions defense when I see some guy who can barely read, pull down $28/hr screwing in bolts on an assemblyline, and then biatch about how they want more. Or when a company is doing badly, they decide to strike so they can net more benefits, or when you have such gross incompetence that potentially peoples lives are in danger and they can't be fired because of all the union red tape. I'm sorry, unions just seem so un-american to me, if I own/run a company it should be me who tells the employees what to do, not the other way around.

P.S. I know plenty of union guys btw, and these union guys deal in the saftey of your children if you let your kids take a school bus to school. Trust me, they're a prime example of why unions are a godawful idea. These guys couldn't find their own ass with their own hands and they're pulling down $75,000 a year, and the problems they leave on the school busses is gonna end with some bus full of kids exploding one day.

RandomExcess: Damn, it is sooooooo refreshing to vote Democratic and not have to bear any responsibility for the disaster that BushCo has wrought on this country.

so, Bush takes blame for this Delphi mess too ? ahhhh, I see.

Perhaps they do, Spamdog, but his Boobies was right. Capitalism, despite what you might think, is not a zero-sum game. I can sell something to someone else and we both come out richer for it. Stocks, for example.

I always chuckle when I read about the Burgeosie uprisings, as if TV hasn't been designed to prevent that from happening.

2005-10-11 07:44:20 AM Wytchocolate

You STFU, cause I sure as hell won't.... Why don't you move to China, I hear there are lots of job opportunities there...

P.S. I know plenty of union guys btw, and these union guys deal in the saftey of your children if you let your kids take a school bus to school. Trust me, they're a prime example of why unions are a godawful idea. These guys couldn't find their own ass with their own hands and they're pulling down $75,000 a year, and the problems they leave on the school busses is gonna end with some bus full of kids exploding one day.

Hey asshole? Just yesterday I was in a Radio Shack and a guy was complaining that he can't find work, he's a heavy machine operator(bulldozers). He has a family and a mortgage like everyone else that he built his life on, now mexicans are doing his job for half of what he used to be paid.

I hope to god this happens to you, and you learn EXACTLY how full of shiat you are.

ImJustaTroll
I'm not trying to argue that capitalism is doomed or anything. I live in a capitalist country; I know it works.
I really just hang around here to skewer egotists. Sorry if I seem like a real jerk. =P

vegasj:so, Bush takes blame for this Delphi mess too ? ahhhh, I see.

It's like "Six degrees of Kevin Bacon"

Well, not to play devil's advocate or nothing, but mabye by cutting the worker's salaries, the executive saved the company 5 times what his bonus was. Saving company money = money for you.

This of course is assuming that the laborers took a 50% pay, but had anyone actually read the article, you'd realize that this is never mentioned, and that the sumbmitter just successfully started a flame war.

Gimme a medal. I'm going to own Boeing, and cut even more US jobs, not to be evil, but to make money. I believe its wrong to deprive much harder working people (Indians, Chinese, whatever) that will also work cheaper of jobs becuase the company is an "American" company. Moving offshore, benefits the poor more than the rich.

By the way, if you're on reading this, you're in the top .1% of people in the world. Face it, most of the world is MUCH poorer than you.