Not sure if it's waste material, but yes, the only reason there isn't non-Chinese supply is economics. If they ban export the economics changes quickly.
"In terms of CEO compensation based on realized stock options, CEOs of major U.S. companies earned 20 times more than a typical worker in 1965; this ratio grew to 30-to-1 in 1978 and 59-to-1 by 1989, and then it surged in the 1990s, hitting 376-to-1 by the end of the 1990s recovery, in 2000. The fall in the stock market after 2000 reduced CEO stock-related pay (e.g., realized stock options) and caused CEO compensation to tumble in 2002, to 192 times typical worker pay, before beginning to rise again in 2003. CEO compensation recovered to a level of 347 times worker pay by 2007, almost back to its 2000 level. The financial crisis of 2008 and accompanying stock market decline reduced CEO compensation between 2007 and 2009, as discussed above, and the CEO-to-worker compensation ratio fell in tandem. By 2014, the stock market had recouped all of the value it had lost following the financial crisis and the CEO-to-worker compensation ratio in 2014 had recovered to 299-to-1. The fall in CEO compensation since 2014 has caused the CEO-to-worker pay ratio to fall to 271-to-1 in 2016. Though the CEO-to-worker compensation ratio remains below the peak values achieved earlier in the 2000s, it is far higher than what prevailed through the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s."
I'd say it's regular employees that are getting fleeced the most. We are in the middle of perhaps the greatest economic boom the country has seen, and yet wages have been flat for decades.
They don't get the pay because they're better, they get the pay so everyone with a realistic shot at becoming CEO works really hard for the tournament prize.
Well, consider a company like Amazon, with a revenue like $232.9 billion. Say the best CEO, relative to the second best, can eek an extra 1/10 of 1% of that as profit. That's $232 million.
I mean, I don't think "deserve" has anything to do with it. The leverage of the decisions and the market do. A company won't leave profit on the table because of the notion that one guy doesn't "deserve" to get paid some percentage of the value generated by his decisions. They'll want the best CEO possible at "any price", and market dynamics and rational self-interest will drive compensation into the hundreds of millions, with no notion of not incidentally disproportionately awarding one random person on the planet.
Consider this has to not only compete with itself but other ways of generating profit. Narrow mindedly: what if you invested the same dollar amount in middle management instead? More broadly: how much does $232 million in R&D generate?
Once you consider other portions of the business are actually capable of generating revenue as well the original question of "how much value can the CEO actually generate" still stands.
Thats the point of it all though isn't it? The value of the CEO is in knowing where to prioritize reinvestment. The CEO is the one responsible for making the decisions you are suggesting be made.
The CEO job is hard. To get to the position they're in they need to be expert "fleecers." Not just anyone can convince shareholders that one person has the work output of 20 engineers and therefore deserves equivalent pay. You need to have skills that no one else has: the ability to manipulate.
While I kind of agree to a degree, work output =\= value. Great managers have less work output than a single engineer, but can easily provide far more value as a whole in terms of removing roadblocks, protecting time, keeping work focused on concrete goals, etc. The same can be true at the senior leadership level as well where setting the company on the right path, executing large deals, securing new markets, etc. can easily create more overall value for the company than any one or even ten engineers.
An engineer's pay is bounded by, but not determined by, the value of what they produce. That is why even when an engineer produces a million dollar breakthrough, they don't get a million dollar bonus.
Instead, their pay is determined based on their replacement value -- how much the company would have to pay to get another engineer of comparable skill, if the first one should leave. If it is hard to find a comparable replacement, then their pay is also determined by the absolute value increase they bring relative to a less-skilled replacement. This isn't strictly true at all times but it's the guiding principle.
A CEO can likewise make decisions with billion dollar impact. But their pay should not be determined by the value of their decision-making, but rather by the price at which others would step up to take on that role, and by how much more valuable the current CEO's decisions than those that a replacement would make.
I don't personally understand why there isn't a huge pool of skilled would-be CEOs willing to run companies for a fraction of the pay of current CEOs. Probably because CEO experience is so hard to come by. The rewards are so high though that you'd think there would be more CEO boot camps. But I guess the risk of a bad CEO (whose bad decisions could sink the whole company) are considered high enough that a real track record is considered nearly priceless, and it also has huge barriers to entry.
Many people are smart enough not to be swayed by fear based news. You’re 100x more likely to die in a car accident on your commute tomorrow than by a cartel member in Mexico as a tourist.
The murder rate in Mexico is >20 per 100K per year. The car crash death rate in the US is around 11 per 100K per year. So you're almost certainly not x100 likely to die in your commute tomorrow. I've been to Mexico and I felt reasonably safe but it's a lot less safe these days and it's just not the safest place in general.
>The murder rate in Mexico is >20 per 100K per year. The car crash death rate in the US is around 11 per 100K per year. So you're almost certainly not x100 likely to die in your commute tomorrow
That would be relevant if the murder rate was randomly distributed across the population, and didn't concern cartel members and their explicit targets primarily. Not to mention that Mexico is a big place, and the murder rate in tourist areas is not the same as in cartel land...
Could you break down the murder rate by places people actually visit? I don't look at homicides in Chicago (19 per 100k) when planning a trip to Austin.
I don't think many people worry about the homicide rate in Chicago when planning a trip to Chicago. Similar thing to Mexico, the homicides are contained within a pretty specific subpopulation.
In whose best interests? Because it's really only the cartels that matter since the law has no grip on them. And the cartel doesn't care about keeping tourists safe and happy.
Of course they care. Every tourist killed brings more attention to them than needed, if the person was high profile enough it can bring enough international pressure for the government to take them down.
To be fair, I think qualifying as a tourist is much less subjective than being called "good". As non-native to Mexico, I really am more interested in the probability "being murdered in Mexico given you're a a tourist", P(m|t), than "being murdered in Mexico", P(m).
> As non-native to Mexico, I really am more interested in the probability "being murdered in Mexico given you're a tourist"...
I think a more meaningful metric for tourists is the probability of getting murdered as a tourist in Mexico vs the probability of getting murdered while on vacation in another country X.
I don't understand the downvotes. If we're talking about tourists doesn't it make sense to look at... tourists?
EDIT: to be clear, my hypothesis was the murder rate of tourists was lower than the overall murder rate, which could plausibly make the "You’re 100x more likely to die in a car accident" statement correct. See hsitz's comment and my response. 100x is likely an exaggeration but you still are probably "more likely to die in a car accident on your commute tomorrow than by a cartel member in Mexico as a tourist".
Mexico has somewhere around 18 million tourists per year, about half of whom are Americans [1]. I can't remember any being murdered, but I suppose a handful have. U.S. media loves to publicize these kinds of things so I'm pretty sure I'd be well aware if it were more than a handful, certainly if it was more than a handful being killed by cartels, who commit most of the murders in Mexico.
So say, 10 tourists get murdered in Mexico each year. That's (very roughly) 10 per 18 million, or 1 per 1.8 million, or 0.06 per 100k.
BTW, adding "per year" to the metric would be misleading, add nothing, because it falls out of the unit analysis in the calculation, which is done based on
10 tourists 10 tourists
1 year murdered murdered
--------------- x -------------- = ---------------
18 mil tourists 1 year 18 mil tourists
This is not that helpful, because tourists stay just a short time, not a full year like local residents. If you want to somehow compare this to a metric of inhabitants murdered per 100k per year then you probably want to do more. Assume the average tourist stays 1 week. Then we need to multiply by 52 to get the number of tourists murdered per year of tourist time in Mexico, which yields result of around 3 (0.06 x 52) per 100k of tourist-years. This is significantly less than the U.S. average of 5 murders/100k per year. So it could be that U.S. tourists are safer in Mexico than they are at home. ;)
Right, I was suggesting the murder rate for tourists might be lower than the overall murder rate, which could make the "You’re 100x more likely to die in a car accident on your commute tomorrow than by a cartel member in Mexico as a tourist" statement correct.
0.06 is indeed 100x less than 11, but to compare to the car crash death rate above you'd need to estimate the amount of time tourists spend in the country per year. If you say 1 week per year that brings it up to 3.12 per 100k per year, so still less than the risk of dying in a car accident (in the US), but not 100x less.
Also, technically the statement was "by a cartel member", so you'd have to know how many of those murders were by cartel members.
Exactly, I think I was editing to add that as you wrote this. Also, my guesstimate of 10 tourist murders/year may be way off. I'm guessing it's lower, certainly if only by cartel members, but not sure.
I think it's worth it to allow this but I fail to see it's true relevance. If companies don't innovate sufficiently for the long term they will die to other companies that do. Hence the market takes care of itself.
Shareholders aren’t incentivized to act in the company’s long-term interest; only to maximize apparent growth for as long as they hold the company’s shares. This leads to companies making shortsighted moves that aren’t in their long-term interest, due to shareholder influence.
It can't. The size of a receiver is that of a pizza (this is the only way I've ever seen it described, I wonder if there is a more precise description somewhere) not that of a cell phone antenna.
It might contribute to providing backhaul services making cell-towers cheaper to deploy, and it might enable things like sticking an antenna in a vehicle, but it can't provide 4g style cell phone service.
Would it be feasible for them to build standalone cell towers of their own that connect to these space networks? So rather than "no cell towers at all", the benefit they provide is "no cables at all". They would just go around to remote areas and build towers without needing to lay down the cables. (disclaimer: basically don't understand this stuff at all haha)
Random twitter user (Anner J. Bonilla🇵🇷 <more emoji's, for some reason only 1 renders on HN>)
> can Starlink be used to back haul LTE/regular cell in rural areas or emergency situations/disasters? Seems like a great thing for disasters where back haul is damaged but not sure how useful it be due to bandwidth/latency?
Yes! Many comments on r/spacex suggest that being a good use case for them but they have one major downside. Weather can affect satellite network connectivity which brings their availability down a few nines and many people expect most everything to run 100% of the time. I know growing up, I convinced my parents to try out directtv and my dad always got so mad when the weather caused the satellite tv to go out so it isn't perfect. Therefore, I don't expect it to be used by most people unless their only other opens are hughesnet or dsl.
Yeah, that's basically feasible and your intuition of the cost-savings / requirements is accurate. A cell phone monopoly doesn't have any incentive to pass on those savings to customers, but maybe a small group could band together and buy a portable base station to share.
Remote towers often have wireless backhauls anyway. But if you only want a cell or two of coverage surrounded by a vast dead zone then it's likely viable somewhere.
No, it's impossible. Antenna theory dictates what the size of an antenna can perform at. Without significantly reducing the noise temperature of the antenna much farther than anything else out there, it will never happen. And noise temperature is pretty much guided by physics at this point.
I'm not a hardware guy, but i doubt it. They would need to reduce the size and power requirements by an order of magnitude each of which we are currently struggling to do nowadays. Most importantly though, the wavelengths they are using i do not think penetrate buildings well and I don't think any of other wavelengths can effectively transmit that much bandwidth through buildings from space efficiently/economically.
Not only that, but phased array relies on the radio signal hitting different antennas at different times. So the array of antennas have to be spaced a minimum distance apart depending on the wavelength used.
