Samsung chip workers will get an average $340k bonus as AI profits soar

These finance jobs are low paid because they're not that skilled and many people can do them. Same basic reason as why fast food temp worker is low paid.

No billionaire is forced to break up a public company to pay taxes, the same as no average Joe is forced to sell his clothes to pay taxes. The idea in common is that if one knows that one must have cash at the end of the fiscal year, then one sets aside the money and simply avoids buying clothes or investing in assets.

Even if a rich person reinvests everything, the control over large amount of money is what makes it problematic.

Also the idea that welfare doesn't go to investments is wrong. When you buy groceries (or anything really), there is a decision made by the management of the company you buy these things from to reinvest part of it to maintain or build productive capacity.

There is no need for a "capitalist" (owner of the enterprise) to insert themself into the process, they are useless middlemen who get a cut, essentially. (They are not so useless when they do actual managerial work, but then they can be just an employee like everyone else.)

That's certainly an opinion that some people have, but as the parent comment stated, companies don't run without employees, so the idea that the value created is solely attributed to the founders or other executives is not an empircal fact like you're claiming it is. There's no scientific formula for "how much of this result of a bunch of actions that multiple people took over the course of a few years is attributed to each of the people"; the only way to have any sort of objective delineation of that like you're describing is if you already bake in assumptions of how valuable each piece is before you've started, which just moves the opinions one later deeper.

I can't prove you wrong any more than you can prove the parent commenter wrong, because what you've said is based on so many premises that I fundamentally agree with that seem like universal laws to you.

I appreciate that this is a flippant remark, but there are crypto billionaires proving that there are exceptions to this assertion.

I guess one important nuace is that it's not all billionaires for whom this is the case. You have lots of Carlos Slim style 'get a government monopoly and collect the rents'. So it's a bit messy.

There's also all the various shenanigans they employ to avoid paying a fair share of tax, so they're mainly "stealing from society".

The level of wealth hoarding by certain people would be classed as a serious mental illness if they were hoarding something else, but it's actually far more damaging to the rest of the world that they hoard wealth.

Without billionaires, money stays in the community where it circulates (workers and small business owners make money and they spend it). With billionaires it is extracted from the communities and hoarded in investment accounts a thousand miles away.

I truly cannot believe that anyone with an ounce of empathy or integrity could possibly believe a statement as absurd as this.

A 40 year old person can’t retire on that money.

Now, using the leverage is the difficulty to unionize. Athletes are a tiny group, pretty easy to organize. Pilots are a small group, also pretty easy to unionize. The fact they have to be licensed means there is a record for all the people needed pull in. Software engineers seem to be 5x-20x larger population than commercial pilots (quick/rough searches). They have no certification or registry organization and have no common affiliations. It's incredibly difficult to organize this group. There's also no regulatory capture requiring developers to be US citizens so, if you did unionize and tried to negotiate too hard the industry would just move away from the US so there's just not a lot of leverage this profession has.

For unions to be as effective in tech as for say pilots or doctors, you'd have to agree on a way to restrict supply (H1B restrictions, more licensing and credentialling etc) to give the union leverage. You have to control the supply taps and rate limit entry to the field.

I think it's hard to say if this would net out better for workers than the current arrangements, which are already the best in the world on nearly every metric.

It also seems like there's a timing issue - if tech workers DID successfully unionise enough to withhold a meaningful fraction of labour, the gains might ultimately end up in the market cap of AI companies via substitution.

You seem surprised? Do you know how things (sometimes) work in Silicon Valley?

If you do not feel gratitude to your employer I suggest you find a different one. If you cannot find such an employer over an extended time frame, perhaps the problem is you.

No not a gift but they sure do align incentives

First, the general public would have more disposable income if we shift more of the tax burden on the ultra rich.

Second, people like Elon Musk won't be able to give themselves massive bonuses that are essentially paid by diluting common stock.

Also, with regard to the U.S., the U.S. could wipe out its national debt with a one-time wealth tax, and also pass a balanced budget const. amendment so it never ends up deep in debt again.

Lastly, perverse and extremely greed-based exploitative businesses might become less common, since there aren't ultra fat executive paychecks. Although it might still happen if a large group of people are able to make a somewhat high salary off such schemes.

I think I am making a shrewd decision here if my math and equine knowledge holds.

The average person on hacker news is easily in the 90th percentile of software engineers, so yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if the most people here make somewhere around there.

The biggest confounding factor is the other fact that most HN users are startup founders living off ramen in Peter Thiel's garage, so that probably brings down the average some.

product regulations and antitrust as examples