If I understand correctly you can easily spot those types of bags. Instead of paper they look like a fine plastic mesh. Lipton uses them in their pyramid-shaped sachets.
Also, the city allows buyers to take what used to be a family home (e.g. 4-5 bedrooms), tear it down and put up a 1-2 bedroom house (more modern, more amenities, e.g. garage, sauna, etc). Why policymakers allow this if they believe there's a supply problem is beyond me - on my block the number of bedrooms has gone down by about a quarter in the last few years as a result...
What's the regulation that allows you to do that ? From what I understood, you aren't legally allowed to reduce the number of units that a property is zoned for.
It makes sense when you think about their business - because banks are extremely pro-cyclical, they need an 'out' to reduce compensation when their profits blowup or economy turns. Easiest and quickest to drop bonuses.
[edit] Saving 10K on a programmer, even multiplied over 1000 programmers isn't going to amount to a hill of beans in a crisis where the bank is at risk. My suspicion is that tech management at banks have adopted this system because they're failed middle managers and it helps them pretend that they're BSDs with the ability to swing pnl.
My suspicion is that any time someone's analysis of a situation requires them to say "$GROUP is just bad at their jobs," that analysis is biased at flawed at the deepest levels.
Or it could be experience speaking: I worked at one of these banks for a decade, and was distinctly unimpressed by the caliber of technology management.
Bizarrely, I'd rate the one I worked at as best in class as far as tech management goes.
To back this up, I can draw on the experiences of my friends and former colleagues across the Street, and a large number of hair-raising interviews at other banks that made me repeatedly wonder why I would trade in the devil I know for a dumpster fire.
At the end of the day though, "the best in class" is still not "good".
The issue is that the same argument made for programmers can be made for back office & middle office as well, which when added up are much more than 1000 programmers. I agree that the bonus:salary ratio should increase drastically for trading/sales vs other roles, but for corporate culture/uniformity and practical business (need to quickly reduce costs) reasons it's done this way to some degree.
Based on your and scott00's reply, it sounds like the "giant bonus" is a way to skirt the rules regarding taking money from investors (and turning employees into such).
I guess it's better than the "unfunded pension because they don't come due for 50 years when we'll be totes making bank" approach...
How about starting by taxing many people's main part of wealth, their house, at market value (i.e. no Prop 13)? Let's not let perfect get in the way of good..
The problem with that is that many people bought their houses back when they were much, much cheaper. So doing that would cause many, many people to be forced from their homes only for the crime of being one of the early people in an area that later became popular.
Any policy that would cause people to be forced from their homes just because should be viewed as a failure.
> Any policy that would cause people to be forced from their homes just because should be viewed as a failure.
I have a really really hard time feeling bad for people who bought homes in the bay area in ~1980. They won the lottery. Their home grew 10% y/y for 30 years outpacing inflation by a significant margin. They got a 30 year tax break while their income likely outpaced inflation as well because they live in an extremely good job market. That house they bought for 100k is now worth 1.7 Million. They can sell the home, move basically anywhere else in the country, and retire on the remaining gain. Yeah, I'm having a hard time feeling too bad for them.
On the other hand, the person who moved to SF in 1980 and decided to rent, I feel bad for them. Unless they found a rent controlled apartment, they've seen their rents grow 10% y/y, and if they found a rent controlled apartment they probably got evicted when the owners of the property sold it, and the new owners decided they wanted to redo the property as condos.
Lets just call it what it is, rent control for rich people. Then maybe we'll talk about it sensibly and realize that it's a horribly thought out plan.
>>I have a really really hard time feeling bad for people who bought homes in the bay area in ~1980. They won the lottery.
>>On the other hand, the person who moved to SF in 1980 and decided to rent, I feel bad for them.
Instead of punishing people for being successful. The latter people should ponder on their foolishness, instead of blaming other people for being more intelligent.
Last time I check making good decisions about one's future is not a vice.
If only home ownership weren't correlated with generational wealth. Then we'd have a meritocracy, and you could dismiss people renting as bad decision makers. In the real world, people rent because they can't afford to buy a home.
>>In the real world, people rent because they can't afford to buy a home.
In real world, you can always bootstrap your way to a decent nest egg, whether its a retirement fund or a home. It takes time, and it takes hard work. But is very possible and a lot of people do it.
If you can't, then evaluate your spending patterns seriously. I haven't met any person yet who didn't have wasteful expenditure that couldn't be eliminated.
More often than not its not the means/resources, its lack of resourcefulness. People in general don't have the motivation to take steps towards solving a difficult problem, and the discipline to suffer through a grind and see it through to the end. This of course is a very different problem, the responsibility of which starts and ends at a individual alone.
>I haven't met any person yet who didn't have wasteful expenditure that couldn't be eliminated
People who are poor or improvised deserve to live a life that also allows them to have something enjoyable, including hobbies. It shouldn't beconsidered a lack of discipline that an impoverished person could maybe enjoy their life once in a while. It's depressing how much one can expect a life of misery of they're poor.
However, that location X is not always feasible to move to and work from. So it's worthless to discuss all location X. Instead, you should be focusing on locations Y, which are.
Why the hell should they have to move, though? They bought a home in that area because they wanted to be there. Why should they be forced from their home because you have some kind of hard on for punishing people who got lucky?
Any tax on wealth would have similar effects: You own a business with notional value $2M? Pay X% of that each year, whether or not the business generates that amount in cash. You are a retiree with $2M in CDs or bonds, generating your retirement income? Pay taxes on the capital before you feed/clothe yourself. Etc, etc. Yes, property taxes may impact the middle- or non-1%-upper-class more than a wealth tax, and [a modest degree of] shelter is a basic human need, but market-based property taxes are significantly easier to implement (how to value privately-held businesses? how to deal with offshore assets?). Perhaps good + implementable > perfect + unachievable.
