It's the flip flopping of liberal investment in government and public services, followed by conservative slashing of those services, followed by a condemnation of government's ability to provide after having been slashed, followed by an open bidding war for private consultancies to take over the role of the slashed service at a supposedly lower cost (that overruns in the end anyway, just like the aforementioned government service did in the first place). Rinse and repeat as every generation of politician proposes the new thing (repackaged old thing) and can then pat themselves on the back about what a good job they did. The kickbacks must be nice too I suppose ;)

I've lived in cities and states where there was never the remote political possibility of the "conservative slashing of services" yet the problems and complaints still persist. Your theory may have some gaps.

Gaps or a soap boxed size podium in some backwater forum board with bad css where they can beg the question about a liberal conservative epicycle?

When you get on a plane do you think they fuel it to run out exactly at the moment the plane stops at its final destination, and not a drop more? Don't you think that they reserve fuel for emergencies?

Why shouldn't a business consider itself at 0 operating dollars but still have a full account for healthcare or equivalent severance?

It sounds like you shouldn't join a startup then. The very concept here is that you're taking some of this risk.

There is risk of not working for another twelve years, of being laid off, or the C-level getting paid out and no one else.

But a startup that raises a billion dollars and fails to set a cut-off that gets everyone out the door with their last paycheques is one that people will jump out of earlier.

Planes prepare for basically 0 chance of failure.

Most startups fail. And everyone involved should know that going into it.

To operate a startup protecting against all risk will likely guarantee failure in almost all cases.

>Planes prepare for basically 0 chance of failure.

NO, the entire point of plane safety is that you are prepared for the VAST MAJORITY OF FAILURES, through extensive planning, testing, regulations that force certain choices, redundancy, backups, etc.

Maybe companies should stop trying to play check kiting as SOP for business operation, and be willing to admit that they sucked at business, burned a billion dollars, and didn't even keep any of it to help any of the people who did the work survive for the next few months as they adjust.

You misunderstood my meaning. Planes prepare for, I guess what I'd call individual component type failures, so the flight as a whole doesn't fail. They do not accept a 1% chance of failure. The plane stays grounded and doesn't leave the gate.

Startups on the other hand, (normally) must accept some risk of failure in order to have any chance of success.

Using all capitalized characters doesn't make your argument any better, bud.

Do you run a business? How much reserve are you saving for if you go bankrupt? Can I see a screenshot of it?

It doesn't have to be perfect. It just has to be convincing. That takes a lot less data and is much more tolerant to simplifications. Just look at the claims that were thrown around GPT's abilities at first.

Hear me out here: what if the realization that the conscious effort was in the way of optimization was part of the optimization all along??

This is some of the most disingenuous crap I've read in a while. Flip it on its head:

"If c-suite really only cares about $ spent on labor, they would accept the productivity outcome of their salary proposals to employees. But they don't. They want to get more productivity, just like the workers of [insert competing corp], while not changing or even reducing comp."

The reason your comment is disingenuous is that it assumes that the best place for this money to go is into c-suite/board pockets, and for some reason assumes that workers wouldn't take the couple extra grand the CEO pay split would give them. I challenge any CEO to put it up to a (non-binding, don't shit yourself) company-wide vote.

But let's disregard the salary split. It is an incredibly simple-minded way of approaching what to do with millions/year. Are all of you, who justify these ridiculous ratios, truly unable to think of ways to spend dozens of millions of dollars to improve all employees' qualities of life? Those who spend all this money on consultants to figure out how to squeeze an extra penny of profits can't figure out how to further optimize the health of the workforce instead?

Cue the comments about "no choice, fiduciary duty". Makes me sick.

Where did I state that the 21B in profit needs to go to shareholders? I'm all for giving the employees more of the profits, but not because it's unfair that the CEO gets paid well.

Do you see ads to play solitaire on a regular basis but "control yourself" to not play it? I also don't see ads for magazines like I see ads for cars, food, gambling, etc. The magazines themselves contain ads, sure, but I have to have the desire to read a magazine first in order for my attention to be hijacked by an ad within.

Mustard would be way better

Allow me to spell it out: if IBM could guarantee themselves a maintenance or growth of market share in the short-term while simultaneously clamping down on licenses that are anything but closed-source, they would. iBM didn't buy redhat because they think it's doing things the "right way". They bought redhat because they thought they could make money with it.

Appreciate it

It's more like saying that Germans like shitty meat because the best selling kind was the cheap, low-quality sausages at the corner store. Your attestation is the cherry on top.

Stop complaining and bring back apprenticeships. A university's objective is to create more professors and researchers, not industry workers.

... create more adminstrators, professors and researchers

Now don't be silly. No point creating professors and researchers when the funding could go to administrators instead!