I don't think your individual performance as an IC should be measured in anything related to revenue under normal circumstances. As an IC engineer you aren't in control of product. You can give feedback on product decisions but that gets rarely heard. You mostly have control over deliverables that you are asked to produce and that's what you should be measured by. Empowering others around you is another factor that must be incorporated and arguably this is where things get fuzzy but a good manager should be able to tell. Of course it also matters that the company trusts the manager otherwise you end to in gaming metrics land. If your manager cannot be trusted you are off into shitb politics land. Those are the two major failure modes. Shit metric gaming and shit politics. Preventing those two from happening is hard and must come from the top
Can I buy (foreign) cash as an investment on Vanguard (I genuinely don't know)? The money market fund is about interests from debtors not currency speculation.
Does anyone still use these Latin terms? When I went to school in the 90s and early 00s we just counted from 1st to 12 and university just was it's own thing and how many semesters you were in didn't matter that much because there was no class structure.
I'd add though that companies don't have to be "ethical and slightly less greedy" to compete on price. Competing on price is a natural way to gain market share. Nobody would say that Bezo expressed ethics and less greed when he said "Your margin is my opportunity"
Companies should charge the real equilibrium price of a product. It's an important signal to lower or increase supply. However, they should not create a coordinated scarcity or otherwise artificially force a higher price than the equilibrium price. This can only happen through (illegal!) cartels or too much market power (which the government is supposed to prevent).
As usual ee cannot ask for better people but need a system that makes the wrong people do the right thing.
"But the US has consistently been far too passive and accepts greedy companies far too readily."
All companies are greedy. That's the reason for existence. Your point that monopolies and oligopolies need to be crushed is very valid though. I wish more mergers were rejected in the first place.
Regulating prices is a recipe for disaster though.
I feel that US companies are consistently more ruthless and cut-throat than companies in other countries I have visited. I see that as cultural rather than a pure economic issue.
One race-to-the-bottom phenomenon that (to me at least) appears to aggravate the impact of "corporate greed" is the social loop that goes as follows:
1. company decides to push the boundaries of the socially acceptable when it comes to cutting corners (e.g. screwing their customers, or employees, or environment, or debtors)
2. People don't like it, but rationalize this as being a natural consequence of incorporation and the profit motive. Hence while they grumble, there negative impacts to public perception don't actually cost the company as much as you might think
2b. Even if there's a boycott, there will be vocal minority that thinks it's all a bunch of whiny <target audience we're better than>. They'll actively harass or undermine said boycott or backlash, even if in a purely egotistical sense their interests are actually aligned with the boycotters
3. Social norm is reset; we all collectively expect even less from companies. That doesn't however mean the new norm is better or maintained, because as soon as there's some new major conflict between short-term profit and maintaining a decent reputation in public, we go back to step 1 from the new, lower baseline.
Stuff like increasing partisanship, and decreasing incentives for journalist (whether profession, citizen or influencer) to maintain their professional standing (as opposed to targeting clickbate) probably smears those gears nicely.
Many companies have historically clearly paid well over the odds to maintain their reputation, and done well doing so. It's just not true that nihilistic short term greed has always paid; obviously it didn't and still doesn't really. It profitable to do the little, but simultaneously also to do as many cheap things that materially affect public standing as possible.
By promoting the profit motive past a merely utilitarian means to an efficiency-optimizing end into a matter of national identity and point of distinction vs. in particular the USSR, we've shifted our culture beyond what's really rational. We (as a society) don't merely respect and understand the profit motive; we see it as a sign of merit - and significant enough merit that "winning" on that scale excuses a lot of other bad behavior.
That's not really how that works. It's more along the lines of saying "we're doing this good thing because I want to and I have majority control so I don't have to care about the other shareholders" vs. saying "we're doing this good thing because it's good PR that may increase sales or help placate regulators" even though the thing you're doing is the exact same thing.
There are a lot of rules whose de facto consequence is to prohibit describing the true reason someone is doing something instead of actually prohibiting them from doing it.
That's an assertion, not a statement of fact. Pricing in natural monopolies is a mature subject, and public utilities have been a thing for over 100 years. Also, pricing for medical procedures is regulated in Europe, and it works extremely well.
Yes, it's preferably over allowing a monopoly to set prices. However, wherever possible you should break up the monopoly or prevent it on the first place. Of course there are conditions where that's very hard and you mention some of them.
Setting prices where you could just have a functioning market has historically been well proven to lead to disaster. Look at any communist country. The GDR ended up allowing luxury stores that were not price bound and they were a huge hit for a reason.
The wait time for medical procedures is extremely long in places with price caps.
It does not work “extremely well” at all, it results in shortages and wait times exactly as you would expect from economics 101. I’m speaking from personal experience having been through it myself but feel free to look up how many Canadians go to the US every year and pay out of pocket for more evidence.
What do you mean "free stuff". This isn't about giving potatoes away for free but about reducing margins and competing on price. "Your margin is my opportunity" seems to work well in many cases
One Uber founder is American and the other Canadian and AFAIK both lived in the Bay area, so they probably prefer staying where they were. How much harder would it be to get VC funding for a business in the UK? They already had VC connections in the US from prior ventures. Same issue probably true for engineers they could bring on board. The UK is a much smaller market.
Further, I don't think Uber started out breaking regulations. Initially you could only hail black limos and which were licensed. They only started offering rides from unlicensed drivers in response to competition from Lyft. Lyft in turn started as a long-distance ride sharing company which is also legal. So the hurdle for either company to move to the UK was even higher. Moving an established company to a less important market seems far fetched
What is there to research with GoF that could be worth the massive risk? We had a vaccine for COVID in a weekend. Approval and manufacturing where the bottlenecks.
There’s a lot of GoF research on a lot of different diseases with a wide range of goals.
One goal for disease likely to cause pandemics is ultimately to create better treatments for those already infected. There’s a long lag between a vaccine being designed and scaling production and distribution to actually protect people. That means there’s going to be a lot of people infected in an outbreak, including many vaccinated people.
Are there any examples of medication that was developed for a disease that came out of GoF where the medication was approved and preventive mass production took place?
My understanding is success have come more from protocols more than medication.
Take antimicrobial resistance, you need to understand how microbes gain resistance by actually creating resistant bacteria/fungi etc before you can develop efficient countermeasures.
With COVID there was a lot of confusion around using masks and disinfecting public spaces in the early days. A better model of the disease could have been really useful both in the early days and how people responded to mixed messages.
reply