Curious Canid

I think it is irrational, in the sense that executives’ sole legal responsibility, at least in the US, is to make as much money as possible for their shareholders. Favoring control over productivity is a violation of that. They are gratifying their egos instead of doing their jobs.

Of course, in a sane world, how they treat their employees would be an issue, not just profitability.

People who run startups, even the successful ones, tend to be awful to their employees. I should say, especially the successful ones.

Me too. Musk can’t actually manage people, but he can pretend more convincingly if he can see them in person and yell at them. There are a lot of managers like that and there are far more executives.

My company looked at the actual business results from the period of COVID remote work. Productivity went up, so they decided to keep things that way. It also allowed them to get rid of all their office space, except for a sparsely populated headquarters building, which is saving them a lot of money.

Most studies have shown that workers were more efficient when working remotely. Why would any executive want to reduce efficiency and increase infrastructure costs? The Return-To-Office push is not rational. It represents an inability to adapt to changing conditions. If boards were doing their jobs, they would be quietly showing those executives the door and looking for better people to run their companies.

The list of possible permanent solutions will not include doing anything about climate change or the other conditions causing the problem. Instead, they will focus on making obscene amounts of money for giant corporations until it becomes obvious they aren’t going to work.

That is one of the most brilliant pieces of sarcasm I’ve ever seen. I wish there were a way to make sure everyone sees it.

My concern is that I expect those incentives to be removed very quickly under the next administration.

The big problem is that those billions of dollars in savings would cost billions of dollars in profits for energy companies. As long as Citizens United remains in place, we are unlikely to see any legislation to encourage people to switch.

I agree with you that Citizens United has almost completely corrupted our political system, but the problem with corporate governance goes back a lot further. I’m not a lawyer, but I’ve read that the landmark case was against Henry Ford as the CEO of Ford Motor Company.

You are absolutely right. Our current laws (and precedents) require CEOs and Directors to produce the best results possible for their shareholders. They can and have been sued for failing to do that. It effectively means they have to screw their employees and customers.

If corporations are people, then nearly all of them are sociopaths. The law requires it. (So it isn’t surprising that the people who prove most effective at running them lean strongly in that direction as well.)

I’m not sure how far along it is, but the EU has been working on a change to their corporate laws that would require corporations to balance the good of their shareholders against other factors, such as their employees, their customers, and the public at large. Among other things, it would make them liable for how they deal, or fail to deal, with their companies’ effects on climate change.

The EU has been steadily passing laws that actually help its citizens and provide protection against corporations. Those of us elsewhere in the world are also benefiting from their efforts. Being required to do the right thing in Europe often makes it less expensive to do it everywhere, than to make special efforts to exploit the areas where that is still allowed. The EU laws also encourage people elsewhere to push for better protections of their own.

The EU is far from perfect, but it gives me hope.

I like you.

Yes. I, my wife, and several friends have had intermittent problems with long-delays in message delivery. In some of those cases, neither of the phones involved moved, which rules out most of the common explanations. I’ve considered disabling RCS entirely, but a recent move to Signal has made this less of an issue.

That is one of the saddest things I’ve heard today.

I did not know about that. Time for me to do some reading. Thanks for your post!

I have thought for years that we needed more political parties in this countries, but the current system makes it almost impossible for them to hold any real power.

What’s needed is a takeover of the Democratic party. The Republicans did it, for evil. We could do it for good.

The practical problem is that Citizens United gives the super-rich most of the power. It would take a very large-scale populist movement to push them out and take back control.

I thought I was past being shocked by things like this, but it still shocked me,

We are experiencing a bizarre confluence of terrible things. Large numbers of people have checked out from reality, which is bad. Meanwhile, more and more people are willing to resort to extreme violence toward anyone who disagrees with them, which is worse. The combination is incredibly destructive.

I saw an article a year or two back that talked about this very thing. It was actually management people at Amazon saying that they predicted they would be “out of employees” before the end of this decade.

Well, clearly, their executive team all need to be in the office. Their actual workers can be trusted to work from home.