I can’t get inside the head of any of the crazies who go on a rampage and shoot up a school or a house of worship, but it gives me comfort to think that such people now know that if they shoot a CEO instead of a classroom full of children they will be regarded as having made a positive contribution to society. I really hope school shootings will go down after this, and I think they may well.
I know a school shooting up which wouldn’t be a huge crime. Back then, that is. Now I can’t be certain.
“A-are we the baddies?”
This was a random killing by a mentally ill person. Let’s not turn a tragic incident into a trend. Most people don’t hate CEOs. They don’t care about CEOs. They have bigger issues to care about.
How fucking tone-deaf is this person? The bigger issues that we care about are things like going bankrupt from getting sick or injured. Those issues are directly caused by their CEOs. This wasn’t a random killing, which is why people are so happy about it.
Soooo out of touch it’s hilarious.
Please, go ahead and continue to show how little understanding you have for the common man, by all means.
They’re not out of touch, they’re just trying to control the narrative.
“If we pay these professional mouthpieces to spout enough nonsense, perhaps the upwelling of public vitriol will be tamped down until next quarter’s bonuses.”
All the labor agreements of the past century were the tenuous detente of these more severe options. Now they’re relearning their own history.
We are 100% not saying Boo-Urns.
/NYTimes staff writer
The bigger issues that we care about are things like going bankrupt from getting sick or injured. Those issues are directly caused by their CEOs.
I think that depends very much on where you live. Here in Germany we don’t usually go bankrupt from getting sick. I at least worry much more about the climate catastrophe or right wing propaganda on social media. Issues that in a funny coincidence are also caused directly by CEOs.
If he is mentally ill, the majority of the US might be as well and they are tired of the system that makes them ill.
Here’s an idea, make human life more important than line go up. I’m pretty sure that would get alllllll of your asses off the firing line.
What if the line going up wasn’t money, but the value of human life? 🤔
We measure what we treasure!
You mean, it’s all just about the lines we meet along the way?
Okay but what if we just sent everyone some stickers with our logo on it?
I mean EVERYBODY loves stickers. Then w we can keep making money, you can keep dying and you’ll have some great bling for your toddlers coffin!
Everybody wins!
Think of how few stickers are on the average toddler’s coffin?
I was thinking pizza party myself, all our employees (except the ones we fired for being negative nancies) love pizza parties.
But my capitalism!
But the cult of the line goes up says the line must go up, are you even paying attention to the line and whether it’s going up?
“Journalists look for heroes and villains; life is not that simple. Why is the killer getting 10 times as much press as the person who was killed?”
I agree with the last part of this quote, but probably not in the same way they wanted.
Why aren’t we hearing more about the policies the CEO supported that caused so much pain and suffering?
Why did I have to learn about them having double the industry-standard claims denial rate through a meme and not through news articles everywhere?
Why am I not seeing more articles about how much money these people made by denying coverage? Why am I not seeing articles about their political contributions to keep healthcare privatized?
You know why, we all know why. Modern corporate journalists are more narrative drivers than journalists. They attempt to control the talking pints and conversation, and steer clear of anything that would promote asking the right questions.
Because if they show all that shit, then they’re going to be agreeing with everyone else…and won’t be able to pull a “why did this happen” routine
One part of the response is that since the 80s, the media were financialized. One consequence is that the media quality dropped and medias reports go in the way of the finance.
Most people don’t hate CEOs.
Uhhh, that actually might not be true.
If you were to do a poll in the US I think you can crack 51%, especially if you phrase it by mentioning that they have a fiduciary responsibility to maximize profit regardless of morality.
Edit: just had a thought. Given how much more money they make than the average worker, and that the average worker puts their health at risk by sitting at a desk so much, this might actually make sense in terms of risk/reward structure.
If the ultra wealthy make more than 1000 than me, shouldn’t they take 1000 times more risk of dying (I’m not supporting violence).
Why would anybody hate CEOs?
(Btw this is just in the past month)
For the curious: https://musictech.com/news/industry/the-musicians-club-ceo-fires-99-employees-reddit/
This guy ran an online musical instrument business, exploiting unpaid remote workers. There is nothing of value lost here.
I would think that the title of CEO might not be appropriate to every organization either. I know a rather big org where the CEO is basically someone who begs for investors, and the CAO does what a CEO usually does. There are orgs where that’s the CFO, or the COO. Regardless of the title, it’s all executives we’re angry about because of the incredible income disparities versus actual responsibilities.
The executives I’ve met are essentially hype men or thumbs up thumbs down types. All of them were finance types or management types. To me, if your only qualification is many years of managing with barely any experience in the actual product/service your org provides, then that’s a problem.
Hospitals run by management types? Engineering services run by accountants? It’s all middlemen extracting piece of the pie from the people actually doing the work.
As a society we need to purge the system of middlemen period. The internet made middlemen obsolete, yet they are still exploiting labor in ridiculous ways.
I don’t hate somebody just because they’re a CEO.
I hate all rich people though that aren’t using their wealth to improve the lives of others as much as possible.
I mean, the likes of Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos could end world hunger with a snap of their bony fingers, and they’re not doing it, despite the fact that they would still be wealthy beyond comprehension if they did.
We’re asking them to do the bare minimum and utilize their wealth in a responsible manner, and they’re not even doing that much.
the likes of Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos could end world hunger with a snap of their bony fingers, and they’re not doing it, despite the fact that they would still be wealthy beyond comprehension if they did.
I’m reminded of this line Citizen Kane:
You’re right, I did lose a million dollars last year. I expect to lose a million dollars this year. I expect to lose a million dollars next year. You know, Mr. Thatcher, at the rate of a million dollars a year, I’ll have to close this place in… sixty years”.
I mean, the likes of Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos could end world hunger with a snap of their bony fingers
Bullshit.
World hunger, which has in fact decreased drastically over the past century, is not a problem that money can solve, because cost is not the reason it persists where it does.
One major issue: food donations to poor areas tend to be hoarded and distributed unequally by the most powerful people in those poor areas.
So we’re one sentence in, and already we need to fundamentally understand local political dynamics and either use force to ensure equal distribution, or to change local leadership structures. This is already out of control.
You can’t just throw money at the problem and expect it to just be solved. There are real underlying societal and infrastructure issues in a lot of impoverished countries that need to be solved in order for hunger to be solved. You could ship a billion tons of food to a single starving region and there would still be millions of starving people.
Additionally, simply handing out food would kill the domestic food industry (because who would buy food when billionaires are giving it away for free) and would make the country even more problematic.
You should know what you’re taking about when you make ridiculous claims like this.
You can’t just throw money at the problem and expect it to just be solved. There are real underlying societal and infrastructure issues in a lot of impoverished countries that need to be solved in order for hunger to be solved. You could ship a billion tons of food to a single starving region and there would still be millions of starving people.
That’s a strawman. No-one said “they should just, like, buy enough food to feed the hungry”.
When people say it would cost x to solve world hunger, they are talking about those “underlying societal and infrastructure issues”.
So, yes. Everything can be solved with money. You can hire people to “fundamentally understand local political dynamics”, invest in research, pay to fund the programs that will enable impoverished regions to develop the means to build the infrastructure to feed themselves.
Additionally, simply handing out food would kill the domestic food industry (because who would buy food when billionaires are giving it away for free) and would make the country even more problematic.
Just because this is the idea you have in mind for how to solve hunger, and it is, as you rightly stated, a fucking stupid idea, doesn’t make it the only idea.
When people say it would cost x to solve world hunger, they are talking about those “underlying societal and infrastructure issues”.
And those issues cannot be fixed simply by throwing money at them, making “the likes of Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos could end world hunger with a snap of their bony fingers” a deeply ignorant statement.
So, yes. Everything can be solved with money. You can hire people to “fundamentally understand local political dynamics”, invest in research, pay to fund the programs that will enable impoverished regions to develop the means to build the infrastructure to feed themselves.
And then the warlords steal the food and redistribute it as they see fit.
You’re deeply naive about the reality of the circumstances in places where hunger is still a major problem.
The bottom line is, you can’t truly solve world hunger until you solve world peace, and you can’t solve world peace with money.
There are still places in the world where slavery is legal, for fuck’s sake. Do you really, truly think things like this could still be true in 2024 if money and what/who you can buy/hire were actually the solution?
And then the warlords steal the food and redistribute it as they see fit.
No, you are willfully misunderstanding my point.
There are still places in the world where slavery is legal, for fuck’s sake. Do you really, truly think things like this could still be true in 2024 if money and what/who you can buy/hire were actually the solution?
Absolutely.
Throwing money at solving the surface layer issues / symptoms is moot, but yes, for every new layer of problem you uncover you can ask “so what are the causes for that” until you reach something that can be fixed wit money.
Og, and I do not believe that this has anything to do with world peace. The nations on earth without hunger problems aren’t peaceful utopias either, after all. But on the other hand, hunger does seem to cause a lot of instability…
for every new layer of problem you uncover you can ask “so what are the causes for that” until you reach something that can be fixed wit money.
This is just a naive assumption.
The statement that a single billionaire’s wealth can not only solve world hunger, but do it so easily as to compare it to a snap of the fingers, is frankly, comically absurd, and exposes not only a massive ignorance of the root causes of the starvation that is still occurring in the modern day, but even for those issues which CAN be solved with an injection of funds, a massive ignorance of just how MUCH funding it would take.
As one tiny example, the US, a single country, spends over 1 TRILLION on welfare, not once or in total, but annually. And a mere FOUR percent of Earth’s population lives there.
Even the wealthiest human being on the planet’s net worth is nothing compared to what it would take to solve even the small minority of issues cold hard cash can solve. You have no sense of perspective and scale on this.
Most, if not all, CEOs are rich though and I’m sure most people follow your sentiments too. It’s just that CEOs are currently the flavour of the month.
especially if you phrase it by mentioning that they have a fiduciary responsibility to maximize profit regardless of morality.
Also regardless of mortality.
“Our industry is built around devaluing human life for profit. Why aren’t these people valuing our lives?”
It’s like a sketch comedy show. They can’t be this dumb.
It is a comedy routine, and they aren’t dumb, but blind. They see most humans as worthless animals. They could not give a fuck what happens to you, because your existence is irrelevant to their lives.
— “My challenge is keeping employees engaged. How do you maintain a sense of purpose if you think your customers hate you?”
Your customers DO hate you. It’s not just what you think, it’s reality.
Maybe rather than trying to maintain a sense of purpose for what you’re doing, you should take a step back and question WHAT you’re doing, and whether it has any purpose in society at all other than making you money?
if you think your customers hate you?”
They were under the impression that the customers didn’t hate them? How out of touch are they?
Very. Most don’t even know how much a dozen eggs cost, much less how much rent costs, much less how little disposable income people have. Money is just numbers to them. It’s not necessary for their survival only for their status. So it’s a totally different reality for them.
it’s a totally different reality for them.
Oh I know. I used to work in middle management for a franchise and it was so bizarre to be at the corporate meetings. You have the people from corporate talking about how profit is up from last year, and franchisees complaining to them they need to increase prices more because minimum wage increased and profit percent is down.
It does not matter to them that they are receiving more money than ever because the actual money doesn’t matter. All that matters is they are getting a bigger portion of the money than anyone else. It’s just a high score for them to run up.
Classic narcissist trait. Complete and funnily honest bewilderment at how it is possible that some people don’t love and admire then. My dad who is estranged from the whole family (because of that) was one level below the C suite at a huge corporation. Treated everyone like shit, surprised Pikachu face when one by one the family abandoned him. I guess it takes to be such a psychopath to make it that far on the corporate ladder.
keeping employees engaged
Not the problem.
if you think your customers hate you?
They do not hate them. They hate you. The C level.
Hoy fuck the disconnect in those people.
Hoy fuck the disconnect in those people.
Amen to that.
Listen to these guys talk about how they’re proud of what they did… NO recognition that all those ‘denials’ are denying real people the care they need.
Most people don’t hate CEOs. They don’t care about CEOs. They have bigger issues to care about.”
Bigger issues? Like the health care bills they are drowning in? Also, I think most people loathe CEOs, these bitches have zero awareness.
“I keep taking more from them and they don’t like it?!”
Hate is the cost of squeezing those extra dollars. Extra profit isn’t free, they’re lowering another game slider for it, and that slider is how much your customers support your actions. They’re only still around as a customer because all the other options have been bought out or run out of business.
The only reason customers are engaged is because the service sucks, the product sucks, the support sucks, the tos sucks, the sneaky fees suck, the greed sucks, the CEOs suck.
Well, corporate America is made up of hardworking Americans who do their best to reward the investors, and many times those investors are pension funds
Ah yes, every day I wake up to go to work just to do my best to reward the investors. Not because I need to pay for living expenses, just because I love pleasing the investors.
JFC these people are living in a fantasy world.
Just wanted to comment on these two.
“I have to wonder if the demonization of corporate America and the wealthy over the last four years planted a mind virus in the assassin’s mind.”
Fuck you! You have the mind virus. A virus which leads you to believe that the rest of us should suffer because you’re better. Eat shit anonymous CEO.
“If you walk by the place where it happened, it’s business as usual, which gives me some perspective. This was a random killing by a mentally ill person. Let’s not turn a tragic incident into a trend. Most people don’t hate CEOs. They don’t care about CEOs. They have bigger issues to care about.”
Then light some candles and put out some flowers you fucking cowardly parasite. Hold a vigil, gather your CEO buddies and sing Kumbaya. Be sure and post the date online so all of the healthcare CEOs know when to be there.
Most people don’t hate CEOs.
The public reaction to this event disagrees with this claim.
Social media is used by a tiny minority of the population.
Thinking you can extrapolate what you see on social media into “the public” at large is the chief reason people on Reddit and Lemmy were so baffled when Harris got her ass kicked in the election.
Be more mindful of what’s true of “the public”, and what’s true only in the echo chamber.
95%+ of posts and comments have been in support of a murderer, barely any opposition, even on more conservative social media like Facebook… Sure, the general public is different, but even if it’s 60%, that’s still a lot…
Mind virus.
Lgbt.
Left.
Right.
Wokeness.
Immigrants.
Distract
Depose.
Deengage.
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Even left/right/center is scapegoating. Or rather divide and conquer.
And suddenly the divide is a commie one - proletariat vs borgouis.
Sorry about your daughter.
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I hate CEOs, landlords, royal families, and anybody else perpetuating the status quo.
Why don’t you love your oligarchy overlords? All our surveys say you’re happy to have no choices other than the ones our questionnaire leads you to. You didn’t cancel your subscriptions after we jacked the prices up a half dozen times in the last five years and/or shoved ads at you, so you must be happy.
The disconnect between public perception and personal humanity has been striking, with some commentary bordering on dehumanizing.
Yeah it’s a lot easier to humanize someone who makes six figures than someone who makes seven. Why don’t you start there?
Or maybe just make it so the CEO doesn’t make 700x more than the lowest paid worker. You don’t even have to reduce the CEO pay to do it! Just lift up those other people.
That’s actually been studied. Turns out that about 40 is the tipping point for most people, as in CEO earnings 40 times more than the lowest paid workers. Up to that point people think they boss earns it, above that resentment starts to grow.
They’re at 700. Yeah, that’s dangerous. People are very sensitive about relative earning for work. Fairness is just hard wired into all animals and it’s dangerous to ignore this, although humans react a bit later and that gives a false sense if security for those at the top.
But it’s inevitable as a successful business grows, and the population grows. A CEO of a company of 100 people does not have the same level of responsibility as the CEO of one employing hundreds of thousands (Google says UHC employs 440,000, for example).
Working conditions were inarguably much worse a century ago, but the gap wasn’t anywhere close to 700x back then, was it? The gap was smaller not because the CEOs were more generous, it was just because the largest businesses were much smaller.
So you’re saying large corporations need to be broken up into smaller businesses I avoid concentrating too much wealth in upper management.
No, arbitrarily punishing a business for being too successful is both nonsensical, and has a chilling effect on new entrepreneurship. Also, it makes literally zero difference to someone earning $10/hour if one CEO is earning over $4000/hour, or if ten CEOs are each earning $400/hour.
Ultimately, the ratio itself doesn’t matter at all. The actual number is what actually matters. Who do you think is more likely to be more resentful, someone making $10/hour under a CEO making 50x that, or someone making $100/hour under a CEO making 50x that? Obviously the first person…if they can’t make ends meet, it’s not going to make any difference to them if the CEO gets a pay cut, the fuck do they care?
Businesses that were too successful are also called monopolies, and have a chilling effect on entrepreneurship all in their own.
Median wage in USA is about $20/h, so the actual numbers say there are a lot of people being closer to having trouble making ends meet. Even then, the ratio matters a lot. It’s the difference between “we’re all in this together” and “some of you won’t make it but it’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make”. In the latter situation there is a lot more resentment and sympathy for violence.
Businesses that were too successful are also called monopolies
No. There is no inherent relationship between the two things. A business can absolutely be very successful while there is competition, simply by being the best ‘competitor’ in the eyes of the customers.
the ratio matters a lot. It’s the difference between “we’re all in this together” and “some of you won’t make it but it’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make”.
The vast majority of people don’t know or care how much the person at the top is making, at all. They care only about if they’re in good shape themselves. Someone who’s making $100/hour and is living comfortably is, in 99% of cases not going to really give a shit if the CEO is making 50x what they are, or 500x.
That’s the reality.
15% of people make $100k in the USA. That means 85% care and a large part of them are not in a good shape.
What infuriates me is that there are those that make 6 figures as being able to potentially make 7. And sure, some of them might.
But are they brain surgeons that have such a specialized life saving surgery that by the nature of economics pushes the value of their skill exceptionally high? Nope.
Hell, I make 6, and I’ll admit, I have a lot more than a lot of people. I’m 2-3x the median of my area. I can’t buy a house. I own a 7 year old RAV4. If I was better managing my money and not having to pay out my ass for my ex wife, sure, things would be better.
It’s not at all difficult to find how just a little less income makes life much harder. It is VERY difficult to see how someone who has so much money can be remotely ok with people having it harder than them.
Those pulling in 7 figures without highly valuable skills should be dehumanized. Because they have abandoned what has helped humans survive at all. Each other.
Also, as if many CEO’s and upper managements humanize their customers and not see them as numbers in a spreadsheet.
US income distribution is on the same level as fucking Russia. Bring back the tax brackets from the 1950’s and 60’s.
It’s different people. Those in US still own real things and do something with them to get such incomes.
Those in Russia steal.
In other words, in USA connections are means to help actual power and tools to actual power. In Russia it’s the other way around, actual power is all dependent on connections, which ultimately all go to one ruling group.
It’s nowhere as bad. But it will get as bad as Russia, of course, if Americans don’t learn something.
Hahaha. Just because it’s “legal” here doesn’t mean it’s not stealing. Taking billions in insurance premiums and then spending it to lobby to make it harder and harder to qualify to receive money for a claim is “legal” but so unethical and morally bankrupt that a guy just killed a CEO because of it and the entire country just shrugged and said “Yeah that’s about right.”
It’s legal in Russia too at this point. That’s not what I mean. Wealthy people in Russia own nothing really - they are just pockets of Putin. Less wealthy people are just elements of various mechanisms, legal and not, able to steal according to their status. Less wealthy than them - those who do honest business, but pretend the competition is not stifled by various invisible limitations by connections. The lower it gets, the more it is like normal stuff, but one can feel that something is wrong even arriving from Yerevan to Moscow, and Armenia is quite oligarch-owned too.
In Russia there are no CEOs to kill. People in such positions are kinda normal and everyone knows where real power lies, and those holding it can’t be so easily caught.
I misunderstood the core of what you were saying. Thank you for explaining it like this.
Dude, you have a self selecting Elite in the US and most other countries. It is the same shit. How many “rags to riches” stories still happen? And these ultimately also involve the right connections at the right time.
Look at the lauded “started in a Garage” tech billionaires.
Bill Gates?
His father was a prominent lawyer, and his mother served on the board of directors of First Interstate BancSystem and United Way of America. Gates’s maternal grandfather J. W. Maxwell was a national bank president.
At age 13, he enrolled in the private Lakeside prep school.[14][15] When he was in eighth grade, the Mothers’ Club at the school used proceeds from Lakeside School’s rummage sale to buy a Teletype Model 33 ASR terminal and a block of computer time on a General Electric (GE) computer for the students.[16] Gates took an interest in programming the GE system in BASIC, and he was excused from math classes to pursue his interest.
Zuckerberg? Haward student
Bezos? Princeton and then various banks, albeit his family background actually was lower/middle class.
Musk? Fucking apartheid mine owners.
No, I get how it’s in the USA. Matches your description. Still radically different from Russia.
Really? It feels worse than Russia.
You haven’t been to Russia.
I haven’t been to America either
Awww poor billionaires. So sad.
Good. Money can’t buy happiness and if they try, we need to take their happiness. Billionaires already have everything, they don’t need peace of mind.
