Bank CEO thinks journalist salaries are 'outrageous'

Ragu, just because technology makes certain aspects of life easier doesn't necessarily make it so for everyone.

Take newspaper reporters, for example. They used to have to write one, maybe two stories a day. In the old days, they wrote it out by hand. Then they got typewriters.

Now they have computers, and mobile devices, and not only do they have to write one or two, or in many cases three stories a day, they have to blog. And tweet. And shoot photos. And shoot video. And write three updates for the website.

So, at the end of the night, when the reporter goes home, they get to fall asleep in front of their cheaper TV because they did the job of three people. All thanks to technology.

 

Nor do material goods necessarily correlate with happiness (which leads to a related point that GDP is a poor measure of well-being). Further, the middle class has been screwed by the way housing has turned into a positional good--not because people want to show off their dicks with their McMansions, but because the constant battle for what are now geographically based service like "good" schools has inflated prices (all because the elites don't really want an equal opportunity system--they want one in which their kids can't fail, which is sort of antithetical to social mobility).

 

Know what else the sainted Jamie Dimon had happen on his watch? His bank bribed a handful of politicians to get inflated fees on swap deals that no municiple issuer had any business touching, driving the main county of my metropolitan area into bankruptcy.

http://articles.businessinsider.com/2011-10-23/wall_street/30312613_1_jefferson-county-sewer-rates-financial-firms

Wonder how much bonus Mr. Dimon got from that? Of course it got pointed out by a bunch of haters in the media, who by his reckoning should be in a bread line.

I was raised in the age of Jake Butcher, and was taught that every banker was a theiving son of a bitch to never be trusted. America could do worse than return to that lesson.

 

If a company's value drops so much that your stake in it is worth less than what you loaned, it's a bad decision.

And if, as the junior creditors and bondholders claim, you KNEW the deal would make the company insolvent, you improperly withheld evidence that accurately reflected the solvency of the company, and you KNEW that as a senior secured creditor your interests were safe . . . that makes you a criminal. Or it should. In the USA it makes you a billionaire.


I do, however, agree 100 percent that the idea that we "aren't keeping up" with previous generations is utter bullshit. I grew up with two older brothers in an 850-square-foot house that, when I was 14, we were able to add two rooms onto to make it 1300 sf. My dad saved I don't know how many years just to pay the $10,000 the addition cost.

We believe that nonsense because we are wired to believe --- or advertisers and peers have convinced us --- that doing without ANYTHING we want is being deprived. So the person making $25K a year will still buy a late-model car and an iPhone and fork out $200 for Springsteen tickets under the excuse that, "Well, I deserve to have SOME enjoyment in my life!"

As if there can be no enjoyment in life without such trivialities.

 

This is really laughable. I got my pay cut 6.5% for part of 2010, 2011, 2012 and beyond. I did not get this because I did a worse job or am doing less work. In fact, I'm doing a better job and a lot more work because we have fewer people and more responsibilities. However, almost everything I need to pay for is going up in price: gas, rent, food, clothing, etc. Oh, and I have a 1991 TV that is not flat-screen. And I drive a 1999 car. So no, I'm really not doing better. I'm sure I'm hardly alone in this situation.

 

I find my experience to be the only one that matters.

 

Tell me again why Jamie Dimon cares what journalists' salaries are.

And, tell me he would really even notice very much if (according to Ragu) his salary went from, what, $42 million in 2006, to "only" almost $21 million in 2010.

Honestly, how can people have so much money? It really is almost inconceivable...especially to your average journalist.

I hope he does something good -- preferably for others -- with a very substantial portion of that income.

 

Rich people are never philanthropic with their money.

It would be far better for the government to take that wealth. They would spend it better.

 

Pretty sure no one has advocated that.

Again, Americans are largely OK with others' wealth when they feel that wealth has been fairly earned.

 

The price of goods has gone dow partially due to more widely-available credit and cheap third-world labor. You can argue about the pros and cons of these things, but they're part of the equation. It's not all down to increased standard of living. Those things are so much parts of it that we can't comfortably divorce ourselves from them, but they aren't all good for us long term.

A lot of these goods are also, frankly, pieces of junk. You bought an alarm clock in the 1970s and expected it to last forever. You buy it now and expect to get a year or three's use out of it, because it either breaks or is replaced by version 2.57 so the company can push more widgets.