I can cite much much more people there if they want to discuss fairness, they better forget and act this line of argument never existed!

I believe they should justify the value they create in this high paid positions compared to all other people making and disseminating the product. There is no justification for this level.

There are lots and lots of families there living on a less fair level of salary but produce much more value (and no damages).

How can you even spend around 2.5 million A YEAR (okay, before taxes, whatever) if you're not BURNING the cash?

I don't get it.

The point isn't to spend it, the point is to make so much money that investments self replicate. At that point, they can stop worrying about money forever and just live off the interest.

Then, you have trust funds for your children so that none of them ever have to work. And when you die, your children will inherit the fortune, so they can do the same for their children, ad infinitum. And if they want a "job" you can start a nonprofit that they can run, so they can be known as successful administrators while you are recognized as a selfless philanthropist who gave away so much money.

I guess it would be hard on their families because they would move off the fast track of multi-generational absolute financial security.

It's called lifestyle creep.

You go from a $1 million dollar home, to a $10 million dollar home.

Instead of one $50k car, you now own 2-3 $150k cars.

Tens of thousands of dollars will go towards your kids education, every single year.

You hire people to do work for you (tutors, nannies, maids, whatever), these cost tens of thousands of dollars.

Maybe you buy some vacation property - that's more money to spend.

And, in the end, you're not some kind of high-rolling baller that jet sets around the world in a private jet or yacht, spending fortunes on vanity.

You're really "just" living the very upper-middle class life.

Let's says it's the half after taxes: 1.25M. Spending 3424 a day for 365 days should get you there. You have to realize it's our fault to not understand these poor people.

Breaking it down on daily expenses really helps me understand how bad their situation is. Thanks for that!

(I don't even make that much in a month (after taxes)).

You take loan for a mansion that can suck such an income dry. Or two, or 5. Add some luxury lifestyle (cars, clothing, vacations, gadgets, expensive restaurants) and you are losing money.

That excludes purely burning cash ie on drugs/alcohol, hookers or living in super-high rental place.

How do you live in two or 5 mansions at the same time? Questions over questions... But yeah, I don't make enough money to understand those problems.

> Let's says it's the half after taxes

If you make that much money, you're not paying more than 25% taxes. Or you are not using the right lawyers.

Is there any easy way to use those tax evasion schemes as a private preson with a lower income, too?

I wasn't even talking about tax evasion. Just that rich people can often reorganize their income to be capital gains, for which the tax is just 15%.

I don't think this is controversial. Warren Buffett talked about how he pays a lower tax rate than his secretary. There is also the famous curve of tax vs income group: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/10/06/opinion/incom...

Tax evasion is illegal. What these people do is not (but maybe morally questionable?). Please don't go to an accountant asking to help you in "tax evasion schemes" :)

Seems like nobody really cares about tax evasion, though. But maybe only if you're big enough... ;-)

I also think I still have some legal headroom for optimizing my tax return forms. Maybe I'll have to try an accountant next year.

No tax lawyer but the principle this works on, as I understand it, is having a lot of deductible costs to lower your taxable salary. It works for anyone, just the degree to which you have to invent expenses differs.

I'll read more into that. Should be able to find some things.

There's lots of info about this online but it really depends on your country. For me, things like my commute to work, expenses for my home office (even though I worked in an actual office until corona), and other things can be deducted. The most ironic category is expenses necessary to file taxes.

Most countries also seem to have savings plans where you put money away until retirement and pay taxes only when you're allowed to take it out, after retirement age (after retirement, you have a lower income, so pay a lower tax rate). Of course, you still pay those taxes (wouldn't be a certainty of life, now, would it?), but they're lower.

You don't spend $60 to fix a faucet, you spend $100K to redo the bathroom.

Especially since the leadership is just plain bad. Mozilla did develop in the complete wrong direction in my opinion.

It's the organisational equivalent to tech debt.

A clear problem, should address it, but probably won't. And will make up some phoney reason to justify it.

Don't get infuriated at someone for something they were mis-quoted at saying. See the original statement here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24565071

“That's too big a discount to ask people and their families to commit to.“

Doesn’t seem to be much of a misquote. Poor Mitchell Baker. She’ll just have to suffer with her non-discounted salary.

I'm not defending her argument or agreeing with it, I just think that the rest of the quote adds important context. Quoting that last sentence alone almost makes it seem like the bad excuse a child would make. Her actual point is that asking executives to take an 80% pay cut to go work at Mozilla is going to make it difficult to attract talented people, not that lowering the current compensation would cause the current executive team's families to suffer.

Again, I don't agree with that since clearly the higher salaries are not attracting any talented executives either.

Given that she is barely even worth the lower, 80%-discounted salary, I don't find that a compelling argument.

I would much rather a lower-salary, less-experienced CEO who actually cares about the mission enough to accept that salary, than someone who has presided over an erosion of Firefox's market share and significant layoffs, while still increasing her own salary. Clearly the system is not working by paying their CEO a market rate.

Seriously. The only reason they can say that is because they're in charge of the company and get to make decisions. How fair have Mozilla's layoffs been on the families of the laid-off workers? I bet not all that fair.

really makes me want to commit more time to the class war.

Well, rip mozilla