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I think there is a standard, so as long your bank’s app supports it and more importantly the merchant actually provides a QR code to scan (which is unlikely).

Then again, I don’t see much need for that when I can just NFC pretty much everywhere (of course the merchant still ends up paying up to 1% on every transaction)

Tapping my phone on an NFC terminal seems much easier and more straightforward than having to scan a QR or install a third party app and having to figure out how to link it with my bank account. There is just probably not a lot of demand for a system like this in much of the west (in cases where you can’t use a card there is always SEPA instant payments)

Apple Pay (unless you use it to pay online) is just wallet app for debit/credit cards, Android has the same thing.

I guess in Europe there is just much less demand for systems like this because NFC terminals are you ubiquitous.

is it really that different from SEPA though?

I don’t see their point much different from what you described in your comment.

> the harsher reality we live in

as terrible as it is if we focus on the whole developed world “we” is just a tiny minority (even in the US, just unfortunately not as tiny…)

> unrealistic view of policing

so maybe they could do a separate version for Americans?

> 0.12 percent of world electricity

That seems a lot? I’d have guessed it’s a magnitude or two less

> Wireless charging is so wasteful

Just how wasteful is it? 70-80% vs 9X% considering how little power phones use on average is insignificant…

You’d save what? 1-2 kWh per year at the very most? Totally irrelevant..

> There's nothing obvious about this to me - how would you distinguish that from survivorship bias?

So success of companies is entirely random? That seems statistically unlikely…

I mean are you really saying that there are no decisions that CEOs regularly take due to which a company might lose/gains up to millions to billions of dollars? Why wouldn’t you pay a CEO whose actions can bring the company billions a 100m or so? Seems like a good deal..

e.g. if you put a random highly competent, educated and very hardworking person in charge of Apple back in 1997 is it more or less likely that he would have done better than Jobs?

I mean, yeah I agree with you in part. In most cases it’s hard to distinguish real impact (even after a few years) from survivorship bias which is why this whole process is so inefficient. I’m sure that quite a few companies are just as likely (if not more likely) to hire a 100+ mil CEO who’ll be a net negative on as one who’s action will bring 10x+ in additional revenue compared to what most other candidates would have.

I’m not that sure that a higher proportion of profits going to the shareholders would be a better outcome. Sure the money saved by paying the CEO less might result in lower prices or go to lower ranked employees but it’s not obvious to me that that’s necessarily what would happen.

> The boards, the CEOs, etc. these are not positions that truly need talent and shrewdness these are positions that exist for people to aspire to.

And yet depending on who’s the people in these positions are the company might earn up to hundreds of billions more or less over a few years.

The decisions Pichai does or does not make clearly can cost/bring in more than just 200-300 million.

> These can all be replaced with collective bodies coming from the firm itself.

Companies run by committees are generally notoriously bad at innovation (just look at Europe..)

Depends how you measure “earning”. If we look at Google’s stock price and growth in relation to its competitors he possibly cost significantly more money to the company than he was paid.

> How many people bought or used a tech product solely based on the CEO of the company? Virtually none

A lot bought it because of some decisions made by the CEO. They likely wouldn’t have bought it if he hadn’t made them (of course it varies a lot between industries).

By how much would you say a famous actor/athlete increases the revenue 10/20/50/100/1000%? A CEO can do that too.

Would Apple have become one if not the most successful companies of all time if they had all the other people who helped Jobs accomplish this but not him?

Probably not.

> Any moron knew it was time to invest in da Cloud once AWS was successful.

Yet Google doesn’t seem to be doing all that well at all in this area. At least relatively…

I do agree in principle but it’s not that obvious to me if overall it would be much better if all the surplus went to the shareholders instead. At least CEOs generally have to actually work for that money..

> CEO's aren't special

some CEOs are terrible, a lot are mediocre and a few are indeed special and worth every penny they get and much more (from the utilitarian/rational point of the company’s shareholders). The problem is that it’s very hard to tell in advance..

> total spending per employee (not even just SWE) is about $1mm

Where did you get this figure? It doesn’t sound right at all..

aren’t Google’s payouts for ads to websites/content creators/etc. included in their costs?

and of course all the other stuff the other comments mentioned and also including paying various contractors hired through other companies..

> Anyone can sound confident on the internet,

I’m not that sure about that

I don’t think “skillset” is the right word either. It’s the financial outcome of the decisions the CEO makes which is the only thing that really matters. Which is notoriously hard to measure and impossible to do in advance. So companies tend to use various proxies when hiring like past experience and less useful ones like skills, education, character, personal connections, work ethic etc.

Obviously this system is very inefficient but nobody can deny that some CEO are better than others and that the best ones can make decisions which bring 10-100x or more money to the company than whatever they are paid.

So if the board of 100 billion company believes that a CEO they can hire for 100 million will increase growth/profits by more than 10 million CEO would it seems perfectly rational to pay him as much (they might be awful at picking the ’best’ person but that does not invalidate the core principle)

> how many super hard working and ultra educated people

Both attributes seem to be somewhat tangentially related to being a highly successful CEO.

There are plenty of examples of “super hard working” and educated CEOs running their companies to the ground and costing much, much more than just $200 million..

Which would likely end with only being able to hire significantly less competent CEOs than other companies.

Only on average over long term of course. There is quite a lot of variance considering how useless someone like Pichai seems to be.

> it's much harder to measure their performance

That doesn’t mean that their performance can’t significantly affect their companies stock price to a much higher degree than similarly paid athletes could.

> Physicality is far more measurable

Who cares. Do you believe that only people whose output could be precisely measured should be highly compensated?

Of course there is a lot of inefficiency considering Pichai seems to be a very poor CEO who’s quite replaceable.

For photos?

Do people really spend significant amounts of time arguing whose phone is better in the real world?

I mean… Switzerland IS the silicon valley of Europe and generally has much higher salaries than every other place in Western Europe. Also it’s a very small country.

Also no.. the average software developer salary in most US (not impoverished) states outside of California is about 90-100k+ which is not that far from what you’d earn in Switzerland on average and significantly above France, Italy and even Germany or the Netherlands.

> Salaries are cheaper while social charges and taxes can be higher.

That doesn’t even come close in explaining the gap in salaries. ~10-20% in extra taxes (also remember that your employer is paying for your health insurance in this US, which is about 10% or so of your pre-tax income in Europe in many countries) still leaves an extra 50-100k or so.

> Salary is like 15-20% of costs

That really, really depends on your business model. For most software companies it’s much higher than that (especially if you factor in stock based comp)

> Everyone wonders why healthcare sucks and labor laws are horrible in the US.

I’m not sure that’s connected. Salaries for tech workers are higher because of much higher demand than in Europe, if it was easy to get a green card.. that would change.

Also not sure what does this have to do with healthcare? Americans and American companies especially (since in Europe you have to cover most of the costs through taxes or insurance yourself) spend much more on healthcare than Europeans do.

and anyway, the US healthcare system seems like a great deal when you earn 200-300k+, much better to pay (or have your employer pay) a fixed fee than ~10% of your income.

> weren't using YouTube to begin with

Or using it with an ad blocker

But nominal growth is huge unlike back in 2008/9, most of that is eaten by inflation but it should still result in meaningful revenue growth in many sectors.

but they are not just somewhat lower, they are massively lower. Is 1-2 extra week really worth $50-100k? Also many (most?) tech companies offer more than 2 weeks in the US