Recent Comments

• Paul on Disney accused by Catholic cleric of corrupting children’s minds Hi John, you're not the only one! See http://www.jesusandmo.net/
• LR on LIFE: (L-R) SNL comic Tina Fey and Sen. John McCain in 2004 well how much they spend on clothes. Its insane.
• Jan Joris Vereijken on The system is becoming unthawed Strangely enough, "thaw" and "unthaw" mean nearly the same thing, just, as you well know, in Dutch "dooien" and "ontdooien" mean nearly the same thing. If you look up "ont" a Dutch dictionary, you'll find it means, amongst other things, 1) "The reverse of", 2) "To begin with". So: "Ontdooien" = "Beginnen te dooien", "Ontploffen" = "Beginnen met ploffen". Same thing in English; look up "loosen" and "unloosen" in an English dictionary!
• Mauro on Pope Benedict on the Nature of University Reform I know I read before that the internet does reduce attention spans, given how quickly we get information. I've read several articles recently about this, with psychologists showing a decrease in attention span over generations or something like that. That's not the Pope making stuff up. Also, there IS a danger of children playing videogames too much and spending all their time on computers and not interacting with the real world. I don't know how bad this is, but I can see why the Pope wouldn't like it. Instead of forming interpersonal relations, they learn their way around on and filter the world through these machines called computers. I'd say the Pope's statement is fairly innocuous in this case.
• Mudak on Pope Benedict on the Nature of University Reform This pope has spoken before against the availability of information that leads to a greater worldliness and materialism, though. Besides, if new technologies really helped to reduce the incidence of unnecessary theistic dogma (as most theistic dogma is), then why do websites like Rapture Ready and CAPAlert exist?
• John Sinteur on CEOs “cashed out” prior to economic crisis I like the "issue employees options too" solution - not 1/20th, of course, but pro ratio to the ceo salary (if he makes twice your salary, he gets twice the options). The whole idea behind this is to close the gap between lowest pay and highest pay, and there's really no difference between one kind of compensation (such as base salary) and another kind (such as options). And small businesses getting clients is no problem - I've managed to be a one-person startup and get clients without my clients being worried about getting me as personnel, there's rules and forms that can assist, and they can be reused here. Check out the dutch rules here. Doing something similar for outsourced services in this case is trivial.
• John Sinteur on Pope Benedict on the Nature of University Reform Perhaps I'm just too disgusted by everything the church has done and still does. Anyway, you're probably right, there's plenty of things in the article to frown upon without dragging other things in as well.
• Maarten on CEOs “cashed out” prior to economic crisis I'm not so persuaded by your solution to the outsourcing issue; many functions can already be outsourced to specialized companies (e.g. cleaning, reception, gardening) and others can be covered by temp agencies. I suppose you could look at the length of service by temps and the reporting hierarchy, but it seems like a morass to me. It would restrict large companies to only do business with suppliers who are already established and have other clients; any start-up supplier where you're the first customer (e.g. a new catering company for box lunches) is suddenly going to impact executive compensation. Suddenly beginning small businesses are frozen out of a huge market of publicly traded companies. Counting options towards the salary max: how does that work: Do you count the value of the option or that of the stock when its sold? The former seems useless (options are rarely worth much when issued), and the latter... well, if the options become worth more than the 20X, does that force employee salaries to be raised, or is there a cap on the amount the CEO can cash in? (Greatly reducing the incentive.) Or would you say that employees must be issued 1/20th as many options?
• Maarten on Pope Benedict on the Nature of University Reform I'd agree with Andrew that your reaction here doesn't seem warranted by anything in the article. But you could have had a field day with a different angle: the Pope bemoans the isolating effect of the online "virtual reality" while praising the efforts of a reformer who lived isolated in a monastery:

  Although living in the seclusion of the cloister, St Peter Damian was a forceful figure in the Gregorian Reform movement, whose personal example and many writings exercised great influence on religious life in the 11th and 12th centuries.

• Andrew H on Pope Benedict on the Nature of University Reform Please, I'm not a Catholic, but your commentary on Catholicism and the Pope's motivation is silly and unjustified.
• John Sinteur on Pope Benedict on the Nature of University Reform Thanks for the links!
• Mr. N on Pope Benedict on the Nature of University Reform I think you missed this news http://www.repubblica.it/2008/11/sezioni/esteri/benedetto-xvi-27/vaticano-omosessualita/vaticano-omosessualita.html?ref=search http://www.corriere.it/cronache/08_dicembre_01/vaticano_omosessualita_aborto_d7ed9566-bfae-11dd-a787-00144f02aabc.shtml Can't find a source in english, but basically it say: "Vatican refuses to back the United Nations proposal for a global decriminalization of homosexuality." France proposed a universal ban of criminalization of homosexuality. Vatican reprentative at the UN, mons. Celestino Migliore, strongly opposed the proposal. The official position was confirmed later by Vatican spokesmen, adding that even if supporting criminalization of homosexuality the church does not approve the death penalty (used in a few nations against gays). According to Migliore, a similar proposal would "discriminate" all the countries that do not allow same-sex marriage.
• Roland Hesz on User interface of the week - Bulk Rename Utility Holy crap... I love buttons and blingies, but this...
• John Sinteur on CEOs “cashed out” prior to economic crisis Let me try: right now, if I claim with the dutch tax office to be a company of one person, they will look at my customers. If I have only one, they say "ha ha, you're not a company, you're employed". You could do something similar with outsourcing - for the purpose of max ceo salary, any company that is a supplier will be looked at: any of them with too few customers will have their lowest and highest salary viewed as if they were only one entity together with the company they're supplying to. Mind you - that's only for max ceo salary purpose. Outsourcing to a better-receptionist-training supplier is still possible, but you'll have to make sure they have many customers if (and only if) you're doing that to avoid being counted in the CEO limit. CEO options: companies can still give them, of course, but they'll count towards the 20x maximum. Any options I ever got were taxed as income, so the infrastructure to do that is already in place. And there's no reason the board has to give options of their own company only. If a board feels that they have to give the CEO of Boring, Inc options for Google stock to keep the ceo interested, that's up to them. Any ceo who is so limited in his view that he will walk away from an industry where his personal wealth isn't growing enough is a ceo you don't want as board anyway.
• Maarten on CEOs “cashed out” prior to economic crisis I'm glad you brought up the need to deal with splitting the company to effectively raise the lowest salary. I'm curious how you would prevent that without completely preventing businesses from restructuring to become more competitive. Without any regulation, the 15-20X max compensation rule would provide perverse incentive to outsource the lower-paid functions in a company: outsourcing may be cheaper *and* would raise the minimum salary in the company, allowing the CEO a raise, which would be a lose-lose result. How can you create reasonable checks and balances against this? If a specialized company can provide better trained receptionists at a lower cost, are you going to make that illegal? With the CEO buying options: any rational individual will invest money in the companies that they think are going to do best. So if the company hiring a CEO is in a lower growth or lower profit industry, or simply not currently positioned as well as some competitors, a rational CEO might invest in other companies than their own, no matter how good a manager they think they are. Perhaps the board of directors would still like some financial incentive tied to company results--that's where stock/option plans come in. Looking at the two together--if the company is going to do well and the CEO can afford to buy lots of stock or options, he or she may decide to forego much of a regular salary at all, opting to keep salaries low to maximize profits. Oops.