“One thing that’s surprisingly inexpensive for a lot of our clients is health insurance. The insurance policy for members of SAG-AFTRA is amazing. For the money, it is the best health insurance out there. It’s only about $400 per quarter for an individual, so you’re looking at about $1,200 or $1,500 a year for the best PPO coverage in the country. It travels with you everywhere, and you have access to emergency care facilities and 24/7 mental-health care. It’s great. I wish I could get it.”
For me, this is the most surprising quote from the article. It really shows how us Plebians are ground into dust by the healthcare industry.
I can assure you that the majority of SAG actors are working service jobs, living hand to mouth. This isn't an example of the rich lording over the plebs, this is an example of a union doing right by its members.
Why should health insurance be progressive? I'd be willing to bet that healthcare costs scale sub-linearly with income, so why would a private insurer charge more to somebody who makes more money?
In the case of a properly functioning public healthcare system, I totally buy and support it, though.
Good question, but I'm not opposed to this. I'd say the German health care system is mostly a good one, and I'm absolutely happy to pay a percentage of income. Sure, if they managed to have it running at a flat fee that doesn't disadvantage people with minimum wage jobs, I'd gladly pay less - although I think 10% is totally fair, especially when comparing it to the US system and people doing kickstarters for their cancer treatment...
I actually agree with you, for a system run as a public service (which I think healthcare should be), I just don't see a workable justification for it under a private system.
The difference is, I think, in the word "insurance". If a USAn doesn't pay for health insurance, they have to pay for healthcare. I don't particularly know how Germany's system works, but I'd assume that non-payment of taxes, while it probably has other repercussions, does not preclude receiving healthcare.
My complete guess would be that this is an intra-union agreement. The insurer could be charging a fixed rate per member with the union enforcing a progressive scheme.
Same in UK - you pay a % of your salary above a certain level, so the more you earn the more you pay. But you are always covered for absolutely everything without co-pays, limits etc etc no matter whether you earn zero(and pay nothing towards it) or are a millionaire. Using it also doesn't affect how much you pay, it's just a flat % of your salary regardless of whether you are healthy or chronically ill.
If you're talking about national insurance, which is more or less fixed, then you are incorrect. The NHS is not funded by it. It's still payed by taxes but it's not a flat rate tax.
Getting into and maintaining SAG membership is very time consuming and expensive.
You could work in the industry for years and never get in. Others get lucky and get in within a few months. A lot of people are SAG Eligible but can't afford the initial fees to get in.
It's not like a standard union where you show up to work every day for months and you are in. Non-union basically do the exact same thing as union folk, but get paid less per hour. In contrast, there is a budget limit to how many SAG workers can be on set, so while your hourly is higher, the quantity of work you have is much lower.
Most SAG members are background extras, who don't earn very much money, and can't work more if they wanted to.
Definitely not the union you'd want to emulate. Film and TV actors are all temporary workers.
Well, the good thing about unions, is they're democratically organized. So, tech workers should look at what works in SAG (performance based pay w/reasonable floors, great benefits), emulate that, and set aside the problems/barriers you describe.
And actually tech workers have a lot of similarities to those in entertainment (both front and back of house) larger numbers of nerodiverse members than the population at large for example.
The Biggest tech union on the UK just merged with BECTU (the eqvielent of IATSE)
It's missing the component that the employer is paying. I doubt doctors, hospitals, and drug manufacturers are selling to SAG-AFTRA for less than to other similar size organizations. But SAG-AFTRA was able to negotiate better contributions from employers.
As someone linked below, you can actually see here that employer is kicking in another 15%+ for premiums, which at $50k per year is $625 per month and at $100k per year is $1250 per month:
Employer portion plus at least $133 from the employee = at least $500-$600 per month, if not $1,200+ for the higher earners which seems about what you get on healthcare.gov. I didn't look into what deductibles and copays were, but I'd be surprised if it was much lower than what most employer based health insurance plans offer.
This is one of things I always wonder about. Libertarians and other free-market enthusiasts should actually be for collective bargaining and unions. Because in an actual free market it's legal to form unions, just like it's legal to form a corporation.
Collective bargaining is a feature of a free market. If you don't like the idea of unions and collective bargaining, you don't like free markets.
Agreeing with this and referencing Peter Thiel, which I do a lot. In Zero to One, Thiel argues that the pure, ideal free markets that politicians and economists dream of drive profits to zero. Think about the math - it's obvious. You see this in high competition markets for effectively identical products, like groceries or gas stations. Razor-thin margins. The only way to profit is via some sort of localized monopoly, which is what "unique value proposition" of any sort actually means. This isn't a defense of old-school robber baron monopolies (which break the math in the other direction), but it's to Thiel's broader ideas about how to build a high profit company.
The need for labor unions is a product of the free market, and a way to build a unique value proposition. With employees that are totally fungible, totally replaceable parts, the marginal value of labor itself is driven to zero. Wages become a race to the bottom, and working becomes unprofitable. But by saying "Only members of the union can work here", the union sharply decreases the available labor pool, thus creating a unique value proposition.
In other words, it's a market response to a market problem.
The people who call for "free markets" and rail against unions basically don't understand what it is they're asking for. They're in love with an ideal, not thinking about how profit actually works in the real world, as a function of economics. It's straight-up ignorance reinforced by puritan idealism.
"Americans mythologize competition and credit it with saving us from socialist bread lines. Actually, capitalism and competition are opposites. Capitalism is premised on the accumulation of capital, but under perfect competition all profits get competed away. If you want to create and capture lasting value, don't build an undifferentiated commodity business."
I support free markets because they tend to distribute scarce resources efficiently, and monopoly disrupts that. A union is, roughly, an attempt to form a monopoly and charge a price above the market price, which our first expectation should lead us to think will cause a deadweight loss and drop in employment, although there will be some rents to the workers that keep their jobs which of course is why they are trying to do it.
Corporations can take on a role as a monopolist but it's not inherent to their nature. I would hazard to say that most corporations are in a market where they can't affect the equilibrium market price of the good they're selling by very much, and thus don't resemble a union in that respect.
What about exclusive contracts? They're common as dirt in the business world... "You commit to us, you have to buy this only from us for the next X years". I don't see how this is different from unions.
That's true if you have a free market, but the healthcare market is not free due to supply restrictions (can't make new doctors easily), demand restrictions (employer or government bears most of the cost, but patients are consuming healthcare services), and complex regulatory things that increase overhead. So an idealogically pure libertarian would argue that unions are bad, but a more pragmatic libertarian could argue that unions are bad overall, but might help address some of the current problems with the healthcare system.
I guess I interpreted the argument as being about workers and employers, with healthcare cost as a given, with the debate mainly being about how much the employer should subsidize healthcare. Which basically amounts to how high should the wage be since you can lump in any subsidy to healthcare with the standard wage and consider that the entire compensation package that's being negotiated over. And in the case of software engineers specifically, which is what I responded to, the market has a lot of buyers and sellers.
Unions almost invariably require government regulated support, because collective anything rarely stands on its own before people defect.
I think that's a general good feature of the free market. Collusion is hard until you get down to only a few providers of a service. (In this case, labor.)
The real problem here is that employees generally have no power, because they have no flexibility. We have a nationwide, intergenerational case of people living paycheck to paycheck when even modest savings would've lead to fantastic wealthbuilding. In short, we wouldn't need unions if employees had a BATNA.
This is a financial education problem. But it's one that could be temporarily solved by susbsidizing a BATNA for workers, rather than enforcing labor laws that lead directly to inefficiency.
> Libertarians and other free-market enthusiasts should actually be for collective bargaining and unions.
This depends on what you mean by "be for collective bargaining". As in most things, the details matter, and the slogan "be for unions" is almost meaningless.
In the sense that people should be able to form and/or join unions etc, then absolutely, I think most libertarians would be totally for it.
But often when people say you're for or against unions, they're talking about specific laws with specific consequences. For example, should an employer have the right to fire an employee who is attempting to start a union? A libertarian might well say that both sides have liberties that shouldn't be taken away in this case. If the employee manages to start a union and gets collective bargaining power - good for them! But the government shouldn't intrude on the employer's right to fire employees if it so chooses, no matter what the cause.
Another example - many countries have laws that say that if some percentage of the workforce, say 30%, agrees to form a union, then all employees are now automatically part of that union. This makes it much easier to form unions, obviously, and you might make the case that it helps protect the usually-less-powerful employees from the usually-more-powerful employer. On the other hand, this often means that individual employees don't have the freedom to negotiate their own specific terms with the employers, even if they prefer not to be part of the union. Or that the employees now must pay money into the union, whether they want to or not.
Again, all of these are legitimate debates and most of the sides of this can be defended. But the slogan "you should be for collective bargaining and unions" just doesn't include enough nuance to even being to address how you should react to each of the above - which are the specific laws that people are talking about when talking about unions.
Thanks for pointing out the bargaining power asymmetry problem. Asymmetries in power are fundamental to how markets work, but when most people say "free market", they mean some imaginary world where buyer and seller have exactly the same power.
As a libertarian, what bothers me is the mandatory union. If you want to unionize, go on a strike or whatever, I'm OK with that. But if I don't want to, respect me and leave me alone.
This is a variation on the tragedy of the commons.
For each person, the most advantageous outcome is if everybody but them participates in a union. The end result is that nobody participates in a union, making things worse for everybody.
^ This. The only thing that I really have against unions is that so many make it difficult to get a job where they operate, and on the flip side, require membership to work at a given employer. If a union's benefits are so good (and they often are) then there shouldn't be a need to put people in against their will.
Yep. Though we're a rare breed I'll admit, I'm an American libertarian and I'm supportive of unions and collective bargaining.
I have a caveat in that I don't support laws that interfere with such bargaining or artificially increase one party's market power (closed shop laws). In the US this identifies me as being "right to work" which is often seen as anti-union.
For example I don't support the UAW due to their long history of using the state to increase their market power.
When people say they “support unions” they mean that they support laws that “artificially increase one side’s bargaining power”, which you say you don’t. The most important of such laws are ones that inhibit employers from replacing striking workers.
Without this law and the corollary of reasonable firing (as in with a lawful reason), unions are dead on arrival as anyone willing to unionize will get fired on the spot.
This is similar to the procedural loophole of registering manifestations where the mayor or other redeposit body can virtually countermand the right to organize. It happens all the time.
If conditions are bad workers have an increased ability to unionize. If they're not bad they don't. That seems like a fair incentive for businesses to keep conditions good. I think unions got a bad rap precisely because they used the government as a lever (and the trappings of that, e.g. UAW bosses in Detroit). If the government steps back the system balances itself.
I 100% agree and should have said that in the original post. I’m not exactly sure how I feel about those laws (though I flat out oppose attempts to require cause for firings in general), but I mainly wanted to point out that principled libertarians trying to square the circle, the way the person I was relying to was, are trying to have their cake and eat it too. Unions can only exist and be effective, in the vast majority of cases, because the state uses its coercive power to give them artificially-inflated bargaining power. Whether that’s for the better or worse is a different question.
>For example I don't support the UAW due to their long history of using the state to increase their market power.
That's a fair caveat from a libertarian standpoint. It's just that most of the self-declared libertarians I meet seem to have the idea that the state should forbid unions from interfering with their idea of a free market. Which sounds very unlibertarian to me.
That's not really gatekeeping. In order for words to have meaning they have to preclude the set of all things they are not. There is a cogent argument that support of collective bargaining is compatible with the philosophical school of libertarianism, and that a liberatarian subscribing to that school of thought would consequently support it. It's not necessarily self-evident, and you can argue against it if you'd like, but then it's simply a disagreement. Gatekeeping implies an unreasonable barrier being imposed on an ingroup or social identity (not typically a political or philosophical school of thought). For example, "you're not really a fan of <band> if you can't name all the songs from their <obscure album>."
People disagree about the finer points of political ideas all the time. But drawing a line in the sand doesn't immediately signify gatekeeping, it signifies normal debate. This is especially evident if you compare the example I gave to what you're calling gatekeeping: it would be unreasonable to require all fans of a band to have episodic recollection and deep opinions on every song ever recorded by the band. But it would not be unreasonable to assume a libertarian with philosophical fidelity to the school of thought supports collective bargaining. Again, it might not be correct, but it's not ridiculous.
As a meta point, I'm noticing a trend online where people will give a quick driveby dismissal using terms from the popular zeitgeist. Typical, recent examples include "gatekeeping", "whataboutism" and "gaslighting." Sometimes these are appropriate criticisms to levy at someone's argument and they draw a real insight. But they're also frequently abused or pigeonholed into discussion in contrived ways. From my perspective this seems like a more subtle equivalent of collecting logical fallacies to point out in other people's arguments online. It's symptomatic of something larger: that snark is the modern saboteur of reasoned debate.
Very, very rarely is a single sentence critique of another person's point anything more than a middle brow dismissal. It sounds intellectual but there's no deconstruction or antithesis involved. If you wanted to substantially critique the commenter's point, it would probably have been more appropriate to cite "No True Scotsman" instead of "Gatekeeping". Better still would be to skip the trite idiom altogether and explain why you consider it an error with substantive depth. A pithy comment only convinces those who already agree with you. A meaningfully persuasive one convinces the audience, if not the original commenter.
Libertarianism was born as a left wing ideology in line with many anarchic ideologies. It is fully inclusive. Right wing Libertarianism is by definition a paradox. You can only partake if you have the capital resources, ie not fully inclusive at all. Collective bargaining is fully aligned with classical Libertarianism and is somehow shunned by right wing libertarians. You can see how i have come to the conclusion right wing libertarians are a confused bunch. Their ideas are inconsistent and incoherent.
Actually, it shows you plebeians the power of unions.
I have a handful of friends that work in Hollywood as actors and producers. They get paid amazingly well and get insane amounts of time off.
...all because they have organized labor. Most people would be amazed how much an extra gets paid once they have their SAG card.
Many take advantage of unemployment as well since they typically work on contracts. Have several friends that will work for 6 months on a show and then take 3-4 months off while collecting unemployment and figuring out what contract they want to take next.
Typical health care costs in developed countries is on the $3k-$5k per person per year range [0]
(The U.S. is nearly $10k a year)
However, on average the U.S. government (thus taxpayer) funds half of the health care costs, meaning that the private sector has to fund about $5k per person per year. That would suggest the SAG employer is paying $3500 a year and the SAG employee $1500 a year.
Here in The Netherlands we pay ~€90~€120 premium to insurers. The €90 package only gives you access to select hospitals per region for non-emergency care, and you aren’t covered for ‘extras’ like physiotherapy. The €120 package is pretty much the ‘all-in’ package.
On top of that you have a ~€380 deductible. Everything except medicine costs goes from this deductible first. If you really trust your health (or have the money to cover it) you can raise the deductible to ~€800, which will drop your monthly premium by ~€20.
GP visits are free and act as a sort of filter for access to the ‘real’ healthcare system. Anything minor (prescriptions for various minor diseases, mole removal, etc) goes through him and if he thinks something warrants further research you get blood work done or see a specialist, waiting times usually 1 week, 2 weeks tops.
All in all its a really nice ‘hybrid’ sort of system. It isn’t 100% socialized like some countries around us, but the end result is that we have the best healthcare system in Europe (and thus probably the world) :)
It's fairly irellevent who pays, everyone ends up paying in the end.
The Netherlands spends $5385 per year per person on healthcare, 80% of that is spent by the government.
The UK spends $4192 per year, again 80% is by the government. The UK has trickier cost areas to handle too (healthcare in Scottish islands is far more per person than in Rotterdam)
Measuring the objective quality of a health care system is almost impossible (it varies dramatically on your subjective priorities), let alone measuring value per dollar, but I don't think I've ever seen one that claims the Netherlands is better than Scanadavian ones.
As far as I know the EHCI (Euro Health Consumer Index) is the one that is considered a very accurate source, and they have ranked The Netherlands as having the best system for 8(!) years in a row so far, with the Swiss hot on our heels[1]. They're also coincidentally Sweden-based, in case you might feel they would be biased.
The problem with comparing worldwide is that the WHO does an annual health report, but this focusses on a different aspect each year, instead of a general outlay. It has been done in 2000, with data from 1993-1997. The Netherlands switched from a completely socialised system ('Ziekenfonds') to the hybrid system in 2006. A lot of our improvements are because of that, and thus aren't in the 2000 WHO ranking.
The only other source I could find is the Legatum Institute prosperity index[2], which puts us 6th behind: Luxembourg, Singapore, Switzerland, Japan, Austria, Sweden, Norway. As their healthcare research is only part of a bigger picture (and thus less focused), I tend to give it less weight.
As a sidenote, aside from a small bit of extra pride its not very important where a country sits in the top 15, all these countries their healthcare systems can be regarded as top notch. The only places to attain a higher level of care would be in (usually foreign) private institutions, which come with such high costs that they are only accessible to an elite few.
It's interesting. Looking at total healthcare spending from 1990 to 2005, Netherlands and Sweden were about the same per capita. From 2005 Netherlands costs shot up, overtaking countries like France, Germany, Iceland etc.
Sweden didn't shoot up until 2010.
The Netherlands has spent a lot on healthcare, especially after 2006 - not as much as Norway (which I suspect has higher costs due to sparsely populated areas), Switzerland, and Luxemburg, but more than the rest of Europe. If you pay more, you get more.
Are you sure the benefits of your hybrid system aren't because you increased health spending by over 50% (about 7% pa) from 2004 to 2010, where Sweden only increased by about 30% (about 4% pa)?
I can't find the story, but several years ago, an NBA player bought a bunch of fast food franchises, and there was collective head-scratching about why he'd do that. Matthew Yglesias pointed out that it was brilliant: the value of the franchises was that they were illiquid, so that he had a backstop against overspending or family members asking for money.
About that last point: for those of us who come from middle class backgrounds, it's easy to think "just be reasonable about what you give people". It's a much harder proposition if your entire family has been struggling your entire life--especially if they made sacrifices for your dream (I think John Wall's mom once let the lights get cut off to pay for something basketball related for him).
On that last point... an analogy When the microfinance exuberance started dying back about 5 years ago, I heard the following interpretation of micro-credit:
Poor rural people need credit because they can't save. They can't save because they owe their neighbours a moral debt.
Jennifer really needs $50 to pay her kid's dentist bill. She looked after your grandmother, when she was sick and you were away. You owe her (and love her, you're friends).
If you have $50 saved, you will get requests that cannot be refused. Everyone is broke and everyone owes eachother favours. Debt is the only way of getting a lump sum. The critic concluded that saving with a (big) negative interest rate is a bitter pill, but better than nothing.
Fast food franchises sound like a great idea, if they aren't too failure prone. You lock up illiquid assets. You can give family members jobs, if necessary/appropriate. The bad idea side effects of this is that businesses can potentially lose money as well as value.
The spanner in any such system will always be debt. You can lock up all your assets but if you have assets to your name, you can get credit and spend those assets regardless.
This is a great point, and it also fits with how a lot of "tribal" societies work/worked. You never accumulate wealth, but, for instance, if you have a large yam harvest, you throw a feast for the entire community.
That reminds me of the basic investing advice by a friend of mine who is a $100M fund manager. He says there are three factors to any investment - risk, returns, and liquidity. Fix one of these three. If you want low risk, you must sacrifice either high returns, or high liquidity. So most good investments (relatively low risk and high returns) have poor liquidity - it can be slow and difficult to convert the invested capital back into cash. Buying fast food franchises is a good example. They're reliable cash cows, but hard to sell.
The ultimate returns come from low liquidity and high risk. That's the world of venture capital. Without the possibility of 100x returns, it's absolutely stupid to invest in new businesses with little likelihood of survival. Money tied up in preferred stock is effectively illiquid and can be completely lost (hence the term "liquidity event"). And that can and should take years.
ESPN's 30 for 30 docs are really great, even if you're not particularly huge into sports. Broke is one of my favorites (after a "The Two Escobars"). It goes into a lot of detail about how ill-prepared many professional athletes are for the lifestyle, how they overestimate their net worth and their projected career duration, and digs into all of the different pitfalls new signees might face as they enter sport. It's easy to blow it off and say "whatever, they're all soft, tattooed millionaires anyway", but there's a lot of heartbreaking instances where people did the right thing and still ended up bankrupt.
This is my favorite ESPN documentary. It was so good. I met Bernie Kosar among a bunch of other athletes and celebrities during Super Bowl XXXI. I was working security. I had to walk him around for a few hours. He was a real nice guy. Real accommodating to all the fan request. Even the crazy ones. So when I saw him on the special I could see how he could be taken advantage of. He seemed like a guy who was too eager to please.
I used to like watching those fluffy biography shows where they talked about people who hit it big and got rich and famous. Sometimes it was overnight. Sometimes it took them years.
Most of the people had already died. Some were still alive. The ones that were still alive, you could tell that they tried to "fluff it up a bit" -- not get too critical.
But in almost every instance? If you hit it rich (famous makes it even worse), you might as well become a drug addict or shoot yourself. It tends to destroy lives. There's nothing happy about it.
On reddit awhile back there was an "AskReddit" about what to do if you won a bunch of money in the lottery. The best advice was sobering: it is a minefield of self-deception and manipulation.
What's so weird to me is the huge chasm between the reality of getting rich quick and the way the general public views it. We've glamorized it way too much.
NPR had a story where an NBA player described his finances. He is basically on an allowance and money shows up in his checking account each week.
His advisor seemed like a good guy and talked about the dangers of family asking for money and hangers on. His advisor acted like the bad cop and actually did the rejections for requests and even introduced the player to other players who made good choices and could be a mentor/friend.
Outside the allowance if he wants a new car or vacation he calls the advisor and they tell him yes or no or later and help him get a good deal if yes.
He talked about having no financial clue early on and straight up didn't know the value of say $20k because he had never been exposed to dealing with money in that way.
He also talked about teammates blowing through their money like crazy and meanwhile he saves.
He did a stint in the NBA d league for rehab at one point and bought a not so great car (relative) because he thought having his usual car there would be embarrassing as it was quite a contrast relative to his d league teammates. Finally one of his teammates asked why he was driving that boring old car, so he had his car brought to the local city so his teammates could drive it ;)
Granted this guy has several houses, bought stuff for family and can spend like crazy on his allowance, but within some level of reason.
Dude was lucky he got a good advisor and was smart enough to listen.
So, doing the "right thing" might not be the way to phrase it, but there are many athletes who lived within their means themselves and were taken advantage of by people they trusted. A recent example of the is Jack Johnson [1], whose parent's spent all of his money and left him $10M in debt.
> "whatever, they're all soft, tattooed millionaires anyway"
Despite my disdain for spectator sports "soft" is never a word I would use for their athletes. If anything, I would expect those who have had to work so hard and stay disciplined would be able to roll that discipline over into fiscal responsibility.
Thought this bit was interesting:
"... actors, recording artists, producers, writers, and athletes with personal net worths ranging from $1 million to $50 million..."
I kind of feel bad for the low end of her clients whose net worth is only $1 million. Don't get me wrong, it's a lot of money. But it also doesn't go that far nowadays, especially if you live in SF Bay area (though most of her clients are probably in the LA area; slightly better but not by much). You can't even afford a decent house with cash for that amount of money. I feel bad for the client who has $1m but thinks he/she has a lot of money, and needs to pay a financial adviser (5% even!) to manage it for him/her. In this day and age and in California, if you have $1m, you'd better be working hard still and save up for retirement.
I would guess that those clients are young and with high income, so their net worth may not be that meaningful yet. Otherwise, they would be well-advised to fire their financial manager, take their million dollars and live somewhere less expensive.
Since they're "actors, recording artists, producers, writers, and athletes" they're often in LA, NYC, and a handful of other places that are expensive to live. They usually have to be near their projects, sets, studio, or team for a significant part of the year.
We're not talking about remote software developers or launching a new startup here.
I don't disagree, but you are having a conversation about something completely different. This was my comment:
>I would guess that those clients are young and with high income, so their net worth may not be that meaningful yet. Otherwise, they would be well-advised to fire their financial manager, take their million dollars and live somewhere less expensive.
When I say "otherwise," that means that you are either old or on a low salary. Let's spell that out:
i) If you are young, on a low salary, but own a million dollars, you would be well-advised to change careers and move somewhere else, otherwise that million dollars won't last long, especially with an expensive financial manager.
ii) If you are old and own a million dollars, you may as well consider retirement.
Thanks for your comment anyway, but since I don't feel super invested in this argument, I'm going to end my participation here.
To us, $1M doesn't sound like a lot in areas like SF/LA, but, generally speaking, most nouveau riche in this demographic typically don't even think COL upfront. In the ESPN "Broke" documentary, it was said something like 50-60% of athletes end up broke (essentially back where many of them started). Young, financially uneducated, popular, and newly rich is a perfect storm for wealth mismanagement.
If a 20-something actor/artist/athlete lands a lot of money, the first thing they go to is immediate lifestyle "improvement". Fancy cars, nice clothes, luxury amenities. "I'm rich now, so I gotta look the part, right?". Scroll through a few Instagrams of rookies who got their first payday, and you'll see them driving in an S-class Benz with an LV handbag. The novelty of saying "I'm a millionaire now" imprints the image that they will be a millionaire forever - and that short-term thinking is what runs the well dry.
> You normally ignore your first home in these sort of calculations.
I was under the impression that you subtracted your mortgage from its value when calculating net worth, not just ignore it. It makes a difference in your life decisions -- In my case, I have a home with no mortgage. I could sell it to move to a cheaper area and end up with enough cash out of the move to fund a new business. It would be a high risk move, but the option is not nullified just because I currently live in that home.
The cookie wall won't let me continue without agreeing to cookies. I can reject them in the Cookie Policy, but that too is protected behind the cookie wall.
Obviously, this doesn't comply with the GDPR, and makes the site unreadable for some.
This article loads just fine without needed any cookies, just curl it (via a US server) and load it. If that works, why do they need to set any cookies? Some sites need session cookies to maintain login details from request to request, that's fine. Some sites may offer the option to use cookies to save your login from one visit to the next, that's also fine, ask if they want that.
Most sites don't need to set any cookies though, so why bother asking permission.
"This site costs money, accept our cookies while we sell your personal information for a fraction of what it's worth or you can't see it. We value your personal data at 6 cents, as that's what the 300 companies we sell it to will pay us."
Do people still really believe that cases like this are the result of ignorance? It's been years since GDPR was made into law, seems to me the only explanations are severe negligence or malevolence.
Maybe some people just decided to don’t give a shit about GDPR...hard to blame them. They law (while well intended) is totally out of proportion and puts the internet in danger.
It’s insanly stupid and backwards...just like the new copyright laws the EU is working on.
Europeans are shooting themselves right back into the dark ages...and I probably wouldn’t care if they weren’t ruining it for everyone else too.
Your definition of stealing is a weird one. As far as I know (insert here giant US Corp) has always followed local tax laws.
I think Europeans are just being bitches about the fact that they haven’t been able to replicate Silcon Valleys success (with noteable exceptions such as Spotify, Zendesk and others which ultimately also moved their HQs to the US though).
Yes, the US spies on Europeans and everybody else, just as Europeans and the rest of the world spy on the US. It’s what nation states do...they spy on each other. You and I might not like it but it’s whats it is...no need to single out the US.
There you have it. The motivation for this new legislation is to change those facts: correct tax "avoidance" and prevent powerful foreign corporations to spy and steal assets (i.e. news snippets).
It seems the US is very sensitive when nobody buys their cars, but sees absolutely no problem dominating modern comunications. The EU has a problem with that.
And my definition of stealing is a pretty standard one: both Apple and Google have been repeatedly fined using EU law for tax issues, for example.
Users working around major internet sites who can't be bothered to comply with EU law, what's lost is convenience and Rule of Law. Sure I can put ear plugs in when every $carBrand goes past, but what's better is making cars with proper exhaust baffles.
These wall designs are really surprising; I would expect bad designs to come from difficulty of implementing data collection management, not the wall UX. Just imagine you're a user seeing this, do you not feel antagonized?
Since the data collection management would traditionally be stored as a cookie... It's a bit of a chicken and egg problem. Without tracking, how do you track that consent was revoked?
The cookie law bugs me because it's feels like it's being applied in completely the wrong place. Isn't the browser perfectly capable of restricting third party cookies and presenting the necessary legal warnings?
browsers can restrict third party cookies. But this is opt-out, default is to allow these. The average user is most likely not aware of these settings.
They're not surprising if you assume the ground state for every company that does not fear the teeth that come with this legislation is malice. They're doing the bare minimum they need to so they can pretend to think they have complied if anyone knocks on their door, while still trampling all over everyone's rights.
The US does a terrible job of inculcating basic financial literacy in the populace.
The only way that paying someone 5% of assets / income just to avoid ruination can be a sound investment is if the person is utterly clueless about how money in general, and compound interest in particular, works.
Depends on how much work these people put in. If they are going over every contract including insurance etc it would be an extremely valuable service.
On to of that they are sorting all their mail, doing bill payments etc. 'I was at his house every single day, helping to oversee contractors, pick out windows, pick out drapes.'
Which might also indicate that good politics are a part of her job as well.
You don't want to tell the contractors who aren't trying to rip you off "I need to stand here and stare at you so that you don't cheat me/steal anything", but if you're always around to help "pick out windows" or "choose drapes", you can keep an eye on things without being too obvious about it.
A large number of these people will have been outside of the "real world" for a good proportion of their adult (and often, child) lives. Without comprehensive financial education early in schools, and with careers in industries detached from a lot of financial pressure, surrounded by hanger-ons and perceptions of lifestyle.
I actually have a lot of empathy for these groups who see success but don't have the skillset to know what's best.
"people will have been outside of the "real world""
This. I met a woman who was a nurse practitioner or something like that. She had a young boy and girl. Her plan was for them to be a pro football player and actress. So she would take them out of school to go to football or acting camp. She actively discouraged them from focusing on school. If these kids are successful, they will be lacking basic skills we take for granted. Think about the average person's understanding of math, and imagine someone actively discouraged from learning it.
It could be tragic if they were successful, which is such an unreal thing to say. Even worse, the odds aren't good, and they don't have skills to fall back on.
> Her plan was for them to be a pro football player
The NBA has been trying to do a better job about educating people on the reality of professional sports.
A lot (the vast majority) of people overestimate children / youth skill, especially parents.
The NBA has been big on trying to encourage players even beginning to start college ball as taking college seriously, and by more than just empty words. Saying things like "There are 350+ NCAA basketball teams, each with a roster of up to 13 players. There are two draft rounds, 60 players. Even adjusting for four years of college players, there is less than a 3% chance you will be drafted to the NBA, even if you play college ball".
There is even at high levels, a huge disparity of quality and talent.
When I grew up in Australia, before refereeing basketball at a very high level, I was involved in cricket. I remember a promo event, where two international cricketers from India visited a local club.
They faced off against the kids, and just hit balls around the field gently for them to run and get.
Then they faced off against the state team.
Every single ball was hit out of the park, without a hint of exaggeration. Some with a bounce or two, but every single one hit the fence. Fast, slow, good, bad, it didn't matter. It was just effortless. I think that did a lot to dawn on people who thought "My kid/adult son is playing at the state level, he could be like these guys one day". Maybe. But most likely not.
So I do like that there is some (though not enough) effort at saying "Hey, you need a fallback, because you almost certainly will need it". Even earlier than college, if needed.
From reading the article these aren't just accountants or financial managers: they're on call 24/7 and ready to handhold you through everything and seem to be willing to manage every aspect of your life that you throw at them (love life included, like mentioned in the article). Seems like it's a ton of work.
Seems reasonable considering the amount of babysitting they do.
Managing assets and making sure certain bills get paid on time seems reasonable. But having to talk them out of impulse buys they may not be able to afford sounds terrible.
It’s like these stars are not fully functioning human beings.
> It’s like these stars are not fully functioning human beings
Or that the personalities that (a) go into low-probability high-payoff careers like entertainment and (b) do well in entertainment (through further selection or the perso al transformations necessary to succeed in Hollywood or the NFL) are also bad at saying no to competitive luxuries and short-term impulses.
I see this very much. Friends that are surrounded by dual income couples that are lawyers/doctors/etc get convinced that 300k+ household incomes are "not that much". This while being 97+% percentile for household incomes in the US.
But even if it's of assets, she's not just managing money. A hedge fund manager isn't going to help choose your drapes, at least not within the management fee.
I imagine that’s the fee her firm takes, assuming she has some employees, a snazzy office etc there will be overheads out of that - but yeah, accountants do well.
These people get most of their income from working, not investing. It’s worth a lot of money for them not to be distracted by day to day business stuff.
Wealth/power/fame don't change who people are, they just allow them to express it unconstrained.
For fame and fortune as an artist, though, the chances of "making it" are so remote that the proportion of sober and rational people who choose to take the first steps down that path has to be rather low, and that of the ones that just keep going down the path even lower.
I had a friend who worked as a concierge for an ultra-rich family, and didn't like the toll it took on his personality. He said "The attitude is contagious, but sadly the money isn't."
The short, simple sentences and the unassuming vocabulary made it feel like an ESL piece for college students. I also found it moderately interesting, but it really could have benefited from a more personal touch (why and how did she get into this business?) and longer, more engaging anecdotes.
That can be accurate, but keep in mind that the people ins Silicon Valley are there using the brain and therefore more aware of the financials of their lives. Artists and sportists on the other hand can be a bit more detached from how much they make. I am not saying that this happens in 100% of the cases but there is a correlation.
I kind of agree with your sentiment but you make it sound a bit like artists don't use their brain, or are outright stupid - which I don't think you meant and I don't think is true.
There's going to be a lot of difference in practice between accumulating a lot of money over the course of decades until you're in a pretty good place in your 50s, and having all of that dumped on you in one fell swoop when you're 19.
Among the things that a SV engineer who manages that has to think about is if they have children, what happens when they die. It's nice to pass some things on to your children, but at the same time, plopping a million dollars in assets down on your kid all at once may not be doing them favors. Best to look at your options. (I'm not going into it here just because it's really more than fits into an HN message, nor should you take the advice from me; I'm aware that there are options.)
Well, it goes both ways. No shortage of tech worker manchildren who despite their financial situation still have no idea how to behave in a way that will encourage people to like them.
Yea that's kind of key. 5% of total income for financial advising seems a bit steep, BUT if they're a high risk of spending it all on hookers and blackjack then maybe it's best for them?
I'd rather see 5% go towards financial education in schools, but hey, then this person would be out of a job.
Financial education in schools hardly applies to this situation. As the article states, much of this is helping out people that are extremely distracted by their careers and are on the road constantly. Even with the motivation, I bet the time and energy for artists to think about finances would be more than a 5% hit to their career/output etc.
It's the same reason startups are happy to pay fairly high cloud prices so as not to have to deal with staffing network engineers and stuff like the old days.
I interviewed a potential business manager that was recommended by a few celebrity-actor types a few years back.
The idea of someone taking financial responsibility off your plate full-stop was definitely intriguing, but I did the math about what that would cost vs. just a full time personal assistant and I couldn't justify it.
He did immediately recommend a new bank for me which I had never heard about. Was fantastic advice, been happy with them since.
> 2 and 20 is what premier hedge funds make (many charge less nowadays). 1% is a standard financial advisor fee.
Hedge fund managers and financial advisors meet with their LPs/clients from time to time. They don’t “get all of [their] clients’ mail — bills, fan mail, business-related mail, everything” nor “oversee payments for their mortgages, phone, rent, utilities, and all the little things that keep their lives going and the lights on.”
At 5% AUM, you might as well put it in cash, when you consider risk adjustmentd and post tax investment returns.
But skimming this article, it's not just investment returns really. I guess these people really are liable to blow all their money on stuff off left to their own devices.
"I felt like I had failed him, or could have done more." -- This sounds like the actor died as a result of a wrong choice, not from a freak car accident.
He did a great job in Odd Thomas. That movie got too little attention. I say that not even knowing about the book. Interesting enough, one person who watched it with me yawning or nearly falling asleep during most of it was at edge of couch during last scenes. They totally flipped its style on audience.
I'll remember him that way in a movie where he played a great character dedicated to entertaining and protecting the rest. :)
I wish there was a service like this for people with an average income.
There are lots of artists out there who are in this category, and who could use such a service. Also, the typical "mad scientist" probably doesn't care much for personal finance, so they could benefit as well. And lots of other people.
> I wish there was a service like this for people with an average income
I pay my accountant roughly $1,000 a year to, once a quarter, look over my credit card and bank statements with me and talk about how much I should be contributing to which accounts and where I may be spending too much. (This is preferable, for me, to a financial advisor because I like to pick my own investments.)
> It is easy to become enmeshed in clients’ lives. I had one client who was young and impressionable and became very successful very quickly, and he was getting pulled in different directions by the people around him. He and I clicked and became very close. He bought a house and was away a lot, so I was at his house every single day, helping to oversee contractors, pick out windows, pick out drapes. I was a big part of his life. He died suddenly, and it crushed me. I felt like I had failed him, or could have done more.
Contextually I wouldn't think so, his death was an accident caused by what ended up being deemed really poor design of the shift interface of his vehicle; the guilt implication from the author sounds more like maybe drugs or falling in with the wrong crowd or something.
The Varian Rule, which is about how the future resembles how the rich live today, the middle and poorer classes will have tomorrow, may apply here. Multi-family offices for middle net worth individuals seem like a plausible future.
I can't seem to convince my lawyer and accountant friends that this is a viable service because (I think) they are basically not entrepreneurial, and big firms don't offer it because they are already fighting and maintaining position in the HNWI market.
A one-stop shop that handles everything from taxes, to parking tickets, legal advice, to investments, insurance, and even medical, could be worth it for a lot of people.
What makes it viable now is that families with the kind of money worth professional management are still actually working for it each day, that is, still making this kind of money on their labor instead of returns on capital, so they have the income (albeit less in assets), but not the time to manage it properly.
I would look forward to using such a service...one day. :)
Lots of these services are being created piecemeal. Professional management works for these people because the clients are overwhelmed and don't know what they're doing. They don't know how to budget X million dollars for 4 years.
Most average people think that they do know what they're doing. They have a few hundred in the bank, they're paycheck is the same and comes every 2 weeks, and they know the price and value of the things they need. They don't suffer from the illusion that they can buy jetskis on a whim without bankrupting themselves.
Arguably, that Lamborghini is even a thing suggests otherwise. There is tons of new and younger money out there that could be deployed to build real lasting foundations for families, at least enough for grandchildren to have private school and college taken care of.
I shudder to think about how much time it takes to juggle all the different financial things I deal with, and how sub-optimal they are because it's too much of a pain to coordinate.
Lovely example: I have autopay for all my recurring expenses except my water bill. Through some mixture of losing some information and the shittiness of their website, I can't get a login to set up autopay. So each month, I spend a few minutes on the phone to pay--it doesn't require authentication to pay over the phone, but it requires authentication to pay over the web.
Is Mick Jagger primarily a musician or a businessman?
Rock and roll has always been a business - 'the music business' - and usually those that succeed have an excellent business partner that looks after the books. You would be surprised at the property and stock portfolios of the truly successful 'musicians'. Even John Lennon was a 'businessman'. Although he did put peace and love first and foremost he made sure those Russians paid him in furs when he sang a few ditties there.
The same goes in the 'art business'. Is Damien Hirst an artist or a businessman, first and foremost? Again, an excellent business partner takes care of business for him whilst the army of interns/students/wannabees do the hard work of assembling the dead animals into 'art' (for the status-anxiety celebrities to buy).
So-called 'celebrities' have to be smart otherwise they end up with accountants skimming off '5%' of their earnings.
For me, this is the most surprising quote from the article. It really shows how us Plebians are ground into dust by the healthcare industry.