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)

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

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?

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

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..

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.

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..)

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.

Probably not.

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

> 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..

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

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

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)

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..