[getpokedagain]

> I agree with your sentiment, but the reason for the imbalance is risk. As an employee you don't have financial risk tied to the company, you get a regular paycheck. But if you are an investor you take a risk that the money you invest can one day just vanish with zero return.

I would challenge you to change your perspective on this. The average employee is likely to be worse in the case of a failed company than an investor. The investor may lose funds sure but the employee:

- loss of income which they live off of while the investor likely has other money remaining as they are rich.

- loss of access to good health coverage in the USA

- potential opportunity costs in the form of learning the wrong things to support the now defunct company ie learned rust but now we all code in AI tools

- potential opportunity costs implied in aging. Few want a 60 y/o engineer but a 60 y/o investor is great.

In short while the investor can lose objectively more money the worker loses more relatively.

[reassess_blind]

Everything you said is true, but the relevant risk in the equation is objective risk, not relative risk.

[getpokedagain]

I suppose. But in a world where upset people then act irrationally up to and including doing some murder I wonder if we start mapping burnt out individuals to a higher "cost" than their lost spending. What for example is the objective cost of Samuel Cassidy? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_San_Jose_shooting#Perpetr...

[kristov]

Oh I agree with you. I don't live in the US, but in a country that has a very high progressive tax rate. I am taxed about 50% of my income currently. But I gladly pay it because I like to live in a safe country with strong government programs and a great healthcare system. It is also very difficult to fire an employee here. Companies generally have to pay people to leave, and this can be a year salary upwards. But I do sympathize with people in the US, even if the "average" lifestyle experience is higher, because a lot of people seem to be struggling there.

[getpokedagain]

yea I did not want to assume but my take here is very biased upon my locale.

[nradov]

Spare us your sympathy. When it's harder to terminate employees then employers are more reluctant to hire in the first place, leading to higher unemployment rates and overall slower economic growth. As a US based employee who has been laid off before (multiple times) I prefer our approach.

[sensanaty]

Oh no, not the slower economic growth!

If the choice is between propping up the economy which is built atop a delicate house of cards and is about to implode on us anyways thanks to the AI bros, or knowing that the psychotic C-suite can't fire me because he needs an extra 0.2% of profit margin to look good to investors, I'll take the latter.

Having experienced both worlds here, it's about roughly the same difficulty getting hired, except over here in NL at the end of my 1 month in which they can fire me for any reason, I get a nice little ironclad contract that provides me rights as a worker. Anyone claiming getting laid off unceremoniously is better is just coping