Lou Katz @lou@entropyservice.com

A lot of companies seem to misunderstand the role of pay in hiring and retaining smart people. In my first year at Microsoft Research I listened to a (normally sensible) member of the lab’s leadership team explain that the bonus structure was there to incentivise good research. I looked around the room and wondered who had ever thought ‘well, I was going to do some mediocre research, but for 20% more money this year I will do something world leading!’ My guess: no one.

If you want to hire the best people, you are looking for the people who, if money didn’t matter, would do the job for free because they believe it’s important and care about the outcome. You don’t pay them well to persuade them to work. You pay them well so that they can afford to work on the things that they think are important. If smart people don’t think the things you’re doing are important then you should consider why you’re doing them.

This is especially true for executive compensation. The best CEOs are ones that care about the company’s products and want everyone to use them, not the ones that want to make the most money. This is especially true for non profits where your pool should start with people who care a lot about the organisation’s mission. Paying more (above a certain level) won’t find more of those people it will simply dilute the pool with people who are there for the money, not the mission.

EDIT: A lot of people seem to be misunderstanding this and think this is an argument to pay people badly. It absolutely isn't. If you pay people badly, they will spend a lot if time thinking about money. Your job as a manager is to remove problems. Money removes a lot of problems. But a lot of problems cannot be removed by applying money. If someone competent is being told to do nonsense work that they know will cause problems in the long run, no amount of money will make them motivated. The problems that can be solved with money are the easy ones.

@billclawson @pluralistic Essentially, political power in the US is now divided between a repressive death cult and a fundraising business, and the reason that the death cult keeps winning is because at least you can get people excited about joining a death cult.

The history of Nazis holding rallies in left-wing areas of Weimar Germany, instigating street fights, and then telling the press that only they could save Germany from the "violent communists" seems like an important thing for people to be studying right now.

The #assassinations in #Minnesota highlight a dirty secret hardly ever mentioned in the news: U.S. has 1.1 million private #police officers. There is an unprecedented footprint of privately organized #violence that is doing all sorts of things most people have no idea about. #gunviolence #maga #rightwing #gop #hatred #guns https://bsky.app/profile/equalityalec.bsky.social/post/3lrnm5cu6mk2d #civilliberties #fear #murders #political #politics #secondamendment

If there's anything that illustrated the hollowness of the Democratic Party as an effective opposition for me, it's this.

Yesterday, I watched a video of a sitting US Senator being thrown to the ground and cuffed by fed goons for asking questions of the fed official he has direct oversight authority over.

Within minutes, I'd gotten DOZENS of texts from Dems and Dem orgs asking for $5-$50 to "fight fascism."

That's it. "Are you terrified that your country is slipping into fascism? Pay me."

Sigh, the establishment Democrats' response to one of their senators being attacked by Trump goons was to beg.

They begged Trump to pretty please not do it again.

They begged everyone who'd ever given a nickel to one of their candidates to fork over more money.

They begged each other to find ways to please the right wing.

Taking to the streets on "No Kings" day is more and more essential.

So is organizing, starting in your neighborhood.

It's getting very, very late.

Trump went to see Les Miserables at the Kennedy Center but was presumably surprised that it wasn't the animated version.

I was at a car wash in Culver City today that was raided twice last weekend by ICE. 25 car wash workers and 1 customer have been kidnapped over the past several days, and the whereabouts of most of them is unknown. I spoke to families of the kidnap victims: prospect.org/justice/2025...

ICE Kidnappings Stoke Fear and...

The Overton Window has shifted all the way to ban all non-white people from coming to America. It was never about illegal immigration.

The US now has no vaccine advisory committee, no CDC director, and an anti-vaxxer as Health Secretary.

There are now more U.S. troops + federalized law enforcement deployed to the streets of Los Angeles than in Iraq and Syria combined.

@SnoopJ@hachyderm.io can’t afford to hire people to launch weather balloons
Can’t afford the meteorologists who tell you when a tornado is about to end your town
No money for cancer or Alzheimer’s research, nor any money for vaccines and public health
But man oh man we’ve got money to burn to send the marines into a peaceful protest
Money to burn to roll tanks through DC
Money to burn for bombing Palestine

If a seven-year-old can’t walk to the store the fault lies not with the parents but with the community.

RE: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:oo5c7ttf4pwp7p5dxpzd3bcs/post/3lqwv6uucrc2f

We don’t need to back off the American Gestapo and we don’t need to respect its agents. People exercising state violence are not entitled to anonymity. Nor are the people directing the state violence.

RE: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:4llrhdclvdlmmynkwsmg5tdc/post/3lqx5b7w2wt2h

The fact that both a magistrate judge and a district judge denied the government a search warrant for an Instagram account run by student protesters at Columbia University speaks to the lack of probable cause, EFF’s Mario Trujillo told @theintercept. https://theintercept.com/2025/06/04/fbi-columbia-gaza-warrant-instagram/

The thing to remember is that it is not up to you whether or not you are criminal: it is up to those in power how they label you. So the #civilrights of criminals are the civil rights you have - or don't have. https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/trump-mass-deporation-stephen-miller-rcna210396

Sacramento County Sheriff jailing people for as long as 4 days for "illegal camping" or for sleeping outdoors because they are #homeless. https://www.sacbee.com/news/local/homeless/article307003236.html