Submitted via IRC for Bytram
This week the British papers revelled in news about how much the BBC's on-air stars get paid, though the salaries of their counterparts in commercial TV remain under wraps. In Norway, there are no such secrets. Anyone can find out how much anyone else is paid - and it rarely causes problems.
In the past, your salary was published in a book. A list of everyone's income, assets and the tax they had paid, could be found on a shelf in the public library. These days, the information is online, just a few keystrokes away. The change happened in 2001, and it had an instant impact.
"It became pure entertainment for many," says Tom Staavi, a former economics editor at the national daily, VG.
"At one stage you would automatically be told what your Facebook friends had earned, simply by logging on to Facebook. It was getting ridiculous."
Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-40669239
(Score: 3, Informative) by Snotnose on Monday July 24 2017, @12:34AM (8 children)
I'm guessing the folks with the money know how to hide the money so they don't show up as superrich.
When the dust settled America realized it was saved by a porn star.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday July 24 2017, @02:43AM (5 children)
Not so much... In Denmark they scale your speeding tickets as a percentage of annual income.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Monday July 24 2017, @06:21AM (4 children)
If the money don't show well then there's nothing to scale to.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday July 24 2017, @12:44PM (3 children)
I'm sure that Scandinavia has just as many tax evaders as everywhere else in the world, but the big fish will find it hard to hide in those little economies - and tax evasion is just as, if not more, serious in the land of high tax for high social benefits.
If you're running an internet porn site and keeping your income offshore, maybe you'd get away with it, but if you're living large in Scandinavia and spending the money you make there where they can see it... you'll be called out for underreporting of income faster than the US or Southern Europe.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 24 2017, @02:32PM (2 children)
I'm sure there are ways to ensure that the majority of that money never enters those little economies. You were buying a Yacht in some Arab country? How would Denmark even learn about it? Especially if it was not you who showed up as buyer, but a straw person. Oh, you are using it? Well, you are "renting" it from that straw person (who promptly pays the "rent", minus some provision, into your secret offshore account).
(Score: 2) by aclarke on Monday July 24 2017, @02:57PM (1 child)
You get busted because you're at a party bragging about your yacht, and someone behind you overhears. He looks up your income and assets, and sees that there's no way someone with your reported assets owns a yacht. He then reports you, and you get audited and busted. According to the article, this does happen.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Monday July 24 2017, @10:15PM
The tax men are very happy with the productivity improvements provided by facebook.
"So, Mr second-grade teacher, let's go over the 4 bikini-clad "friends" who were with you on that 60-footer which a "friend" was letting you use in Nassau"
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 24 2017, @06:44AM (1 child)
Richest people have like $1 salaries while making millions in capital gains. Also there is the wealth vs. income issue.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Monday July 24 2017, @03:40PM
Could solve that by taxing capital gains just like all other income - doing otherwise is blatantly classist tax law.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Whoever on Monday July 24 2017, @12:36AM (3 children)
If salaries for pseudonyms were published in the USA, we would probably find out the Ethanol-fueled has a minimum-wage job at Walmart or somewhere similar.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 24 2017, @12:47AM
Eth earns a metric asston designing racist lawnmower robots which have taken all the mexican landscaping jerbs.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 24 2017, @12:55AM (1 child)
MDC is secretly a billionaire.
(Score: 2) by tibman on Monday July 24 2017, @04:24PM
He finds that it's easier to sing for coffee money than to remember his bank account password.
SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 24 2017, @12:43AM (5 children)
Yeah sure you can afford to advertise everyone's income in a country where the Gini coefficient [wikipedia.org] is low like Norway (0.633) but try pulling that stunt in the USA (0.801) and you'll have riots in the streets.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 24 2017, @12:47AM (1 child)
A) This has been going on since the 1800s.
B) All the nordics do this in one way or another.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 24 2017, @12:52AM
The lowest Gini coefficients belong to Japan where everyone is equally rich and China where everyone is equally poor.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 24 2017, @02:50AM (1 child)
Nice to see that Gini exists and that there is a formal way to look at pay inequality.
On the other hand, I think the multiplier between average pay (in any given company) vs. CEO and other executive pay is more dramatic. I can see that a boss might be worth ten or twenty times "average", but not hundreds of times, like we see in some of the Fortune 500.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 24 2017, @04:44AM
The largest pay differential between the lowest-paid worker and the highest-paid worker at any Mondragon operation is 9:1. [googleusercontent.com] (orig) [wikipedia.org]
Socialism is better.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 24 2017, @07:43AM
No riots so far in CA over this issue. Here is the salary of everyone funded even partly by State money.
http://www.sacbee.com/site-services/databases/state-pay/article2642161.html [sacbee.com]
Includes all the UC campuses, police, etc. You'll find football coaches at the top of the list, obviously. Because football.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Snotnose on Monday July 24 2017, @01:24AM (5 children)
Back in 90 or so I worked on the Seawolf submarine. I was strictly prohibited, under dire Bad Things Will Happen To You warnings, from discussing salary.
Turned out job classifications had a range of some 4k top to bottom. Those job classifications were on every bulletin board, right next to minimum wage laws and discrimination. Every employee not only got business cards with their job classification, but they got a nameplate on their cube with the job classifications.
So I could look at Fred, see "Oooohh engineer 3", run to the bulletin board, and see Fred was making from 58k to 62k per year.
Government work. If you haven't done it, you don't know what you're missing.
When the dust settled America realized it was saved by a porn star.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 24 2017, @01:34AM (1 child)
Bureaucratic rules lawyers passing the buck indefinitely? Disconnection between performance and pay removing any motivation to do quality work? Chronic backstabbers trying to get everyone fired as soon as contractually possible?
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Snotnose on Monday July 24 2017, @02:37AM
Pretty much. When I came onto the project I guessed 6 months start to finish. We spent a year just doing paperwork. No code, just pseudocode. They actually sent a room full of people from Alexandria to San Diego for a week to review our docs. There was not a single technical comment. It was all "section 3.1.7.2 should start section 3.1.8". Keep in mind we had a team of 6, all 6 of us were in that room with I think 8 of them for a week.
They sent a whole team of people to San Diego for what was essentially a week's vacation.
Best part? I talk to hardware. I was designing for a Code Warrior DSP card. A card I was allowed to see in a file cabinet, but not in a live system. This is important, I'd learned 10 years earlier hardware vendors lied through their teeth to sell stuff.
Sky Warrior had this thing called "chaining", which let you build a list of DSP things to do without any CPU intervention. Without it there was no way we could meet out timing requirements.
So, after a year of pseudocode and other bullshit, never writing a single line of code, I quit. Soon after management realized "uh, we need to write some code". Had lunch with the woman who took over my job after I quit (she was quite accomplished in DSP work, I was a dude without a secret clearance following orders with no clue about DSP). Turned out chaining didn't work. She asked the vendor, vendor said "nobody else used it, they never implemented it".
I would have found out chaining didn't work within 2 months of starting the job. Company didn't find out for over a year.
She figured it out. Wish I could remember her name just to give a shout out, but I have no clue. I would not have been able to meet the requirements without chaining.
But it gets better. My company couldn't decide on a naming format, be it Thisway, thisWay, ThisWay, this_way, This_way, you get the idea. This was 1990, era of the IDE as the solution to all your software ills. Cadre I think it was called. Sales dude said "You'll master this in 30 minutes". Yep, he was right, we all mastered it in 30 minutes. Because it sucked as an editor. The list of things it could do would fit on a toothpick. The only thing it was good for was generating the paper trail government contracts required.
Anyway, first time they changed the coding standard du jour it took 6 of us a week to update our files, mainly because we couldn't run sed scripts over files held in the CASE tool. Second time they changed the coding standard I'd been halfway to figuring out how to pull files out of CASE cuz I wanted to use vi, not their brain dead editor. Third time I knew how to both pull files out, and put them back in. And run sed commands between. So third time management decided our camel case sucked I could suck the files out of CASE, run a sed script, and shove them back in. In less than 30 minutes. By this time management had gotten accustomed to changing camel case would take a week. So we would update our scripts, fuck off for a week, then check all our files back in.
The dessert? About a year after I left they did an audit on our code. Turned out every time I pulled a file out of the CASE tool I essentially deleted it, and when I put it back in I made a new file. In other words, file revision history? Yeah, about that.
When the dust settled America realized it was saved by a porn star.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Monday July 24 2017, @02:12AM (2 children)
Mostly he wrote electrical test plans.
One day he said to me, "Aboard submarines there are some black boxes. And there are some quiet men who tend to those black boxes."
Some guy later published a book that detailed the Seawolf's mission of tapping Soviet fiber optic cables.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 24 2017, @07:51AM
Were there any black men that tended quiet boxes? Or was it just quiet men and black boxes?
(Score: 2) by Snotnose on Monday July 24 2017, @11:59AM
They tapped the cables a good 10-20 years before Seawolf ever hit the water.
When the dust settled America realized it was saved by a porn star.