I stay up all night

[prototypian]

I can't sleep. Things seem so bleak

I feel like I'm watching the world just erode away the last vestiges of humanity.

My country is home to the world's largest population of billionaires; a few thousand people who own 40% of the wealth in the country. Those immediately beneath them push for productivity in the stock market with companies owned by those billionaires through hiring the fewest people and paying the least. And the amount of wealth that exists now in those billionaires can keep the economy going as consumption without the need for normal consumer spending. The goal is to have no payroll costs but have maximum profit. The cycle just gets worse. Every idea is designed to reduce costs by employees.

If you are emoloyed, expect to spend most of your time defining how you have improved your output with 20 percent gains quarter over quarter and a disappointing year over year decrease in cost of living adjustments and higher healthcare costs.

It's so bleak

 

[katara]

I just woke up like 20 minutes ago but it's still dark out. I also live in USA. I tried venting about it here and received some really rude responses. Some ppl on here are part of the problem.

 

[ScaredCutter]

i hate how the world is, esp countries experiencing that. my bf lives in america and im always anxious and in fear what tomorrow will be like for him. i hate the stupid president, i hate the gov, the supreme people, honestly america is so shit i dont even know how people are happy there. i honestly wish someone could do everyone a favour and get rid of these corrupted people for good. i wish there was an age limit to STOP applying for terms, to be FORCED to leave the supreme house positions. i wish these billionaires had a real heart. i wish the people, the real people who struggle, who work hard, who are actually doing something could have semi power to vote these people out of their power tripping position. i wish it was mandatory for anyone who reaches billions to experience what its like to work from the ground up, to not be so lucky. i remember a millionaire trying it and he had to stop because that shit took a hard toll on him and honestly, atleast that dude saw it eye to eye, dont know what hes doing now anyways. i hate how these filthy rich people say they have "experienced" being poor, homeless, struggling to make ends meet and what not when they havent. they are so heartless, cutting them open, their heart wouldve failed because they are so greedy and corrupt.

 

[prototypian]

I honestly don't think it is the billionaires or millionaires or any specific person defining the good or bad or doing terrible things.

Behind the billionaires-take the tech leader, Elon Musk, there is a potential payout for him of a trillion dollars.

His investors are sort of humans but are really representatives of clusters of humans who work in towers that define requirements of investment yield per unit. And it always must be faster and better than it was before.

For musk to receive his trillion dollar payout the company and investors will have to receive many more than trillions as this payout is his incentive.

Behind those incentives are those towers of investment.

I once worked at the world's largest consumer bank. I was an analyst. I was called in to do some analysis of something called "compatible account enrollment" or "secondary offering enrollment". Those terms mean that customers at the retail bank (this bank is on every corner for customer retail checking, banking, savings, credit cards and accounting for households) we're being pushed to sign up for other services the bank has from overdraft protection to credit cards to life insurance etc. I never understood why I was being asked to analyze this by bank manager.

I changed careers and that was behind
Me and suddenly there was a huge scandal and multi billion dollar fine by regulators where tens of thousands of bank managers were pushing retail bank tellers to automatically sign up customers without their knowledge for those services.

Moving up the food chain from those bank managers you saw internal policies of bank tellers being given targets that were numbers of enrollments or termination, then low level mananever had similar targets for their team, then regional Managers had bonus mediated targets meaning their bonus was at stake if their cluster of banks did not hit the secondary enrollment targets then senior directors and VP's had very significant bonus pools tied to these then backing up further the senior executives had bonus targets until you reach then board and investors who approached those senior executives with a do or die requirement: you will increase the usage of these fee based services or you will lose your role and be fired because we have assigned you this task. The task is required, it will yield improved market share and a higher stock price and we aren't concerned with how it gets implemented, you have to get it done.

So the executives can see few people as consumers want these services. Looking down, there isn't much demand for them but the investors aren't concerned with that. The bank has a market cap of trillions of dollars and they each own percentages of that including payouts and they are accountable to their investors for absolute profit. The bank customers number in the hundreds of millions and if they each pay a buck or two for a service the. That's a lot of money per quarter and that's all you need at an institutional level to get the payout.

Interesting that at the end of the scandal, the group who was given the civil and criminal penalties are the tellers and their managers who were given the choice of hit these targets or be fired. The others above them even got to keep the bonuses that occurred. No one technically did anything but set expectations and imply that this set of targets was importyant enough to be fired for missing the goals so get it done and they don't want to hear excuses.

Thats what I see as the part that is dehumanizing. If for example a company has 100k workers in the world and a big hedge fund investor needs a return they can say "if you cut payroll by 40 percent and use that payroll for share buyback then you will get a bonus and if you don't you will be fired". Anyone fortunate enough to be high enough up in the organization is faced with the execution and ethics or lack thereof to make the cuts. Nothing beneath that matters. The race is to get out first with the wining results and revenue.

 

[prototypian]

No I actually didn't realize that's why I kept getting asked to do the analysis. I kept wondering why the leads in that line of business wanted analysis of the specifics on the cross selling. Which I did as a series of reports. I wasn't involved in the reason for the reports nor was I aware of the actual process. I was hired away from that bank four years before the actual results came to light and I realized it then.

I definitely could have filed a whistleblower report then but it was in the news at that point and already part of both federal and other investigations. I'm sure my reports internally were found although I don't know for certain.

Another company I was with had all of these analyses with confidence intervals produced to study terminations and compensation bands. Terminations can occur for many reasons at a company from site closures to change of internal processes to market to just wanting more money changed from payroll to different internal purposes. I would get enormous sets of data and be asked to analyze the compensation of the layoffs and then determine the adverse impact to different cuts of the levels. I realized much later that the purpose wasn't trying to ensure equitable terminations and payouts; it was to ensure that they maximized the highest costs with layoffs while just being under the threshold that the statistics would show they were targeting that population. The goal was to ensure those individuals making the most in a given round of layoffs were the ones that were cut while preventing a trigger of a mathematical adverse impact.

There are unfortunately armies of people like me. I'm an actuary and have a lot of training in math, statistics and analytics from college and post college. You always imagine that your work will be to help people and you even assume that's what you're being asked to run these analyses. Then later you realize that you're really just a part of the justification of protecting the corporate interests. It's another part of why I get down and do want to kill myself. I never imagined something as sumple as finance and analytics would have the specific purpose of screwing workers and customers and using math to justify or prevent lawsuits with the various bands and examples.

But in the case of the large consumer bank, I had absolutely no idea that the reason I was being fed cross selling and account data on these didfeeent banks and being asked to compare it was because regulators were already aware or understood it and the bank finance goobers were running reports to protect it. I would have had no problem doing a whistleblower and in fact the woman who did that whistle blowing and provided evidence was a bit of a hero and was compensated by the justice department. The banks name rhymes with Bells Largo and I was one employee out of thousands in the analytics and accounting groups and one of hundreds of thousands employed in consumer banking. But I only pieced that together well after I was at another firm and justifying ratios of hires and fires in the compensation department. And even now I'm in another company at least this time involved in risk analysis of communications modeling. But the thi bf that gets me depressed and adds to wanting to die is that 100 percent of the work is designed to justify behaviors or limit liability. You rarely know specifically why you're asked to run models or produce bands of risks but you realize it after. I was at a conference once on actuarial risk and a person presented their work on injuries. The injuries weren't specific but were the impact of person to person collision with protective gear and the concern was that the participants in the activity were being asked to do something that guaranteed injury. The data showed after an enormous set of modeling that the risk far outweighed the protections to prevent catastrophic brain jnjury. Later you realized that what he was showing was the balance between the concerns that the NFL and networks had of the kickoff or punt return and the incredible speed and power those athletes generate when they run at each other. But the concern wasn't led by the fact that the outcomes showed brain injury. It was mostly the concern of what the change in viewership might be and sponsorship without that featured play in the game. Would there be fewer spectacular plays if the kickoff was replaced an what would that do to advertising outcomes for those moments during the game as televised. That's what the real concern of the study was. And again, armies of actuaries do the math to determine if the risk outweighs the benefit.

I'm not whining, I have my own demons for suicidal ideation. I'm just sharing that the stack against individuals in succeeding has huge groups of concentrated lawyers, mathematicians, analysts, risk assessors and policy developers to prevent financial loss and limit liability.