>this same plan today is $780 a month without subsidies
The problem with your comment is that your prices are very exact but the consumed goods (insurances) are described only vaguely.
The country I live in, introduced obligatory health insurance 1996. The first proposition by our Democratic Party goes back to 1960. After 30 years of intense political fight we now have a system that is supported by all of the parties. So I think our system is as balanced as it gets. Plus we have a highly competitive system between insurence companies, and you are allowed to switch the insurance company every year, which then is done by lot of people.
The absolute most important thing is a rock-solid legal description of the minimun that every insurance company has to deliver.
Here are the + and - after 10 years of practical experience with obligatory healthcare:
+ High competition, disciplines insurance companies to work efficiently, and allows new, small and innovative companies to enter the market.
+ It's a pretty fair non-discriminatory system, nationwide and across all insurance companies
+ Simple system once it is established
+ Vulnerable persons are well protected.
+ The common health of the people is rising.
- The costs are rising every year because the is no direct interest in keeping the costs down
- The insurance companies get more powerful every year due intense lobbying, this not in our interest.
- There is explosion of special health services, very expensive treatments, rising salaries in the health economy
TLDR: Obligatory healthcare is good and you live longer. But it comes with a price.
I agree with every paragraph, that comment bothered me too.
But I also take issue with that false placement of him, that is again expressed in that OP title: "Aaron Swartz’s Theory on How to Save the World". That is not serious and is also in a way of disrespecting him.
It is remotly similar when Obama got its Nobel Price. I think it was done with good intentions, but was completely misplaced.
Uncharitably throwing misplaced attributed at a deceased person, because it goes well with the intention of selling a book is not human, but kind of perverse.
The difficult but necessary thing is to describe his real public influence and legacy without hurting those close to him.
His ideas had always much less weight then his persona that was created by others and to some degree by him. There is no reason to judge him for that, because we all strive for significance and nobody is perfect. But I agree we should stop to further support that bumptious memory of him.
In the end, he was also a victim of dynamics that where not in his influence. There was people who wanted to make an example of him, because he (like many others) wanted to set information free.
I liked him because he was good looking in a JFK kind of sense. His confident charisma was pleasant and comforting, his words never misplaced. I miss him.
"... milked Yahoo for a hundred million dollars she didn't earn."
"Marissa Mayer's failure at Yahoo was caused by pure incompetence, negligence, and laziness of all involved. Nothing about it that deserves praise."
I just wanted to thank you for this comment, because it is important that we get the facts straight. There was not one thing she brought in the company that showed a hint to financial success.
Reading some other comments, I think the suggestion is that the overrating was fraudulent. In which case the price is a relevant factor. Mayer was worth some amount of money, a mild overestimate would be human error, but a massive overestimate would be evidence towards a fraud claim (in the sense that the error would demand explanation as unintentional). I don't endorse that on a Mayer-specific level, but I think it's the shape of the argument.
None of which disagrees with you, it's just an interesting note for assessing what a hypothetical fraudulent CEO appointment would look like. Presumably it would factor in price in the sense of "could a reasonable person assess the CEO's worth at this value?"
Appendum:
When I said "She is overrated at an almost fraudulent level." I meant the she and other people from the board created an image of superiority around Meyer, that led to and justified a fantastic compensation plan. Then when you compare this fantasy image to her real accomplishments, the term "delusion" would not be wrong. And at a certain level of delusion, we can also name it fraud. Yes, I think this is fraud.
What exactly do you want to accomplish with this comment?
Are you really suggesting that we shouldn't analyze and criticize Marissa for failing? Why is it important to you to create a safe space for this CEO? This CEO had a very self-confident attitude but in the end got nothing right. There were no signs progress and development with her and the company. She showed no intrinsic focus and absolutely no creativity.
And what are this big risks you are talking about? "we usually celebrate taking on big projects and big risks ..."
All I know is that she got a compensation plan in 2012 for about 120 mio. dollars. If you play in this league you dont get points for "good-faith". Why gets someone who failed such a high compensation and why should it be wrong to criticize and even bash such a person?
I can answer that: because she's a woman. That's the ugly truth behind the rabid defense of Marissa. Because she joins a long line of failed female CEOs and the mere recognition of this fact sends certain people into a frenzy, so just deny, deny, deny.
I fully expect to be repudiated as a misogynist by a tidal wave of people drunk off this cognitive dissonance, but I simply speak the truth. Marissa was an abysmal CEO, and for years people will try to whitewash that to avoid its ugly stain on female professionals.
Trying to tie this to her gender would require a lot of evidence to be remotly meaningful. Yahoo has been failing for a decade and a half, largely punctuated by a couple of lucky investments (Google and Alibaba).
I also see little evidence of rabid defenses of her. I see some that don't believe she deserves to be crucified for failing to save a company that's been failing for a long time before she joined, and a lot of rabid attacks on her with little substantive.
Here's the thing: If Yahoo was in such dire shape that it couldn't be saved (that seems to be the consensus), it should have been scrapped and sold for parts to maximize shareholder value.
Instead Marissa squandered hundreds of millions of dollars on random acquisitions and Katie Couric. In my mind there is nothing noble or defensible about coming into a dire situation, throwing a Hail Mary and then shrugging when it doesn't work.
The board hired her presumably believing that there was some non-zero chance that she would manage to turn Yahoo around, just as it has done with a string of past CEO's. Presumably they also surmised that even if she didn't, shareholders would come out of it ok.
And lo and behold: When she joined the share price was below $16. It's now above $42. A lot of that (maybe all?) is the Alibaba holding, but the point is that whether not Mayer did a good job or not, Yahoo! as a whole is still worth a lot more today.
But presumably this is part of the reason they took the risk: Yahoo!'s core businesses were valued extremely low - the total value of the business is tied up in the Alibaba holding. As such spending hundreds of millions to try to turn things around meant betting with a miniscule proportion of the value of the company with a potential for huge payoff if it succeeded, and very little downside.
In retrospect its easy to say she didn't achieve what they hoped. But it's not so easy to say the alternatives would've been better.
I'm sure she did stupid acquisitions. I'm also sure most of Yahoo's CEO's have done plenty of stupid acquisitions. I'm equally sure Yahoo's board signed of on all of them.
The point isn't that she has no blame. The point is that she is par for the course for Yahoo, and there's little indication someone else would have achieved better results.
I think there should be more female CEOs. But if they are overbearing and underdelivering we should be allowed to talk about that with no restrictions.
I'm not going to repudiate you as a misogynist because I think some of what you're saying has merit. And I don't believe you're saying it because you think females make bad CEOs.
But I'd hardly call my comment a "rabid defense" of Marissa. I was attempting to set a balanced tone for this discussion. I readily agree that she failed to prevent Yahoo from failing.
The reality that you yourself need to confront is that there are way more people who will shrilly call her "an abysmal CEO" without really weighing the facts.
> Because she joins a long line of failed female CEOs
I wonder: how many appointed CEOs, as opposed to founders, succeed? And how many of them them are appointed to floundering companies, versus say the transition that happened at Microsoft and/or Google? Heck, even Ballmer was a disaster.
How much of the history of failed female CEOs is likely because they get much, much less of the Bezos/Brin/Page/Gates initial growth, I am unsure, but I'd be interested to know.
> Reduction in unsubstantiated nasty comments. A better conversation.
At the time you wrote this, there where zero nasty comments. Not even substantiated ones.
> Attempting to save a company that appeared at the time to be completely unsaveable.
Why do make that claim? This and similar is repeated here often: "A sinking ship", "Could not be saved even by Jesus", ...
This is completely wrong! Either a company is beyond repair, then no respectable CEO would play the hero here. Or it shows potential for some kind of transformation process, where the company can find a new and successful purpose. In both cases the company is in a fragile state, because it is very hard to measure its true value. It's in a situation that is opposite to a very promising company: there is a chance that this company is underhyped. Yahoo was underhyped and underestimated, probably also by Marissa Meyer.
> Why not? What's different about that league compared to the one you and I play in?
Let me use an analogy here: When you and I are football players, then Marissa would have been our trainer. The problem is that the compensation plan made her also some kind of a Ronaldo.
You would be right about what to do with a struggling company if you had perfect information. However most of the time a board is not working with perfect information and must make a judgement call. Pretending after the fact that they could have known how this would play out is ignoring that. It's an easy decision to criticize in hindsight after the fact. Much harder to get right in the moment.
> [...]
>this same plan today is $780 a month without subsidies
The problem with your comment is that your prices are very exact but the consumed goods (insurances) are described only vaguely.
The country I live in, introduced obligatory health insurance 1996. The first proposition by our Democratic Party goes back to 1960. After 30 years of intense political fight we now have a system that is supported by all of the parties. So I think our system is as balanced as it gets. Plus we have a highly competitive system between insurence companies, and you are allowed to switch the insurance company every year, which then is done by lot of people.
The absolute most important thing is a rock-solid legal description of the minimun that every insurance company has to deliver.
Here are the + and - after 10 years of practical experience with obligatory healthcare:
+ High competition, disciplines insurance companies to work efficiently, and allows new, small and innovative companies to enter the market.
+ It's a pretty fair non-discriminatory system, nationwide and across all insurance companies
+ Simple system once it is established
+ Vulnerable persons are well protected.
+ The common health of the people is rising.
- The costs are rising every year because the is no direct interest in keeping the costs down
- The insurance companies get more powerful every year due intense lobbying, this not in our interest.
- There is explosion of special health services, very expensive treatments, rising salaries in the health economy
TLDR: Obligatory healthcare is good and you live longer. But it comes with a price.