Well, they’re separated by the Panama canal, so by the same token that Africa and Asia aren’t the same land mass, neither are the Americas.

For reference, nowhere in Western Europe is even close to the much of the west coast of the Americas in terms of seismic activity.

I mean look, it’s cool that they’re doing this and all, and the idea or a trans Atlantic flight in 3 hours is neat for sure … but air travel is already really damn fast, could we focus on making it less shit in other ways?

• Can we get the carbon footprint down so it doesn’t contribute so much to the end of the world?

• Can we cut fuel costs significantly so it doesn’t have to be so miserably expensive?

The shareholders can go and buy a diversified portfolio on their own, by investing in many companies, so they can derisk their portfolio without conglomeration.

If they already own shares of the conglomerating company, its returns will be lower (they don’t care that it’s less risky; they’ve diversified already). Similarly, the returns of the company that is now becoming part of the conglomeration will likely be reduced, which negatively affects shareholders of that company.

The benefit is really only for the people whose prospects are deeply tied to this company, and only this company… its management employees, who are compensated by the company (often in the form of stock that they can’t sell till they leave, or that vests over a long time frame).

Portuguese, there’s a few hundred million speakers of Portuguese in South America.

I suppose I should have included French and made it four … there’s Quebec, but also Martinique, French Guiana, and so on. Maybe 10-15 million all in all?

Vs. ~450m for Spanish, ~400m for English and ~300m for Portuguese.

Right? People are forgetting that we’ve got essentially three languages in the entire hemisphere.

You speak three languages in Europe? Congrats you speak 12% of the commonly spoken / national languages.

Speak one language in the Americas? Congrats, you speak 1/3 of them!

Sent an application in!

Exactly. "Pay people enough, " is table stakes. It’s good business strategy and it’s a basic moral duty. "Grossly over pay people, " is probably not good business strategy; even if you do, it isn’t going to make up for being a shitty place to work

Yep. It’s why companies can offer ridiculous salaries and still have crazy employee churn (see: amazon, tesla).

Right… “perform an actual exit interview” would be good

So… this is pretty stupid, a raise in pay certainly might help.

However, from the perspective of a career spent managing teams, often organizations with hundreds of employees, if you think your people are all solely motivated by compensation, you’re going to do a very poor job as a manager.

Everyone wants more money, but that’s not all they want – and there are plenty of people who quit high paying jobs that treated them poorly or gave them no opportunity to grow.

Think about appropriate compensation as necessary, but often not sufficient – and think about the best boss you ever had. They probably did more than just pay you fairly, that’s the bare minimum.