The connection is that GDP/Recession has never been about mainstreet or average joe.
Recession is usually bad for Joe and mainstreat, but the opposite is not implied. It is ignorant to think it is or was defined by the average experience.
I feel it’s also ignorant to think it shouldn’t be defined by that experience. Our metrics have been misleading or we just need better ones and/or possibly a new word for how average joe talks about “recession”. A purely academic definition that has no basis in reality seems pointless to me.
purely academic definistions have a tremendous number of purposes.
Just as it would be silly to define a countries military equipment production capacity by public sentiment, the same is true for purely financial GDP.
There are tons of metrics that can used to articulate how the economy feels for average joe. We have low consumer sentiment, lagging median income, GINI, opinion surveys, ect.
Using the word "recession" adds gravitas by claiming something that isnt true.
> it’s also ignorant to think it shouldn’t be defined by that experience
If defined rigorously, sure. But the literature is replete with measureas of downturns.
What more commonly comes up in online discussions is some dude with a vibe, which isn't particularly useful for talking about anything larger in scale than that one dude.
Why do you think they get to accumulate shares and pay tax at the end.
If options Sundar will have the pay income when exercised, or if RSU, they will have to pay income taxes when granted.
If you want to research the tax imlications, the relevant term is PSU (Performance Stock Units), which is the form almost all of these CEO incentives take.
(edited) My bad, I meant to type "options" not "shares". You get to choose when to exercise options. When tax is incurred will vary according to your jurisdiction.
I'm fairly sure that Sundar Pinchai will have paid someone to research the tax implications before negotiating this deal.
The IRS page refers to Incentive Stock Options (ISOs) as "statutory" options. These are the "holy grail" because they allow you to avoid income tax at exercise and only pay capital gains when you sell.
ISOs have a 100k cap per year.
Further, the next line after your exceprt is "However, you may be subject to alternative minimum tax in the year you exercise an ISO", which is an income tax
I don't think it's that crazy. It's fairly well documented that a reusable cloth shopping bag has a break even with plastic shopping bags at around a 100-200 reuses, something most people won't reach.
With diapers, you have wash water, electricity, and a gas dryer in the mix.
Then you have people in this thread talking about services to pickup and wash them for you. How many trips car trips is that- 2 a week?
1. Id guess an average cloth diaper gets reused more than 100x
2. Think about the mass differences you’re comparing here. A standard plastic grocery bag is about 5 grams of material. A standard cloth bag is around 250. Cloth vs disposable diapers are approximately the same amount of material. This is the “gotcha, vegan! Iceberg lettuce is less efficient on a CO2 per calorie basis than beef! Eat more steak to be greener” type of argument.
3. You’re doing the thing contrarians often do of only counting one side of the ledger, while hand waving away the other. Disposable diapers require water, tree growing, tree cutting, tree transport, tree processing, bleaching, transport, packaging, product transport, disposal transport, disposal processing, etc etc. for each time a diaper is used. Really think about the full cradle-to-grave cycle of these things. Reusables must be washed, yes. But they, importantly, don’t require any of the other steps, which is, y’know, extremely significant. It’s not even remotely plausible single-use diapers are more resourceful than cloth ones.
I think it's plausible that cloth diapers are worse per use than disposable ones due to the mass industrialization of manufacture and resource intensity of cleaning.
You are right that we have to look at the full breakdown of the cradle to grave resource cost.
A washer and dry cycle is about 5 kilowatt hours, which is about the average household energy consumption in China or twice that in India.
Financially, in California it's about $3 per wash for power before accounting for water, soap, ect.
Let's say you got 10 diapers per day and washing every 2 days.
That's 15 cents and 250 watt hours per diaper use.
American use a lot of electricity, so washing diapers would be about a 10% household increase
Cloth shopping bags are a really bad comparison here.
Some things working in favor of cloth diapers here are general greening of the grid, mitigating issues with electricity consumption.
Beyond that, line drying diapers works very well and even preserves the life of the diapers.
Cloth diapers hold their value extremely well and can easily be bought/sold/given away on sites like OfferUp or groups like Buy Nothing.
ALso, "2 car trips per week": do you have no idea how this works? No diaper service in their right mind would send out cars to make bespoke trips to individuals. They're done using a big truck on a schedule to amortize the cost of pick up and drop off as much as possible.
Technically you should kill as many as possible "for the environment".
What we're really seeing in all this is so many parents are insecure in their parenting and decisions that they feel the need to jump to "do it my way or you're the literal devil."
If we take the charitable view, it's that things like "cloth diapers saved so much money I'm sad others don't try it" - which may be entirely true. But trying to use things like "if you use a diaper you are the cause of climate change" is something beyond.
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