Why CEO is high paid?

Back in year 2011, I watched the movie In Time, the movie idea is great, money can buy time. How good it will be if we really can use money to buy time, but on the other hand the world will getting crueler if we can buy time.

Too bad the movie story line is not as good as its idea.

Then in year 2012, I watched the movie Upside Down.

I like the office idea, high paid management stay on the ceiling and low paid worker stand on the floor. But, again the story line is slightly disappointed with this great idea.

Then this year, year 2013, the new hot movie screening now, the Elysium.

I haven't watch the movie, so no comment on it for the moment.

So, what these movies to do with today headline? Well, as we all can see, these movies are talking about dividing human being into two groups, the wealthy and the poor. The wealthy enjoy all the good things, good health, clean and comfort environment; and the poor suffer all the shit left by the wealthy.

I read an article said, even we able to gather all the wealth and equally divided to everyone, after sometime, the wealthiness gap will back. I can't stop myself to agreed that statement, some human are just know how to make themselves as rich as possible.

Look at those CEO or the top management, they had been paid much much higher than the worker working as factory operator, the general worker, the army, and others. Have you asked a question, why these top management is so high paid?

Lets imaging a situation. Imaging now there is a top guy with plenty of money, and others are those poor people. Now, the top guy say I want to have fried chicken for meal. If, all the poor don't want make the food, then the money is useless, it will be just some useless colorful papers or some yellowish steel stones. You can't consume that nor it can be converted into fried chicken. Up to this stage, we all agreed that money is useless.

So now, since the top guy stays at so high, he must has something great about it. So, what he does in order to have fried chicken as his meal? He picks someone from the poor and assigns him as the leader of the poor and pays him very high salary, maybe a 1000 times the normal poor can earn. That lucky guy may not be highly skilled, or a genius in everything, but most of the time that lucky guy must like talking and properly dressed. So, now the happy lucky guy tell the poor, if you all work hard and follow the top guy instruction,one day you will enjoy the position that I'm enjoy now, high salary, no working hazard, no risk and you can start enjoy your life similar to what the top guy enjoying.

If you are the poor what will you do? Work la, what to do else since you are not the chosen one.

So, now you understand why CEO is a high paid guy? They are the chosen one so that you can be motivated to work harder and hopefully someday you can be the lucky chosen one also. This is the top guy carrot-and-the-donkey trick, the lucky CEO is the carrot and you all are the donkeys that work hard chasing the carrot.

Today we are going to learn a very simple Chinese word, 米. It may look like an asterisk "*", but this word is very important to human being, especially Asian people.

Ok, the word that we going to learn today is 米, pronounced as "mi". The meaning of this word is rice. We all know what is rice, something that we eat. Apart from it default meaning, it also has different meanings.

We like to say someone that rich, or seem to be rich, "有米", mean got rice. Why we say rich people got rice, but not got gold, got silver, or got grass, but we say the bugger got rice. To understand this sentence, we need to go back to few thousand years ago, back to Qing dynasty 秦朝.

At that moment, all the government workers are paid using rice. For example, the prime minister annual salary at that time is ten thousand stone rice. One stone is around 150 pounds of rice. Which mean, the prime minister was given 1.5 million pounds of rice as his salary. So, if you want to buy something, like fish or house, you can pay the vendor using rice. If you want to know the price of an item, you may ask "How much rice?". Therefore, the rich people are those who owned lots and lots of rice.

The story now go to Jin dynasty 晋朝 (the dynasty after the three kingdoms), the vary famous author named Tao Yuan Ming said a very famous idiom, 不为五斗米折腰, we can direct translate it as "don't bow for 5 pecks of rice". According to history, one peck of rice is about 15 pounds, so 5 pecks is around 75 pounds of rice. Tao Yuan Ming was resigning from his post because he did not want to put down his pride to please the higher post officer. A great person don't work for money, there are far more important things than money.

Ok, that's all for today about the rice story.