> If you want people in e.g Bay Area to consider you at all, you'll have to offer them more than you'd need to get the attention of people in Warsaw. That's why remote salaries can still vary by location.

Then why not take what you'd offer to people in the Bay Area and also offer that to people in Warsaw? That's what the author is taking issue with.

EDIT: This was posed as a question for rhetorical purposes, it's obvious that businesses don't do this because they don't have to and it's cheaper not to. Parent said they didn't agree with the author's logic, but the author's statement about companies paying based on value wasn't attempting to make a logical assertion, it was a lament about ethics.

> the author's statement about companies paying based on value wasn't attempting to make a logical assertion, it was a lament about ethics.

The ethics is also not that simple either. Paying an equal nominal number of dollars to employees on opposite sides of the planet is not necessarily fair and equal in other ways. Those employees may have different benefits, legal rights, legal and tax obligations, and a different standard of life that they can purchase with that nominal amount of dollars.

Because you don't have to: even a significantly lower salary than what would be good in the Bay Area would attract and retain people from Warsaw

Because employees are very expensive, and I don't live in magic pixie land where money is free. Every penny spent on an employee is a foregone opportunity to hire more employees, or require less sales to break even, or deliver dividends to the owners of the company, ie rent for the capital borrowed from them.

You can see this in how engineers don't volunteer to take pay cuts so janitors and fast food employees get paid the same...