4 ms·

What I find the most depressing in this saga is that all the people mentionned are now sipping champagne from their 5 star hotel room. All are billionaires/mill

What I find the most depressing in this saga is that all the people mentionned are now sipping champagne from their 5 star hotel room. All are billionaires/millionnairs thanks to a fraud. While good/normal/working people are just trying to pay their bills. How do you build a society where lying/cheating/bullshitting is more valuable to the community than working ?

thundergolfer 7y ago
Did you mean to say “less valuable” in your question? Because if you didn’t, well we can study recent history to get an answer because we’ve already built that society. What complicates the picture though is that these lying/cheating/bullshitting financiers work some of the most hours in society. It’s a weird new phenomenon where the very richest and the very poorest are all working very long work weeks. The poorest are cleaners, care workers, and teachers though, and then there’s these rich people pulling off scams, losing money and contributing nothing of value, yet still getting paid a shitload. I’m reading “Liar’s Poker” now, and man it is awful learning the anti-social attitudes of these workplaces and knowing that this book then became something that further promulgated those attitudes.
- jeromekampot 7y ago
  I meant more valuable in the sense that these people who are not doing their part in improving society seem more valuable (read, make more money) than people who do. How do you raise your kid not to cheat or lie OR ELSE he will live a life of leisure. How can these people not be stripped of their assets and left to rot in a vulgar jail ? Why are we rewarding these destructive behaviour ? I've read a lot of these post mortem articles. They all feel like the author wished he was Neuman, wished he got away with the millions. I am a software engineer, have been for 20 years, I always felt I was contributing to society. I've build things that make people's life easier (in exchange for teaching my kids, baking my bread or treating me when I'm sick). These predatory people do not bring anything to the table but are regarded as gods.
  - timwaagh 7y ago
    I'm pretty sure all of them worked pretty hard their entire lives. The possible exception being Neumann, who is just a lucky guy really. But yeah programming ain't glamorous. Get into some other profession if you have what it takes. it could be worse. You could be baking bread in one of those cold baker facilities, getting up at midnight for half the money you make now.
  - javajosh 7y ago
    >How do you raise your kid not to cheat or lie OR ELSE he will live a life of leisure? An interesting problem. The answer is partly that there is more to life than money - and as another poster mentioned, there's really not much leisure involved. The cheaters legitimately work very hard! Essentially, I think the Gervais principle [1] is largely true. And therefore it's fine, and from a spiritual perspective, strictly better, to be a loser. (And I don't think there's any harm in trying to find an exception to the principle - tilting at the windmill of an honestly made fortune!) https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-the-office-according-to-the-office/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
    - jeromekampot 7y ago
      There is more to life than money for people who already have enough money. For the billion others, no. And let's be clear, these millions did not get created out of thin air. They are the product of the real work of real people. And no, bullshitting your way for a mere 5 (?) years of your working life cannot be compared to the 40+ years of work of anyone else. And no, putting a name on a principle does not make it common sense. But yes, making a small fortune from your hard work and genius is totally acceptable. Fair and square
      - javajosh 7y ago
        I'm a bit confused, and a little saddened, by your tone. Not to mention content (creating out of thin air? working for only 5 years? Gervais principle is common sense?). It's like you're responding to a different comment!
javajosh 7y ago
Well, all societies are bound to collapse, and that's probably one reason. More tactically, the wealthy are often polite, non-violent, and spend a lot of money in their near vicinity, and this serves to completely insulate them from the social/emotional effects of how they acquired the money. Nasty looks, shunning, or the threat of it, goes a long way toward enforcing social norms. Another issue is the often jaw-dropping cynicism of a business world so obsessed with doing things, that any concern with how they are done is totally ignored. It's a world in which "cheating" loses its meaning; anyone who is incensed at unethical, or even illegal (but not enforced) behavior is a naive rube. Ultimately, I think this happens because of a catastrophic failure of the justice system.
- TheOtherHobbes 7y ago
  The numbers in a billionaire's net worth include no contextual information - nothing about the lives damaged, the jobs lost, the opportunities eliminated, the time wasted, the scamming, cheating, and manipulation, the ecological support structures destroyed. Business and personal accounting systems deny, ignore, and suppress those contextual details. So does the "investment" industry. And that makes a mockery of "price discovery" because the nominal market price always excludes critical externalities. It's possible to become extremely rich without negative externalities. It just happens to be incredibly difficult. The looser your ethics, and the less empathy you have for competitors and victims, the easier it gets. It's a feedback loop which rewards unethical behaviour. Essentially, money itself is a form of morality-laundering. It's an integer when it should be a complete trace through a common contextual event map.
  - javajosh 7y ago
    Indeed, and what makes it interesting is that the information can (and should) travel in both directions: just as I want to know what my dollar has done when I buy an apple (e.g. I paid starvation wages to farmers and justified clear-cutting of a piece of rain-forest, gave political contributions to some dictator, etc) and the vendor gets to know how I earned that money (e.g. an office job where I make software content that tricks users into giving up more personal info, ultimately to get a higher ad price). You run into a technical issue in that you can trace a dollar indefinitely in both directions. But perhaps there's a solution, like some sort of decay.
netcan 7y ago
Idk is it's really all that bad. We tend to focus on juicy scandals. In this case, it was/is terrible conflicts of interest combined with a "pump-and-dump" mentality that exit focused startups are prone to during boom times. OTOH, the "system" worked, and wework investors got "busted" before IPO. It never reached the stage where pros and insiders cash out to public investors. In retrospect, investor cash was spent/wasted by operating expenses... Operating expenses are salaries and such. It may be wasteful, but the losers are risk tolerant investors so c'est la vie. In a "dot-com" scenario, a much larger amount (market cap) goes from public investors to private ones. If wework had succeeded in getting to this stage, it would be aweful. Imo, we need more risk, not less. Professional risk investors though, they are too good at offloading that risk to where it isn't supposed to be. Most of the institutional fixers (large funds, banks, regulators, sec, etc) suggest "fixes" that reduce risk. This is not a good thing. We need risk, and that includes a risk of shenanigans. I'd rather have a public blowup than an even more conservative professional investor class.
- abvdasker 7y ago
  Adam Neumann is now a billionaire. In the meritocratic, rational-markets mythology of how many people believe the system works, you're only supposed to get a billion dollars if you create value for a lot of people. After 18.5 billion dollars of investment, thanks to Adam Neumann's leadership, WeWork is now worth 8 billion dollars. So rather than creating value, he actually destroyed a shitload of it. And now he's richer than you or I will ever be. You're also ignoring one group of victims here. I wonder how the current and former employees of WeWork would feel about your assessment that it's "not so bad"? Their labor was no doubt compensated largely in the form of now-worthless equity grants. "Sorry you got screwed but this is necessary for the health of the investor class. Won't somebody please think of the investor class?!" How totally fucking odious. I don't know how you look at WeWork and arrive at the conclusion that professional investors are at risk of becoming too conservative. Clearly, venture capital has stopped functioning with any sort of discipline or rationality if it can invest in companies like WeWork and Theranos which later turn out to be obvious mirages of pure ineptitude and greed.
powerapple 7y ago
They created jobs, employed more than ten thousand people, why is it a bad thing?

thundergolfer 7y ago

Did you mean to say “less valuable” in your question? Because if you didn’t, well we can study recent history to get an answer because we’ve already built that society. What complicates the picture though is that these lying/cheating/bullshitting financiers work some of the most hours in society. It’s a weird new phenomenon where the very richest and the very poorest are all working very long work weeks. The poorest are cleaners, care workers, and teachers though, and then there’s these rich people pulling off scams, losing money and contributing nothing of value, yet still getting paid a shitload. I’m reading “Liar’s Poker” now, and man it is awful learning the anti-social attitudes of these workplaces and knowing that this book then became something that further promulgated those attitudes.

jeromekampot 7y ago
I meant more valuable in the sense that these people who are not doing their part in improving society seem more valuable (read, make more money) than people who do. How do you raise your kid not to cheat or lie OR ELSE he will live a life of leisure. How can these people not be stripped of their assets and left to rot in a vulgar jail ? Why are we rewarding these destructive behaviour ? I've read a lot of these post mortem articles. They all feel like the author wished he was Neuman, wished he got away with the millions. I am a software engineer, have been for 20 years, I always felt I was contributing to society. I've build things that make people's life easier (in exchange for teaching my kids, baking my bread or treating me when I'm sick). These predatory people do not bring anything to the table but are regarded as gods.
- timwaagh 7y ago
  I'm pretty sure all of them worked pretty hard their entire lives. The possible exception being Neumann, who is just a lucky guy really. But yeah programming ain't glamorous. Get into some other profession if you have what it takes. it could be worse. You could be baking bread in one of those cold baker facilities, getting up at midnight for half the money you make now.
- javajosh 7y ago
  >How do you raise your kid not to cheat or lie OR ELSE he will live a life of leisure? An interesting problem. The answer is partly that there is more to life than money - and as another poster mentioned, there's really not much leisure involved. The cheaters legitimately work very hard! Essentially, I think the Gervais principle [1] is largely true. And therefore it's fine, and from a spiritual perspective, strictly better, to be a loser. (And I don't think there's any harm in trying to find an exception to the principle - tilting at the windmill of an honestly made fortune!) https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-the-office-according-to-the-office/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
  - jeromekampot 7y ago
    There is more to life than money for people who already have enough money. For the billion others, no. And let's be clear, these millions did not get created out of thin air. They are the product of the real work of real people. And no, bullshitting your way for a mere 5 (?) years of your working life cannot be compared to the 40+ years of work of anyone else. And no, putting a name on a principle does not make it common sense. But yes, making a small fortune from your hard work and genius is totally acceptable. Fair and square
    - javajosh 7y ago
      I'm a bit confused, and a little saddened, by your tone. Not to mention content (creating out of thin air? working for only 5 years? Gervais principle is common sense?). It's like you're responding to a different comment!

javajosh 7y ago

Well, all societies are bound to collapse, and that's probably one reason. More tactically, the wealthy are often polite, non-violent, and spend a lot of money in their near vicinity, and this serves to completely insulate them from the social/emotional effects of how they acquired the money. Nasty looks, shunning, or the threat of it, goes a long way toward enforcing social norms. Another issue is the often jaw-dropping cynicism of a business world so obsessed with doing things, that any concern with how they are done is totally ignored. It's a world in which "cheating" loses its meaning; anyone who is incensed at unethical, or even illegal (but not enforced) behavior is a naive rube. Ultimately, I think this happens because of a catastrophic failure of the justice system.

TheOtherHobbes 7y ago
The numbers in a billionaire's net worth include no contextual information - nothing about the lives damaged, the jobs lost, the opportunities eliminated, the time wasted, the scamming, cheating, and manipulation, the ecological support structures destroyed. Business and personal accounting systems deny, ignore, and suppress those contextual details. So does the "investment" industry. And that makes a mockery of "price discovery" because the nominal market price always excludes critical externalities. It's possible to become extremely rich without negative externalities. It just happens to be incredibly difficult. The looser your ethics, and the less empathy you have for competitors and victims, the easier it gets. It's a feedback loop which rewards unethical behaviour. Essentially, money itself is a form of morality-laundering. It's an integer when it should be a complete trace through a common contextual event map.
- javajosh 7y ago
  Indeed, and what makes it interesting is that the information can (and should) travel in both directions: just as I want to know what my dollar has done when I buy an apple (e.g. I paid starvation wages to farmers and justified clear-cutting of a piece of rain-forest, gave political contributions to some dictator, etc) and the vendor gets to know how I earned that money (e.g. an office job where I make software content that tricks users into giving up more personal info, ultimately to get a higher ad price). You run into a technical issue in that you can trace a dollar indefinitely in both directions. But perhaps there's a solution, like some sort of decay.

netcan 7y ago

Idk is it's really all that bad. We tend to focus on juicy scandals. In this case, it was/is terrible conflicts of interest combined with a "pump-and-dump" mentality that exit focused startups are prone to during boom times. OTOH, the "system" worked, and wework investors got "busted" before IPO. It never reached the stage where pros and insiders cash out to public investors. In retrospect, investor cash was spent/wasted by operating expenses... Operating expenses are salaries and such. It may be wasteful, but the losers are risk tolerant investors so c'est la vie. In a "dot-com" scenario, a much larger amount (market cap) goes from public investors to private ones. If wework had succeeded in getting to this stage, it would be aweful. Imo, we need more risk, not less. Professional risk investors though, they are too good at offloading that risk to where it isn't supposed to be. Most of the institutional fixers (large funds, banks, regulators, sec, etc) suggest "fixes" that reduce risk. This is not a good thing. We need risk, and that includes a risk of shenanigans. I'd rather have a public blowup than an even more conservative professional investor class.

abvdasker 7y ago
Adam Neumann is now a billionaire. In the meritocratic, rational-markets mythology of how many people believe the system works, you're only supposed to get a billion dollars if you create value for a lot of people. After 18.5 billion dollars of investment, thanks to Adam Neumann's leadership, WeWork is now worth 8 billion dollars. So rather than creating value, he actually destroyed a shitload of it. And now he's richer than you or I will ever be. You're also ignoring one group of victims here. I wonder how the current and former employees of WeWork would feel about your assessment that it's "not so bad"? Their labor was no doubt compensated largely in the form of now-worthless equity grants. "Sorry you got screwed but this is necessary for the health of the investor class. Won't somebody please think of the investor class?!" How totally fucking odious. I don't know how you look at WeWork and arrive at the conclusion that professional investors are at risk of becoming too conservative. Clearly, venture capital has stopped functioning with any sort of discipline or rationality if it can invest in companies like WeWork and Theranos which later turn out to be obvious mirages of pure ineptitude and greed.

powerapple 7y ago

They created jobs, employed more than ten thousand people, why is it a bad thing?