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> If the company fires hundreds or thousands of people and there is no visible dip in the productivity, is it really a bad thing? How can you be so callous? Th

> If the company fires hundreds or thousands of people and there is no visible dip in the productivity, is it really a bad thing? How can you be so callous? This is why people don't like startup people. Yes, obviously it's a bad thing, because those people are now without a source of income and often without health insurance. I say "obviously" because it's pretty reasonable to expect people aren't sociopaths, and care about the well-being of others. It's only within your sick bubble where maximizing profit at the expense of human suffering is considered a reasonable option. Unfortunately, people like you have a disproportionate power in our society. I'm not saying you're a sociopath, I'm saying that the economic ideology which is commonplace on Hacker News makes normal people who believe it behave like sociopaths. Sure, in a society with a reasonable safety net where losing your job wasn't a potential death sentence, laying off some workers occasionally would be fine. But we don't live in a Keynesian fantasy-world, we live in a world where insurance companies have death panels.

sadcodemonkey 3y ago
thank you for saying this. the archives of HN comments are going to make a fascinating case study for the next civilization explaining why this one collapsed.
sokoloff 3y ago
Would it also be preferable for companies to act as de-facto charities and hire an extra 10% (or an extra hundreds to thousands) of people in order to provide some of the people who are currently out of work a source of income and health insurance? If 100 fewer employees is bad; is 100 more good?
- kerkeslager 3y ago
  > Would it also be preferable for companies to act as de-facto charities and hire an extra 10% (or an extra hundreds to thousands) of people in order to provide some of the people who are currently out of work a source of income and health insurance? No, that's a low-effort straw man argument. It would be preferable for us to stop trusting companies to provide for people's needs, and build effective systems for providing people's needs. A good start might be to stop pretending corporate actions are always morally good as long as they're profitable, and recognize that firing people causes harm to those people. That's not a difficult concept for normal people--again, its obvious--and corporations have spilled a great deal of ink to override basic human empathy on this subject. I'll agree that companies can't be made to work if they're required to act as charities, but I'll also say that if corporations can't exist without causing harm then I'm not sure why we'd want them to exist. The entire purpose of allowing corporations to exist is that they are supposed to benefit society. At the very least, if we're going to allow companies to fire at will, we need a much more effective social safety net to help workers pick up the pieces when they get fired. But of course these corporations will fight against that, because exploiting their workers' dependence is profitable, and besides, they don't want to be asked to pay to fix the harms they cause.
  - valval 3y ago
    Socialism has never worked and never will.
    - kerkeslager 3y ago
      I'm not even advocating for socialism, or any system of economics. The disagreement is more fundamental than that. I'm advocating for having some compassion and empathy toward human beings. There are very reasonable arguments to be made that capitalism is the best way to achieve compassionate and empathetic results. But you're not even on board with that more fundamental goal, you're just dismissing it as socialism. And I AM moralizing here, and I AM personally criticizing you. If you see someone advocating for basic compassion and empathy toward human beings and all you can think is "socialism = fail", you're a bad person. Being able to have compassion and empathy towards others is at the core of any ethical system I can imagine. Grow a conscience.
      - valval 3y ago
        You’re so far off anything reasonable and rational that I don’t even know how to begin addressing your points. Your initial message reads like a person who has taken the first lesson of the first three courses in a political science major trying to describe their self-prescribed problems in the world. Yes, getting fired is an unpleasant thing and a necessary evil similar to break-ups and falling off a bicycle. Life has its components of suffering, and that’s more than fine.
        kerkeslager 3y ago
        Life has a lot more suffering because people like you don't give a shit about causing suffering to others. And it is not in evidence that this example of suffering is a necessary evil. I'm open to capitalist solutions to the lack of a safety net for people who get fired, but a) you're not proposing any, because you don't see other people's suffering as a problem, i.e. you're an amoral danger to society and b) H.N.-style "all regulation is bad" isn't even capitalism--a free market requires a strong central authority to prevent anticompetitive practices. If you see all government intervention as anti-capitalist it's pretty clear you haven't actually read Adam Smith's works. You aren't even capitalist, you're just pro-corporate for selfish reasons.

sadcodemonkey 3y ago

thank you for saying this. the archives of HN comments are going to make a fascinating case study for the next civilization explaining why this one collapsed.

sokoloff 3y ago

Would it also be preferable for companies to act as de-facto charities and hire an extra 10% (or an extra hundreds to thousands) of people in order to provide some of the people who are currently out of work a source of income and health insurance? If 100 fewer employees is bad; is 100 more good?

kerkeslager 3y ago
> Would it also be preferable for companies to act as de-facto charities and hire an extra 10% (or an extra hundreds to thousands) of people in order to provide some of the people who are currently out of work a source of income and health insurance? No, that's a low-effort straw man argument. It would be preferable for us to stop trusting companies to provide for people's needs, and build effective systems for providing people's needs. A good start might be to stop pretending corporate actions are always morally good as long as they're profitable, and recognize that firing people causes harm to those people. That's not a difficult concept for normal people--again, its obvious--and corporations have spilled a great deal of ink to override basic human empathy on this subject. I'll agree that companies can't be made to work if they're required to act as charities, but I'll also say that if corporations can't exist without causing harm then I'm not sure why we'd want them to exist. The entire purpose of allowing corporations to exist is that they are supposed to benefit society. At the very least, if we're going to allow companies to fire at will, we need a much more effective social safety net to help workers pick up the pieces when they get fired. But of course these corporations will fight against that, because exploiting their workers' dependence is profitable, and besides, they don't want to be asked to pay to fix the harms they cause.
- valval 3y ago
  Socialism has never worked and never will.
  - kerkeslager 3y ago
    I'm not even advocating for socialism, or any system of economics. The disagreement is more fundamental than that. I'm advocating for having some compassion and empathy toward human beings. There are very reasonable arguments to be made that capitalism is the best way to achieve compassionate and empathetic results. But you're not even on board with that more fundamental goal, you're just dismissing it as socialism. And I AM moralizing here, and I AM personally criticizing you. If you see someone advocating for basic compassion and empathy toward human beings and all you can think is "socialism = fail", you're a bad person. Being able to have compassion and empathy towards others is at the core of any ethical system I can imagine. Grow a conscience.
    - valval 3y ago
      You’re so far off anything reasonable and rational that I don’t even know how to begin addressing your points. Your initial message reads like a person who has taken the first lesson of the first three courses in a political science major trying to describe their self-prescribed problems in the world. Yes, getting fired is an unpleasant thing and a necessary evil similar to break-ups and falling off a bicycle. Life has its components of suffering, and that’s more than fine.
      - kerkeslager 3y ago
        Life has a lot more suffering because people like you don't give a shit about causing suffering to others. And it is not in evidence that this example of suffering is a necessary evil. I'm open to capitalist solutions to the lack of a safety net for people who get fired, but a) you're not proposing any, because you don't see other people's suffering as a problem, i.e. you're an amoral danger to society and b) H.N.-style "all regulation is bad" isn't even capitalism--a free market requires a strong central authority to prevent anticompetitive practices. If you see all government intervention as anti-capitalist it's pretty clear you haven't actually read Adam Smith's works. You aren't even capitalist, you're just pro-corporate for selfish reasons.