10 ms·

A tragic story would be one where folks in positions of power in these organizations saw these crises coming from a million miles away, tried to avoid disaster,

A tragic story would be one where folks in positions of power in these organizations saw these crises coming from a million miles away, tried to avoid disaster, and failed. I don't think this is a tragic story. I think this is a rather boring and formulaic plot we're seeing over and over: the story of late-stage capitalism and the application of value-extraction to human social structures resulting in comically terrible outcomes.

ath3nd 2y ago
[flagged]
- adamc 2y ago
  This is a problem that could be solved with serious penalties (say, 20 years in prison for executives involved) and serious enforcement.
  - ssklash 2y ago
    It's really not though. All that money goes somewhere, and not just in their pockets. Some goes to make sure that serious penalties and serious enforcement doesn't happen, because that too is another avenue of ensuring maximum profit.
    - throw10920 2y ago
      > Some goes to make sure that serious penalties and serious enforcement doesn't happen Representatives aren't emotionless puppets that respond to money. They're people, and they can be good or bad. In this case, they're bad, and they're the ones to blame, because they're responsible for protecting consumers from bad companies. > that too is another avenue of ensuring maximum profit This is also insanely deluded and ignorant of reality. Every communist country in existence has power deals between bureaucrats in charge of the state, and bureaucrats in charge of producing things. This is a result of human nature, and capitalism doesn't come into it at all.
      - toofy 2y ago
        > and they're the ones to blame, because they're responsible for protecting consumers from bad companies. in your example they’re both bad—both the original aggressor and the one refusing to enforce against that aggressor. we need to mitigate against this desire to find The One thing to blame. By their very nature complicated situations will have many problems, rarely simply one. we need to remember this so we don’t accidentally stifle conversations by saying “No! It’s this other thing! Not what you said!” we need to recognize this when we find ourselves falling into this trap. keep in mind, in your scenario, if the elected representative were to enforce against the aggressor, the aggressor would go to jail because their actions are bad—-this tells us that no, it isn’t only the elected person. Both of the parties in your scenario are actively making the situation worse. it’s both. they both deserve our derision.
        tekknik 2y ago
        if we want to point fingers then I certainly have my targets but what good will that do? you’ll piss off one side, promote the other, and increase the divide for both. another solution, actually boycott immorality. morality was pushed from society not so long ago, at least in the US, and what you see is the result. why wouldn’t you follow the letter of the law and screw over large swaths of people if it’s legal?
        CRConrad 2y ago
        [flagged]
        throw10920 2y ago
        > mistaking morality for having anything to do with whom you are or are not allowed to fuck > Except of course kids and in general people who don't want you to There's no self-consistent system of morality (that does not involve religion) that simultaneously supports all of these positions. What religious morality are you using?
    - ath3nd 2y ago
      Sure it doesn't ALL go in their pockets. https://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-pay-in-2022/ https://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-pay-in-2022/ The average CEO nowadays is paid 344 times more than an average worker, while in 1978 this figure was "only" 21 times. And indeed, lots of it goes to prevent serious penalties, like lawyering-up, lobbying, (deceitful) media campaigns, bribing "scientists" and "doctors", etc. Just look at Big Tobacco's playbook: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Frank_Statement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Frank_Statement and see it playing out with Big Oil and climate change, Big Chem (PFAS in our water), etc etc. And, let's not forget Big Tech, with companies like Twitter/X where fascism now thrives, and Instagram/TikTok/Whatever who mine our attention. These companies have grown, much like tumors, to be overly powerful, overly protected, and overly influential. And they wreck havoc on our societies and planet. Their attempts of "self-regulation" are laughable, and so far also laughable have been our governments' attempts to reign them in. My point is that the kind of corp feudalism we see now is a direct following of unrestrained capitalism/libertarianism. Unless we reign in the companies, break them down, make them pay fair wages and hold them responsible for their societal and environmental impact, we will drown in our own garbage. And yes, it's capitalism to blame, a philosophy where you optimize only for profit, throwing all other values out the window, in the hope that the (non-existent) "invisible hand" of the market will somehow fix everything magically.
      - tekknik 2y ago
        > it's capitalism to blame it doesn’t matter how many times this is said, rational people know the issue is with humans and not capitalism. we can’t keep giving human behavior a pass and blaming systems that literally cannot take any action on their own. we see this with guns as well, the problem is not the system nor the laws, the problem is people. i wish you luck in fixing people, as many have tried before you and failed.
        ath3nd 2y ago
        The solution to guns is simple. Ban guns and make ownership hard. It's the same reason you don't allow 10 year-olds to operate a vehicle, cause it can be a danger to society. > it doesn’t matter how many times this is said, rational people know the issue is with humans and not capitalism. This statement is the equivalent of hand waving. Capitalism is a system made by humans, it's not some divine order. We have toppled other flawed systems in the past, feudalism (kings and queens heads were rolling), slavery, and we can do the same with capitalism. These large complex systems have a life on their own and are susceptible to laws that individuals within can't predict/influence, so it's not human nature. Humans are largely compassionate, cooperative creatures. But the system in which we are placed influences our behavior to a huge extent. In this case, the system is definitely the problem, because it has bugs and corner cases that make it collapse, one way or another, and behavior that we consider "bad" to flourish. Capitalism, let's call it for what it is, has become money-based feudalism where the most ruthless and sociopathic people "succeed". How else would you call Big Tobacco's disinformation campaigns: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Frank_Statement# https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Frank_Statement#. This purposeful misinformation of the public is surely evil. How else would you call tobacco execs' behavior if not evil and sociopathic? The capitalistic system is basically cutthroat lying and stealing and extraction of value with a false veneer of fairness and law. - Theoretically, we are all equal in front of the law. In practice, the rich can lawyer up and get away with things that a normal person wouldn't be able to - Theoretically, all of us, through hard work and enterprise, can "succeed" in capitalism. In practice, it's much more important who your daddy is, where you were born, and where you studied (which is also influenced by money) - Theoretically, the government system in which we participate has elected bodies which are supposed to protect us from harm (e.g pollution, climate change, etc). In practice, money has allowed large corporation to buy politicians, lobbyists, campaign time, influence public opinion, etc. So, you see, in capitalism, the system is very very rigged, it promises one thing, but, behind the scenes, it's all about money. Everything is optimized for money, everything else is thrown out of the window (including people, nature, morals). There is only one option to defeat this rigged system, and that's not individual action, it's collective action. Strikes work, greedy corps can't actually survive without their workers doing the work. The pandemic made many people re-evaluate what's important, and we saw that it's the lower paid professions that were the "essential ones": nurses, delivery drivers, sanitation, etc. Why are they lower paid then? Now we are back to pretending nothing ever happened and corporations really hard are trying to make it business as usual again, trying to put you back to the office, trying to raise their prices and blame it on inflation. But guess what: with the fabrics of society unraveling together with the natural world, when there is no drinkable water and no food to eat, and fires are raging everywhere, you will realize that capitalism was the cancer causing all this. You'd be regretting you didn't band up with others and acted up sooner.
- throw10920 2y ago
  This is deluded. "Capitalism" is not "structured" in this way at all. This is a failure of regulation, and it's extremely easy to see why: because competent regulators would take anticompetitive action against large monopolies like Google and Meta, as well as enacting laws to prevent undesirable things like personal data being sold. > The perverse incentives of capitalism will never create good social change ...and you just outed yourself as being extremely ignorant of basically all history, as the vast majority of socially beneficial inventions and rights of all time have come from capitalist countries.
  - ath3nd 2y ago
    > This is deluded. "Capitalism" is not "structured" in this way at all. This is a failure of regulation I do agree with you that this is a failure of regulation. However, in the stage of capitalism we are currently in, capitalism actively FIGHTS regulation. Whether it's lobbyism, hiring "scientists" to challenge independent studies, outright tax evasion, or simply accepting fines for disaster after disaster (oil spills, bad plane design, data sales) because they can afford it. Hell, politicians now are deregulating our countries by privatising or de-funding branch after branch (see the NHS in the UK). Capitalism at its current stage is just a giant fire-sale, and our governments are as deeply involved as the corporations, not out of maliciousness, but due to how the system naturally drags everybody and everything in, with its need for constant growth. You know what else constantly grows? Tumors. Sure we do need powerful regulation and regulation enforcement, but we also need to think whether a system that produces statements like this: https://jacobin.com/2022/05/pete-buttigieg-free-market-hungry-baby-formula-capitalism https://jacobin.com/2022/05/pete-buttigieg-free-market-hungr... "Pete Buttigieg: Hungry Babies, Regrettably, Are Just the Price of the Free Market" Is worth preserving. I'd say not, and I will work my best to dismantle it and throw it in the past, where it belongs, along with slavery, feudalism, fascism and other obsolete and harmful human societal arrangements.
    - throw10920 2y ago
      > However, in the stage of capitalism we are currently in This is, again, deeply deluded and detached from reality. People always fight those who hold them back. This applies to employees fighting bosses, children fighting parents, companies fighting regulators, citizens fighting corrupt governments, and different bureaucrats fighting each other in socialist and communist systems. It's blindingly obvious that this phenomenon isn't specific to capitalism, and outright false to claim that it wouldn't happen in any other economic system. (and, in fact, it would be much worse in command economies, as history clearly shows) > Capitalism at its current stage is just a giant fire-sale Again: there's no "at its current stage" - there is corruption in government that has allowed bad actors to run rampant. The fact that tens of thousands of companies are behaving reasonably trivially disproves your claim that this is a "stage". This is bad actors, which have always existed, and always will continue to exist, that are now less checked than usual because of regulatory failure. > we also need to think whether a system that produces statements like this ...which proves decisively that you have no idea what you're talking about. This is not an argument - this is emotional pleading. That describes a lot of your posts, actually - pleading. Because there are no logical points made, just a lot of emotionally manipulative, trivially-false statements. > will work my best to dismantle it and throw it in the past ...and there's the activism, which comes with the typical lack of understanding of reality that is common to proponents for communism. You should visit North Korea for yourself and see how alternative systems to capitalism actually work.
ToucanLoucan 2y ago
The line has to go up, and the slack has to be taken out of every last source of revenue. Like that story that was here yesterday about insurance companies monitoring customer's insured assets with drones and AI. Every unexploited dollar left on the table is slack, and a perfect market leaves no dollar unexploited. Therefore a more perfect market can be built with more perfect machine-powered decisions to more perfectly screw you out of every nickel they can. "Oops, sorry your brother cut his leg and you had to speed to the hospital, but you better get a second job if you wanna keep your car." Fuck this shit. Fuck all of it. And fuck all the status quo warriors sitting on the sidelines bleating about "it's just the way it is" because the axe hasn't swung for them yet. You're safe now because the market has more vulnerable people to grind up first, but rest assured, as it churns through them, your time will come too.
- alfiedotwtf 2y ago
  You’re on a website run by venture capitalists who use this platform to increase the value of their portfolios… so unless you’re an agent provocateur, your comment needs to be read as ironic performance art because I hate to break it to you - you’re also part of the problem
  - toomuchtodo 2y ago
    I operated under this mental model originally as well. But, based on all available information, while HN allows running ads for YC portfolio companies and uses it for other promo purposes (YC applications), I have come to the conclusion tha pg, dang, et el are running this place as part science project, part public good, funded by YC returns (which, while not exact, can be predicted with high confidence from public information wrt portfolio liquidity events). Certainly, you need funding, look what happened to Reddit's quest to squeeze community for returns. HN runs lean (two servers in colo, a few mods) and small (less is more), so they can be more flexible in what they're optimizing for. I will argue there is something intangible that exists they are cultivating. More for another thread, but I would be cautious about saying "You cannot speak truth about capitalism failings because YC runs HN and YC is a VC fund." Simplicity is rare, and the evidence does not indicate this forum runs to maximize profit.
toomuchtodo 2y ago
Someone on HN [1] recommended "Broken Code," [2] a book about the various people who tried to fix Facebook/Meta from the inside and noped out. Highly recommend having purchased and read. "Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy.” -- Captain G. M. Gilbert [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40969211 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40969211 [2] https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/712678/broken-code-by-jeff-horwitz/ https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/712678/broken-code-... (keep those book recommendations coming)
rurp 2y ago
I'm beyond being shocked by this kind of behavior but it is still striking to me how some of the most profitable companies in history will go out of their way to do shady deals for a slight short term increase in their record profits. The resulting reputational damage and future risk to their monopoly revenue has got to make deals like this -EV for the company in the long run, but decision makers at these companies are paid more for short term profits and they know it.
- pseudocomposer 2y ago
  Reputational damage is pretty easy to limit for companies that can control what news a huge majority of people see.
  - mrguyorama 2y ago
    If the "Craftsman" brand of tools didn't go completely out of business despite removing the lifetime warranty and just slapping the brand name on cheap chinese tools, then "Reputational damage" does not exist.
    - markovs_gun 2y ago
      Yep. Reputational damage is a thing of the past in a world where everyone is completely bombarded with useless and incorrect information 24/7. Maybe it was never a thing at all, and companies merely assumed it was as a theoretical. Either way, I have never seen any brand actually suffer long term because of their reputation.
      - mixmastamyk 2y ago
        Tarnished brands change their name these days.
    - mewse 2y ago
      Pedantry: "Craftsman" was never a company and didn't "go out of business". "Craftsman" was originally a store brand used by Sears, under which it sold tools that Sears contracted various third parties to produce. In 2017, Stanley Black & Decker purchased the "Craftsman" trademark from Sears (Sears Holdings at the time), giving Sears a long-term royalty-free license to continue producing and selling tools under that trademark (I think that license lasts for about another decade at this point? And then there'd be a small royalty payment for using the trademark beyond that point.) As a result, several different stores now each carry tools all called "Craftsman", they're generally not the same tools; different stores sell different tools produced in different places, and all sell their own versions of the tools under the same "Craftsman" brand name. This undoubtedly causes absurd levels of consumer confusion. As you say, it's absolutely causing tremendous reputational value for the trademark.
tekknik 2y ago
> the story of late-stage capitalism and the application of value-extraction to human social structures resulting in comically terrible outcomes You mean the MBAs. Ban anything related to business administration degrees and fix the problem.

ath3nd 2y ago

[flagged]

adamc 2y ago
This is a problem that could be solved with serious penalties (say, 20 years in prison for executives involved) and serious enforcement.
- ssklash 2y ago
  It's really not though. All that money goes somewhere, and not just in their pockets. Some goes to make sure that serious penalties and serious enforcement doesn't happen, because that too is another avenue of ensuring maximum profit.
  - throw10920 2y ago
    > Some goes to make sure that serious penalties and serious enforcement doesn't happen Representatives aren't emotionless puppets that respond to money. They're people, and they can be good or bad. In this case, they're bad, and they're the ones to blame, because they're responsible for protecting consumers from bad companies. > that too is another avenue of ensuring maximum profit This is also insanely deluded and ignorant of reality. Every communist country in existence has power deals between bureaucrats in charge of the state, and bureaucrats in charge of producing things. This is a result of human nature, and capitalism doesn't come into it at all.
    - toofy 2y ago
      > and they're the ones to blame, because they're responsible for protecting consumers from bad companies. in your example they’re both bad—both the original aggressor and the one refusing to enforce against that aggressor. we need to mitigate against this desire to find The One thing to blame. By their very nature complicated situations will have many problems, rarely simply one. we need to remember this so we don’t accidentally stifle conversations by saying “No! It’s this other thing! Not what you said!” we need to recognize this when we find ourselves falling into this trap. keep in mind, in your scenario, if the elected representative were to enforce against the aggressor, the aggressor would go to jail because their actions are bad—-this tells us that no, it isn’t only the elected person. Both of the parties in your scenario are actively making the situation worse. it’s both. they both deserve our derision.
      - tekknik 2y ago
        if we want to point fingers then I certainly have my targets but what good will that do? you’ll piss off one side, promote the other, and increase the divide for both. another solution, actually boycott immorality. morality was pushed from society not so long ago, at least in the US, and what you see is the result. why wouldn’t you follow the letter of the law and screw over large swaths of people if it’s legal?
        CRConrad 2y ago
        [flagged]
        throw10920 2y ago
        > mistaking morality for having anything to do with whom you are or are not allowed to fuck > Except of course kids and in general people who don't want you to There's no self-consistent system of morality (that does not involve religion) that simultaneously supports all of these positions. What religious morality are you using?
  - ath3nd 2y ago
    Sure it doesn't ALL go in their pockets. https://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-pay-in-2022/ https://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-pay-in-2022/ The average CEO nowadays is paid 344 times more than an average worker, while in 1978 this figure was "only" 21 times. And indeed, lots of it goes to prevent serious penalties, like lawyering-up, lobbying, (deceitful) media campaigns, bribing "scientists" and "doctors", etc. Just look at Big Tobacco's playbook: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Frank_Statement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Frank_Statement and see it playing out with Big Oil and climate change, Big Chem (PFAS in our water), etc etc. And, let's not forget Big Tech, with companies like Twitter/X where fascism now thrives, and Instagram/TikTok/Whatever who mine our attention. These companies have grown, much like tumors, to be overly powerful, overly protected, and overly influential. And they wreck havoc on our societies and planet. Their attempts of "self-regulation" are laughable, and so far also laughable have been our governments' attempts to reign them in. My point is that the kind of corp feudalism we see now is a direct following of unrestrained capitalism/libertarianism. Unless we reign in the companies, break them down, make them pay fair wages and hold them responsible for their societal and environmental impact, we will drown in our own garbage. And yes, it's capitalism to blame, a philosophy where you optimize only for profit, throwing all other values out the window, in the hope that the (non-existent) "invisible hand" of the market will somehow fix everything magically.
    - tekknik 2y ago
      > it's capitalism to blame it doesn’t matter how many times this is said, rational people know the issue is with humans and not capitalism. we can’t keep giving human behavior a pass and blaming systems that literally cannot take any action on their own. we see this with guns as well, the problem is not the system nor the laws, the problem is people. i wish you luck in fixing people, as many have tried before you and failed.
      - ath3nd 2y ago
        The solution to guns is simple. Ban guns and make ownership hard. It's the same reason you don't allow 10 year-olds to operate a vehicle, cause it can be a danger to society. > it doesn’t matter how many times this is said, rational people know the issue is with humans and not capitalism. This statement is the equivalent of hand waving. Capitalism is a system made by humans, it's not some divine order. We have toppled other flawed systems in the past, feudalism (kings and queens heads were rolling), slavery, and we can do the same with capitalism. These large complex systems have a life on their own and are susceptible to laws that individuals within can't predict/influence, so it's not human nature. Humans are largely compassionate, cooperative creatures. But the system in which we are placed influences our behavior to a huge extent. In this case, the system is definitely the problem, because it has bugs and corner cases that make it collapse, one way or another, and behavior that we consider "bad" to flourish. Capitalism, let's call it for what it is, has become money-based feudalism where the most ruthless and sociopathic people "succeed". How else would you call Big Tobacco's disinformation campaigns: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Frank_Statement# https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Frank_Statement#. This purposeful misinformation of the public is surely evil. How else would you call tobacco execs' behavior if not evil and sociopathic? The capitalistic system is basically cutthroat lying and stealing and extraction of value with a false veneer of fairness and law. - Theoretically, we are all equal in front of the law. In practice, the rich can lawyer up and get away with things that a normal person wouldn't be able to - Theoretically, all of us, through hard work and enterprise, can "succeed" in capitalism. In practice, it's much more important who your daddy is, where you were born, and where you studied (which is also influenced by money) - Theoretically, the government system in which we participate has elected bodies which are supposed to protect us from harm (e.g pollution, climate change, etc). In practice, money has allowed large corporation to buy politicians, lobbyists, campaign time, influence public opinion, etc. So, you see, in capitalism, the system is very very rigged, it promises one thing, but, behind the scenes, it's all about money. Everything is optimized for money, everything else is thrown out of the window (including people, nature, morals). There is only one option to defeat this rigged system, and that's not individual action, it's collective action. Strikes work, greedy corps can't actually survive without their workers doing the work. The pandemic made many people re-evaluate what's important, and we saw that it's the lower paid professions that were the "essential ones": nurses, delivery drivers, sanitation, etc. Why are they lower paid then? Now we are back to pretending nothing ever happened and corporations really hard are trying to make it business as usual again, trying to put you back to the office, trying to raise their prices and blame it on inflation. But guess what: with the fabrics of society unraveling together with the natural world, when there is no drinkable water and no food to eat, and fires are raging everywhere, you will realize that capitalism was the cancer causing all this. You'd be regretting you didn't band up with others and acted up sooner.
throw10920 2y ago
This is deluded. "Capitalism" is not "structured" in this way at all. This is a failure of regulation, and it's extremely easy to see why: because competent regulators would take anticompetitive action against large monopolies like Google and Meta, as well as enacting laws to prevent undesirable things like personal data being sold. > The perverse incentives of capitalism will never create good social change ...and you just outed yourself as being extremely ignorant of basically all history, as the vast majority of socially beneficial inventions and rights of all time have come from capitalist countries.
- ath3nd 2y ago
  > This is deluded. "Capitalism" is not "structured" in this way at all. This is a failure of regulation I do agree with you that this is a failure of regulation. However, in the stage of capitalism we are currently in, capitalism actively FIGHTS regulation. Whether it's lobbyism, hiring "scientists" to challenge independent studies, outright tax evasion, or simply accepting fines for disaster after disaster (oil spills, bad plane design, data sales) because they can afford it. Hell, politicians now are deregulating our countries by privatising or de-funding branch after branch (see the NHS in the UK). Capitalism at its current stage is just a giant fire-sale, and our governments are as deeply involved as the corporations, not out of maliciousness, but due to how the system naturally drags everybody and everything in, with its need for constant growth. You know what else constantly grows? Tumors. Sure we do need powerful regulation and regulation enforcement, but we also need to think whether a system that produces statements like this: https://jacobin.com/2022/05/pete-buttigieg-free-market-hungry-baby-formula-capitalism https://jacobin.com/2022/05/pete-buttigieg-free-market-hungr... "Pete Buttigieg: Hungry Babies, Regrettably, Are Just the Price of the Free Market" Is worth preserving. I'd say not, and I will work my best to dismantle it and throw it in the past, where it belongs, along with slavery, feudalism, fascism and other obsolete and harmful human societal arrangements.
  - throw10920 2y ago
    > However, in the stage of capitalism we are currently in This is, again, deeply deluded and detached from reality. People always fight those who hold them back. This applies to employees fighting bosses, children fighting parents, companies fighting regulators, citizens fighting corrupt governments, and different bureaucrats fighting each other in socialist and communist systems. It's blindingly obvious that this phenomenon isn't specific to capitalism, and outright false to claim that it wouldn't happen in any other economic system. (and, in fact, it would be much worse in command economies, as history clearly shows) > Capitalism at its current stage is just a giant fire-sale Again: there's no "at its current stage" - there is corruption in government that has allowed bad actors to run rampant. The fact that tens of thousands of companies are behaving reasonably trivially disproves your claim that this is a "stage". This is bad actors, which have always existed, and always will continue to exist, that are now less checked than usual because of regulatory failure. > we also need to think whether a system that produces statements like this ...which proves decisively that you have no idea what you're talking about. This is not an argument - this is emotional pleading. That describes a lot of your posts, actually - pleading. Because there are no logical points made, just a lot of emotionally manipulative, trivially-false statements. > will work my best to dismantle it and throw it in the past ...and there's the activism, which comes with the typical lack of understanding of reality that is common to proponents for communism. You should visit North Korea for yourself and see how alternative systems to capitalism actually work.

ToucanLoucan 2y ago

The line has to go up, and the slack has to be taken out of every last source of revenue. Like that story that was here yesterday about insurance companies monitoring customer's insured assets with drones and AI. Every unexploited dollar left on the table is slack, and a perfect market leaves no dollar unexploited. Therefore a more perfect market can be built with more perfect machine-powered decisions to more perfectly screw you out of every nickel they can. "Oops, sorry your brother cut his leg and you had to speed to the hospital, but you better get a second job if you wanna keep your car." Fuck this shit. Fuck all of it. And fuck all the status quo warriors sitting on the sidelines bleating about "it's just the way it is" because the axe hasn't swung for them yet. You're safe now because the market has more vulnerable people to grind up first, but rest assured, as it churns through them, your time will come too.

alfiedotwtf 2y ago
You’re on a website run by venture capitalists who use this platform to increase the value of their portfolios… so unless you’re an agent provocateur, your comment needs to be read as ironic performance art because I hate to break it to you - you’re also part of the problem
- toomuchtodo 2y ago
  I operated under this mental model originally as well. But, based on all available information, while HN allows running ads for YC portfolio companies and uses it for other promo purposes (YC applications), I have come to the conclusion tha pg, dang, et el are running this place as part science project, part public good, funded by YC returns (which, while not exact, can be predicted with high confidence from public information wrt portfolio liquidity events). Certainly, you need funding, look what happened to Reddit's quest to squeeze community for returns. HN runs lean (two servers in colo, a few mods) and small (less is more), so they can be more flexible in what they're optimizing for. I will argue there is something intangible that exists they are cultivating. More for another thread, but I would be cautious about saying "You cannot speak truth about capitalism failings because YC runs HN and YC is a VC fund." Simplicity is rare, and the evidence does not indicate this forum runs to maximize profit.

toomuchtodo 2y ago

Someone on HN [1] recommended "Broken Code," [2] a book about the various people who tried to fix Facebook/Meta from the inside and noped out. Highly recommend having purchased and read. "Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy.” -- Captain G. M. Gilbert [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40969211 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40969211 [2] https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/712678/broken-code-by-jeff-horwitz/ https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/712678/broken-code-... (keep those book recommendations coming)

rurp 2y ago

I'm beyond being shocked by this kind of behavior but it is still striking to me how some of the most profitable companies in history will go out of their way to do shady deals for a slight short term increase in their record profits. The resulting reputational damage and future risk to their monopoly revenue has got to make deals like this -EV for the company in the long run, but decision makers at these companies are paid more for short term profits and they know it.

pseudocomposer 2y ago
Reputational damage is pretty easy to limit for companies that can control what news a huge majority of people see.
- mrguyorama 2y ago
  If the "Craftsman" brand of tools didn't go completely out of business despite removing the lifetime warranty and just slapping the brand name on cheap chinese tools, then "Reputational damage" does not exist.
  - markovs_gun 2y ago
    Yep. Reputational damage is a thing of the past in a world where everyone is completely bombarded with useless and incorrect information 24/7. Maybe it was never a thing at all, and companies merely assumed it was as a theoretical. Either way, I have never seen any brand actually suffer long term because of their reputation.
    - mixmastamyk 2y ago
      Tarnished brands change their name these days.
  - mewse 2y ago
    Pedantry: "Craftsman" was never a company and didn't "go out of business". "Craftsman" was originally a store brand used by Sears, under which it sold tools that Sears contracted various third parties to produce. In 2017, Stanley Black & Decker purchased the "Craftsman" trademark from Sears (Sears Holdings at the time), giving Sears a long-term royalty-free license to continue producing and selling tools under that trademark (I think that license lasts for about another decade at this point? And then there'd be a small royalty payment for using the trademark beyond that point.) As a result, several different stores now each carry tools all called "Craftsman", they're generally not the same tools; different stores sell different tools produced in different places, and all sell their own versions of the tools under the same "Craftsman" brand name. This undoubtedly causes absurd levels of consumer confusion. As you say, it's absolutely causing tremendous reputational value for the trademark.

tekknik 2y ago

> the story of late-stage capitalism and the application of value-extraction to human social structures resulting in comically terrible outcomes You mean the MBAs. Ban anything related to business administration degrees and fix the problem.