> I'd challenge the idea that this got upvoted for intellectual interest
Of course we can only guess about that. No doubt the users who flagged the article feel the same way as you. On the other hand, I disagree because I can feel it touching my own intellectual curiosity: it's extraordinary that a 5-year-old could and would do that. Yes it's strongly sentimental, which is not usually our thing here, but it's important for HN to have the occasional story in that overlapping part of the Venn diagram.
This is one of the cases where a moderator's individual taste affects the site. Is that fair? No it is not, but there's an interesting reason to do it anyway: you need some sort of individual judgment affecting the site, in order to prevent it from converging into the brown noise of everyone-put-together. A system like HN can get itself into a rut otherwise, becoming too predictable and too common-denominator. I don't think that I'm the best individual to supply the perturbations; it's just that someone needs to, and for whatever reason I ended up in that role. Since this function is about bumping the system out of its grooves, sort of like the mutations in a genetic algorithm, it probably doesn't matter that much if I do a fabulous job on that point. I just need to not suck at it, and if that were the case, HN would probably be screwed for more significant reasons.
It's not merely predicated on a utilitarian ethical viewpoint, it assumes that we've accurately accounted for costs of the options (eg, second and third order effects) when deciding rather than merely justifying our preferences with biased models.
Empirically, the second (biased models) happens considerably more often than the first (accurate accounting) -- to the point that even if you're a utilitarian, you have to admit it doesn't work in practice. You simply can't make the required benefit calculations for utilitarianism.
This is something businesses get wrong a lot: their numerical justification is actually a reflection of the biases of their staff, rather than an accurate accounting of the options.
The counterpoint to this is that you can't just wait forever before making a decision. At some point, you'll have to do with imprecise data, and for a pandemic that is developing very rapidly, you can't just sit back and do nothing (well you can, but then you have to make an argument for why this is a good option).
As to the point of whether utilitarianism is a good ethical framework... well, at least no non-consequentialist ethical framework has ever convinced me. A naïve reading of utilitarianism has its problems, of course, but those can be accounted for; but the classical Kantian conundrum of not being allowed to lie to a murderer seems silly to me. Plus saying "principles matter" has just as many problems as the utilitarian approach, as nobody will be able to agree on those principles.
They're not going to have to re-issue shares at a lower price; they're going to get bailed out by the taxpayers.
The conditions for government money should be:
1. All current debt is converted into shares, erasing payback preferences and on-going payments to creditors.
2. Companies must issue new shares as collateral to the government at current market rate, in exchange for the money.
3. Rather than repayment, the government will sell the shares on the open market in years 2-6 (a 5 year window).
4. All share buybacks at the company are banned for a period of 10 years.
It's okay to nationally support critical businesses, but make the shareholders take it in the wallet for their reckless business practices leading up to this.
They took a gamble by buying shares instead of saving -- let them take the hit for losing.
> make the shareholders take it in the wallet for their reckless business practices
The problem is that those business practices weren't decided by the shareholders. The shareholders in most cases are mutual funds holding millions of people's retirement savings. Those people had no say in the business decisions made by the companies; they don't even control which individual stocks the mutual funds invest in. Their retirement savings are not what should be taking the hit.
So where is the accountability, then? Does it fall on whatever % of owners who are active investors? Or are they shielded by the fact that there's a mutual fund present who pledges to simply vote with the board on every decision?
Doesn't saying that these are people's retirement savings and so structurally should only ever be allowed to go up in value create perverse incentives and remove all of the responsibility from.. everyone involved?
Shareholders benefited massively and accumulated huge rewards from the market leveraging up during the borrow-for-buybacks period, and now in a downturn we're throwing our hands up and saying that we can't let those companies face any negative consequences for taking on that risk because nobody was in control? Or some people were in control, but there were also some who weren't?
Something is missing here if a company having passive shareholders means it should do well, business-practices-be-damned.
There isn't any real accountability as far as shareholders being able to hold corporate executives and boards of directors accountable. That is a huge breakage in corporate governance that won't be easily fixed.
> saying that these are people's retirement savings and so structurally should only ever be allowed to go up in value
Who said that?
All I said is that, since the shareholders weren't the ones that made the questionable business decisions, they shouldn't be the ones that are shafted because everyone wants a scapegoat.
> perverse incentives
There are certainly perverse incentives for corporate executives and boards of directors, but they aren't of the form you describe. It's simpler than that: it's just what I said above, that there is no practical way for shareholders to hold them accountable.
> Shareholders benefited massively and accumulated huge rewards from the market leveraging up during the borrow-for-buybacks period
And now they are taking the hit from the market tanking. My 401k is down quite a bit.
> now in a downturn we're throwing our hands up and saying that we can't let those companies face any negative consequences for taking on that risk because nobody was in control?
I'm not saying that. I'm just saying that (a) the shareholders weren't the ones that made the bad decisions, and (b) the shareholders are already taking a hit anyway.
If you really want the government to Do Something, it should fix the perverse incentives that corporate executives and boards of directors face. Having real criminal penalties for breaches of fiduciary responsibility, and stricter rules for what companies that take any investment from retirement funds can do, would be a good start.
Yeah, I'm not fan of "the corporations" but the decisions that would made by various corporations to leverage to the hilt came from the overall market conditions rather than individual enterprise decisions.
(not that I think much of the parent's idiosyncratic money-scheme but still).
An alternative path: The bailees issue preferred stocks to US taxpayers. In case of failure, the taxpayer collects first. In case of success, they get repaid for their investment.
Perhaps within the next five years we will see the number of deaths decline, as a pandemic results in people who would die in the next few years instead die earlier.
The RNA-world hypothesis conjectures that life started via a chemical soup developing things similar to viroids.
These early RNA-based replicators would go on to become more complicated, first developing a protective barrier and then specialized organelles.
As a byproduct of that process, viruses developed which could interact with organelles (or just the soup inside a cell) to reproduce themselves without being part of the host "genetic code".
In approximate complexity order:
- self-replicating compound, in solution with precursors
- viroid
- virus
- bacteria
- archaea
- eukaryota
From that perspective, hiding viroids (or similar simple replicators) in comets and boosting them into other systems would be a relatively efficient way to "seed" life around the cosmos.
Wow, this blows my mind. So is there a hypothesis that viroids may have been planted on comets by aliens to seed life around the cosmos and that we may be a product of that? If so, do you know the name of that hypothesis?
I guess there's not much to base such a wild hypothesis on but would love to go down the rabit hole anyways.
I can't find the article but I once read a fascinating theory that life is simply the evolution of entropy. The universe constantly trying to equalize, take higher energies and equalize them. Like a rock on a ledge there is energy waiting to release. Once all the energy is release the universe will end. The theory argued that life is simply the universe finding the most maximum way it can convert energy from one form to the other. I can't find the article at the moment but will continue looking. If correct it argues that life would be fundamental throughout the entire universe.
We've seen from CNN and Google that their views don't match society at large, and they're happy to use their positions of influence to "correct" society.
That's what caused CNN's ratings to collapse, and Google to face both a lawsuit (PragerU) and investigation (from Congress).
Did either stop them? Of course not -- they know better than you!
(If anyone wonders why my posts are dead -- it's because HN employs the same kind of Overton censorship, under the guise of policing tone.)
Setting aside the morality -- which is its own reason to treat people well -- it's damnably effective.
Something I got from a book on negotiating:
It doesn't matter how good of a negotiator you are, if you develop a reputation for being a jerk, you're going to fail.
Why?
Because for every room you're in being the best negotiator, your reputation is in ten, negotiating the other way and talking you out of deals you didn't even know about.
Conversely, if you develop a reputation for being a reliable partner and a fair dealer, then your reputation will do the hard work for you. People will talk you into deals without your input, because they want to work with people like that.
I have a theory that women don’t like to negotiate because they think negotiating requires them to be tough and mean. But really, if you’re affable and charismatic when trying to make a deal, which should come more naturally to most women, then you would be in good shape.
> we mean intellectual interest, not all kinds of interest
> For example, there is social interest (the sort of thing that leads to celebrity gossip).
> These things all have their place, but not here.
I'd challenge the idea that this got upvoted for intellectual interest or that it belongs here.