> These people are insane. Keep personalities like this far away from your life.

Tempting as it is to post unsubstantive denunciations to the internet, this is the kind of thing we're hoping to avoid here (and especially personal attacks). If you have a concern you can express in a way that adds information, by all means do. But please don't just post empty anger, even though it's perennially popular.

I think by reading the quotations I have selectively excerpted from the original article, a thoughtful reader can infer the substance of my concern. There is no need to spell everything out as if we're all unsophisticated dullards.

Did you not read the part where she worked for Morgan Stanley? Stuff like this is passed around in Wall Street companies as a positive legend rather than life-endangering foolhardiness and poor judgement (which it is).

If you work at a company and they start hiring large numbers of ex-Wall-Street execs, run.

> These people are insane.

No, not really. An earnings call for an enterprise that large is worth many human lives (at the standard rate of about $2 million, which is itself derived from both people's own insurance choices as well as court-case awards); part of what someone at that level is paid to do is to put her company (and the well-being of the millions of people with a stake in it) above herself, and Mrs. Porat did that.

The fact that you're trying to equate the cost of a human life with an earnings call shows that you've missed the point entirely.

$2 million (or whatever number) may be the standard rate used to compensate others for a lost life, but does anyone willingly sell their life for $2 million?

I think there is a difference between how we try to compensate for the loss of something irreplaceable (a life) or disincentive negligence, and the price of something bought and sold.

Isn't life insurance fraud by suicide selling your life for a chance at money, usually much less than $2 million?

Obviously not, because you're not dead.

Life insurance fraud of killing yourself and making it look like it wasn't a suicide in order for your beneficiaries to get the payout. You would very much be dead.

Okay, let me assume that this is even a thing (I don't know, but you seem to). There are still two fallacies in trying to equate the lost life against the payout:

1. The person committing the suicide and thus the fraud would not be weighing his life against the money, he would be considering the well-being of his beneficiaries instead, and deciding that their well-being is worth more than his life.

2. He cannot reasonably control the payout of the life insurance. Anything beyond a certain mark (maybe 2 million $) would raise a lot of eyebrows in the insurance company.

> An earnings call for an enterprise that large is worth many human lives

I wish I could read this without thinking of human sacrifice on a scale unseen since pre-Columbian meso-America.

Even by your logic this is insane. She's paid more than 2,000,000 a year, and therefore should not be sacrificing herself from a pure economics standpoint.

The minimum prison sentence for manslaughter in the first degree in New York is 10 years, not a $2 million dollar fine. [My point being that there are some problems with equating lives to money.]

i'm with you, it takes someone to be at least a little bit crazy to do a job like this under those circumstances.

i always wonder how lonely these people are in their day to day lives, but maybe they derive satisfaction from their hectic work lives instead of human relationships.

i know i've been there before from my own hectic work schedules, caught up in the love affair of a high pressure work environment.