(2) You cannot explain away 2008 as being the fault of the people who couldn't pay their mortgage. WTAF dude.
What I'm getting from this is that you have wrapped yourself up in a nice blanket of ignorance and a nice comfy salary, and while you have come to the conclusion that the business you're engaging in is fraudulent, you've convinced yourself that anybody but you is responsible. Participating makes you responsible. If you don't have the scruples to leave something like that and have no financial pressure to stay, then you don't deserve any work in tech when the dust settles. I for one would never hire you.
I do believe the whole tech industry is nothing but a giant scam, selling snake oil at a premium. You are as much the problem as I am.
We very much live in a world where you are either the sheep or the wolf, and I ain't gonna be a sheep. I won't back down to bullies of your kind.
> I for one would never hire you.
At least, I don't pretend I'm gonna save the world from itself.
If you start to question the morality of who pays your salary, you will soon find that there are very little companies that you would allow yourself to work for. I can think of renewable energies, and not much else.
In truth, I already work for an evil company. All companies I worked for in my long career were morally bankrupt one way or another. I never had any trouble sleeping at night.
If it's not illegal it's fine.
A lot of today unicorns started illegally. Uber, Spotify, Airbnb. Yet, nobody comment about those because their goal was supposedly "noble". That's the problem with the variable geometry morality of the left.
"If it's moral from our point of view, but illegal, the laws are the problem. If what's you're doing is immoral from our point of view, but legal, then you should be ashamed of yourself and repent (or die)."
In other words, it's nothing but dogma and proselytism.
That’s literally the idea. People doing bad things should find hiring minions difficult.
We're gonna make a deal, I'll let you work in ad-tech, and you let me build tool which allow people to shoot themselves in the foot.
- Apple uses exploitative labor practices to manufacture iPhones [0]
- Google is increasingly being recognized as a surveillance and manipulation platform. They have even been caught manipulating elections [1]
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/12/29/lens-te...
[1] https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/download/epstein-testimony
When you are subprime rated, you would have to be a complete moron to take a variable loan on you life. But sure, poor them, it's not their fault, it's the mean evil banker who gave them a tool to shoot themselves with ...
That the difference between you and me. I'm gonna give people the freedom to shoot themselves. You, well, you know better how each and every of them shall live there lives.
Remind me of ESR writing... http://www.catb.org/~esr/guns/gun-ethics.html
Do you even realize your own mentality ?
And loads of people were that moronic, do they really deserve to have suffered because some other people wanted to profit as much as possible from their stupidity? It's not like these morons had the tools to really assess what the fuck they were doing. Not excluding the fact that many of these loans were basically predatory, using the naivety/stupidity of these people against themselves to cash in.
Does all the world deserve to suffer through a major economic crisis because some morons are totally free to be predated upon by forces much more educated and sophisticated about the financial markets (and by extension doing that knowingly, pretty fucking evil)?
Libertarian ideology doesn't really hold much to reality, full freedom to do whatever is only achievable when the population is educated enough, humanity is not there yet.
What the actual fuck...
This defensiveness is really off putting, it seems like the only argument you can carry is "the left has a Gospel and I'm against it" and I still have absolute no idea what exactly you refer to and why you are against whatever you are referring to.
You just feel victimised and attacked for some reason.
In contrast, this thread has simply been establishing that jlcoff is a bad person. It’s not a fallacy or a derailment of the discussion to do so, rather it was the discussion. I can imagine why they feel attacked, it’s because they are literally being told they’re a bad person for their personal views. It would be implausible to expect a debate about the morality of working at a place you believe to be a scam, with such a person, to go without challenging them for it. And I wouldn’t expect such a person to respond without raising some form of “let ye without sin cast the first stone” defence and eventually just dribble out insults. My point is: you don’t have to worry about using community standards or HN policy to protect me from ad hominem attacks from them; all of this was priced in. It is inseparable from the nature of fraudulent schemes and the people who push them.
Especially with the dogmatic left at the helm.
Catchphrases don't foster discussion, don't be on the thought-terminating camp, pretty idiotic reply to be honest.
I don't know what you refer by the Gospel of the left, and from there I can't figure out what exactly you are attacking.
What is even "radical left" to you? These are such non-specific terms that just got even less defined with this whole culture wars shit.
I don't know what you are talking about and you haven't exposed anything that I can talk about, just empty platitudes and terms that actually mean nothing...
It was the banks' and regulators' responsibility to not allow bad loans to be issued and resold as mis-labeled AAA investment vehicles. That is the part that broke the global economy.
Looked at from first principles, the market cannot work efficiently if people are allowed to lie. Lies create an enormous amount of waste through direct and indirect effects.
Government as the monopoly on power (and locking people up) has an important role to play in policing this.
Such as Tesla FSD ?
But (in the US at least), it actually is the government's job to keep the economy stable in order to "insure domestic Tranquility [... and...] promote the general Welfare"
Well, since that tool was largely fraud from which the bankers expected to profit (and did, in the short-term, until they got taken down by the rest of the industry doing the same thing) by externalizing risk, yeah, it is.
You're putting the blame in the wrong place. I'd start by looking at FNMA. Don't take my word - read up on it.