Comment by opo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by opo | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

>... But frankly, I don't give a fuck about whether Yahoo succeeds financially--I want my life and the lives of other people to be better. And I want that to be the goal of my government.

In this situation it doesn't matter that yahoo is a private corporation - the same cost/benefit analysis essentially needs to be done no matter what the structure of the organization. Let's pretend that email had been created by a government agency and that agency has to decide how much of the budget to spend on security. If it costs X dollars to make something 90% secure, 10X for 95% secure and 10,000X for 99.9999% secure, etc etc eventually you have to choose how much to spend - resources aren't infinite for that government agency either. (And to make it much more difficult, they just have a guess that X dollars will make their product N% secure.) It isn't as black and white as you are trying to portray it.

I think it is fair to criticize yahoo for how the prioritized security but the same kind of issue has happened with non-profit companies and with government organizations, so no, it isn't just a "big, bad, greedy corporate problem."

You're the one trying to make it black and white, he's simply saying that unlike private industry, government can have another motive be primary rather than profit, i.e. help it citizens as the primary goal. Yea, budgets aren't unlimited, but not having to be profitable makes a huge difference in which actions can be taken. Profit is not the correct goal for every action that can be taken by an organization, government isn't a business.

If "profit" is defined as: "generating more value than is consumed in the production process"...

Then yes, we damn well better demand that profit be the correct goal for every action regardless of organizational structure.

If our system is distorted to inaccurately measure profit locally, without properly accounting for negative externalities, then that's a legitimate problem, but the way to solve it is by factoring those hidden costs back into the profit calculation, not giving up on "profitability" properly defined.

If profit is defined as $income - $expenses = $profit, then you'd be using the word the way everyone else is using it, and you'd be participating productively in the conversation.

  > ... government can have another motive be primary 
  > rather than profit, i.e. help it citizens as the 
  > primary goal.

But there's still ROI here, and there's still a budget (no matter how big the deficit gets). So the question remains: how do I spend that money? Do I spend all of it on security apparatuses, or do I have to scale back and spend some on other social services? How much? What's the best bang for my buck?

Given the current state of computer security, a government program that fines companies for poor security practices could easily pay for itself.

> budgets aren't unlimited, but not having to be profitable makes a huge difference in which actions can be taken.

Profits are still required for gov't spending, but they are just made by someone else in the country and transferred to the gov't via taxation. Even deficit spending is just the choice to spend money today that will be obtained from taxation at a later date.

I know this is snarky, but: tell it to the OMB.

Corporations do not have any sort of exclusive lock on cost-benefit analysis.

Edit: including bad cost-benefit analysis.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com