If it's an HN thread about the latest social media startup, the lament is that SV doesn't innovate enough. If it's about a company tackling something hard, out come accusations of 'vapourware', and predictions of their imminent doom.
You realize that isn't actually how a capital market based economy works, right? Investors are the "command" part of the economy, responsible for allocating resources. If they decide to only invest in ridiculous, worthless ideas then we all definitely lose. So far that hasn't happened, but never forget that it is very important for us all where investors put their money.
This "somewhere, someone is losing money!" concern trolling fallacy is one "usefully idiotic" source of our repeated bailout follies, so I'd like never to see it again.
One bad decision here or there won't make much of a difference, because it doesn't dent the whole, and it likely doesn't affect anyone directly connected to us. But many bad decisions is a whole other ballgame.
Here the argument seems to be that a transportation project in Dubai is somehow the same as Goldman purchasing CDSs from AIG.
When the general welfare is invoked to justify extraordinary action, but the action itself doesn't contribute to that at all, the original argument ceases to convince. Cui bono?
I had trouble parsing this, is there an idiom in here that I'm not familiar with?
Thanks!
"somewhere, someone is losing money": Any functioning market in securities will have winners and losers, so it isn't automatically a problem that someone has lost in any particular situation.
"concern trolling": This is when e.g. I pretend that I'm worried about something bad that might happen to you, but in reality the advice I'm giving is meant to help myself instead. We see this typically when a consultant from one political party claims to be worried about consequences for the other political party.
"fallacy": Something lots of people believe, that isn't true.
"usefully idiotic": A "useful idiot" is someone who believes the bullshit peddled by class enemies to such an extent that she'll repeat that bullshit in all seriousness, to her own detriment.
"bailout follies": We've had lots of economic downturns, but somehow only those overseen by Goldman alumni as Treasury Secretaries have required the taxpayer to give Wall Street lots of money.