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Comment by discombobulate | Hacker News Reader

I quite like Martin. I talked to him a few time on YouTube, whilst he was live streaming.

He's whip-smart & knowledgeable. He does, however, have a couple of major flaws. 1) He trolls. Hard. 2) It seems he lies. Which I picked up from a previous news article. (He claimed to have ~$50mm under management @ his previous hedge fund. It was more like $1.6mm. Something like that).

I can forgive the trolling. It's over the top, IMO. But it is what it is.

The lying is another kettle of fish. You can't go around bullshitting ppl. &, as he found out, you can't go around bullshitting investors.

I think he loves money too much. The thought of being poor may have pushed him to do something stupid (ultimately his call!).

I hope he doesn't have too hard a time in jail. Losing his fortune (I believe he loses his shares from Retrophin. ~$65mm. That's already a punishment.

Edit: I don't know why I'm being downvoted. I'm being honest. Fuck you people, frankly.

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>He's whip-smart & knowledgeable.

People keep saying this as if it matters. What did you expect, that he'd be a drooling idiot? So he's smart and personable. Of course he is, most con men are.

I wouldn't describe him as personable.

Being smart is a trait I admire. I learned from him. Especially from his mistakes.

There's this weird feeling that somehow, even though he's gouging everyone who pays for insurance at best and just the sick at worst and after being found guilty of fraud we should still like him and because why? Because he's familiar with internet culture in the same way we are? Afterall, he may be a fraudster and a gouger but he's not so bad because he's also a troller! He may be a conman but he's our conman (and intelligent!)

Gouging is a debatable economic concept.

How so?

EDIT: Also, is that the only flaw you found with my comment? If so, lol.

Here's something on Wikipedia. I've not read it, yet. Not having a basis in economics is a reasonable argument, imo.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_gouging#Opposition_to_la...

Edit: I'm trying to listen to a live Shkreli interview & replaying @ the same time. Sorry if I didn't rebut it as fully as I would normally.

You didn't really rebut at all, you just googled it and pasted a link here...

I think here even Sowell would agree that it exists. Basically price gouging can't exist if we use a simplified view of a perfectly competitive market. If we move over to a market with only one seller then we could probably define price gouging as when the monopoly firm charges a price higher (or much higher) than what we would see in a competitive equilibrium. AKA exactly what Shkreli did.

You lol. I took that as incredulity.

Is there such thing as a perfectly competitive market irl?

There's a canonical example used by the Mises Institute -- water after a hurricane. I watch a lecture half a decade ago. I don't have perfect information. Far from it. It was convincing. A stripped down model which made gouging look ridiculous. I think it's debatable.

>Is there such thing as a perfectly competitive market irl?

Wikipedia has the requirements for a perfectly competitive market, if you look at them you'll see that there certainly can't be many markets like that. I'd say the closest thing you're liable to run into on a day to day basis is gasoline. There's a lot of stations, you probably drive past a few everyday so you've got good price information, you know what the product will be and it's all the same.

>There's a canonical example used by the Mises Institute -- water after a hurricane. I watch a lecture half a decade ago. I don't have perfect information. Far from it. It was convincing. A stripped down model which made gouging look ridiculous. I think it's debatable.

One thing I find with libertarians (Mises tipped me off) is that they're often not too familiar with good critiques, only the surface level stuff that gets thrown around on twitter or tumblr. So here's my contribution:

http://critiques.us/index.php?title=Matt_Bruenig

Maybe read some critiques, the worst it can do is make you a better libertarian.

Hadn't realised about the gas market.

Mises is a big clue. I like to hear both sides. I've got some Marx to learn before anything else (econ). Maybe with a focus on the Frankfurt School.

>I quite like Martin. I talked to him a few time on YouTube, whilst he was live streaming.

He's a sociopath, of course you liked him. That's what those kind of people do. Build confidence and exploit people.

Nice armchair psychology. Do you have more?

I'm not sure a well-known phenomenon (talented sociopaths can make excellent manipulators & get everyone to love them within five minutes of meeting) counts as armchair psychology.

I think the point is that 'sociopath' has become used as a tired catch-all for anyone displaying a few traits of the disorder, as in this case.

Trolling is lying. Either you believe terrible things, or you lie about believing them to make people angry. Normal lying is usually intended for personal gain, trolling is just lies intended to hurt other people.

>Trolling is lying

Not at all, I think one of the most famous "troll" things he did was buy the master Wu-Tang album and threaten to destroy it so no one could ever hear the album.

There's no lying or anything meant to "hurt" anyone there, but you can imagine that it rubbed a lot of people the wrong way.

Threatening to destroy it so nobody else can hear it is explicitly intended to hurt people who want to hear the album. If you don't mean to hurt anyone, by definition it isn't trolling.

Maybe I'm stretching the meaning of lying, but I think it's dishonest to represent yourself as a patron of the arts, as the album was produced as a piece of art, when you're really bidding on it with the sole purpose of depriving others. If that's not the reason he bought it, then he wasn't trolling.

except, no one was actually hurt. He didn't destroy the album (as far as I know). You could make an argument that it's a dick move, and I might agree, but it's his property to do with as he wishes.

Then go after Wu-Tang. They engendered this 'hurt'.

Maybe that's true. I unfollowed him on Twitter b/c of the trolling.

> make a deliberately offensive or provocative online post with the aim of upsetting someone or eliciting an angry response from them.

That is the correct definition of trolling, yours is wrong. It comes from the method of fishing, as in baiting people. It's about getting reaction usually by making people angry or upset. It's purpose is not to hurt other people. Although many people get butthurt over being trolled. BThat is on them. And kind of the point of trolling, "don't waste your time getting upset over shit people, esp people you don't know, do or say. Don't give them power over you". Trolling wouldn't work, if people didn't freak out over it.

> Edit: I don't know why I'm being downvoted.

Don't whine about the Internet. Seriously, waste of time and beneath anyone with a modicum of confidence. Also it earns you downvotes.

I automatically downvote any post that makes mention of its own downvotes or upvotes no matter the other content. It is tawdry.

Oh so his only two flaws are trolling and he lies. But he's OK sure. How about the fact that he caused the suffering of patients needing the drug that he was raised prices on?

I believe he corrected the price of a drug. & no one went without. Those unable to pay for insurance got the drug for free.

Also, I said two major flaws. Obviously, ppl have many flaws.

Edit: It's economic illiteracy if you don't understand that. If you have evidence which says otherwise(?), I'm happy to look at it.

One thing to consider is: why is he the one who decides who can afford the drug or gets a free version? Seems horrible to me - we have laws to protect equal access to services like this (Medicare, Medicaid).

Another argument of his I found extremely disgusting is that he claims he's reinvesting profits from the price raise to further drug research. Ok, but again, we only have his word for that (and he's been convicted of fraud(!)). You can only claim you're smarter than the system and more responsible so much before people realize what's going on.

It's insurance that pays, I believe . So it's a function of price. He changed the price based on market condition.

Agree on the second point. Personally, I don't think that's relavent.

And who pays insurance?

Pricing something correctly isn't immoral

Sure maybe you can explain what you mean by the phrase: "pricing something correctly"

What someone will pay & what someone will sell @. Normal basic econ.

Edit: (I can't seem to reply) I think non-gov monopolies are ok. You'd make a ton of money in your example, & then be able to create more drugs. Generally, I think it's good for talented people to get resources. Superior resource allocation.

This isn't normal basic econ. This is a monopoly market.

Let's say I create a cure for a truly horrible disease like Huntington's. Let's say it cost me absolutely zero dollars of R&D, I just happened upon it in some weird stroke of happenstance and the FDA does a rush approval and gives me a grant for even those costs, basically fantasyworld but $0 expenditure by me so everything I make is pure profit. And let's say I bring this drug to market and I give it a very controversial price. Which is that I will cure you of Huntington's if and only if you pay me 1 million dollars or all of your worldly possessions, whichever is higher. Do you believe I should be able to do this?

There's nothing talented at all about buying rights to a drug and then raising the price of it. Monopolies hurt consumers, why would you think that's okay? Especially in a field like pharmaceuticals where peoples lives are literally on the line?

At the price which will maximize total profits.

Because it's his drug. He bought it. It's his property.

Exactly. If one does not like this particular part of the story perhaps they should write the politicians who stopped giving a shit the second the news moved on, and who seem to have accomplished nothing related to healthcare in the 2 years since.

As has been stated previously, the drug was available free to those who needed it.

Got a source for the "suffering"?

also, iirc the patients that need that drug are literally low triple digits if not lower. making sure they all get it one way or another is not exactly a challenging logistics problem. imo it's more of a marvel that something so niche is available at all.

You need to start questioning what you see on TV & the Huffington Post.

I went to high school with a fellow like Shkreli and with same story: rising fortunes, financial lying, fraud, conviction.

Same traits as above, though unlike Shkreli this guy was extremely personable and likable.

He was just a congenital liar and driven by something inside to... do more, do something bigger. He had the most incredible stories in high school that largely turned out to be lies, but at the time it all hung together with enough reality you couldn't see through it.

It's interesting knowing someone like my acquaintance and seeing the same story in other people of playing fast with lies trying to make it really big, when they actually have the skills to do it more honestly.

> when they actually have the skills to do it more honestly.

That crossed my mind. That's why I think accepting failer is an inherant factor in business. Risk/reward. May win. Could lose.

> He claimed to have ~$50mm under management @ his previous hedge fund. It was more like $1.6mm

The number of people who think the leverage their account gives them - and he could have easily had 20x-50x leverage - means that is money under management is surprising.

I agree with you, but I might suggest editing out the last sentence of your edit because that's like, rude.

I'll keep it. I'm going to try & not do it it again. At the very least wait before saying anything!

> Fuck you people, frankly.

27 minutes ago

You might find that waiting a few more minutes might make readers more sympathetic to your thoughts. Often I suspect some users may downvote because they see both the impatience and the swearing at "you people" which they see as being every user except you.

Just a helpful hint. By the way, at 29 minutes, your comment was in the black and was not downvoted and was at #3. Welcome to Hacker News. I hope you enjoy your time on this technology site.

I've been around HN for a while. It went from 2 points to 0 to 1. I had already written the edit. I decided to keep it.

I probably shouldn't have. I thought it would help. I guess it shows I'm human. I don't want to come across as a psychopath. I have a tendency to stick to ideas others feel are wrong (vs actually being wrong). Actually, HN is quite good on that front. Accepting logic.

Edit: Could have lied here. Just took the downvotes.

Edit2: Which is what I just learned. Better to be disliked & be truthful. In most cases. (Would lie to someone trying to murder me, for example. Despite what Kant says).

    > It went from 2 points to 0 to 1.

So you were complaining about 2 downvotes?

I wanted to eat dinner (it's late in the UK) & took the time to type out the comment. Yes.

Edit: I've also already said I would wait in future. Not sure what else you'd like.

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