BlackRock’s Message: Contribute to Society, or Risk Losing Our Support | Hacker News Reader

BlackRock’s Message: Contribute to Society, or Risk Losing Our Support

nytimes.com

146 pointslnguyen67 comments

The idea that businesses' sole loyalty must be to shareholders is not ancient, and it is not a long-standing central tenet of capitalism.

On September 13 1970, the University of Chicago economist Milton Friedman published an article in the New York Times Magazine under the headline "The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits". You can find it here. https://www.colorado.edu/studentgroups/libertarians/issues/f... Much of the shareholder-only ethic of US business is based on that article.

Mr. Fink and his investment firm seem (to me) to be part of a movement to relax that single-minded approach to corporate ethics. Obviously a company that extracts every bit of value from its customers, workers, and host communities leaves them less resilient and certainly less loyal to the company. Uber's the egregious example, but there are plenty of others. Mr. Fink is betting that companies who don't extract everything will have a longer future.

It's worth a try. The Friedman approach has now been tried, and it's not working as well as some might have hoped.

Isn't that just the same Friedman approach with a longer time horizon?

Imagine a farmer who farms to exhaust the soil. He earns money but in 30 years, the farmland is rendered useless. He becomes poor in the end.

Another farmer farms slower, leaving fallow years, sustainably. He earns less money but 30 years later the farm is productive. He remains wealthy in the end.

Going from farmer 1 to farmer 2's strategy is not a change in ethics. The second farmer didn't care about the land as an end in itself. He just thought longer into the future, and knew how to measure assets that weren't obvious (in his case, land quality; in real life, loyalty, image, healthy communities to embed in).

There's also a financial reasoning behind that. Low interest rates and high liquidity seems to be the new normal. Even "Main Street" corps are trading with PE ratios above 20. This means 20y of current profits to get back the money.

A capital investor now needs a lot of profitable years to recoup their investment. One single scandal like VW emissions may jeopardize a lot of years profits.

And that's why farmers take care of their land, because farmers generally retire on the worth of it.

The Friedman approach is merely to recognize that the executive’s responsibility is to execute the desires of the shareholders. The “profit at all costs” mantra comes from the (sometimes false) idea that shareholders care only about profits, and not about using the corporation as a vehicle for social impact.

In this case, BlackRock (the shareholder) is making its desires clear — profits are not the only standard by which its companies will be evaluated. This is fully in accordance with Friedman’s principles. In fact, this kind of shareholder activism is only possible if executives are held to Friedman’s standards. Otherwise, they could just tell the shareholders to piss off.

> The Friedman approach is merely to recognize that the executive’s responsibility is to execute the desires of the shareholders. The “profit at all costs” mantra comes from the (sometimes false) idea that shareholders care only about profits, and not about using the corporation as a vehicle for social impact.

How do you reach this interpretation? Friedman himself explicitly used the word "profits".

This is Friedman's own words, in the 1970 article he wrote in the NYT [1]:

> That is why, in my book Capitalism and Freedom, I have called it a "fundamentally subversive doctrine" in a free society, and have said that in such a society, "there is one and only one social responsibility of business–to use it resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud."

Either we charitably interpret his writings as broadly as possible, and we get into a religious debate over which denomination under Friedmanomics is the "One Truth", or we can just recognize that maybe it's time to reconsider some things in supply side capitalism, and try another implementation of capitalism.

I'm also very tempted to point out that the last point in his doctrine in practice likely is an unavoidable effect of supply side economics, thus incompatible with the idea behind the principle.

[1] https://www.colorado.edu/studentgroups/libertarians/issues/f...

Especially in the current market though, profits are increased through numerous different levers. For awhile, it was price price price, and the lowest won. This built the Chinese outsourcing manufacturing engines and the Walmart stores, and now Amazon is eating them in the same way.

Now however it's becoming more fashionable to not simply have the cheapest price, but to have things like socially responsible sourcing of products (coffee especially does this), low friction purchasing processes and easy returns (Amazon), companies that make note of being produced in the same country, companies that make efforts to take care of their own staff making it more palatable to pay more to ensure the people making what you consume are paid living wages, or subscription convenience allow products that are technically higher priced to compete in the market much more effectively than previous years.

I.e. the drumbeat of the last few decades, where employees are paid the bare minimum possible, where corners are cut at every aspect, where service and quality take a backseat to just the lowest possible price, are going out of fashion. The rules of the game are changing, and so the players must also change.

> so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud."

This is also an enormous caveat. The type of fiduciary responsibility espoused by Friedman seems to be completely at odds with the type currently practiced.

Indeed, that was what my last line was hinting at, although I could've phrased it less cryptically.

Friedman also supported tax cuts and deregulation.

Combining those two is like saying that the human body works fine as long as no organ malfunctions. While technically true, it's completely irrelevant to whether or not it's a scenario worth debating, and whether or not we in reality need doctors and medicine.

We wouldn't need law enforcement if everyone followed the rules either. It's still not the case.

> The “profit at all costs” mantra comes from the (sometimes false) idea that shareholders care only about profits

Shareholders are detached from negative externalities of their investments unless they pay a financial price. We certainly can't count on shareholders to rein in a company like Equifax, no matter how much harm their investments might cause. There will always be plenty of investors who care only about profit.

> it's not working as well as some might have hoped.

Curious what was hoped that didn't work?

If consumers demanded corporate social responsibility, the shareholders would want that too because it would be profitable. Capitalism's outcome does not match with making the world a better place because consumers main priorities are not making the world a better place.

"Despite Mr. Fink’s insistence that companies benefit society, it’s worth noting he’s not playing down the importance of profits and, while it’s a subtle point, he believes that having social purpose is inextricably linked to a company’s ability to maintain its profits."

Perhaps capitalism is realizing what thinking long term actually means then? The future for humanity is bleak if we continue down the path of unsustainable business practices. At this point we really do know better. We can't allow our only natural habitat to be exhausted for the sake a few luxurious generations.

At the current rate our businesses are exploiting the environment and people, it's honestly hard to say what's bound to happen first, the planet reaching its limit or the poor eating the rich. Either way, change gon' come. Hopefully we avoid all of that and start thinking about more than just our own immediate futures.

In this way, I think the real long term strategy is to inject some compassion and empathy into business.

There's also self preservation as a motivation in case of sudden abundance of pitchforks.

That's an optimistic view, but think (late) capitalism is realising that it's putting it's own short term profits in jeopardy, and it's just good business to recognise that.

It's pretty obvious there's a growing wave of consumers that are realising that capitalism may be out of control in regards to social issues like the environment and workforce exploitation, and this can have a real and immediate impact on the companies profits and stock price if uncovered - Volkswagen lost 64% of it's value in a few months after the emissions scandal and profits were down 20%. The likelihood that corporate misdeeds are uncovered is only increasing as whistleblowing and hacking become more common.

People seem to think protecting shareholder value only involves growing the company by any means necessary - this was always a ridiculous idea, some growth choices put the whole company at risk, this seems like a nudge to remind companies of that.

    > Perhaps capitalism is realizing...

While it superficially looks good for corporations to "contribute to society" and they will fall over themselves to give lip-service for this idea, such goodwill will VAPORIZE in the instant they're no longer deeply in the black.

Sorry, but capitalism won't "realize" anything by itself. We should not leave any aspect of our social safety net up to the whims of hedge-fund a-holes, financiers and large corporations who have demonstrated over and over and over what they _really_ care about.

If only i had this message on paper- i could make a hat from that. A hat can keep you warm on rainy days, you can even fold them from shares if they go down in value.

Why am i expected to wast time on letters of good intention. From a person who would fight every government attempt to forcing it to actually implement this mentality in actions. All that energy, that went into serverfarms to distribute this drizzle- its gone, for nothing. Maybee they burned some tree for that- and we cant even make a hat from this.

Side note: It isn’t clear why Jana went after Apple, considering that it has better tools to manage the use of its products by children than anyone else in the industry; but the general idea of technology companies paying more attention to children’s health is a good one

That is rather the key point, I think. Why Apple indeed?

The phrase "virtue signalling" is rather widely used and abused, but if it has any definition at all it would have to mean something like this: the very public and noisy display of moral purity through mounting public attacks on those claimed to be less morally pure, specifically for the purpose of boosting your own credentials.

If this firm Jana Partners and Calstrs actually cared about the topic of children and electronics, and was pursuing some well thought out logical agenda to increase child safety in industry, it would make more sense to publicly request down-tier phone vendors whose child-related feature set was not as good as Apple's to rise to their level. They would use Apple as an example for everyone else, not attack Apple and imply that they don't care enough. Objectively they seem to care more than most manufacturers do, even if it's only a small amount (I guess Android has some similar features too these days).

But if this firm is merely posturing and engaged in "virtue signalling", and doesn't actually care much about numerically significant outcomes on children, then it makes perfect sense to attack Apple because the goal is to be as noisy and attention grabbing as possible and Apple has more brand recognition than most firms do.

If major investment funds are being taken over by social activism, this doesn't seem like good news for anyone. What makes us think that Fink in particular has such great wisdom or insight into how society should be remodelled. What if his idea of "contributing to society" looks rather different to most other people's? And what will the people who put money in his funds think, when they discover that he's using their money to advance his own pet political causes?

When I was younger I used to think that faceless financial types like Fink were bad, a part of The System and activism was wonderful. Now I'm older I think the world could use a bit less naive activism and a bit more understanding of how it got the way it is before people go and throw wrenches into it. Fink should get back to delivering returns and let society itself decide what "contributing to society" means.

Fink should get back to delivering returns and let society itself decide what "contributing to society" means.

Fink isn't part of society? Blackrock isn't part of society? Who counts as "society"? If Fink and Blackrock are excluded, do you have a guideline for who is allowed to decide these things on behalf of society?

Fink is a part of society. He isn't society. He's just one guy.

Society can make collective decisions using collective mechanisms. Mostly: voting and markets. But it can also be things like organised religions, other voluntary communities and so on.

When one guy has accumulated large sums of money by promising to invest it only on the basis of yield and then turns around and starts throwing that weight around, he's effectively overriding the collective judgement of many other people who can't cause as immediate an impact on any specific firm as he can.

It may not be ideal, but individuals who amass power and then override other's collective judgement is a large part of how our society behaves.

Absolutely so, but that doesn't mean we should encourage it!

Depends on the specific situation. Sometimes it is a damn good idea.

> When one guy has accumulated large sums of money by promising to invest it only on the basis of yield and then turns around and starts throwing that weight around, he's effectively overriding the collective judgement of many other people who can't cause as immediate an impact on any specific firm as he can.

By investing with an organization, individuals and institutions are authorizing that organization to make investment decisions on their behalf within the stated objectives and requirements of a given fund. In this case, Fink's thesis is that social responsibility will lead companies and consequently funds investing in those companies to outperform in the long run, which is in line with the firm's obligations as a fiduciary. If investors feel like this perspective isn't representative of their individual judgement, they can take their money elsewhere. If investors continue to invest with BlackRock, they're deferring to Fink's judgement on this issue and nothing is being "overridden".

I am not sure how you don’t see that asking the most influential phone maker in the world to focus on the effect of its devices on children won’t numerically improve outcomes? Of course it makes sense to focus on the market leader that influences the industry rather than marginal down market devices.

Also, I don’t think apple’s controls are all that good. MacOS X has quiet time for kids, etc. I don’t think iOS has that. Android also allows more invasive apps to take over more of the OS if parents so desire to exert more control over the device. You can see some of the rigmarole that this parent control app has to deal with on iOS: https://screentimelabs.com/help/ios-differences/

iOS is not the market leader in any market? Android dominates everywhere, as far as I know, although moreso in some markets than others. And Android is open source, so Jana could easily fund child-safety features themselves if they disagree with Google or Samsung or Huawei on prioritisation.

Regardless, the fund in question hasn't made specific suggestions for what Apple - apparently the market leader in this particular feature - could do better. Perhaps Jana has no such ideas and merely feel that publicly attacking Apple will be sufficient to get the creative juices flowing. In that case they are wrong. If they don't feel like actually contributing features in question then they should, at most, be telling others to look at the design work Apple has done and copy it. They should not be making generic exhortations to Apple to "work harder", because that looks strongly like virtue signalling and is thus ignorable.

Apple is the leading device manufacturer. And Apple doesn't have a mechanism to limit screen time on their devices. There are solutions in the Android ecosystem that do that.

Steve Jobs was once asked what his kids thought of the iPad. He replied that he didn’t let them use it.

http://uk.businessinsider.com/heres-why-steve-jobs-never-let...

tbf, Jobs may have been a business visionary etc, but given that every hour of his life was x-rayed by various biography writers and journalists and he was not much of a family man - spending so much time at work. So we should not follow his parenting advice just based on the fact that he was a good businessman. Not that excessive iPad use is good for anyone, just consider it for the right reasons and not because Jobs said something once.

https://www.zerohedge.com/contributed/2013-06-05/real-reason...

Blackrock got easy terms under NDA for buying up rental housing, getting sweetheart deals not available to individual home buyers. Now they have the arrogance to engage in moral posturing?

How about they disclose the terms under which they bought those rentals? Something tells me the current administration won't mind...

I don't see how this affects their message, other than making it a bit less effectively transmittable due to the veneer of hypocrisy. We don't let factors like these confound each other when considering complex systems, though, do we?

That sounds like an argument that hypocrisy is trivial and has no meaning.

Hypocrisy is a thing that impacts arguments because arguments are usually, by their nature, somewhat subjective and based on many barely articulated judgements, the text of an argument being something of a gloss over the thinking that we hope has gone into it.

So if someone argues strongly that path A is the right path, then walks path B, that suggests their argument was dishonest and that they may know things or believe things that they didn't let on, and that if they had, maybe we'd want to walk path B as well.

In this case BlackRock is telling others to "contribute to society", which is vague enough to be meaningless to begin with, but then muddies their position even further by doing things that don't appear to be implementing their own advice. So if even they don't believe in it, why should anyone else?

Hey, I'm going to say this as well itentioned as possible. Please keep an open mind and as always do your own research:

Zero Hedge is a pile of propaganda and you shouldn't believe anything you read in it.

> Mike Whitney explained last September:

(QUOTE)

At the end of the first paragraph of (QUOTE) they have (businessweek). If you search for that text, it doesn't appear in businessweek, it appears in all sorts of nutter right-wing websites.

What does that show about the content of the article? Nothing. But it does show you one example of the tricks that Zero Hedge uses to make itself appear more legitimate.

Also, do a bit of research about Mike Whitney. His living seems to be trashing Obama. Does that mean the things he says are factually wrong? Again, no. But from my experience the kind of people who first reach a conclusion and then come up with the argument to support the conclusion, are typically dumb or dishonest.

I'm afraid your Businessweek example is incorrect. There is a link provided, linking to Telegram.com with the complete article from Bloomberg Businessweek. The link is broken, but it's cached at archive.org just after the date it was published in 2012:

http://web.archive.org/web/20120713014102/http://www.telegra...

So why link to the Worcester County Telegram's syndication of Businessweek articles, and not directly to Bloomberg Businessweek? Because old Bloomberg articles are behind a paywall and only accessible to Bloomberg Professional Service Subscribers. Here's an example Bloomberg link from that year, note that it only contains one sentence:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2012-10-29/bonds-bet...

As for being a right-wing nutter site, the Worcester County Telegram was owned by The New York Times at the time they published/syndicated that article in 2012.

https://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2013/11/26/john-henry-s... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telegram_%26_Gazette

I generally agree with your sentiment on Zero Hedge (and all media), definitely keep an open mind and do your own research. But in this case, it does appear to be from Businessweek.

There's two tiers of quotes there. What you pointed out is the referrence for the inner quote (starting with "About 6 million U.S. borrowers..."). I was referring to the outer quote, the one by "Mike Whitney". Am I missing something?

It applies to both quotes. Zero Hedge quotes Mike Whitney's article, and within that Mike Whitney quotes Businessweek. The quotation from Businessweek is the portion in quotation marks:

“synthetic financing to reduce the up-front capital required if they agree to form a joint venture with Fannie Mae and share proceeds from the rental or sale of properties"

It's from the same Businessweek article, "Colony Capital wins foreclosed homes in Fannie Mae auction". Mike Whitney attributes it only by title on his site, but Zero Hedge added a Telegram.com link to the syndicated article. It looks like Zero Hedge actually took an extra step to verify the Businessweek quotes in this case.

If you look into the history of Sears you'll find the CEO, Theodore Houser, addressed this issue in in the late 1950s with a book he wrote called "Big Business and Human Values".

Mr. Houser retired from Sears in the 1960s when it was doing very well. When we read his book now we find an interesting contrast with his successors as time evolves and especially with his current one.

It's not a leap to say ignoring human values is exactly what led to Sears current position, which was akin to Amazon.com when Mr. Houser was running it, and for decades before him.

Just so I understand this thoroughly, did BlackRock just gain BlackRock's support or did it loose it? Perhaps there's no change in policy?

Sounds like I'll be divesting myself from any BlackRock investments. I invest to make money, not for some "social justice" platform which usually is justice only for the chosen. Plus the focus on the "climate", a non-science based position is dumb.

Muhammad Yunus whom won the Nobel Prize for micro financing, said in his book that corporations need to also be financially hurt or helped by how much social capital they contribute to society.

Yes! Minor correction to spelling: Muhammad Yunus

Muhammad Yunus’ concept of Social Business is essentially using for-profit enterprises that are self-sustaining to solve problems typically addressed by charity: Poverty, unemployment, education, equal opportunity, clean water, reduced carbon emissions, etc.

I'm interested in why Blackrock thinks it has the right to use my retirement funds to do anything other than maximize my gains.

You want to drive social responsibility from corporations, fine -- but do it on your own dime. As every honest banker is taught fairly early on in his or her career, OPM is sacred.

If your retirement fund isn't leaving money on the table, then it is probably not going to be there when you retire.

They have a right and an obligation to serve their clients' collective long term interest. That may include acceptance of the fact that letting the world burn (both literally and figuratively) for the sake of short-term externality-denying profit might not serve that interest. They even have a right to forego investments that their clients would find morally repugnant. As long as they're clear and honest about which strategies and ideals they're pursuing, your say is limited to investing with them or investing elsewhere. Your pittance of a retirement fund doesn't give you the right to dictate every detail of their activity. That would be denying that certain interests can be represented in the market, and that's not how free markets work.

> They have a right and an obligation to serve their clients' collective long term interest.

Two points: (1) they have a right and obligation to serve their client's financial interest, as regarded to the money invested in them. They don't have any obligation to serve any other form of their client's financial interest - if you talked to them on the phone in a sad and depressed manner and then they used your money to hire a psychologist to get you out of it, for example, it might be in your interest, but it certainly wouldn't be what you hired them for.

(2) It's their obligation to serve their client's interest, not the society's. If the client would want to help the society as a whole is his decision to make, not this institution's.

But sadly, any institution large enough inevitably forgets these two points and gets too big for it's constituents to enforce them, governments being first and foremost example.

> It's their obligation to serve their client's interest, not the society's. If the client would want to help the society as a whole is his decision to make, not this institution's.

Not in Germany, for example. The german constitution specifically states this:

  Art 14, (2) Eigentum verpflichtet. Sein Gebrauch soll zugleich dem Wohle der Allgemeinheit dienen.

It's absolutely fine if a company decides to use its market power to shift things towards community good. There are many investment funds and banks that among their goals have benefits to society (GLS Bank, as another german example). Companies are also not required to put clients short term interest before the companies long-term survival. You're not forced to be a client, you're welcome to move to a investment fund that doesn't have such a policy if you think they perform better.

> Art 14, (2) Eigentum verpflichtet. Sein Gebrauch soll zugleich dem Wohle der Allgemeinheit dienen.

Can you please provide an accurate translation? I doubt that Google Translate is enough for such an important and meaning-dense thing. I'd like to argue about it, but first I want to understand it.

> Companies are also not required to put clients short term interest before the companies long-term survival. You're not forced to be a client, you're welcome to move to a investment fund that doesn't have such a policy if you think they perform better.

Well, this is a good point that they can do it - my point is that they shouldn't. Just like a single-purpose command line tools are more efficient than a full-blown combine, financial organizations should be dedicated to one single goal instead of trying to balance different points in their complicated mission statements - it just breeds internal politics and actions that serve public image first and real effect second.

If you want to spend your resources on public good, find a good charity.

It's roughly:

"Property is an obligation. It's use must also serve the general good."

(2) Property entails obligations. Its use shall also serve the public good.

(From here: https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/englisch_gg/englisch_gg.h...)

Google translates it as

> Property obliges. Its use should also serve the public good.

which is more or less accurate.

> If you want to spend your resources on public good, find a good charity.

That's kinda like saying cars should only go fast, if you also want to not die when taking a breath outside, you have to wear a gas mask or deploy nanobots that remove pollutants from the atmosphere.

Public transport is fastest when everybody just uses kung fu to move others out of the way, and when the doors are razor sharp and close on a timer -- if you also want people to not be injured, go to a hospital.

> Property obliges. Its use should also serve the public good.

Honestly, when I got this translation it was so absurd that I was completely sure that I miss something here. What does "property" oblige you to? How can state's constitution dictate to what end property can be used?

If I would be living in a country with such a constitution, I would either try to change it, move somewhere else or just consider myself not morally bound by the country's laws as completely immoral.

> That's kinda like saying cars should only go fast, if you also want to not die when taking a breath outside, you have to wear a gas mask or deploy nanobots that remove pollutants from the atmosphere.

I think that for a productive discussion, we need to separate two things: main goal and side conditions. You have a good point that any paperclip optimizer should have necessary side conditions, like "not destroy the world while you're at it". However, in it's decision making process these conditions should be very different from the main goal: they should be simple boolean categories, just something that you have to maintain at all times, not a numeric parameter that you can increase indefinetly - this should be goal.

Thankfully, companies already have boolean conditions like that, they're called laws.

That part of the constitution is basically used to justify things like environmental or historical building protection laws. It binds the legislator to always consider the public good when enacting laws (and "public good" is defined by the legislator itself through the law). In particular, it has no binding effect to anyone apart from the legislator. It honestly isn't of that much importance in the grand scheme of things.

Immediately preceding is the order to always preserve and protect private property.

X amounts of pollutants per mile might be fine, X * N amount might be "destroying the world". Encapsulating it in a boolean doesn't make it magically that simple.

> they have a right and obligation to serve their client's financial interest

Those financial interests aren't served by depressions or die-offs. It's a pedant's point, not one that affects any of the points I made.

They have an obligation to provide me the investments described in the prospectus I was given when I decided to invest with them. Nothing in those prospectuses says anything about handicapping returns based on social responsibility. The size of my investments with them is immaterial.

Shifting the job of promoting social good to FMs also makes it impossible to compare them. They will all be able to excuse their shitty performance by saying that they earned their clients 22 Bonus Society Points this quarter.

Finally: corporate responsibility of this variety is ephemeral. The correct avenue to obtain lasting change in corporate behavior is via government regulation. All private sector brouhaha about social responsibility does is give regulators a dodge: it allows them to say "look, they're self regulating!" and then sit on their hands.

Yeah, I'm with the Friedman Doctrine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_doctrine

You are free to re-invest your retirement funds elsewhere if you disagree with them

You try getting a F500 company to change its retirement carrier.

The same BlackRock that's just made a killing short selling shares in the failed UK public sector contractor Carillion?

What is unethical about short selling?

There is a suggestion that HSBC and others may have been working with inside knowledge. Blackrock also hired the outgoing chancellor of the UK George Osborne who was responsible for awarding vast numbers of contract to Carillion.

I read an article in FT this morning about how the Carillion problems were hinted in annual reports going back to 2011 (and also how shorting them was popular throughout 2016 and 2017). Hindsight is 20/20, but there's a real chance that Blackrock are just pretty good at what they do.

Employing George Osborne for squillions straight from government is definitely unethical. How can he act in the best interest of the country when there is a colossal personal incentive to keep BlackRock et al on side during his tenure?

> What is unethical about short selling?

Short-sold stocks are 'borrowed' from an investor who has less market information than the trader.

The trader deliberately hides that information so as to leave the owner holding the bag when the price drops, whilst pocketing the difference as profit.

Doesn't seem ethical to me. Legal, yes.

Well, consider TSLA, one of the most shorted stocks of last years. I don't think that Tesla short-sellers are deliberately hiding some information from investors. Jim Chanos, the most famous TSLA seller, is very open why, in his opinion, true tesla price is zero [0] and definitely not hiding anything. Some even argue that Jim is too vocal.

[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2017/12/14/jim-chanos-we-think-tesla-is...

Maybe the UK govt would have done well to look at Blackrock's bet against Carillion and ask them what they saw that they didn't.

You can tell a sociopath to not only do thing A but also B, but that won't necessarily mean that both thing A and B will receive the same effort.

To benefit society, one has to be capable of empathy. Whilst human individuals often are capable, the plural of human is cattle.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com