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Comment by viscanti | Hacker News Reader

> this is being done by Facebook which has a person like Mark Zuckerberg, who has again and again shown that he has no moral compass and has complete disregard for people privacy rights

Sure. But think about all the money they can make from selling ads if they know everything that people buy. Doesn't he have a fiduciary responsibility to maximize shareholder value?

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No he doesn't, that is not what fiduciary responsibility means. See https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2012/06/26/the-shareholder-v...

This seemed like fairly clear sarcasm to me.

The problem with using sarcasm as a vehicle for genuine discussion is that not everybody gets the joke.

>The problem with using sarcasm as a vehicle for genuine discussion is that not everybody gets the joke.

That's fine, assuming "everybody" is not the target audience.

Sarcasm or not, I found the follow-up response with the Harvard Law School article quite interesting!

Implied sarcasm and irony is a troll's game. Not to imply that the poster is a troll, I have no reason to think that, but that's why I never assume sarcasm if it's not explicitly stated.

>Implied sarcasm and irony is a troll's game. Not to imply that the poster is a troll, I have no reason to think that, but that's why I never assume sarcasm if it's not explicitly stated.

Sarcasm and irony have been used in an enormous amount of major English-language texts since, well, there WERE English-language texts. Most of these texts don't take the time to spell things out to their less observant readers. Not assuming sarcasm will lead you to miss the point entirely. (This sounds terribly rude and elitist but it's true. And of course, little heed was given to those learning English as a second, or third, language, when these texts were written.)

Take the King James bible, for example. In Exodus, Moses is asked "Were there a lack of graves in Egypt, that you took us away to die in the wilderness?"

Hopefully this doesn't need to be explicitly flagged as sarcasm for you to understand its meaning.

* From the Hacker News Operators Manual - Hacker News Principle 3.7 states no amount of sarcasm, no matter how extreme, will be clear to the majority of hacker news readers. Thus sarcasm in commenting should be avoided as much as possible, and if deemed absolutely necessary, clearly signaled with the "/s" mark at the end of the comment.

Edit - It's actually Principle 4.1

That's a reasonable critique against an implementation of short term shareholder value maximization. That said, it doesn't show a different definition for fiduciary responsibility. It does, however, illustrate my original point that fiduciary responsibility is a silly justification for lots of things it's used to justify.

I assume you are joking, but your statement highlights the problem with a "moral" system rooted in maximizing shareholder value. I think free enterprise markets have many advantages, but there has to be a better grounding for ethical decisions.

One part of a better grounding could be a free market as opposed to a system where the tax payer bails out the banks.

You forgot the `/s`.

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