All this settlement achieves is 'a cost of doing business', as they say. It's not punishment or deterrence. McKinsey and other companies like them will do similar in the future, and simply pay it off, again.
To me, "a cost of doing business" implies that they're making more money than it costs them. Here at least, that doesn't seem to be the case. So while this may not have been sufficient for retribution, I think it's easy to make the case that this will be a pretty good deterrent.
Consulting companies will start to realize that they can be liable for the advice the give.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/03/business/mckinsey-opioids...
It's wayyyy more than the cost of doing business. This project represents less than 0.001% of a year's revenue. Company is losing 5-6%.
15 years of work must have cost more than $1M
https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2021/2/4/mckinseytopay-573...
I think the only proper fix would be to disallow companies from going bankrupt - ie. if a company has unpaid debts, the shareholders must pay them, and the share price can become negative. That forces everyone to build such risks into their models from the start, and company directors will be discouraged from taking such risky bets.
Other similar financial instruments exist - like stock shorts, futures contracts, lloyds names, etc.
Then if the remaining investors pay the debts, they've also lost all the money they invested.
Where do you draw the line for investors responsible? Anyone who's still in? Whoever was ever in?
If there is damage when you take it over, you better ask the person you're taking over the lease from to pay for it, cos else it's gonna be blamed on you and you'll have to pay for it...
The same translates to buying shares with my proposal - you better inspect what you're taking on, because there might be costs associated.
We saw last week how bad it is to hold excessively large short positions. This proposal would effectively make long positions have unlimited downside risk as well. I think it would have extremely deleterious effects on investment and the bad actors would still find ways to avoid the downside by leaving other shareholders holding "the bag."
(Not an argument, just an observation)
I'm serious, this guides decisions with Attorney Generals.
> If big companies started facing consequences for their actions our economy would fall apart.
This assumes that you have a functional society after say...Chase or Nestle or Pfizer or Boeing or Disney, etc becomes insolvent. You will lose more than a decade in churn as the monopolies (enough that they can dictate legislative agendas) leave huge gaps that are inevitably filled with instability. The "good actors" that would backfill is a utopian fantasy. Different names, different brands, but the same kinds of people would end up in the same positions of influence. That's how the (mostly) capitalistic system operates.
Also, we wont have functional society without Dysney and Nestle? What, society will collapse if we run out of chocolates and movies? People won't have diabetes?
The breadth of these companies is almost immeasurable. Nestle owns an immense amount of resource rights (eg the largest siphon of natural water from the Los Angeles basin) and industry (#1 food producing company in the world). Disney is the leading intellectual property holder of the world. The ubiquity, innate cultural knowledge, and economic strength of corporate entities in the world are part of what keep society stable. The brands are stable, so families are able to be stable and confident about the future.
This is why I picked out examples from multiple industries, all of which are known actors, who have been slapped on the hand for heinous acts over recent time.
Natural resources won't go away with the company that has scammed society to gain control of them.
> Disney is the leading intellectual property holder of the world.
I'm sorry, but how is that supposed to be an argument that removing Disney would have negative consequences?
'The brands are stable, so families are able to be stable and confident about the future.'
You mean zero-hour workers at Dysney, or warehouse workers at Amazon that confidently piss in a bottle?
My comment was referring to your statement that if we did hold them accountable, the economy would fall apart.
It amounts to literal gambling with people's lives and the individuals responsible face almost no risk. The worst thing that happens is that their company has to pay a big fine. Someone who steals a car will face a multi year federal sentence. Who had the biggest negative impact on society, the dude that stole a car or the people responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths?
It currently is and I don't see any sign of it stopping. The foundation was laid in the 80s, the roof fell in on January 6th, and the Democrats don't have enough of a spine to actually fix the problem because Republicans keep calling them mean names.
The only way out is to fix that mutual misunderstanding, and to stop destroying the neutral space where that misunderstanding can be mended.
I'd love it if whenever politics comes up on HN, we started brainstorming ways to do that, instead of amplifying the us vs. them rhetoric that is too prevalent elsewhere.
(Not to say that the problems in our society can be distributed fully between those two groups).
Obvious to whom, and damage to whom? Even those are things we need to work to restore a common view on. Even if you're right (and w.r.t. Fox News it'd be hard to be wrong), based on those I know who vary from middle left to far right, apportioning partisan blame, and blame in general, is just not going to be a productive way to frame the path forward. Maybe we need to take a breather, ignore who said what and why, and just look at where we really are, where we think we're going, and what we (as people, not as groups or parties or labels) can mutually agree to do to improve where we're going, and to find more common ground where we disagree on the fundamentals.
There are far too many things for just a few of us in a single HN thread to solve, of course, and I suppose proposing that we "elites" "solve" them is one of the things that contributes to the coastal/inland left/right rift. But every time I feel compelled to comment on a political discussion on HN, I'm still going to try (and occasionally fail) to keep searching for a way out, rather than just adding to the volume of what already exists, and encourage everyone who reads this to do the same. We know there is pain, we know there are voices to be heard. Now we need to use that pain to come together instead of to break apart. If we can find ways to do this on HN, maybe we can spread that to all the other communities we are part of.
There's no logical reason to be fighting seven wars, having 5% of the world's population but 25% of its prisoners and 20% of its covid deaths... and 800 billionaires. Our polity is shit. We're not in a local maxima. Literally any possible change would be for the better. The system we have cannot be changed via the methods it allows, however. Juvenile pleas for understanding only prolong our misery.
The system we have cannot be changed via the methods it allows, however.
Not all at once, that's for sure. But the right small changes early on can lead to very large changes later. Some of those are possible, like voting methods other than first-past-the-post or instant-runoff. Some of them are in the direct control of people who visit HN, like the nature of social networking algorithms, and the metrics chosen to optimize them.
Juvenile pleas for understanding only prolong our misery.
For what it's worth, when I was a teenager, I was far less interested in understanding or compromise. That was about two decades ago. It's only after living in many, many different places as an adult that I think that "understanding" is not only possible, but necessary. My perspective now is anything but juvenile.
When I'm saying we need to bridge the gap between left and right, I'm not saying we need to preserve the status quo exactly as it is. I'm saying that not doing so will practically guarantee that all sides end up worse than the status quo.
The Democrats have been trying to bridge the gap for 30 years and the Republicans keep spitting in their face (Newt Gingrich in the 90s, the entire party vs Obama in the 00s). The Democrats seem to have finally figured this out and Republicans are now upset that it isn't working any more. Republicans aren't interested in bridging the gap because if they do, their base will find someone who's "a real fighter, not a RINO".
Maybe we should be more interested in what people can do, than what politicians can't.
Now think about which side wants to do this and which side wants to stop them.
And then? Instead of lumping people into "sides" like some seem to want us to do because they benefit from conflict, we can ask "Okay, the party can't be reasoned with, but what about the people?" I'm not denying there are politicians and pundits and whatnot who do everything they are accused of. I'm saying we can try to ignore them and focus on human connection with the people who follow them out of tradition but don't fully agree with them. Do you have any ideas for how to start doing that?
I don't normally read people's comment history. I read your past day or so of comments to see why we seem to be talking past one another. IMO the phrasing of some of your comments tends toward escalation rather than discussion. (Disclaimer: I don't represent HN itself in the slightest, nor are my views likely to be fully correlated with the HN mainstream)
I addressed this earlier, the people can't be reasoned with either, that's what I meant when I said that reasonable GOP politicians get labeled as RINOs and then lose their primary race to the more extreme candidate. In fact, here's a very timely example. Ben Sasse was punished for doing exactly that: https://twitter.com/kylegriffin1/status/1357675346062057472
These voters have an outsized effect on government because of the electoral college and the fact that we give more votes to empty land instead of real Americans who happen to live in cities. If we had a fair voting system, these views would be much less mainstream and taken much less seriously. It sounds counter-intuitive but you have to force these people to "be reasonable" by taking away their power if they're not.
>the people who follow them out of tradition but don't fully agree with them.
I think a lot of the voters in this category have left the party, so most of the voters left are the unreasonable ones. Sometimes people can't be reasoned with and the only option left is to limit the damage they can cause.
After annoying powerful interests for decades, Martin Luther King Jr. finally tried to unite poor blacks with poor whites, not because they liked each other but because they shared common interests. He was assassinated within five months. TPTB can abide less racism, but not more class solidarity.
It’s long been my loosely held belief that _extreme_ change to a political system will _necessarily_ harm the average citizen. I think history has shown that to be true fairly consistently.
"Our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break?"
But the great thing is we can all disagree on that, and still agree to work together where we can.
It would not be extreme in any real sense to give labor unions more power, or to imprison fewer people, or to end drug prohibition, or to stop brutalizing undocumented immigrants, or to have less racism enforced by our bureaucracies, or to reign in abusive social media firms, or to provide adequate health care to everyone. All of these things have already been done in particular states and municipalities. Large numbers of Americans already support these things. Even so, armies of Chickens Little lie in wait to assail those who reasonably suggest further improvements.
We got in this position by gradual "sustainable" steps. Shit runs downhill. If everything continues to change in the way it has changed already, in ten years we'll be even further downhill. The 1960s' civil rights movement wasn't gradual accommodation. Old white people were angered all over the nation. That's why it led to genuine improvements. As Lenin said, one must always try to be as radical as reality itself.
And this and a multitude of other things drove some to double down on Confederate culture and eventually led to January 6th. The US abounds with examples of blowback at home and worldwide. That needs to be taken into account somehow in any future strategy for improvement. Giving the best and least committed of your opposition some dignity should make it easier to convince them to work with you to restore the much larger gap in dignity for others, and reduce the blowback.
> His efforts to improve race relations, in which as an African-American he engaged with members of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), convinced Klansmen to leave and denounce the KKK.
He also told me its just as important to disrupt their organizing and recruiting efforts to stop new people from joining
So, it's foolish to blame "the events of 1/6" on civil rights organizers. It's also foolish to blame the events on racism. Sure, there were racists involved, but as mentioned above we have had racists in USA for a long time. If they really wanted to have a racist insurrection, they probably would have done it on the occasion of the election of an actual black man, instead of that of an ancient white man whose 93-year record in public office clearly documents that he is also a racist. The occupy-capitol people foolishly identify with a politician whose speech and policies are racist, and that is certainly a large part of his appeal to them. Of course if black people had done similar things they would have been gunned down. Still, the occupy-capitol people never would have turned to Trump if any "real" politician had had a sensible message with respect to national conditions. To name a single example among many, wages have been stagnant since 1971. [0] That's longer than most Americans have been alive. Why doesn't any non-racist politician pretend to care about that?
The aptly named "First Steps Act" smells a "No True Changes" fallacy here. :)
Not sure if that was the intended connotation though.
Edit: to the reply comparing this to murder, not it's not. And even if you do compare it, the court look at an individuals standing and contribution to the community all the time in sentencing.