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Comment by BrainScraps | Hacker News Reader

It is a bit disconcerting to me that commenters here are fascinated by the technical analysis of this system and appear quite oblivious to the problem of starving human beings.

Perhaps I am not intellectual enough to appreciate the empathy hiding behind this analytical ruminating about the problem - but I wish that I got the impression that there was more reaction happening than "Wow, what an interesting phenomenon in the commodities market- how do all of these moving pieces fit together?"

To quote the sometimes poignant Jack Johnson: "Why don't the newscasters cry when they read about people who die? At least they could be decent enough to put just a tear in their eyes"

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For what little it's worth, a lot of my commentary on HN for quite a while has been centered around the effects of things on real people -- whether it's UI, buggy software, or poverty.

And those conversations have generally not gone very well.

So I've recently started giving up. HN is just not the place for that sort of thing. It's a place where the audience-participants want analysis, they want technical details, they prize expertise, and they can't discuss value unless there's a hard real-world number involved.

That's not altogether bad, but I do hope that somewhere there is a group of smart people who actually think about the real-life problems that other people have, and try to do something about it. If there is, I don't know of it yet.

Thanks for your insight and for your past championing of a more "ground level" approach to improving some crucial systems.

The sort of community of which you speak does certainly sound like an exciting and powerful one. I hope that it exists, and I hope that it finds you - and maybe me.

I can't speak for others on HN but I come here seeking knowledge, to understand. Not as forum for activation. This knowledge is then to be used to take action in the real world.

That may not be through pushing a cause or donating to a charity, but by getting myself into a position of greater power and authority to make a real impact when I can make an impact.

I see articles like this as cards at my disposal, that I will refer back to when the time is right and the chance is there, to make a dent.

I think we all realize it's a terrible thing, but repeating how sad it is will get us nowhere. Understanding what caused it and how it works, on the other hand, can help us prevent further people from starving. I'm personally happy that HN often takes an analytical, rationalist point of view, rather than an emotional one like eg. Reddit tends to do.

Exactly - if you don't understand a system, how can you fix it? You risk making it worse, rather than better, or shunting the problem elsewhere, but not really fixing it.

...exactly.

The sentiment seems to be that "we" need to somehow control these prices and markets, which has worked horribly in the past (and present).

The creation of the index isn't the problem. Wild speculation is. When you speculate the wrong way, you need to lose. But the precedent has been set --not only on the top level with the huge banks, but with main street citizens speculating on second homes and mortgages-- that the bet should be upside only.

This community is exactly the type of testosterone-driven money-obsessed community that would create a Goldman Sachs Commodity Index that will cause starvation, and then absolve themselves of responsibility due to some free market arms-length ideology.

It's not a coincidence that you're disturbed by the comments. Wall Street entrepreneurs and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are fundamentally very similar in mindset and outlook.

Entrepreneurs are trained to have a laser focus on their own issues and to look at everything in terms of dollar value.

Recently, it is becoming more clear to Silicon Valley entrepreneurs that short-term windfalls are preferable, so they try to pump up the speculative value of their companies and dump them before anything bad happens. Pumping and dumping your own Silicon Valley start up is surely one of the easiest ways to get very rich right now.

The not-so-small difference is that tech-entrepreneurs (in SV or anywhere else) are creating real value and "WS entrepreneurs" (which I guess you mean brokers and similar) are just betting and not creating real value.

I said they were similar in "mindset and outlook". Would Silicon Valley hesitate to cause humanitarian crises in the name of profit? What if those crises were very only indirectly linked to their behaviour?

What if Silicon Valley discovered today that they were putting millions of low-skill Americans irreparably out of work. Would this motivate them to modify their libertarian ideology, or lobby for free educations for the poor?

I could not disagree with you more.

SV Entrepreneur types, as a generalisation, are more like the farmers in this article selling there wares than the WS Bankers. Sure people are money obsessed but they do it either by being profitable or by selling equity in value creating businesses.

I think the Google slogan of "Don't be evil" is the best summation of the average tech entrepreneur these days, generally because they are smart respectable human beings. They are looking to solve a problem that exists, for people willing to pay.

Of course there are always bad apples.

There is nothing broken about demand and supply, only the steps in between are broken, which the financial institution's such as Goldman saps on.

I think "Don't be evil" is a slogan of tech employees, not tech entrepreneurs.

I single out Hacker News as being psychologically different from normal software engineers. The focus on Hacker News is money, and many people here see profit as inherently virtuous. Social darwinism, eugenics, authoritarianism, and other extreme right political views are overrepresented on Hacker News, and given surprising amounts of leeway considering the swiftness with which other views are scrubbed away here.

Something which has always disturbed me about the community is the macabre fascination with funding and exits.

Obviously these are healthy steps in the progression of some businesses, but at times it seems HN focuses on them to the exclusion of whether a startup actually contributes something worthwhile. It is probably arguable that those things represent a reasonable proxy for the value created (or expected to be created) by the business. Then again, there are plenty of funded (and acquired) business models which are based on cynical exploitation of the less-educated for the benefit of the business owner, at a net cost to society as a whole.

If an SV entrepreneur-type is more focused on getting funded or making an exit than creating net value to society, I think it is fair to draw ethical comparisons with the WS banker-type.

I'm not sure I can agree. Sometimes there is an emphasis on acquisition, but companies that sound overvalued or negative to society tend to be disliked on HN as well. Groupon, for instance, gets flak in about every thread that mentions it.

Middle-men are often seen as ethically compromised in any supply-and-demand scenario. this is not new.

The whole GS franchise is built on their role as a go-between. Need hyphens? You might not understand the hyphen farmer's strange accent, but the merchant has been dealing with him for a long time.

I thought the human angle of the piece was far overblown. The underlying story being presented is "Goldman Sachs raises prices and people starve as a result". I think that was mostly to add a dramatic point to the article. In reality it's a "look at how all of these pieces fit together, and here's how Goldman Sachs hacked the system" story. While hackers love that kind of thing, we're a relatively small market and a story with a spin about the evil of corporations is so in right now.

The reason people aren't reacting to human suffering is because we can see that it isn't a real factor in this story. We're talking about a small change in the world's supply of food here. It would be very difficult to image (or prove) that anyone actually died of starvation as a result of this. It's more like a loaf of bread that used to cost $4.50 now costs $6.00. That extra $1.50 can be enough to make an unpleasant life significantly less pleasant (believe me, I know), but I don't think it equates to the starving human beings.

tl;dr - Capitalism is a dick move. Don't blame the flaws in the system on the people who benefit from them.

Food prices have tripled since 2005, roughly. That makes a huge difference in many countries, and to the poor in many more. It is a very real factor.

Unfortunately, people at the margin DO starve. All economic activity happens at the margin.

What usually happens is a country at a large scale imports less subsidized food commodity, and this limits government distribution of that commodity -- they usually stop some feeding centers, which makes the marginal trip more difficult or impossible for some people.

It might also lead to scaled back or eliminated aid programs.

So what happens when you've to live with $5 a week? This $1.50 blocks you from buying any bread.

One of the things markets are supposed to do in theory is to route resources to where they are needed, and financially punish people who move resources in stupid ways.

The technical analysis I've seen here seems to hover around the question of why the investors were not automatically screwed. In a more efficient market the price collapse would have been obvious, the bubble would not have happened, and no one would have starved.

This doesn't directly address the inhumanity involved, but the analysis is important.

>One of the things markets are supposed to do in theory is to route resources to where they are needed, and financially punish people who move resources in stupid ways.

How many more people have to die needlessly before this theory is reexamined by those who practice it?

Planned economy has been attempted in several countries. Their death record isn't exactly shining.

>It is a bit disconcerting to me that commenters here are fascinated by the technical analysis of this system and appear quite oblivious to the problem of starving human beings.

Your emoting and four bucks will buy a cup of coffee. It's not going to help anyone eat.

You have to understand what's going on before you can make things better. So yeah, how the "moving pieces fit together" matters more than how much anybody cares.

>how the "moving pieces fit together" matters more than how much anybody cares.

It takes both to take any meaningful, equitable, decisive action. Analysis without motivation leads us to scholarly indifference.

Your point is taken when it comes to empathy without logic.

I am currently drunk; but i think that if every newcaster drop a tear for everyone who dies in the news they read, they would eventually die of dehydration (so to speak).

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