> When major banks fail they take out major parts of the economy.
Sure. So... do the bankers go to jail?
Nope. They get bonuses.
It's a great scam. They play with your money. If they lose, oh well, the government will bail them out. If they win, they keep the money. And either way, the people in charge get large bonuses.
Only Iceland chose to charge the bankers who engaged in predatory / illegal behavior. Every other country pretty gave them a handshake, and a pat on the back.
Look, if the bank is "too big to fail", by all means bail them out. But nationalize it, fire the idiots in charge, and sell off the assets to people who aren't robber barons.
They let Lehman Brothers die. The results of that were awful. They did more or less what you suggest with the next failure, AIG, which was bought by the government for a song. The government has since sold their shares, making 22 billion dollars profit off that bailout. The government did so well from the deal that the old CEO is trying to sue on the basis that the terms were unfair.
After that, the government offered to buy assets from banks to ensure they had enough cash to keep doing business (TARP). Every bank was asked to participate because the government didn't want to single out the weakest ones. They were concerned the stigma would drive away business and push them over the edge. In the end, the government sold off the TARP assets they bought and made another 15 billion dollars profit off that.
The bailouts were not that expensive. What was tremendously expensive was the impact of businesses all around the world shaking in fear of being short on cash and unable to secure a loan. That caused them to reduce spending, but one person's spending is another's income. That caused a spiral of dropping incomes and cutting costs. That's where layoffs, bankruptcies, and wage freezes came from. Government revenue dropped significantly too as tax money comes from sales and income.
Banks should be smaller. Hell, companies in general should be smaller. We have far too many oligopolies and near-monopolies. Not enough competition.
The problem is finding agreement on the specifics. We got a whole slew of new regulations in Dodd-Frank and Basel III, but nobody outside of financial experts know or understand them. The general public doesn't agree on much more than that they hate bankers.
I know there's a few common things often pointed to, like reinstating Glass-Steagall, but there's plenty of disagreement there too. For one, I don't think it would have made much difference in this crisis. The counterparty risks that dominated this crisis were all in the investment sides of the companies anyways. It seems more like a pet cause than an actual solution.
I guess the problem is that politics is broken. Ideally, smart, well-informed people would discuss these things and the public would listen and support the best ideas. That's not how politics works these days, though. Party ideology is basically religion at this point.
Fix the government and everything else flows from there. But, that's easier said than done. The American government is fractured and broken because American society is fractured and broken. It's not clear how to make it whole again.
There's more people affected negatively by irresponsible banks and student loans than those that who were affected negatively who worked for the banks. For example, I know more than a handful of people who were let go from Lehman and are doing just fine. In fact I literally just met someone who today is making a $500k salary. We still have people digging themselves out of debt because they lost everything (tangible and intangibles) due to the 2008 crisis.
> The American government is fractured and broken because American society is fractured and broken.
There's a great theory which is that federal politics is all rooted in local politics. In other words, the reason the federal government is full of assholes is because people let these people get elected at the local level and their natural progression is simply to move up through system to the federal level (usually passing it off as "well it just affects that one town, so what").
> the federal government is full of assholes is because people let these people get elected at the local level
I feel that politics in general is a field where sociopaths can thrive. There's a lot of backstabbing, deal making, and pandering I think fits well with that mindset at all levels of government. I think the same could be said for wall street as well.
You're right about how people have been impacted. That's going to continue to hurt as long as their point of view is ignored. Can't just tell angry people to stop being angry. Doesn't work.
> Is this, like, a case of the government having the wrong incentives, needing more to look tough than to actually recover their money?
The government (to some extent) expresses the will of the people In the US and Canada, most people have expressed strong support for such debtors prisons. Largely in the belief that it will never happen to them.
This is an exceptional case of cruelty - imagine spending years learning a craft (and spending thousands and thousands of dollars for it) and one fine day, not being able to use it anymore. It is even more worse in cases of healthcare professionals, as the aging population needs all the help it can get. No-one benefits at the end. I really wish we put common sense and compassion before commerce.
> a panelist out-and-out harassed an attendee... and the organizers did nothing
You seem to have misplaced the context which I'm sure was unintentional - the panelist, having been harassed and dogpiled for many years by the racist misogynist attendee, who specifically sat on the front row with many of his fellow harassers to make a point, called him a shithead.
That, sir, is why the organisers did nothing - because he is a verifiable shithead and calling him such in front of an audience is not harassment in any sense of the word.
> The panelist, having been harassed and dogpiled for many years by the racist misogynist attendee
... which is, of course, not true.
> sat on the front row with many of his fellow harassers
Who also didn't harass her.
Honestly, this isn't rocket science.
If I make a video calling someone an idiot, asshole, etc. That in no way is harassment. They don't need to see it. It's not directed at then.
The same goes for other form of communication. Were these people sending harassing messages directly to her? The answer is "maybe once or twice, but there was absolutely no pattern of harassment".
I think you (and her supporters) are misconstruing criticism, and hostile criticism for outright harassment. It's not.
In contrast, there is no question that her behavior violated the rules of vidcon. There is no question that the behavior of the alleged harassers did not violate the rules of vidcon, while they were at vidcon.
The organizers have given an apology to Sarkeesian for allowing a group that has dedicated itself to harassing her over the years to come and monopolize the front seats of that panel.
You would think someone so concerned about the harassment of a key figure supporting the GamerGate movement would actually report the situation in its entirety. It's almost as all of this might not be about ethics in video game journalism after all.
> The organizers have given an apology to Sarkeesian for allowing a group that has dedicated itself to harassing her over the years
I've looked... is there any proof of this?
- phone calls from those people to Anita
- emails...
- twitter messages
- facebook messages...
If there are, I'll be happy to label them harassers. But until then... I have this weird idea that
the rule of law is more important than feelings
The vidcon people (among others) have made it clear that they will violate their own rules in order to "get" the bad people. People who, according to their own rules, have done nothing wrong.
Witch-hunts end up in one place, and only one place. The people who previously were accusers, on trial, for the same offenses.
So again, is there any reason to believe these accusations? If not, why do you believe them?
Edit Apparently asking for evidence was the wrong thing to do.
> This shows that power and political agendas trump peopl's alleged morality.
I'm not familiar with the incident, but I don't think it proves this. If the harassment was real, the organizers could just be incompetent/afraid of interfering/incapable of reading the situation. In which case they're perhaps not suitable for organizing, but doesn't mean it's political.
It seems inconceivable that you are as well-versed in the details of this incident as you seem to be but unaware that the situation is entirely different than what you're describing.
I could see someone being ignorant of the truth and believing the very surface-level description you give here, but your subsequent comments reveal a willful ignorance on your part.
Censorship of nasty harassers would have been welcome in that case, and describing that nasty harassers as she did was hardly harassment, no matter how it might give one the vapors.
Roper: So now you'd give the Devil benefit of law!
More: Yes. What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?
Roper: I'd cut down every law in England to do that!
More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you — where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country's planted thick with laws from coast to coast — man's laws, not God's — and if you cut them down — and you're just the man to do it — d'you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake.
---
I am disturbed by the fascination with witch-hunts. My attempts here to ask people to explain themselves have resulted in no explanations (of course). Just accusations.
Well, if those people are so bad, then the rule of law should allow them to be banned and/or punished. If they're not that bad, then the rule of law should be followed. If we're not going to follow the rule of law, then why pretend to have rules?
Maybe I'm weird... but none of that makes any sense to me.
I tried to avoid gigantic quotes from the Vidcon Medium post I linked previously, but I'm assuming you read this:
Our founder, Hank Green, talked with our panelist and said two things:
1. He told her that her comment had violated our policy, but that he understood that there was a broader context (which to be clear, we were blissfully ignorant of until this weekend, and remain inexpert in.)
2. He apologized to her for not having been more aware of and active in understanding the situation before the event, which resulted in her being subjected to a hostile environment that she had not signed up for.
> If we're not going to follow the rule of law, then why pretend to have rules?
Rules are an imperfect tool. People behaving badly while carefully staying within the limit of the rules often run afoul of the intentions of the rule makers; it boils down to trusting those responsible for rule interpretation and enforcement.
Option 1: Adding feature to npm/composer/gem/pip ad infinitum
Option 2: add per-language parser support to the alerting tool instead.
Option 2 doesn't necessitate a new (information-duplicating, still potentially error prone) standard, and can likely leverage available, tested libraries ;-)
* any non Javascript / ruby / go languages don't have standard packages, package names, etc.
* any non Javascript / ruby / go languages may be using one of many build systems. It's just too hard to troll through random build systems to see what dependencies are used
* therefore, a simple text file is what will work, and is what will be trivial for everyone to use
* if you find it too hard to update one line in a text file when you add (for example) a new dependency on libldap... you shouldn't be programming
Even more than that, Maven came up with the groupId concept, which I think is under-utilized by many other package managers... The leftpad fiasco could have been mitigated with it, for example.
> Crucially, Jayne's definition of "consciousness" is basically introspection.
With language as a key portion. See any discussion of deaf people who aren't taught language until late in life, such a Helen Keller. The stories consistently have them emotionally overwhelmed when the first learn language. They want to know the names of everything.
And also, they consistently talk about "before" and "after". Before language, they were a collection of emotions, fears, desires, etc. After language, they existed for the first time. They could name things, including themselves.
This looks a lot like the transition to self aware consciousness. Which means Jayne isn't entirely wrong.
> I really wonder if non-programmers think the same or is it just like any other profession they're not knowledgeable of?
There is a large difference between competence and ignorance. They're qualitatively different, and different in each field.
e.g. programmers do magic things like read the error messages on the screen. Non-programmers not only don't do that, they can't comprehend why it's necessary. (Without exaggerating too much)
The same applies for mechanics, carpenters, etc. I've seen good people work, and they do things that I just don't get. I'm not sure any amount of training will result in the same intuitive understanding.
It's why I went into programming, and not anything else...
> e.g. programmers do magic things like read the error messages on the screen. Non-programmers not only don't do that, they can't comprehend why it's necessary. (Without exaggerating too much)
More than once it has crossed my mind that it would be worthwhile to build custom error message dialogs that can't be closed for at least 30 seconds (maybe with a secret override) for some areas of our products. The number of times I've been on a support screenshare with customers where they try to connect to some external service, and it fails, and they instantly dismiss the prompt that would tell them exactly why it failed, if they would just read it, is maddening. At least that kind of a built-in delay would give me time to fire up the snipping tool and grab a screenshot from my end...
Oh, we do that too... It's a struggle to get people to actually send those to us, for some reason, or even just open them up. Usually this kind of thing occurs with initial installation, and we're typically installing into some location that is firewalled to hell and gone, so we can't depend on being able to access anything even within their own LAN, let alone the outside internet.
Sure. So... do the bankers go to jail?
Nope. They get bonuses.
It's a great scam. They play with your money. If they lose, oh well, the government will bail them out. If they win, they keep the money. And either way, the people in charge get large bonuses.
Only Iceland chose to charge the bankers who engaged in predatory / illegal behavior. Every other country pretty gave them a handshake, and a pat on the back.
And it's still ongoing.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/mikecollins/2015/07/14/the-big-...
Look, if the bank is "too big to fail", by all means bail them out. But nationalize it, fire the idiots in charge, and sell off the assets to people who aren't robber barons.