General Motors declares bankruptcy

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/jun/01/general-motors-bankruptcy-chapter-11

by ksvs • 17 years ago

37 24 17 years ago

guardian.co.uk

swombat5• 17 years ago

From the guidelines:

Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

I think they may have covered this on TV. Just a little bit, you know.

I've got nothing against the nytimes article that takes a very specific angle on this story and tells us about the kind of people they have in charge of all this, but straight-up "GM is bankrupt" stories don't really fit the HN mould imho.

chaosmachine• 17 years ago

There's been a lot of "off-topic" stuff lately. I feel your pain.

On the other hand, there's this other guideline:

"Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site."

swombat5• 17 years ago

Yeah, I know. I'm still trying to figure out a clever way to basically state that I've flagged the story and encourage others to do so as well.

I think until pg makes the flagging process more visible so that stories like this get killed, I'll have to go and make silly posts like this (karma be damned).

jamesjyu• 17 years ago

Twitter and Facebook are covered all the time on TV. Should stories about them be banned too? I just think that the TV litmus test is too simplistic.

gaius2• 17 years ago

Indeed, and Tesla gets mentioned here all the time.

lallysingh• 17 years ago

It's also a big topic likely to get some interesting commentary from HN readers. It, combined with GM's replacement in the DOW by Cisco, represents a shift in the US economy from manufacturing towards technology.

pg• 17 years ago

This is a momentous event. This sort of story is the reason that sentence contains the word "probably."

Whereas the guidelines are very specific about not submitting comments of the type you just did. And this page shows why. Now we have an entire thread of boring metacommentary.

lucumo• 17 years ago

To be honest, I find the metacommentary a bit more interesting than the article.

The metacommentary is what shapes HN as a community. In that sense, at least, it has some value.

The article on the other hand: I've already read it a lot of times. First there were the articles that GM may declare bankruptcy, then there were the articles how GM is more likely to declare bankruptcy, then there were the articles how GM is one step closer to bankruptcy and now, finally, GM declares bankruptcy. All these articles were the same, apart from the headline, every one of those articles were published in a gazillion sources, none adding interesting commentary, and then all of it repeated because some European/local car maker depends on GM and needed to be sold. I've read one of those articles and I've read them all.

I think in that sense the "if it was on TV, it shouldn't be here"-thing is quite valid: You'll encounter it everywhere and there's no value in discussing it here, because it has been discussed to death already.

Now, I don't really like the metacommentary either, even though I'm participating in it, but I do think the article gets undue credit. It's not really that valuable.

run4yourlives• 17 years ago

Would be better discussed on newmogul.com. As such, flagged.

gaius2• 17 years ago

On Channel 4 News they are referring to GM now as Government Motors.

mahmud• 17 years ago

Channel 4 is what broadcasting company exactly in your area? Here it's NBC4; I very much doubt NBC is in the business of name calling wrt government "expansion" as Fox would, not to mention that NBC is owned by GE who is in strong business with .gov:

http://www.cjr.org/resources/?c=ge

swombat5• 17 years ago

In the UK, there's a broadcasting company called "Channel 4". That's what he was referring to.

http://www.channel4.com/

General Motors declares bankruptcy

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