colonelanguz

these gifts have been known about for a long time

No they haven't. That's why it's breaking news when they get discovered.

In my entire life I have never seen any evidence that for supreme Court justices things influenced their ruling.

How would you possibly know what this looks like when, as you concede, there never have been meaningful investigations into the justices?

The history of the justices predicts their current rulings and does it amazingly well.

No better than the history of their acceptance of lavish gifts from ideologically motivated rich people.

That is wild. What is an example?

Not the same thing. You're comparing the relationship between a fake version of an artwork and the artwork itself to that between two digital objects both of which are derivative of a third thing. The third thing is the analog to the artwork, making the metaphor unusable

Your like ironic actual point is well taken but I just wanted to note that even without the irony this is actually a very cool thought provoking question and I couldn't answer it at first.

Yeah. And he also hasn't beaten the market in over a decade.

Would you mind briefly explaining the concept of "tech debt" to a layperson?

In my opinion, no, not really. Hard work could be necessary but not sufficient, or contingently necessary. Or the success criterion could be defined in a way that obscures the link to hard work. This is from a review of Taleb's The Black Swan:

As Cicero pointed out, we all suffer from 'survivorship bias': that is, we confine our evidence to that adduced from those few who succeed or survive, and ignore the silent evidence of all those who didn't make it. The graveyard is silent, the awards ceremony is noisy.

[1] https://sunwords.com/2009/08/24/to-understand-success-and-fa...

Well said! I came here to say this. Founders of successful businesses usually are not exceptional geniuses. They often happen to be in the right place at the right time, or they steal ideas from other people when the business is too young to be worth litigating over. See, e.g., Microsoft, Facebook, Snapchat, etc. Or they get government assistance at a critical time. E.g., Elon Musk. There are so many species of selection bias at work here; I totally agree with your comment about reading "Ten morning habits of billionaires."

Also, the idea that one should be "constantly judging both how hard you're trying and how well you're doing," _while_ trying to try hard and trying to do well, is insane. You can't be the CEO and the ditch-digger at the same time. You have to be able to inhabit both perspectives as _separate_.

That said, it was an interesting read, albeit a self-consciously unhelpful one. It was helpful and humbling to read that you just think some things are easy for you because they were taught at a low level in school. I can adapt that same logic to suggest that this author isn't imparting serious, deep knowledge about the true nature of hard work and success.

You rock dude ignore these haters king

How many agains makes the study wrong

Standing and merits are both terms of art. Merits essentially means whether one side wins or not. Standing OTOH is a preliminary matter like jurisdiction. If the court lacks jurisdiction over the defendant or the subject matter of the dispute, they kick the case on jurisdiction without reaching the merits. If the plaintiff doesn't have standing, they kick the case on standing without reaching the merits.

Your confusion is 100% reasonable because there is _conceptual_ overlap between standing and "who wins." For example, one aspect of standing is "injury-in-fact." That means "you suffered a harm recognized by the legal system." If the court says no standing because no injury-in-fact, to a layperson that's similar to saying "stop crying, go home." Which sounds a lot like saying "you lose the case."

You cited a source which proves you were wrong in exactly the way I pointed out. Your entire original comment hinged on a bizarre metaphor you created out of your false premise that in protection rackets, the "threat" is fake or choreographed. It isn't, so your comment isn't an intelligible critique of the comment it was intended to respond to. Yes, that's my point: your critique is wrong. I told you how: it is based on a false premise.

(i'm citing them, you are not)

You cited Wikipedia, and you haven't cited a single source for any proposition other than the one you were specifically wrong about.

I'm sorry i'm not basing my arguments on movies i've seen.

Deliberate obtuseness. The obvious implication of the reference to gangster films is that anyone who has even a passing familiarity with protection rackets knows that harm from the racketeer is not the only threatened harm. The third sentence of the Wikipedia entry you mentioned confirms this: "Through the credible threat of violence, the racketeers deter people from swindling, robbing, injuring, sabotaging or otherwise harming their clients." That means that the analogy between the CIA and a protection racket is perfectly tenable—in the parlance of your Wikipedia entry, a "broader protection racket" rather than a "pure extortion racket."

Not sure how to spell it out any clearer than that. I'm not implying you're getting concepts wrong. You got them both wrong.

Can't tell if you're trolling/deliberately obtuse or what

Here's what I meant: Your wrong conception of how a protection racket works undermines your argument that the person who said "That's like supporting a protection racket" is wrong.

No idea what you're talking about with "implies that the protector has the absolute ability to control if an attack occurs or not." Have you ever seen a gangster film? Anyways every time you invoke a new concept you're getting it wrong so maybe take a step back and think about what people are talking about instead of just randomly generating provocative hypos because you disagree with someone

A protection racket implies the "threat" is fake or choreographed.

Actually it doesn't

I just wanted to say that thoughtful posts like this are the reason I come to this site. Well-said, friend. I had never even explicitly acknowledged this in my own mind until I read your post.

Inb4 "Subscribe to Matt Levine's Money Stuff"[1]

Particularly in terms of generating what another thoughtful user dubbed "contextual understanding," this is a gold mine. Also occasionally gives very lucid, refreshing descriptions of how lots of things that other finance people take for granted work.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/authors/ARbTQlRLRjE/matthe...

That question is probably a bit over my head. My outlook is pretty grim and skeptical because of my experience with American capitalism so far. But the fact that people like Leo Strine and Marty Lipton are apparently meaningfully moving these ideas beyond the bounds of academia is definitely a good sign. (Slightly) more tangibly, 93% of investor respondents to a recent survey about corporate purpose indicated that it's important for a corporation to have a purpose, and 38% agreed that defining/managing stakeholder impact is an important reason to have a corporate purpose.[1] (This study was published on the HLS Blog after I wrote a more cynical reply to you yesterday and forgot to send it. Neat I guess.)

I read the Harvard Law corporate governance blog pretty regularly, and a staggering percentage of recent scholarship on there has been about corporate purpose, stakeholder capitalism, and ESG. ESG and stakeholder theory aren't exactly the same thing, but here's a good overview of how ESG might impact M&A and governance moving forward [2].

[1] https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2020/06/19/making-corporate-... [2] https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2020/02/20/the-coming-impact...

Thank you for your kind words! I totally agree about how flippantly people throw out the value-maximization point. And it is definitely true that the real standards which govern directors' and officers' conduct are murkier than the maxim "maximize shareholder value." The Business Roundtable's recent embrace of stakeholder theory seems likely to complicated things [1], and efforts by influential people like former Delaware Supreme Court Chief Justice Leo Strine [2] and legendary corporate lawyer Martin Lipton [3] have meaningfully contested the accepted definition of corporate purpose outside of the academy in recent months. But I do think Delaware law is pretty clear on the principle behind D&Os' fiduciary duties. The best summation I have seen of it is in a talk that Vice Chancellor Travis Laster gave at UVA Law last spring; [4] it's a great talk. Cheers yo.

[1] https://www.businessroundtable.org/business-roundtable-redef...

[2] https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2020/05/16/purpose-with-mean...

[3] https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2020/05/27/on-the-purpose-of...

[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ET8v47XPcUY&feature=youtu.be

Certainly it has been enforced against a company (thousands of them), but in a way it is more of a hypothetical threat. I was not referring to a statutory law, but rather to fiduciary duties, which derive from the common law of equity. The quotation from the Hsu case I provided above is a clear depiction of the standard of conduct required of directors and officers of Delaware corporations. But in reality, fiduciary standards operate more like you suggested—as a hypothetical threat. The reason for this is that, although the standards of conduct demanded of Delaware directors and officers are onerous and exacting, the standard of judicial review of challenged conduct is ordinarily very relaxed. In most ordinary situations, the standard of review is the business judgment rule, which essentially punts on the question of whether a particular action violates a fiduciary duty. The idea is that courts do not supplant directors' judgment with their own. More onerous standards of review are available in other situations, such as mergers and transactions where an interested party sits on the board or is an executive. (Facebook is an interesting example of a controlled company, given Zuckerberg's ownership stake, and its decisions might be subject to more scrutiny, but procedural safeguards are generally available to cleanse even conflicted decisionmaking.)

It's worth clarifying that only those to whom fiduciary duties are owed can ever sue for damages resulting from their breach. In other words, shareholders. That's how the threat gets operationalized—by a shareholder or class of shareholders suing the corporation for failing to maximize shareholder value through a fiduciary breach.

Anyways, the point I really wanted to make is that shareholder value maximization really is meaningfully encoded in American corporate law. If you meant to suggest that reality is less black-and-white than that, then I hope the foregoing ramble confirms that you are correct!

I agree! Were you attempting to respond to my comment, or just venting?

100%. Not that this means anything but I'm a JD and my JD girlfriend specializes in international law and we agree it's basically a joke. But hell yeah it was illegal.

I posted a long boring reply about this that you can read above, but it strikes me that your comment lives or dies on the meaning it assigns to the word "justify." If you're referencing _moral_ justification, then yeah of course you are right. War is horrible. But if you mean _legal_ justification, then here's a non-exhaustive list: - Self-defense

I am sympathetic to the point that you are making and hate to go all legal-positivist, but an illegal war is a war that isn't legal under international law. Defending your country from an invasion is like the gold standard of legality. It sits in contradistinction to, e.g., wars of aggression, which are what they sound like. To be a legal war where you're not defending against an invasion, it's necessary to have either a UNSC resolution supporting the war or a compelling self-defense/preemptive justification.

For the 2003 invasion of Iraq, people argue that it was illegal because there was no UNSC resolution. The U.S. and U.K. argued that it was authorized under the UNSC resolution that blessed the first U.s. invasion of Iraq. I think that sounds like nonsense, and particularly when you factor in that the actual pretenses for the 2003 invasion were false and probably fabricated by the aggressing parties—it seems like not a stretch to call it an illegal war.

Obviously the 2003 Iraq Invasion doesn't itself get you to OP's 4 million body count, but I hope this is a helpful start.

Delaware companies do. See, e.g., Frederick Hsu Living Tr. v. ODN Hldg. Corp., 2017 WL 1437308, at *18 (Del. Ch. Apr. 14, 2017) (“[T]he fiduciary relationship requires that the directors act prudently, loyally, and in good faith to maximize the value of the corporation over the long-term for the benefit of the providers of presumptively permanent equity capital . . .”).

Facebook is a Delaware company.

That's a fair point. It doesn't make me feel any differently about the proposition that, in a society that preaches values like rugged individualism and fiscal responsibility to its poorest members, it's strange to me that 99% of the government's per capita expenditures are going to places other than the people. Literally 99%. And by blindly subsidizing every single business, including like hedge funds and other speculators who partially caused the liquidity crisis, the government in sowing the seeds for the next meltdown and disguising insolvent firms as economically viable ones. All of which is bad for society and the economy.

This was incredibly frustrating to read because, intentionally or not, it perpetuates and normalizes the actual moral hazard of this crisis. It conflates the correct notion that if the government is forcing people not to work, it should make sure they don't starve to death, with the false notion that, in a capitalist society, businesses who were so balance sheet reckless that they couldn't last a month without government loans ought to be bailed out simply because it's "not their fault" that an economic crisis exposed their irresponsible planning.

That's not how capitalism works; the weakest companies should be allowed to fail. The government can still lend to keep their workers alive, but what it's really doing in this crisis is keeping their stock price alive, which overwhelmingly benefits corporate insiders and rich people who own stocks. That's the opposite of how the corporate form is supposed to work—equityholders get all of the upside on a sunny day, so they're entitled to ZERO protection on a rainy day. It's risky to buy stock. Buy bonds if you don't want to shoulder risk.

The most frustrating thing to me is that the same companies who are asking for buyouts could have simply held excess cash, or raised their employees' wages, or invested in profitable assets—all things you expect companies to do under capitalism! But instead, they invested in stock buybacks, which means literally spending retained earnings on inflating their own stock price. Apple is a classic example: earnings has actually been flat since like 2015, but earnings per share has gone up because Apple has bought back $250B of its own stock in the last eight years or so. But at least Apple is solvent! The airlines, for example, are asking for a bailout in almost exactly the same amount that they have spent on stock buybacks in the last several years. It frustrates.