That's the weird part. The argument seems to be that any temporal failure of a system means we need to change the system wholesale. There is no argument for why a different system would be better, merely the belief that the current system has flaws, therefore...
This part confused me:
> bad public policy coupled with decades of corporate greed.
The article mentions a cascading set of changes that move from minor inconvenience (bicycle parts) to minor but more serious inconvenience (french fries being, however tangentially, "food"). Even then, there is no claim that the "have no potatoes" was for all ingredients, and no one went hungry did they? Unless I'm mistaken, no one in the west has yet starved as a result of all this. Happy to be corrected.
A restaurant I go to has variously been out of Lamb, Chicken and Sweet potatoes. I mean, the horror of being forced to eat normal potato wedges over sweet potato wedges was too much for me, but AFAICT I'm still alive.
So it seems like, as you point out, the system has failed to produce the outcome people claim not to want - huge choice variety and abundance - but has instead produced slightly less than huge choice variety at some moments in time. I'm not sold that's a disaster.
The first derivative of food supply disruption is clearly positive. The exact value of the second is debatable, but I feel confident saying it is at least not clearly substantially negative. Slightly negative at best and I can't give a lot of evidence for that.
The sum total of that disruption has not yet burned through our buffer, though it has caused a noticeable rise in prices. However, it is not wise to wait for our buffer to be entirely gone before being willing to identify the problem.
I think "stems from" is complicated in this instance by how much changed and how fast. Systems can take only so much change in a set period of time, and we've had a hell of a lot of change in under 2 years.
Populations movements (COVID), combined with personal spending habit changes (things over experiences), combined with who spends money (office -> work from home contributed to the toilet paper shortages), combined with labour market changes, combined with immigration changes (hospitality in Sydney is weird without foreign students and backpackers), combined with a lack of slack in the system (JIT etc), combined with probably hundreds of small law changes played a part in what is happening. That all these happened at once only makes it all the worse.
I think it's an archaic spelling of the verb "steer". I remember the edition of Treasure Island I had as a boy has Long John Silver use it in the line "We can stear a course, but who's to set one?" when they are discussing whether to mutiny.
Though when I google that phrase, Silver uses the modern spelling.
I often wonder: wouldn't fines paid as a percentage of stock be a better deterrent? Taking stock off shareholders changes the fraud equation from risk of fine vs the profitability upside, to shareholder's losing real value.
That's the role of shareholders AFAICT, to hold their board and the company accountable. Fail to do so and lose your shareholding seems the right direct risk.
The fines could also be a lot larger, because there is minimal risk of bankrupting a business from diluting existing shareholders. A 1% shareholder hit would be $4B at current market cap. Make it 5% and really make shareholders pay.
But there's a market where you can exchange the two, so they are roughly the same thing. If you have your 1% shares fined away, you can buy back the upside, if that's what you want. Or if you have a fine of 1% equivalent in cash, you can sell shares to pay for it.
Either way you've lost 1%, but you can decide whether to hold the upside exposure and voting control.
I think the key is the size of the fine. $1B to JPM is not really a whole lot. Maybe scaling the fine according to the size of the entity might make sense, but then there's a question of why everyone else at JPM is getting fined simply for doing their job in the same building as the guys who did this.
Edit. On second thought I guess you mean there will be a restriction on buying back the shares?
I think it's really important for people to understand that $1Bn isn't a lot of money to JPM because they do lots of things. They made $30Bn last year - but this specific trading business probably made nothing like that. They're doing consumer banking, investment banking, commercial banking, asset and wealth management. It might be true that $1Bn isn't a huge sum compared to the total profitability of JPM but I don't see why JPM's consumer banking arm has anything to do with the fine. Most likely these trading desks sum up to around 50-100 people at most. It's a very profitable sector (when you're breaking the law) but it's a tiny tiny part of what JPM do, and the idea that we should fine JPM more because they have lots of other businesses is just kind of crazy.
This would encourage the behavior because if there is less stock of the company held by anyone it increases the price .
Shareholders can change corporate behavior lik Carl Icahn but here it seems like it was very opaque to even monitor, the other way they can enforce good behavior is to sell the stock.
The sibling comments have an interesting worldview: can't fine management cause it's not their firm, can't fine shareholders cause it's not their fault, its nobody's fault.
Holders of common stock are not involved in the daily operations of the company. Not all ownership involves that level of liability. This is by design.
Apparently you didn't think very hard about that one. If you made the owner of a company criminally liable for any wrong-doing by the company's employees, nobody would risk owning a company. It would be impossible to have an advanced economy with these conditions.
They don't need to police it, they need to give the board etc. the proper incentives to do business legally because they will be hurt financially if the business doesn't. The policing is still done by the government agencies.
My point still stands even if Paypal has one less unicorn.
Founder also doesn't have a universal definition and by your own link the courts decided that he could be called a co-founder, along with the 4 others.
I think the articles problem is the lack of a definition of "crisis", and that leads to a bad mismatch between the headline and what is a reasonable look at the data.
My issues with the article are:
It starts from a too high aggregation level - almost no one is homeless in California, they are homeless usually in a very narrow area e.g. within 500 metres of bridge X.
Percentage change in raw numbers are not a good way to measure "crisis", and especially not at a state or city aggregated level. It seems more like traffic to me. Even in peak hour traffic, many roads are free of traffic, and the worst affected roads are those where the level of cars exceeds the roads ability to cope. That happens in a thin range of total cars per minute for specific roads, not due to X% increase overall. The same is true of homelessness in a city vs ... let's call them "hotspots".
Perhaps even more important than numbers in specific areas is the actual conditions homelessness creates in those areas. "Bad conditions" could be everything from human faeces on the street increasing, to murders, over doses, disease and unsanitary conditions, and it is possible for "bad conditions" to decrease and homeless numbers go up, or visa versa. That is harder to measure for sure, but probably closer to what most people mean by crisis.
It's not, I just don't want to name them for reasons that should be obvious. There may or may not be enough info in my post to figure out what I'm talking about, you'll have to use your best judgement.
> last time I checked, SpaceX wasn’t promising 80% of its rockets would work back in its early days.
Is your criticism that these places are making false promises, or:
> “Move fast and break things” doesn’t work when the “things” are humans, not code and technology.
RCTs and placebos work exactly this way. People literally die to help us learn what does and does not work. We lost 8-9 months of COVID-19 deaths because of a system that needs to go slow, and yet had experimentation regimes that still put participants at risk.
I don't know of any verification method that doesn't require some degree of risk for the participants, but I'd love to hear one.
This part confused me:
> bad public policy coupled with decades of corporate greed.
The article mentions a cascading set of changes that move from minor inconvenience (bicycle parts) to minor but more serious inconvenience (french fries being, however tangentially, "food"). Even then, there is no claim that the "have no potatoes" was for all ingredients, and no one went hungry did they? Unless I'm mistaken, no one in the west has yet starved as a result of all this. Happy to be corrected.
A restaurant I go to has variously been out of Lamb, Chicken and Sweet potatoes. I mean, the horror of being forced to eat normal potato wedges over sweet potato wedges was too much for me, but AFAICT I'm still alive.
So it seems like, as you point out, the system has failed to produce the outcome people claim not to want - huge choice variety and abundance - but has instead produced slightly less than huge choice variety at some moments in time. I'm not sold that's a disaster.