
Create a Crisis, Capture a Unicorn - howard941
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/12/business/crisis-management-ipo-unicorn.html
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jsnider3
This is funny, but I'm not sure what the actual point is.

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tcmb
He has a business model[1] that sounds valid, and the reason he cannot
implement is because his partner is "burdened with a sense of ethics and even
a conscience". Not hard to imagine that there are other people out there who
are not burdened with that.

Another aspect might be that there are ways to benefit from stirring up crises
without solving them (like ad-financed social media and news sites).

[1] Concocting crises in order to get paid for solving them. Like the Charlie
Chaplin scene where the kid gets paid by the window repair guy to break
windows.

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bilbo0s
> _Another aspect might be that there are ways to benefit from stirring up
> crises without solving them (like ad-financed social media and news
> sites)..._

This has become laughably transparent recently. With lots of people out saying
that we need to stop the data privacy violations of social media/news sites by
"breaking them up", while almost none of the people advocating breakups want
to simply make it illegal to share user data for commercial purposes. It
didn't occur to me until you mentioned it that, of course! You know? I mean
they probably want to be able to have one of those little companies and share
your data to make money.

I really should have figured that out before.

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anitil
This is such a frustrating article because the kernel of the idea is _really_
interesting. It reads like the writer jumbled up a bunch of recent events into
a column and called it a day.

There are real-life examples of this phenomenon. The best I can think of is
the 'Children Overboard' scandal in Aus [0] that fabricated an 'illegal
immigration crisis' that only they could solve. Thus changing the political
landscape around refugees for decades

[0] Prepare to be depressed :
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children_Overboard_affair](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children_Overboard_affair)

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demygale
This is not funny, but I’m not sure what the actual point is.

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ttul
That was my thought as well.

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sjg007
I mean this is a valid short strategy so...

