> Boards have a fiduciary duty to the shareholders. As an all-cash offer, this generates for the shareholders a substantial return with NO RISK, and so the board has a serious legal obligation to carefully review this offer and make a decision.
The fact that their primary concern has to be for their shareholders and not whether the sale will be good at all for the rest of humanity is a huge problem in my eyes.
If someone offers to purchase your home or other property, the decision to accept that offer lay with the property owner(s), not the municipality, county, or state who may or may not consider impact to humanity. In what utopia do you think we live?
You don't have 300 million people (including heads of state) outside your house (that you jointly own with millions of other people) standing on your lawn interacting with each other and the rest of the world.
You likely do have people or organizations on the loan to your house though, and they don't really get a say most of the time as long as they can be paid off.
What if instead of a house we were talking about a small business that serves people. Can that business not sell itself to someone else?
Property rights and the government stepping in to force changes don't interact well, and goes against a free market type system. The government does step in sometimes, but usually when they see what's being done as being anti-competitive and hurting people through reducing market effectiveness, not just because they've made some moral judgement. Personally I'm happy they're not doing the latter, I suspect quite a lot of people would not agree with the judgements they were making at any specific time, depending on the specific groups in power.
Property rights and the government stepping in to force changes don't interact well, and goes against a free market type system. The government does step in sometimes, but usually when they see what's being done as being anti-competitive and hurting people through reducing market effectiveness, not just because they've made some moral judgement.
Tobacco advertising, pollution, lead gasoline... Clearly we do make moral choices and, as a democracy, pass laws restricting some activities. The world is not encompassed by The Profit Motive.
I'm not quite sure that unrestricted hyper-optimised misery factories are the thing we should be shooting for.
> Tobacco advertising, pollution, lead gasoline... Clearly we do make moral choices and, as a democracy, pass laws restricting some activities.
We do, but I think it's rare, and much rarer than that list would imply. I see most of those as clear issues of public health. The one where that's a harder claim to make, advertising, it's about making the market function better. Free markets requires require widely distributed and accurate information to function correctly, and false information is extremely damaging to a free market.
> I'm not quite sure that unrestricted hyper-optimised misery factories are the thing we should be shooting for.
Neither am I. I'm not some free market only anti-regulation type. I think a completely unregulated market is trivially shown to be unworkable by our own history, so regulation is required to curtail blatant market manipulation. I even think more regulation restricting the size of large companies (or disincentivizing them) would be useful, but I think they need to be applied to foreign companies as well or we're just hurting ourselves without solving any problem.
There's probably a hundred ways that is infeasible and has problems, but it's obvious there are real problems to address with inequality and outsized companies with outsized influence, and something needs to change. I'm just hesitant to couch it in moral terms when it comes to what the government can and should do, because I think that's a slippery slope.
People claim that free markets, capitalism, and government noninterference lead to good outcomes.
Then when we look at examples of these things causing harm rather than leading to good outcomes, people shout and say "Hey you can't do that, its a free market!"
If people want to use the argument that free markets should be able to cause harm if they want then people need to stop using the argument that free markets are good because of all the good they consistently do.
I don't think that's an accurate assessment of my position or point. You can see my reply to your sibling comment for further explanation from me. In short I don't think a free market is a panacea or perfect, but I do think it's a tool that when used appropriately and kept in check to keep it's known deficiencies from making it a net negative, it's better than what else we have available.
You can criticize Twitter's leadership all you want, but I don't see how allowing Elon Musk to take ownership control of Twitter would better humanity.
and not allowing him to take control would better humanity? I wanted to eat dinner today but I don't see how that would better humanity. I don't see why humanity should be taken into considerating when it's irrelevant. Most people don't even use twitter.
Yes, I do hold some criticisms against Twitter leadership, true, but I'm also fascinated by your view. So I wonder, what if I'm wrong? And then it would be really helpful to see your argument, if you have one. I'm on the fence on a number of things, so this is really your chance to change my mind. And if you do, I might do stuff like investing in Twitter right now, instead of waiting for Musk to take over. Just an example. I'm not saying I will, but it would be a logical next thing to do if you convince me. If not, then I'll probably just wait like everyone else.
> Free speech is dangerous; without censorship, progressive ideas cannot propagate because people can then make them look as silly as they truly are.
By this definition, the US never would have abolished slavery. Those who praise conservative ideas always put those ideas in a vacuum where they can't be proven wrong. Fascinating, isn't it?
the statement asserted has nothing to do with any specific party at any specific point in period. This is an example of progress during an era of which, apparently, free speech was unquestioned. The past accomplishments of the Republican party much more closely mirror the current Democratic party due to the Southern Strategy, but again, not relevant to the point being made.
> Progress for progress's sake isn't always progress
then it's definitively not progressive, isn't it? Conservation is a reactive stance, not an active one.
Imagine someone sets fire to a masterpiece, art conservatives don't take a reactive stance and say "hey you shouldn't have done that", they take an active stance using safeguards to ensure that it doesn't happen in the first place because it can't be undone.
But isn't this demonstrably false? (Not even to mention that "progressive" in this context seems to mean something very different from the dictionary definition).
Which Twitter are you using? Pick up any conservative YouTube video talking about social media and you'll see plenty of examples.
One example that comes to mind is Hunter Biden's laptop (recently confirmed as true, even by left wing publications) being censured vs all the Trump's Russian allegations (which didn't go anywhere) which weren't.
Many of the silliest progressive ideas are being / have been normalized thanks to Big Tech and the establishment doing one or more of three things:
1) actively censoring people who speak out against them
2) preventing discussions from happening in the first place (comments disabled, dislikes hidden)
3) actively promoting the ideal progressive version of the idea to cut down on dissent
Take the pronouns thing. Every other Instagram account of a female has her official pronouns (which you may only choose from a list of officially allowed ones so as to cut down on dissent via things like “your majesty / his highness”) set to she/her. I’m sorry but we all know you’re a woman. Why are you putting your pronouns up? The idea is a preposterous one; don’t even get anyone started on the they/them abomination.
And yet dissent and mockery of this abject stupidity is largely censored. As a result it’s bleeding out into the real world.
I hang in very progressive social circles. Trust me when I tell you, you do not want this reality. Their lives are defined by their progressive causes and perceived slights and micro aggressions. Every introduction “must” involve your pronouns and if you “forget” them they will innocently ask you of them. As a result people are bumbling pronouns all the time, I cannot tell you how many times even the pronoun experts start to say “she” or “he” in casual conversation referring to someone but then panic and stutter and say “they” because they can’t quite remember what pronoun this particular person wants to go by today or if they’re a they/them who despises people who feel like they should be able to speak freely without knowing they’re very, very special and are too special to go by a binary pronoun.
Mockery is the best defense against stupidity. Which is why it’s under such a big threat. And it’s why Elon is taking over Twitter.
To normalize people being open and explicit about their gender identity so that people with non-obvious gender identities can feel less conspicuous sharing theirs.
> they/them
They and them have been neutral-gender pronouns forever.
> And yet dissent and mockery of this abject stupidity is largely censored.
Because most of it is thinly veiled transphobia. You can still disagree with the censorship but to act as if it's mostly good-faith arguments being censored is just naive.
>To normalize people being open and explicit about their gender identity so that people with non-obvious gender identities can feel less conspicuous sharing theirs.
This oft-repeated stance is a very naive way of thinking in my view, if you're different from 99% of the population, then you're going to stand out no matter how much other people try simulating your superficial markers (while being obviously baseline themselves). If you look like a duck and walk like a duck, no amount of people saying "Quack!" when introducing themselves will prevent me from noticing you're different in a fundamental way from all those people pretending to be like you, all those people are managing to do is a semi-mockery of what they supposedly support. There are deeper patterns than language, humans aren't GPT-3 to be fooled by simplistic imitation games of speech patterns.
It's usually immediately obvious if a She/Her or a They/Them is matching the traditional features of the declared pronouns, it's literally millennia upon millennia of pattern-matching processes deeply hardwired into my mammalian brain and always running in the background, I couldn't stop it if I wanted to. I suspect most people are the same. You don't change reality by changing words, conspicuous things are conspicuous.
Not to mention the whole flawed framework of "Normalizing" and "Validating" things as worthy moral goals in the first place, why do things have to be common in order to be accepted ? So nakedly hive minded.
>They and them have been neutral-gender pronouns forever.
Common misconception, they are not gender-neutral in the modern sense, they refer to those of unkown gender. The gender is still one of the perfectly defined binary we all know, it's just not known or relevant to the speaker. There is no quantum wave function of genders waiting to collapse behind 17th century uses of 'They'. This misunderstanding manifests itself as soon as you encounter monstrosities like "They is looking for a new car to buy".
>Because most of it is thinly veiled transphobia.
Ah yes, transphobia, the cardinal sin, the unspeakable horror, the one thing you're not supposed to say[1]. Let's ban all mention of this atrocity, let's shun and exile All Who Dare Transgress.
This surely won't backfire at all, supressing dissent has a very good track record of eliminating it entirely.
I'm positive you've put more thought into this pair of comments than I ever did in my life about this issue of pronouns. Don't you think it's at least a bit weird that you're so obsessed and irate about such a minor detail?
Also, it's very funny that you're so taken up in arms against the world-ending catastrophe of people writing "they/them" in their twitter bios, yet see no issue with a multi-hundred-billionaire dictating what is and isn't allowed on a major internet platform (by all means wealth inequality is one of the major problems of the modern age).
EDIT: About the singular "they" thing: that whole paragraph is hilarious (quantum what?) but it's a pet peeve of mine to correct those misconceptions. Your sentence is grammatically incorrect, even when the function is singular, the agreement in number is still plural, e.g. "someone wrote their name here" -> "they have written their name", not "they has written their name".
Plus, singular they has been attested since the 14th century. Plural they...? Since the 13th.
>I'm positive you've put more thought into this pair of comments than I ever did in my life about this issue of pronouns.
Eh, not really. I don't even live in a country where that's a common practice (thankfully), my comments naturally tend to be long whatever their subject are, you can verify this yourself by looking at my post history.
>it's very funny that you're so taken up in arms against the world-ending catastrophe of people writing "they/them" in their twitter bios
So, first off, I'm not 'up in arms', it's just that as a man with a certain propensity towards heresies, it's second nature for me to look at a social web and immediately notice the conformists, and I'm not a big fan of conformists. Secondly, I never implied those people are doing anything 'world-ending', although they are participating in their fair share of censorship-defense and general internet poisoning, but really they are just engaging in a pitiful and obvious illusion. I'm bringing that up, half-ridiculing it, and half-pointing-out it's counter-productive to what they actually want.
>yet see no issue with a multi-hundred-billionaire dictating what is and isn't allowed on a major internet platform
Where exactly did I mention that I support or even care about Musk's attempted takeover of Twitter :) ? and who do you think controls facebook, youtube or reddit, the progressive spaces who ban you when you look funnily in their general direction? or are billionaires only bad when they hold opinions you don't like ?
>Your sentence is grammatically incorrect
Congratulations on noticing the obvious, that's kinda the whole point of the example. 'They' doesn't make sense for a known person of a definite gender, your examples are all assuming the default usage of it as a placeholder for somebody of an unknown general gender, but the moment you start using it to refer to a specific person you start running into issues like whether to use "is" or "are".
>singular they has been attested since the 14th century
OK ? how is this relevant ? where did I express problems with the fact that 'they' can be used to refer to a single unknown person ?
what does your last point even mean? are you objecting to the idea that transphobia is bad? Nobody is suggesting not talking about transphobia. I didn't even say i agreed with censoring anything. I'm just pointing out that a lot of the stuff that does get censored is stuff that isn't adding anything meaningful to the conversation and is explicitly argued in bad faith.
>are you objecting to the idea that transphobia is bad?
Well, considering this word can be basically JIT-redefined to mean anything on the fly, I wouldn't say this question is necessarily meaningful without some shared state. What I can say is that I would never like or support making fun of people for things they can't change, if your meaning of 'transphobia' includes that, sure that's bad.
But you know what else is bad? religious authority. The existence of a vague and ill-defined sin that a select class of people can arbitarily expand and contract it's definition to include and exclude anything and anyone they like or dislike, and civil authorities and institutions bending over backward to please that class. Transphobia is the modern day heresy, it's something you can throw at someone without the slightest understanding what they have said and get a mob to descend on them if you get your timing right. Lgbt 'acceptance' groups are strikingly similar to the fanatically religous, down to the particular language used to redirect criticism and pretend they are open to dissent.
>Nobody is suggesting not talking about transphobia.
In order for this to be a real 'talk', and not just a one-directional sermon between identical replicas, you have to allow people who are hostile to the artificially-dominant stance. Those who think transphobia isn't a real problem, or those who think it's a real but exaggerated, and so on and so forth. I'm not seeing any of that on any trans conversation I have ever seen on social media, all I see is an incredibly aritifical and incredibly religious "As We All Know Tran Lives Matter, Much More Than The Rest Of Us Actually", it reminds me of when dictators invite themselves to staged talkshows and pretend that the conversations aren't scripted.
>I'm just pointing out that a lot of the stuff that does get censored is stuff that isn't adding anything meaningful to the conversation
Considering the amount of censoring and manipulation that happens on social media, I think that's not convincing argument for censorship. If you kill 90% of humans you're going to eradicate an aweful lot of diseases, if you imprison 70% of people you're going to catch a lot of criminals, etc... Any strategy where you do the same thing to a significant percentage of the population is going to work more or less like random guessing aka a 50% coin flip, unless you're really unlucky or the population is really skewed. You're better off measuring ratios of where it works and where it doesn't work.
Sorry, a person's gender identity just isn't that interesting, and the extra cognitive load of remembering pronouns isn't something I'm willing to bear.
I'm learning Japanese and they have dozens of pronouns, perhaps hundreds of them. Not only is someone's gender identity bound to their pronoun, but other important aspects are bound as well such as job and age. I don't see anything wrong with introducing a few more to the English language, we've been too restrictive for too long and the language is just getting downright creaky.
Some of the recent pronouns I've seen are barely pronounceable. Getting others to refer to you in an unwieldy way seems more like a power play to me.
We already have some titles that signal achievement, like Doctor. I'd be for introducing more of them. Maybe we can get rid of the hereditary ones, too.
It's easier to just think of it like someone's name. Even if someone's name is hard to pronounce, we generally make an effort *if* we want to socialize with them.
I won't disagree there's power plays going on. Lots of people glob onto any well-intentioned movement to push their own egos. But I'm more concerned with being kind to those in the margins than accidentally validating a narcissist. Idk. I get where you're coming from. But. A lot of these people are genuinely not "he" or "her" and it's just kind of degrading to force them into one of those buckets.
it not being interesting to you doesn't mean it isn't incredibly important to them. The fact that it is incredibly important to them is obvious, and the "cognitive load" you're talking about is completely trivial. If you're not willing to take even the tiniest effort to make the people around you feel welcome, you may be the one being narcissistic.
Count me as another long-time HN user who refuses on principle to play the My Pronouns game. Burn me at the proverbial stake if you will, or bring out the HR version of the portable guillotine—but I will never, ever knuckle under to the heresy hunters and virtue signallers.
>bring out the HR version of the portable guillotine
>I will never, ever knuckle under to the heresy hunters
My god you really need to take yourself way less seriously. Is this what happens when you've lived your life in first-world middle class comfort? You think you're a martyr for... being slightly impolite to people?
In my view (and actually the view of a lot of people, given the responses in this thread), it has almost nothing to do with politeness and everything to do with avoiding being manipulated by wokeists.
I don't quite get your stance. You're free not to use those words. It's not like it is against the law to not use those pronouns. It is a simple and nearly effortless courtesy, that you can ignore if you want, with the consequence that people may think you're a twat and treat you accordingly.
Like, you're not mandated by law to greet someone with "good morning" instead of saying "fuck you". Yet it is widely understood that if you do this and refuse to say good morning, people will be upset and become hostile towards you. It's a perfect analogous situation. I'm not really sure what you want.
It's no more coercive than any other social norm. If you act disrespectful to the people around you, they will treat you accordingly. Everyone everywhere accepts this in 99% of situations and it is interesting to see the specific exceptions they make.
Some relevant offtopic here. Long time ago I came across a book of occult nature that, among other things, outlined 6 soul types, one of them being a curiously accurate portait of what we call wokeness now:
...individualised by vanity were born into city populations, and life after life they tended to drift together by similarity of tastes and contempt for others, even though their dominating idiosyncrasy of vanity led to much quarrelling and often-repeated ruptures among themselves. Separateness became much intensified, their minds strengthening in an undesirable way, and becoming more and more of a shell, shutting out others. Their emotions, as they repressed animal passions, grew less powerful, for the animal passions were starved out by a hard and cold asceticism, instead of being transmuted into human emotions; sex-passion, for instance, was destroyed instead of being changed into love. The result was that they had less feeling, birth after birth, and physically tended towards sexlessness, and while they developed individualism to a high point, this very development led to constant quarrels and rioting. They formed communities, but these broke up again, because no one would obey; each wanted to rule. Any attempt to help or guide them, on the part of more highly developed people, led to an outburst of jealousy and resentment, it being taken as a plan to manage or belittle them. Pride grew stronger and stronger, and they became cold and calculating, without pity and without remorse.
I could also write up paragraphs of text filled with vague generalizations and prejudices about people living in the rural countryside, and paint up a picture that all the people who live there are abominations who uniquely suffer from the negative aspects of the human condition..
But I won't, because this and that are both mindless factionalist drivel.
> The fact that their primary concern has to be for their shareholders and not whether the sale will be good at all for the rest of humanity is a huge problem in my eyes.
I know very little about public trading or the laws regarding it - especially compared to many other HN users - but here's my novice response:
Think about why that's a rule. The board doesn't own the company; the shareholders do. The board's role is to make decisions on behalf of the shareholders. The rule exists to ensure they do exactly that.
A board deciding to financially harm the investors they represent for the "good of humanity" goes against the very concept of investment. A public company intentionally acting against the financial interests of its owners would see its stock value immediately collapse, causing immense damage to its shareholders, employees, and customers.
If you want a company to act "for the good of humanity", it has to either be privately owned or align with the financial interests of its investors.
> A board deciding to financially harm the investors they represent for the "good of humanity" goes against the very concept of investment.
It does not. It goes against a very specific concept of investment, which is that I should be able to buy a thing and make money with absolutely zero regard for anybody else. It is not a rule of the universe that owning something should allow me to harm others.
I agree that ownership of a company does not entitle you to harm others. There are many laws which exist to prevent companies from harming others and we probably need more of those.
But this isn't about what rights a company has. This is about the obligations a board has to act on behalf of its shareholders within legal limits.
Please don't confuse my comments for an approval of public companies choosing financial gain over the good of others. This is one of the primary reasons why I am very critical of companies going public. Going public essentially means a company sells its soul for investment money. The owners and investors may see a big payout, but the potential long-term good a company can do is handicapped as soon as it goes public.
The concept of shareholder value really got started in the 1970s, pushed by Milton Friedman and others. And value seems to be interpreted as nothing more than the stock price.
Hence the idea that anything is justified as long as it gooses the stock price, and that a corporation has no social obligations whatsoever.
It's really just a silly common misinterpretation of a vague legal concept, the stock market equivalent of "correlation doesn't imply causation", in that it's the only thing many people know about the subject and that they consider this very complicated information that needs to be mentioned at every possible opportunity.
In reality, there has been more or less exactly one successful invocation of the concept in history, against Craig Newmark, when he explicitly said he was going to do something that would harm shareholders.
In reality, you do whatever you want and if anybody complains you tell them it's good PR and will therefore benefit shareholders in the long run. You can be as wrong about that as you want as long as you manage to avoid explicitly stating that you know to be wrong.
That's all very well and good but aren't you arguing in a circle? You're essentially saying "since shareholders have absolute power over an enterprise, therefore they have absolute power over the enterprise". Sure, but we're arguing that it's not a good idea to have companies be immune to any public accountability or and democratic control. In fact we already do this: there are myriad laws that constrain the behaviour of companies: rules about financing, transparency, pollution, taxes, etc.
I read the comment as being a complaint specifically about the rule that board members should have to act in the financial interest of shareholders. If the intention was to criticize ownership rights of shareholders or to argue for legal limitations on the powers of a company's owners, then my response definitely doesn't address that.
Why is Twitter important enough to require democratic stewardship? Lots of people don't use Twitter; it's the least used platform among all the other social media companies. When you're thinking about stewarding capital democratically, think about where the lines are, and why. The critique I'm reading behind the lines here is that Twitter, despite being a private institution, has a large amount of impact on society and so should be subject to democratic oversight. I'm not sure that's the reality; Twitter is a failing business with a stagnant, albeit highly engaged, userbase. It's unclear to me why we should subject Twitter to democratic control for the good of its small userbase. If anything that critique would be more applicable to something like Facebook in the US or WhatsApp in other countries (HK, India, etc) which actually have come to take a sort of infrastructural role in communications. Twitter does not have this role. Should the government have stepped in during the Tumblr acquisition?
That's the tricky thing with making the case to steward corporations democratically. Just for example, my parents don't know anything about Twitter except its name. I think they would find the government regulating Twitter to be an overreach of democracy simply because it's not something they know or even care about.
Because...they own the company? They literally hold shares representing their ownership of the company and then vote on what to do with said company. That is democratic.
Legally, the Board can consider stakeholder goals and morality. I think if Musk announced a profitable-but-legal foray into genocide, you could urge shareholders to reject it, and no court will hold otherwise.
But at some point the shareholders can overrule you. And in those cases, we find management’s highest goal is usually preserving their own special salary, not the “interests of humanity.”
> The fact that their primary concern has to be for their shareholders and not whether the sale will be good at all for the rest of humanity is a huge problem in my eyes
The fact that their primary concern has to be for their shareholders and not whether the sale will be good at all for the rest of humanity is a huge problem in my eyes.