[potatolicious]

The type of people that Goldman employs aren't stupid, or ignorant. I've known a few - they are perfectly aware of what the company does, and the moral minefield they are in.

To accept employment there requires a conscious relinquishing of moral culpability - i.e., these people have decided that, yes, what the company does is fundamentally wrong, but for whatever reason (money, fame, power, the thrill of the hack, satisfaction of working on the winning team, etc) they don't care.

I'm not sure what use it would be to preach to people like this.

[fleitz]

I'm going to take massive downvotes on this but...

You can't preach to people like that, they're fully rational and immune to patriotic emotional dulce et decorum est bullshit.

They don't care that their going to hell for their actions because they know hell doesn't exist.

The world isn't some retarded star wars black and white fantasy, it's black and black pretending to be white. Stop naming shadows in platos cave and get out into the sunshine.

Google didn't succeed because open source is some miracle of business, they succeeded because they created a platform for clicking ads and open source software makes that platform cheaper. Gmail isn't a gift to the internet community, it's more ads. If they didn't make money from it, they'd shut it down.

[potatolicious]

I don't care that I'm going to hell, because I know hell doesn't exist. Indeed, no matter how pious I act, by some religion's definition I'm damned anyways.

But yet I'm not out there destroying livelihoods for personal profit. Way to pander to the stereotype that fear of the hereafter/almighty is the only way to get people to act morally/curb antisocial behavior.

I police my own behavior because, by some lucky stroke of evolutionary development, I have been granted the ability for high-level thought. Many people have been able to use this tremendously powerful ability to better us all collectively. Some seem only interested in using theirs for self-interest, even at the (grave) expense of everyone else.

This really is the core of it though: many people I've met in finance do believe wholeheartedly in "might makes right" - that morality and what the system allows them to do are one and the same.

I fear these people greatly.

[fleitz]

You're a programmer, most of what you is put people out of work.

That thing you automated? Someone who doesn't know how to program lost their job because of it, and it ain't coming back.

You'll tell yourself that you've created opportunities for two more programming jobs for someone else to enhance your automation work, but that guy with the GED is still out of work. Tough shit buddy, should have learned to program.

The difference between you and people in finance is they've stopped lying to themselves about what they do. Btw, I'm a programmer whose going into finance. Why? Because I can eliminate more jobs and make more money for myself doing that then I could eliminating jobs as a programmer. Now I'm just eliminating big money financier jobs instead of 40K grunt jobs. Hey broker dude, screw your 5% finders fee, my program will take 1% instead. Hit the bricks pal. Middle men need to eat just as much as producers and consumers.

We put people out of work for our own personal profit, the only difference is you're pretending about what you do and I'm not.

And you know the really funny thing is? We'll all be better off because the next generation of people won't have to do those silly jobs, but in the mean time people are going to be out of work.

Do you know how many researchers, secretaries, etc are out of work because of Google? Stop kidding yourself and get real about how the world works.

I could write a brilliant essay filled with bullshit about how I'm making the world a better place increasing efficiency, allowing one person to do more, and live a better life, and it would be just as true as what I just wrote. Financiers know double entry accounting and they know that for every credit there is a debit, both sides of the leger are equally true.

[potatolicious]

Ah yes, you're right of course - there is no objective measure of the balance of good and evil. What I do does eliminate jobs. Does the benefit to everyone else outweigh the loss of these jobs? Many people would say yes, some would say no. Some job eliminations open the door for more jobs - for different people. Does this balance the morality of putting people out of work?

I don't know. Nobody does. But there is some measure of balance to what we do. What we do has a benefit - a benefit to someone other than just ourselves. Right now I work in travel informatics. What I do empowers tens of millions of customers to make better choices about how they travel, find better prices, put more information at their fingertips, keeping them informed.

The price of this is that I'm also putting airline service agents out of work, not to mention travel agents. I've made an end run around them and made it easier to get all of this information than going and talking to a human.

Personally, I think this is a worthwhile balance. The loss of these jobs also means a massive improvement to the efficiency of travel, and the happiness of tens of millions of travelers. This isn't a clueless assumption either - the emails I've seen from users demonstrates that people are passionate about what we do. You can disagree - and you wouldn't be wrong. I am, after all, not the arbiter of what is and isn't a worthwhile trade.

There's a difference between this and what Goldman does, though. The balance is way on the other end of the scale. The artificial supply squeeze on industries benefits... what exactly, besides Goldman itself? The price is obvious - rising consumer prices, starving people who can no longer afford to eat (re: the food crisis that Goldman is also accused of contributing to), wars and revolutions caused by desperate, hungry people.

So what's the upside? What did we gain for this price Goldman has exacted?

> "Financiers know double entry accounting and they know that for every credit there is a debit, both sides of the leger are equally true."

Please name the "credit" of what Goldman has done here.

We're not idiots, we know there's a credit and a debit. The question is, this doesn't seem to be the case in situations like these, where it seems we're all paying the price, and the only "credit" is to the financier.

[yummyfajitas]

The artificial supply squeeze on industries benefits... what exactly, besides Goldman itself?

If aluminum becomes more scarce in the future (Goldman seems to be betting that it will be), then Goldman has done us all a favor by conserving it in the present.

If it is not more scarce in the future, then Goldman will lose money.

[tptacek]

It's troubling that a comment like this has to be buried deep in a thread about religion, Platonic ideals, might-makes-right, higher-order thought, and the nature of morality --- most of it stipulating Goldman is evil.

[dman]

In an ideal scenario that is what would happen. Unfortunately the invisible hand of adam is now tied behind his back. When 2008-2009 happened I was mildly optimistic that a new kind of finance firm would emerge - one which would use technology more intelligently, have a lower cost structure by virtue of having no bad assets on their books and one that would accept lower margins in order to make a headstart against established firms. In a well functioning market that is what would have happened - established players who got it wrong would have gone out of business leaving room for newer younger firms to spring up and do things in a better way. I still cannot place my finger on what exactly broke but the deadwood does not seem to burn in forest fires anymore.

[Jd]

In case you didn't read the preceding comment carefully, he knows that what you say is true, he just doesn't give a shit -- and, moreover, knows that you can't do a damn thing about it.

[potatolicious]

I suppose - though I got some sense that he thinks the engineering he does is the same as what we do. To be slightly snarky about it, his argument seems to be "we're all evil, I just own up to being evil, the rest of you suckers are just in denial".

Except, his breed of evil is considerably more extreme than ours.

[anon1385]

We can overthrow existing power structures and execute him. Has happened before, will happen again. Amusingly, the harder he works and the better he is at his job, the closer this gets.

[Peaker]

The moral issue raised above was one of corruption and fraud, not efficiency. It seems you are trying to pretend that the issue is increased efficiency taking away people's jobs.

[seigenblues]

You're just describing one kind of programming. I write code that does things that literally couldn't be done by people. it's a job where there wasn't one before -- and it helps create other jobs where there weren't any before. I don't want to say our company wouldn't be able to exist without that code, because my code wouldn't exist without the rest of the company, either, but the point remains:

If your self-justification works for you -- great. But you're lying to yourself if you think it has to be that way or that that is the only way. Computers (& technology generally) enable new business models at the same time as they make other models obsolete, such is life. Whether you think that balance tips one way or another is your business -- but your blatant cynicism and "oh, the world has to work this way" seems like you just letting yourself off easy.

That said, i wish you the best putting those big-money financier jobs out of work :)

[whatusername]

Really? I'm curious to know what code you write then? I write code that does things faster/better/cheaper/easier -- but theoretically at least a person could perform whatever task I'm writing.

[seigenblues]

It collects measurements from distributed renewable energy installations and uses those measurements to measure & optimize the systems' performance.

I suppose you could have engineers drive around with clipboards, but the amount of data collected and the frequency its collected at would suffer. In other words, that job could never exist for a human.

Is that close enough to count for your "theoretically"? I don't think so, personally, as it could never make business sense to have that job be needed for the operation of the business, so...

[feralchimp]

Because there's only so much value to be created, and we've reached "peak value"?

False.

[muhfuhkuh]

"they're fully rational and immune to patriotic emotional dulce et decorum est bullshit."

You give people great intellectual credit in one breath and then decrease their worth vis a vis your bottom line the next. Which is it? Are they smart enough to look through BS or are they cattle for you to replace with a small shell script?

Remember, people voted for Bush for the same reasons you feel they are above: They believed he was a good Christian man that they could share a beer with. His put-upon Southern accent (I mean, really, what born-and-raised New Englander you know has a drawl? Honestly?) won "hearts and minds"

"The world isn't some retarded star wars black and white fantasy, it's black and black pretending to be white"

Yes, and I guess those billions given to the Red Cross were rounding errors on some software somewhere and only robots volunteer at homeless shelters and everyone walks past rape victims on their way to Cabaret. We get it, you're hardcore and you see the world as a gigantic Somalia with money as the single, thin veneer of civilization keeping us from eating each other.

I suppose Lloyd Blankfein is the philosopher-king of this post-apocalyptic wasteland of "black on black" you describe, sitting forlornly on his throne of skulls. I'd laugh if you weren't so goddamn serious about it.

"Google didn't succeed because open source is some miracle of business"

And, yet, Red Hat made $1 Billion last year, gives every stick of code away. So does Wordpress, and Sourcefire. And, before being acquired, so did Xensource and MySQL. Github makes millions from the Git open source SCM.

[jeza]

Isn't it more a case that they divorce themselves from reality by dealing with pure numbers? I gather they would only focus on prices and not even think about the impact it has on other companies and people.