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Eric Carroll

@cstross
This is really good.

I am watching this dynamic close up and personal with many of my former clients, who have now moved into the extractive phase solely to make their stock price go up by any means necessary.

They used to make a great product, & are busy gutting it on the Number Go Up alter.

Notice no corporation ever settles into their old age of a stable stock price & issues dividends anymore?

19 April at 12:25 | Wall-to-wall | Open on cosocial.ca
6 comments
Charlie Stross

@EricCarroll If I was Planetary Overlord, I'd have to urgently consider proposals to abolish shares and dividends and replace them with company interest-bearing bond issues as a way of raising working capital. Share ownership in joint stock corporations has turned into a toxic death-spiral of short-termism.

19 April at 12:29 | Open on wandering.shop
Eric Carroll

@cstross
Remember the junk bond crisis?

It seems like "if it can be abused, someone will abuse it" is the Iron Law of unregulated capitalism.

Why should any complex system that has no negative feedback loop not be like this?

Coupled systems with no corrective negative feedback loops are inherently unstable & tend towards coupled positive feedback until destruction.

This is imo the first principle error of neoliberalism.

The system cannot be the governor. Basic general systems theory.

@cstross
Remember the junk bond crisis?

It seems like "if it can be abused, someone will abuse it" is the Iron Law of unregulated capitalism.

Why should any complex system that has no negative feedback loop not be like this?

Coupled systems with no corrective negative feedback loops are inherently unstable & tend towards coupled positive feedback until destruction.

19 April at 12:46 | Open on cosocial.ca
MatthewToad43

@EricCarroll @cstross Tobin tax (tax on all financial transactions to discourage speculation). Tobin disavowed it eventually, but it greatly reduces the most serious abuses, especially the tendency to pump money into things that will inevitably become illegal sooner or later (unless so much money is pumped in that they buy the regulator).

19 April at 13:23 | Open on climatejustice.social
Eric Carroll

@cstross
> It’s a deadly combination — people who try to use easy data to justify making decisions when they don’t know the first thing about a product, because they’re too busy numberfucking & datafucking to try to make number bigger, results in every one of these companies getting worse.

I called this driving a spreadsheet. No clue of the actual business, just optimize easy to measure metrics.

I am changing that to number & data fucking & The McNamara Fallacy.

Perfection.

@cstross
> It’s a deadly combination — people who try to use easy data to justify making decisions when they don’t know the first thing about a product, because they’re too busy numberfucking & datafucking to try to make number bigger, results in every one of these companies getting worse.

I called this driving a spreadsheet. No clue of the actual business, just optimize easy to measure metrics.

19 April at 14:24 | Open on cosocial.ca
HighlandLawyer

@cstross @EricCarroll Another (not exclusive) option is to removed limited liability: you own shares, you're liable for that percentage of the business debts if it goes bust.
Or you could make limited liability contingent on the company having good ethical policies built in, & applying them- obviously that would require regular audits. Hmm, I seem to recall someone having that as a background detail in some SF novel...

19 April at 13:45 | Open on mastodon.social
Jelle Haandrikman

@EricCarroll @cstross For an investor it's a failure when the outcome is a stable company with 20 people doing what they like on a yearly 4 million USD revenue with 15% profit margin.

19 April at 13:22 | Open on mas.to
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