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Comment by gaius | Hacker News Reader

Oh please. The HN dream is riches beyond imagination just for making a website. Pot meet kettle.

The difference is that we generally only get rich if we help people. Financial types often get rich (much more reliably than us) by screwing over people, luring them into indebtedness, and profiting from (and, I would argue, causing) the losses of others.

Finance allows people to -

1) attend college and pay for it later 2) buy a car to get to work 3) raise capital to start your business 4) Allows people to enter positions which cut down the risk to their business from external variables like currencies and commodity prices 5) Allows people to do stupid things 6) Allows people to travel light without having to carry loads of cash 7) Enables stupidity

If you start holding the enablement of stupidity against industries then there will be very few left that dont enable stupidity in some form or another.

I never said that finance doesn't do anything good. But the compensation that people in finance receive is often way out of proportion to the good that they do in the world (assuming that they are doing good, which they often aren't). What makes finance dangerous is that it is capable of taking many other industries down with it when it fails. But it is not in the best interest of people in finance to be careful. They can make more money taking big risks in the short term, so that's what they do.

Lets dismantle the defense industry [1], physics research at public universities [2], chemical manufacturing [3], medical companies [4] while we are at it. Banning people/industries for their worst behavior is going to create a very sparse, minimalistic world.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_an... [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_Project [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster [4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thalidomide

We need to learn lessons from what happened and help prevent it from occurring in the future but lets not go overboard here.

that's funny because if you read the thread a few weeks ago about "how much did you make from your startup's exit", most non-founders got royally screwed, making less than 20k. the tales of VCs screwing people over or founders screwing over employees in SV is legendary

Some of us actually want to make something useful.

I completely agree.

I was involved in a conversation with a fellow programmer who was complaining about how much investment bankers made, and that they didn't do any real work.

I pointed out to him, that as programmers, all we do is think and type. We have the "luxury" of sitting in a chair all day long and only moving our fingers.

There are teachers, police officers, and coal miners that think the exact same thing about us as well. So let's not start throwing rocks here at other people. We should just be happy that we're so well paid to be doing something we love. No need to start saying that investment bankers or traders aren't doing anything "useful". I'm sure their clients would disagree.

if you define 'usefulness' in terms of the manner in which you perform your work, you might have a point.

if you define 'usefulness' in terms of 'alleviating some form of human suffering' then i think your point vanishes: prop traders don't have clients. they make money for themselves alone.

Not true; arbitrageurs equalize prices across markets and add liquidity. Their profit is earned by guaranteeing you the lowest price on all the exchanges that the asset is traded.

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