Hacker News Reader

Comment by jefftk | Hacker News Reader

The emergencies you're talking about in seafaring are situations where people might die. Conventions and rules appropriate for that kind of situation are very different than for lower stakes situations, and I don't think the analogy is very illuminating.

View on HN

Right. In a situation where people may die, the leader must risk his own life to protect the lives of those under him. In a situation where people may lose their livelihoods, the leader should risk his own livelihood to protect the livelihoods of those under him. How is this analogy inappropriate?

Lives and employment work very differently:

* People understandably put a very high value on their life continuing, and really don't want to trade it against other things.

* People vary a lot in how much value they put on their job continuing, and how much they are willing to trade off against it.

For example, many people would consider taking a 2x raise even if it increased their chances of losing their job in the next 3y from 5% to 50%, but you're not going to find many takers for a 50% chance of death in the next 3y no matter what you're offering.

You can have a culture where jobs are treated as sacrosanct as lives, who are nearly so. In a culture like that companies would be extremely cautious about hiring in a way that would make workers overall worse off, and startups with be much less practical. Europe is farther in this direction than the US, though not all the way to what I think you are proposing with your analogy.

No one is saying that jobs should be "treated as sacrosanct as lives". The argument put forward by waylandsmithers is about responsibility and accountability. If we make sea captains legally accountable for the lives they are charged with, why don't we make CEOs accountable for the livelihoods they are responsible for (i.e. that they make decisions about)?

Did you know that the military commander-in-chief and generals do not put their own lives in the fromt of the battle?

Perhaps they should.

The amounts of money involved can absolutely spell life and death for people not lucky enough to have been born into the top 1%.

"White collar crime" generally has vastly broader effects than what we normally think of when we talk about crime; it's just harder to see because the effects are not as immediate or obvious. Livelihoods destroyed by layoffs to juice the stock price; land, water, and air poisoned by pollutants released because paying the fine is cheaper than actually cleaning them up; people dying because they can no longer afford the insulin they need to live after the price was raised absurd amounts purely to increase profits...

Just because the CEOs aren't physically on a ship where everyone's lives depend on making good decisions in times of crisis doesn't mean they aren't responsible for incalculable pain, suffering, misery, and death.

Are you saying this Coinbase layoff will likely kill people?

I'm saying any large layoff has a decent chance of making some people homeless—either because they weren't making enough before to save money, or because they were riding an unrealistic expectation of growth (that the company and entire industry are often actively selling you) and bet too much on it (the latter being what I'd guess more likely in this case, based on my assumptions about the kind of money Coinbase would've been paying). And once you're homeless, you're at much higher risk for all kinds of problems, including dying in a variety of unpleasant ways.

This seems highly exaggerated.

If someone really over leveraged themselves so much, at some point you can’t blame their employer.

By that theory, Coinbase already saved their lives since they'd be homeless if they weren't hired.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com