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Comment by klank | Hacker News Reader

> any quarter could decide to payout investors through share buyback etc.

Your etc. is layoffs. In this example, the "free-cash-flow" is people's salaries. I'm not personally comfortable with it being considered such a liquid asset.

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> Your etc. is layoffs. In this example, the "free-cash-flow" is people's salaries. I'm not personally comfortable with it being considered such a liquid asset.

It’s almost certainly, in the case of Amazon, data centers and fulfillment centers and trucks and planes and heavy equipment.

Unfortunately, you are probably viewed as a liquid asset by your management.

> Unfortunately, you are probably viewed as a liquid asset by your management.

What a rotten world we live in

For the record, I wasn't justifying the world that has created these incentives. In order to understand (maybe even someday change) the rottenness of the world, it's important to avoid the sort of reasoning that the OP critiques, which sees everything as just a sort of arbitrary maliciousness, rather than understanding the very concrete institutional mechanisms by which it has perversely become 'rational' to view everything outside a few profit centers as a 'liquid asset.' If a firm doesn't generate free-cash-flow, which is very very difficult outside the software industry, it will not receive significant capital investment and will be dependent on debt/profits. This impacts not just the life of employees, but limits what endeavors are funded at all, i.e. in part why it is that "software is eating the world." How to change those incentives is a much more difficult, but real problem.

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