> I wouldn’t chalk any of this up to malicious intent. I’m sure they are swamped with such requests.
Stalling in the hope that reporters won't escalate, instead of allocating a tiny bit of their billions in profit to hiring for this, is malicious in my book.
I had several small requests for moderation (deleting and banning spammers posting spam/crypto scam issues/PRs in my repos and ones I contribute to) answered within a day earlier this year after more than a decade of never needing to request moderation. I'm not defending GH here as it's obviously unacceptable that the OP's issue took this long, but they definitely do or at least did have mods. I would guess they need a lot more of them if something this serious went unaddressed, or maybe the ones I interacted with are now gone and have not been backfilled.
I mean.. for better or worse, this is how corporate America works. Hiring to solve a problem that's not costing them money (and solving it doesn't make money) is probably not going to happen, especially with the current state of the economy. They have more of an obligation to make money for their investors than they do anything else, that's just how it works.
> They have more of an obligation to make money for their investors than they do anything else, that's just how it works
Where does this myth come from, and how does it survive? It's either an excuse for parasitic corporatism, or an expression of learned helplessness. Nobody has been successfully sued for prioritizing the long-term health and reputation of a company over self-starving quarterly profit.
Is there a perverse incentive toward the latter anyway? Yes. But it mostly serves current leadership, who are evaluated and paid on short horizons, at the expense of the long-term investors who own most of the equity.
"Accepting funding from investors puts you in a fiduciary role in which you’re responsible for managing their money and putting their needs above your own"
The reality is "it's complicated". But the strongest form of this - that "companies must maximize profits over ALL over concerns NO MATTER WHAT" is basically a myth. See:
So yeah, "fiduciary duty" is a real thing, but that's not quite the same thing as saying that every single decision has to be focused on nothing but profit maximization.
So you think making bad business decisions is holding up to fiduciary duty? You can't throw money at every problem that you'd like to solve, calling that malice is silly was the point I was trying to make.
Paying staff to avoid distributing literal malware on your platform is not a bad business decision. And even if it was - yes, bad business decisions are within the scope of fiduciary duty. Have you ever seen someone successfully sued under this clause for making a bad business decision, in your life? Fiduciary duty is more like, you can't take the money and run or pay your nephew a $10,000,000 salary to play ping pong in the office. As long as you're not doing something clearly, intentionally harmful to the business and investors, you're clear.
Neglecting all other ethical duties beside profits is so close to malice it takes ...an, ah, expert, to tell you the differences and how important they are.
And this neglecting all duties besides profits thing is real, it is institutionalized by decisions of investors, by managers hired by investors, by regulators "captured" by investors and so-forth. It is the norm. But that doesn't it's a legal or ethical that a given manager or employee has, at least not currently.
Nothing in that article says you're obligated to maximize profit, and you're not:
> To quote the U.S. Supreme Court opinion in the recent Hobby Lobby case: “Modern corporate law does not require for-profit corporations to pursue profit at the expense of everything else, and many do not.”
Executives are free to pursue near-term profit at the expense of everything else if they choose, and the shareholders are free to replace them if they don't. That's a choice by those executives or shareholders though, not an obligation.
I said it's their biggest priority, not their only priority... solving a problem that doesn't cost money and the solution doesn't make money is bottom of the barrel. Come on guys, be real.
FWIW I totally agree with that. What I (and several others) disagree with is the idea that the concept of fiduciary duty confers an obligation to pursue profit at the expense of all else.
Is there an incentive to do that? Yes, or at least it's obviously quite possible. But is there an obligation? No.
Relative to the comment you were responding to, it sounded like you were defending the idea that an obligation exists.
The distinction matters because if such an obligation did exist it would effectively excuse a lot of bad behavior.
You used the word "obligation", not "priority". That's simply not correct, and it transfers responsibility from the people making these decisions to whatever nebulous system would enforce that "obligation".
If you look at the case law for fiduciary responsibility, then you'll find that executives have a strong obligation against self-dealing (decisions that clearly benefit them at the expense of the shareholder), but not much else. The "business judgment rule" makes it generally lawful for executives to make decisions that you, the shareholders, the judge, or anyone else might consider to be bad business judgment. It couldn't really be otherwise, since the difference between wasteful spending and a wise investment in the company's reputation might be unclear even decades later.
If shareholders disagree with an executive's business judgment, then their remedy is to fire that executive. That remedy has nothing specific to "making money"--the shareholders are just as free to fire a CEO for excessive attention to profit as insufficient.
Where on that page is there anything to indicate that hiring more QA or mods would be so bad as to be considered a breach of fiduciary duty? That seems like a pretty big exaggeration, at best.
This behavior is a matter of incentives, not obligations. No need to apologize for them.
"Fiduciary duty" does not mean "pursue profit to the exclusion of all other considerations".
many readers here have not experienced a standard of customer support that was common decades ago. Google in particular created a new standard for ignoring the customer on a large scale, in my own experiences. Secondly, the customer paid money to a company for service, while an emergent business form does not take money from the customer directly, blurring the definition of customer.
I strongly agree that failure to stand for consumer rights is both learned helplessness and an apologist cooperator psychology. CA Voter here.
If we have no way to strike back, they will simply suck every drop of blood out the way you use every part of the buffalo. There is no way to escape Microsoft when they just buy everything and turn it into part of their garbage moat.
I'm pretty sure that is a more recent development, and that at least the Soviet Union and China weren't observers during the cold war. (But I haven't looked it up.)
I can confirm this is the first episode, which I just watched since I had no idea about Numberwang until a minute ago. So I guess a true Numberwang fan would know that.
Obviously, it depends on whether board has rotated or not. It seems the model doesn't support board rotation yet, so the result is consistent with the limited set of features.
The rule book is quite big. You must have seen it in one of the many ads for the family board game version. As one site summarizes it:
> A NumberWang "board game in a box" was produced in 2008, including the board, numbers, two 400-sided dice, special hosting accessories and all 37 volumes of the rules so that you can say "That's NumberWang!" with confidence. For everyone from ages 8 to 88.
So even the true fan may falter in his or her judgement.
I assume that part was for entertainment, this wouldn't fly in court. But they also show the dark patterns used to make you consent to it, and how certain features seem unaffected by these choices or send one last request when revoking consent.
Except most people that get actually good at a field do so through their day job. By removing mathematician as a viable job, most can't afford to spend the necessary hours to become a good mathematician at all. We're going back to only rich people or those with a rich patron having a chance of developing themselves.
We thought your Rust.NET comment was somewhat in jest. No, Microsoft isn't porting Rust to .NET, they barely try to support anything other than C# on it nowadays, but the article mentions an internal adapter for MSVC codegen.
The project linked above has been posted to HN in the past a few times though.
Stalling in the hope that reporters won't escalate, instead of allocating a tiny bit of their billions in profit to hiring for this, is malicious in my book.
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