| Put 80,000 people out of work and take a chunk of of everyone's retirement account. Not to mention the second order effect on other tech stocks. It's right there in the comment you're replying to. But that's boring. Let's pretend Gozilla is real. He's been around for a hundred years, pops up once in a while and wipes out a chunk of a coastal city before swimming back to the deep. Killing Godzilla once and for all would be a clear benefit, save thousands of lives and trillions of dollars of property damage. Governments and militaries and smart people work hard developing death rays and mega bombs and Kaiju-specific viruses and, oh I don't know, really big spears. Perhaps one will succeed. But, he's been around for a hundred years. A whole industry has grown up around him to mitigate the effects and deal with the fallout. There's rapid-response evacuation blimps and self-erecting submerged delay walls and monster insurance. There are collateralized collateral damage obligations to securitize and spread the cost of compensating property owners for military weapons that miss their target. The financial system does what it does well: taking an existential risk, sticking a price on it, and turning it into profit. And it's not just white collars cashing in: there's entire companies that do nothing but quickly rebuild bridges that he chews up, or recycle building rubble into new skyscrapers. There's a whole smorgasbord of mom-and-pop operations that do things like scraping up and disposing of the gallons of his stinky saliva that clog the streets after a rampage (with a little refining, it proves to be a surprisingly effective self-adhesive sealant for leaking pressure vessels). Others specialize in filling in claw-shaped potholes in asphalt. Yet more insulate small buildings against fire damage. Satellites monitor him; subscription services forecast his movements; one company is developing a promising body armor based on studies of a scute found after an attack in Montevideo. And then one particularly wild plan actully works. Trapped in a constricting net made of nano-scale monofilament and engineered spider silk, Godzilla dies in the shallows outside Cape Town, South Africa. The world celebrates. The next morning, hungover, everybody defaults on their Godzilla insurance. The value of those securitized policies goes to zero. The CCDOs blow up too: finance's innovation is exceeded only by its myopia. Investors take a beating. It's not 2008, but pretty damn close. The business was actually insanely profitable given that everyone in a coastal city anywhere in the world was at risk. The specialist construction and recycling giants lay off people by the thousand. All the independent niche remediation companies shut up shop. Tens of thousands are out of work. Same thing, innit. |
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| ▲ | bothers 20 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > Tens of thousands are out of work. Instead of dead. Killed regularly. With survivors knowing that it will happen again, the buildings they put up will come back down, and that is the least of their worries because the buildings can indeed be put back up. Unlike the rest of society Godzilla stomped into ruins. Godzilla is real. It turns populations into needless wastes and flattens entire communities, cities, countries. We're talking about war. You're countering the desire for peace with "but think of Raytheon's profits." | | |
| ▲ | scrumper 20 hours ago | parent [-] | | No I'm just saying that slaying the monster has secondary effects. Yes if the whole world one day ate some mushrooms and decided that war was completely over, there would be some upheaval. We would agree that it'd be worth it. To make my position perfectly clear, I would rather Meta died a slow death than was assassinated by the judiciary. It is better for most - the 80,000 easy-sleeping order followers, my 401(k) - if they take a few big hits and then disintegrate. |
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| ▲ | hyperhello 20 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | That would be offset by a one-time surplus of Godzilla meat. | | |
| ▲ | scrumper 20 hours ago | parent [-] | | Meh. Even assuming the flesh isn't toxic (which it totally is, and radioactive to boot) Godzilla weighs, what, 200,000,000lbs[1] which even at a ridiculous Wagyu price of $300/lb (and assuming every ounce of the bastard is meat) is only 60 billion dollars - the square root of fuck all in this context. And he died in the southern hemisphere summer; it's hot as balls in Cape Town in December so his corpse starts rotting pretty quickly. Certainly faster than you could butcher a hundred thousand ton monster with bombproof skin. [1] https://x.com/TohoKingdom/status/1129168820944265216 screengrab from Monarch showing fatty's weight at 99,600 tons. |
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| ▲ | applfanboysbgon 21 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I enjoyed your short story, but not quite the same thing. The employees are the Godzilla, not protecting us from it or cleaning up the damage it causes. Not really sure why we're supposed to be hellbent on preserving the jobs of 80,000 that are actively detrimental to the rest of society. If you work for Godzilla Corp, getting paid a real cushy salary to destroy everything you can, I'd rather you don't have your job, actually. It's not like it's hard to find a new job with Godzilla Corp on your resume, it just might not be as well-paying or cartoonishly evil, to which I would say, suck it up. | | |
| ▲ | scrumper 20 hours ago | parent [-] | | Weeeelllll... I was going to just go "fair point" and stop at that but I don't think I entirely agree. Most of those 80k, perhaps all but a few hundred, would do whatever they were told to do. They are the sort of banal evil that just wants a (large) paycheck and a decent annual review. You could pick them up and plop them into another, completely benign tech company doing something totally different and they'd make sure the site ran properly and the backlog was groomed just so. They're like, er, Godzilla's limbs. For sure, very damaging, but not really directly responsible. His nasty reptile brain is in charge. That's the few hundred at the top that decide that Meta is going to fight these lawsuits or claim they're actually giving kids powerful tools for controlling their online experience or whatever other PR bullshit they barf up every time this happens. That's not some random SRE. Eh, they are shitbags though; they knew what they were getting into. I'm not advocating for welfare for 'em. So, after that: fair point well made. The secondary effects of nuking Meta would be pretty severe. The markets really would take a big hit and some (near-) retirees would suffer quite a lot. Oh God, who's to say it wouldn't go all hydra on us: Meta goes pop, 80,000 well-off sociopaths scatter to hacker spaces around the world and produce a few thousand even worse companies. |
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| ▲ | 21 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | [deleted] |
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