| ▲ | Paracompact 2 hours ago |
| > 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. |
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| ▲ | ktm5j 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| Definitely not a myth, friend. Read this article from Harvard Business School: https://online.hbs.edu/blog/post/fiduciary-duty-to-investors "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" |
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| ▲ | mindcrime an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | 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: https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2012/06/26/the-shareholder-v... https://www.legislate.ai/blog/does-the-law-require-public-co... https://lawreview.law.ucdavis.edu/archives/56/5/end-sharehol... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20325023 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shareholder_value 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. | | |
| ▲ | ktm5j 22 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | 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. | |
| ▲ | 29 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | [deleted] |
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| ▲ | tripletao an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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.” https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-co... 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. | | |
| ▲ | ktm5j 34 minutes ago | parent [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | usefulcat 2 minutes ago | parent [-] | | 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. |
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| ▲ | usefulcat an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | 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". |
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| ▲ | usefulcat an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > They have more of an obligation to make money for their investors "Obligation" is the wrong word. Should be "incentive". |
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| ▲ | mistrial9 an hour ago | parent | prev [-] |
| 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. |
