No fucking shit.

[gridlore]

I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interest of organizations, specifically banks and others, was such as they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders.

- Alan Greenspan, former Chairman of the Federal Reserve.

No, really? Amazing. See, I figured that one out in the wake of the Savings and Loan debacle. I saw it again when I read about the robber barons and the birth of the labor movement. Anytime there is a chance to gain wealth, power, and/or prestige, unethical people will flock to it. People who will flout the laws, break the rules, and trample everyone to get their particular brass ring. They may even be a distinct minority, but when there are tens of thousands of bankers, even a 1% rate of occurrence for these thugs means hundreds or thousands of them.

Lord & Sons would be much better off if I had a pintel-mounted M2HB Machine Gun. I see a truck from White Cap or another of our rivals? BUDDABUDDABUDDABUDDABUDDABUDDA. But we have laws that keep us from doing that. So we are forced to beat them into the ground with better service and competitive prices. Darn it.

Folks, I am a high-school dropout. Why the FUCK do I grasp the concept of "people are greedy fucks, and given the chance, will screw their own grandmothers to make a buck" better than a man with a couple of advanced degrees?

Comments

[lostwanderfound.livejournal.com]

Did you ever get to play much Car Wars (http://www.sjgames.com/carwars/)? It may be that the reason why I didn't bother to get a car licence until I was 25 (although I could drive a forklift when I was 19, and had my bike licence at 20...) was that there was a distinct lack of cars with twin Vulcans in the motor classifieds.

From my POV, it's absolutely stunning how closely the whole "short selling" thing parallels what happened back in the days when the "corner" was first invented. It's the same idea; monopolise a specialised area of trades and then deliberately drive the market into wild oscillations in order to profit on the losses of those who were unprepared for the swing. It's like making bets on how many times you can jump up and down on the gunwale of the lifeboat. And the whole thing gets a lot worse if you toss in the craziness of dark liquidity (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_liquidity)...

I'm beginning to wonder if there's any limit to the number of times humanity can kick itself in the head without learning anything from the experience.