<story><title> Outrageous HSBC Settlement Proves the Drug War is a Joke</title><url>http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/outrageous-hsbc-settlement-proves-the-drug-war-is-a-joke-20121213</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jzwinck</author><text>Too big to fail is too big.  Would it really be so bad if we simply outlawed companies exceeding a certain number of employees?  HSBC recently had about a quarter of a million people, which is just insane.  When things get that big, nobody fully understands what is going on anymore, even at a basic level, and it does become plausible that terrible actions are taken with literally no one to blame, either because nobody is sure where the blame lies, or because the would-be accusers are scared of the systemic risk (which these days is very real).&lt;p&gt;I propose that twenty thousand people ought to be enough for any company.  Having more, smaller firms will improve the job market for individuals, reduce the burden of mega-powerful interests in government acting against the population as a whole, and provide more genuine opportunities for real leadership to a greater number of people.&lt;p&gt;A gradual phase-in could be used, say max 500K employees by 2020, 200K by 2025, 100K by 2030, 50K by 2035, and 20K by 2040.  And no funny business: one person cannot have a controlling interest in companies whose employee counts exceed the limit in aggregate.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>chollida1</author><text>&amp;gt; I propose that twenty thousand people ought to be enough for any company.&lt;p&gt;This seems foolish.&lt;p&gt;Better tell McDonalds, IBM, Target, HP, GE, Pepsi, Coke, Home Depo, and Berkshire Hathaway they are now too big to fail.&lt;p&gt;Oh and dont&amp;#x27; forget google, they have more than 20,000 employees, better break them up.&lt;p&gt;Actually why not just look down this list to see just how foolish your 20,000 person proposal would be:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune500/2012/performers/companies/biggest/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;money.cnn.com&amp;#x2F;magazines&amp;#x2F;fortune&amp;#x2F;fortune500&amp;#x2F;2012&amp;#x2F;perfo...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;Note that by the time you get to company 49 they still employ more than 126,000 people.&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;&lt;/i&gt;EDIT&lt;i&gt;&lt;/i&gt;  Sorry I guess my point wasn&amp;#x27;t clear.  My point is that employee size is a very poor measure of a company being &amp;quot;too big to fail&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;Let me lay it out like this.  Consider a fictitious burger company with 20,000 employees. With 50 states it can only employ 400 people in each state.  If it went bankrupt it&amp;#x27;s very hard to see how this is &amp;quot;too big to fail&amp;quot;.</text></comment>
<story><title> Outrageous HSBC Settlement Proves the Drug War is a Joke</title><url>http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/outrageous-hsbc-settlement-proves-the-drug-war-is-a-joke-20121213</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jzwinck</author><text>Too big to fail is too big.  Would it really be so bad if we simply outlawed companies exceeding a certain number of employees?  HSBC recently had about a quarter of a million people, which is just insane.  When things get that big, nobody fully understands what is going on anymore, even at a basic level, and it does become plausible that terrible actions are taken with literally no one to blame, either because nobody is sure where the blame lies, or because the would-be accusers are scared of the systemic risk (which these days is very real).&lt;p&gt;I propose that twenty thousand people ought to be enough for any company.  Having more, smaller firms will improve the job market for individuals, reduce the burden of mega-powerful interests in government acting against the population as a whole, and provide more genuine opportunities for real leadership to a greater number of people.&lt;p&gt;A gradual phase-in could be used, say max 500K employees by 2020, 200K by 2025, 100K by 2030, 50K by 2035, and 20K by 2040.  And no funny business: one person cannot have a controlling interest in companies whose employee counts exceed the limit in aggregate.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sz4kerto</author><text>This is not a good approach. There are companies with extremely high number of employeees, but no real systemic risk, etc., especially in manufacturing (see Foxconn) and among large conglomerates (Siemens). Correlatedness (and leverageÖ must be dealt with, not merely company size.</text></comment>