<story><title>Nassim Taleb: End Bonuses For Bankers</title><url>http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/08/opinion/end-bonuses-for-bankers.html?_r=1&amp;pagewanted=all</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>wtvanhest</author><text>I love hacker news for discussions about business and about learning about how the smartest programmers in the world think about programming.&lt;p&gt;When articles that deal with the world outside of startup finance appear on Hacker News, the articles and comments usually have so little knowledge behind them they are practically unreadable.&lt;p&gt;It would be nice if this community could keep the articles they post based on VC funding, angel funding, debt funding for start ups, option pools, etc.&lt;p&gt;The comments here are more representative of political ideals and not based on facts.&lt;p&gt;(Also, I understand that is not entirely true as some comments are actually quit interesting, but I have to wade through so much garbage to find them that it isn&apos;t worth it.)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bermanoid</author><text>&lt;i&gt;When articles that deal with the world outside of startup finance appear on Hacker News, the articles and comments usually have so little knowledge behind them they are practically unreadable.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes these issues just don&apos;t require that much knowledge to understand, though, and I think this is one of those.&lt;p&gt;When upside returns are based on a percentage of your winnings, and downside is limited to the loss of a job, at worst, the course of action is clear: shoot the moon, take on as much risk as you possibly can. Push the rules as far as they&apos;ll go to crank up the variance of your returns, and half the time, it&apos;ll pay off.&lt;p&gt;There are no subtleties here, no deep knowledge of banking required to see what&apos;s wrong with this picture. I&apos;ll agree that finding a solution might be tricky, but the fundamental problem has nothing whatsoever to do with politics, it&apos;s simple arithmetic.&lt;p&gt;Hell, even the people that benefit from these sort of incentive schemes - they&apos;re most definitely not a stupid lot, if you&apos;ve ever interacted with them! - tend to think that they&apos;re crazy, they &lt;i&gt;agree&lt;/i&gt; that what&apos;s good for them personally tends to be bad for their companies, and bad for the economy at large.  But being fairly rational decision makers, they optimize for personal profit, just as most of us would if we were in their shoes.</text></comment>
<story><title>Nassim Taleb: End Bonuses For Bankers</title><url>http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/08/opinion/end-bonuses-for-bankers.html?_r=1&amp;pagewanted=all</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>wtvanhest</author><text>I love hacker news for discussions about business and about learning about how the smartest programmers in the world think about programming.&lt;p&gt;When articles that deal with the world outside of startup finance appear on Hacker News, the articles and comments usually have so little knowledge behind them they are practically unreadable.&lt;p&gt;It would be nice if this community could keep the articles they post based on VC funding, angel funding, debt funding for start ups, option pools, etc.&lt;p&gt;The comments here are more representative of political ideals and not based on facts.&lt;p&gt;(Also, I understand that is not entirely true as some comments are actually quit interesting, but I have to wade through so much garbage to find them that it isn&apos;t worth it.)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Dbkasia</author><text>I would tend to disagree that this article is not relevant, startup finance and access to funding for startups is highly dependent on the health of the financial system, and this article deals with the economics and the gaming of that system.</text></comment>