Re: [OT] Murder in New York

On 12/11/2024 9:33 PM, Scott Dorsey wrote:

Cryptoengineer  <petertrei@gmail.com> wrote:

>
No matter what their PR may tell you, the fiduciary duty of
the officers in every public corporations is the same: "Maximize
shareholder return on investment". NOT "Serve our customers". If
they fail to do so at every opportunity, they can be sued.
>
Particularly when their customers are individuals, there is an
enormous disparity in agency and power, and corporations will
use their power to ride roughshod over people, and every year
it looks like they have fewer ethics and less of a conscience.
>
I'd love to find a solution which rebalanced this.

 The conservative answer is that competition in the marketplace
prevents this from happening, because in a competitive environment
customers who are poorly served go to a competing company and
this is bad for shareholder return.
 This is mostly true, but because it's mostly true, large corporations
will do anything possible to stifle competition.  The problem is
that the government in the post-Reagan era tends to let them, and
we have had a number of margers of huge corporations to the point
where many industries are dominated by one large company and
competition has disappeared.
 I would say, and more conservative people might disagree, that another
part of the problem is that directors of corporations are very
interested in the immediate and short-term shareholder value with
no interest in the long-term effects of their actions.  This is
because their income is often directly tied to short-term shareholder
value and what happens to the stock in ten years means nothing to them
because they won't be around then.  This seems to me to be almost
entirely the fault of the corporations themselves which set
remuneration standards that way.
--scott

Agreed. Competition *should* be the answer. But for most people,
the notion that there's a *choice* in insurers is illusory. Most
people in America are insured through their employers, and those
employers usually offer only a single choice.
The employer's motivation, again, is to Maximize Shareholder
Return on Investment. Thus, it will pick the cheapest plan, not
the best. They employee has no agency in the matter, save to
find a different job.
pt