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[JoshuaFH]

His lawyer said there were times he wanted to punch him in the face.

The guy has a level of want to punch his face that is legendary.

To be fair, even if he wasn't an asshole, he has the most smugly punchable face in existence.

[sluissa]

Just a random thought... but maybe the tariffs will make collecting cans profitable again. I used to do it as a kid and made a notable amount of money on it. (Well, I think I collected $20 over a year or so. But $20 to a 80/90s kid is not bad money, basically an extra birthday.) Last time I did it was in college though. Hadn't done it in a while, but all the beer cans... I couldn't resist. Took a car trunk full in and made less than $1.00. Not even sure it covered gas.

[Max™]

Ya'll (USTEDES) forget he broke down in tears, and this is a guy who did shit like raising the cost of medicine purely for profit margins, hopefully he finds a happy role as some big thug's wife in prison.

[JoshuaFH]

Well, HOPEFULLY he doesn't go to a nice white collar prison where there's no real threat to him.

Reading that article about the jurors cracks me up. "And he disrespected the Wu Tang Clan!" indeed!

[MrRoboto75]

hey, the Wu Tang Clan ain't nothing to fuck with

[Rolan7]

Ya'll (USTEDES) forget he broke down in tears, and this is a guy who did shit like raising the cost of medicine purely for profit margins, hopefully he finds a happy role as some big thug's wife in prison.

He did the thing that everyone in a publicly owned corporation in obligated to do   He just did it so blatantly (and ineptly - failing to account for public opinion blowback) that it helped promote the issue in public discourse.
(and now it turns out he did unrelated crime)

I'm frankly uncomfortable when people focus on his smug "punchability", though.  I see it too, sure, but his lack of charisma isn't the reason medicine is so expensive.  He's a scapegoat.

Heck, him getting arrested now is great for the optics of Big Pharma.  The actual players throw the incompetent, public-facing maroon under the bus, letting us feel like progress is being made.  (I'm still expecting a similarly inevitable betrayal for another smug business tycoon...)

[Culise]

Ya'll (USTEDES) forget he broke down in tears, and this is a guy who did shit like raising the cost of medicine purely for profit margins, hopefully he finds a happy role as some big thug's wife in prison.

He did the thing that everyone in a publicly owned corporation in obligated to do

Don't let anyone get away using "he's obligated to do it" as an excuse. Plenty of nasty big corps don't go around jacking up the price of critical goods or services. Corporations are not necessarily legally obligated to maximize profit at all costs.  Asserting that just feels like a way to let them get off easy and sidesteps the issue that they're personally being greedy jerks, while giving them an excuse to engage in pursuing short-term profits via methods that are ultimately destructive.

[smjjames]

I think that was mostly sarcasm on Rolan's part.

[Culise]

...ah.  I've heard it entirely too much in seriousness, it seems; it didn't click even with the smilie.  My apologies.

[Rolan7]

Well uh... no actually, I thought it was true?  In fact I sorta still do, after doing some ASAP research.

That article points out that serving the best interests of the shareholders could definitely include things besides merely profits/dividends.  Tax burden or environmental impact affect shareholders like other people.

On the other hand, there is case law that corporations are obligated to serve their shareholders...  Even other corporations.  Apparently a big example was Ebay Vs Craigslist

Either way, I'd say that Shkreli failed the shareholders by being unrepentantly smug and blatant about what he was doing.
...I'd say that, if I knew his corporation actually suffered due to his actions.  Huffington Post says his price hike was never reversed.  With such a captive market, I'm not sure his awful decisions actually hurt sales, and they *probably improved dividends.  Perhaps some of his shareholders had to pay the inflated drug prices, but statistically few compared to the profit gain.

Edit:  I haven't checked the stock price, just guessing because of the price hike on a patented drug remaining.

[McTraveller]

Fiduciary responsibility does not mean "the most important thing is shareholder return on investment."  It just means that companies are supposed to be, ahem, responsible with their finances.

There are lots of discussions out and about regarding when and how that got twisted into the version of it we now see.

[Rolan7]

I suppose at this point I'm more comfortable treating corporations as amoral profit-maximizing algorithms running on wetware, and keeping them in line with government oversight.  Because what are the alternatives? 

Trusting in owners/shareholders to make sacrifices against their best interests is fine when they're members of the community who care about being welcome around town, but that's only small business at most nowadays.

Trusting in the people to sneak onto guarded private property and expose secrets which trigger boycotts?  Even when people do, which was already too much to ask, the news cycle runs too fast for any real effect.

The government is still perfectly capable of harnessing these useful, amoral algorithms for the benefit of us all...  Except for the lobbying industry, by which corporations have largely broken free.

But making fun of (even threatening) this rude, incompetent ogligarch who conveniently got caught does less than nothing to solve that problem.

[Reelya]

Really interesting bit of research, which points out how much of the lower brain functions are responsible for some political "opinions":

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/inspired-life/wp/2017/11/22/at-yale-we-conducted-an-experiment-to-turn-conservatives-into-liberals-the-results-say-a-lot-about-our-political-divisions/?utm_term=.c8b7f6e8334d

...
Conservatives, it turns out, react more strongly to physical threat than liberals do. In fact, their greater concern with physical safety seems to be determined early in life: In one University of California study, the more fear a 4-year-old showed in a laboratory situation, the more conservative his or her political attitudes were found to be 20 years later. Brain imaging studies have even shown that the fear center of the brain, the amygdala, is actually larger in conservatives than in liberals.
...
In a new study to appear in a forthcoming issue of the European Journal of Social Psychology, my colleagues Jaime Napier, Julie Huang and Andy Vonasch and I asked 300 U.S. residents in an online survey their opinions on several contemporary issues such as gay rights, abortion, feminism and immigration, as well as social change in general. The group was two-thirds female, about three-quarters white, with an average age of 35. Thirty-percent of the participants self-identified as Republican, and the rest as Democrat.

But before they answered the survey questions, we had them engage in an intense imagination exercise. They were asked to close their eyes and richly imagine being visited by a genie who granted them a superpower. For half of our participants, this superpower was to be able to fly, under one’s own power. For the other half, it was to be completely physically safe, invulnerable to any harm.

If they had just imagined being able to fly, their responses to the social attitude survey showed the usual clear difference between Republicans and Democrats — the former endorsed more conservative positions on social issues and were also more resistant to social change in general.

But if they had instead just imagined being completely physically safe, the Republicans became significantly more liberal — their positions on social attitudes were much more like the Democratic respondents. And on the issue of social change in general, the Republicans’ attitudes were now indistinguishable from the Democrats. Imagining being completely safe from physical harm had done what no experiment had done before — it had turned conservatives into liberals.
...
anti-immigration attitudes are also linked directly to the underlying basic drive for physical safety. For centuries, arch-conservative leaders have often referred to scapegoated minority groups as “germs” or “bacteria” that seek to invade and destroy their country from within.
...
Therefore, we reasoned, making people feel safer about a dangerous flu virus should serve to calm their fears about immigrants — and making them feel more threatened by the flu virus should cause them to be more against immigration than they were before. In a 2011 study, my colleagues and I showed just that. First, we reminded our nationwide sample of liberals and conservatives about the threat of the flu virus (during the H1N1 epidemic), and then measured their attitudes toward immigration. Afterward we simply asked them if they’d already gotten their flu shot or not. It turned out that those who had not gotten a flu shot (feeling threatened) expressed more negative attitudes toward immigration, while those who had received the vaccination (feeling safe) had more positive attitudes about immigration.

In another study, using hand sanitizer after being warned about the flu virus had the same effect on immigration attitudes as had being vaccinated. A simple squirt of Purell after we had raised the threat of the flu had changed their minds. It made them feel safe from the dangerous virus, and this made them feel socially safe from immigrants as well.

While there could be some rational sense to the association "fear of disease" = "fear of strangers", having anti-immigrant fear dependent on something like simply washing your hands with anti-bacterial soap doesn't make a whole lot of rational sense.

[wierd]

To me, this strongly suggests the need for another study.  specifically, one involving the "24 hour news phenomenon".

You know what I mean--- Since the news has morphed from a 10 to 20 minute segment 3 times a day into a "Nonstop sensationalist extravaganza" that glorifies in finding the most heinous stories from around the planet to share, all in the name of RATINGS!!, it would be interesting to cross-compare rise in total cultural conservatism along side the degree of sensationalism in the press, with a sidebar comparison against the rate of "cord cutting" percentages (as control, otherwise cordcutters would present a growing source of error against the expected trends)

[Max™]

If it wasn't for getting cable free with our internet at this point I'd be all about getting rid of the cable, as is I just set up a cluster of favorite channels and skip the rest of the couple thousand or so we apparently have. The only one of those channels that has news ever is the one Jeopardy comes on, and we skip it outside of that half hour.