This definitely fails the HN commenting guidelines. I agree that the OP is wrong on this point, but calling him an idiot doesn't add anything to this discussion. If you felt so strongly against his point, you should illustrate why he is so wrong with your comment. Don't just insult him.
Ok, fine, the insult was not necessary, but I flagged the post for being a piece of trash that I hope never to see the like of on HN.
The OP is not deserving of a reply on the basis of this post. It is uninformed tripe that belongs on the reddit/r/teabaggers forum or some such lowly place.
How this kind of trash gets 24 points is beyond me. Who are the people upvoting this?
I will also add that the account which submitted this is only 2 hours old, obviously created just to submit this piece of crap.
If you can clarify why this post is a "piece of trash", it would help me understand how to write better articles. I already changed my post from "zero" value to "arbitrary" value to make it more clear. I also linked to the Rolling Stone article for people that want to dive deeper into the topic. And yes, I shouldn't have generalized an entire industry and refer actually to a specific piece. It's also my opinion, which a lot of people may agree/disagree with it.
Apologies for the overreaction earlier. I did react a bit insultingly. It was an irritable reaction to a "stock statement" that I associate with idiots, which wasn't really called for in this context.
The stock statement in question is the dismissal of an enormous and critical industry as "value-less".
You link to a Rolling Stones article (by Matt Taibbi, who is a controversial journalist, who panders to the pseudo-libertarian crowds on reddit) which attacks Goldman Sachs for manipulating the US Fed (a fair point), and you use that as a justification for condemning investment banking as a whole.
Investment banking is a huge collection of professions which generally assists with one primary purposes: helping companies raise money. To dismiss that as valueless is clearly wrong. Surely, if anyone understands the value of being able to raise money, it must be startup founders. Investment banking exists to enable large corporations to raise money.
Some other purposes of investment banking include: hedging against risks (via derivates, for example, which you also dismiss), providing more advanced financial instruments (fyi, options, which you use to pay your employees, are derivatives too - and they wouldn't exist if investment bankers hadn't thought them up), market research (which has provided dubious value in the past, but that is an indictment of the global mega-banks, not of the research function, which is essential), market making (essential to provide a fluid, liquid market where people can actually exit), and many others.
When I first loaded up your site, it displayed with no CSS template, and looked like a craigslist post (I did not initially check the URL), and I checked the poster, and it was created 2 hours ago for the clear purpose of submitting this story, and it had a disproportionate number of upvotes for the weak point it was making, and it also made the above generalisation which, in my mind, categorised you directly as a reddit-style "omg banking is evil" type.
That led me (wrongly) to lump you in with the "idiots". Again, I apologise for that, it was an incorrect and rash overreaction - but some of the points above still stand. Hopefully now you understand my thinking better, though.
@swombat Gotcha. That makes sense. I originally wrote the post in 20 minutes after watching "The Inside Job" so that's probably why it seems like I'm one of the "reddit-style omg banking is evil" type."
Yes, I wrote such a broad generalization, which I will definitely not include in future posts. So, thanks for the clarification. Learn something new everyday.
Will look into the CSS. Have no idea why it didn't load for you?
It strikes me as ironic that you, as a relatively established member of HN, feel the need to resort to personal insults and general snarkiness in arguing that this article does not belong on HN.
I agree with you on the quality of the article and the simplistic reasoning by the author in reply to your comment, but at least he is showing some civility, as per HN's guidelines, which cannot be said of your comments in this thread.
Funny, others are downvoting the "snip" comments as they are - if I'd deleted them (thus leaving a weird, broken-looking conversation), they couldn't! Oh well.
