Insurance companies (or their subcontractors) will invest exactly enough money to make their systems find any inconsistency or miscoding in the insurance claim and reject the entire claim on that basis. They will not help hospitals or other care providers update their systems.
For example, my mother works in a small town pharmacy. One insurance claim was rejected by an insurance auditor because the date that the patient picked up the prescription was written on the back of a form rather than the front. It took the pharmacy owner many hours over many days to fix that "billing error" to the satisfaction of the insurance company's claims auditor, including convincing the patient to come back in to sign an updated claim -- after all, the date was added to the front of the sheet, and that change required the patient's signature to confirm that it was accurate. (Yes, it cost more in labor to fight the rejection than to give up on the claim, but my mother says the pharmacy's owner is rather head-strong.)
The vast majority of user interfaces spend more time waiting for user input than they spend drawing to the screen. Of course, users notice redraw time more when they are the ones waiting. But I've used Qt on a small device (a several-year-old cell phone application processor), and the things that made that UI slow are the animations that were chosen for the UI -- animations that are drawn by the CPU and GPU using compiled code, but with durations that were a little bit too long for impatient users like me.
There is a (mostly overlapping) vast majority of user interfaces that are less responsive than possible because they block the UI during long-latency operations, but that has little to do with the language used to implement the UI, and more to do with how easy it is to kick off background tasks from the UI and push those results back to the UI. (QML has a benefit here because it makes that easier.)
Plus, JavaScript JITters are getting better every few months.
I came from a Gtk+ background, but am using Qt Quick (QML) in one project. The widget set as of Qt 4.7.2 is woefully anemic, but other than that, it seems like a general improvement over using C++ for the entire UI. At least 90% of user interfaces (averaged over the world's applications; there are a few very graphics-intense apps that bring down the average) do not need the marginal speed improvement you can get by using C++ instead of QML. Qt does a pretty decent job at making it easy to go between native C++ widgets and QML code, so C++ developers get to focus on the parts of the GUI that need performance.
What is in using QML for me? I get to offload most of the GUI development to a UX designer who is better at that sort of thing (and costs my employer less per hour of work). Then I get to focus on the novel and application-specific parts of the interface. I also get cleaner separation between those application-specific bits and the overall skin.
So, were you working for incompetent managers who had incompetent process people who were all working for incompetent executives, or were you working for some contractor who was more interested in billing hours than getting the job done? The behavior you describe tends to happen when "actually doing something" is not seen as an important business objective -- this can be due to regulatory strangulation, but more often it is due to poor or unethical leadership.
Requirements management is an inherently hard problem, for the reasons you list. Unfortunately, for almost all projects, it is impractical for all of the requirements to be laid out in advance. Fortunately, though, a valiant initial effort to document and analyze the requirements can save a lot of rework and confusion down the road.
I am disappointed too. I have lost count of the times that my coworkers (or direct reports) decided to skip documenting a design because of pressure to get the code done, only to have that come back and bite them (and the project manager who was applying the schedule pressure) later. Then there is one coworker who made commits to reindent and reformat every source file in a project -- mixing that with functional changes. Another coworker decided to write his own not-quite-XML parser.
I probably annoy my coworkers occasionally with my insistence that we define and follow certain (usually minimal) processes. I know there are one or two people who hate our code review system. However, I have never advocated for a new process unless it was meant to fix a recurring problem and I thought it was close to the most efficient way we could mitigate the problem.
One thing that I have noticed -- which my boss (the director of engineering here) also harps on -- is that most companies cannot afford to create processes that assume good developers. They can assume that bad developers are moved out of the organization, but many developers are in the middle. At least in this area of the country, we simply cannot find enough developers who know the basic principles of the kind of systems we work on. (I am not talking about the particular use of our software, but things like hard real time guarantees, designing usable user interfaces or analyzing control loops.) We can find plenty of people who are.NET or Java enterprise-y experts or who can write DSP code, but they would not walk in the door as "good" developers for our projects.
Besides, even good developers make mistakes. They make more mistakes when they are under serious time pressure. That is human nature. Development processes -- at least when they are a good fit for the project -- help ensure that good developers deliver good code on a predictable schedule.
People who have passion about what they are doing are usually much more productive than people who view the job as a way to get a paycheck. They also tend to want to stay longer, meaning the organization saves on replacement and retraining costs. There are also just wrong processes (of which "too much process" is a case) for an organization, so organizations need to do cost/benefit analyses on their processes.
Other than that, I agree with you. Developers have three choices when they are faced with a process requirement that annoys them. From easiest to hardest: (a) suck it up and do it because it's part of the job, (b) quit and look for greener pastures or (c) try to convince the right people to revise the process. (Sometimes (c) is easier than (b) if the process is new, and the cumulative effects of (a) can make (b) easier when summed over many annoying process requirements.)
Don't confuse impetuosity with passion. I write code with non-trivial safety outcomes if it fails to do its job. I manage to do it with both process and passion. Sometimes I even surprise myself and have passion for the more tedious parts of the process, because I know they make the product better given a certain schedule: The systems I work on are complex, and even though I am a smart guy, I cannot keep all the details on all the systems and subsystems I have to work on in my head long enough to analyze designs and changes without following some processes.
This is dead on. Every software-developing business needs to decide its own process needs. Even if they are developing safety-critical code that has to pass rigorous certifications (FDA, DO-178B, etc), sane people do not order everything on the process menu. However, an organization does have to look at its market, its code base, its structure/culture, and its history to figure out what kinds of process it should use. Sure, having a defined process means developers spend less time throwing code at the wall, but the code they do throw usually sticks to the wall better and longer, and they usually feel good about that.
If someone seriously and repeatedly complains that following the process kills their passion, it is due either to a failure of that analysis or them being in the wrong organization. As an software developer and occasional manager and/or process guy, I have seen both cases. I have also seen cases where having a defined process helps channel creativity. Good process tools help you focus on the right parts of the problem; for example, having a template for a design description that identifies particular subjects to focus on, and may suggest areas that have been rabbit-holes in the past.
You haven't read the license in question, have you? (LGPLv2, according to the WebKit web page.)
Section 4: "You may copy and distribute the Library (or a portion or derivative of it, under Section 2) in object code or executable form under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above provided that you accompany it with the complete corresponding machine-readable source code, which must be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange."
How do you figure this allows delay in providing the source code?
Either that or it's a Boondogglus enormous. When I read "Census staff can work directly with corporate leaders in technology, key members of other government agencies, and academia", the first thing that came to mind is that the Census people in question will get to spend as much time as they want, respectively, (a) receiving Enterprise Ready Widget sales pitches, (b) schmooze with counterparts in other agencies, and (c) travel to universities in pretty places to do grant reviews.
What are you going on about? Internet2 is all about backbone(-like) technologies. Almost by definition it does not care about the very edge of the network (consumers) except to the extent that some of the edge nodes -- users of scientific computing -- have some really large data sets to move across the backbone. Internet2 is not trying to solve whatever problems you think distinguish those two network links (or solve "last mile" issues in general). If that focus on the backbone makes it fail to advance the "commodity" Internet, that makes it a problem with Internet2's mission, not with ISPs.
That is a curious conjecture. I would think that Internet2's primary distinction from the commercial Internet is the speed of individual links. For most of Internet2's life -- in particular, the last three quarters of it -- commercial gear vendors have greatly increased link speeds, routing table capacity, capacity to handle routing changes and other "carrier grade" features. Vendors for edge routers have focused on distinguishing features like deep packet inspection. Do you allege that ISPs are at fault because they selected equipment, technology and approaches that were inferior to what Internet2 developed? If so, why?
Read any of Radley Balko's reporting on the War on Drugs (the "Studies" section of that page is a good place to start).
Reason Magazine has a number of articles on how asset forfeiture laws let cops seize things from innocent people and keep them (or auction the things to buy new toys), and how little traction the victims of the seizures get from the legal system.
If you would like more general examples, read this book.
Shut up, you right-wing troglodyte. Closing down Guantanamo bay necessarily takes a while. As does withdrawing our troops from Afghanistan or from Iraq. The same applies to finding an alternative to targeted killings (which were an alternative to extraordinary rendition).
On a domestic note, just give President Obama's health care reforms the time they need to work. (I would suggest waiting until the heat death of the universe.) Also, Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman tells us that the stimulus only failed because it wasn't big enough. And if you ignore the multi-billion dollar irregular tax break that GM got, and expect still-owned stock to sell for significantly more than its current value, the US Government made money on its "investment" in Government Motors. We need not even talk about how successful Cash For Clunkers was at just moving demand around in time and making it harder for people to buy cheap used cars, or the dozen or so mortgages successfully modified under the Home Affordable Mortgage Program.
The solution to the failure of these few, small, scattered US Government programs is more US Government!
Standard form disclaimers like the one you quote are typically superseded by the agreements that are specific to the relationship in question. If a customer pays extra for backups, judges tend to be unsympathetic if the vendor tries to weasel out by the kind of argument you suggested ("we never promised we could RESTORE backups! and we told them it was at their own risk!"). Otherwise the additional agreement and charge for the backups gets the customer nothing but a bill of goods.
The show's creators really should have spent the hundred dollars or whatever to have an on-site backup of the data, though.
The principle is called recusal. Look it up if you are curious. It is a serious and frequent enough question that there are pretty good guidelines for judges about when they must recuse themselves from a case and when they should (but are not required to) recuse themselves. For example, new appointees to the Supreme Court often have to sit out cases that came up through the circuit where they served before, because they were involved in that particular case before being appointed to the Court.
(To answer the likely question: I do not know what the rules say about this kind of case, but it would appear to be at the judge's discretion. Notable causes of mandatory recusal include a known monetary stake in the outcome and previous involvement in the adjudication of that case, so I would infer that neither of those apply here.)
Do you have any suggested alternatives that don't involve the multi-generational Ponzi scheme known as Social Security, or did you just want to whine?
It should not be surprising that if you save $100 a month for 40 years, it will give you very much for very long after retirement. On the other hand, the median household income in the US is $50,000. If you rely on your employer to put aside the equivalent of 2.5% of your income, without putting in anything on your own, that is your own fault. Most Americans could downsize their cable, mobile phone, and/or Internet service to double the $100/month figure. Most retirement advisors recommend more like 10% of your income should go towards retirement and rainy-day savings. (And yes, I know that median household income distorts things a bit because income grows as one gets closer to retirement -- but on the other hand, I suspect Slashdot's reader base has higher median income than the general public.)
Yes. In particular, it means there are a bunch of prima donna types among open source developers and advocates. Usually this is a good thing, but you will sometimes get these kinds of spats because both sides are convinced they're right and neither side is particularly good at communicating with people who (they think) are wrong about such important matters.
The Great Depression was obviously not caused or extended by financial companies trying to fix the stock market crash. There is a serious strain of historical economic analysis that argues that government intervention made the depression worse and longer, but none saying companies did so or even had the power to do that. Even today, no company is powerful enough to cause the kind of long-lasting economic damage that the government can cause by imposing this kind of trading tax or rate limit.
Social Security's current model is doomed even without the kind of additional burden you suggest (unless we have huge unexpected population growth to re-inflate that Ponzi scheme). Its impending problem is one of long-term balances, not of liquidity. The banks that got loans recently were mostly suffering from liquidity problems, which you can address with loans. There is no reasonable prospect of loan repayment by an entity with long-term balance problems.
Ask state employees and retirees in CalPERS if they would like it if CalPERS had to liquidate and they had to retire based on a fire-sale valuation of its assets. Is it "good riddance" for them to starve?
Your "fuck them, destroy their money, the government can magically give me mine" attitude is repulsive. That attitude clearly shows that you either ignored the failure of communism last century or that you are too stupid to have learned its lesson.
What caused the Great Depression: The 1929 stock market crash, or the government's attempts to reverse its effects? You seem to think it would have been better for the government to sit by and conduct business as usual in the aftermath.
It is in fact the loss of perceived value (for example, what most of us call "invested dollars") that triggers people's loss avoidance behaviors, and those reactions are what cause the painful ripples through the rest of the economy. That kind of dollar loss also leaves grandmothers struggling to pay for food, and pension funds struggling to pay benefits to retirees. On top of that is the loss of fluidity, which means that it is harder and more expensive in real terms to invest in new public stock offerings. The wider economic pain is why government tries to step in and restore book values quickly; the fact that central planning just doesn't work is why most such attempts fail.
No, I am saying that the value of investments owned by retirees and public pensions depends on the current system, as does how much money a small company can raise from public markets. Throwing a wrench into the works out of some distorted sense of fairness is going to hurt them disproportionately. It is the law of unintended consequences, which liberals seem to think can be circumvented by enough wishful thinking.
Yeah, all those disgusting parasite retirees, all those disgusting parasite public-employee pension systems, all those disgusting parasite small companies that want to take advantage of public markets to get the millions of dollars they need to bring their new ideas to the public. That's the only kind of disgusting parasite that will care that the stock market takes a nose-dive and triggers a recession or depression.
Slashdot Mirror
Insurance companies (or their subcontractors) will invest exactly enough money to make their systems find any inconsistency or miscoding in the insurance claim and reject the entire claim on that basis. They will not help hospitals or other care providers update their systems.
For example, my mother works in a small town pharmacy. One insurance claim was rejected by an insurance auditor because the date that the patient picked up the prescription was written on the back of a form rather than the front. It took the pharmacy owner many hours over many days to fix that "billing error" to the satisfaction of the insurance company's claims auditor, including convincing the patient to come back in to sign an updated claim -- after all, the date was added to the front of the sheet, and that change required the patient's signature to confirm that it was accurate. (Yes, it cost more in labor to fight the rejection than to give up on the claim, but my mother says the pharmacy's owner is rather head-strong.)
The vast majority of user interfaces spend more time waiting for user input than they spend drawing to the screen. Of course, users notice redraw time more when they are the ones waiting. But I've used Qt on a small device (a several-year-old cell phone application processor), and the things that made that UI slow are the animations that were chosen for the UI -- animations that are drawn by the CPU and GPU using compiled code, but with durations that were a little bit too long for impatient users like me.
There is a (mostly overlapping) vast majority of user interfaces that are less responsive than possible because they block the UI during long-latency operations, but that has little to do with the language used to implement the UI, and more to do with how easy it is to kick off background tasks from the UI and push those results back to the UI. (QML has a benefit here because it makes that easier.)
Plus, JavaScript JITters are getting better every few months.
I came from a Gtk+ background, but am using Qt Quick (QML) in one project. The widget set as of Qt 4.7.2 is woefully anemic, but other than that, it seems like a general improvement over using C++ for the entire UI. At least 90% of user interfaces (averaged over the world's applications; there are a few very graphics-intense apps that bring down the average) do not need the marginal speed improvement you can get by using C++ instead of QML. Qt does a pretty decent job at making it easy to go between native C++ widgets and QML code, so C++ developers get to focus on the parts of the GUI that need performance.
What is in using QML for me? I get to offload most of the GUI development to a UX designer who is better at that sort of thing (and costs my employer less per hour of work). Then I get to focus on the novel and application-specific parts of the interface. I also get cleaner separation between those application-specific bits and the overall skin.
So, were you working for incompetent managers who had incompetent process people who were all working for incompetent executives, or were you working for some contractor who was more interested in billing hours than getting the job done? The behavior you describe tends to happen when "actually doing something" is not seen as an important business objective -- this can be due to regulatory strangulation, but more often it is due to poor or unethical leadership.
Requirements management is an inherently hard problem, for the reasons you list. Unfortunately, for almost all projects, it is impractical for all of the requirements to be laid out in advance. Fortunately, though, a valiant initial effort to document and analyze the requirements can save a lot of rework and confusion down the road.
I am disappointed too. I have lost count of the times that my coworkers (or direct reports) decided to skip documenting a design because of pressure to get the code done, only to have that come back and bite them (and the project manager who was applying the schedule pressure) later. Then there is one coworker who made commits to reindent and reformat every source file in a project -- mixing that with functional changes. Another coworker decided to write his own not-quite-XML parser.
I probably annoy my coworkers occasionally with my insistence that we define and follow certain (usually minimal) processes. I know there are one or two people who hate our code review system. However, I have never advocated for a new process unless it was meant to fix a recurring problem and I thought it was close to the most efficient way we could mitigate the problem.
One thing that I have noticed -- which my boss (the director of engineering here) also harps on -- is that most companies cannot afford to create processes that assume good developers. They can assume that bad developers are moved out of the organization, but many developers are in the middle. At least in this area of the country, we simply cannot find enough developers who know the basic principles of the kind of systems we work on. (I am not talking about the particular use of our software, but things like hard real time guarantees, designing usable user interfaces or analyzing control loops.) We can find plenty of people who are .NET or Java enterprise-y experts or who can write DSP code, but they would not walk in the door as "good" developers for our projects.
Besides, even good developers make mistakes. They make more mistakes when they are under serious time pressure. That is human nature. Development processes -- at least when they are a good fit for the project -- help ensure that good developers deliver good code on a predictable schedule.
People who have passion about what they are doing are usually much more productive than people who view the job as a way to get a paycheck. They also tend to want to stay longer, meaning the organization saves on replacement and retraining costs. There are also just wrong processes (of which "too much process" is a case) for an organization, so organizations need to do cost/benefit analyses on their processes.
Other than that, I agree with you. Developers have three choices when they are faced with a process requirement that annoys them. From easiest to hardest: (a) suck it up and do it because it's part of the job, (b) quit and look for greener pastures or (c) try to convince the right people to revise the process. (Sometimes (c) is easier than (b) if the process is new, and the cumulative effects of (a) can make (b) easier when summed over many annoying process requirements.)
Don't confuse impetuosity with passion. I write code with non-trivial safety outcomes if it fails to do its job. I manage to do it with both process and passion. Sometimes I even surprise myself and have passion for the more tedious parts of the process, because I know they make the product better given a certain schedule: The systems I work on are complex, and even though I am a smart guy, I cannot keep all the details on all the systems and subsystems I have to work on in my head long enough to analyze designs and changes without following some processes.
This is dead on. Every software-developing business needs to decide its own process needs. Even if they are developing safety-critical code that has to pass rigorous certifications (FDA, DO-178B, etc), sane people do not order everything on the process menu. However, an organization does have to look at its market, its code base, its structure/culture, and its history to figure out what kinds of process it should use. Sure, having a defined process means developers spend less time throwing code at the wall, but the code they do throw usually sticks to the wall better and longer, and they usually feel good about that.
If someone seriously and repeatedly complains that following the process kills their passion, it is due either to a failure of that analysis or them being in the wrong organization. As an software developer and occasional manager and/or process guy, I have seen both cases. I have also seen cases where having a defined process helps channel creativity. Good process tools help you focus on the right parts of the problem; for example, having a template for a design description that identifies particular subjects to focus on, and may suggest areas that have been rabbit-holes in the past.
You haven't read the license in question, have you? (LGPLv2, according to the WebKit web page.)
Section 4: "You may copy and distribute the Library (or a portion or derivative of it, under Section 2) in object code or executable form under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above provided that you accompany it with the complete corresponding machine-readable source code, which must be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange."
How do you figure this allows delay in providing the source code?
Either that or it's a Boondogglus enormous. When I read "Census staff can work directly with corporate leaders in technology, key members of other government agencies, and academia", the first thing that came to mind is that the Census people in question will get to spend as much time as they want, respectively, (a) receiving Enterprise Ready Widget sales pitches, (b) schmooze with counterparts in other agencies, and (c) travel to universities in pretty places to do grant reviews.
What are you going on about? Internet2 is all about backbone(-like) technologies. Almost by definition it does not care about the very edge of the network (consumers) except to the extent that some of the edge nodes -- users of scientific computing -- have some really large data sets to move across the backbone. Internet2 is not trying to solve whatever problems you think distinguish those two network links (or solve "last mile" issues in general). If that focus on the backbone makes it fail to advance the "commodity" Internet, that makes it a problem with Internet2's mission, not with ISPs.
That is a curious conjecture. I would think that Internet2's primary distinction from the commercial Internet is the speed of individual links. For most of Internet2's life -- in particular, the last three quarters of it -- commercial gear vendors have greatly increased link speeds, routing table capacity, capacity to handle routing changes and other "carrier grade" features. Vendors for edge routers have focused on distinguishing features like deep packet inspection. Do you allege that ISPs are at fault because they selected equipment, technology and approaches that were inferior to what Internet2 developed? If so, why?
You want citations?
Read any of Radley Balko's reporting on the War on Drugs (the "Studies" section of that page is a good place to start).
Reason Magazine has a number of articles on how asset forfeiture laws let cops seize things from innocent people and keep them (or auction the things to buy new toys), and how little traction the victims of the seizures get from the legal system.
If you would like more general examples, read this book.
Shut up, you right-wing troglodyte. Closing down Guantanamo bay necessarily takes a while. As does withdrawing our troops from Afghanistan or from Iraq. The same applies to finding an alternative to targeted killings (which were an alternative to extraordinary rendition).
On a domestic note, just give President Obama's health care reforms the time they need to work. (I would suggest waiting until the heat death of the universe.) Also, Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman tells us that the stimulus only failed because it wasn't big enough. And if you ignore the multi-billion dollar irregular tax break that GM got, and expect still-owned stock to sell for significantly more than its current value, the US Government made money on its "investment" in Government Motors. We need not even talk about how successful Cash For Clunkers was at just moving demand around in time and making it harder for people to buy cheap used cars, or the dozen or so mortgages successfully modified under the Home Affordable Mortgage Program.
The solution to the failure of these few, small, scattered US Government programs is more US Government!
Standard form disclaimers like the one you quote are typically superseded by the agreements that are specific to the relationship in question. If a customer pays extra for backups, judges tend to be unsympathetic if the vendor tries to weasel out by the kind of argument you suggested ("we never promised we could RESTORE backups! and we told them it was at their own risk!"). Otherwise the additional agreement and charge for the backups gets the customer nothing but a bill of goods.
The show's creators really should have spent the hundred dollars or whatever to have an on-site backup of the data, though.
The principle is called recusal. Look it up if you are curious. It is a serious and frequent enough question that there are pretty good guidelines for judges about when they must recuse themselves from a case and when they should (but are not required to) recuse themselves. For example, new appointees to the Supreme Court often have to sit out cases that came up through the circuit where they served before, because they were involved in that particular case before being appointed to the Court.
(To answer the likely question: I do not know what the rules say about this kind of case, but it would appear to be at the judge's discretion. Notable causes of mandatory recusal include a known monetary stake in the outcome and previous involvement in the adjudication of that case, so I would infer that neither of those apply here.)
Typo: "it will give you very much" should, hopefully obviously, read "it will NOT give you very much".
Do you have any suggested alternatives that don't involve the multi-generational Ponzi scheme known as Social Security, or did you just want to whine?
It should not be surprising that if you save $100 a month for 40 years, it will give you very much for very long after retirement. On the other hand, the median household income in the US is $50,000. If you rely on your employer to put aside the equivalent of 2.5% of your income, without putting in anything on your own, that is your own fault. Most Americans could downsize their cable, mobile phone, and/or Internet service to double the $100/month figure. Most retirement advisors recommend more like 10% of your income should go towards retirement and rainy-day savings. (And yes, I know that median household income distorts things a bit because income grows as one gets closer to retirement -- but on the other hand, I suspect Slashdot's reader base has higher median income than the general public.)
Yes. In particular, it means there are a bunch of prima donna types among open source developers and advocates. Usually this is a good thing, but you will sometimes get these kinds of spats because both sides are convinced they're right and neither side is particularly good at communicating with people who (they think) are wrong about such important matters.
The Great Depression was obviously not caused or extended by financial companies trying to fix the stock market crash. There is a serious strain of historical economic analysis that argues that government intervention made the depression worse and longer, but none saying companies did so or even had the power to do that. Even today, no company is powerful enough to cause the kind of long-lasting economic damage that the government can cause by imposing this kind of trading tax or rate limit.
Social Security's current model is doomed even without the kind of additional burden you suggest (unless we have huge unexpected population growth to re-inflate that Ponzi scheme). Its impending problem is one of long-term balances, not of liquidity. The banks that got loans recently were mostly suffering from liquidity problems, which you can address with loans. There is no reasonable prospect of loan repayment by an entity with long-term balance problems.
Ask state employees and retirees in CalPERS if they would like it if CalPERS had to liquidate and they had to retire based on a fire-sale valuation of its assets. Is it "good riddance" for them to starve?
Your "fuck them, destroy their money, the government can magically give me mine" attitude is repulsive. That attitude clearly shows that you either ignored the failure of communism last century or that you are too stupid to have learned its lesson.
Jump off a bridge, moron.
What caused the Great Depression: The 1929 stock market crash, or the government's attempts to reverse its effects? You seem to think it would have been better for the government to sit by and conduct business as usual in the aftermath.
It is in fact the loss of perceived value (for example, what most of us call "invested dollars") that triggers people's loss avoidance behaviors, and those reactions are what cause the painful ripples through the rest of the economy. That kind of dollar loss also leaves grandmothers struggling to pay for food, and pension funds struggling to pay benefits to retirees. On top of that is the loss of fluidity, which means that it is harder and more expensive in real terms to invest in new public stock offerings. The wider economic pain is why government tries to step in and restore book values quickly; the fact that central planning just doesn't work is why most such attempts fail.
No, I am saying that the value of investments owned by retirees and public pensions depends on the current system, as does how much money a small company can raise from public markets. Throwing a wrench into the works out of some distorted sense of fairness is going to hurt them disproportionately. It is the law of unintended consequences, which liberals seem to think can be circumvented by enough wishful thinking.
Yeah, all those disgusting parasite retirees, all those disgusting parasite public-employee pension systems, all those disgusting parasite small companies that want to take advantage of public markets to get the millions of dollars they need to bring their new ideas to the public. That's the only kind of disgusting parasite that will care that the stock market takes a nose-dive and triggers a recession or depression.