The Onion
5 HN mentions · mentioned in 5 months, 2012–2024
2:05 · 4.8M views · Nov 13, 2008
An Onion News Network satirical panel segment debating whether the government should stop pouring money into a giant desert hole during a recession.
HN uses it as a recurring joke reference for wasteful spending and pointless money pits.
5 comments from Hacker News
I am extremely uncomfortable with these less voting right shares that so many companies(FB, Google et al) favor these days. It perverts the open market and reminds me of shenanigans in Eastern European stock markets and Asian ones where it is the norm for minority shareholders to be left out to dry. It creates a conflict of interest for those with more voting rights than ownership. Usually the interests are aligned but there are no checks and balances anymore. In the old days a corporate raider could challenge a badly run company and threaten to overturn the board. So now you have 14% of company but have 65% of voting rights you can do whatever to those 85% "minority" shareholders. So those with Class B shares get to have their cake and eat it too. This is close to FB building a 5B money hole( this video ) in a desert.
Isn't this kind of "burying the lede" where the real 'alarmingness' is the fact that people are so willing to kill someone they have never met, going off of very little information, with a missile from the sky, even in a simulation? This reminds me of that Onion skit where pundits argue about how money should be destroyed, and everyone just accepts the fact that destroying money is a given. this video
This is a slightly different topic (government spending), but I've always loved this old Onion News Network video: 'Should The Government Stop Dumping Money Into A Giant Hole?'. The sentiment feels the same to me: this video
Sometimes the truth is partisan. The government really doesn't have any incentive to be efficient, and really does dump giant amounts of money into a bonfire on a regular basis: this video
The Onion's meditations on the difference, aka "Should The Government Stop Dumping Money Into A Giant Hole?" this video