Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Martin Shkreli has been sentenced to seven years in prison

theverge.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

311–320 of 446 posts

Re: Martin Shkreli has been sentenced to seven years in prison

#311

Post by Harimwakairi »

yodsanklai wrote: post #11

I used to watch some of his investment tutorials on youtube as well as other videos. For someone called the "most hated man in America", he actually seemed like a nice person. I also enjoyed his trollish sense of humor.

> For someone called the "most hated man in America", he actually seemed like a nice person.

Not to be an ass, but many horrible people are skilled at manipulating an audience and crafting a particular persona. This man couldn't have defrauded his investors without a great degree of charisma and the ability to appear trustworthy and likable.

Re: Martin Shkreli has been sentenced to seven years in prison

#312

Post by grzm »

harryh wrote: post #309
ctrl-j wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a question of personal responsibility: * I mug you, compared to being a bystander while you are mugged. * I hit you with my car, compared to being a passenger in the car ahead of the one that hit you. * I price-gouge you on a medication you need to live, compared to buying a laptop for my job instead of sending that money to buy food for someone half a world away. Do you really not see the difference?

So called price-gouging is more of an inaction (failing to sell you the product you want at your preferred price) than an action.

In many of the cases people think of when referring to price gouging in pharmaceuticals (such as Mylan with the EpiPen, Turing and Daraprim, or Valeant and a whole host of products) it was a positive action on behalf of the company, raising the prices by multiples. Regardless of one's feelings of whether this is legal, moral, or otherwise, calling price-gouging in these cases "more of an inaction" is a misrepresentation.

Re: Martin Shkreli has been sentenced to seven years in prison

#313

Post by rainieri »

tpush wrote: post #184

The majority of comments here being sad about Shkreli kinda reaffirms my views about HN, I have to say. Shkreli always seemed like a personified 4chan teenager "memelord" with money. Good to see that playing out your delusions of grandeur and arrogance toward the justice system is met with consequences. Maybe in prison he will mature a bit.

He already is quite mature. The media brought him to the stage and he gave a little show. You should see one of his videos shutting down people like you who read 3 or 4 articles and formed an opinion based on that.

Re: Martin Shkreli has been sentenced to seven years in prison

#315

Post by coryfklein »

ergothus wrote: post #50
yodsanklai wrote: post #11

I used to watch some of his investment tutorials on youtube as well as other videos. For someone called the "most hated man in America", he actually seemed like a nice person. I also enjoyed his trollish sense of humor.

> I also enjoyed his trollish sense of humor. I think that makes the title that much easier to understand. I'm an old-fuddy-duddy (for example, I say things like 'fuddy-duddy'), but to me there are two forms of trolling. One where you're doing it to get their reaction and entertainment when they get it. I find this usually fun - the person doing it has fun, any audience has fun, and the person has that anguish-relief…

Love this. Glee from seeing somebody else suffer belongs in the 17th century, not today, and whatever "humor" value it may have does not give cause to dissociate it from its very nature of cruelty.

Re: Martin Shkreli has been sentenced to seven years in prison

#316

Post by tinus_hn »

cabaalis wrote: post #274
MaybiusStrip wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regulating the price of medication isn't a slippery slope to outlawing MacBook pros. What a preposterous thing to say. The law is whatever society decides it should be. There is nothing inherently rational about it. You'd have to accept some pretty messed up things as rational if you actually believed that.

Just 2 nitpicks: 1) The law is what a very small group of people decides it should be, and 2) Slippery slopes in law are a very real thing. Just listen to Supreme Court oral arguments. That's (supposedly) why it takes so much forethought and time to enact them.

This group of people consists of who a very large group of people think it should consist of. You can actually go and vote or even go into politics yourself!

Re: Martin Shkreli has been sentenced to seven years in prison

#317

Post by enraged_camel »

c3534l wrote: post #233

This whole thing seems like the justice system struggling to punish someone for doing something that wasn't illegal, finding something else to pin him with (and he was guilty of it, sure), then basing sentencing on that other crime, but using this new charge as a smokescreen. This whole thing reeks of corruption, but the kind of corruption where the people abusing their authority think they're the good guys.

It’s definitely not corruption. Al Capone did lots of awful shit, but in the end was convicted and sent to prison for tax evasion.

Re: Martin Shkreli has been sentenced to seven years in prison

#318

Post by stevenh »

bhouston wrote: post #5

He was so obnoxious that I guess it is easy to be happy about that, but he was so small time in the grand scheme of things. But nearly no bankers responsible for the 2008 financial crisis ever went to jail: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/09/how-wal...

You think people should go to prison for being obnoxious?

Re: Martin Shkreli has been sentenced to seven years in prison

#319

Post by dwild »

harryh wrote: post #218
wpietri wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mistakenly compare a failure to act ("save someone from malaria") with a clear purposeful action ("extorted sick poor people"). And there's no particular "higher purpose" of the law here that prevents us from making Shkreli's behavior illegal. Price gouging is illegal under other circumstances [1]; as far as I can tell his actions were legal just because nobody thought someone would be this awful. If you'd like t…

Malaria person: please wpietri, help me. wpietri: No Sick person: please shkreli, help me. shkreli: Sure, for $500 At least in the second scenario the person is being offered an option under which they get help. It sounds a lot better than the first scenario for the afflicted.

2012 - Malaria person: please dwild, help me.

dwild: no

2017 - Malaria person: please dwild, help me.

dwild: no

2012 - Sick person: please Daraprim, help me.

Daraprim: Sure, for US$13.5

2017 - Sick person: please Daraprim, help me.

shkreli: Sure, for US$750

You see the difference? With me, they stayed at the same level of help, none. In the second, he purposefully profited from the help they were getting from Daraprim. He removed something they had beforehand.

Re: Martin Shkreli has been sentenced to seven years in prison

#320

Post by dragonwriter »

brucephillips wrote: post #174
Florin_Andrei wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the outrage was ever about Shkreli not saving someone's life. It was about Shkreli making lots of money from people's suffering, after artificially inflating the price of a drug that he controlled. In other words, getting rich from increasing the amount of misery in this world.

AFAIK, only the insurance companies paid his exorbitant prices.

Increases to insurance company costs are passed on, with markup, to the insured.
Post reply on HN