60 comments in and no one has noticed OP is missing the link to the article being discussed (the link at the end of the post doesn’t go to it as promised, but instead to an older BB article about the topic). Here it is:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/dandiamond/2015/12/03/what-martin-shkreli-says-now-i-shouldve-raised-prices-higher/
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Lol, the thing is, this bag of well-mixed shit is so repellent, it’s more than plausible he would have said that.
It’d be perfectly in character for human garbage.
Thanks for the link.
I have heard it argued that the only legal obligation a company has is to maximise shareholder value.
This is the most specious nonsense imaginable because:
not all companies have shareholders that require value
not all companies have returns on investment as the aim of their charter
“shareholder value” isn’t actually AFAIK in the Companies Acts (that I am familiar with) for really quite obvious reasons (Amazon doesn’t do profit, Apple doesn’t do dividends…)
whereas ALL companies are actually obliged to follow many, many other laws from employment law through to environmental law (which can come with pretty onerous strict liability). What the management have to do with the shareholders is not get fired by them. This is not the same as being bound to do any and everything that will wring money out of people no matter its legality or ethics or its impact on the future viability of the company outside the quarterly earnings.
I’ve heard this argument from clever, educated, successful people. It’s pretty much the rich person’s equivalent of Freeman on the Land nonsense: gibberish legalese.
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As long as we aren’t disputing the level of humanity on display
He’s not just an asshole, he’s also an idiot. Raising the price that far above the cost of somebody else getting their generic approved is a stupid, loosing game. As has been shown. It is a poor parasite that kills its host, which in this case he has. If he had raised his price just enough that nobody else would go to the trouble to undercut him he would still be a douche, but he wouldn’t have been an idiot. Instead he overpaid for an asset and then tried to get every penny he could before he destroyed it. That’s what these business “geniuses” DO.
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“My shareholders expect me to make the most profit,” Shkreli said, a
theme that he returned to again and again. “That’s the ugly, dirty
truth.”
Okay, but then you’re doing it wrong.
Killing customers doesn’t make ANYONE any profit, and illness is a deep drag on the rest of the economy.
You have a business where you can charge rent - make people pay for drugs they need. It’s in your interests as a businessdouche to keep them low, so that disposable income can go and fuel the rest of the economy, raising demand for more experimental and rare drugs that you can then make BANK off of developing.
Short-term profits at the expense of long-term (financial) health are stupid and if you don’t know that, you need to go back to doofus school.
The only thing that keeps us from swimming in rivers of meth is the failure of individuals to buy a two-buck copy of an old used edition of an organic chemistry textbook. I remember reading Mitch Andre Garcia of Chemistry-Blog fame lament his finances in conjunction with the idea that he can make crystal meth in his bathtub. In Breaking Bad they go over two different synthetic routes. One is an idiot-proof dehydroxylation and the other is (I’m guessing since they’re sparse on the details and my memory here is shoddy) some kind of acyl substitution. Both of which are described somewhere in between chapters 15-25 depending on the specific textbook you’re looking at. Maybe earlier for dehydroxylation.
I remember a friend of mine who was arrested for heroin got asked if she was making crystal meth. She told the cop that she was too stupid to make it. The cop replied by saying, “It’s seventh-grade chemistry.” Her response was that she flunked seventh-grade chemistry. I don’t think they teach that in seventh grade, but the difficulty is about right. Drugs are easy, and our war on drugs theoretically keeps a lot of interesting and useful technologies from making it to our doorsteps.
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I think you and i see suspiciously eye to eye on this–are you mind controlling me?
######again?
A move like that could actually improve this dingleberry’s rep. 
It’s mislabelled in this case though, because it seems like the only thing the product does is make the smell reaaaallly strong so that it’s easy to identify and treat…
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I thought I was high-fiving you brah!
Seriously though I tend to go a bit bug eyed when I hear this argument “the only legal…” blah blah blah in much the same way that most people, with any legal education at all, do when encountering Fremmen on the Sand or whatever they are called…
I did read this article which suggests that the origin of the concept is an a priori underpinning an article from Friedman.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2013/06/26/the-origin-of-the-worlds-dumbest-idea-milton-friedman/
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I’m just a silly 
And to pile on how much I agree with your points…
The only real thing that chasing short term gains does is to increase volatility. Unlike a more balanced market–say a game of flipping a perfect coin–human controlled short term markets always have an imperfect match between the knowledge of the buyer and seller.
So maximizing short term gains means one or both of two things: you are at some point not gonna be the smartest frood in the room or–and this one is the kicker–you cheat. Kobyashi Maru the transaction.
So the choice can be simplified to Not Making Money or Cheating if you rely on volatility. This is why it is insanely obvious to anyone that contemplates this problem observed that wealth is concentrated in the hands of long term value investors and con artists.
There’s my econ rant for the day 
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That makes him a parasatoid, in that he feeds off of the host temporarily and then kills it as part of his life cycle.
He’s just not one of the COOL parasitoids.
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Timely, ain’t it
Still tickles my funny bone that this study came from Harvard. Perhaps the only funnier source would have been Wharton.
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Nothing
Literally
The German language is such that root meanings can be concatenated to create new words as needed with the full meaning inherent in their structure.
Kind of like a sentence…
You said doody!
We have to seize the technologies. Design the needed hardware to be possible to be made with the available machining (3d printing, here you go), the electronics around generic components (hi, Arduino) and/or produced in China outside of the Western wannabe restrictions and/or marketed to fit the fear narratives of today (“this ion mobility spectrometer can detect terrorists using chemical weapons, protect yourself” - and also can check the purity of your moonshine and make sure the MDMA is really MDMA…), the software opensource. That way the tech will become rather difficult to suppress.
Yeah, it’s sad that it’s easier to buy meth than effective cold medicine. You probably could make big bank converting meth into Sudafed.
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Look what he buys with what he makes:
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