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Comment by D_Alex | Hacker News Reader

This reads like some kind of allegory, but I really cannot tell for what... But taking it in the somewhat literal spirit: we have a good analogy in the market with free range eggs.

Here in Australia, "free range" hens must be kept at no more that 10,000 head/hectare (or 1 sqm of land per hen). This is massively better than battery hens, which are kept at as low as... 0.03 sqm of cage/hen. The animal welfare benefits are huge, battery hens have a truly horrible existence, to the point where I believe that it is immoral to farm them in this way.

But some producers are advertising lower stocking densities, some 6 sqm per hen and others even 10 sqm. They are charging a small premium for their eggs, and some people pay it, because they like the idea of animals being treated well.

So yes, many people are prepared to pay a bit extra for ethical treatment of animals. Even people (if that where the original post was pointing at).

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Given the source, I interpreted it as referring to how companies treat their employees (i.e. worker bees). The story suggests that, all other things being equal, consumers might gravitate towards companies with a reputation for treating their employees well. Mark, Barry, and Willy produce the same product at the same price, so how they treat their employees becomes how they differentiate themselves and win over consumers.

The problem is, all things are rarely equal and, if they are, businesses usually find ways of differentiating themselves that consumers care more about than happy employees. When Mark starts losing business to Barry, he's going to cut his prices, spend more on advertising, etc.. Treating his bees poorly may actually help him squeeze more honey out of them at less cost, so Barry might not be able to match him without starting to mistreat his bees a little too. Willy's costs are probably the highest of the three, but maybe he can use clever advertising to portray his product as a luxury item that's somehow better than Barry's or Mark's, even if it's identical. If that fails he'll have to choose between happy bees and not going bankrupt.

I'd like to live in a world where a virtuous feedback loop would lead to companies treating their employees better and better, but history says that's not the world we live in. We live in a world that has had to come up with labour unions when spirals of mistreatment and cost-cutting got out of hand. We live in a world where executive pay is going stratospheric while employee benefits are stagnant. Perhaps it would be a better world if people cared more about how companies treat their employees, but I honestly don't see how you get people browsing Amazon to choose the honey that's $2/jar more just because it came from slightly happier bees.

I interpreted it a bit more broadly as a message about a company's image in the media (though this may be influenced by how it is reputed to treat its workers).

I thought the author's point was that if your company's only value proposition is that you are "less evil" than some company B (but with virtually the same product), then your position is extremely vulnerable.

> I'd like to live in a world where a virtuous feedback loop would lead to companies treating their employees better and better, but history says that's not the world we live in.

The world we live in has historically treated workers better and better, with some ups and downs, mostly for economic reasons.

The primary factor that determines worker welfare is the price of labor. If labor is cheap due to low demand and lots of people compete for jobs, they will accept being mistreated. If labor is expensive due to high demand and fewer people competing for jobs, they will not accept being mistreated. They will move on to greener pastures.

This is different across industries, of course. The plight is upon those who have little to offer to the demands of the economy. If nobody wants to eat honey anymore, having bees work for free wouldn't save the company.

What we also have learned from history, but tend to forget, is that price fixing doesn't solve the problem.

> We live in a world where executive pay is going stratospheric while employee benefits are stagnant.

This is numerically irrelevant, because there are very few such executives. Cutting into their compensation to pay the many lower-tier workers a tiny bit more would make no difference.

CEO pay is a scapegoat. The real transfer has gone to shareholders. US is basically bisected to two classes now where the below class lives inside a meatgrinder with no realistic way out.

Shareholders are scapegoats as well. Just as dividing up CEO compensation among workers would be a drop in the bucket, dividing company profits (or just dividends) amongst them often wouldn't amount to a substantial difference.

Shareholders only have made paper profits in the S&P 500 because the governments of the world have decided that debt has to be cheap in order to avoid another liquidity crisis, therefore assets must be relatively expensive.

This isn't a wealth transfer, it's price inflation. Warren Buffett may have a bigger dollar valuation to his name today, but he couldn't buy any more stock or real estate with it.

You got me there, Quote:'The problem is, all things are rarely equal and, if they are, businesses usually find ways of differentiating themselves that consumers care more about than happy employees.'...but...

"'Ethical' behavior rules the internal- and security policy social", anyone ?? P-:

> I'd like to live in a world where a virtuous feedback loop would lead to companies treating their employees better and better, but history says that's not the world we live in.

This sort of comment always reminds me of the quintessential answer: "That's funny, I always thought the world is what we make of it."

If the only way we can 'make consumers choose better' is to continually publish and broadcast the worst corporate behavior in order to spur these kinds of shifts, then so be it.

Scream loudly about WalMart subverting local government and historical societies to build a store within sight of Tenochtitlan.

Republish over and over about Amazon's treatment of their fulfillment workers.

Shame them all until the baseline is as much better as we can make it, and keep pushing against the entropy.

That's how we make the world better.

The world is what We make it, not what I make it. The coordination problem is not trivial.

Look at our lord and savior Bill Gates saving the USA from novel Corovirus. He could only do that after amassing a fortune from being a criminally savage businessperson for decades.

Agreed it's not a trivial problem. That was my point, that we need to show the cases of worst behavior often, loudly, and broadly so that people are informed and have the option to make choices.

Got a bone to pick about BG, gotcha.

This is an excellent point.

Bill Gates has money because he created a product that set back science for decades. It still hurts science today. The way Windows differentiates itself from Unix for the sole reason of not being compatible has set back society immensely.

Today, after having made all this money exploiting society in general and science in particular, he is putting money back into science.

Look, I get it, the damage is already done, so him putting money back we gain some back. And I also get it. If he didn't do it someone else would have.

But does that absolve the sins of the individual?

How does Windows hurt science?

They were trying to kill off Linux for decades. Yet most science ran on Linux/Unix.

there is actually a lot many more examples, I am just summarizing in one sentence.

My main issue with that approach is in practice it has two issues one of which is escalation of standards for being "good" means that you are still a bastard for paying workers $15/hr when the minimum wage is $10. And responding to one demand means others try to push more without any returns. It makes conceding not worth it and does everything about negotations wrong. And attempts to influence companies fundamentally are negotations which depend upon being a party to it one way or another.

Meanwhile ignoring the "fuck you we don't care" bad actors already know about especially the commodities it winds up disproportionate.

The second issue is lack of chosing battles it depletes social capital to the point nobody outside the bubble takes them remotely seriously.

> The story suggests that, all other things being equal, consumers might gravitate towards companies with a reputation for treating their employees well.

I got that feeling as well, but I think it's not really well-supported in the real world. Some consumers gravitate towards companies with a good reputation / ethical platform / health focus / whatever. But the vast majority of consumers choose on price or value separate from these things. For example, in the US how many people shop at Whole Foods vs. normal supermarkets? I'd be surprised if it's more than 1 in 10.

> We live in a world that has had to come up with labour unions when spirals of mistreatment and cost-cutting got out of hand

The OP story is one reason that unions in certain geographies will attempt to unionize the entire industry all at once, so that there's no competitive disadvantage for one employer against another on labor costs.

If you're organizing janitors in Miami, building owners will need to hire SOME contracting service to maintain the building but want the cheapest, still-quality one available. So if the workers do it together, it actually makes the fight with the employers easier not harder because they're less worried about losing business.

Of course, this also means the lack of union density makes it harder for any individual place to unionize.

I'd say it's not just the ethical treatment of animals, but quality also. Animals growing in cages are under huge stress and much more prone to diseases, so they are often given a number of medications as a prevention. Their whole physiology is heavily altered. As they're never exposed to direct sunlight production of some vitamins is severely reduced in caged animals. They're fed special food to stimulate nesting, to make yolk more yellow, etc. It has to be highly concentrated and hormone rich to stimulate them laying unnaturally many eggs, from very young age.

> so they are often given a number of medications as a prevention

This in fact leads to evolution of multi resistant germs which then leads to those germs landing on the meat products and finally on humans. If you are healthy this isn't a problem but if you get an infection by those germs, treatment options are greatly reduced.

The US has a massive resistant germ problem, and it's partly caused by laxer regulations aroud antibiotic application in industrial animal farms compared to the EU where there are strict regulations and the resistant germ problem is smaller.

So yes, if you eat that kind of meat you are directly exposed to a major health risk. People still die of sepsis today, limbs are still being amputated because of untreatable infections.

It’s ridesharing - and the independent contractors are the worker bees. Nothing condescending about that.

Yeah, on my first read it seemed pretty clear Mark is Uber and Barry is Lyft.

Given Rachel’s recent post history about the “moustache”, this is on point.

I think the 1099 bit is pretty obvious. It's about how employees and customers are treated. Remember the Delete Uber campaign a little while ago? Lyft had absolutely no secret sauce to differentiate itself aside from a slightly more positive brand identity. It was never accused of ignoring sexual assaults and has a reputation for paying drivers slightly better.

That's going on to an extent over here as well, except that it has more or less been incorporated into government strategy as a way to differentiate local farmers from lower cost competitors.

As a result, meat is expensive, but the quality is much better than what you get across the border(s).

The real kicker is that Zürich is now ground zero for food tech, and there's a real chance that they're going to outcompete local farmers on quality, price, and ethics.

Most people aren't aware that free range eggs can't be ethical no matter how free the range is.

All male chicks are macerated because they cannot lay eggs.

https://youtu.be/t_u0jxi_v-w

Same thing applies to dairy cows and their male offspring. There literally is no free lunch with large scale dairy. Not to mention debeaking and other carnal processes used to curtail the animals.

you mean eggs can't be ethical right? That's not specific to free range eggs.

No, eggs can be ethical if you run a small farm where you have the resources to take care of both the males and females. But I've not heard of large farms doing such, probably because of the issue of fertilization necessarily leading to segregation of sexes. Perhaps there is a farm that takes care of the males despite their economic negative - if so, sign me up for their eggs.

While extremely unpleasant, it's unpleasant _to us_. I don't see the chicks suffering any distress whatsoever.

That was the inspiration behind Zyklon B. Kill them quickly, without pain, efficiently. Then there's no moral quandry?? I don't agree.

Wiping out lives is inherently wrong. Lives/Souls shouldn't just be used like an ass-wipe.

This topic reeks of Cloud Atlas fabricants or the "grasshopper" bars from Snowpiercer.

Humans have potential, social networks, ability to imagine the future and so on. Chicks have none of those things.

Like I said, it's a video that's extremely unpleasant to us - to you as well, and it's normal to react to it.

Where do you draw the line? Broccoli is alive, should I stop eating broccoli?

> 1 sqm

That seems awfully low for "free range". It's at least 8 sqm in Austria.

> Here in Australia, "free range" hens must be kept at no more that 10,000 head/hectare

Australian "free range" eggs are a scam. When people imagine "free range", they're thinking of chickens walking free in a green meadow, which is nowhere near what actual "free range" chickens get to experience. 10,000 head/hectare is disgusting.

To get what you imagine you're getting with "free range", you need to buy pastured chickens and eggs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=can8xFpZKRs

I dont remember what is the requirement in my part of Europe (maybe there is a EU standard?) for free range chickens, but anyway: many years ago a close family friend wanted to start producing free range eggs on his farm. There was a huuuge area (to meet the requirements) fenced that the chickens were free to use, but still very rarely any chicken walked over 15 meters away from their shelter.

If the shelter moves, as in the video I linked, it works quite well.

I read it as a straightforward swipe at companies whose entire business is “X other company, but ethical.” They’re sitting ducks for another company to come along and trivially one-up them in the virtue stakes.

While it might suck to be someone whose only value is "slightly less evil", being replaced would seem to come with the territory of making 'slight ethics improvement' your major marketable feature.

Either you remain on the forefront of ethics, continually re-capturing your market and basically creating an ever moving 'ethics' moat, or you are replaced and forgotten just as surely as a smartphone manufacturer who declines to update their models

For the smartphone manufacturer, ethics isn't the key thing, features are. But for bee farming or egg farming or what have you, perhaps ethics are the key feature, the key differentiator in the market.

Ultimately it would seem that an 'ethics arm race' powered by ethical consumers would be a good thing, even if there is some noise on the supply side about who precisely is producing the ethical outcomes

but it's not a race to the bottom. Some folks are just looking for a service provider that is not absolutely terrible. So there is not a demand for ride share services from Mother Theresa, but there is a demand for ride share services that don't make you feel bad about consuming them. Per this interpretation, it's a satisficing problem, not an optimization problem.

>many people are prepared to pay a bit extra for ethical treatment of animals

More accurately, they pay extra for the perception of ethical treatment of animals. Chickens on "free range" farms suffer horribly too.

How is that?

Scale a chickens weight up to human weight, and many people live in less space than that...

Not sure if I should be paying extra for a chicken to have a nice apartment when I can't afford one myself.

Well if you want to go live in the middle of the countryside, there are plenty of places you can live for cheap.

The definitions vary (so it's hard to be exact), but they don't necessarily "live" at that density, but may only have the option to have some "yard time". I've seen one standard which defined the minimum number of hours per day and the diameter of the pipe through which the chickens could reach said yard (fairly similar to their own size). Equivalently and slighly tongue-in-cheek, you can go for a stroll in a park for a few minutes, and go back to the apartment. Free range.

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