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Comment by apohn | Hacker News Reader

So this is a philosophical argument, but lots of those industries indirectly screw their customers. Optometrists who sell frames generally sell brands from companies like Luxottica who have made eyewear really expensive. The entire insurance industry is one of the major reasons healthcare is expensive and ruins the experience people have with patient care. All of this various from country to country of course.

I could go on, but sometimes your choice is working on a product that either screws the users directly (e.g. ads) or indirectly. Take your pick of where you want to draw the line.

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By this logic, every company screws over everyone and business is bad overall.

That’s an unfair conclusion. Those examples were pretty specific and I, at least, see no reason to generalize (except maybe the insurance one), except perhaps along the lines of “serving exploitative monopolies is bad”

In fairness, there is no ethical consumption under capitalism. If you take that to its logical conclusion, then there is no ethical software development that supports capitalist endeavors.

What I meant is that you can find an example in nearly every business of some person (or group of people) getting "screwed over", which is of course subjective. So subjectively, you could make the case that every business is "exploitative" (like the other replier who claims every capitalistic business is exploitative).

If you take what I said to the logical extreme then sure.

What I was trying to say was that it's very black and white thinking to say something like ads = exploiting users and healthcare = not exploiting users.

Since Facebook usually comes up when people talk about unethical companies, let me use them as an example. Let's say there is a team that improves ad targeting by 5%, helping to reduce the number of irrelevant ads people see. Let's say there's another team that reduces data center electricity's utilization by 5%, which helps the environment.

Is the ad team more or less ethical than the data center team if they are basically both supporting the same end goal?

I don't work for Facebook if that matters. And I have no answers to any of the questions I posed above outside of my personal preference to not work in online advertising unless I need to do it to survive.

Luxottica is an unusual case. Most monopolies aren't that durable and Luxottica has challengers now. Also, the law in the US which says you can't buy glasses unless you have had an eye-exam in the past year is an anomaly amongst nations.

The functionality delivered by products is not screwing people unless you're talking about surveillence capitalism ala Google et.al. Capitalism and the pricing of goods is how we incentivize people to bring things to market and more importantly how we allocate resources. No one, anywhere, through any scheme has ever replaced the market for performing these functions and thereby driving civilization and invention forwards.

People keep believing they can (socialism/Venezuela), or give up on the project entirely after decades of trying (communism/ China / Russia). Maybe one day someone out there qwill have a genuinely new idea which works. Until then you have a right to feel good about contributing, in whatver little customer support / feature adder / managerial capacity you do, to the forward progress of society generally and the amazing, rocket-like increase in wealth absolutely everyone on this earth is experiencing relative to the past 30,000 years.

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