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Comment by ClumsyPilot | Hacker News Reader

Ah yes, the idea that profit driven management is a better juror of freedom than our democratic society.

Whatever they decide, they owe you no explanation or recourse. After all, these people are 'accountable' to wall street. To them 2008 and Boeing 737 were an unforceable turn of fortune, and they should bear no harm from it.

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Please remember that democracy is a way to control a shared resource by the opinion of the majority, and it makes the minority submit to the decision of the majority. A democracy is more free than a tyranny, but it's not freedom incarnate.

If 1.5B Chinese people totally democratically voted to ban particular words from usage worldwide, and were very serious at enforcing their decision, would you conform?

I'd very much appreciate if no society ever chooses things for me, as long as the choice is not of a conflicted shared resource that needs to be handled uniformly to even work (like property laws or traffic rules).

Suffice it to say, the line between majoritarian rule and “true” democracy has been debated since Sophocles. Elections per se do not a democracy make.

Keep in mind the framers of the constitution in the US realized this type of issue, which led to the Bill of Rights protecting things like free speech and other government encroachments on individual liberty.

I appreciate that corporate platforms are different than public spaces when it comes to free speech, but we've got a long way to go before US society broadly tolerates censorship by foreign entities (at least, I hope).

US Bill of Rights was originally written more to protect the states against the federal government. It couldn't even be enforced against the states until the 14th Amendment provided some vehicles for incorporation, and the courts acknowledged them. And even then the process of incorporation is still ongoing - e.g. the 7th is still not incorporated.

Whatever the government decides, they rarely, if ever, provide an explanation or recourse either: the Patriot Act, Ahmad Arbury, TBTF, the assassination of Awlaki, snooping on Americans, Operation Fast and the Furious, the Pentagon's missing billions, Epstein's death, etc.

I'm as pro-democracy as they come, but the belief that the government is somehow (and always) more accountable than companies strains credulity. Companies are accountable to Wall Street, which implies they're accountable to their consumers too. Shake Shack did not have to return the funds they received recently, but they did, because of media attention.

Accountability to wallstreet = accountability to consumers? Where is this idea even coming from? Can you name a single instance of Wallstreet punishing anti-consumer practices? Did AT&T selling of customer location data affect stock price?

All your examples are from defence. I've been watching people challenge in court every kind of decision, from roadbuilding to Brexit.

But tech companies circumvent laws, uber is not a taxy company, people driving them are not employees, Youtube is not a media company, etc. Every time this happens, voting becomes more and more meaningless.

> All your examples are from defence.

Half of those examples have nothing to do with the DOD. One of them (Ahmad Arbury) has nothing to do with the federal government at all. Where did you get this idea from?

Wall Street punishes companies that are not profitable or are losing money. Consumers can make that happen by walking away when companies are anti-consumer. If they do, profits fall and Wall Street would hold that company accountable.

Why do you think Zoom hired security professionals and bought Keybase? Why do you think Facebook reacted after the Cambridge Analytica scandal? Why do you think TikTok separated itself from ByteDance in China?

Even with the most federal oversight, US banks and financial firms tanked the economy and then got paid for it. And it's not a left-right thing; it's a them-us thing. And if you don't believe that, you only need to take a look at the Panama Papers scandal.

I'm sorry.... But what did we learn from 2008? That financial sector is unaccountable or that they own the government?

Boeing was not punished severely enough, because of two things - American nationalism would prevent it from drowning(helloo rescue package ;) ) and belief that they could fix it fast enough. But as a person holding Airbus stock for a long time, I disagree that Boeing wan't punished at all. Boeing's price dropped by 75%, while Airbus lost only 50%

> a better juror of freedom than our democratic society.

Almost anything is better at safeguarding freedom than allowing people to vote on what counts as freedom.

Companies have a profit motive to upset as few people as possible. Politicians who are democratically elected have incentive to rig things in their favor, especially when it comes to more ambiguous things like gerrymandering.

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