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Comment by seigando | Hacker News Reader

It's kind of amazing how much of our culture is predicated on consumer exploitation. Justice and reparations seem like a pipe dream.

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Even if you were to get it, what would that change? The culture of consumer exploitation would still be there. How do you change something that's been a cultural cornerstone for over a century?

That's what justice and reparations means to me. Changing the culture.

That implies punishing people but neither the crime nor the workable alternatives have been clearly established.

"Exploitation" is a word so overused and often paired with many economic fallacies including feudal ones that merchants had to be ripping people off to make a profit because of the cost of transport plus a "universal fixed price" assumption.

...I mean if someone is dependent on your service and there aren't viable alternatives or a means of making a viable alternative, and your pricing is exploitative and meant to siphon away customer's money so you can get rich at their expense, maybe the issue is that you don't believe 'exploitation' exists because of how much you love money over regular people.

Those are not the definitions of those words. Neither Justice nor reparations are designed to change the culture. In fact, they're designed to do the opposite: maintain the status quo.

They’re designed to make the status quo untenable, not maintain it.

Justice exists to prevent chaos and restore order. How does that make the status quo untenable?

Because when companies make decisions, they'll need to think, "will this decision cause states to seek $2.2 trillion from me?"

Again, how does that make the status quo untenable? It hasn't done much to hinder google's operations in Europe.

moving towards post scarcity economies where people aren’t struggling to acquire what they need and what they want so the motivation to do things isn’t sales numbers and profit margins

How?

enact laws to make real estate a really bad investment to stop capital costs of existing being sucked away from everywhere

start nonprofit companies in many sectors that lean heavily on automation and sell at cost direct to consumers open sourced/open designed products

Let me know how that goes for you.

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