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Comment by javajosh | Hacker News Reader

You sir have taken naming and shaming to a whole new level. And I for one, applaud you. The VW scandal [1] happened only very recently, and it was very serious, and people deserve a reminder of it (and should avoid VW products).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_emissions_scandal

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VW was far from the only one that manipulated air pollution tests: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diesel_emissions_scandal

We should also avoid using Amazon due to absurd employee treatment, Google for privacy violations, any oil company because of everything they stand for, etc.

It's a little rich to look through fingers with all other companies because it would be inconvenient otherwise, and then boycott VW that saw its punishment.

VW is too big to be punished, but the folks who discovered the fraud were punished; they should be given millions by governments for the healthcare savings of having less pollution in cities because of their work. Instead they were blackballed.

I will only trust VW when they start fighting for the whistleblowers.

VW's supervisory board has co-determination, which means that Union of German workers has half the voting rights. The Supervisory board monitors and approves corporate statutes, and is appoints the members of the board of management.

Even with such a democratic (closer to atleast) approach if whistleblowers are salted, I don't have much hope that quasi-secretive exec cabals are going to be more open. Outside a few niche startups, that eventually ditch any 'don't be evil' anchors.

I don't buy the too big to be punished. If regulation agenencies can approve/deny a corporate merger/sale/etc, I think they should have the power to force change. Rarely, is it the rank and file employees causing the mischief. As the C-suite employees and possibly the board of directors, it is the job responibilities to be responsible. In these situations, why not have the regulators come in and force a leadership change? If one particular individual is more responsible than others, why not ban them from holding leadership positions in the future? Other industries have similar punishments. Allow the company to stay alive under new management.

Too big to punish is quite frankly just laughable.

I'm wondering how to be an ethical consumer in general and have a hard time identifying products to support.

There is no ethical consumption under capitalism.

That's just BS. There are plenty of businesses that choose to do the ethically/moral/decent thing, but they tend to be the smaller ones. The giant fucking evilCorps in the world suck all the oxygen from every conversation, so it feels like they are the only examples available. I'd also suggest private companies vs publicly traded companies where their obligation is to the stock holders rather than being decent.

Can you provide an example company?

https://puri.sm

patagonia

I'd go one step further in that analysis. Why does it feel that large companies are the most representative to the people (like me) claiming that consumption under capitalism is unethical?

Well, I'm a bit of an anarchist, so I'm going to go down the 'distribution of power' line here. It doesn't matter that purism or system76 is ethical when Google controls my every waking moment. When the mega evil Corps have all the power and the influence. When they control not just my life but also the ecological and political environment around me. Denying the power of Google is akin to climate change denial. So yes, I'm not going to point to a small company built off of open source and pretend that my life is okay.

Or I could go a bit further down the Marxist line, and say it's because capitalism requires large scale exploitation at a large scale. Ignoring that exploitation is supporting that exploitation, and is immoral. I'll not get into the theory to support this in this comment, but when Amazon warehouse workers literally work themselves to death for my shitty orders, we've got a problem. And it is immoral to point to the existence of Purism and say that everything is fine.

This is coming off more intense than I intended. I'm sorry. I swear this isn't personal criticism, just an attempt at productive engagement with ideology, but the world is breaking. It's really fucking hard to be kind.

Modern capitalism (corporatism) is not ethical after a certain scale. There is no such thing as an ethical product sold at the margins necessary to stay in business at the top of the food chain.

Framed another way, I have yet to meet a C-level exec of an organization bigger than 50 employees who wasn’t an obvious sociopath.

What really needs support is political change. That might be on an individual candidate level, or on a meta level (e.g. voting against politicians who will gerrymander). Personally I don't think it's worth the energy trying to optimize one's individual consumer choices, at least to the extent that you can put that energy toward systemic change.

It's not perfect but I've found that companies that are certified B corps to generally be more ethical and try to steer my spending in that direction.

https://bcorporation.net/

As a society we should have rules that prevent these problem from our capitalistic company creations.

It would be much easier than researching every business you want to interact with.

But because the rules vary by country and fewer rules generally mean less expenses, companies that behave badly and don't get caught or are overseas seem to have a competitive advantage.

> our capitalistic company creations

Grammar question for anyone: is it capitalistic or just capitalist?

I keep seeing "-istic" tacked on to words these days, feel it is incorrect.

Like you, I thought the “-istic” suffix was superfluous but when I checked it out, it forms ‘adjectives from nouns or from other adjectives, with the meaning "of or pertaining to" the preceding component’¹.

In this case, “capitalist” could be either a noun or an adjective while “capitalistic” is unambiguously an adjective. I tend to use “capitalist” as an adjective (pertaining to “capitalism”) as it’s usually clear from the context that the word is an adjective. However, it’s not wrong to use “capitalistic” and I’d say it’s a matter of personal style rather than grammar.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-istic#English

A good example of whataboutism.

Which as always is a perfectly valid counter when presented with ignorance towards all but one hand-picked data point.

No, because the original post never said anything about Amazon, Google, or the oil companies being any different from VW. You are accusing the post as presenting with ignorance towards those data points simply because they don't mention them, but there was no prior context to mention them.

>it was very serious

If it was so serious then how come almost no attention was paid to Fiat Chrysler when they were fined for shipping cars with defeat devices?

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/civil-settlements-united-stat...

I know this is going to be extremely controversial here, but bear with me. They gave customers more power for the same money. For those of us who don't really care too much about emissions, why should we be mad at Volkswagen? If anything we should be happy.

Because you should care about emissions

I love my VW. It's a solid car. Why should I avoid VW again? The emissions scandal was a defeat device built into diesel cars. my car is petrol as are most cars.

They did what everyone does. But they're German so they get rekt from both Americans and Germans

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