> Apple is trying maximize the money they’re making …
And that is the problem with our modern companies. The only morals is making money. What a pitiful excuse.
And that is the problem with our modern companies. The only morals is making money. What a pitiful excuse.
Dark patterns and raking in money is what these managers do and take pride in. The system we've created made that so.
[Edit: I should clarify that i meant that a company needs no other reason to exist, not that a ethical company is impossible]
That is not actually true. Corporations are a tradeoff for society: a corporation fulfills some societal need in exchange for investors receiving limited liability and a chance to profit. We have every right to question whether or not this arrangement is beneficial or harmful to society, and every so often a corporation will be broken up when society's needs are not being met.
Don't think that profit, limited liability, or anything about the current arrangement is a given or a natural right or anything like that. It is a system we use to accomplish certain shared goals, nothing more.
For example, a company could be made to serve the interests of employees rather than just shareholders. This can be done by, for example, requiring a certain percentage of the board of directors to be employee representatives.
On the flip side, I see numerous posts and comments on HN that blame companies for not behaving more ethical. This is complete nonsense to me; you can't expect companies to autoregulate when they are designed to follow only 2 things: laws and market. Since as we know now we have little control over what the market wants, the real control is through regulation.
But the US has done a very poor job at selecting their politician leadership for a long time now.... that's where people who wants to do something needs to look at..
Unfortunately we don't and likely won't ever know who exactly did what. The best we can do is point at the company as a whole and say that some people over there decided to do bad things, nobody else in that group stopped them, and then some of those people went and did the bad thing. I don't see why that's not a reasonable critique when we cannot be more specific.
I think that it is also important to do so. The more we perpetuate the idea that companies can't be blamed for bad-but-not-illegal behavior the more we help enable people to make those sorts of decisions as part of a company. They can't be blamed personally - it was the best decision for the company and that's what companies do, you know?
We also help reduce negative feelings towards the companies when they do behave unethically. You can't actually blame them - they're a company after all, right? But this actually helps enable companies to get away with it. Negative public perceptions can impact the ability of a company to make money. I don't see why we should be trying to reduce this kind of influence.
What I was referring to is the expectation that this criticism can make the difference; I don't think it can, for mostly one single reason: if you happen to make progress and magically turn 99% of the people running companies ethical, you have created a huge incentive for being evil. Someone acting unethical will reap the benefit without competitor.
I tend to see these dynamics as balances and movement from balances when something changes. I think changing laws changes the balance point and after a shake, the system will settle somewhere else. Trying to persuade managers to be ethical it's just a fight against the balance that you will eventually lose.
The more meaningful aspects are the fact it creates a negative reputation, and that reputation impacts all interactions with the company. A bad reputation adds an additional cost to interacting with you (be it customers, workers, or business partners), and that needs to be constantly paid for somehow.
Additionally, there's some level of 'acceptableness' for the individuals of a company to do unethical things, which also plays a role. You addressed this in your 99% hypothetical, which I would agree with if it was done in a vacuum. However it's not. In practice if 1% of businesses were behaving in some way the rest refused on ethical grounds, lawmakers would be be falling over themselves to address it. Obviously such an example is unlikely to appear, but I hope you get my point. Moving the needle on acceptable behavior also moves the needle on what acceptable regulations of behavior.
I also largely agree on many of these factors being a dynamic balance. It's just that public criticism is already a factor in the current balance. Some level of criticism is required to maintain it, lest we move towards a balance that sees even more bad behavior.
According to you, seeing as almost every country in history was run exclusively for the benefit of the ruling class, none of them had a reason to exist?
> But the US has done a very poor job at selecting their politician leadership for a long time now.
Agreed. But i think it's a problem in the system itself. The us have a binary choice between hilary/biden and trump with no middle ground.
Hmm... with "reason to exist" I meant the reason why they were "created" in the first place. This is an interesting article that expands on how corporation "rights" have changed since foundation (take the historical data points more than the underlying political bias): https://www.americanbar.org/groups/crsj/publications/human_r...
> Agreed. But i think it's a problem in the system itself. The us have a binary choice between hilary/biden and trump with no middle ground.
Indeed! I believe the problem in the system is even deeper. Regardless of your values or your preferred policies, I really feel hilary/biden/trump is a very poor display for the United States. The selection process that brought them there is not working. Smart people avoid going into politics in the first place because of this selection process. People don't want to spend their days arguing with a guy with bogus claim that is only trying to bring them down.
The way this is supposed to work is that you make flour and I want flour so I give you money and you give me flour. Then you make more money by automating the production of flour so you can sell it to me for a lower price even though you now have higher margins. And try to take market share from competitors who are doing the same thing. The profit motive increases efficiency. This is growing the pie.
The nefarious way to make money is to swipe somebody else's piece. This is rent seeking. It causes prices to increase with no increase in value. It is to be destroyed.
If companies didn't have to maximize x% of the profit made on the investor's money per quarter/year, they will be able to focus on product/service, customer and employees more. It may result in less profit but it will be better for the society as a whole.
We can see this happening when some company is acquired solely for sucking money out of it. Sometimes it leads to worsening of the service/product made by original company, y% of employees get fired because new owners don't care about the product or the employees. Money saved by using cheaper but worse raw material and firing employees shows up as profit.
Because money is sole motivator, we end up over optimizing a company's operations around it. This could be seen everywhere when Covid started. Hospitals didn't have have back up PPEs. Auto makers didn't have parts/chips in inventory for emergencies. They're optimized to order the amount they need in immediate future, without any serious thought to contingency.
When an Amazon worker is asked to self x products across the warehouse in y minutes, like a machine without a thought to the well being of the worker, its because Amazon has to show profit to the investors.
We don't have product making companies anymore, we have stock making companies. They don't sell goods, services, they sell stocks.
What do you believe the original motivation was, if it wasn't money?
[Edit] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f61KMw5zVhg&ab_channel=batxg...
Richard Feynman, explaining if "it" was worth the Nobel Prize.
"...I already got the prize. Prize is the pleasure of finding the thing out, kick in the discovery, the observation other people use it. Those are the real things..."
The problem with this sentiment is it's always presented as some new found discovery, and not as an inherent outcome of a capitalist economy. It was in 1973, 48 years ago now, that Ford did the infamous calculation on not to recall the Ford Pinto because the cost of recall was less than their calculated law suit risk - a move that would have killed their customers; and then further still Milton Friedman defended this decision.
We haven't had "product making companies" as the norm for at least 50 years now. What era are you talking about?
My comment was hyperbolic, it should have been more moderate.
BS. One of the only things Ayn Rand got right was her view of money: it is one of the greatest forces for good humans have ever invented. Money allows us to settle our disputes without violence; money is what enables peaceful trade; money is how we moved beyond palace economies.
Sure, money can corrupt some things, but on the whole money has likely saved many lives and in all likelihood the free societies we have today could never have existed without a monetary system.
I was talking about the human greed that is exploited by money.
Also, if you're going to fight a war with another country, money doesn't mean much does it? Unless you have a global currency that both sides can agree on. Ultimately wars were fought for resources (Non ideological ones). Money is just paper/coins which you can print anytime you want if you control the resources.
What have we done with love, mercy…
The difference (some would argue, improvement) is that shekels have a worth of their own, so can be stored against harder times, which may not have been possible with the goods they bought. Of course, that shekel value being variable over time, can equally lead to riches or ruin, and requires a more sophisticated treatment by perhaps insufficiently sophisticated participants; snakes and ladders.
In any event, societies existed well before this “money” thing came along, even free ones. High technology societies do need a money system, I think; for automated transactions to take place, there needs to be a standardized good-exchange valuation, but not all high-tech societies are free, and not all free societies are high-tech. Freedom seems orthogonal to money.
I think we are all in agreement there. But it has such sophistication and is so amazingly efficient that it has an intrinsic value as a mere concept. This is because it enables activities that would otherwise be impossible. A good analogy would be a computer program. This i think is where we differ. But i think it's obvious that money is more than "nothing"- after all it sustains the entire banking industry.
>The difference (some would argue, improvement) is that shekels have a worth of their own, so can be stored against harder times
Again this isn't (and was never) the true reason for money. It was only a security against the money and helped people to visualise the concept better (i know i'm oversimplifying but i think that's the basic idea)
Money is the core of a distributed optimisation system. How does society decide whether to fix a pothole, eat some oranges, advertise a game? The hugely complex chain of suppliers is balanced via money - every actor in the chain is optimising locally using profit as the objective function. Legal agreements are the mechanism to ensure the money flows for the correct goods/services, and society sets constraints (laws/regulations) to enforce goals that are not monetary.
The economics 101 narrative for how money was created is an extremely limited view.
What? Money is the cause of like70% of all violence
What leads you to believe that the pie is smaller than it was without money? I have never seen any kind of statistics like "hunter gatherers had more wars". How you you even formulate the null hypothesis for this?
In Elizabethan times, company charters (and the subsequent right to create and hoard profit) was granted by the queen as a reward for the company doing the work required by the state. Money was a secondary reason for a company's existence, their primary reason was to further the interests of the monarchy and by extension the country.
This is incorrect. There are many reasons a company can exist other than to make money. The company I work for, for example, does not have making money as its primary goal.
There's nothing wrong with a company making money. The problem is people who believe that companies should only make money, or make all the money they can at whatever cost.
There are actually people on HN who think companies have some legal obligation (usually under the cliché of "shareholder maximization") to do anything to make money. This is false.
Companies are created by and for humans. They should work for humans.
So if companies are happy to maximize profit with the only barrier being law, and the lawmakers are too clueless/slow to make effective laws quickly, what are we supposed to do?
Helping people, raising a family, being virtuous…
“Making money” is just so void of content.
Companies either exist for human beings or are just despicable.
But this is just my opinion obviously.
It only becomes a problem when there’s no regulation, which is exactly what’s happening here. Apple has too much market power, and the government is doing nothing to regulate them. The only way Apple will stop doing evil and harmful things like this is if A) government steps in or B) Apple decides to stop trying to grow. B will never happen (it’s basically impossible for a publicly traded company)
The same is true for the other tech giants.
Either we need one big action (break them up), or a lot of small actions (force them to change specific business practices)