Hacker News Reader

Comment by lovich | Hacker News Reader

> It isn't like people were relying on business then business owners got greedy.

Do you actually believe that? That all these business owners were running their factories out of the goodness of their hearts and that they only stopped because the government took all the money they had to give out as charity?

If that is the case why do we see ultra profitable businesses returning to this form instead of trying to carve out any section of their work base that they can, ex. The FAANGs turning most job positions into contractor filled roles like the janitorial staff?

View on HN

There is this contemporary absurd narrative that businesses, business owners, and/or corporations only recently became greedy, and that this development (of greed), not the system itself, is the root of essentially all the problems with the modern economic system.

I think it is quite possible that you were more likely to find a benevolent feudal lord (partially because incentives were more directly, and forcibly, aligned) than find a corporation willing to put profits as anything other than first.

I’m frankly boggled that this thought is even entertained. We have literal centuries of evidence of corporations oppressing their workers and other peoples in the pursuit of profits, down to actual armies killing striking workers. I agree with you that you’d be more likely to find a benevolent feudal lord as they at least viewed their serfs as theirs and not some sort of cogs to be thrown away once they were worn out.

I'm not sure you are being clear in your argument. If we have literal centuries of evidence of corporations oppressing their workers [up to and including] actual armies killing striking workers ... how do you think it is possible that they've become more greedy recently?

Business greed has capped out since approximately the first 48 hours after the establishment of the first business back in Mesopotamia or wherever.

Possibly you haven't taken a literal enough read of what is being said here, but businesses don't ever get "more greedy". The greed capped out centuries ago. It cannot increase. It is impossible for it to get worse. It is at the human limit, and has been basically forever.

It is like the madness of people who think inflation is because businessesmen suddenly got extra greedy. If they could raise prices to that level they'd have done it in 22AD, not 2022AD. Prices are always as high as businesses can charge, if they go up something that isn't greed has to have changed. We can argue about what.

You're right it's not greed itself, but the scale of its target that has grown. One person losing their job to corporate greed is a tragedy, and 10000 people losing their jobs is a statistic.

I think both lines of thought are correct and aren't mutually exclusive. Systemically, we have a fundamental underlying issue where profit motive isn't always aligned with the rest of society and there in lies what we see now.

I also think greed, or perhaps better described as flaunted greedy behavior, has increased over the past several decades. While capitalism has of course always been greed driven, different periods of time and different cultures have set guardrails up as to what level of greedy behavior is and isn't acceptable.

In the US the culture during the prime time of the industrial revolution, capitalism had technology progress propping its greedy appetite up. Those gains have been largely consumed and greed shifted over more and more towards optimizing on labor. We live in an environment now where we no longer assume your employer has your interests at heart and everyone listens to HR and leadership propoganda selling pictures of families and care for their employees while everyone rolls their eyes. We assume our employer will try the pay the least for us and get us to do the most for the least. We assume that they'll replace us the second they have a quantifiable cheaper alternative. Many decades ago these practices weren't as accepted, they certainly occurred, but they came with bad image and cultural rejection that harmed businesses. That isn't the case anymore. Businesses can basically do whatever isn't explicitly restricted by law or more profitable than penalties law sets and its just the accepted state of affairs. After all, it's legal, what are you going to do? Meanwhile through aggressive lobbying businesses are basically writing the law as they see fit.

Also let’s talk about how investors just discovered housing as an asset class and are buying up all the houses.

> Possibly you haven't taken a literal enough read of what is being said here, but businesses don't ever get "more greedy". The greed capped out centuries ago. It cannot increase. It is impossible for it to get worse. It is at the human limit, and has been basically forever.

I don’t agree with this premise, at least not in the context of the United States. You can even see in recent history where the greed amplified in the 80’s with the phrase “greed is good” becoming popular or that myth about how businesses have a legal requirement to pursue profit over everything got into the American psyche after that case against Henry Ford.

Fuck, charging interest on loans used to be considered a sin in western culture. We explicitly have seen greed change in magnitude.

Being charitable / good to employees is good for business and for retaining workforce in a world where employees don't have anyone else to care for them.

If I need to give 40% of my profits (and your salary) to the government and there is an avenue for getting some of that money back when you're in trouble, then go and ask for the government for help.

The mistake is in allowing the government to gather more resources and in turn making people dependant on them.

Welfare also destroyed the family unit (especially in the black community).

Indirect democracy is a fancy name for "electing" with your 1/100M vote an elite which gets to decide how to spend half of your salary.

> Welfare also destroyed the family unit (especially in the black community).

All I needed to read to dismiss this

It's pretty clear that it did...on paper... Didn't actually destroy anything in practice other than the formalization of that unit

If it is pretty clear that it did then you’ll have no problem finding sources that can prove that it occurred, that also take into account the targeted imprisonment that the black community has/had faced since emancipation. Anyone who looks at the black community in the US being destabilized and blames _welfare_ as the cause while ignoring that the legal system imprisons black men at a higher rate than white men regardless of the incident rate of crime is ignorant at best

I read the comment you're replying to as saying it didn't actually destroy anything, it's just easy to infer that from what's visible in records (e.g. statistics). "Didn't actually destroy anything in practice" pretty clearly puts it as against the idea that it destroyed anything though, to my eyes.

That may be what they meant, but my interpretation of their full statement(including the part about the formalization of that unit) was that they didn’t have any family structure to begin with. The poster may have had a nuanced reason for saying that, but given the dog whistle and lack of any nuance actually stated by them, I don’t see a reason to assume as such

Not quite sure what the "dog whistle" was that you're referring to...please explain that!

The statistics show significantly lower marriage rates among black families (moreso correlated to poor families, in which black folks over-represent). The thing not shown in the statistics is the number of families where parents are together, but unmarried (and oftentimes reporting different addresses) because they get SIGNIFICANTLY more benefits that way. So...the family unit is there, but just not formalized. And people are just responding to the incentives in front of them.

That explanation doesn’t have a dog whistle, but implying that a family structure doesn’t exist in any manner in the black community is the dog whistle that it seems you inadvertently triggered

Can't even take seriously a comment which refers to elected leaders as "elites" and that's against my very harsh criticism of the voting restrictions and average voter apathy here.

Being good to employees is in my experience not that clearcut.

Yes, companies spend money on social events to make the employees feel good about the company.

But they won't spend any significant amount of money to keep valued employees, which of course makes said employees look elsewhere.

As an employee you are nearly always better off switching jobs every 18 months, as staying in the same job loses you money.

I wish companies would be more focused on this.

> But they won't spend any significant amount of money to keep valued employees, which of course makes said employees look elsewhere.

Isn't it rather the other way round: you should be very careful to invest too much money into employees who are willing to quit?

Of we train them, they might leave.

But what if we don't train them and they stay?

Simple solution: let the employee pay for the training. If the employee stays for x years, the training costs are waived.

At least in tech, companies have already decided to make employees pay for training. You don’t see people doing leetcode training or side projects to pad their resume because their employers invested in increasing their skill set.

Given that this has already occurred, why would any employee agree to a system where now they have a financial obligation to their employer if they leave?

I get your sentiment but the employers already cut all the benefits out of the system when it comes to skill development. They’ll need to start adding back in investments to employee’s skills without any sort of guaranteed payback for a while before the average employee would extend them any trust

You aren't "investing" in employees by paying them a salary. Employees will get a 10-15% payrise by switching after 2 years. Give them that payrise and communicate why. Even if they leave anyway, you only pay them while they stay so you don't lose much.

> Welfare also destroyed the family unit (especially in the black community).

You sure it wasn't selective enforcement of the War on Drugs (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_the_war_on_drugs) and the criminal justice system in general (https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2015/08/racial-dispariti...), and redlining (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining)?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com