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Comment by makeitdouble | Hacker News Reader

> Public companies are inherently evil by default

The extremism of this positon makes it hard to swallow the message. You might as well be right, but accepting it at face value would be a huge cognitive dissonance for many people working in public companies.

Basically, the “are we the baddies ?” answer would be “yes” for a huge chunk of us, and I don’t think that’s how we see it personally. Companies have to make money, but the evil label needs way more nuance.

To apply this to another context: I genuinely think that IKEA has had an outsized positive impact on our everyday life, even as they aim to make money (not the core “charity”, but the rest of the group), or as they make truely dirty legal and commercial decisions to trick the system in their favor. And they didn’t improve flatpacks by accident, it is their stated mission, and I’d be crazy proud of my job if I designed the Expedit series.

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> IKEA has had an outsized positive impact

IKEA has been illegally logging forests in romania for decades.

The first public conpany was involved in slavery. Show me a large enough company and there will be a history of fraud, illegality and human rights abuses.

They've bee caught using wood from companies logging illegally yes, but that's just as much an enforcement issue in these countries as it is on IKEA to manage it's supply chain.

Also using tainted wood isn't the only thing IKEA has ever done, just as breaking the speed limit or parking illegally isn't he only thing I've ever done. If you were held to a "one strike and you're out" good/evil standard would you really stand up? I know I wouldn't.

Intermediaries are often just an easy way to get out of liability. It can happen to small companies that you don't know about or are powerless to your supplier's illegal practices. With big companies you know and have the power, which makes it your responsibility and you being part of the problem.

There's also a trend to give big companies liability for their supply chains. Germany just enacted a supply chain law last year and there are talks about similar laws for the EU: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supply_Chain_Act

Yep, that's fair enough. I don't buy "therefore evil" though, companies like the people they are composed of are complicated.

> Show me a large enough company and there will be a history

The specificity of your comment (large enough company) is misleading. The flaws you call out are everywhere, not just large companies.

Humans are imperfect. Human organizations and institutions (companies of all sizes, governments of all types, schools, churches, and so on) are also imperfect.

I don't mean to say that we shouldn't set high goals, devise mechanisms to deal with imperfection and so on (checks and balances, regulations, etc), just that there isn't anything particularly unique about "large companies" in this regard.

Funny, I don't see any good from IKEA when you look at the greater picture. More waste, un-accounted for externalities all over the board (labour laws, environment exploitation), extremely well-honed organisation designed to evade taxes through "charities".

You can add their influences in normalizing mass production and mass consumerism, "fast decor", the complete blandness of what they sell and how it contributes to globalization and the destruction of diverse aesthetic values...

I am sympathetic to your point, but think that ship has sailed. It might come back, but not in the same form.

I say that as a sample of the population who deeply wants the bland, blank slate aesthetic in reaction to the rococo and non-modular furniture I had to deal with in other people’s home and surroundings.

Paradoxally, I am sure it will come back as a reaction to people like me, and next gnerations might want to get back to their roots and resurface diverse and culturally more anchored styles. When it does, I hope they’ll have small production tools (home grade cnc mills ?) to do so in small batches at low cost, and get crazy with the stuff they make.

IKEA in a vacuum has many many flaws.

As I see it though, what IKEA displaced wasn’t the family owned expert artisans manufacturing built to order furnitures.

It was piss poor, badly designed, actual shitty materials, poor country labor intensive flat packs.

When I was a kid my family bought cheap mass produced furniture from shopping malls, the looks were fine, it came from Vietnam or China [0], and the quality was laughably bad. Finished product would be slightly crooked. Screws slightly loose. Smell terrible. And people would have that “what did you expect for that price” grin. [1]

I can’t imagine employees were treated in a stellar way either, we heard scandals after scandals about third world factories, and the quality itself was a testament to how much humans were involved in all of that.

So, I see IKEA as a provider of somewhat decent furnitures instead of shitty ones, most other parameters staying the same (they don’t, I genuinely think they’re not worse than the 80s~90s post colonialist euro companies)

[0] how the table turned, quality wise…

[1] to address the obvious “why didn’t they buy more expensive furniture that could have lasted way longer instead”…the answer is simple: upfront money. The same reason people don’t buy 5 story apartment buildings even if that would bring them more money in the long term.

The effects of IKEA must be very different depending on where in the world they were introduced, and when.

If your country (cough-cough USA) had already descended into the "crap products globalisation stage" before IKEA came along, it will feel like a net positive.

If your country (cough-cough Sweden) got IKEA before that stage, I would say, yes, IKEA displaced quality furniture.

I'd say the overall problem is un-accounted for externalities. Cheap crap from China or Vietnam is just a symptom of the same illness.

Crappy products are okay, in a free market economy. But crappy products with huge environmental costs undercutting "kosher" crappy products, is not okay.

What use are even labour and environmental laws if one can skirt them by pushing the problem elsewhere?

Ikea also sells nice, solid wood, furniture. And they typically do so at a price that is much more affordable than their competitors.

If you want to go into Ikea and just buy long lasting solid wood products, go ahead! Indeed I'd argue Ikea has made new solid wood furniture more accessible, heck sometimes new Ikea wood furniture is cheaper than consignment store wood furniture!

I see. Then it's OK to skirt environmental and worker protection laws, I guess. As long as the products are nice.

That’s generally been the decision the western world has settled on, which seems like an improvement in that we at least need the products to be nice

Environment is tough. I see IKEA to blame here, but as long as there will be customer for cheaper goods who don’t care much about where the wood comes from, or how all of that is fabricated, it won’t change much. Other smaller makers have the same conundrum when they source their wood from bigger entities who will either hide where it actually comes from, and/or give plausible deniability. That’s where I see having everyone hypothetically switch to smaller furniture makers wouldn’t be enough, we’d need a lot more to make actual progress.

A bit the same way so many corporations are “carbon neutral” through offset, even if it’s a scam under most of these.

IKEA using it’s position to do something could be a realistic solution, I just don’t know if there is much hope in that regard.

The coffee scene could be a exemple where traceability helps a lot to improve the market (as a consumer there are options to do the right thing for non crazy prices), while the global picture stays grim as the most sold coffee will always be the unmarked super market value pack.

Worker protection: same as for Amazon, I wish they rapidly advance their robotization programs. In the meantime I strongly support more regulation, and would like security and social policies baked into the prices, especially as I don’t think there would be that much actual impact. Just as wish more companies across the board get unions.

We provide a regulatory ecosystem - inside that ecosystem, Amazons and IKEAs are the winners.

If we change the ecosystem, other companies would evolve to be the winners. (Or IKEA and Amazon would change.)

No, and I don't think anyone has argued that. The argument is that the company has both good and bad aspects to it.

> Ikea also sells nice, solid wood, furniture. And they typically do so at a price that is much more affordable than their competitors.

I've seen (and own) some solid wood furniture from IKEA. I'm usually an IKEA defender (see another post I just made on this thread).

I would not describe their solid wood furniture as "nice". Given the way they tend to assemble even small members from multiple small scraps of wood glued together rather than single pieces, I think calling them "solid" is even a bit of a stretch, at least in some cases. They're also made out of fairly soft wood, usually, and barely finished, if at all.

As per your note [1], this is the "Sam Vimes "Boots" theory of socioeconomic unfairness" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory:

"The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles. But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet. This was the Captain Samuel Vimes "Boots" theory of socioeconomic unfairness."

Seen the kind of furniture you can get in the same price range as IKEA?

It's usually most or all of: hideous; difficult to assemble (why people complain about IKEA when basically every other player in their market is far worse, I do not understand); worse-made than IKEA furniture; still, somehow, more expensive than the IKEA equivalent.

IKEA's about the best option out there for people who don't have a lot of money and also would rather not furnish their home with cheap antiques from the 1920s (go much newer, or much older, and it starts getting expensive), having to do a lot of DIY re-upholstering in the process if they want anything with cloth on it.

The other problem with "Public companies are inherently evil by default" is that saying that "the whole system is wrong", is just providing leaders with an excuse. Public Companies can serve their customers, shareholders, and look after their employees while still being ethical, there is always a choice, and there are many positive benefits to behaving ethically, for one, it means you are a trustworthy company to deal with.

It's like the story of the scorpion and the frog.

If you know that the system is broken and it is setup in a way that rewards bad behavior, what do you think is the best course of action: to expect that exceptional individuals will be always in charge to avoid the mistakes, or to fix the system so that even normal, fallible humans can be at helm and not having everyone else worried about potential abuses?

>fix the system so that even normal, fallible humans can be at helm and not having everyone else worried about potential abuses?

I assume normal and fallible humans are the ones who are going to setup this new system that will prevent abuse?

Yes, so? Isn't that the exact purpose of institutions?

If normal people (shareholders, c levels, etc) are going to engage in bad behavior then why do you think other normal people (lawmakers) are not? If lawmakers are going to be rewarded from bad behavior then we can't fix the rules / laws.

I'm not suggesting we shouldn't try, but it isn't really silver bullet.

This is why I said about institutions. Lawmakers are (or should be) subject to public scrutiny.

An employee from a corporation benefits from a corporation that abuses their power. Ordinary citizens that vote for a corrupt politician do not, and have no invested interest in them.

I agree, but until something comes to light abuses could still be happening. I was mostly pushing back on the idea that a system can be created that would allow the average person to not pay attention. I think individuals must be vigilant even if we think we have a good system.

I probably wasn't as clear as I should have been.

"Not worrying about it" is not "not paying attention", maybe that is the point that you assumed more than I intended to convey with my comment.

It's less about matter of eliminating abuse, and more about damage reduction. We can have systems that even if someone screws up, the consequences are not catastrophic.

I don't see why not. Normal humans make mistakes, can't manually manage memory safely, are bad at building safe buildings without experience and standards and guidelines, and naturally fall into unsafe food preparation habits.

Still, we have set up memory safe practices and languages and standards, building standards and regulations, and food safety regulations that work quite well. Just because humans make mistakes and are fallible doesn't mean that humans are incapable of working to prevent mistakes and the consequences of human fallibility.

I'm not suggesting we shouldn't have rules and laws and whatnot. It sounded like the person I was responding to thought it would be a silver bullet. I was trying to push back saying it wouldn't be perfect. We can improve things, but since the rule makers are also fallible there will always be loopholes and other issues.

> Basically, the “are we the baddies ?” answer would be “yes” for a huge chunk of us, and I don’t think that’s how we see it personally. Companies have to make money, but the evil label needs way more nuance.

The answer to this is that if it's nearly impossible to find a more ethical job (e.g. a non-profit medical research worker cooperative) when the system you're under doesn't economically incentivise ethical job creation. If your probability of finding one is incredibly slim, you're practically excused – you're just doing what's needed to have a normal life.

Obviously it's so simplistic it's dangerous. Try to reason the same way about humans, "the only responsibility is to pass on our genes and therefore there can be no altruism". Right? Wrong.

I agree with you, but the obvious retort is that altruism is "just" one possible medium-to-long term emergent strategy whose purpose is to ensure the survival of your genetic material. :)

IKEA is private. Do you not think it would behave quite differently were it a typical public company?

Thanks, I forgot they were private. To my defense, their corporate structure is a mess (on purpose) and the franchise shops could probably be public while the controlling entities and holdings stay private.

The structure is so deliberately conceived that I wouldn’t be surprised if it kept the same functioning even as a public entity. They’d make less money, but would probably still concentrate decision power into a few chosen hands and lock the whole from external influence.

> The extremism of this positon makes it hard to swallow the message. You might as well be right, but accepting it at face value would be a huge cognitive dissonance for many people working in public companies.

Has that not been a critique of software engineers working at FAANGs? That they think they are working for a moral company while the “Don’t Be Evil” company mottos are replaced in the background with anti competitive practices and deals with authoritarian governments.

Tbh I think claiming that it’s an extremist opinion when there’s an entire century+ old political school of thought that views the entirety of capitalism as amoral, is either putting your head in the sand at the thought, or an equally extremist opinion on the good of companies

What political school of thought is that?

Communism?

Ah. That may be the world's worst example of a reasonable alternative based on its track record :)

The bar was if it was extremist or not, not it’s level of effectiveness.

If something nearly half the world followed is considered a extremist then I do not believe the word has any meaning left

I am convinced that 99.999% of the people that claim to be "anti-Capitalist" are in reality anti-Corporativist.

It's way too easy for people working at big companies to think "the company might be evil, but not me / my team". The Corporation gives everyone a moral shield that lets them rationalize all the shit that happens, but the money that pays their salary and the stock options they get all come from the same source.

> It's way too easy for people working at big companies to think "the company might be evil, but not me / my team".

See Better Off Ted for a great look at this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better_Off_Ted

> I am convinced that 99.999% of the people that claim to be "anti-Capitalist" are in reality anti-Corporativist.

Aren't they in fine the same thing?

If you believe that the logical consequence of a system is the emergence of amourphous amoral entities harming the greater good, aren't you actually fundamentaly against said system? I kind of get the opposite take-away from your line of thoughts: I believe that a lot of people who think of themselves as capitalist but actively distrust corporations are actually latent anti-capitalist.

You can have Capitalism without Corporations: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31317641

You can have a market-oriented economy on small scales, and we can have independent professionals competing to see who provides the best services at the lowest prices, and we can use money and capital as the means of production just fine. The problem is when we take a system in one scale and think "bigger is better". This is when we get "amorphous amoral entities harming the greater good".

Mind you, if you think about it this also applies to other socio-political systems. Communism, per se, is not a problem. If the general idea of "communism" was just a bunch of hippies living however they wanted, there wouldn't be so much reason to be against it.

The problem is when you have people going full Trostky and actively work to make it a Global-scale system, effectively turning the State into an "amorphous amoral entity harming the greater good"

Particularly the logic “your code is not open source” = “you are evil”…

Closed source code definitely goes against the right to repair/own/modify.

Does it? If I sell you a widget and make available to you that widget's code, with strict prohibitions on copying and sharing, that's not open-source--but you can repair and modify it.

Right. But what happens if another customer has the same issue, you are prohibited from sharing it.

Once you deal with all edge cases. You end up with an OSS license.

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