Hacker News Reader

Comment by ad404b8a372f2b9 | Hacker News Reader

Interesting, from reading her post you'd think it's a real challenge to avoid working in a company that will eventually become evil. My first thought was that there is a failure in the system if it inevitably leads companies to become evil as they grow (maybe a failure of government?).

But then I realized looking back at my career, I have not worked for any evil companies to my knowledge, at least not cartoonishly evil. It seems most of the companies she mentions have one thing in common, they are by the bay, part of a local system that's one of the economic engines of the U.S and favours growth over any other considerations, including ethics.

So my conclusion from this post would be, if it matters to you, don't work in the bay? There are many industries beside software where good software engineers are needed and you can do good, challenging, and very innovative work "to make the world a better place".

View on HN

Unfortunately most companies don't exist to make the world a better place, most companies exist to make money - the more, the better. And if you want to make more money, there's definitely a temptation to use unethical (while still legal) methods. And companies that make less money tend to be bought by companies that make more money, which tend to be higher on the "evil scale". Or sometimes, a not-so-evil company will buy a more-evil company which then eats them up from within, like Google with DoubleClick or Boeing with McDonnell Douglas.

Glance for a moment at the Wikipedia list of profitable companies [0]. Observe that #1 is Saudi Aramco, which supports one of the more horrible regimes.

Now I'm sure we have a line of people waiting to claim that they are evil, but we're running an experiment in Europe to find out what happens when horrible regimes stop providing oil - turns out there are serious risks of people starving or freezing to death. The loss to living standards is incalculable but large.

There is a great reason that companies are freed from the requirement to be morally good - because human instincts are not calibrated to run an 8-billion-strong postindustrial globe. It doesn't work. If we let people do things completely on instinct most people will die quite quickly, and the leadership will turn out to be corrupt anyway.

We do things this way because a lot of experiments were run, and free market economics gets much better results than all the systems people swear do better. It harnesses greed to the cause of ... if you won't admit it is good you have to at least admit it is effective. Honestly, I think it is good too. Good and evil are not the right mental tools here, morals don't cope with the scale that humans need to operate on now.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_corporate_prof...

>Now I'm sure we have a line of people waiting to claim that they are evil, but we're running an experiment in Europe to find out what happens when horrible regimes stop providing oil - turns out there are serious risks of people starving or freezing to death. The loss to living standards is incalculable but large.

Well I don't see how people in Western Europe (i.e. excluding Ukraine) are in danger of starving and I would actually argue the people that we are seeing being killed at the moment are a direct consequence of buying cheap energy no matter the ethics. If Europe would have invested more strongly into becoming energy independent instead of chasing the cheapest oil and gas, we might have a slighly lower standard of living, but much of European politics would not be infiltrated by money from resource oligarchs and likely Russia would never have invaded so people would not be dying in a pointless war.

In other words, not

The whole western world took a gamble that Russia would behave within acceptable constraints (ie only bringing misery to its own citizens) because the costs of stepping outside those constraints would be too high economically, due to sanctions or just lost trade. I personally still believe that to be true - Russia is now done as a serious participant in the global economy; they won't be trusted for a generation or more. Living standards there will fall dramatically unless they become a vassal state of China. Where the west miscalculated was in expecting the man in charge to remain a rational actor. The last decade has shown us that such an assumption (as applied inside western democracies as well as outside) is no longer valid - so it now seems reasonable to assume un-ending volatility until a new order establishes itself. The next decade will be decided by whether the USA wants to retain its hegemony badly enough to stand up to China, or whether it will retreat into isolationism instead. Currently, sadly, my money is on the latter.

They ware a perfectly rational actor so far, Europe and the west in general has mostly just spouted empty platitudes and always blinked first.

Nothing happened with the two Chechenyan wars, with Georgia, nobody did anything about Syrian cities being bombed to rubble and the 2014 sanctions post-Crimea ware rather weak.

During that time everybody continued to buy gas, oil, electricity, fertilizer, aluminium and titanium. Clearly, the west did not care about things like that and it would be business like normal.

Except that this time it was found out there's a limit.

> everybody continued to buy gas, oil, electricity, fertilizer, aluminium and titanium

not to mention nuclear fuel (https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Framatome-and-Ro...)

> There is a great reason that companies are freed from the requirement to be morally good - because human instincts are not calibrated to run an 8-billion-strong postindustrial globe.

Yet they are bound by many laws and regulations, beyond contract law and non-aggression, born of these instincts you malign, that (try to) prevent the worst of their greed. Laws covering worker safety, union-busting, antitrust and fair competition, child labor, truth in advertising, environmental protection, even requirements on the length and validity of warranties.

You have to ignore all of these constraints to arrive at the simplistic "greed is good" conclusion. A conclusion that implies not only that we should not add further prohibitions against newly-recognized "evil" behavior (e.g. web spying, devices locked against their owner, etc..), but also that we should remove the prohibitions currently in place.

>Yet they are bound by many laws and regulations, beyond contract law and non-aggression, born of these instincts you malign, that (try to) prevent the worst of their greed

We don't regulate companies to prevent "the worst of the greed" except by some naive definition. We regulate them so they mop up or don't leave messes in their wake, be these messes social or environmental.

Companies don't poison the water or use bad labor practices because they want to. Large organizations (Boeing, the Catholic church, the FBI, etc) don't "want". They respond to incentives. Companies do it because it's less un-profitable than the next best option and to not do that while their competitors do puts them at a disadvantage. Regulation only adjusts the incentive scale.

>You have to ignore all of these constraints to arrive at the simplistic "greed is good" conclusion

You have to ignore the difference between "good" and "can be harnessed for good" to come to that conclusion. You're implying meaning he didn't write because it makes a more easily defeated position.

> We don't regulate companies to prevent "the worst of the greed" except by some naive definition. We regulate them so they mop up or don't leave messes in their wake, be these messes social or environmental.

Those messes are the worst of their greed that I was referring to. I have no idea what your objection is - that those laws didn't "mandate companies behave good", but merely "readjusted incentives to avoid undesirable outcomes"??

Of course laws are not as simplistic as "try to do good, avoid doing evil", but that doesn't mean that is not their aim.

That's an astonishing argument. You argue that companies collaborating with evil regimes to produce oil is good, because... when something happens that means we have to stop buying their oil (Russian invasion of Ukraine)... we're suddenly in a lot of pain?

I come to exactly the opposite conclusion from that.

We'd have been far better off not putting ourselves in that position, i.e. in a position of dependence on those regimes in the first place, not to mention funnelling billions into their treasuries. Countries like Russia and Saudi have been using our cash to prop up their repressive regimes for decades, causing untold pain to their population, building up their military and using those funds to destabilise democracies across the globe.

If we'd put that money into nuclear and renewables instead of being happy to embrace greed (and I'd have been fine with legislation to achieve that) we'd have energy security, we'd be looking at much less devastation from climate change and the world would be in a much better place in general.

> If we'd put that money into nuclear and renewables instead of being happy to embrace greed...

The regulators have been squeezing the life out of the nuclear industry for what, 40 years now? There is that wonderful chart floating around [0] showing what regulators have done to the learning curve. You're not going to get a more hardened and cynical capitalist than me and I've been spewing for more than a decade about the Australian government blocking me from investing in nuclear power effectively. Their policy is a disaster on multiple levels.

It isn't greedy people holding back nuclear power, it is the dreamers looking for an industrial power supply that doesn't cause pollution while we run out of fossil fuels. It'd be great if we can find that in renewables, but we'd have gone heavy nuclear decades ago if it was left up to raw greed.

People also whinge about Texas being greedy with their massive investment in cheap renewables rather than winter hardening them. Damn those greedy people for going all in on cheap renewable, I suppose. Again, the issue isn't greed, it is the reactionaries getting antsy when capitalists do things the cheap way. I point out that the Texas grid was still better and cheaper than what the Germans managed with their Energiewende and social whatever it is they wanted to feel moral about.

[0] Figure 7.11 - https://rootsofprogress.org/devanney-on-the-nuclear-flop

How many times has the German grid collapsed?

I have no idea, I only started paying half-attention when the Energiewende started firing up and I don't read German. But I went to have a look and found someone saying they had a 30 hour outage for 30k people in Berlin in 2019.

Things break, and you need to be ready for blackouts. I'd still rather take cheap and 99% availability than expensive and 100%.

https://www.dw.com/en/berlin-blackout-raises-questions-over-...

That was just the usual local incompetence. They cut a cable and couldn't get it reconnected. I don't recall the exact number, but it wasn't many houses.

Europe is actually pretty connected wrt the electricity network, so if we'll ever encounter an actual blackout you can expect it to be covered everywhere, especially in Chinese/Russian media as they'll be meme-ing how much better they're.

Despite having countless localized outages all the time, but hey... You know how dictatorships work. Can't let the truth get in the way of propaganda after all.

The linked article is about the fact that there isn't a plan how to handle a full blackout, precisely because there hasnt been one. It's the same for all developed nations, outage just haven't happened in ages so contingencies have been forgotten, basically.

1) Texans pays something like 15c/kWh and Germans pay something like 30c/kWh. The German grid is far inferior to the Texan one given that they'll both have availability in the 99% range.

2) In Texas you have to be ready for a 48 hour blackout in case your supplier is incompetent. In Germany you have to be ready for a 48 hour blackout in case of ... usual local incompetence? Although the Texan grid is obviously less reliable, that doesn't actually change the amount of preparation that households should be doing.

3) There is also a pretty reasonable argument that it is better to have a rare blackout than to have no plan or experience for a major blackout. It is terrible planning to assume that nothing can go wrong.

4) Texan greed got them to ~25% renewable penetration in their electricity mix. It is cheap and sustainable. The German energiewende has got them to around 40% renewable penetration and "highly dependent on Russian energy, as it gets more than half of the natural gas, a third of heating oil, and half of its coal imports from Russia. Due to this reliance, Germany blocked, delayed or watered down EU proposals to cut Russian energy imports amid the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine" [0]. This wasn't a close contest, the Texan regulators - the ones who leave it a bit more to greedy capitalists - are the ones that people should be putting in charge.

The failures of putting non-greedy people in charge of the German energy grid was so bad it had geopolitical consequences! That is why we try to leave it up to greedy people. If they'd listened to us greedy types they'd be knee-deep in reactors and not crippled by the threat of Russian sanctions. The people pushing the Energiewende thought they were a force for good, and it turns out they were the exact opposite. They were empowering a land war in Europe.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Germany

"but we're running an experiment in Europe to find out what happens when horrible regimes stop providing oil"

That experiment is basically switching one horrible regime with another (e.g. Aserbaidschan and Qatar), so I would argue that it was never really about morals at all, but rather geopolitics and power all along.

Continue doing more buisness with russia would simply be more expensive, as it would increase the cost of doing buisness with closer trading partners/allies.

"morals don't cope with the scale that humans need to operate on now."

So when was a time, when morals could and should have an influence on human operations? Slavery just ended recently (in most parts of the world) and your argument means for example continuing buisness with Nazi germany during the war (and holocaust). There is no line, when you say morals are not the right tool. So this means profiting of slave labour camps. The more and brutal exploitation, the more profit, the better?

I don't think so.

My stance is, that there is just no general solution and everything is case by case. By doing buisness with a random chinese company(e.g. buying something made in china), I do not endorse chinese politic. But if that specific company is involved with slave labour, then yes, I would support that slave system by buying from them and I would try to find a alternative.

I feel like Candide is a pretty good antidote to this sort of thinking, which is a form of Panglossianism.

   <sarcasm>

Supporting brutal regimes because not supporting them means you might not have enough oil or gas? Of course, it works out for the best. A few sacrificed in war and oppression while the many live well. Nazis were bad for the Jews? There are more Jews now than ever, and they have control of their ancestral lands. COVID wasn't being taken seriously enough by some countries/states? They've successfully culled their elderly population and are probably saving tons of long-run suffering.

   </sarcasm>

Obviously, that is all sarcastic, but there is something weird about teleological thinking. The same sort of thinking that the events that led to my birth were ipso-facto moral, because otherwise I would be wishing for my own nonexistence, and as a moral person how could I do that? An immoral person could take my place.

I just read Candide this week, I liked it. The world is pretty miserable - but you need a plan to make it better. "Avoid doing Evil" is a plan that:

1. We have tried.

2. Doesn't work.

The plan "give greedy people incentives to make people materially better off" not only works, but works better than everything else we've tried. Ergo, we want more greed, not less evil.

I wouldn’t call that a plan, just a principle. Same for “all about the Benjamins”. The plan is anything from “Think and Grow Rich” to dealing drugs.

But if your plan is to try to set up a bunch of moral slides that cause your desired outcome as the end of a chain of dominoes, well, best of luck but I am not signing on.

Most companies exist to make a living, and have a clear concept of "well enough".

Unfortunately, due to scale issues, most software development jobs isn't on those companies. But each innovation that reduces the cost of development moves this relation into a better position.

> There are many industries beside software where good software engineers are needed and you can do good, challenging, and very innovative work "to make the world a better place".

Honestly, such as and how?

I worked for one company I thought had a good mission, and a good product (it wasn't ads!), ahead of its competitors. Lackluster marketing, then we got acquired and inept management sunk it, and ended up with those of us who worked on it laid off and it's all gone, now.

I'm in healthcare now, but it is really hard to move the needle. There's no way around integrating with providers, and they're driving a lot of absolutely bonkers technical decisions. I spent a lot of time building out brand new, but completely broken, things, because there's nobody designing the system.

Meanwhile recruiters routinely hit my inbox with information-free cold pitches. I'd kill for a lure that had bait attached to it. The last email that had a salary attached wanted a Senior Software Engineer but was offering less than what I started at in the industry as an entry-level engineer.

> don't work in the bay

I left the Bay, and it's not really changed anything from a work/career perspective. But I don't think it's morally acceptable to tell people to "just leave"; what if they have a home there? family? connections? Perhaps giving it all up might be the most pragmatic thing, but it might crush a soul in the meantime.

That said, the political climate of the Bay was "head, firmly in sand" when I left. I left partly because I do not see the Bay, collectively, being capable of solving the problems they face. (There are a few people trying — including a friend of mine I left behind. But they're hopelessly outnumbered.)

> if it matters to you

Maslow's hierarchy. Real rent is up, nominal compensation is down. People are getting laid off left and right. Being a millionaire is practically a pre-req to home ownership near any city. (And companies include "geographic adjustment" in compensation these days.)

I wouldn't take the message "just leave" necessarily as inconsiderate advice, or at least not always. It might be also meant to vote with your feet, because that's the only influence you can have in the process, and if enough people do it then it may tilt the needle a bit.

Pick any, I've worked in telecom, GIS, health, you need software everywhere. You have to weigh salary against the appeal of the mission and the work environment. You can't have everything, and you certainly can't have bay salaries. Personally I've never had trouble finding meaningful work with people I respect, but I have had to make sacrifices on the salary front.

You seem to have read my comment as saying snarkily "if you really cared you'd just leave", that's not what I intended to convey.

Of course I realize people have multi-faceted priorities, family, financial safety concerns, existing investments, and so on... I'm not telling people to leave as much as I'm saying if you care deeply about working for ethical companies, it seems like working in the bay area is not going to make it easy, and you'd probably have a easier time elsewhere.

There are plenty of cities where you don't need to be a millionaire to own a home, I have a friend who just bought a nice house in San Antonio for 200k. That's another advantage of working out of the bay.

My experience is any company can be viewed as evil. I’ve done a ton of computational work for pharma companies. We were trying to discover cures for diseases, pretty much a good thing, right? Don’t have to look hard to find people giving reasons why pharma companies are evil.

> Don’t have to look hard to find people giving reasons why pharma companies are evil.

Case in point:

Imagine you find someone grasping a cliff edge by their fingertips. Pulling them back to safety is good! Pulling them back to safety only after they promise you all their worldly wealth forevermore is less good. Being in the business of offering people this deal is not better. Funding the effort to prevent people from restraining your exploitation of cliff danglers is still worse.

This isn't an insoluble moral puzzle. I don't think pharma is an ideal example for your larger point. Most businesses don't thrive on the desperation of their customers.

But I also don't think your point is correct. There are better and worse companies.

I understand one needs to make one's peace with one's choices. I've worked for companies that were doing evil (not exclusively, but at all). I've worked for companies that were mediocre at best. I'm currently working for a company that I would say is positively good. I got paid more by the evil companies. I have been happier working for the good companies though it's harder to support my family. But I understand people who choose to keep working for their evil company, particularly when others depend on their income. In one of the more egregious outbursts of evil at one of the companies I worked for I had friends who quit. They didn't want to be complicit. I stayed. I had kids and didn't want to throw my family into turmoil. But I saw the choice I was making.

> This isn't an insoluble moral puzzle. I don't think pharma is an ideal example for your larger point. Most businesses don't thrive on the desperation of their customers.

I mean, pharma as an industry also creates the ability to pull people back from the edge.

Medicine isn't created out of thin air, the universe doesn't just owe us a steady supply of new innovations that have kept so many people alive and in better comfort. Money needs to be invested, that money has to be paid by someone.

(I'm not talking about specifics of the US healthcare system or anything, where there are problems, just pharma in general.)

Like seriously, what is your alternative?

My point is that when a highwayman says "your money or your life" we call it a crime. He gets lots of money because those are the choices. But those are the choices which, in the USA, pharma and other medical professionals offer. They can charge enormous amounts because these are the conditions. Does it cost a lot to develop drugs? Sure. But the profits more than cover the costs. Obviously. This market sector is hugely profitable. Other people who solve difficult problems where their potential customer isn't desperate cannot achieve equivalent profits.

If you work in medicine you have lots of ways to wash your conscience. Medical school is hard and expensive! You are saving lives! But in the end you can charge the rates you charge because your customer is desperate (to say nothing of the information asymmetry, the cost and difficulty of seeking a second opinion, etc.). There is a huge market failure here and that is the source of your enormous profit.

There are many alternative ways to achieve the same end without the market failure fleecing the unfortunate in the middle. Offer bounties for medical breakthroughs. Finance healthcare as a public good. This will reduce the rate of improvement in medical science because the payoff for breakthroughs will be less. Maybe this is the wrong way to go about it. But I'd rather take my chances with a less broken medical system. I've been fleeced many times in my life by the US healthcare system. If I have to sacrifice my well being for some cause, there are others I'd prefer. Will innovations slow if the US stops being a patsy? Yes. But I'd just like access to the medicine we already have.

I don't think that's a great analogy, since giving someone a hand when they are dangling off a cliff is easy and anyone (who happened to be around) could do it at low cost. Developing new medical treatments is incredibly expensive and difficult, and only part of that is because of regulatory burdens. You aren't just playing to develop the treatment you are receiving, but also the dozens of potential treatments that the pharma companies invested huge amounts of money into that didn't end up working out.

This is all beside the point. It is incredibly difficult to carve a palace into a grain of rice inside a bottle. There is no great profit in it, though. Pharma is profitable not because it is difficult but because its customers are desperate, have limited choices, and are dependent on experts to make those choices; experts who also profit from the market failure inherent in medicine.

> So my conclusion from this post would be, if it matters to you, don't work in the bay?

I had a job at a publicly traded company with an office (my office) in Ohio - and not headquartered from the bay but another part of the Midwest - and one day during pride month the CEO emailed everyone to say that they would NOT put up a pride flag. They went on to explain that they couldn’t because it would be upsetting, and if inclusivity flags were normal to display at the office, black people may want a flag too, and where would it end?.

They were a very generic company, and not particularly evil in other aspects of their business.

I have also worked at large FAANG companies in the bay. They treat employees way better (google’s shuttles! Free food! Equity Refreshers!). I would much rather be a Bay Area FAANG employee than an Ohio Generic Co employee. The way FAANG treats their employees isn’t evil.

There’s evil everywhere, IMO I might as well be treated well for being complicit towards it.

I don't understand your point. Are you saying the Ohio company is evil for not putting up a pride flag? Are you saying the Bay-area company isn't evil because they treated their higher-ranked servants well ?

Not OP, but my read is yes; and no, but why not take evil with better benefits.

Because utilitarianism? Just a thought.

seriously, the other poster never stops to consider that the reason people like this CEO are drawing a line in the sand is BECAUSE of people like this poster are running around drawing such conclusions from something as lik a pride flag.

What next, is this poster going to take a flamethrower to the anthill in their backyard? Lets see how well that works.

It’s definitely not good for employees to reject calls for things like a pride flag in mass emails to employees.

The reasoning, other minorities, explicitly mentioning black minorities, may want attention isn’t a very “not-evil” thing to do. It’s a weird whataboutism that throws black employees under the bus as the ultimate problem they’re trying to avoid. This was in 2017, and not eg during the George Floyd protests, so it was really arbitrary to mention.

It’s a flag in an office park, for a month, it has no negative affect to the company except an hour of human effort to put up and take it down. It does have a positive affect for their employees, however. Even if it does “snowball” to other minority groups… really has minimal downsides.

What is particularly stunning was the action to email the company to say they wouldn’t put up a flag because black people may get ideas. That’s the action that is hard to understand because it draws attention to a decision that could be made quietly with less negative impact.

So your anecdotal evidence suggests that all companies are evil?

Because this is certainly not the case.

Given their incentives to profit financially, not being evil would take a concerted effort which could be avoidd simply with an appearance of good, so it seems quite statistically probable that evil is more common than not.

This reminded me of a quote - "It is better to be at the right hand of the devil than in his path". So I looked it up and apparently it's from "The Mummy".

Refusal to conform to fashionable trends isn't evil. It is just being honest, which is admittedly rare in the corporate world.

Most companies that hoist the pride flag probably do not care about gay rights any more than your previous employer. They just do it to mollify Western activist Twitter. Their Middle Eastern branches, if extant, will do the precise opposite in order to mollify Middle Eastern activist Twitter and not get kicked out of the conservative kingdoms/emirates.

Once you start consider most big companies as perfect psychopaths who know how to simulate deep feelings on the surface while having none inside, the world starts making a lot more sense.

I would reach the opposite conclusion that you reached. Any company that allowed those flags I would consider to be intentionally bringing politics into the workplace and therefore manipulating their staff and therefore evil. A lack of political signaling is one of the things I look for in the category of non-evil.

methinks evil needs to stay really super bad and not lighten to "does something I don't agree with".

Are they doing it because of those reasons? Maybe.

Should they really be in the same category as Epstein and Dahmer? methinks no, so maybe lighten up on the language there.

> So my conclusion from this post would be, if it matters to you, don't work in the bay?

I believe you can find "problematic" companies everywhere. If it matters to you, go look at the pay. If they're paying enormous sums, they believe they can make much more. "Good things" usually don't offer that kind of profit margin.

That's not to say that shitty pay = good company, there's plenty of terrible people who are evil AND offer low salaries.

Almost every corporation and startup is cartoonishly evil (in that it stupidly and persistently refuses to look at people, except as a vehicle to increase the high score - money). If I may ask, is there some sort of sector you've worked in that kept the corporations you worked for stricly neutral or better?

I must admit I'm a little skeptical that they were not strictly amoral (which given the right incentives always tends to an almost ridiculous amount of evil), but I would really like to believe it.

> If I may ask, is there some sort of sector you've worked in that kept the corporations you worked for stricly neutral or better?

Education. Non-profits. Hospitals.

Not that the software vendors I worked for in those industries were perfect. Nor were the customers. Evil, greed, ambition, and power came into play and brought negativity to them all. But it tended to center around a handful of poor leaders, and did not prevent the overall impact of the work being "neutral or better".

I’ve worked for various network/telco equipment providers over the course of 20+ years, and there have only been a couple of cartoonishly evil moments that I can recall. Certainly not to the level of thinking that I needed to quit to save my soul. There were some soulless executives, but the business models weren’t morally bankrupt. I have been paid reasonably well (not Bay Area / FAANG well). Most of the companies don’t exist anymore, and I have been through my fair share of layoff cycles.

> Most of the companies don’t exist anymore

Do you think there could be a causal link between their lack of evil and the fact that they don’t exist anymore?

Mostly I think it was that the market moved and they didn't have the capital to make the leap. Combined with a not-so-great product/market fit to begin with, this is fatal for a capital-intensive startup.

At the end of the day it all comes down to personal politics and ethics. If you believe that providing grandma with some communication and networking tools while giving spooks access to her messages and letting marketers spew their stuff at her eyeballs is A-ok then facebook isn't evil.

There are also plenty of companies based in the bay area that aren't evil? I'm not suggesting they're necessarily good, but they're not evil.

This. The majority of companies I know of are evil in just one way: they want your money, and sometimes they will go to great lengths to get it.

The big villains in USA are not that powerful in some other places, because people and their governments reign them in.

> My first thought was that there is a failure in the system if it inevitably leads companies to become evil as they grow (maybe a failure of government?

It is not a bug, it is feature. And it is not the government, it is capitalism which endorses greed.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com