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Comment by benreesman | Hacker News Reader

I started working on social media in 2006. I did it for a big name for most of the 2010s.

It can be a good thing, it’s easier to make it a good thing. It’s expensive as hell to make a screen more destructive than narcotics, you need PhDs and server farms and shit for that.

The problem is that software companies aren’t “allowed to mature”. Sometimes you tap out the market, you aren’t doing 20% next year without pushing the envelope.

Until it’s ok to win in a market and that’s enough, you can’t trust any of this shit.

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How could we remove the temptation to squeeze every last dollar from a company, even if it crushes society in the process?

What if the market leader in an industry was taxed such that there was no incentive to make more money than the 2nd or 3rd place company in the market? This would encourage competition, and also remove many of the perverse incentives when a single company is dominant.

What incentive would there be to take the risk of being the first in the market?

One idea I've been mulling is a progressive corporate tax. It would encourage companies to split up if there aren't massive synergies to justify the increased tax.

How would that work? Is the market a town, a city, a country or the world? What about companies that supply other companies with goods or materials? What about natural and logical monopolies (eg roads, railways, water supplies). It’s gets messy instantly.

I have another idea.

What if we could hold the board and the CEO personally liable with prison time for crimes by all the agents, contractors, employees, and so on of a company (with exception when they explicitly went against company policy to commit said crimes)? You'd think that was already the law but given that the Wells Fargo CEO avoided any prison time when management misused blacklist on employees who didn't meet their illegal quota, I am not holding my breath.

I think this just incentivises cartels or elaborate corporate structures.

Because not only do we have something close to functioning representative government here, even in places they don’t?

The United States military is the most terrifying embodiment of force in human history. It could dismantle any regime on earth in a day. And they got their asses kicked by a bunch of semiliterate extremists with a bunch of surplus Soviet small arms and RPGs hidden in basements.

The point of the digression is we make the rules, and no plausible oppression can stop that short of our consent, and for big parts of our history we made a lot of rules in the general public interest, and enforced them as we saw fit.

I abhor violence and a big reason why I post on the Internet is that I want to see people stop parroting arch-Randian narratives that don’t serve them before one of these tent camps drags Altman out of his Tesla and beats him to death with his own iPhone.

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