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Comment by ycdxvjp | Hacker News Reader

There is an endless supply of corporate robots to replace them.

Instead there are options:

1. Govt walks in and just nationalizes them ala Japan post world war 2 where Mitsubishi, Sumimoto etc where just turned into puppets over night As in hostile takeover to influence how they use their loot.

2. Govt can then use the SpaceX model to disrupt brick and mortar sectors world wide (cement, steel, ships, planes, energy, fertilizer etc etc). The test will be bringing prices down of everything not just for Americans or the west but for everyone. other wise immigration waves just like the drugs flowing into the west will never stop.

Tech is supposed to fuck prices up. Google once upon a time did it for email, chat, video, search etc. I don't see why it can't happen with everything. We need grand goals not just how to add 6 more cameras into another fucking phone.

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Yeah but is government really less corrupt than big tech?

Its very human to want a hero come save the day but I fear that we'd just be replacing one bad actor with another.

If we still lived under monarchy, I'd agree 100%, but we don't.

There's at least a theoretical chance of voting the government out in favour of someone marginally better. I don't know what are the odds of that happening, but it's definitely bigger than 0%. And if we're not in the board of directors of a company, our odds of making them less corrupt is precisely 0%.

Also post world war 2, the Japanese govts did pull it off by taking control of industry and getting everyone to row in a particular direction.

The government as a monolith, probably? The government in specific departments, maybe?

Corporate combinations are profit machines.

Governments are bureaucracy and vote-getting machines.

Pick your monomaniacalism.

But! Bureaucracy does have the benefit of being defined by law. Which... big tech really doesn't.

> There is an endless supply of corporate robots to replace them.

If people will be held personally responsibly they have good incentives to not do this kind of stuff. Right now the incentive is exactly the other way: do anything to earn a profit and it will be good for your personal bank account. If it turns out some stuff was illegal, then well, not something that will be your problem as long as you didn't commit outright blatant fraud.

That Travis Uber guy may have fallen from grace somewhat, but he's still more wealthy than most of us will be, and part of why he's wealthy is because he knowingly (and very explicitly) broke a bunch of laws, never mind he resigned for reasons other than being a Uber's criminal activities.

> Instead there are options:

Neither of these options are what has been commonly referred to as “piercing the corporate veil”: hold the shareholders accountable for the decisions of their hired executives. We’ve been talking about this exact issue so long that it has a name we’ve stopped using.

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

If a company is being fined millions of dollars it’s likely because they made decisions which should reasonably land those responsible in prison.

The shareholders are already held accountable by the practice of fining. The shareholders have a "merely financial" interest. The ptoblem with not piercing the corporate veil is specifically that execs end up getting a "free pass" as it were to do scummy things.

> Tech is supposed to fuck prices up. Google once upon a time did it for email, chat, video, search etc. I don't see why it can't happen with everything. We need grand goals not just how to add 6 more cameras into another fucking phone.

Which raises the question: Are these actually tech companies? Or simply 21st Century advertising (platform) companies - dependant on technology - whose primary goal is to exploit human nature for profit?

Abandon the idea that these are still tech companies and the world makes more sense (and gets more dystopian).

There are tech companies and there are tech startups. They behave differently, and it gets incredibly hard to remain a startup when the employee headcount is in 5-6 figures. The ability to f-* prices up is more a startup thing, imo. I think these large tech companies are, as you say, something different now.

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