I was wrong about the ethics crisis
cacm.acm.org
cacm.acm.org
That's a generic problem with corporatism and monopoly, not "tech".
It shows up in "tech" because "tech" scales so well and has such strong network effects. But the US's tolerance of monopoly is the real cause. There need to be about four major players before markets push prices down. The US has three big banks, two big drugstore chains, etc.
Tough antitrust enforcement would help. Google should be broken up into Search, Browsers, Mobile Devices, Ads, and Services, and the units prohibited from contracting with each other.
Tough labor law enforcement would help. No more "gig worker" jobs that are exempt from labor law. No more "wage shaving". No more unpaid overtime. Prorate medical insurance payments based on hours, so companies that won't pay people for more than 30 hours a week pay their fraction of medical insurance. A minimum wage high enough that people making it don't need food stamps.
Also Yum and Roark, which, together, own much of fast food.
Attaching medical insurance to one's job is a market distortion caused by government tax policy. I.e. it enables one to buy insurance with pre-tax dollars rather than after-tax dollars. Making medical insurance premiums fully tax-deductible would fix that.
> A minimum wage high enough that people making it don't need food stamps.
That just makes those people unemployable, and will need food stamps even more. Nobody is going to hire people who cost more than the value they produce.
> Google should be broken up into Search, Browsers, Mobile Devices, Ads, and Services, and the units prohibited from contracting with each other.
Google is already in trouble because AI is disrupting their search/advertisement business model.
I'd be careful about destroying big business. The US is only part of the world. Destroying US big business means other countries will have those companies, and it's lose lose for the US. Do you want Big Tech to be American companies, or foreign companies?
Good, a job that cannot support biological needs should not exist. It’s not a viable business.
Why should I pay a stealth subsidy to whatever business it is.
> Do you want Big Tech to be American companies, or foreign companies?
This excuse was used to start wars, trample civil rights and employment rights. It basically means we must become like China to beat China. What would be the point?
There was a time in the not so distant past, that close to 100% of those "Minimum Wage" jobs were held by teenagers and youths with close to zero market value as employees, who needed their first few jobs to develop the skills, knowledge, resume and references so they could get an actual job.
Places like McDonalds and Summer Resorts and Amusement parks - were great places for youth to learn these skills. The real distortion is when you started having adults working in McDonalds. It was never a job to support a family - it was a minimum-wage job for kids to get started.
Those "minimum wage" jobs that you had a teenager in the 1950-1986 time period? They paid more than minimum wage does now, on an inflation adjusted basis. That $2/hr job in 1962 would be paying $21/hr if it had kept up with CPI.
That's the whole reason why adults started working in them.
Over time, federal minimum wage did not keep up even with national inflation rates, let alone regional cost of living changes. The result is that these employers, who were once forced to pay even their lowest level employees a living wage, can avoid paying even that.
It's also the CPI-adjusted equivalent of 1960s minimum wage numbers.
giving me $1.25 * (304.702/30.6) = $12.44 or $1 * (304.702/28.1) = $10.84
my sources: https://www.dir.ca.gov/iwc/minimumwagehistory.htm https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/inflation/consumer-pri...
January 1962 $2 => Nov 2024 $21.03
Using $1.25 in Jan 1963 gives me $12.97 ...
I used $2 in 1962 because in the 2016 Republican primaries one of the candidates made a reference to their job working in a burger store using these numbers.
What's gone awry in the last 40 or so years is that the labor market hasn't created enough new employment in what I could call "career" or "occupation" work - for adults, and as a result, they've started working in jobs that were never really meant for them, certainly not for doing things like paying rent, utilities, etc... and as a result - the working poor as a class has grown.
And $21/hour is not near enough to survive on in my region - (and is also a bit less than what most people in my area make at McDonalds (bay area)) - So you are in a round-about way proving my point.
Let me be as clear as I can be - "Increasing the minimum wage to be a living salary of $40-$50/hour would eliminate many opportunities for people entering the workforce who can't justify that kind of investment currently".
Leave it at the market-clearing level of $20-$25/hour, and ideally return to having teenagers/young adults working those jobs while grown-adults move onto other opportunities that our economy should be creating.
Jobs that that cannot support biological needs should exist as they are great for developing job-skills and experience in youth.
Do I think there should be jobs that would only be done in the context of parentally- or other-provided housing, food and clothing? I'm not sure. I lean towards the answer being no, but could be convinced otherwise.
I still don't agree with your 40 year take on this. When "fully grown adults" started flipping burgers, it was because you could live on the income that provided. Now you cannot (and ditto for lots of other minimum wage jobs). It was not the case that these jobs were "teenager only" and people took them even though they were impossible to live on, 60 years ago. They took them (slowly, over a period of time) and they gradually changed from teenager only work into "real jobs", and over a slightly longer period of time no longer acted as viable living wage work.
That said ... sure, the income levels for the lower 4 deciles of the population haven't kept up with things (until very, very recently at least), and this means in part that new jobs at appropriate (lower, but still livable) wages have not been created at sufficiently high rates.
> "Increasing the minimum wage to be a living salary of $40-$50/hour would eliminate many opportunities for people entering the workforce who can't justify that kind of investment currently".
Firstly, as I indicated above, I don't think it has to be that high. Secondly, I think that if there are "opportunities" that cannot afford to pay a living wage, I'm not sure anyone is foregoing much by them not existing. To be clear, what is meant here by a living wage is something that a full time job pays roughly 3x the local rental rate for an appropriately sized studio (perhaps 1BR) apartment in reasonable quality.
> Leave it at the market-clearing level of $20-$25/hour
"Currently, 34 states, territories and districts have minimum wages above the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour. Five states have not adopted a state minimum wage: Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina and Tennessee. Two states, Georgia and Wyoming, have a minimum wage below $7.25 per hour."
There is not a single state that has the "market-clearing level" you mention, so "leaving it" there seems impossible. Tukwila, WA is the only city in the country with a minimum wage above $20.
I had a roommate when I started out and could not afford an apartment. At the time one could also rent someone's spare bedroom. Government zoning also got rid of boarding houses.
> haven't kept up with things
The increasing share of the economy that the government vacuums up comes from somewhere.
I also started out with a roommate when I had my first computing job, which was with a massive multinational. I could not have afforded my own apartment in Cambridge (UK), though that was caused by post-grad student debt than the salary level. I went on to rent a house with someone else until I emigrated to the US.
The fact that there are actually multiple pathways through life doesn't mean that we can't, as a society, draw up our own guidelines for what working for 40hrs a week ought to make possible, even if some people choose to (a) not work 40hrs a week (b) live differently.
Total government revenue as a percentage of GDP has been remarkably flat since the end of WWII (actually distressing to my preferred narrative in which it has declined and should not have).
I think you made that point. The other posters point was that this point is patently untrue. And it's very obviously untrue just by thinking about it for a few minutes. Peak hours for fast food restaurants (and most restaurants) are lunch hours where most teenagers would be in school.
They also tended to be open late night. The hours that teenagers can work are and have been heavily regulated for a very long time. No highschooler is working the 11pm - 4am shift at wendy's.
They were very obviously mostly employing adults.
And if you want a little anecdotal evidence, my father supported my family for a number of years working in fast food in the early to mid 80s during the oil crash
if you want further anecdotal stories, when in high school I worked retail. There were other highschoolers that worked there, but the vast majority of my coworkers were in their 30s.
When in college I worked graveyards at a certain 24 hour breakfast establishment. I was by far the youngest. Everyone else on that shift was in their 40s and had kids and families they were supporting.
We also literally have tropes about the old lady who's been working at the diner for 1000 years... "what do ya want hon?"
That trope didn't just come out of no where.
This is an excellent way to tell everyone you’re comment is just political garbage and can readily be dismissed. It completely drowns any possible signal out with a huge red flag.
You’re either making a statement about conservatives or you’re talking about actual ideas. You can’t have a meaningful conversation about ideas if you’re doing tribalism.
i am talking about an actual idea. an actual idea that happens to fit much more nicely into one political worldview than another. an idea that is repeated much more often by people who hold that worldview than by people who do not. an idea that is more or less demonstrably false.
so i am talking about both the (false) idea and the fact the it is an idea that continues to be talked about (despite its falsehood) by a particular group of people. that can be a meaningful conversation even if you don't like it.
It has nothing to do with feeling uncomfortable, it’s a statement about held beliefs being associated with a particular group and there is no evidence to back it up.
It doesn’t matter who he thinks holds that view. Discuss the idea and refute it directly or shut up. Drop the appeals to tribalism
At this point, it is more interesting that one political worldview still seems quite attached to the idea than the idea itself, which has been clearly shown to be false.
It's quite analogous to trickle-down theory aka the laffer curve. Shown to be false multiple times over the last few decades. Still promoted by people of one particular political worldview and not others.
That's the story here. The idea has been refuted, why are people still talking about it?
Nonsense: Fast-food chains never had a business model of closing during school hours! They remain open, and that shows each role has always required some adult employees with adult budgetary needs.
One can argue minimum-wage jobs are only for kids in school, or one can argue that a regular-businesses-hours company can have min-wage positions, but both together is incoherent.
It's not better to have people have no jobs and require 100% assistance.
> subsidy
Regardless of how you define terms, you'll being paying much more to help them when they are jobless.
> become like China
China has a largely state run economy, with the resulting problems.
It is actually. Former employees are free to learn new skills or do charity instead of being busy surviving a game they can’t win.
You are also subsidising an economically wasteful activity that cannot cover its own true costs - if fast food joint can’t pay a wage, it does not cover the negative externalities from extra traffic on the road, carbon emissions and people getting fat.
Business will be forced to innovate and invest in automation
>>Why should I pay a stealth subsidy to whatever business it is.
I think a lot of the argument around minimum wage is a disagreement (or misunderstanding?) about minimum wage workers.
Let's say you have a $10/hr minimum wage, and some company BigCo hires people and pays them $10/hr. Now, the disagreement: is BigCo actually getting $10/hr of value out of those workers? Or is it $20/hr, or $50/hr, or $5/hr, or $2/hr? Because I think that's a critical question both in terms of "should we subsidize those workers/BigCo" and "should we raise the minimum wage".
Some people do not currently, and may never, have skills that are worth $25/hr in terms of value produced in our economy. I think we need to make sure those people still have an acceptable standard of living, but I don't think setting the minimum wage to $25/hr is likely to do that.
I think this is the wrong question and it’s not our job to solve that.
Example - suppose I have a diamond mine, I can hire anyone with zero skill - homeless, drug addicts, criminals - pay them $5 an hour and they will dig up $1,000 of diamonds a day. What is the answer your own question - how much value is the business getting?
What we should consider instead is this - there is a certain cost for civilisation to continue. Workers must be born, educated, and then create the new generation. If they are not paid enough to continue the cycle, we will not let the country collapse, will we?
I as a taxpayer will end up picking up the tab in one way or another - whether it’s through food stamps, or in immigration or something else.
These jobs could be a total net loss once you account for carbon emissions and other externalities.
I would rather get these people to do charity work or plant trees instead.
And "biological needs" are an ever-increasing target, just beyond minimum wage. When minimum wage increases so does the target. Why? Because it's not about biological needs. It's about relative wealth dressed up as "basic needs".
I do think the US should have a minimum wage increase, but the discussion around it seems so disingenuous.
Companies are not bound by morals, national identity, or any interest other than self-perpetuation. They are a virus that we harness to do good. When the virus overwhelms its host, its time for medicine.
This doesn't actually bear out. Minimum wage increases really don't have a history of making minimum wage employees unemployable, or destroying the companies affected. In fact, the opposite tends to happen, as these businesses tend to be frequented by other minimum wage employees as customers, so it ends up being a rising tide that lifts all boats.
> Do you want Big Tech to be American companies, or foreign companies?
I'd argue that you can't just airdrop these companies into another country and have them be as successful as they are. Even with much stricter monopoly laws, there is a LOT about America that incentivizes these companies to locate there, and frankly I'm not convinced they'd move.
And as a Canadian, I don't even want Big Tech to be American. =) The US is only part of the world, as you said, but your lax and corrupt legal system is polluting the world with these dangerous megacorps.
Don't get me wrong, we're none better, our system would allow for nearly the same abuse, were it not for the fact that our whole country is smaller in population that California. But the point remains that there's a lot of the world that is looking on in horror at these rampaging monster companies and is not in any way assured by the "at least they're American" defense.
It's not nearly that settled
It's "debated" because raising the minimum wage hikes usually come out of profit margins: https://cepr.net/documents/publications/min-wage-2013-02.pdf
If there's one thing the business community and the econ think tanks it funds can all agree upon it's that any policy that involves sacrificing profits is Bad. Global warming denial and this both come from the same source.
That’s ridiculous on its face because there isn’t any higher level of productivity so someone in the economy is eating that loss.
Because Dube, Lester, Reich says that they don't exist. Businesses pay for almost all hikes by dipping into their profit margins. A small % raise prices. A negligible number let people go.
> The biggest expense Rubio’s has been facing is debt — a burden that has grown since the chain was acquired in 2010 by the private equity firm Mill Road Capital
There’s an argument to be made that maybe the number of jobs in the fast food sector has decreased. But that’s also a myopic view since we need to know the labor situation statewide. Someone not in a fast food job might have found employment elsewhere which isn’t a bad thing, especially since the workers who do have those jobs are being paid a livable wage.
https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2024-06-12/the-fast-f...
Same for your water example. At some point, water stops being healthy, without knowing at what point, you can't just ask people to just drink more water, otherwise they may die. In fact people have died for that reason.
At some point, increasing minimum wage will cause unemployment and destroy companies. Maybe we are at that point, or maybe not, without a bound, there is no way to tell.
It is a curve, and price discovery is definitely a thing that the government can’t ignore. In Seattle they are in the awkward phase where the politicians admit the problem but walking back the minimum wage policy, which ratchets upward every year, is not something they want to consider politically.
I have close friends in the food service industry in Seattle that have become quite against the minimum wage increases (which they earn as base pay) because it is costing them a lot of money in real terms and they foresee future reductions in employability, which puts them at risk economically.
This coming from an era when competent service employees were so in demand that employers would make concessions that even tech employees don’t get. They weren’t paid as much but they were given flexibility that most people would envy.
When lending costs were near-zero, housing was doing "great". That doesn't mean it's a smart or sustainable policy, even if we had gotten used to that as the norm.
I sometimes wonder if the same applies to restaurants. Consumers got used to lower prices predicated on lower labor costs. Many got used to eating out very often and to a certain extent the economy responds with more restauranteurs. But it couldn't sustain that once the service cost "bubble" popped. Maybe those low labor rates are not the norms we should accustom ourselves to.
Also, holding up restaurant workers as the token reason for opposing living wages for all workers is a bit disingenious. Like using family farms to argue against inheritence taxes.
Then why not just make minimum wage $100/hour?
There are tons of things people will just immediately stop doing if the prices go up to support labor that expensive.
They more or less are, for those who pay for their own health insurance.
Why would have the same rule for those who receive health insurance as part of an overall W2/labor-based compensation contract?
https://www.irs.gov/instructions/i1040gi#en_US_2024_publink1...
"You may be able to deduct the amount you paid for health insurance (which includes medical, dental, and vision insurance and qualified long-term care insurance) for yourself, your spouse, and your dependents. "
"One of the following statements must be true.
You were self-employed and had a net profit for the year reported on Schedule C or F.
You were a partner with net earnings from self-employment.
You used one of the optional methods to figure your net earnings from self-employment on Schedule SE.
You received wages in 2024 from an S corporation in which you were a more-than-2% shareholder. Health insurance premiums paid or reimbursed by the S corporation are shown as wages on Form W-2.I.e. it's deductible for your business.
My point stands.
On the one hand: health insurance premiums are entirely deductible if you have schedule C income that exceeds their value. This covers more or less all self-employed people, who are the largest group paying for their own insurance.
On the other hand: health insurance premiums are not deductible if you do not have schedule C income that exceeds their value (and/or are eligible for an employer subsidized insurance policy), which means there is still a sizable and significant group of people paying for their own insurance and not able to deduct it.
I am sure you know my own preferred answer: convert all health insurance premiums into taxes that fund a single payer system, so that there is no difference between self-employed "self payers" and non-self-employed "self payers".
Given that we're unlikely to see that before I'm pushing up daisies, I would agree that either any health insurance premium paid by the insured should be tax deductible or none of it should be, to level the playing field. I think I slightly prefer the none solution, but I'm not actively against the all version.
It's clear you know what I meant.
The vast majority of employed people have a single reasonable choice: to take their employers insurance. Anything else would be much more expensive because of lack of deduction. When they change jobs, they are again at the mercy of their (new) employer. Sure there are self-employed folks, and it's different for them, but this thread is not about them. And of course most people with their own insurance choice are self employed precisely because everybody else doesn't really have a choice, which is the whole point.
So, can we please stop with this smoke screen? My popcorn reserves are running low.
Here in the US, FDR had a wage freeze as part of his policies [1] to deal with the continuing Great Depression that WWII had not stopped yet by 1942. Because of that, companies needed to get inventive about ways to increase benefits but not illegally increase wages. Companies started offering insurance plans.
That's where the employment/insurance coupling started.
Also the ACA Employer Mandate[1]. Get rid of that and maybe figure out some sort of "nutrition label" style thing to make it easier to compare offers that are more cash vs more benefits.
[1] https://www.irs.gov/affordable-care-act/employers/employer-s...
...or alternatively, removing deductions for medical insurance.
I worked at an entity with 300+ thousand employees and Probably another 200k retirees… I was able to pay full cost to retain my health insurance from them.
The benefits and out of pocket costs are incredible - my current CEO asked me why I do that rather that use the company insurance and I walked through it with him. It’s not possible to buy that coverage, between the legacy insurance plan and huge risk pool, only the largest entities can have the best insurance.
The “simple answer” is pretty easy. Put a 10% payroll tax with a $5M income cap, and build out Medicare with whatever benefits are doable under that cost structure. Let the market compete for extended benefits, which would work like a traditional insurance market.
The doctors and medical industries would be happy. People would gain newfound job mobility and freedom. Most people would save money vs the payments they make today. Rich people would be sad because taxes.
Something tells me the people in charge most definitely do not want this at all…
> For classical economists such as Adam Smith, the term free market refers to a market free from all forms of economic privilege, monopolies and artificial scarcities.
Employer-defined healthcare creates troughs of economic privilege, builds monopolies with respect to laborers, and enforces artificial scarcity in the supply of labor. It removes liquidity in the labor market if laborers aren't free to bid their labor to the highest bidder at any time simply because they can't risk their own health care. It's not a "free market" determined "solely" by supply and demand when the supply is artificially limited by the rent seeking inherent to employer-defined healthcare, no matter whether or not you think the solution is fairer labor regulations or how much you claim to hate government oversight. That's a market failure.
Shareholder return is not a free market function, in fact for most businesses it’s in the interest of the shareholder to have zero competition, as competitive forces require expenditure in labor and dollars to improve the product at lower margin.
Apple is the best consumer example of this. In segments where there are no competitive forces, say Mac displays, they ship high margin, mediocre products for an extended lifecycle. You can buy a shitty LG for half the price of a mediocre Apple model. The same thing happened in the pre-retina cheap MacBook Air - that thing lived 3 years too long because where else are you gonna go?
A free and liquid market in labor has some overlap with what people concerned with fairer labor market regulations want, but in other areas is diameteically opposed to what they want.
Free markets are unrealizable abstractions that lots of people like to appeal to vaguely, but very few consistently favor as more than a rhetorical device.
Something tells me the people in charge most definitely do not want this at all…
Exactly. The bigger the better.
I'm still baffled why local and state govts aren't easing into a public option.
Ditto the largest (self-insured) employers. It'd be so easy to extend benefits to their partners, local supporting businesses (eg daycares), and so forth.
That's easy enough to answer: lobbying efforts by major insurance companies (and insurance company adjacent companies) prevented it. In many states such lobbying efforts prevented it entirely in the legislature adding direct laws and some state constitutional amendments that states explicitly weren't allowed to build a public option as a part of their healthcare exchanges. It was a big part of the uproar when the ACA was passed at the federal level, a big part of why many states' healthcare exchanges were sabotaged and broken on Day One, and a large part of why the ACA itself made too many compromises in how it established the state-driven healthcare exchanges.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campaign_finance_reform_in_the...
Because socialism is well known for unsustainable costs and poor service.
Businesses like Walmart and McDonald's should pay their own costs without relying on the crutch of the public purse.
If these businesses are so inefficient that they can't survive without handouts then it is good and proper and correct that they die off and be replaced by more efficient businesses.
h/t economist Kevin Phillips.
But let's put that aside. What we have now isn't amarket distortion caused by using pre-tax dollars for employer insurance. It's that an employer can collectively bargain for insurance in a way that an individual never can.
If you have 100,000 people in a group then statistical norms come into play of how often you'll need to do a transplant or [insert expensive procedure here]. Plus you have the negotiating power to get better coverage at a lower price than an individual ever can.
So individual insurance can never work regardless of tax policy. Tying insurance to employment is bad for pretty obvious reasons. And this is how we return to "private insurance shouldn't exist".
Some other countries have private insurance as an option. For example, you can buy private insurance in the UK and some provinces of Canada if you want. Some people obviously feel it is worth it to them to do so (faster time to treatment, private versus shared hospital rooms, etc.). The difference from the US system is that there is a public system available without this expense.
It can work, but it needs to be very carefully regulated.
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2020/09/29/increasin...
You're subsidizing those wages with your tax dollars. You're paying billions per year to make those low incomes livable. In the end it's just corporate welfare:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/clareoconnor/2014/04/15/report-...
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/19/walmart-and-mcdonalds-among-...
https://laborcenter.berkeley.edu/a-downward-push-the-impact-...
It's not the case that they wouldn't employ people. They're not employing people now out of the goodness of their heart.
If they paid living wages (as they should) you'd pay less. Good businesses pay their costs.
But as it is, the likes of Walmart and McDonald's are privatizing their profits and socializing their costs.
Under your proposal I'd be paying even more tax dollars to those rendered unemployable.
> It's not the case that they wouldn't employ people.
People who produce less value than they cost become unemployed.
You probably don't think of yourself as a socialist but socialism is what you're wholeheartedly advocating for here.
And the welfare state you're supporting the worst kind of socialism: corporate handouts for privatized profits and socialized costs.
Or, put differently, it makes the profits of the companies who hire them unsustainable. IMO allowing an non-livable wage in order to subsidize profits isn't a great policy.
(To add some nuance, I think it’s ok in some cases for short duration, like subsidizing new industries or those related to national emergencies, if it doesn’t become a long-term strategy. In general, those that pay extremely low wages are not part of those categories)
I guess a more pointed question is: do you think companies with a model that pays sub-standard wages should have their profits propped up by tax dollars? That's not my personal ideal of well-functioning capitalism.
Walmart and McDonald's are good examples of this.
So true - imagine an iPhone made in China - the horror.
I admire the general spirit of your comment, but this specific example seems off to me. Search and browsers, for example, don't make sense as independent businesses. Rather, they are products based off of Ads.
Maybe the idea would be for Ads to pay Search to include their ads, and for Search to pay Browsers to be the default search engine?
? I thought we still had the big four? Chase, BoA, Citi, WF? And if you're talking about just consumer banking, US Bank is only ~30% behind #4 (Citi).
The flip side is that big banks are great at driving down costs for standard operations (when there are enough of them to be competitive). If all I need is a business checking account as a consultant, I can access that for no cost via one of the giants.
What's the specialty here, risk assessment?
Small banks with a specialty will have loan officers that deeply understand the industry they specialize in and are able to parse a bad deal from a good one.
If a fishing captain comes in and wants to borrow $75k to replace an engine, that could be a great loan to make or a terrible one depending on factors that require knowledge of boats and the fishing industry. If this captain was paid out $150k last season, the hull has a clean survey and this season has a higher harvest quota, it’s a good deal. If the hull is a floating wreck, and the fishery is likely to be closed or contract this season, don’t make the deal. Bank of America does not have a loan officer who knows how to read a commercial vessel hull survey, or who understands local fishing payout customs, nor is it really worth their time to find that person.
A bank that has that knowledge has a competitive edge over banks that don’t. The captains in the fleet all know of that bank, and so do the diesel engine dealers.
In the US, for many industries, there is a bank that maintains that competitive edge, and most of the time it is a bank that you have never heard of.
This isn’t hypothetical, if you want the loan I’m talking about you probably will end up on the phone with these people: https://www.peoplesbank-wa.com/business/loans-lines-of-credi...
And we need Glass-Stegall back. Banks and brokerages should be separate. There is no good reason that Goldman Sachs should be a bank, other than for bailouts, which is why they became a bank.
[1] https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/WFC/wells-fargo/to...
Also, Goldman became a nationally regulated bank to get access to the Federal Reserve window. So did Morgan Stanley.
Why Google? Every single day there are articles here on HN with many comments explaining that Google is done due to LLMs replacing search.
Google market cap: $2.3 bn
Microsoft market cap: $3.2 bn
Break up Microsoft. And for good this time.
Not at all sure that prices are the problem here, nor that markets can solve the actual problems.
Your car shouldn't decide who you can do business with nor should it get a fee from every store you drive to. It shouldn't push it's own payment system for all purchases. And neither should a pocket computer do these things
If you wound enjoy a deep and rigorous treatment of this subject, I strongly recommend Martin Heidegger's "The Question Concerning Technology."
He argues that modern technology is fundamentally different from historical technology, and that corporatism and monopoly are the inevitable result of technology.
There is a general problem with corporatism and monopoly, but there are also specific problems with "tech". Oil & gas monopolies don't broadly carry everyone's private interactions. Sports monopolies generally can't expose political dissidents.
Tech companies can become very powerful without holding a monopoly. All it takes is being big enough to have political sway either through being a big employer or just by straight up lobbying.
The US has a few big banks and then hundreds of regional banks. It’s trivial to bank without using the big ones.
Prohibiting a post breakup Google from contracting with each other is completely idiotic. Either they make sense as standalone businesses or they don’t. Why wouldn’t Google search be allowed to use GCP but be allows to use AWS? If they are different companies they will use what is best for the company and regulating that they use something worse is bad for everyone.
Min wage unrelated
Gig job unrelated
Medical insurance unrelated
The British Empire was the drug dealer empire (first tobacco then opium).
The US is the arms dealer empire, at least since WWI.
The point here is that I believe that any sufficiently large company in the US eventually becomes a defense contractor and thus aligns itself with US foreign policy [1].
So we have Amazon selling cloud services to the CIA, Google selling cloud services to the military and Israel, Meta cooperating with military uses of AI and so on.
[1]: https://newrepublic.com/article/153044/big-techs-unholy-alli...
While I agree with you on the basic issue of monopolies, I think the biggest monopoly problem is the U.S. government. It's so massive that it absolutely dwarfs all other monopolies, like Google.
I would therefore like a solution that does not, in any way whatsoever, increase the power of the US government.
Technology has a tendency to overwhelm and transform everything for the sake of technology.
I wouldn’t say the competitiveness changed all that much and I would say it’s more competitive than Canada with also 3 and less competitive than France with 4. However the competitiveness in France now is specifically because a low cost provider Free entered and started stealing all the costumers rather than because of the number of competitors.
Yes and: Corporatocracy
> strong network effects
Yes and: aka Preferential attachment leading to winner-takes-all.
It's just math. Not some kind of weird moralistic blather.
The tendency towards concentration necessitates some counter balance, backpressure, redistribution, whatever.
> need to be about four major players before markets push prices down.
Yes and: I believe, but cannot prove, unifying markets (nationalization, globalization) accelerated monopolization.
Alas, I don't have any ideas on how to put the toothpaste back into the tube. Clearly, we're not reverting to regionalism or localism any time soon. Economically or politically.
The duty to align your professional life ethically scales with your ability to do so. I personally don't cast aspersions on anyone working in tobacco farms or in a gas station selling cigarettes; they're just trying to get by. But if you're one or two levels up Maslow's Pyramid, it's right to weigh your personal needs against the impact of your work. You'll also be better off for it, knowing that the world would be worse off if you decided to switch gears and become a carpenter/baker/bartender/choose your adventure.
I'll also say: there are ways to contribute morally outside of your 9-5. Volunteer to teach a neighborhood kid to code. Show your local sandwich shop how to set their hours online, or maybe even build them a cookie cutter Squarespace site. Donate a small fraction of your salary (eg 0.5% local, 0.5% global) to causes you believe in, and scale up over the years.
I don't think that's the point you're making, but it's good to be careful with that. You can do good after hours, but it doesn't absolve you from what you're doing 9-to-5.
As to your first point: yes, but it's all relative. Most tech workers are "trying to get by" in their minds. Just look at the SFBA rents and the PG&E bills! And wait until you hear about their college loans... most people in the top 1% don't think about themselves as the top 1%.
In the end, making good decisions often requires sacrifice, pretty much no matter how much you make. And we often find ways to rationalize why it's not the right time for that.
So I actually agree with the notion that being the big tabacco exec and doing good things with your money, plus helping steer things from the inside is a better proposition than becoming a baker and letting someone who has NO moral qualms with tabacco run the ship.
It’s rarely as effective to push change from the outside as it is the inside.
Should people simply never be able to sell or consume tobacco? Even if one’s consumption of tobacco does not negatively affect anyone else?
There, I fixed your uninspired and incorrect anecdote.
Big tobacco execs are quite literally killing absolutely no one. Last I checked they aren’t sticking cigarettes in anyone’s mouth. Personal responsibility for your own actions is unfortunately lacking in many discussions surrounding things like this.
In the public discourse, you'll often see CEOs and founders lauded as incredibly brilliant and rare. As soon as you start to talk about ethics though, they're suddenly fungible. "Someone else would run the orphan crushing factory if not for me"
You're saying this as if it's a given, but why wouldn't this work?
I have a problem with violence...
but basically it comes across as, "I am willing to sacrifice others (but not myself) to achieve my goals because I know better."
Since money is fungible but finite, basically any sort of donation decision involves sacrificing someone. Donating to fund malaria nets when you'd otherwise have funded your local little league team means you're in effect, sacrificing the local little league team. Moreover, by donating their own money, they're by definition "sacrificing myself".
Anyone who could do that job has many far better ways they could apply their career.
To highlight this part of the original in support of this comment. This comes of as somewhat arrogant and is a pretty big red flag...
But also there seems to be a pervasive belief, which if anything feels way strong than it was when I was younger (maybe because the moral-majority christian-nation vibes have fully disappeared, in the US at least? sure, it was always fairly hollow, but at least it was a thing at all), that a business leader is not supposed to do moral things, because it's not their job description; their job truly is "increase shareholder value on a 6-12 month timescale", and if they try to do something different they are judged negatively!
So maybe there is in theory good to be done by being an exec and being more moral than average (maybe not a tobacco exec, but, say, in tech?). But the system is basically designed to prevent you from doing it? It almost seems as though modern model of shareholder capitalism is almost designed to keep things this way: to eliminate the idea at any point that a person should feel bad if they just do the "efficient", shareholder-value-maximizing thing. Nobody has any agency in the big machine, which means no one is accountable for what it does. Perfect, just how we like it? Whereas at least a private enterprise which is beholden to the principles of its leader could in principle do something besides the most cynical possible play at every turn.
If people in power don't provide and protect a democratic process to removing poor leadership then they do not get to complain when people make those decisions on their own.
"They did all that, and literally none of them went to jail? We got to get us some..."
Post-2008 tech companies were built that way from the get-go.
It seems pretty clear that the forces at work are designed to incentivize, reward, and rationalize "greed", and so if one just does their job, so to speak, they will end up doing the greedy thing at every turn. And really we are fine with it! -- what we value more than anything is value creation (on paper). No matter if the actual world is getting worse as long as it appears to be getting better: the economy/investment accounts/stock grants are going up.
The fist paragraph seems to say: "greed is not a good explanation", while the second seems to claim: "greed explains everything and we are all OK with it".
"We were only obeying orders" all the way up. And even when you get to the top, they're only obeying the orders of the market.
At least, that's what they'll tell you, and that's what they tell themselves.
So we have a system that puts selection pressure on economic elites to be sociopathic. And then those same people write the books on "how to be a good CEO" etc, so of course they are going to say that you're not supposed to do things that they themselves don't do.
That's not an EA belief. While EAs have made arguments somewhat in this direction, being a tobacco exec is just incredibly harmful and no one should do it: https://80000hours.org/2016/01/just-how-bad-is-being-a-ceo-i...
(80000 Hours is the primary EA career advising organization)
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/4N5BsDkcWjr5MRSQy/...
EA is one of the most evil ideologies out there.
Reading both articles, I think it depends a lot what strategy the exec employs. If they optimize for getting people to become addicted to smoking or increase how much they smoke (growing the market) then I think it's really unlikely they could donate enough to make up for that enormous harm. On the other hand, if they optimize for increasing profitability by increasing prices and advocating for regulation that acts as barriers to new entrants, and especially if the person who would otherwise have the role would be optimizing for growing the market, then it's likely their work is positive on it's own, regardless of donating.
Would you also say "so you're saying it's ok to be a member of the Nazi party who runs a munitions factory [1], QED"?
As a moderately less contentious example, Alex Karp argues fervently that it is immoral to not produce weapons of war for western countries and the U.S. in particular. Many people agree with him. Ultimately people justify their method of making a living in whichever way they choose, and tech workers are no different. History is the log of the winners and losers of the war between the adherents of different moral codes.
You're saying as if it's indisputable that "Big Tech" was harming children, but we're nowhere close to that. At best, the current literature shows a very weak negative correlational relationship between social media use and mental health. That's certainly not enough to lambast "Big Tech" for failing to abide by "objective standards like minimizing harm to children".
Moreover I question whether "objective standards like minimizing harm to children" existed to begin with, or we're just looking at the past with rose tinted glasses. During the industrial revolution kids worked in factories and mines. In the 20th century they were exposed to lead and particulate pollution. Even if you grant that "Big Tech" was harming kids in some way, I doubt they're doing it in some unprecedented way like you implied.
I cannot imagine that a substantial "many" people believe this. How does it work exactly? If you have any expertise even adjacent to weapons building (e.g. being a programmer) and you are not building weapons for the US due to a lack of effort (as opposed to failing the interview) you're doing something immoral?
I don't think many would agree with this. I suppose his stance is somehow more nuanced? (I wouldn't agree with it either, but at least it would be slightly more reasonable).
This describes it fairly well, although I was thinking of a CNBC interview in particular. He does so many that it’s hard to catalogue.
The argument is roughly that “the west” and “western morality” are critical institutions to be protected, and refusing to protect them is immoral.
And yes, a lot of people support his ideals. Major chunks of the tech investment class, thousands of workers at Palantir, the U.S. State Department, the Acela corridor, etc. It is probably a minority viewpoint amongst normal Americans, but we’re talking about tech workers here. :)
It doesn't follow at all that the best way to defend Western institutions is to build weapons.
(Yes, I realize these aren't your views and that you're merely describing them. But this Alex Karp guy isn't here to debate directly with him...)
To your point about his beliefs not being mine, I think he has a fundamental misunderstanding of how both of those events happened, which is ironic, because the prelude and aftermath of both attacks are revisions on the same theme.
"The West" as a collective lost all of the moral high ground it was supposed to have during the past few decades and particularly last year.
https://mearsheimer.substack.com/p/the-moral-bankruptcy-of-t...
Though I guess that things were quite different during the Cold War...
“Morality-as-cooperation draws on the theory of non-zero-sum games to identify distinct problems of cooperation and their solutions, and it predicts that specific forms of cooperative behavior—including helping kin, helping your group, reciprocating, being brave, deferring to superiors, dividing disputed resources, and respecting prior possession—will be considered morally good wherever they arise, in all cultures.”
Who is kin? Who are one’s superiors? What is prior possession? These are all questions of ideology and power. The only universal code all humanity agrees on is might makes right.
This is a cynical and unjustifiable claim.
Obviously some people disagree. In fact in my experience people almost universally agrees might does not make right.
I don't believe you.
The number of multi-generational households has increased significantly... to 18%. In one of the most expensive housing economies in the world. There's extreme stigma against living with your family once you reach adulthood.
Clearly immoral. IMO more so than weapons.
I realy needed the job
I think this implies that we all should aim to have for everybody those abilities. That is, if somebody is unable, in this sense, to be ethical because he's just trying to get by, it's actually our problem - e.g. he sells cigarettes and that harms us. So we need to some extent work on the goal of everybody having abilities to live ethically.
One of the basic tenets of capitalism is that the exchanges are all voluntary. In practice they are quite clearly not.
The confusion largely is that 'income tax' is really 'wage tax'. Income common wealthy people with lots of capital is return on their capital investment, which is exluded from that tax.
How do you meet people who take responsibility for their life design?
Hmmm, why?
Vegans experience this often.
Edit: the "ethical choicers" can reduce such behavior with a carefully controlled communication (if someone has more tips please share!):
- Don't say "ethic" but "my ethics"
- Keep concise, don't give details if not ask
- Change subject as soon as you feel the listener is uncomfortable
- Say ASAP that you're not trying to convince or change anyone
What's worse, working for Big Tobacco, or working for Big Tech, or working for the DEA and spending your days forcefully "civil forfeituring" innocent people's money without charges? The former are at least taking money from people who voluntarily surrender it in exchange for some service, with fairly good knowledge of what they're getting themselves into. While the latter are basically highway robbers. Yet society has chosen to popularize the first one as immoral, and is now working on villifying the second, with only scant mention of the third.
I'm sure I'm guilty of selective outrage myself. If we're going to quote religious references, how about Christ admonishing those who point out the spec in their neighbor's eye, while ignoring the log in their own.
More focus on one's own morality, and less on judging others, just might make the world a slightly better place.
People (incl. here) want to rationalise their behaviour by giving excuses — such as the very popular "but X is even worse and people don't complain about it" that you yourself are doing — for the fact that they work on in-ethical stuff, because the honest answer is simply "this pays cartloads of money, fuck you got mine", which is unpalatable to their own self-perception.
I guess we're all guilty.
No one working for Big Tobacco thinks they're making the world better unless they're an idiot.
We likely disagree about the merits of the DEA's War To Destroy the Lives of American Meth Users. That's a topic for another post perhaps, but the point is people have wildly different moral frameworks.
I'm sure there are people working for Big Tobacco who think they're making the world better by helping people enjoy themselves. Heck, some people who work in online gambling, or sports betting, or run state lotteries, or make ice cream, might even believe that!
Do they, though? Some of it, sure, but enough to make a positive impact? Probably not. Indeed, efforts to get drug X off the street often lead to a proliferation of more dangerous drug Y. There's plenty of reason to believe the DEA is only making things worse and causing more deaths.
It also brings up another truism: if you are fighting inanimate objects or god forbid abstract concepts you are going to lose just like a drunk boxing with a lamppost.
Mentioning that here, elicits scorn.
I pretty much enjoy the world I live in. That upsets some folks.
The part that will attract scorn is pretending that everyone can do that. In the same way that religion spread by preying on the poor and lecherous portions of society, so too does the tech industry offer the downtrodden and mistreated a better life in exchange for moral leniency. It's not even the "revenge of the nerd" stuff past a certain point - if a $60,000/year software engineer in America turns up their nose to a contract, you can simply send it to a development firm in Pakistan for pennies on the dollar and get roughly equivalent results. There is no moral bartering with at-will employment. It's an illusion.
As individuals, you and I are both powerless to stop the proliferation and success of harmful businesses. America's number one lesson from the past 4 centuries of economic planning is that laissez-faire policy does not course-correct without government intervention. Collective bargaining only works when you're bargaining on a market you control - boycotting certain employers is entirely ineffective when you compare it to legislative reform.
So, with that being said, saving your dignity is not enough to save society. You have every right to take comfort in working a job that you respected - but nobody here owes you any more respect than their dairy farmers or the guy in Thailand that made their $55 Izod sweatshirt. If you come around expecting the hero treatment, then you're bound to feel shortchanged. Sorry.
People who live in Pakistan are also capable of making moral decisions, you know. Your argument only holds if there are infinitely-many people in some kind of idealised labour market, but in the real world there are less than a million people capable of that kind of work.
If you plan to take an immoral job and then work-to-rule while sabotaging the evil schemes, charismatically deflecting all blame to those who were trying to make it succeed (or, better still, keeping the organisation as a whole from understanding that their plan has been sabotaged), then that's a different question, and I'd wish you the best of luck. (Not that such a person would be bragging about it here, anyway.)
That's the problem, right there, I guess. We can't even mention things that should not elicit anything much more than "That's nice," without someone thinking that it's tubthumping. I wasn't inviting criticism of my decision. Sorry.
Sometimes (most times, actually), I post stuff, just to say "Me too," or "Here's my experience with that. Maybe it might help." I'd like to think that it helps others to maybe feel less alone, in their world.
People mention that they do stuff, all the time, here, with the direct expectation of being lauded and cheered. In many cases, I'm really happy to laud them, and cheer them on. There's some cool stuff that goes down, here.
I'm not really into that kind of thing, for myself. I'm retired, and follow my own muse. I've made some big impacts, but not really ones that most folks here would care about. What people here, think of me, doesn't really matter that much. I'm just not that important, and most folks here, aren't as important as they might think they are. We're all just Bozos on this bus. I have a fairly rich social life, and have a lot of people that like me (and, also, dislike me), because they actually know me.
People also post some stuff that reveals some fairly warped and mutated personal worldviews. Most times, I just ignore that. I don't think attacking someone in public does much to help the world; especially in a professional context like HN.
We live in a strange society.
I mean, yeah. This is absolutely something that should make you feel wonderful as an individual, being able to help people that are aligned with your moral understanding. But it's also something you can't exactly share - you'll never communicate the happiness other people felt from your assistance, and you're almost certainly not going to find people that universally respect your own moral compass. On the flip side, there are people with extremely perverse senses of justice that consider murder and automated attacks on civilian populations to be an unparalleled moral imperative - I've seen them right here on HN.
It's your life, I can't tell you how to live it. My point is to tell you why people everywhere will bristle at that type of rhetoric, the holier-than-thou "this is how we transcend suffering" memoir written by hands that spent more time touching a smartphone than doing manual labor to feed a family. If you are in a position where you are emotionally, financially and politically secure enough to sponsor a life that you are satisfied with living, then your satisfaction begins and ends with you. It's like announcing your valiant donation to charity on a public soapbox - to whom does it serve? Will you be donating the soapbox to charity too?
Look out on the world as it is today, and you'll see a society of people that reject causal opportunity and change. We don't boycott companies when they send death squads to kill dissident plantation workers because their products taste too good. We can't boycott our tech companies when they drive margins low enough to install suicide nets and sell user data for profit, because the immediate access to porn and Facebook is too enthralling.
You're a little guy, a cog in that great big machine. If you know that playing your part had great impact on the world, then it should bring you a profound sense of personal justice. The part that makes people scornful is when you zoom out and look at the machine, then conclude "we should all be cogs, imagine how much more efficient the whole thing would run!" Many of us aren't made of steel, and have too few spokes to fill the same role that you do.
All I said, was that I worked for a company for a long time, was basically happy, the work environment was not perfect, I found their ethics attractive, and don't have any regrets.
We live in a really sick world, if that can be interpreted as "holier-than-thou." I know dozens of people, personally, that can say exactly the same thing. They don't consider themselves "special," and I don't really care that much. Almost none are in the tech industry, though, so maybe that's the difference.
I also know a lot of folks that work at jobs they hate; often, for big money. I don't waste time judging them, and am just happy to have them in my life.
I tend to avoid folks that are actively trying to be unethical, but I'm not on a mission to convert them. If they ever want to do things differently, I might have something they could use.
It's sad to think that someone, saying what I did, is somehow "wrong." It's really not a big deal.
Seemed more masochistic to me. Different strokes for different folks.
> "Treat me like da pig dat I am."
- Andrew Dice Clay
It's not "pretending" or seeking "moral leniency" for individuals to use their agency to identify the potential for meaningful work, even within constraints. Recognizing the impact of work, and making conscious choices about how one contributes is more the point.
There exist systemic exploitations of labor certainly.
On being the change ...
It is not heroic idol-seeking to share one's experience, nor to ask others to consider the values dimensions of their work.
Even on a small scale, change can be made. It's worthy to highlight it, and moreover celebrating good can motivate values based thinking in others.
But, that's a different argument than the collective action problem argument you're making here. This isn't a collective action problem. Tech workers can spurn unethical work, just like doctors, lawyers, chemical engineers, etc. Very few of us would work on ransomware, right? Now we're just talking about degrees.
I just think we're starting to realize the "money firehoses" that are either ad tech companies or VCs laundering government ZIRP stimulus are at best unhelpful and at worst eating away at our mental health, our democracy, and our society. The problem is that these are truly behemoth companies, if you don't work for one the company you do work for probably wouldn't be viable without them (do you... have anything in the cloud?) As noted in TFA, there is a real Upton Sinclair problem here. Tech is unimaginable without Google, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, or Apple.
In the absence of legislation, I think tech workers should unionize and demand the following:
- ethical, highly regulated supply chains with penalties that make violations economically non-viable
- fundamental privacy protections: companies cannot share or sell data about you without your consent (basically a data HIPPA), and they're liable for security breaches (looking at you Microsoft)
- slowly phase out advertising. This is a hot take I know, but it's super bad for humans, its critics were right the whole time, and it enables business models (e.g. social media companies) that are somehow even worse.
- ethical treatment of workers: no more union-busting Amazon workers
Maybe it'll take 100 years, yeah, but hopefully humans are still around by then.
No it doesn't. "Woe is ethical me" comments like this might.
I've not really mentioned ethics, before.
The scorn is for working for one employer for that amount of time.
Maybe the tide has been turning the past few years but it was endemic from my point of view a decade ago when I first started reading HN.
Folks who didn’t chase career maximization were typically treated like naive children at best. Working for a third of the wages in some flyover state at a boring company vs some adtech company with an options package was panned on the regular.
It was always part of the zeitgeist you switch jobs early and often to maximize your career progression vs. chill with the same company for most of your life.
Of course, now, it's more about being happy to have a well-paying job as opposed to working a "full-time" job with two or three paychecks from different companies.
Sounds great. Don't listen to the pseudo-realists who chase dreams of grandeur rather than doing something (at least semi-) useful or good with their lives.
I don't understand what you're weighing this against? A job that is literally saving lives maybe, or really leading in a field of science or technology?
Most of us don't have that though, even here on hacker news. Most of us are part of a larger effort that will progress just as well without us, our personal impact is marginal at best.
I've worked in tech for two decades for a company I deem "moral" and I feel I've had impact. But I could have fitted kitchens or made wedding cakes for that time and had just as positive an impact on the world and people I serve professionally. Hell, if I was a carpenter my work could probably outlast anything I've done in tech.
Most work that produces something people are willing to pay for does make the world a better place!
Not enormously so for the vast majority of us, but what one person out of 8 billion can do.
Capitalist transactions are a reflection of value systems and our own shortcomings/biases. To the extent that humans are flawed, many of those transactions are going to be ethically flawed as well.
So as long as it doesn't hurt any third party, it does make the world better!
It's really that's simple!
Your model of "things are very complicated and you can never really know" is very common, but note that it doesn't even attempt to explain anything. This leaves adherents free to assume their gut feel as fact.
For most of us, our tech work will be long forgotten and obsolete 20 years from now. At best it will have provided some small intangible advance - hopefully for the better.
But the people that built my house died before I was born, yet their work has a tangible ongoing impact to this day.
The people who built some European cathedrals lived over 800 years ago, yet that padstone laid by some nameless apprentice still holds an entire functional building in place.
Humans respond to incentives. We seek rewards that may be monetary, social, or intellectual: we optimize our behavior for them all the same. Trying to improve the world by scolding people for acting according to their incentives will not work. It's not a serious position. "If everyone would just..." --- no, everyone is not going to just, and if they were, they'd have already done it. Your exhortation will make no difference.
If you want to change the world, change the incentive structure. Don't expect people to act against their personal interests because you say so. At best, they'll ignore you. At worst, they'll maliciously comply and cause even more harm.
> there are ways to contribute morally outside of your 9-5. Volunteer to teach a neighborhood kid to code.
That's nominally why we have government of the people, by the people, for the people. That's why we have taxes. These scale when the interests are aligned. We've seen them scale.
The problem arises when (as Mitt Romney famously expressed) we think of corporations as people, too, and assign them rights associated with personhood.
They are of "some" people, by "some" people, for "some" people.
This is the crisis I think the US is having now. This is what it think was punctuated with COVID; there is no longer the spirit of "we" and the US is in the era of "me".
"Isn't tasting me?"
...
"I'd say it was halfway between me and not-me. Tasting is not-me doing something for the whole organism.
And at the same time tasting is me being conscious of what's happening. And that's the point of our chewing-grace - to make the me more conscious of what the not-me is up to."
--Aldous Huxley, Island
We’ve already seen how Twitter, under Musk’s leadership, has exploited this system to erode user protections in favor of appeasing his ego. When such moral compromises are normalized at the top, their effects inevitably cascade downward, influencing broader organizational norms and behaviors.
This is why I went through the pain and cost of sponsoring my own O1 and later EB instead of relying on an employer or spousal visa. You just cannot be a full participant with someone who can get you kicked out of the country on 10 day notice.
I'd use a stronger term here, for some more nefarious companies can both exploit and abuse employees on a H1b visa limitation. Now go work 60 hour weeks for less than your peers!!
It seems like you're just trying to shoehorn some kind of unrelated anti-Musk sentiment into a discussion that has nothing to do with H-1B visas or Elon Musk?
Which in turn contributes to eroding user protections, since unprotected workers aren't really in a position to put up a fight when management tells them to do something unethical.
You have access to the same internet everyone else does. Look it up yourself instead of trying to argue with people who are paying attention and put in the time to be informed.
https://www.axios.com/2024/12/27/musk-x-loomer-h1b-maga-veri...
MAGA vs. Musk: Right-wing critics allege censorship, loss of X badges.
A handful of conservative critics of Elon Musk are alleging censorship and claiming they were stripped of their verification badges on X after challenging his views on H-1B visas for highly skilled foreign workers.
The thing about him censoring Laura Loomer only illustrates what a ridiculous point it's gotten to. It's not his censorship and anti-free-speech she's complaining about, it's that it's now to a point that it finally applies to her. She's not against leopards eating people's faces, she's just against leopards eating HER face.
If you still believe Elon Musk supports free speech because you're skeptical of Laura Loomer, you're just as gullible and ignorant and dishonest and unethical as she is.
Of course, just like Musk and Loomer, you're not even arguing in good faith, since your own words prove you obviously didn't read the article. You said "Nothing in the article about account deletions, and nothing but one notorior crank claiming, without evidence, they are being censored.", but right up at the top the article clearly states that THREE people were complaining, and he's deleted or threatened to delete the accounts of several other people and organizations:
>Driving the news: Trump's conspiracy-minded ally Laura Loomer, New York Young Republican Club president Gavin Wax and InfoWars host Owen Shroyer all said their verification badges disappeared after they criticized Musk's support for H-1B visas, railed against Indian culture and attacked Ramaswamy, Musk's DOGE co-chair.
And also:
>He threatened to reassign NPR's account handle last year and marked some links to the site as "unsafe" when users click through.
>Musk also removed the verification badge of The New York Times in 2023.
>X also suspended independent journalist Ken Klippenstein's account after he shared Sen. JD Vance's vetting document from the alleged Iranian hack of Trump's campaign.
And as someone who's not arguing in good faith, you know very well it's absolutely true Elon Musk doesn't support free speech, and the list of people and organizations he's banned or demonetized because he doesn't approve of THEIR free speech goes on and on, and there's nowhere near enough room in a typical article or attention span in a typical reader to list them all. You have a lot of nerve to be that blatantly dishonest in a discussion about ethics.
But you're so intellectually lazy, you didn't even read the article you're facetiously pretending to have read, so don't demand other people write and read exhaustive 50 page well researched detailed articles enumerating every fact and scrap of evidence for you, if you're too lazy to read a one page article yourself. Because you risk embarrassing yourself again by having your own words and the article's words quoted back to you in juxtaposition.
That's unmitigated bullshit. Elon Musk now IS the censorship industrial complex of a corrupt government.
You sure have a lot of nerve and contempt and disrespect for the HN community to repeatedly be THAT brazenly unethical and dishonest in a discussion about ethics. Read the room and take the L.
With all due respect, as Musk would tell you, and I literally quote, which you can independently verify yourself: "Please post a bit more positive, beautiful or informative content on this platform." [1] ... "Take a big step back and FUCK YOURSELF in the face." [2]
[1] Notorious troll Elon Musk ripped for demanding more ‘positive, beautiful’ content on his social media platform: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...
[2] Musk Appears to Quote Popular Film in ‘F** Yourself in the Face’ Tweet: https://www.thedailybeast.com/elon-musk-appears-to-quote-tro...
Whether you or anyone else organize consequences as meaningful or not is a moral abdication. The first thing an immoral person does is justifying the consequences of their actions as inconsequential. This happens to such a degree that doing so is a signal of immorality. Immorality doesn't look like choosing evil, it looks like choosing inconsequentialism.
I offer that that rights aren't ethics. Musk has a reasonable right to censor speech on his platform that he doesn't agree with.
However, when someone establishes themselves as a free speech absolutist, it is arguably unethical for them to remove, suppress and continually work to eliminate speech they disagree with.
The previous site was pretty well moderated. The current site is pretty awful, and the site owner is capricious about meting out punishment to those who offend him. It’s all personal, whereas before it was based on moderation policy.
Yes it is, it's just censorship that (most of) the people who would have heard whatever's being censored want.
it's like my alcoholic doctor telling me I need to cut my drinking: his advice may be sound, but it's rich coming from him.
I'm referring to the people who denied or did not decry the previous twitter administration deleting huge volumes of tweets they didn't like, the people who now populate bluesky and the fediverse they themselves are quite open about saying, because it's a cozy little echo chamber world where the people who disagree are erased from their view
that is completely false.
you should work on developing respect for the opposing views of people of honest intent.
shadowbanning which stops people from seeing content is also censorship, you're wrong (and don't confuse mix this site with twitter either)
What's interesting though is that around that time we basically had no money and support from the military! We lived in a roach-infested home and barely had money for groceries! It absolutely blows me away that my family could barely support itself considering the known-and-taught risks of such a situation.
When he told me about that I asked him why they didn't pay the family more, considering the risks. He hadn't considered it even once before that conversation.
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/elon-musk-accused-...
>Elon Musk accused of censoring conservatives on X who disagree with him about immigration. The claims came after Elon Musk was involved in a public feud with some Republicans over immigration.
It ain't free if someone can buy it.
There is still censorship by surrogacy. It’s just that now they censor things you don’t like being said, so you don’t mind as much. For you it’s not a problem as long as the people being censored have a world view or narrative contrary to your own. But that’s not the same as being a free speech supporter.
That’s being a supporter of free speech for you. Not for anyone else.
By associating this to the subject of the post, are you implying that the perpetrators of unethical tech in the U.S. are mainly foreign workers, and not "homegrown" citizens?
1. Workers' choice of employment does not come close to ameliorating the disadvantage. Every argument against this is a coping mechanism.
I would like to see two changes. One, better oversight of the job categories and their prevailing wage (no more creating new categories with low wages). Two, more freedom for the immigrant to switch jobs at will so long as their job family doesn’t change.
These changes are pro-worker (both resident and immigrant) because they remove the main benefits of hiring foreign labor and prevent undercutting wages. They are changes that I believe SWEs as a class should be in favor of.
At the time (2012-2022) the things about the business model that bothered me were surveillance culture, excessive advertising, and monopoly power. Internally I was also horrified at the abuse of “vendor/contractor” status to maintain a shadow workforce which did a lot of valuable work while receiving almost none of the financial benefits that the full-time workforce received.
3 years later all of those concerns remain but for me they’re a distant second behind the rise of AI. There’s a non-zero chance that AI is one of the most destructive creations in human history and I just can’t allow myself to help advance it until I’m convinced that chance is much closer to zero. I’m in the minority I know, so the best case scenario for me is that I’m wrong and everyone getting rich on AI right now has gotten rich for bringing us something good, not our doom.
As a former history major I do think it’ll be interesting to follow how AI shifts the power balances. We like to pretend that we’ve left the “might makes right” world behind, but AI is an arms race, and it’ll make some terrible weapons. Ethics aside you’re going to want to have the best of those if you want your civilisation to continue being capable or deciding which morals it wants to follow.
This even seems to be the exact goal of many who then probably imagine the next step would then be some sort of basic income to keep things moving, but the endless side effects of this transition make it very unclear if this is even economically feasible.
At best, it would seem to be a return to defacto feudalism. I think 'The Expanse' offered a quite compelling vision of what "Basic" would end up being like in practice.
Those who are seen (even if through no fault of their own) as providing no value to society - existing only to consume, will inevitably be marginalized and ultimately seen as something less than.
The expanse was a 9+ book series that won several literary awards that takes place in an interplanetary humanity several centuries in the future.
Roughly one half of the population of earth, or 30 billion people, live on basic assistance from The United Nations. The only way to leave basic is to get a job or get an education, and there are significant hurdles to both of those routes. People on basic do not get money, but they do receive everything they need to live a life. A barter economy exists among those on basic, and some small industry is available to those on basic if it flies under the government’s radar. Some (unspecified population size) undocumented people do not receive basic, and may resort to crime in order to make ends meet.
However, it is made pretty clear in the books that the reason why this is possible for Mars is because they have this huge ongoing terraforming project that will take a century to complete. So there's always more jobs than people to fill them, basically, and it's all ultimately still paid for by the government, just not directly (via contracts to large enterprises).
1) You can literally cover the planet with sensors and make privacy impossible. Cameras and microphones are already cheap and small. What will they look like in several hundred years? You can already eavesdrop on a conversation in a closed room, e.g. by bouncing a laser off the window to amplify air vibrations. What will be possible in several hundred years?
2) Right now, suppressing the population by force requires control of a sufficient number of serviles. These serviles are prone to joining the revolution if you ask them to harm their own friends and families (Chine only managed to massacre Tianennmen square after reinforcements from other regions survived because the initial wave joined the protesters). They are prone to only serving as long as you can offer them money or threaten then credibly.
In the near future, it will be possible to suppress any uprising (if you're willing to use violence) by a small number of people controlling a large number of automated tools (e.g. killbots, the drone war in Ukraine is a taste of what's to come).
Spoilers ahead.
The story vastly underestimates the competence of state level bad actors.
In the books, Holden and his group were attacked on Eros by a small number (single digits) of covert agents and only managed to survive thanks to Miller. In reality, you don't send 4 people to apprehend 4 people, you send 40.
Later, Holden and other people were apprehended on Ganymede and again, managed to get out of it by overpowering their captors because the government just didn't send enough people. This is not gonna happen in reality.
(Though you might be able to kill one if you're also willing to die in the process. A Belarusian citizen had several KGB agents break into his flat but because it took them a while to break the door down, he managed to grab his gun, ambushed them and shot one in the stomach. The aggressor later bled out but the citizen was also killed.)
"The Expanse" shows the kind of UBI that Big Tech bros would like to see, absolutely. Which is to say, the absolute minimum you need to give people to prevent a revolt and maintain a status quo. But you shouldn't assume that this is the only possibility.
As far as "seen as providing no value to society", that is very much a cultural thing and it is not a constant, so it can and should be changed. OTOH if we insist on treating that particular aspect as immutable, our society is always going to be shitty towards a large number of people in one way or another.
A change like this would be a dramatic shift and the indirect economic consequences are mostly impossible to foresee.
For a simple example the overwhelming majority of jobs that involve unpredictable physical labor aren't going anywhere - everything from janitors to plumbers to doctors.
But in this brave new world these workers, especially the lower paid, would likely require dramatic pay increases, when they have the option of simply not working for an at least comparable 'salary' (and presumably much more if former white collar workers expect their basic to provide more than a janitorial salary). So now you end up turning the labor market upside down with dramatic changes in the overall economic system.
And keep in mind how finely balanced economies are - most Western economies, if growing, are only growing by a couple of percent by year. And now imagine hitting them with this scale of change.
I'm rather fearful for the future of education in this current climate. The tools are already powerful enough to wreak havoc and they haven't stopped growing yet! I don't think we'll properly know the effect for some years now, not until the kids that are currently in 5th, 6th, or 7th start going into the workforce. While the individual optimist in me would like to see AI as this great equalizer, personal tutor for everyone, equal opportunity deliverance, I think we've fumbled it for all but a select few. Certainly there will be cases of great success, students who leverage AI to it's fullest extent. But I urge one to think of the other side of the pie. How will that student respond to this? And how many students are really in this section?
AI in its current state presents a pact with the devil for all but the most disciplined and passionate of us. It makes it far to easy to resign all use of your critical mental faculties, and to stagnate in your various abilities to navigate our complex modern world. Skills such as critical reading, synthesizing, and writing are just a few of the most notable examples. Unrestrained use of tools that help us so immensely in these categories can bring nothing but slow demise for us in the end.
This thought pattern pairs nicely with the discussion of AIs effects on democracy. Hopefully the step taken from assuming the aforementioned society, with its rampant inabilities to reason critically about its surroundings, to saying that this is categorically bad for democracy, isn't too large. Democracy, an imperfect form of government that is the best we have at this moment, only works well with an educated populace. An uneducated democracy governs on borrowed time. One can already see the paint start to peel (there is a larger effect that the Internet has on democracy that I'll leave out of this for now, but is worth thinking about as it's the one responsible for the current decline in our political reality).
The unfortunate conclusion that I reach when I think of all of this, is that it comes down to the ability of government and corporations to properly restrain this technology and foster its growth in a manner that is beneficial for society. And that restraint is hard to see coming with our current set up. This is to avoid being overly dramatic and saying that it's impossible.
If you look at the history of the United States, and truly observe the death grip that its baby, capitalism, has on its governance, if you look at this, you find it hard to believe that this time will be any different from times past. There is far too much money and national security concern at stake here to do anything but put the pedal to the floor and rapidly build an empire in this wild west of AI. The unfortunate conclusion is that perhaps this could have been a wonderful tool for humanity, and allowed us to realize our collective dreams, but due to the reasons stated above I believe this is unachievable with our current set up of governance and understanding of ethics, globally.
There's 2 main possibilities:
1) Self aware AI with its own agency / free will / goals. This is much harder to predict and is IMO less likely with the current approaches so i'll skip it.
2) A"I" / ML tools will become a force multiplier and the powerful will be even more so. Powerful people and organizations (including governments) already have access to much more data about individuals than ordinary citizens. But currently you usually need loyal people to sift through data and to act on it.
With advanced ML tools, you can analyze every person's entire personality, beliefs, social status, etc. And if they align with your goals, you can promote them, if not, you can disadvantage them.
2a) This works if you're a rich person deciding whose medical bills you will pay (and one such person was recently killed for abusing this power).
2b) This works if you're a rich person owning a social network by deciding who's opinions will be more or less visible to others. You can shape entire public discourse and make entire opinions and topics invisible to those who have not already been exposed to them. For example one such censored topic in western discourse is when the use of violence is justified and moral. The west, at least for now, is willing to celebrate moral acts of violence in the past (French revolution, American civil war, assassination of Reinhard Heydrich) but discussion of situations where violence should be used in recent times is taboo and "banned" on many centrally moderated platforms.
2c) And obviously nation states have insane amount of info on both their own citizens and those from other nation states. They already leads to selective enforcement (everybody is guilty of something) and it can get even worse when the government becomes more totalitarian. Can you imagine current China ever having a revolution and reinstating democracy? I can't because any dissent will be stopped before it reaches critical mass.
So states which are currently totalitarian are very unlikely to restore democracy and states which are currently democracies are prone to increasingly totalitarian rule by manipulation from rich individuals - see point 2b.
I’m sure you’ll see bad actors who use AI to indoctrinate people, but at least as long as there is so much competition it’ll be harder to do that than what is happening in more totalitarian states where LLM answers are propaganda.
I’m also very worried about AI spam and impersonation eroding all interpersonal trust online which has obvious disastrous consequences.
It's easy to criticise others when you are not confronted to the situation.
younger-me, I would 100% take the money. older-and-wiser me would not even apply to begin with
Exactly :-). The only way for younger "us" to get older-and-wiser is to get older in the process :-).
I was 20 when I started working in big tech and the reputation of those companies was at its absolute peak. I had a lot to learn.
Geoffrey Hinton was interviewed by Sajid Javid on BBC R4 on Friday [1] and was considerable more pessimistic. If I hear it correctly he reckoned that there is a 10% to 30% chance that AI wipes us out within the next 30 years.
> But I have yet, until now, to point at the elephant in the room and ask whether it is ethical to work for Big Tech, taking all of the above into consideration.
People often highlight "boycotting" as the most effective action an individual can take to drive change, but for those who work in tech, the most powerful message you can send is denying your labor.
To me, this isn’t even about whether "Big Tech" companies are ethical; it’s a matter of ideological principle. FAANG companies already wield far too much power, and I refuse to contribute to that imbalance.
How do you think we got here?
Turns out network effect can compensate for a lot of incompetence and lethargy. Many (most?) big tech engineers are likely already cruising.
Try do something you actually believe is good instead of coping by telling yourself you are intentionally failing to do something bad.
For many reasons, I live a life of extremely rigorous personal ethics.
I don’t insist that others do the same, but I do need to protect myself from others that assume my ethical stance to be weakness.
For example; I make it a point to always keep my word.
Unethical folks that know this of me, are constantly trying to get me to make commitments, without divulging the costs to me, or the boundaries of said commitments.
It’s my responsibility to make sure that I have full disclosure, before making a commitment.
Many people become quite jaded and misanthropic, when faced with this. I tend to find it amusing, watching people try weaseling out of giving full information. Often, these efforts tell me more about things, than full disclosure up front will.
I like people, and can call some really rapacious bastards friend. My ethical stance is truly entirely personal, and I have worked closely, with some spectacularly flawed people.
Scott Adams (He Whose Name Has Been Struck From The Lists) wrote an extremely cynical book, called The Way of the Weasel, which is downright prescient.
that's still boycotting. but it needs to be active rather than passive to send a message. not applying for work is not enough, you have to decline at offer stage on stated principles. i dont think most would go through that effort.
only the highest level individuals who Big Tech tries to poach can do this without much time invesment because they effectively have offers at first contact.
Yes, you'd waste a few hours of some expensive engineers' time, and more hours of relatively cheap recruiter time - but sending the recruiter a big ol' fuck you on first contact gets the message across just fine.
But I'm not sure how much of this sentiment that they hear from people is actually routed to the companies themselves.
By equal speech I mean that people should have equal opportunity to be heard and pitch ideas when it comes to political advocacy. If the rich can send a million messages for every one of yours, no one will ever hear or listen to you.
And even if there wasn't, that'd give them even MORE ammo to go screaming for easier access to H-1B and similar such imported labor.
- Respond with a template explaining why I don't want to work for Google|Amazon|Meta|Microsoft|Apple
- Include information of some tech unions the recruiter could join and give reasons to do so
- Talk to colleagues about concerns and what can we do to mitigate current power imbalances
- Talk to family and friends about the industry, its impact on society, and provide help if they would like to try alternative technologies
Was working on the Manhattan project unethical because it furnished the ability for us to kill humans on an even more vast industrial scale than we previously could have imagined? Perhaps, but it's hard to square this with the reality that the capability of mutually assured destruction has ushered in the longest period of relative peace and global stability in recorded history, during a period of time we might otherwise expect dramatically increased conflict and strife (because we are sharing our limited planet with an additional order of magnitude of humans). Had everyone at Los Alamos boycotted the effort, would we be in a better place when some other power inevitably invented the atomic bomb? Somehow I doubt it.
The world is a complex system. While there are hopefully an expanding set of core "values" that we collectively believe in, any single person is going to be challenged by conflicting values at times. This is like the Kagan stages of psychological development [1], but societally. I can believe that it's net bad for society that someone is working on a cigarette manufacturing line, without personally holding them accountable for the ills that are downstream of their work. There are competing systems (family, society) that place competing values (good - we can afford to live, bad - other people get sick and die) on the exact same work.
If people want to boycott some types of work, more power to them, but I don't think the line between "ethical" and "unethical" tasks is so clear that you can put whole corporations on one side or another of that line.
Sometimes I try and put a dollar amount on how much value I have received from Google in my lifetime. I've used their products for at least 20 years. Tens of thousands of dollars seems like an accurate estimate. I'm happy to recognize that two things are true: that there are societal problems with some big tech businesses that we would collectively benefit from solving AND that I (and millions of other people less fortunate than me, that couldn't "afford" the non-ad-supported cost of these services) have benefited tremendously from the existence of Google and its ilk.
People who were into Google seem to tremendously overestimate the value it provided.
The only Google thing I ever used is Android, and only because it's too hard to avoid it.
Had there not been Google you'd have used alternative services, and your life would not have been much worse.
Yes, a similarly good search engine would have emerged, similar products would have been devised, and the internet would have been ad-supported as it already was before Google.
If you're suggesting that some other company besides Google would have worked out the same algorithms and business plan, then this seems incoherent. Even if true, we'd be here discussing how much value we've gotten from Notgoogle. It's still a tremendous amount of value, whatever the company is named.
I guess you were only talking about the search engine, then.
The technology was ready, PageRank was inspired by other work, and Google came to a good degree out of government grants.
And by the way, the search engine I was using when Google came out (I think it was Northern Light, but I might be mistaken) was not significantly worse; Altavista and Yahoo were definitely among the worst engines by then
> If you're suggesting that some other company besides Google would have worked out the same algorithms and business plan, then this seems incoherent.
Why incoherent?
Had another company done exactly the same but with a different name, yeah, not much would have changed...
But there was no need for things to go this way, for the products you love to emerge; they just, probably, would have been made by several companies, rather than all by one.
But actually, there have always been alternatives to Google's products, it was just your choice to not use them; you could probably have gotten a similar value without ever touching a Google product.
Ah, consequentialist versus deontological ethics: neither camp can even hear the other. Some people just pattern-match making thing X (weapons, profits, patents, non-free software, whatever) against individual behavior and condemn individuals doing these things regardless of the actual effects on the real world. Sure, invading Japan instead of bombing it would have killed a million Americans and who knows how many Japanese (real WW2 allied estimate), but ATOM BOMB BAD and PEOPLE WHO DO BAD, and so we get people who treat Los Alamos as some kind of moral black hole.
The world makes sense only when we judge actions by their consequences. The strident and brittle deontological rules that writers of articles that feature the wor d"ethics" in the headline invariably promote are poor approximations of the behaviors that lead to good consequences in the world.
Most people who believe that nuclear strikes on Japan were morally wrong also believe that Japan would have surrendered regardless, and nukes were thus redundant (and hence, wrong).
If you studied this question, you should know that there's a compelling argument that Japanese were motivated just as much if not more by Soviets entering the fray with considerable success. Now, you may personally disagree with this assessment, but surely you can at least recognize that others can legitimately hold this opinion and base their ethical calculus on it?
I'm not sure I agree with this part. To quote Gene Wolfe: "until we reach the end of time we don’t know whether something is good or bad, we can only judge the intentions of those who acted." Judging morals by outcome seems like a tricky path down a slippery slope. The Manhattan Project is morally complicated, both because the intentions of those involved was complicated, and because the outcome was complicated. What's wrong to do, I think, is simplifying it down to "was good" or "was bad".
I am a security professional. My work directly affects the security of the systems I am responsible for. If I do my job well, people’s data is less likely to be stolen, leaked, intentionally corrupted, or held for ransom. I also influence privacy related decisions.
I work for a Mag7 company. The company has many divisions; the division I work for doesn’t seem to be doing anything that I would perceive as unethical, but other divisions of my company do behave in a way I consider unethical.
I’m not afraid to take an ethical stance; in a previous job at another company I have directly confronted my management chain about questionable behavior and threatened to quit (I ended up convincing them my position was correct).
So how do I reason about that? Really the sticking point is that large companies are not monoliths. Am I acting unethically for working for an ethical division of an imperfect company?
Bentham might apply if you consider the overall outcome: is the work your company does positive or ethical for the majority of people the majority of the time? It seems like the “greatest good for the greatest number” would allow for some small unethical aspects so long as the outcome is good for the majority. This could also be seen as a shortcoming in that philosophy because it justifies some pretty terrible actions for the greater good (some of which, like the Manhattan project and its outcome, are mentioned elsewhere in this thread).
Kant might make you look at your company and imagine that all companies acted that way as a way to reason ethically. If all companies acted the way your company acts would that be good or bad for humanity? Kind of like the golden rule, but more rational.
There are many more to consider but it’s my view that most of them will get you to the point where you probably shouldn’t work for an unethical company, even if your particular work or area of focus is perfectly ethical. Mainly because you working for the company allows or helps it to exist in some way, and we don’t want unethical companies to exist. So maybe you could reason your way into working there if your sole focus was finding a way to destroy the company somehow. Otherwise it’s probably better to work elsewhere.
As an aside, I consider anything that actively subverts the company, beyond whistleblowing, as unethical, and in fact, it’s a threat that people like me have to defend against, so I would never involve myself in such activities.
Kroger is a good example of a large market share. They hide behind multiple grocery store names as a dark pattern to fool consumers that there is actual market competition. This allows for them to price gouge the consumer with lack of seller competition. Producers loose their selling power with the lack of buying competition too. Making those statements, am I subverting Kroger?
They were referring to stuff like sabatoge, I'm sure
I try to find theoretical situations that I find easier to think about, and hence easier to judge on a moral level. Usually I construct these situations by going to extremes with certain variables. What if your company had one employee? What if all of humanity was its workforce?
For example, let's say your employer just employs you, and your job is to press a button every month that kills a random person and generates 30k dollars. That's a situation where I personally find it very easy to make a moral judgement.
Then, in very small increments, try and change this theoretical situation to more closely resemble the real thing. Maybe there's some context missing, maybe one of the variables is too extreme. And with each increment, try to pass judgement.
For example, you can change the kill button so that maybe the button has some positive effect (maybe it kills someone, but also cures two terminal cancer patients). Or maybe you want to increase the number of employees and see how that makes you feel.
It's not a silver bullet, but there's a chance that pursuing this mode of thought ends up enabling you to confidently assess your personal situation in morality. It's also not necessarily easy. It can be difficult to find the right starting point (there's more than one!), or the right incremental change (there's more than one!). I hope it may be of help.
For an example of this way of thinking you could look up Peter Singer's argument for charity, or the pro stem cell research argument which asks you to choose between saving little girl or a box of embryos from a burning building (I forget the origin).
BigTech was already struggling to hire the caliber of engineers they needed when I worked there (and I left 5 years ago), and a fair number of the best candidates were refusing on ethical grounds (in that era, mostly around Cambridge Analytic and Facebook's involvement in Myanmar, but also due to concerns about blatant marketing to teens).
I don't think it's a given that these companies can maintain a staff of thousands of top-tier engineers as they sink themselves ever deeper into the various ethical quagmires.
You can’t make people do things with ethics. That’s not what ethics is for, and that’s not what he is talking about.
'Show me an organization's stupidity and I'll show you their malice' - Munger's Psychology of Human Misquotations
It's not a free market failure. It's an example of the Tragedy of the Commons.
Also, how do you explain how countries like the US are so prominently involved in the climate crisis? Are you going to say the US is not very much free market?
There were corporate conflicts of interest with respect to customers long before technology. But it took tech to create a community scrapbook, tied to a mass surveillance, psychology hacking and coercion flywheel, powered by hundreds of billions of dollars from third parties, and motivated by trillions of dollars of potential market cap.
Something has to give. Society is eventually going to have to come to terms with the fact that minor incidents of poor behavior, when scaled up with technology, can significantly degrade society.
Many things are illegal now, that in the far past would never have been considered a problem. Scale matters. And Internet tech scales.
As industry practicioners, we have the agency to force positive change in our field. If the government is too encumbered and the executives are too avaricious, that leaves us. If you want tech to do good things for people, work for a company that makes tech that does good things for people.
Yes, presumably, you will get on some company-wide hiring denylists. (Not because you're prominent, but because there will be routine LLM-powered "corporate fit" checks, against massive corpora and streams of ongoing surveillance capitalism monitoring of most things being said.)
Some things need to be said. And people need to not just hear it once, and forget it, but to hear it from many people, on an ongoing basis. So not saying it is being complicit.
This is a bullshit premise. Many people who worked at Google when I was there (including myself) sincerely believed that Google was good for society.
People sitting on the outside have an incorrect mental model of how people work at companies like this.
A very very small minority work there and think the company is evil. The ones who think that do not last long because it’s insufferable working with people drinking different koolaid. The same thing is true for working for Wall Street, defense contractors, drug companies, and whatever else you can think of.
If it’s a company that defines and leads the space, it’s likely filled with motivated employees that already think the company is doing the right thing.
So there is no ethical quandary of “what is good for me vs what is good for society” because the employee thinks he/she is doing good for society by working there.
> Uber skirted regulations, shrugged off safety issues, and presided over a workplace rife with sexual harassment.” Was it ethical to have worked at Uber under Kalanick?
This is the false dichotomy that doesn’t apply to people who drink the koolaid. If you think Uber has saved thousands of lives via reduced drunk driving and available rides out of bad areas, disrupting/ignoring local regulations is easy to justify. A leader who had sexual harassment issues is completely irrelevant because of “the mission”.
Implying that someone is unethical to be at Uber while that was going on makes as much sense as implying someone is unethical for being a research professor at Harvard when others there have published fraudulent papers at the same time.
I think that for every true believer in the "mission" of the company, there are two or three employees who choose not to closely scrutinize the ethics of the company's actions, because they are paid extraordinarily well.
I don't think my company is evil per se, but I do think that if we were optimizing for the good of humanity, rather than profit, our products would look rather different.
> hold paramount the safety, health, and welfare of the public, to strive to comply with ethical design and sustainable development practices, to protect the privacy of others, and to disclose promptly factors that might endanger the public or the environment
That code is pretty squarely at odds with big tech's latest malevolent aims.
This needs to be repeated more often.
Early on, there was this idea that free market capitalism was inherently amoral, and we had to do things like "vote with your wallet" to enforce some kind of morality on the system. This has been gradually replaced with a pseudo-religious idea that there's some inherent "virtue" to capitalism. You just need to have faith in the system, and everything will magically work itself out.
Breakthroughs in information technology always cause disruption in the political meaning (wars and chaos). It was like that when writing was invented (making big organized religions possible), it was the same with printing press (allowing reformation and big political movements), it was similar with radio (which allowed 20-th century style totalitarian regimes).
Each time the legacy powers struggled to survive and wars started. It took some time for the societies to adapt and regulate the new technologies and create a new stable equilibrium.
It's not surprising that it's the same with internet. We have unstable wild-west style information oligarchy forming before our eyes. The moguls build continent-spanning empires. There's no regulation, the costs are negligible, and the only ones trying to control it are the authoritarians. And the new oligarchs are obviously fighting with their thought-control powers against the regulation with all they've got.
It won't end without fireworks.
This says it all.
I'm going to have to add that my list of favorite aphorisms. And it's not just salaries that drive this dynamic. It is difficult to get someone to understand something when their entire identity is invested in not understanding it. This applies to religions, political ideologies, and even to a lot of self-styled rationalism.
An even bigger problem is that most of the economic and social benefits have come from technology. This even includes shorter work weeks and paid leave (typically falsely credited to unions) and greater disposable income, which have come from technology (broadly speaking) and not from activism.
A tech "ethics crisis" and the "dangerous" profit motive are just renewed attacks against capitalism, and "tech" is itself just the tip of the spear of capitalism (and the cultural nom de guerre of capitalism's elites).
Just goes to show what happens when you elect people like this, and why any democracy that wants to remain one will have mechanisms in place that will block such people regardless of how many votes they might get.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/the-size-of-donald-tru...
> Trump's 2024 raw vote margin was smaller than any popular vote winner since 2000, and the fifth-lowest since 1960
So it was a big in your face landslide. Cope.
The problem is not if Big Tech does support or does not support something. The problem is they have any opinion at all! The pitch is they are "platforms" and "arbiters" who decide like highest court. They should not have any opinions at all!
All this oligopoly needs to be dissolved!
This wrong on so many levels. There is neither a climate crisis nor a market failure. If any, central economies exhibited (and exhibit) higher levels of pollution and destruction of public good.
Mindless repetition of the climate crisis trope has done more damage to the cause than carbon emissions.
There is also an education crisis apparently.
> We must balance optimizing for oneself with optimizing for others
Yet if each person would optimize for themself, then the balancing is automatically taken care of. The invisible hand is even more free and dexterous on the social scale than the economic.
> the belief in the magical power of the free market always to serve the public good has no theoretical basis. In fact, our current climate crisis is a demonstrated market failure.
The power of the free market is at least as theoretically and empirically sound as the climate crisis.
I think everyone understands that there are higher-order consequences of externalities, which affect many (if not all) actors. That's why people are interested in the question of whether they are priced efficiently in markets, and it's why people are interested in ways to improve the pricing of externalities.
The question is not whether they are priced at all, the question is whether they are efficiently priced.
The scales sure can be tipped on the individual level, but you are only considering the "one individual vs. one individual" case. Many cliques of extreme power have been taken down by the weaker majority, which is also one of the processes contributing to the collapse of monopolies.
This is a unifaceted way of posing problems, often also done with monopolization.
Of course this is a unifaceted way of posing a problem: it's a model, given we're dealing with philosophical ideas. I should hope that I needn't provide examples for the model, given the state of the world at present won't let you swing a cat without hitting one.
What I suggested is an instance of Kant's categorical imperative: "Act by the maxim whereby you can at once will that it should become a universal law." The maxim in this case being "optimize for your own benefit."
You are in a situation where you have a particular benefit. You may choose to share part of this benefit with another individual, who can be said to be deprived without it. This individual lacks the capacity to gain the benefit by their own means. Said individual shall be a permanent stranger: you will never again meet, your choice here being without future consequence as a result. Sharing your benefit diminishes it, but does not lose it.
What decision do you make?
Someone has drunk the ChatGPT-will-replace-$500,000-engineers koolaid, I see
It gets worse, they got advice and then didn't follow it:
"Google reportedly sought input from consultants including the firm Business for Social Responsibility (BSR). Consultants apparently recommended that the contract bar the sale and use of its AI tools to the Israeli military 'and other sensitive customers,' the report says. Ultimately, the [Google] contract reportedly didn’t reflect those recommendations."
https://www.theverge.com/2024/12/3/24311951/google-project-n...
The end result is Lavender which HRW details here: https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/09/10/questions-and-answers-is...