Hacker News Reader

The "Fuck you, I got mine" mentality and short-termism has been festering for decades at many American institutions, such as for-profit companies. Openly selling the country short for personal benefit is just one small step after many hundreds of them to get where we are.

View on HN

>The "Fuck you, I got mine" mentality and short-termism has been festering for decades

...in American culture

Which we export across the world. When we open up a widget factory in your non-US town it seeps in and takes hold.

When have the corporations ever not had a short-termist "Fuck you, I got mine" mentality in America?

I'd say prior to Financialization, i.e. before the "greed is good" zeitgeist of the 1980s. When wages and salaries grew in tandem with increases in productivity.

Ever heard of Bell Labs?

Bell Labs was cool, but it was more or less just a part of AT&T wasn't it? The company that spent about a century with a near-monopoly on all telecommunications at great expense to basically everyone in America, and even eventually led to them being broken up into a few dozen separate companies.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com