Monster Cables picked the wrong guy to threaten (2008)
oncontracts.com
oncontracts.com
But it wasn't because of their alleged improved sound quality or whatever, it was because they had a lifetime warranty. Dude had bought two monster 1/4inch cables and gotten them replaced "for free" like 5 times.
From what I can tell they got rid of the lifetime warranty around 2018 and have mostly transitioned to licensing their name.
##.comtr.athing:has-text('bschmidt')
And it can all be cleaned with a DELETE WHERE LIKE sql statement.
Phreak on.
(and not very important but to be pedantic, I don't know if hn has an sql backend? It used to be all in-memory if I recall, but that was many years ago)
None of them have broken or developed faulty connections over the years, and that's worth it the price difference in my opinion. In my case, for a couple of them, the price difference was nil, because the store was selling them at a 50% discount to just get them out of their premises.
Every time I've had a cable fail it was at one of the solder joints on the connector. Stripping it down and re-soldering takes a few minutes, sure, but it saves you from having to drive to a music shop or pay for shipping. For this reason I try to only buy cables that are built to let you do this instead of ones with closed, molded ends.
I contacted them. They asked for a photo, which I was able to text them directly from my phone (very advanced for 2009). He looked at it, said it was their fault, and to toss it. Another was shipped to me.
I have a Logitech mouse that’s double clicking. One of the 10 (!!!) steps I was supposed to do before they’d accept that it’s broken was to go to a website and click 100 (!!!!!) times.
I sincerely miss the companies that were totally dedicated to customer service.
Captchas are craaaaazy nowadays
/s
They’re generally pretty good about warrantying them, but life is short so I don't always bother.
"Did I stutter?"
Basically, someone asked themselves "how do I port the audiophile scam to the home entertainment space?" And monster cables was born.
When Monster first came out it became a meme.
Their advertisement was laughable and remember joking with tech savvy friends about how all wire was vastly inferior to the alien technology monster used in their oxygen free high purity copper that "allows more music to flow" (actual quote from their shitty packaging.) They sold cables for everything AV and then invaded the musician space with their trash.
Overly aggressive salesmen in electronics stores would push them on every sale. It was tiring. Buying a little TV for the kitchen? "Dont forget the monster HDMI cable and monster coax cable to hook up the cable box! oh and the monster surge strip that purifies the electron essence before the harmonic protuberances make it into your music!" Sure thing chief, lemme spend a hundred bucks on five bucks worth of cable. No wonder they turned into a meme and a lot of people hated them. But there's always a sucker who loves showing off his $80 cables to another sucker.
Would recommend.
I actually did have Monster-brand speaker cable many years ago, but it was the original version with no connectors, just a bare spool. I don't remember it being much more expensive than any other 12-gauge speaker wire at the time, and it was both more flexible than some other brands and prettier when exposed -- which is arguably a selling point. I still have a segment of that original cable, actually, and use it for my center channel. Somewhat amusingly given the actual linked article, the rest of the cable I have is from Blue Jeans.
My town has a radio shack still, and I visit them as much as I can, but I have yet to find a cable that nice
Given Monster some credit for at least being a brand. Have fun trying to reclaim a warranty from the discount chinese numbered company that tops your amazon search. It will be out of business before your delivery arrives.
I remember seeing someone else raging about how a Chinese company on Amazon had no accountability because the business address field was filled with unintelligible gibberish and there was no way to find the company.
So I looked it up. Not only was it very easy to find the address, it was obviously the address of the owner's personal home. So even if the company did go out of business, odds are good you could make contact and ask for redress.
People will assume anything.
Well it's not fun because most of them have very painless warranty claims - hammer the product with a 1 star review and applie for replacement, most will just give you full refund, no / barely any questions asked. Anything to keep their top Amazon search positions and reviews. I remember when Amazon was slammed with MPOW bluetooth products, I had minor hinge issue after almost a year on a set of cans and they just shipped me a new one, didn't even need photo evidence of destruction of old device. That's been my experience with multipe "Chinesium" products on Amazon, and essentially why Amazon > Aliexpress for the RMA premium. Buy from a top ranked product where seller doesn't want to compromise position with bad reviews, pay a few bucks extra on Amazon, get faster shipping and no question asked exchanges/refunds because seller already have it built into margins.
Overpriced because you are envious of their marketing or pricing strategy? They were appropriately priced as long as the marketing wasn't more deceptive than products are generally (and noting it's not a food product or medical claim).
> But it wasn't because of their alleged improved sound quality or whatever, it was because they had a lifetime warranty.
Isn't that (along with branding) a valid reason to price a product at a certain level?
Don't like to solder? Cordial has also cables with Neutrik connectors ready to use, for half the price of a Monster.
The problem though, is the _misleading_ marketing around "better sound" and similar that is false and does not justify charging more to basic home consumers who don't know any better.
“Monster's counsel had made a horrible mistake, and probably caused lasting harm to the company, by sending me that ridiculous letter. But he, and Monster, did apparently know the first rule of holes: "If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging." The end, therefore, of the story was a bit anticlimactic. Knowing that I was able to defend myself and knowing that they'd probably be sanctioned for frivolous conduct if they sued me, Monster fell silent. Not a peep was heard again.”
Tekton received such massive and negative feedback, he tried to backpedal the initial threat. But still, the gall. They suffered reputationally not from the [mildly] negative review, but from the fallout from the ill-advised threat of lawsuit.
https://www.audioresurgence.com/2024/04/tekton-speakers-revi...
[more neutral] https://musictech.com/news/gear/tekton-audio-allegedly-threa...
> My overarching sense is that this whole saga has been largely Mr. Alexander’s fault and it could have been easily avoided.
> Alexander has dropped the Mother Of All Bombs on this situation, displaying disrespect towards the reviewing industry, and regarding reviewers as trivial annoyances that can be easily brushed aside. The outcome of this saga and who will ultimately withstand the fallout remains to be seen, but Mr. Alexander almost certainly looks like an ass at this moment in time, and in my opinion, any negative assessment he receives is largely self-inflicted.
>There’s no doubt in my mind that Eric Alexander of Tekton Design is largely in the right, and in principle, challenging these reviewers was mostly justified.
The next sentence is revealing though:
>The problem, and the reason we’re here now dwelling on it, is how he went about it.
I'm not sure if I understand the first of the quotes, honestly, given the rest of the content. But that seems to be what GP was referencing.
This sort of thing always reminds of the Jack Daniels cease and desist letter[0], which, at least for me, had the exact opposite effect.
0. https://brokenpianoforpresident.wordpress.com/2012/07/19/jac...
I wish all companies took such an approach. You catch more flies with honey, and all that.
15 years later, I get a registered letter from a law firm – counsel to the HOA – claiming that I was violating their trademark by owning the domain name, demanding that I turn it over to the HOA, etc.
If an actual human had reached out to me, I would have happily transferred the domain. Instead, they paid a lawyer to be a dick about it – so I ignored the letter, they registered the .net, and everyone moved on.
I still keep the domain up, and redirect it to their new URL, because as long as the .com domain works, people will be using it. Which means they will still want it, and I'm not giving it to them. At least not until they ask nicely, and catch me with honey instead of vinegar.
[0]Despite this incident, their HOA is normally perfectly reasonable. It's a few hundred dollars per year to keep up with road repairs, signage, community facilities upkeep, etc.
Then again, maybe there’s less hate for HOA’s here than in other spaces. This is typical HOA behavior!
Also, my parents still live there, so I didn't want to start any more drama. In fact, they sold their previous home and built a new place in the same community, while it would have been far cheaper to build outside the HOA.
All this to say that, while the internet is full of genuine examples of nightmare HOAs, my parents' HOA is normally run by a few retired folks who mind their own business.
If plaintiffs had to pay the fees for defense prior to settlement or judgement, most of this would disappear. Sadly, nobody has the balls to implement that.
* The "J" stands for "Good Work!"
This is the new design: https://www.amazon.com/-/de/gp/aw/d/1621050521/
The toy company claimed their products were parodies, which have heightened protection from such claims, but the Court didn’t buy it.
https://www.oyez.org/cases/2022/22-148
Fun oral argument for an extended dog walk; you get to hear the justices argue about scatological jokes and whiskey bottle shapes.
JD’s advocate, Lisa Blatt, is also reliably a hoot.
If that really is the reason you’re threatening action against someone, they may just understand if you’re nice about it!
That said, while it may foster more goodwill towards your company, it probably isn’t as surefire a way to generate the swift response you want as being a dick and making the threats
Realistically, you will not win a judgment on this to compensate you for your time dealing with a single cease and desist letter. If someone shows a really excessive pattern of it, perhaps a judge or a bar association could be convinced to make an example of them.
But I think I was less imagining a countersuit that literally just "seeks damages for wasted time and effort"... and more imagining a countersuit that can somehow "rope in" the claims in the original suit, so as to force those claims to be evaluated and case law to be created upon that evaluation — whether the original claimant likes it or not.
Imagine, by analogy, outside the domain of IP law:
1. Party A threatens to sue party B for having violated the terms of some contract they have.
2. Party A then drops this threat.
3. Party B then sues party A with the intent of having a judge still evaluate that same question, but now in the other direction: "would party A have had legal standing to sue party B?" — where in the case that party B wins that judgement, this would not only award damages to party B, but also have the same case-law impact as if party A had really sued party B, and lost.
> As for your requests for information, or for action, directed to me: I
> would remind you that it is you, not I, who are making claims; and it
> is you, not I, who must substantiate those claims. You have not done so.
If someone threatens to sue you, you can sue them to establish that their suit is groundless.
It was good for Blue Jeans and for Monster, as they both avoided expensive litigation, but from a more general perspective, it would have been better if Monster thought Blue Jeans was an easy victim, sued and got its comeuppance.
Plus the threat to impose even bigger costs with anti trust violation claims!
Need to imagine the face of the in-house counsel reading it.
Guess BJC was content with letting them just go away...but once this was generally known, it does reduce the value of those threats.
Channel your energy in the right direction ..
It starts with several pages worth of requests for information. I'm pretty sure those aren't actually requests for information - they're a threat. If Monster were to actually sue, he'd be entitled to these documents as part of discovery, so he's essentially saying "if you sue me, you'll spend a lot of money on discovery (and be forced to reveal stuff you'd rather not)".
Sprinkled in are some suggestions of ethics violations on the side of Monster's lawyers, a hint at Monster's likely corporate tax evasion scheme (and the requirement to produce the material that proves the tax evasion in discovery), and the threat to break their racket in the last paragraph that kopirgan already pointed out.
All this is even more impressive than the quoted part, and sadly omitted in the original blog post.
Now tonearm cables are a whole different animal, and my pair was a mid-priced custom set though one of the high-end dealers — all substance, no flash => aka, not paying for an advertising budget & fancy packaging.
1: https://proftomcrick.com/2014/04/29/arkell-v-pressdram-1971/
So yea, “digital” cables are not immune to signal integrity issues, and better cables do perform better.
I understand that monster takes this to the next level of bullshit — but in principle, yes, more expensive cable cable can yield better quality. Or should I say — crappy cable can result in quality degradation
Better cables perform better, but not at all in the way that Monster suggests.
Gold plating and oxygen-free copper doesn't matter.
Any certified HDMI cable will operate at least to its certification, whether or not it is gold plated with triple shielded conductors.
I wish the HDMI forum would officially deprecate all older HDMI standards, so that companies like Monster couldn't advertise that their cables provide "better color, higher resolution, better sound", etc. All the cables in the store would be 8k HDMI 2.2 cables, or they wouldn't be allowed to use the HDMI trademark.
I buy cheap cables from China. They generally work-to-spec out of the...plastic bag, but may not handle frequent plug/unplug cycles or any sort of rough treatment.
If your TV only supports 4k@60 HDMI 2, no need to go buy more expensive cables with specs you can't use. And even then, unless you're playing time-sensitive games, 4k@60 is probably all you need anyway.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15668069
DonHopkins on Nov 10, 2017 | parent | context | favorite | on: Electric Sheep on Ubuntu Linux 17.10
I deserve to be downvoted by the literature snobs, but if you liked Blade Runner the movie (and who in their right mind doesn't?), then you may very well enjoy K. W. Jeter's three written sequels to the MOVIE Blade Runner (not the BOOK DADOES), "Blade Runner 2: The Edge of Human", "Blade Runner 3: Replicant Night", and "Blade Runner 4: Eye and Talon". There is no book "Blade Runner 1" -- that's the movie.
The irony is that Philip K Dick was offered a whole lot of money to write another book entitled "Blade Runner" based on the screenplay of the movie, but he insisted on maintaining the integrity and title of his original book DADOES by re-issuing it with a reference to the (quite different) movie on the cover, instead of rewriting another book called "Blade Runner" based on the movie based on his own book. (Harrumph!) He would have made a lot more money by selling out that way, but he steadfastly refused to do it.
However, fortunately for us, after his death, his friend and fellow SF writer K. W. Jeter (who also wrote an excellent cyberpunk novel Dr. Adder which Dick loved) sold out on his behalf and wrote those three books based on the movie (which referenced famous lines like "Wake up. Time to die!").
They explore the question of what the fuck happened after they went flying off into the wilderness (that unused footage from The Shining), and whether Decker was a replicant. (Who would have guessed??!)
So even though they're not written by PKD, or directly based on his original all time great book, and not as authentic and mentally twisted as a real PKD book, they are still pretty excellent and twisted in their own right, and well worth reading. They're based on an excellent movie based on an epic book, and written by a friend and author PKD respected, who's written some other excellent books.
And while you're at it, check out Dr. Adder and K. W. Jeter's other books too! Especially Noire, for its hi-fi cables made out of the still-living spinal columns of copyright violators. (I suggest you buy a copy and don't pirate it!)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blade_Runner_2:_The_Edge_of_Hu...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blade_Runner_3:_Replicant_Nigh...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blade_Runner_4:_Eye_and_Talon
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K._W._Jeter
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Adder
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noir_(novel)
http://www.indiewire.com/2015/12/watch-u-s-theatrical-ending...
http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/jeter_k_w
Jeter's most significant sf may lie in the thematic trilogy comprising Dr Adder (1984) – his first novel (written 1972), long left unpublished because of its sometimes turgid violence – The Glass Hammer (1985) and Death Arms (1987); Alligator Alley (1989) as by Dr Adder with Mink Mole (see Ferret) is a distant outrider to the sequence. Philip K Dick had read Dr Adder in manuscript and for years advocated it; and it is clear why. Though the novel clearly prefigures the under-soil airlessness of the best urban Cyberpunk, it even more clearly serves as a bridge between the defiant reality-testing Paranoia of Dick's characters and the doomed realpolitiking of the surrendered souls who dwell in post-1984 urban sprawls (see Cities). In each of these convoluted tales, set in a devastated Somme-like Near-Future America, Jeter's characters seem to vacillate between the sf traditions of resistance and cyberpunk quietism. In worlds like these, the intermittent flashes of sf imagery or content are unlasting consolations.
[...]
Much of his later work has consisted of Sharecrop contributions to various proprietorial worlds, including Alien Nation, Star Trek, Star Wars [for titles see Checklist]; of some interest in this output are his Ties – they are also in a sense Sequels by Another Hand – to the film Blade Runner (1982), comprising Blade Runner 2: The Edge of Human (1995), Blade Runner 3: Replicant Night (1996) and Blade Runner 4: Eye & Talon (2000), and making use of some original Philip K Dick material. The sense of ebbing enthusiasm generated by these various Ties is not markedly altered by Jeter's most recent singleton, Noir (1998), a Cyberpunk novel whose detective protagonist's main job is killing copyright violators so that their still-living spinal cords may be incorporated into hi-fi system cables; the irreality of this concept, and the bad-joke names that proliferate throughout, are somewhat stiffened up by the constant interactive presence of the already dead, a Philip K Dick effect, as filtered through Jeter's own intensely florid sensibility. [JC]
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1678420/Blade_Runner_Enha...
A slightly odd review: https://youtube.com/watch?v=vAmXzVuFEoA
All that being said it’s unusual to find a cable that is both clean enough to do the handshake and keep sync but noisy enough to give you visible snow. So it’s still quite true that practically speaking, yes, it’s usually an all or nothing deal. Cable quality can and does matter though. I was a BlueJeans customer for a long time before the brief Monster spat, but it endeared them to me, and I still try to buy from them when I need to buy a cable I need to be absolutely sure of.
The only such error correction I'm aware of is when reading data from a CD, which at this point is a tiny part of digital audio. Is there something I'm missing?
FEC and other types of error correction or recovery is ubiquitous in wireless audio and communications applications including phone calls, Bluetooth, VoIP, wireless microphones, and digital radio. Responsibility for the error correction is sometimes part of the underlying transport mechanism and sometimes incorporated directly into the codec. Encryption & privacy requirements for audio also mean that we solved these problems long ago. IIRC that the WWII SIGSALY encrypted telephone between the US and UK required and implemented error correction.
By contrast, most audio-over-IP formats do not (they rely on the IP-level checks).
Anyway, thanks for pointing out the rather important world filled with codecs that we actually live in.
That's not been my experience with hdmi or dvi. Bad cables or bad connections can result in artifacts in the display. Sometimes bad cables can result in difficulty negotiating but a good result if negotiate succeeds. Bad cables can result in frequent dropouts as the signal quality varies around the threshold.
Differences in cable construction may lead to more or less longevity in difficult environments: frequent connection cycles, movement in the cable, heat/humidity/other environmental stuff, tight bends, etc.
Certainly, once you reliably meet the threshold SNR for accurate reception, a better cable doesn't help much.
Does that need oxygen free, cold extruded in zero-g cables? No. But a well made cable is likely to last longer in challenging environments.
The HDMI standard doesn't have a way of telling you that you really need an HDMI 2.2 cable and you actually have an HDMI 1.x cable. It just tries to send the signal, and if the analogue bandwidth of the cable is insufficient, then the error correction will be insufficient and you'll get no signal or snow and blocks.
This is somewhat of a good thing, since many short HDMI 1.x cables will work for standards that require HDMI 2.x.
Not all ‘Ethernet’ cables are the same. Someone will give you 100mbit. Some will give you a gigabit. Some will give you even more. They’ve all got RJ45 on them.
“All HDMI cables are the same” is an almost-baseless corruption of a very valid critique of Monster et al.
RJ45 is a wiring pin-out standard for that plug [1]. It's also a standard for telephony, not networking -- it carries one phone line. A gross waste of pins if you ask me.
[1] Not quite. An RJ45S plug has a tab on the side that will not insert into an 8P8C jack.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/this-xbox-hdmi-cable-has-anti-...
Gotta wonder how bad you gotta screw up to have your byline on every article you wrote permanently set to that.
He seems to have done fairly well for himself, since then.
If this is true, whether that was wrong of Clint to do or not would depend on his contract.
And here's a thread about it, which is admittedly hard to read because the "Audioholics" has been replaced the words "Bad Robot": https://forums.audioholics.com/forums/threads/bad-robot.9451...
As far as legal tactics go, I’m very sympathetic to his position and wish more folks would fight to the finish instead of settling for nuisance values.
They’re just good, simple, solidly built cables that fulfill their intended functions. No snake oil, no BS. 10/10 will buy again when I’ve got a home and a rack for a bunch of fixed-length custom cabling.
Once I patiently explained that a cable shouldn't matter for digital as long as the bits got there, and seeing the young sales guy pause and then "get it". And I got the (relatively) cheap cables.
Also speaker wire. You can get perfectly good copper cables for less, probably in a thicker gauge wire.
Emphasis mine.
As someone that sold AV equipment, including cables, in the late ‘00s / early ‘10s, nerds that misunderstood the nuances of this were the single worst group of customers to work with.
You could see them coming a mile away. By the time “gold-plated HDMI cables are a scam” gets down to their level of pseudo-intellect, it becomes “all cables with the same physical connectors are the same”. Patently untrue, and 99.9% of the time they won’t have any of it. Some of the most snide, belittling, insulting shit ever sneered at me in a professional context has been from some socks-and-sandals nerd practically accusing me of genocide because I dare suggested that the cheapest HDMI cable on the shelf explicitly doesn’t support whatever insanely expensive TV, blu-ray player, or whatever else, that they’ve purchased.
15+ years later, purchasing the ‘right’ HDMI cable is if anything a more Byzantine process. Made worse by the fact that any conversation on the topic inevitably has at last one person butting in to say “they’re all just cables bro aha”.
Would be nice if the EU could step in an make DisplayPort the required connection and protocol like they did for the USB-C port for charging.
We had it, it was called SCART.
Let me just clarify that this was really not something outside the range of common sense.
I recall it was merely overpriced but decent $29 cables vs $129 monster cables. This was pre-hdmi probably 2000 or earlier and it was at the Good Guys.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Guys_(American_company)
That said, yeah hdmi and say 4k is confusing. Thank goodness for unconfusing standards like USB-C. (kidding!)
I even had their HDMI to 2xCat6 cable bridge, that worked fine with, you guessed it, monoprice cat6. Dozens of yards.
Maybe I've just gotten lucky buying cheap commodity cables.
The included cable wasn't long enough so I bought a new one that I thought looked good, came home and didn't work right.
That's when I discovered not all HDMI cables are the same, and I had to check supported bandwidth.
Sadly the cheapest cable I could find in town that supported my needs were... Monster Cable.
People frequently did try to claim you would get deeper reds and better blacks and all sorts of audiophile-grade bullshit by spending that extra hundred dollars on magic cables.
While you feel you might have been knowledgeable and honest in intent, the retail electronics industry as a whole is filled with a heady mix of ignorance and profiteering, to the detriment of customers. They’re almost always better served by grabbing cables from an online vendor after leaving the store.
And that’s if the devices they buy don’t already come with a perfectly good HDMI cable, which most do now.
https://www.ksbw.com/article/cat-and-cloud-coffee-in-santa-c...
In reality, he just sent them a slightly-snarky response to their flimsy cease-and-desist, and they decided not to go forward with a lawsuit, which is probably how it would have played out anyway.
This story reminded me of the multi-year battle by Monster energy going after MonsterFishKeepers.com
https://reefbuilders.com/2016/03/01/monster-fish-keepers-win...
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-e&channel=ent...
(the only coat hangers i've seen lately are plastic or wood)
"Music was much more open with plenty of air around the instruments. Imaging was superb - greatly improved over previous cables that I used. The depth was substantially improved with great instrumental recognition from front to rear. In other words, the speakers managed to disappear and only the performances were remaining."
"I had for the first time, heard tones and instruments that were previously hidden with other cables. Music sounded more alive - had more presence. Brass instruments now had a bite (yet with a rich, non-strident tone) that sounded as if you were there."
"The bass tones improved dramatically, taking on a fuller (tighter with less bloat) than I had remembered with previous cables"
I'd love to see how these people do with a double blind setup.
This kind of hyperbole for the magical powers bestowed by even the smallest (or most dubious) accessories is a source of unending amusement for me, if it wasn't so foolish.
Music lovers buy hifi systems to listen to their music.
Audiophiles buy music to listen to their hifi systems.
A few months in we got a cease-and-desist from a company who claimed (and I'm not making this up) to have a trademark on the idea of making the dot of an "i" into a little circle in a different colour, and said that the trade dress of our logo was infringing because their logo was just their company name in a (different) font with the dot on the "i" being a circle in a different colour.
I wrote back and asked them to clarify that it was their contention that that was a trademark and making it very clear I would fight it and we had no intention of changing anything. They disappeared.
It's really important not to feed this nonsense by caving to the trolls.
Bschmidt###... who hurt you? Why is this your life?
I feel sad for the person if they think this is the best use of their time.
Re about "nobody sees these", only registered users with half a brain see them, and they're the ones who can easily filter out people acting like a child with nothing better to do. It's people not logged in who don't have "show dead" enabled that don't see it.
Audio stereophile-wise, I could replace them with zip wire (two conductor, twisted 24-gauge cable). But they wouldn't have the neat nylon braided jacket, or shove things out of the way when I'm moving the speakers.
It was stupid but fun to add them to my setup, and now I'm glad I have them.
I also have some interconnect cables from Blue Jeans Cable, that fellow is awesome.
If Monster is suing him, may they burn in court.
I got let out of 2-3 months of jury duty on an asbestos case by saying basically the same thing. Voir dire is fun, particularly if you manage to scare the bejezus out of both sides.
seeing this pugnacious lawyer write an excellent response has me considering buying from blue jeans.
*edit to fix link; in the future, maybe tell me it broke instead of reflexively downvoting
What is the fucking rationale behind that? Why must we baby shareholders and be cruel to workers despite the latter providing 100% of society's value?