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Comment by mvieira38 | Hacker News Reader

Viewing corporations as amoral bots that are justified in squeezing every bit of profit out of humans is exactly what is wrong with our society. Someone in a big tech was the inventor of this dark pattern and they think they're awesome for finding a loophole in the well-meaning regulation, at the cost of the costumer they supposedly should serve. That person is the problem, and so are the people that followed them

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"Viewing corporations as amoral bots..."

How else should we view them? Walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, probably a duck.

Nobody justified the behavior, only stated that corporations have proven over time to generally seek profits over all else. They provide legal cover to bad-faith actions. That wasn't the original intention, but it is absolutely the current state of the world.

Publically traded companies are inherently aligned with the traits of psychopathy.

They are exactly the Paperclip Maximizer thought experiment, except it's dollars (or euros or whatever) instead of paperclips.

corporations are the mechanism by which bad actors are shielded from responsibility. limited liability is used in bad faith in these cases; regulating this bad-faith usage should impact the individuals responsible for the implementation, but should also impact those not directly involved for allowing it to happen in the first place, including board members, management and investors (if you really want to see change, start fucking with peoples' money when they allow bad things to happen through inaction).

I don't think the malicious compliance is "justified", but I do think it was predictable. What did the lawmakers think would happen?

Unless you're advocating slaughtering 90% of humanity, what is the purpose of this line of thinking?

Sure, some of you are just so good and nice that you're going to spend all of your time trying to better your fellow man no matter the incentives. The rest of us are spending our time and energy trying to better ourselves. It's better for everyone if the rules of the game are set up so those actions create positive externalities.

We tend to lock up people whose actions are amoral enough. The problem with thinking that its normal for corporations to act amorally is that that also means we forget its people making these decisions and that those people should be held accountable.

For this "modern" view, you have to look back to 1896, when New Jersey made it easy to create for-profit corporations beholden only to shareholders as a way to attract investment to the state.

It's really not even primarily the privately-held corporations that are the problem. Some family business, even if it's big, is more likely to care about its reputation because that's their family's company and it's still going to be their family's company in 50 years or more.

Whereas you get publicly-traded companies and the primary shareholders are investment funds, whose managers get bonuses based on short-term results and who may not be in the same job or having the fund hold the same companies in as little as a year from now. So their incentive is to have companies squeeze customers for short-term gains and then choose the right time to pawn the shares off on some bag holders who see strong recent numbers and don't realize what that strategy does to the company's long-term prospects.

It's basically the further removed those benefiting financially are from the actual operation the more likely the business will care about money over everything else. The public private distinction matters less - private companies can still have external investors calling the shots.

> Viewing corporations as amoral bots that are justified in squeezing every bit of profit out of humans

Literally what a corporation is.

This is capitalism mate. People will do basically anything with the "for the company" excuse. If they don't, they will be out of a job and eventually starve.

Laws are the only things that can limit corporations. Without those we'd still have children working, 14 hour shifts and no weekends.

Why is that person a problem? That is why rule of law exists, ideally, so that we don't run society on arbitrary outraged moral judgement. E.g. many people are morally outraged by presence of any illegal immigrants and others are outraged by any enforcement against undocumented immigrants. If we base decisions on arbitrary outraged moral judgement it's not going to go well.

A "loophole" is only a "loophole" to someone who agrees with yours. And I say it as someone who agrees in this particular instance.

That person is a problem because low-trust environments are inherently low-privacy and low-efficiency environments. Allowing a small portion of the population to destroy trust and then justifying it with "well there was no explicit rule against it" is parasitic on the whole society. It's better to stand up and say "this is unacceptable and clearly not what was asked for".

That is only as far as you or I are concerned. The environment where you first write the rules then someone can arbitrarily come and say nah that's not what we meant (with any consequences) is far worse than any low trust environment. Vague rules with selective/interpretative enforcement is in fact what authoritarian countries like Russia/China tend to use. Disturbing social harmony is illegal and all the right thinking people know it when they see it.

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