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Comment by Computer0 | Hacker News Reader

businesses are not people

If a business is destroyed by ransomware, all its employees lose their jobs. The business's customers lose the services the business was providing. The families supported by these jobs are now all at risk.

All that money goes somewhere. Much of it goes towards clothing, feeding, and housing people. Also, in most places it's a crime to rob anyone, even selfish assholes.

What if it is of my belief that businesses should not exist, and a job should not be a requirement for basic needs.

That seems beside the point. The ransomware extortionists aren't doing a utilitarian calculation and transferring funds from Exxon to Oxfam. They're taking money where they can and using it to fund a lavish lifestyle and more extortion. In particular, they aren't channeling it towards transforming any society into one in which basic needs are met by something other than jobs and businesses of the familiar sort. The extortionists cause suffering. They parasitize other people's labor. Their acts have actual, identifiable victims. The escorts serving them Moët at their birthday parties funded by other people's suffering aren't doing it for fun, love, or charity. For the escorts, it's a job.

You are entitled to your own beliefs, no matter how crazy they are. Society doesn’t have to be held hostage by them, though.

Show me the social contract I signed.

So you suppose we should go back to foraging for berries and sheltering in caves?

it would be more human of an experience than this hell i endure everyday

I agree that our economic system is cold, transactional, and cruel. The problem kinder systems always face is that the people indifferent to the cruelty of capitalism, exemplified by these extortionists, are still there in the alternative system. The alternative must develop countermeasures or fail. The countermeasures replicate the cold transactional cruelty of capitalism.

This isn't to say all countries are doing equally well or poorly, just that countries that came closest to eliminating what we call businesses were not generally regarded as kind, compassionate paradises by the people who lived there.

You sound depressed. I wish you well. I wish the world were kinder to idealists. May you find a supportive community within the indifferent wider world.

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