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Comment by akudha | Hacker News Reader

It is easy to be ethically and morally responsible, after one becomes rich, after one is retired. Until then, it is enough to follow the law just enough to not get fined. Actually, even that is a tall ask these days - fines are just cost of doing business.

It sucks that it is this way, but society seems to have largely accepted it

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Fine are the cost of doing business... FOR COMPANIES.

For individuals: arrest, jail, prison, and horrifically crippling fines are normal.

An individual kills 1 person, and its 15y to life. But if youre an 'insurance company' and make policies in abeyance of insurance and arbitrarily deny 30% of claims getting many killed (Luigi says hi), thats perfectly fine. Youre a business leader making lots of money.

You steal $100 from the till at $shitretailjob and company calls cops and has you arrested. BUT if they fraudulently change timesheets and steal $100 from you, wellllll thats a civil matter.

Or, a company made 1B dollars but spent $990M, they only owe taxes on 10M$. But if I make $100k and spent $90k, I still pay taxes on 100k, not 10K.

This country should be called the Corporate States of America. That fiction has more rights than I or any other non-billionaire average human will ever have.

> This country should be called the Corporate States of America.

Who knows a country in which is different, let me know, please, honestly.

I can call these hypocrisies to light. I do so on the off chance that we gain enough support to start reversing end-stage capitalism.

Im not going to list factoids of what rank we are or arent. Its honestly irrelevant. Im stuck here, since I have no familial claim of citizenship elsewhere.

So, yeah. I speak out here and in person, about these abuses.

Eventually, we'll do better. Takes time. Probably longer than I have alive.

China is definitely different in this particular aspect. The balance of powers in "state vs corporations" is completely different from the US. And China is seeing massive benefits from this particular aspect of its country, it's closely related to their ascension vs. the decline of the US in particular.

Before people turn to Reddit-style downvoting and flagging, this isn't a vouch for China as a country on the whole. It has plenty of other problems that certain Western countries don't have. I'm simply talking about the specific topic at hand.

Can you enumerate some of these benefits? They famously arrested Jack Ma for not bending to the CCP enough. I don’t think that’s really a benefit (e.g. if the equivalent in the US was Democrats arresting any CEOa politically against them).

They're countless. Can you not think of any major issues as of 2026 directly caused by the enormous power that megacorporations hold in the US? I struggle to believe you can't. If you can, then it should be easy to see that at least some of them would not happen in China because of the opposite balance of power.

Just to give one example, look up the crackdown on Alibaba and platform monopolies. You also mentioned Jack Ma. The Ant Group IPO he was pushing, was likely to be a bad thing for most of Chinese society.

How did Netflix do making a business decision that defied the wishes of the Ellison family? With Trump 47 there are literally pages of this sort of stuff.

Other notable non-Trumpist example is Joseph Nacchio, the former CEO of Qwest. He refused to comply with a request for phone records without a warrant. The reaction was a drop in Federal business and a prosecution for insider trading.

That was over 20 years ago? And there were half a dozen Qwest executives who were profiting from insider trading on inflated revenues that started in 1999, long before the NSA incident in 2001. I remember it clearly because I had the misfortune of being a shareholder in that dog.

China's problems with PFAS are substantially worse than the US.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/398603137_Global_in...

The difference is that when China actually cracks down things change relatively quickly. In 10 years this group [1] will be lower than in the US

[1] https://www.bmj.com/content/393/bmj.s771

Yea, when the communist party thinks an industry should change it changes in the way the communist party says. Of course it is often not without side-effects.

I'm sure they are, as I imagine they produce magnitudes more of it. Doesn't change anything about the balance of powers though.

China is tightening regulations and trying to clean up their country.

Trump is waging war on the EPA.

China, Germany, any country in Scandinavia, Poland, Japan… it is a long list

But also, what if you have those ideas and thoughts from the beginning and during the entire time, yet also build your life on those systems you despise, then you use your "won" resources to fight against them, isn't that at least better than the alternatives?

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