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It's very simple to validate your hypothesis: if this was a small French shop and its 2-3 employees were campaigning on social media for people to block access

It's very simple to validate your hypothesis: if this was a small French shop and its 2-3 employees were campaigning on social media for people to block access to the shop, could the owner fire them for the same reason? Would it be imoral as well?

DyslexicAtheist 8y ago
your validation perhaps ignores that a small french shop, being campaigned against by 2-3 people would never reach this scale?
- gtirloni 8y ago
  Why does scale change the dynamics in this situation? I specifically used the exact same situation that happened with Amazon against a smaller shop. Is it or is it not imoral for the small shop owner to fire those employees?
  - DyslexicAtheist 8y ago
    you're asking me to compare apples with oranges. But fwiw if a small bookshop is hypothetically at the same time an oligopoly, able to spend millions in political lobbying, while at the same time guilty of avoiding taxes via global tax-loopholes then yes them firing their employees would be immoral. Tax avoidance isn't to be blamed just on these mega-corps but our political system which in France parachutes people from these companies into politics and vice versa. E.g. don't hate the player hate the game, but it's still one-sided to point the finger at an external party just because Amazon pays the salaries of some of us here. As I wrote above - these companies are a symptom of a broken / rigged system which neglects the statistical outliers or fringe cases that aren't maximizing their profits. I'm such an outlier since I never shop on Amazon and I've watched my selection in bookstores dwindle over the past 2 decades ... Going to bookstores and spend my whole Friday/Sat there browsing paper-books was once my fav way to relax. Now everything needs to be ordered bc it's not in stock... And I blame Amazon for it the same way as I blame starfucks, Zara et al for killing the high-streets in every town in the world. There is no more point in traveling because every place looks the same. And even people think the same. But again this isn't just about books but about total "disruption" without thinking about the effects to the existing social fabric. We're all just guniea pigs in this and the solution offered by BigTech is to fix all these problems with more BigTech.
  - PavlovsCat 8y ago
    > I specifically used the exact same situation that happened with Amazon against a smaller shop. No, you left all the important details out. Why are the 2-3 employees of this hypothetical small shop campaigning to block it? That matters.

DyslexicAtheist 8y ago

your validation perhaps ignores that a small french shop, being campaigned against by 2-3 people would never reach this scale?

gtirloni 8y ago
Why does scale change the dynamics in this situation? I specifically used the exact same situation that happened with Amazon against a smaller shop. Is it or is it not imoral for the small shop owner to fire those employees?
- DyslexicAtheist 8y ago
  you're asking me to compare apples with oranges. But fwiw if a small bookshop is hypothetically at the same time an oligopoly, able to spend millions in political lobbying, while at the same time guilty of avoiding taxes via global tax-loopholes then yes them firing their employees would be immoral. Tax avoidance isn't to be blamed just on these mega-corps but our political system which in France parachutes people from these companies into politics and vice versa. E.g. don't hate the player hate the game, but it's still one-sided to point the finger at an external party just because Amazon pays the salaries of some of us here. As I wrote above - these companies are a symptom of a broken / rigged system which neglects the statistical outliers or fringe cases that aren't maximizing their profits. I'm such an outlier since I never shop on Amazon and I've watched my selection in bookstores dwindle over the past 2 decades ... Going to bookstores and spend my whole Friday/Sat there browsing paper-books was once my fav way to relax. Now everything needs to be ordered bc it's not in stock... And I blame Amazon for it the same way as I blame starfucks, Zara et al for killing the high-streets in every town in the world. There is no more point in traveling because every place looks the same. And even people think the same. But again this isn't just about books but about total "disruption" without thinking about the effects to the existing social fabric. We're all just guniea pigs in this and the solution offered by BigTech is to fix all these problems with more BigTech.
- PavlovsCat 8y ago
  > I specifically used the exact same situation that happened with Amazon against a smaller shop. No, you left all the important details out. Why are the 2-3 employees of this hypothetical small shop campaigning to block it? That matters.