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Your example is comical. By my reading, Amazon stole (and was ordered to return) $70 million from Americans by offering their children fake playmoney for their

Your example is comical. By my reading, Amazon stole (and was ordered to return) $70 million from Americans by offering their children fake playmoney for their real money. Where are the punitive damages? $70 million is piss to Amazon. Here's another comical example from recent: Facebook is fined $5B for privacy violations. Their stock goes up for the day.

tomhoward 7y ago
Nowhere did I say the conduct of the big tech companies is anything resembling perfect, nor that the regulation of them is perfect. The point was that none of this justifies property theft from other big companies, and that we all learned this as children. But sure, petty theft can be a powerful form of protest I guess, so if that's important to you, knock yourself out.
- 1000units 7y ago
  The claim was big corporations get to rip off and exploit little people virtually at will, and your refutation was that they are punished (or at least get slapped in the wrist as evidenced), everything is at balance in the moral realm, and a hostile personal orientation against them is unwarranted. You've now updated your argument to Big Tech may be evil but that doesn't mean we should assume Big Grocery is too. That could be right, but if we look closely I'm sure we could find some tremendously nasty things happening there too. The incentives are making Big Money, not doing good. This is an issue of our (Post-)Industrial society.
  - tomhoward 7y ago
    I'd started writing a longer reply, then thought "you know what, it's Sunday night here, I've just started drinking a really nice glass of wine and my partner is about to serve up the home-made pasta we've spent the past couple of hours preparing... life's too short for this" and wrote a low-effort reply. As your previous comment began with "your example is comical" didn't exactly make me feel like a good-faith effort at serious discussion was likely to be worth the investment, and you came right though and asserted that I'd said things that I did't say at all. So here we are. For what it's worth, I don't think "big tech" or "big grocery" is "evil" or "not evil" in any binary sense. People and organisations respond to incentives and societal standards. Sometimes those incentives and standards are healthy and lead to broadly beneficial outcomes and sometimes they are perverse and lead to negative outcomes. Countless economists over several centuries have explored these topics far more deeply than I can in an HN comment late on a Sunday evening. For some people it's really important to think that the big tech companies are evil and to blame for all society's ills, and now people are claiming that means it's really important to go easy on people who shoplift. OK then, they're welcome to that view. I still think society is better if people - both individuals and corporates of all sizes - act ethically and morally and don't steal or defraud, and I don't think individuals can expect politicians and corporations to act ethically if we're not willing to act ethically in our personal lives. That said, I'm not a law-and-order hardliner, and I have actually shoplifted in my life, at a young age, though not for any reasons to do with waging any just war against supposedly evil corporations. I was just in a bad place in life. So I have plenty of compassion for people who end up doing wrong due to being in bad circumstances. Anyway, like I said, it's late on a pleasant Sunday evening and life is too short to spend any more time talking about this, so I'm out.
    - benjaminbrodie 7y ago
      Isn't life too short for spending several hours to make pasta lol lol
      - tomhoward 7y ago
        I said couple, not several! My partner is of half-Italian background, and today was the first time she used the chitarra [1] she recently received as a gift from her family. So yep, making the dough, waiting for it to rise, making the sauce, then pushing the dough through the chitarra to make the spaghetti all takes a bit of time. It's not an every-day thing, but as a couple's thing to do on a quiet Sunday afternoon, it was great. And it tasted incredible. Worth every second. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaghetti_alla_chitarra https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaghetti_alla_chitarra
        benjaminbrodie 7y ago
        all I get to eat today is milk lol that's supposed to be used with coffee (kwa-fee lol lol) but I just drink it lol lol, not super ethical but life is too short lol. Hope you enjoy pasta with fine partner lol and enjoy life bruh
        1000units 7y ago
        It sounds like you're living the life, man. I apologize if I goaded you into an unproductive argument; sometimes I get like that. Cheers.
        tomhoward 7y ago
        Thanks for the kind comment. I did still learn a thing or two from the discussion so thanks for your part in that too :)

tomhoward 7y ago

Nowhere did I say the conduct of the big tech companies is anything resembling perfect, nor that the regulation of them is perfect. The point was that none of this justifies property theft from other big companies, and that we all learned this as children. But sure, petty theft can be a powerful form of protest I guess, so if that's important to you, knock yourself out.

1000units 7y ago
The claim was big corporations get to rip off and exploit little people virtually at will, and your refutation was that they are punished (or at least get slapped in the wrist as evidenced), everything is at balance in the moral realm, and a hostile personal orientation against them is unwarranted. You've now updated your argument to Big Tech may be evil but that doesn't mean we should assume Big Grocery is too. That could be right, but if we look closely I'm sure we could find some tremendously nasty things happening there too. The incentives are making Big Money, not doing good. This is an issue of our (Post-)Industrial society.
- tomhoward 7y ago
  I'd started writing a longer reply, then thought "you know what, it's Sunday night here, I've just started drinking a really nice glass of wine and my partner is about to serve up the home-made pasta we've spent the past couple of hours preparing... life's too short for this" and wrote a low-effort reply. As your previous comment began with "your example is comical" didn't exactly make me feel like a good-faith effort at serious discussion was likely to be worth the investment, and you came right though and asserted that I'd said things that I did't say at all. So here we are. For what it's worth, I don't think "big tech" or "big grocery" is "evil" or "not evil" in any binary sense. People and organisations respond to incentives and societal standards. Sometimes those incentives and standards are healthy and lead to broadly beneficial outcomes and sometimes they are perverse and lead to negative outcomes. Countless economists over several centuries have explored these topics far more deeply than I can in an HN comment late on a Sunday evening. For some people it's really important to think that the big tech companies are evil and to blame for all society's ills, and now people are claiming that means it's really important to go easy on people who shoplift. OK then, they're welcome to that view. I still think society is better if people - both individuals and corporates of all sizes - act ethically and morally and don't steal or defraud, and I don't think individuals can expect politicians and corporations to act ethically if we're not willing to act ethically in our personal lives. That said, I'm not a law-and-order hardliner, and I have actually shoplifted in my life, at a young age, though not for any reasons to do with waging any just war against supposedly evil corporations. I was just in a bad place in life. So I have plenty of compassion for people who end up doing wrong due to being in bad circumstances. Anyway, like I said, it's late on a pleasant Sunday evening and life is too short to spend any more time talking about this, so I'm out.
  - benjaminbrodie 7y ago
    Isn't life too short for spending several hours to make pasta lol lol
    - tomhoward 7y ago
      I said couple, not several! My partner is of half-Italian background, and today was the first time she used the chitarra [1] she recently received as a gift from her family. So yep, making the dough, waiting for it to rise, making the sauce, then pushing the dough through the chitarra to make the spaghetti all takes a bit of time. It's not an every-day thing, but as a couple's thing to do on a quiet Sunday afternoon, it was great. And it tasted incredible. Worth every second. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaghetti_alla_chitarra https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaghetti_alla_chitarra
      - benjaminbrodie 7y ago
        all I get to eat today is milk lol that's supposed to be used with coffee (kwa-fee lol lol) but I just drink it lol lol, not super ethical but life is too short lol. Hope you enjoy pasta with fine partner lol and enjoy life bruh
      - 1000units 7y ago
        It sounds like you're living the life, man. I apologize if I goaded you into an unproductive argument; sometimes I get like that. Cheers.
        tomhoward 7y ago
        Thanks for the kind comment. I did still learn a thing or two from the discussion so thanks for your part in that too :)