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I wanted to follow up after giving sufficient time for other replies. I sincerely hope you check your history and read this :-) First off, thankyou for the in

• rented_mule 5y ago
  I think your reply was cutoff. :-( I completely agree about the downsides of the race to the bottom - I think it's inherently short sighted on a number of fronts (humane treatment of workers, wise use of natural resources, long term success, etc.). But I also see it as an almost inescapable consequence of US style capitalism. US capital markets reward companies who squeeze out every last penny and punish those who don't. Executives in public companies that are seen sacrificing short term revenue or short term profits for anything don't often keep their job for long. And those executives exploit this by making sure they have golden parachutes. I think it goes way beyond race to the bottom. It's the effort to optimize the exploitation of everything for money. There is so much money to be made by exploiting every nuance of every law and regulation (or lack thereof), that I don't see companies pulling back willingly for any length of time. And the people who are already benefitting most from this have accumulated so much wealth and power that I don't think there's much hope of establishing laws or regulations that don't have exploitable loopholes designed in. I fear it will take something on the scale of the Great Depression to get meaningful change in this regard.