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> Public companies are inherently evil by default The extremism of this positon makes it hard to swallow the message. You might as well be right, but accepting

> Public companies are inherently evil by default The extremism of this positon makes it hard to swallow the message. You might as well be right, but accepting it at face value would be a huge cognitive dissonance for many people working in public companies. Basically, the “are we the baddies ?” answer would be “yes” for a huge chunk of us, and I don’t think that’s how we see it personally. Companies have to make money, but the evil label needs way more nuance. To apply this to another context: I genuinely think that IKEA has had an outsized positive impact on our everyday life, even as they aim to make money (not the core “charity”, but the rest of the group), or as they make truely dirty legal and commercial decisions to trick the system in their favor. And they didn’t improve flatpacks by accident, it is their stated mission, and I’d be crazy proud of my job if I designed the Expedit series.

ClumsyPilot 4y ago
> IKEA has had an outsized positive impact IKEA has been illegally logging forests in romania for decades. The first public conpany was involved in slavery. Show me a large enough company and there will be a history of fraud, illegality and human rights abuses.
- simonh 4y ago
  They've bee caught using wood from companies logging illegally yes, but that's just as much an enforcement issue in these countries as it is on IKEA to manage it's supply chain. Also using tainted wood isn't the only thing IKEA has ever done, just as breaking the speed limit or parking illegally isn't he only thing I've ever done. If you were held to a "one strike and you're out" good/evil standard would you really stand up? I know I wouldn't.
  - legulere 4y ago
    Intermediaries are often just an easy way to get out of liability. It can happen to small companies that you don't know about or are powerless to your supplier's illegal practices. With big companies you know and have the power, which makes it your responsibility and you being part of the problem. There's also a trend to give big companies liability for their supply chains. Germany just enacted a supply chain law last year and there are talks about similar laws for the EU: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supply_Chain_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supply_Chain_Act
    - simonh 4y ago
      Yep, that's fair enough. I don't buy "therefore evil" though, companies like the people they are composed of are complicated.
- gwright 4y ago
  > Show me a large enough company and there will be a history The specificity of your comment (large enough company) is misleading. The flaws you call out are everywhere, not just large companies. Humans are imperfect. Human organizations and institutions (companies of all sizes, governments of all types, schools, churches, and so on) are also imperfect. I don't mean to say that we shouldn't set high goals, devise mechanisms to deal with imperfection and so on (checks and balances, regulations, etc), just that there isn't anything particularly unique about "large companies" in this regard.
Shoue 4y ago
> Basically, the “are we the baddies ?” answer would be “yes” for a huge chunk of us, and I don’t think that’s how we see it personally. Companies have to make money, but the evil label needs way more nuance. The answer to this is that if it's nearly impossible to find a more ethical job (e.g. a non-profit medical research worker cooperative) when the system you're under doesn't economically incentivise ethical job creation. If your probability of finding one is incredibly slim, you're practically excused – you're just doing what's needed to have a normal life.
BoardsOfCanada 4y ago
Obviously it's so simplistic it's dangerous. Try to reason the same way about humans, "the only responsibility is to pass on our genes and therefore there can be no altruism". Right? Wrong.
- b3morales 4y ago
  I agree with you, but the obvious retort is that altruism is "just" one possible medium-to-long term emergent strategy whose purpose is to ensure the survival of your genetic material. :)
rglullis 4y ago
I am convinced that 99.999% of the people that claim to be "anti-Capitalist" are in reality anti-Corporativist. It's way too easy for people working at big companies to think "the company might be evil, but not me / my team". The Corporation gives everyone a moral shield that lets them rationalize all the shit that happens, but the money that pays their salary and the stock options they get all come from the same source.
- deadbunny 4y ago
  > It's way too easy for people working at big companies to think "the company might be evil, but not me / my team". See Better Off Ted for a great look at this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better_Off_Ted https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better_Off_Ted
- brmgb 4y ago
  > I am convinced that 99.999% of the people that claim to be "anti-Capitalist" are in reality anti-Corporativist. Aren't they in fine the same thing? If you believe that the logical consequence of a system is the emergence of amourphous amoral entities harming the greater good, aren't you actually fundamentaly against said system? I kind of get the opposite take-away from your line of thoughts: I believe that a lot of people who think of themselves as capitalist but actively distrust corporations are actually latent anti-capitalist.
  - rglullis 4y ago
    You can have Capitalism without Corporations: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31317641 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31317641 You can have a market-oriented economy on small scales, and we can have independent professionals competing to see who provides the best services at the lowest prices, and we can use money and capital as the means of production just fine. The problem is when we take a system in one scale and think "bigger is better". This is when we get "amorphous amoral entities harming the greater good". Mind you, if you think about it this also applies to other socio-political systems. Communism, per se, is not a problem. If the general idea of "communism" was just a bunch of hippies living however they wanted, there wouldn't be so much reason to be against it. The problem is when you have people going full Trostky and actively work to make it a Global-scale system, effectively turning the State into an "amorphous amoral entity harming the greater good"
cm2187 4y ago
Particularly the logic “your code is not open source” = “you are evil”…
- Ygg2 4y ago
  Closed source code definitely goes against the right to repair/own/modify.
  - eropple 4y ago
    Does it? If I sell you a widget and make available to you that widget's code, with strict prohibitions on copying and sharing, that's not open-source--but you can repair and modify it.
    - Ygg2 4y ago
      Right. But what happens if another customer has the same issue, you are prohibited from sharing it. Once you deal with all edge cases. You end up with an OSS license.
rossng 4y ago
IKEA is private. Do you not think it would behave quite differently were it a typical public company?
- makeitdouble 4y ago
  Thanks, I forgot they were private. To my defense, their corporate structure is a mess (on purpose) and the franchise shops could probably be public while the controlling entities and holdings stay private. The structure is so deliberately conceived that I wouldn’t be surprised if it kept the same functioning even as a public entity. They’d make less money, but would probably still concentrate decision power into a few chosen hands and lock the whole from external influence.
actionfromafar 4y ago
Funny, I don't see any good from IKEA when you look at the greater picture. More waste, un-accounted for externalities all over the board (labour laws, environment exploitation), extremely well-honed organisation designed to evade taxes through "charities".
- rglullis 4y ago
  You can add their influences in normalizing mass production and mass consumerism, "fast decor", the complete blandness of what they sell and how it contributes to globalization and the destruction of diverse aesthetic values...
  - makeitdouble 4y ago
    I am sympathetic to your point, but think that ship has sailed. It might come back, but not in the same form. I say that as a sample of the population who deeply wants the bland, blank slate aesthetic in reaction to the rococo and non-modular furniture I had to deal with in other people’s home and surroundings. Paradoxally, I am sure it will come back as a reaction to people like me, and next gnerations might want to get back to their roots and resurface diverse and culturally more anchored styles. When it does, I hope they’ll have small production tools (home grade cnc mills ?) to do so in small batches at low cost, and get crazy with the stuff they make.
- makeitdouble 4y ago
  IKEA in a vacuum has many many flaws. As I see it though, what IKEA displaced wasn’t the family owned expert artisans manufacturing built to order furnitures. It was piss poor, badly designed, actual shitty materials, poor country labor intensive flat packs. When I was a kid my family bought cheap mass produced furniture from shopping malls, the looks were fine, it came from Vietnam or China [0], and the quality was laughably bad. Finished product would be slightly crooked. Screws slightly loose. Smell terrible. And people would have that “what did you expect for that price” grin. [1] I can’t imagine employees were treated in a stellar way either, we heard scandals after scandals about third world factories, and the quality itself was a testament to how much humans were involved in all of that. So, I see IKEA as a provider of somewhat decent furnitures instead of shitty ones, most other parameters staying the same (they don’t, I genuinely think they’re not worse than the 80s~90s post colonialist euro companies) [0] how the table turned, quality wise… [1] to address the obvious “why didn’t they buy more expensive furniture that could have lasted way longer instead”…the answer is simple: upfront money. The same reason people don’t buy 5 story apartment buildings even if that would bring them more money in the long term.
notriskfree 4y ago
The other problem with "Public companies are inherently evil by default" is that saying that "the whole system is wrong", is just providing leaders with an excuse. Public Companies can serve their customers, shareholders, and look after their employees while still being ethical, there is always a choice, and there are many positive benefits to behaving ethically, for one, it means you are a trustworthy company to deal with.
- rglullis 4y ago
  It's like the story of the scorpion and the frog. If you know that the system is broken and it is setup in a way that rewards bad behavior, what do you think is the best course of action: to expect that exceptional individuals will be always in charge to avoid the mistakes, or to fix the system so that even normal, fallible humans can be at helm and not having everyone else worried about potential abuses?
  - _-david-_ 4y ago
    >fix the system so that even normal, fallible humans can be at helm and not having everyone else worried about potential abuses? I assume normal and fallible humans are the ones who are going to setup this new system that will prevent abuse?
    - rglullis 4y ago
      Yes, so? Isn't that the exact purpose of institutions?
      - _-david-_ 4y ago
        If normal people (shareholders, c levels, etc) are going to engage in bad behavior then why do you think other normal people (lawmakers) are not? If lawmakers are going to be rewarded from bad behavior then we can't fix the rules / laws. I'm not suggesting we shouldn't try, but it isn't really silver bullet.
lovich 4y ago
> The extremism of this positon makes it hard to swallow the message. You might as well be right, but accepting it at face value would be a huge cognitive dissonance for many people working in public companies. Has that not been a critique of software engineers working at FAANGs? That they think they are working for a moral company while the “Don’t Be Evil” company mottos are replaced in the background with anti competitive practices and deals with authoritarian governments. Tbh I think claiming that it’s an extremist opinion when there’s an entire century+ old political school of thought that views the entirety of capitalism as amoral, is either putting your head in the sand at the thought, or an equally extremist opinion on the good of companies
- robertlagrant 4y ago
  What political school of thought is that?
  - lovich 4y ago
    Communism?
    - robertlagrant 4y ago
      Ah. That may be the world's worst example of a reasonable alternative based on its track record :)
      - lovich 4y ago
        The bar was if it was extremist or not, not it’s level of effectiveness. If something nearly half the world followed is considered a extremist then I do not believe the word has any meaning left

ClumsyPilot 4y ago

> IKEA has had an outsized positive impact IKEA has been illegally logging forests in romania for decades. The first public conpany was involved in slavery. Show me a large enough company and there will be a history of fraud, illegality and human rights abuses.

simonh 4y ago
They've bee caught using wood from companies logging illegally yes, but that's just as much an enforcement issue in these countries as it is on IKEA to manage it's supply chain. Also using tainted wood isn't the only thing IKEA has ever done, just as breaking the speed limit or parking illegally isn't he only thing I've ever done. If you were held to a "one strike and you're out" good/evil standard would you really stand up? I know I wouldn't.
- legulere 4y ago
  Intermediaries are often just an easy way to get out of liability. It can happen to small companies that you don't know about or are powerless to your supplier's illegal practices. With big companies you know and have the power, which makes it your responsibility and you being part of the problem. There's also a trend to give big companies liability for their supply chains. Germany just enacted a supply chain law last year and there are talks about similar laws for the EU: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supply_Chain_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supply_Chain_Act
  - simonh 4y ago
    Yep, that's fair enough. I don't buy "therefore evil" though, companies like the people they are composed of are complicated.
gwright 4y ago
> Show me a large enough company and there will be a history The specificity of your comment (large enough company) is misleading. The flaws you call out are everywhere, not just large companies. Humans are imperfect. Human organizations and institutions (companies of all sizes, governments of all types, schools, churches, and so on) are also imperfect. I don't mean to say that we shouldn't set high goals, devise mechanisms to deal with imperfection and so on (checks and balances, regulations, etc), just that there isn't anything particularly unique about "large companies" in this regard.

Shoue 4y ago

> Basically, the “are we the baddies ?” answer would be “yes” for a huge chunk of us, and I don’t think that’s how we see it personally. Companies have to make money, but the evil label needs way more nuance. The answer to this is that if it's nearly impossible to find a more ethical job (e.g. a non-profit medical research worker cooperative) when the system you're under doesn't economically incentivise ethical job creation. If your probability of finding one is incredibly slim, you're practically excused – you're just doing what's needed to have a normal life.

BoardsOfCanada 4y ago

Obviously it's so simplistic it's dangerous. Try to reason the same way about humans, "the only responsibility is to pass on our genes and therefore there can be no altruism". Right? Wrong.

b3morales 4y ago
I agree with you, but the obvious retort is that altruism is "just" one possible medium-to-long term emergent strategy whose purpose is to ensure the survival of your genetic material. :)

rglullis 4y ago

I am convinced that 99.999% of the people that claim to be "anti-Capitalist" are in reality anti-Corporativist. It's way too easy for people working at big companies to think "the company might be evil, but not me / my team". The Corporation gives everyone a moral shield that lets them rationalize all the shit that happens, but the money that pays their salary and the stock options they get all come from the same source.

deadbunny 4y ago
> It's way too easy for people working at big companies to think "the company might be evil, but not me / my team". See Better Off Ted for a great look at this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better_Off_Ted https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better_Off_Ted
brmgb 4y ago
> I am convinced that 99.999% of the people that claim to be "anti-Capitalist" are in reality anti-Corporativist. Aren't they in fine the same thing? If you believe that the logical consequence of a system is the emergence of amourphous amoral entities harming the greater good, aren't you actually fundamentaly against said system? I kind of get the opposite take-away from your line of thoughts: I believe that a lot of people who think of themselves as capitalist but actively distrust corporations are actually latent anti-capitalist.
- rglullis 4y ago
  You can have Capitalism without Corporations: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31317641 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31317641 You can have a market-oriented economy on small scales, and we can have independent professionals competing to see who provides the best services at the lowest prices, and we can use money and capital as the means of production just fine. The problem is when we take a system in one scale and think "bigger is better". This is when we get "amorphous amoral entities harming the greater good". Mind you, if you think about it this also applies to other socio-political systems. Communism, per se, is not a problem. If the general idea of "communism" was just a bunch of hippies living however they wanted, there wouldn't be so much reason to be against it. The problem is when you have people going full Trostky and actively work to make it a Global-scale system, effectively turning the State into an "amorphous amoral entity harming the greater good"

cm2187 4y ago

Particularly the logic “your code is not open source” = “you are evil”…

Ygg2 4y ago
Closed source code definitely goes against the right to repair/own/modify.
- eropple 4y ago
  Does it? If I sell you a widget and make available to you that widget's code, with strict prohibitions on copying and sharing, that's not open-source--but you can repair and modify it.
  - Ygg2 4y ago
    Right. But what happens if another customer has the same issue, you are prohibited from sharing it. Once you deal with all edge cases. You end up with an OSS license.

rossng 4y ago

IKEA is private. Do you not think it would behave quite differently were it a typical public company?

makeitdouble 4y ago
Thanks, I forgot they were private. To my defense, their corporate structure is a mess (on purpose) and the franchise shops could probably be public while the controlling entities and holdings stay private. The structure is so deliberately conceived that I wouldn’t be surprised if it kept the same functioning even as a public entity. They’d make less money, but would probably still concentrate decision power into a few chosen hands and lock the whole from external influence.

actionfromafar 4y ago

Funny, I don't see any good from IKEA when you look at the greater picture. More waste, un-accounted for externalities all over the board (labour laws, environment exploitation), extremely well-honed organisation designed to evade taxes through "charities".

rglullis 4y ago
You can add their influences in normalizing mass production and mass consumerism, "fast decor", the complete blandness of what they sell and how it contributes to globalization and the destruction of diverse aesthetic values...
- makeitdouble 4y ago
  I am sympathetic to your point, but think that ship has sailed. It might come back, but not in the same form. I say that as a sample of the population who deeply wants the bland, blank slate aesthetic in reaction to the rococo and non-modular furniture I had to deal with in other people’s home and surroundings. Paradoxally, I am sure it will come back as a reaction to people like me, and next gnerations might want to get back to their roots and resurface diverse and culturally more anchored styles. When it does, I hope they’ll have small production tools (home grade cnc mills ?) to do so in small batches at low cost, and get crazy with the stuff they make.
makeitdouble 4y ago
IKEA in a vacuum has many many flaws. As I see it though, what IKEA displaced wasn’t the family owned expert artisans manufacturing built to order furnitures. It was piss poor, badly designed, actual shitty materials, poor country labor intensive flat packs. When I was a kid my family bought cheap mass produced furniture from shopping malls, the looks were fine, it came from Vietnam or China [0], and the quality was laughably bad. Finished product would be slightly crooked. Screws slightly loose. Smell terrible. And people would have that “what did you expect for that price” grin. [1] I can’t imagine employees were treated in a stellar way either, we heard scandals after scandals about third world factories, and the quality itself was a testament to how much humans were involved in all of that. So, I see IKEA as a provider of somewhat decent furnitures instead of shitty ones, most other parameters staying the same (they don’t, I genuinely think they’re not worse than the 80s~90s post colonialist euro companies) [0] how the table turned, quality wise… [1] to address the obvious “why didn’t they buy more expensive furniture that could have lasted way longer instead”…the answer is simple: upfront money. The same reason people don’t buy 5 story apartment buildings even if that would bring them more money in the long term.

notriskfree 4y ago

The other problem with "Public companies are inherently evil by default" is that saying that "the whole system is wrong", is just providing leaders with an excuse. Public Companies can serve their customers, shareholders, and look after their employees while still being ethical, there is always a choice, and there are many positive benefits to behaving ethically, for one, it means you are a trustworthy company to deal with.

rglullis 4y ago
It's like the story of the scorpion and the frog. If you know that the system is broken and it is setup in a way that rewards bad behavior, what do you think is the best course of action: to expect that exceptional individuals will be always in charge to avoid the mistakes, or to fix the system so that even normal, fallible humans can be at helm and not having everyone else worried about potential abuses?
- _-david-_ 4y ago
  >fix the system so that even normal, fallible humans can be at helm and not having everyone else worried about potential abuses? I assume normal and fallible humans are the ones who are going to setup this new system that will prevent abuse?
  - rglullis 4y ago
    Yes, so? Isn't that the exact purpose of institutions?
    - _-david-_ 4y ago
      If normal people (shareholders, c levels, etc) are going to engage in bad behavior then why do you think other normal people (lawmakers) are not? If lawmakers are going to be rewarded from bad behavior then we can't fix the rules / laws. I'm not suggesting we shouldn't try, but it isn't really silver bullet.

lovich 4y ago

> The extremism of this positon makes it hard to swallow the message. You might as well be right, but accepting it at face value would be a huge cognitive dissonance for many people working in public companies. Has that not been a critique of software engineers working at FAANGs? That they think they are working for a moral company while the “Don’t Be Evil” company mottos are replaced in the background with anti competitive practices and deals with authoritarian governments. Tbh I think claiming that it’s an extremist opinion when there’s an entire century+ old political school of thought that views the entirety of capitalism as amoral, is either putting your head in the sand at the thought, or an equally extremist opinion on the good of companies

robertlagrant 4y ago
What political school of thought is that?
- lovich 4y ago
  Communism?
  - robertlagrant 4y ago
    Ah. That may be the world's worst example of a reasonable alternative based on its track record :)
    - lovich 4y ago
      The bar was if it was extremist or not, not it’s level of effectiveness. If something nearly half the world followed is considered a extremist then I do not believe the word has any meaning left