4 ms·

Unfortunately most companies don't exist to make the world a better place, most companies exist to make money - the more, the better. And if you want to make mo

by rob74 4y ago

Unfortunately most companies don't exist to make the world a better place, most companies exist to make money - the more, the better. And if you want to make more money, there's definitely a temptation to use unethical (while still legal) methods. And companies that make less money tend to be bought by companies that make more money, which tend to be higher on the "evil scale". Or sometimes, a not-so-evil company will buy a more-evil company which then eats them up from within, like Google with DoubleClick or Boeing with McDonnell Douglas.

roenxi 4y ago
Glance for a moment at the Wikipedia list of profitable companies [0]. Observe that #1 is Saudi Aramco, which supports one of the more horrible regimes. Now I'm sure we have a line of people waiting to claim that they are evil, but we're running an experiment in Europe to find out what happens when horrible regimes stop providing oil - turns out there are serious risks of people starving or freezing to death. The loss to living standards is incalculable but large. There is a great reason that companies are freed from the requirement to be morally good - because human instincts are not calibrated to run an 8-billion-strong postindustrial globe. It doesn't work. If we let people do things completely on instinct most people will die quite quickly, and the leadership will turn out to be corrupt anyway. We do things this way because a lot of experiments were run, and free market economics gets much better results than all the systems people swear do better. It harnesses greed to the cause of ... if you won't admit it is good you have to at least admit it is effective. Honestly, I think it is good too. Good and evil are not the right mental tools here, morals don't cope with the scale that humans need to operate on now. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_corporate_profits_and_losses https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_corporate_prof...
- cycomanic 4y ago
  >Now I'm sure we have a line of people waiting to claim that they are evil, but we're running an experiment in Europe to find out what happens when horrible regimes stop providing oil - turns out there are serious risks of people starving or freezing to death. The loss to living standards is incalculable but large. Well I don't see how people in Western Europe (i.e. excluding Ukraine) are in danger of starving and I would actually argue the people that we are seeing being killed at the moment are a direct consequence of buying cheap energy no matter the ethics. If Europe would have invested more strongly into becoming energy independent instead of chasing the cheapest oil and gas, we might have a slighly lower standard of living, but much of European politics would not be infiltrated by money from resource oligarchs and likely Russia would never have invaded so people would not be dying in a pointless war. In other words, not
  - Moissanite 4y ago
    The whole western world took a gamble that Russia would behave within acceptable constraints (ie only bringing misery to its own citizens) because the costs of stepping outside those constraints would be too high economically, due to sanctions or just lost trade. I personally still believe that to be true - Russia is now done as a serious participant in the global economy; they won't be trusted for a generation or more. Living standards there will fall dramatically unless they become a vassal state of China. Where the west miscalculated was in expecting the man in charge to remain a rational actor. The last decade has shown us that such an assumption (as applied inside western democracies as well as outside) is no longer valid - so it now seems reasonable to assume un-ending volatility until a new order establishes itself. The next decade will be decided by whether the USA wants to retain its hegemony badly enough to stand up to China, or whether it will retreat into isolationism instead. Currently, sadly, my money is on the latter.
    - RF_Savage 4y ago
      They ware a perfectly rational actor so far, Europe and the west in general has mostly just spouted empty platitudes and always blinked first. Nothing happened with the two Chechenyan wars, with Georgia, nobody did anything about Syrian cities being bombed to rubble and the 2014 sanctions post-Crimea ware rather weak. During that time everybody continued to buy gas, oil, electricity, fertilizer, aluminium and titanium. Clearly, the west did not care about things like that and it would be business like normal. Except that this time it was found out there's a limit.
      - rob74 4y ago
        > everybody continued to buy gas, oil, electricity, fertilizer, aluminium and titanium not to mention nuclear fuel (https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Framatome-and-Rosatom-expand-cooperation https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Framatome-and-Ro...)
- pannSun 4y ago
  > There is a great reason that companies are freed from the requirement to be morally good - because human instincts are not calibrated to run an 8-billion-strong postindustrial globe. Yet they are bound by many laws and regulations, beyond contract law and non-aggression, born of these instincts you malign, that (try to) prevent the worst of their greed. Laws covering worker safety, union-busting, antitrust and fair competition, child labor, truth in advertising, environmental protection, even requirements on the length and validity of warranties. You have to ignore all of these constraints to arrive at the simplistic "greed is good" conclusion. A conclusion that implies not only that we should not add further prohibitions against newly-recognized "evil" behavior (e.g. web spying, devices locked against their owner, etc..), but also that we should remove the prohibitions currently in place.
  - dsfyu404ed 4y ago
    >Yet they are bound by many laws and regulations, beyond contract law and non-aggression, born of these instincts you malign, that (try to) prevent the worst of their greed We don't regulate companies to prevent "the worst of the greed" except by some naive definition. We regulate them so they mop up or don't leave messes in their wake, be these messes social or environmental. Companies don't poison the water or use bad labor practices because they want to. Large organizations (Boeing, the Catholic church, the FBI, etc) don't "want". They respond to incentives. Companies do it because it's less un-profitable than the next best option and to not do that while their competitors do puts them at a disadvantage. Regulation only adjusts the incentive scale. >You have to ignore all of these constraints to arrive at the simplistic "greed is good" conclusion You have to ignore the difference between "good" and "can be harnessed for good" to come to that conclusion. You're implying meaning he didn't write because it makes a more easily defeated position.
    - pannSun 4y ago
      > We don't regulate companies to prevent "the worst of the greed" except by some naive definition. We regulate them so they mop up or don't leave messes in their wake, be these messes social or environmental. Those messes are the worst of their greed that I was referring to. I have no idea what your objection is - that those laws didn't "mandate companies behave good", but merely "readjusted incentives to avoid undesirable outcomes"?? Of course laws are not as simplistic as "try to do good, avoid doing evil", but that doesn't mean that is not their aim.
- chimprich 4y ago
  That's an astonishing argument. You argue that companies collaborating with evil regimes to produce oil is good, because... when something happens that means we have to stop buying their oil (Russian invasion of Ukraine)... we're suddenly in a lot of pain? I come to exactly the opposite conclusion from that. We'd have been far better off not putting ourselves in that position, i.e. in a position of dependence on those regimes in the first place, not to mention funnelling billions into their treasuries. Countries like Russia and Saudi have been using our cash to prop up their repressive regimes for decades, causing untold pain to their population, building up their military and using those funds to destabilise democracies across the globe. If we'd put that money into nuclear and renewables instead of being happy to embrace greed (and I'd have been fine with legislation to achieve that) we'd have energy security, we'd be looking at much less devastation from climate change and the world would be in a much better place in general.
  - roenxi 4y ago
    > If we'd put that money into nuclear and renewables instead of being happy to embrace greed... The regulators have been squeezing the life out of the nuclear industry for what, 40 years now? There is that wonderful chart floating around [0] showing what regulators have done to the learning curve. You're not going to get a more hardened and cynical capitalist than me and I've been spewing for more than a decade about the Australian government blocking me from investing in nuclear power effectively. Their policy is a disaster on multiple levels. It isn't greedy people holding back nuclear power, it is the dreamers looking for an industrial power supply that doesn't cause pollution while we run out of fossil fuels. It'd be great if we can find that in renewables, but we'd have gone heavy nuclear decades ago if it was left up to raw greed. People also whinge about Texas being greedy with their massive investment in cheap renewables rather than winter hardening them. Damn those greedy people for going all in on cheap renewable, I suppose. Again, the issue isn't greed, it is the reactionaries getting antsy when capitalists do things the cheap way. I point out that the Texas grid was still better and cheaper than what the Germans managed with their Energiewende and social whatever it is they wanted to feel moral about. [0] Figure 7.11 - https://rootsofprogress.org/devanney-on-the-nuclear-flop https://rootsofprogress.org/devanney-on-the-nuclear-flop
- hutzlibu 4y ago
  "but we're running an experiment in Europe to find out what happens when horrible regimes stop providing oil" That experiment is basically switching one horrible regime with another (e.g. Aserbaidschan and Qatar), so I would argue that it was never really about morals at all, but rather geopolitics and power all along. Continue doing more buisness with russia would simply be more expensive, as it would increase the cost of doing buisness with closer trading partners/allies. "morals don't cope with the scale that humans need to operate on now." So when was a time, when morals could and should have an influence on human operations? Slavery just ended recently (in most parts of the world) and your argument means for example continuing buisness with Nazi germany during the war (and holocaust). There is no line, when you say morals are not the right tool. So this means profiting of slave labour camps. The more and brutal exploitation, the more profit, the better? I don't think so. My stance is, that there is just no general solution and everything is case by case. By doing buisness with a random chinese company(e.g. buying something made in china), I do not endorse chinese politic. But if that specific company is involved with slave labour, then yes, I would support that slave system by buying from them and I would try to find a alternative.
- projektfu 4y ago
  I feel like Candide is a pretty good antidote to this sort of thinking, which is a form of Panglossianism. <sarcasm> Supporting brutal regimes because not supporting them means you might not have enough oil or gas? Of course, it works out for the best. A few sacrificed in war and oppression while the many live well. Nazis were bad for the Jews? There are more Jews now than ever, and they have control of their ancestral lands. COVID wasn't being taken seriously enough by some countries/states? They've successfully culled their elderly population and are probably saving tons of long-run suffering. </sarcasm> Obviously, that is all sarcastic, but there is something weird about teleological thinking. The same sort of thinking that the events that led to my birth were ipso-facto moral, because otherwise I would be wishing for my own nonexistence, and as a moral person how could I do that? An immoral person could take my place.
  - roenxi 4y ago
    I just read Candide this week, I liked it. The world is pretty miserable - but you need a plan to make it better. "Avoid doing Evil" is a plan that: 1. We have tried. 2. Doesn't work. The plan "give greedy people incentives to make people materially better off" not only works, but works better than everything else we've tried. Ergo, we want more greed, not less evil.
    - projektfu 4y ago
      I wouldn’t call that a plan, just a principle. Same for “all about the Benjamins”. The plan is anything from “Think and Grow Rich” to dealing drugs. But if your plan is to try to set up a bunch of moral slides that cause your desired outcome as the end of a chain of dominoes, well, best of luck but I am not signing on.
marcosdumay 4y ago
Most companies exist to make a living, and have a clear concept of "well enough". Unfortunately, due to scale issues, most software development jobs isn't on those companies. But each innovation that reduces the cost of development moves this relation into a better position.

by rob74 4y ago

roenxi 4y ago

Glance for a moment at the Wikipedia list of profitable companies [0]. Observe that #1 is Saudi Aramco, which supports one of the more horrible regimes. Now I'm sure we have a line of people waiting to claim that they are evil, but we're running an experiment in Europe to find out what happens when horrible regimes stop providing oil - turns out there are serious risks of people starving or freezing to death. The loss to living standards is incalculable but large. There is a great reason that companies are freed from the requirement to be morally good - because human instincts are not calibrated to run an 8-billion-strong postindustrial globe. It doesn't work. If we let people do things completely on instinct most people will die quite quickly, and the leadership will turn out to be corrupt anyway. We do things this way because a lot of experiments were run, and free market economics gets much better results than all the systems people swear do better. It harnesses greed to the cause of ... if you won't admit it is good you have to at least admit it is effective. Honestly, I think it is good too. Good and evil are not the right mental tools here, morals don't cope with the scale that humans need to operate on now. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_corporate_profits_and_losses https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_corporate_prof...

cycomanic 4y ago
>Now I'm sure we have a line of people waiting to claim that they are evil, but we're running an experiment in Europe to find out what happens when horrible regimes stop providing oil - turns out there are serious risks of people starving or freezing to death. The loss to living standards is incalculable but large. Well I don't see how people in Western Europe (i.e. excluding Ukraine) are in danger of starving and I would actually argue the people that we are seeing being killed at the moment are a direct consequence of buying cheap energy no matter the ethics. If Europe would have invested more strongly into becoming energy independent instead of chasing the cheapest oil and gas, we might have a slighly lower standard of living, but much of European politics would not be infiltrated by money from resource oligarchs and likely Russia would never have invaded so people would not be dying in a pointless war. In other words, not
- Moissanite 4y ago
  The whole western world took a gamble that Russia would behave within acceptable constraints (ie only bringing misery to its own citizens) because the costs of stepping outside those constraints would be too high economically, due to sanctions or just lost trade. I personally still believe that to be true - Russia is now done as a serious participant in the global economy; they won't be trusted for a generation or more. Living standards there will fall dramatically unless they become a vassal state of China. Where the west miscalculated was in expecting the man in charge to remain a rational actor. The last decade has shown us that such an assumption (as applied inside western democracies as well as outside) is no longer valid - so it now seems reasonable to assume un-ending volatility until a new order establishes itself. The next decade will be decided by whether the USA wants to retain its hegemony badly enough to stand up to China, or whether it will retreat into isolationism instead. Currently, sadly, my money is on the latter.
  - RF_Savage 4y ago
    They ware a perfectly rational actor so far, Europe and the west in general has mostly just spouted empty platitudes and always blinked first. Nothing happened with the two Chechenyan wars, with Georgia, nobody did anything about Syrian cities being bombed to rubble and the 2014 sanctions post-Crimea ware rather weak. During that time everybody continued to buy gas, oil, electricity, fertilizer, aluminium and titanium. Clearly, the west did not care about things like that and it would be business like normal. Except that this time it was found out there's a limit.
    - rob74 4y ago
      > everybody continued to buy gas, oil, electricity, fertilizer, aluminium and titanium not to mention nuclear fuel (https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Framatome-and-Rosatom-expand-cooperation https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Framatome-and-Ro...)
pannSun 4y ago
> There is a great reason that companies are freed from the requirement to be morally good - because human instincts are not calibrated to run an 8-billion-strong postindustrial globe. Yet they are bound by many laws and regulations, beyond contract law and non-aggression, born of these instincts you malign, that (try to) prevent the worst of their greed. Laws covering worker safety, union-busting, antitrust and fair competition, child labor, truth in advertising, environmental protection, even requirements on the length and validity of warranties. You have to ignore all of these constraints to arrive at the simplistic "greed is good" conclusion. A conclusion that implies not only that we should not add further prohibitions against newly-recognized "evil" behavior (e.g. web spying, devices locked against their owner, etc..), but also that we should remove the prohibitions currently in place.
- dsfyu404ed 4y ago
  >Yet they are bound by many laws and regulations, beyond contract law and non-aggression, born of these instincts you malign, that (try to) prevent the worst of their greed We don't regulate companies to prevent "the worst of the greed" except by some naive definition. We regulate them so they mop up or don't leave messes in their wake, be these messes social or environmental. Companies don't poison the water or use bad labor practices because they want to. Large organizations (Boeing, the Catholic church, the FBI, etc) don't "want". They respond to incentives. Companies do it because it's less un-profitable than the next best option and to not do that while their competitors do puts them at a disadvantage. Regulation only adjusts the incentive scale. >You have to ignore all of these constraints to arrive at the simplistic "greed is good" conclusion You have to ignore the difference between "good" and "can be harnessed for good" to come to that conclusion. You're implying meaning he didn't write because it makes a more easily defeated position.
  - pannSun 4y ago
    > We don't regulate companies to prevent "the worst of the greed" except by some naive definition. We regulate them so they mop up or don't leave messes in their wake, be these messes social or environmental. Those messes are the worst of their greed that I was referring to. I have no idea what your objection is - that those laws didn't "mandate companies behave good", but merely "readjusted incentives to avoid undesirable outcomes"?? Of course laws are not as simplistic as "try to do good, avoid doing evil", but that doesn't mean that is not their aim.
chimprich 4y ago
That's an astonishing argument. You argue that companies collaborating with evil regimes to produce oil is good, because... when something happens that means we have to stop buying their oil (Russian invasion of Ukraine)... we're suddenly in a lot of pain? I come to exactly the opposite conclusion from that. We'd have been far better off not putting ourselves in that position, i.e. in a position of dependence on those regimes in the first place, not to mention funnelling billions into their treasuries. Countries like Russia and Saudi have been using our cash to prop up their repressive regimes for decades, causing untold pain to their population, building up their military and using those funds to destabilise democracies across the globe. If we'd put that money into nuclear and renewables instead of being happy to embrace greed (and I'd have been fine with legislation to achieve that) we'd have energy security, we'd be looking at much less devastation from climate change and the world would be in a much better place in general.
- roenxi 4y ago
  > If we'd put that money into nuclear and renewables instead of being happy to embrace greed... The regulators have been squeezing the life out of the nuclear industry for what, 40 years now? There is that wonderful chart floating around [0] showing what regulators have done to the learning curve. You're not going to get a more hardened and cynical capitalist than me and I've been spewing for more than a decade about the Australian government blocking me from investing in nuclear power effectively. Their policy is a disaster on multiple levels. It isn't greedy people holding back nuclear power, it is the dreamers looking for an industrial power supply that doesn't cause pollution while we run out of fossil fuels. It'd be great if we can find that in renewables, but we'd have gone heavy nuclear decades ago if it was left up to raw greed. People also whinge about Texas being greedy with their massive investment in cheap renewables rather than winter hardening them. Damn those greedy people for going all in on cheap renewable, I suppose. Again, the issue isn't greed, it is the reactionaries getting antsy when capitalists do things the cheap way. I point out that the Texas grid was still better and cheaper than what the Germans managed with their Energiewende and social whatever it is they wanted to feel moral about. [0] Figure 7.11 - https://rootsofprogress.org/devanney-on-the-nuclear-flop https://rootsofprogress.org/devanney-on-the-nuclear-flop
hutzlibu 4y ago
"but we're running an experiment in Europe to find out what happens when horrible regimes stop providing oil" That experiment is basically switching one horrible regime with another (e.g. Aserbaidschan and Qatar), so I would argue that it was never really about morals at all, but rather geopolitics and power all along. Continue doing more buisness with russia would simply be more expensive, as it would increase the cost of doing buisness with closer trading partners/allies. "morals don't cope with the scale that humans need to operate on now." So when was a time, when morals could and should have an influence on human operations? Slavery just ended recently (in most parts of the world) and your argument means for example continuing buisness with Nazi germany during the war (and holocaust). There is no line, when you say morals are not the right tool. So this means profiting of slave labour camps. The more and brutal exploitation, the more profit, the better? I don't think so. My stance is, that there is just no general solution and everything is case by case. By doing buisness with a random chinese company(e.g. buying something made in china), I do not endorse chinese politic. But if that specific company is involved with slave labour, then yes, I would support that slave system by buying from them and I would try to find a alternative.
projektfu 4y ago
I feel like Candide is a pretty good antidote to this sort of thinking, which is a form of Panglossianism. <sarcasm> Supporting brutal regimes because not supporting them means you might not have enough oil or gas? Of course, it works out for the best. A few sacrificed in war and oppression while the many live well. Nazis were bad for the Jews? There are more Jews now than ever, and they have control of their ancestral lands. COVID wasn't being taken seriously enough by some countries/states? They've successfully culled their elderly population and are probably saving tons of long-run suffering. </sarcasm> Obviously, that is all sarcastic, but there is something weird about teleological thinking. The same sort of thinking that the events that led to my birth were ipso-facto moral, because otherwise I would be wishing for my own nonexistence, and as a moral person how could I do that? An immoral person could take my place.
- roenxi 4y ago
  I just read Candide this week, I liked it. The world is pretty miserable - but you need a plan to make it better. "Avoid doing Evil" is a plan that: 1. We have tried. 2. Doesn't work. The plan "give greedy people incentives to make people materially better off" not only works, but works better than everything else we've tried. Ergo, we want more greed, not less evil.
  - projektfu 4y ago
    I wouldn’t call that a plan, just a principle. Same for “all about the Benjamins”. The plan is anything from “Think and Grow Rich” to dealing drugs. But if your plan is to try to set up a bunch of moral slides that cause your desired outcome as the end of a chain of dominoes, well, best of luck but I am not signing on.

marcosdumay 4y ago

Most companies exist to make a living, and have a clear concept of "well enough". Unfortunately, due to scale issues, most software development jobs isn't on those companies. But each innovation that reduces the cost of development moves this relation into a better position.