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Fun piece of history regarding business ethics, the mass-unionization of West Virginia coal mines occurred after the mass-unionization of coal mines in other re

Fun piece of history regarding business ethics, the mass-unionization of West Virginia coal mines occurred after the mass-unionization of coal mines in other regions. Part of the reason the unionization effort in West Virginia was so fanatical was that part of the deal the unions struck with the mine owners in other regions was that they would unionize West Virginia as fast as possible, otherwise the newly unionized coal mines in other regions couldn't compete with cheaper, non-unionized West Virginia coal miners. Point being, the playing field must be level for ethical business to exist. If you try to act ethically on your own you will lose to a less ethical (but still legal) competitor. Sure if you're dominant enough or niche enough you can get away with being ethical, but if you have hard competition, good luck. You'll maintain your virtue, and they'll maintain their profits, and we'll see who's still around in 5 years. Granted it is possible to overstep and cause a customer revolt, but hoping your competition is that stupid is not an effective strategy.

ethanbond 4y ago
This was also a specific argument FDR made in the fireside chats against child labor: ethical business owners who try not to use child labor are being put out of business by those who do, so we need to step in and correct the market to allow for the ethical to compete with the unethical. Edit: As a brief aside the Fireside Chats are pretty remarkable pieces of public communication. I just can’t imagine a public leader speaking with such a blend of clarity, compassion, and force as what he did. They’re not particularly shallow or short on details, either! He spoke like an adult to a nation of adults - really refreshing.
- hansel_der 4y ago
  point beeing that self regulating markets are a lie
  - largepeepee 4y ago
    Another way to put it is, the endgame of unregulated markets are monopolies.
    - IG_Semmelweiss 4y ago
      The endgame for any living being is maximize return for as minimal effort. This is not true for just "unregulated markets". Regulated markets operate the same way, see: Banks. Credit Cards. Healthcare insurance by state. But that's why we have laws specifically to break up anticompetitive behavior. The problem is they are not properly written and leave a lot up to discretion.
      - lostlogin 4y ago
        > The endgame for any living being is maximize return for as minimal effort. I’m a cynical person but this is way beyond what I think. You don’t have to go far to see counter examples where someone has done something pretty great for which they get little return but spent a lot of effort. Skimming the front page on HN today has some examples. The examples I found: the WLED link, the large format camera blog post and the thing about Tolkien.
      - jancsika 4y ago
        > The endgame for any living being is maximize return for as minimal effort. Sure, OG hackers don't want to waste 30 seconds walking to the printer if their print job isn't ready. But OG hackers solve that problem by spending three hundred million seconds writing an entire OS from scratch. And in the end, I'm not even sure if that solved the original problem. Of course you wouldn't be wrong by seven orders of magnitude in the more common cases. But I strongly doubt that Haiku, the Quine that works in dozens of languages at once, or Gnome 2 started their work to fatten up for the coming winter months.
    - CPLX 4y ago
      Sort of. The end game is more what I would call a mafia state. Localized monopolies in constant conflict but also loose cooperation with each other. Your ability to survive and thrive depends on being in the favor of the most relevant oligarch.
    - hannasanarion 4y ago
      the endgame of for-profit companies in unregulated markets are monopolies. Cutting corners and monopolizing makes sense for a business when absentee profit-seeking owners are the ones calling the shots and taking the spoils. An alternative corporate structure where decision-makers have different incentives coughsoughworkerco-ops might choose different and less destructive behavior in the same free market.
  - jazzyjackson 4y ago
    unless, of course, you consider the government a player in the market as opposed to an outside force
  - akomtu 4y ago
    It's not a lie. It just says that under any set of constraints you define, a free market will arrange itself in the optimal way. The market, by itself, is blind, and its optimal state is as good as your constraints. Under no constraints, the most efficient "eigenfunction" of the market is one uber monopoly.
    - Jon_Lowtek 4y ago
      The ideal of self regulation the grandparent calls a lie is not about markets adjusting to optimally fulfill regulatory constraints, but the believe that such regulation is unnecessary, because market participants will factor in ethical concerns, removing unethical practices by not doing business with those using them.
    - cfraenkel 4y ago
      You're conveniently moving the goalposts when the original premise no longer passes the smell test. I'm old enough to remember the original talking points selling 'self-regulating markets. "A rising sea raises all boats" and plenty more of that ilk. Just a poorly disguised fig leaf covering 'take from those with less, and give to those with more'.
  - gumby 4y ago
    Lie? No. They just seek to a set point that is socially undesirable but may be preferred to a powerful subset of participants. There are other systems have the same control system issues. I don't mean this a sarcasm. The point of good regulation is to try to change the incentive structure so that the system seeks to a different peak in the possibility space, avoiding various hill-climbing errors along the way. That's hard, but the approach of mandating how can be easier to write but much harder to implement (less stable, expensive, and requiring a lot of government effort). A good example is exchange trading schemes. Instead of requiring a huge bureaucracy, the European trading system issues a number of emissions permits and then lets the market decide whether to upgrade or buy permits. As the number of certs sinks predictably over time, people can plan ahead to commit to building better plants (or retrofit) vs eking a couple of extra years out and then shutting the plant down. Less paperwork, fewer regulators, and letting the market seek to the point you want.
  - jdbertron 4y ago
    It's so easy for people to always 'assume' the cost of regulation is zero. But it never is. If you factor it in, and play with the amount, then all this nonsense goes away. There are no perfect markets free of problems. The real question should be how they get resolved. Regulation is the one way people choose, because it only seems cheap.
- api 4y ago
  It also works today for tariffs against goods manufactured using overseas slave and near slave labor. “Imported totalitarianism” is the new child labor and slavery.
- oska 4y ago
  This is a flawed argument, in my opinion. You stop doing something unethical because it is unethical. You don't wait until you've been able to force everyone else from doing what you see as unethical (while they may not). Virtue is its own reward. Virtue isn't forcing everyone else to do what you see as virtuous.
  - llamaimperative 4y ago
    That may all be true and yet it wasn't individuals choosing to be unethical that ended (or dramatically curtailed) child labor. The federal government stepping in and disallowing it did.
    - oska 4y ago
      Sure, but the argument FDR was putting was that he was doing it for the 'ethical' business owners who were supposedly forced to keep employing child labour because others were still using it. No. The business owners could have and should have stopped doing what they saw as unethical by themselves. (I'm not arguing against anti-child labour laws here; I'm arguing against this reported argument for their introduction by FDR. And, to be fair, it's only the reported argument here that I'm responding to; it might not be a faithful representation of what FDR actually said.)
wpietri 4y ago
That is a good example of why ethical businesses should support regulation. Another one is the capital markets. The most popular stock markets tend to be the most highly regulated both internally (that is, by the markets themselves) and by government (e.g., the SEC). Why? Because strong regulation enables consumer trust. Look at all the foreign companies that list on the NYSE, for example: https://www.nyse.com/listings/international-listings https://www.nyse.com/listings/international-listings Smart businesses support things like standards, certifications, and good regulations so that they are competing in a fair arena and don't have to compromise on their principles.
- subradios 4y ago
  Unethical business also supports regulation, the vape industry has been handed to RJ Reynolds due to regulations that ban all vapes that would be competitive with Vuse. Businesses support regulation if it gives them a permanent, competitive advantage over potential competitors. Child labor laws hurt my ability to pay for college and advance my career, and it also destroys mom and pop shops, because the school system has to give the 15 year old kid a permission slip to help stock shelves or open up shop. That's not to say we shouldn't have them, but child labor laws were primarily about children being exposed to the nature of industrial manufacturing work circa 1930 - not anything to do with today and thus using them as an analogy for other incentives problems (especially when solving them creates a principal agent problem) is misguided.
  - Avshalom 4y ago
    >>not anything to do with today Only because it's still illegal today.
  - BlueTemplar 4y ago
    At 15 years old, you are not a kid any more. Chimney sweepers used (often sold to them) boys, 5 to 10 years old (sometimes as young as 3) to climb in the chimneys to clean them (quite dangerous work). A minimum age of 14 (then 16) was put into place in 1834, and started to be enforced in 1875. (Note that this might have taken much longer if innovators hadn't been lobbying for child-free technics to do it.)
AequitasOmnibus 4y ago
This is such a spot on observation. But the incentives aren’t there for business competitors to self-regulate in an ethical manner. That’s why we as users (and yes, we’re all users to various degrees) should push for more robust regulation. If, as you correctly note, most competitors are only going to operate in the legal-but-unethical space, change the law until the legal avenue and the ethical avenue are the same. The libertarians will come out of the woodwork to say more regulation is not the answer, but when it comes to alternatives, watch the real world examples of “unregulated ethical businesses” melt away into the realm of the theoretical.
- hammock 4y ago
  > watch the real world examples of “unregulated ethical businesses” melt away into the realm of the theoretical Try an example of a regulated ethical business. Exxon? Verizon? Amazon? Nestle? UnitedHealth Group? Pfizer? General Motors? DuPont? Regulation is just as much a pipe dream as libertarianism
  - alexhsamuel 4y ago
    Now try imagining those businesses in a world without regulation. No one has suggested that regulation will produce ethical business. The proposal is to impose regulation to limit the unethical behavior of business, which is something quite different.
    - hammock 4y ago
      > Now try imagining those businesses in a world without regulation. You’ve brought us back to the theoretical world we were trying to avoid…
  - fragmede 4y ago
    Unless you're allergic to the entire concept of modern banking, I think most credit unions would apply. Local restaurants run by good people also would also seem to count.
  - rqtwteye 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y ago
This exact thing is why I am not happy about Apple being forced by the EU to allow alternative app stores. The Apple App Store has served to mitigate some of the worse excesses and privacy abuses by various apps and social media sites. Now that there is a way apps can reach the coveted iPhone user demographic without having to go through Apple's strict privacy review, I fear that apps will slowly migrate their functionality/offer discounts for using alternative stores and will increase their abuse of user data.
- simion314 4y ago
  >This exact thing is why I am not happy about Apple being forced by the EU to allow alternative app stores. The Apple App Store has served to mitigate some of the worse excesses and privacy abuses by various apps and social media sites. Since USA is not part of EU, and USA is a giant market then I assume that USA citizens have no reason to get scared by your FUD, and if you are from EU and want the wall garden I am sure Apple will let you opt in in the USA version of the store.
  - bspammer 4y ago
    Neither of those will help when some company whose app I want to use says “Hey, our app is only available on Evil Store. Install that first and enable all permissions”
    - simion314 4y ago
      This did not happen on Android, show me 2 or 3 example of a must have app that an USA citizen has to side load? There is not otherwise I assure the Apple PR army would have jumped on that occasion. Also as I said the USA is not in EU, so Meta/Facebook will still have no choice then put a iOS app of WhatsApp in the Store. I am 100% sure that this is FUD, reality shows that there is no must use app that a developer refuses to put on the Google Play store because they are evil, the apps are either not allowed in the store because ToS or the apps are small side projects.
cortesoft 4y ago
Yep, this is what is known as a Collective Action Problem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_action_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_action_problem): even if every individual would prefer if all businesses behaved ethically, the rational decision for each individual is to behave unethically. This is why I get frustrated with people who say we should influence businesses with our wallet, by choosing not to shop at stores who behave badly. However, my individual buying choice won't make any difference; for example, if I hate Walmart, my only two choices are to not shop there and not get the benefit of the cheaper prices, but still have Walmart around doing bad things, or I can shop there and get the better prices, and Walmart is still around doing bad things. My individual choice does not change whether Walmart is around or not, but it DOES have a big effect on how much money I save. There is no rational reason to pay more when there is no benefit. My individual spending is not even a blip on their bottom line. Of course, I would be willing to pay more if it meant the type of abuses that Walmart does would stop, but that is not the choice I am given.
- scottLobster 4y ago
  Yeah, it's also why I stopped feeling guilty about driving a ICE car and not choosing the more expensive renewable supplier option on my power bill. At the end of the day I'm not so rich that I can afford to make inefficient sacrifices. My kids' college funds still need filling, sourcing my power from coal/natural gas means thousands of dollars in those funds over the years that wouldn't otherwise be there. Or I can make a negligible dent in global carbon emissions and my kids can take on thousands extra in student loans. I'm happy to do my part when we're all (or at least most of us) playing the same game, but I have too many people directly relying on me to be an ineffective martyr. Back in 2016 I read a "human interest" story about some janitor who saved his pennies for months, keeping track with an excel spreadsheet, so he could make a multi-hundred dollar donation to Hillary Clinton's campaign. The article was clearly trying to frame this as some noble sacrifice from someone who doesn't have much to begin with, I just saw a poor person getting fleeced by an aristocrat, and she lost anyway.
  - godelski 4y ago
    I think something difficult about this is that a big component depends on how much we weigh future outcomes. Obviously too much future weight is not good because we do a lot of harm now ("for the greater good" utilitarian philosophy has done extraordinary damage to our world) but also hyper focusing on the now too does substantial harm (existential threats like climate change can be traced to these effects). It also depends how we weigh collective actions vs individual. I do not think there is a correct answer here, at least one we can measure or define in a meaningful way, despite how much passion we have for certain views. But I also agree with your main message, that it is hard to encourage collective action if we are not willing to first go after the main contributors to the problem. Individuals who contribute to the problem several magnitudes above the median individual (e.g. independently, Gates and Musk both produced more emissions than the median American, in a single week, purely do to their aviation admissions). We get mad at those who are above the law, and it is unsurprising that we would be mad at those who are above our moral codes. How can we have collective action while we let hundreds or thousands of people like this persist in their actions?
nine_k 4y ago
There is an idea that sheer market forces should push things towards being honest and pleading to the user. If a customer buys rotten stuff in a store A, next time the customer goes to another store (B, C, D,..), and tells friends that store A is no good. If store A continues to mistreat its customers, it goes out of business. But this only works when the customer has some reasonable choice. If store A is the only store in town, it will have customers, no matter how bad it is. With a lot of daily-use software, there is a network effect: you have to use it because everybody else uses it, and you need to interoperate. Here choice wanes, and you're stuck with the same 2-3 choices. Each of the mega-businesses can inconvenience you, or screw you over, but you have little to gain by switching to a competitor, if it even exists. Google and Microsoft are AT&T and Standard Oil of our day.
- andrepd 4y ago
  Not only that. It is not reasonable for people to e.g. test themselves if their food or drink or medicine is not poisoned. That's why laws exist. Likewise, it is not reasonable to ask an average person to consider the minutiae of standardised data interchange or open-source modem drivers. That's why laws to protect the user and to protect competition should exist. I've had people unironically say to me (in person) "if you die from drinking tainted liquor your estate can just sue the shop; this is a deterrent so they won't do that".
  - nine_k 4y ago
    > if you die from drinking tainted liquor your estate can just sue the shop I think that would be a right thing to do, and the shop would likely be sued out of existence, with a felony charges for some of the personnel and owners. This is one reason why shops try to keep things sanitary: a customer with an estate to speak of would ruin them if hurt. (But those without an estate may have been hurt for some time with relatively little consequence.) Another reason is, of course, inspections (they don't need to be strictly state-operated, but may have to be state-mandated), where the inspecting agency would sue / fine the shop out of existence if for presence of dangerously tainted liquor. An ounce of prevention, etc.
perfecthjrjth 4y ago
This is how manufacturing was moved to China. Walmart forced many manufacturers move their operations to China; otherwise, the latter companies would lose their contracts with Walmart.

ethanbond 4y ago

This was also a specific argument FDR made in the fireside chats against child labor: ethical business owners who try not to use child labor are being put out of business by those who do, so we need to step in and correct the market to allow for the ethical to compete with the unethical. Edit: As a brief aside the Fireside Chats are pretty remarkable pieces of public communication. I just can’t imagine a public leader speaking with such a blend of clarity, compassion, and force as what he did. They’re not particularly shallow or short on details, either! He spoke like an adult to a nation of adults - really refreshing.

hansel_der 4y ago
point beeing that self regulating markets are a lie
- largepeepee 4y ago
  Another way to put it is, the endgame of unregulated markets are monopolies.
  - IG_Semmelweiss 4y ago
    The endgame for any living being is maximize return for as minimal effort. This is not true for just "unregulated markets". Regulated markets operate the same way, see: Banks. Credit Cards. Healthcare insurance by state. But that's why we have laws specifically to break up anticompetitive behavior. The problem is they are not properly written and leave a lot up to discretion.
    - lostlogin 4y ago
      > The endgame for any living being is maximize return for as minimal effort. I’m a cynical person but this is way beyond what I think. You don’t have to go far to see counter examples where someone has done something pretty great for which they get little return but spent a lot of effort. Skimming the front page on HN today has some examples. The examples I found: the WLED link, the large format camera blog post and the thing about Tolkien.
    - jancsika 4y ago
      > The endgame for any living being is maximize return for as minimal effort. Sure, OG hackers don't want to waste 30 seconds walking to the printer if their print job isn't ready. But OG hackers solve that problem by spending three hundred million seconds writing an entire OS from scratch. And in the end, I'm not even sure if that solved the original problem. Of course you wouldn't be wrong by seven orders of magnitude in the more common cases. But I strongly doubt that Haiku, the Quine that works in dozens of languages at once, or Gnome 2 started their work to fatten up for the coming winter months.
  - CPLX 4y ago
    Sort of. The end game is more what I would call a mafia state. Localized monopolies in constant conflict but also loose cooperation with each other. Your ability to survive and thrive depends on being in the favor of the most relevant oligarch.
  - hannasanarion 4y ago
    the endgame of for-profit companies in unregulated markets are monopolies. Cutting corners and monopolizing makes sense for a business when absentee profit-seeking owners are the ones calling the shots and taking the spoils. An alternative corporate structure where decision-makers have different incentives coughsoughworkerco-ops might choose different and less destructive behavior in the same free market.
- jazzyjackson 4y ago
  unless, of course, you consider the government a player in the market as opposed to an outside force
- akomtu 4y ago
  It's not a lie. It just says that under any set of constraints you define, a free market will arrange itself in the optimal way. The market, by itself, is blind, and its optimal state is as good as your constraints. Under no constraints, the most efficient "eigenfunction" of the market is one uber monopoly.
  - Jon_Lowtek 4y ago
    The ideal of self regulation the grandparent calls a lie is not about markets adjusting to optimally fulfill regulatory constraints, but the believe that such regulation is unnecessary, because market participants will factor in ethical concerns, removing unethical practices by not doing business with those using them.
  - cfraenkel 4y ago
    You're conveniently moving the goalposts when the original premise no longer passes the smell test. I'm old enough to remember the original talking points selling 'self-regulating markets. "A rising sea raises all boats" and plenty more of that ilk. Just a poorly disguised fig leaf covering 'take from those with less, and give to those with more'.
- gumby 4y ago
  Lie? No. They just seek to a set point that is socially undesirable but may be preferred to a powerful subset of participants. There are other systems have the same control system issues. I don't mean this a sarcasm. The point of good regulation is to try to change the incentive structure so that the system seeks to a different peak in the possibility space, avoiding various hill-climbing errors along the way. That's hard, but the approach of mandating how can be easier to write but much harder to implement (less stable, expensive, and requiring a lot of government effort). A good example is exchange trading schemes. Instead of requiring a huge bureaucracy, the European trading system issues a number of emissions permits and then lets the market decide whether to upgrade or buy permits. As the number of certs sinks predictably over time, people can plan ahead to commit to building better plants (or retrofit) vs eking a couple of extra years out and then shutting the plant down. Less paperwork, fewer regulators, and letting the market seek to the point you want.
- jdbertron 4y ago
  It's so easy for people to always 'assume' the cost of regulation is zero. But it never is. If you factor it in, and play with the amount, then all this nonsense goes away. There are no perfect markets free of problems. The real question should be how they get resolved. Regulation is the one way people choose, because it only seems cheap.
api 4y ago
It also works today for tariffs against goods manufactured using overseas slave and near slave labor. “Imported totalitarianism” is the new child labor and slavery.
oska 4y ago
This is a flawed argument, in my opinion. You stop doing something unethical because it is unethical. You don't wait until you've been able to force everyone else from doing what you see as unethical (while they may not). Virtue is its own reward. Virtue isn't forcing everyone else to do what you see as virtuous.
- llamaimperative 4y ago
  That may all be true and yet it wasn't individuals choosing to be unethical that ended (or dramatically curtailed) child labor. The federal government stepping in and disallowing it did.
  - oska 4y ago
    Sure, but the argument FDR was putting was that he was doing it for the 'ethical' business owners who were supposedly forced to keep employing child labour because others were still using it. No. The business owners could have and should have stopped doing what they saw as unethical by themselves. (I'm not arguing against anti-child labour laws here; I'm arguing against this reported argument for their introduction by FDR. And, to be fair, it's only the reported argument here that I'm responding to; it might not be a faithful representation of what FDR actually said.)

wpietri 4y ago

That is a good example of why ethical businesses should support regulation. Another one is the capital markets. The most popular stock markets tend to be the most highly regulated both internally (that is, by the markets themselves) and by government (e.g., the SEC). Why? Because strong regulation enables consumer trust. Look at all the foreign companies that list on the NYSE, for example: https://www.nyse.com/listings/international-listings https://www.nyse.com/listings/international-listings Smart businesses support things like standards, certifications, and good regulations so that they are competing in a fair arena and don't have to compromise on their principles.

subradios 4y ago
Unethical business also supports regulation, the vape industry has been handed to RJ Reynolds due to regulations that ban all vapes that would be competitive with Vuse. Businesses support regulation if it gives them a permanent, competitive advantage over potential competitors. Child labor laws hurt my ability to pay for college and advance my career, and it also destroys mom and pop shops, because the school system has to give the 15 year old kid a permission slip to help stock shelves or open up shop. That's not to say we shouldn't have them, but child labor laws were primarily about children being exposed to the nature of industrial manufacturing work circa 1930 - not anything to do with today and thus using them as an analogy for other incentives problems (especially when solving them creates a principal agent problem) is misguided.
- Avshalom 4y ago
  >>not anything to do with today Only because it's still illegal today.
- BlueTemplar 4y ago
  At 15 years old, you are not a kid any more. Chimney sweepers used (often sold to them) boys, 5 to 10 years old (sometimes as young as 3) to climb in the chimneys to clean them (quite dangerous work). A minimum age of 14 (then 16) was put into place in 1834, and started to be enforced in 1875. (Note that this might have taken much longer if innovators hadn't been lobbying for child-free technics to do it.)

AequitasOmnibus 4y ago

This is such a spot on observation. But the incentives aren’t there for business competitors to self-regulate in an ethical manner. That’s why we as users (and yes, we’re all users to various degrees) should push for more robust regulation. If, as you correctly note, most competitors are only going to operate in the legal-but-unethical space, change the law until the legal avenue and the ethical avenue are the same. The libertarians will come out of the woodwork to say more regulation is not the answer, but when it comes to alternatives, watch the real world examples of “unregulated ethical businesses” melt away into the realm of the theoretical.

hammock 4y ago
> watch the real world examples of “unregulated ethical businesses” melt away into the realm of the theoretical Try an example of a regulated ethical business. Exxon? Verizon? Amazon? Nestle? UnitedHealth Group? Pfizer? General Motors? DuPont? Regulation is just as much a pipe dream as libertarianism
- alexhsamuel 4y ago
  Now try imagining those businesses in a world without regulation. No one has suggested that regulation will produce ethical business. The proposal is to impose regulation to limit the unethical behavior of business, which is something quite different.
  - hammock 4y ago
    > Now try imagining those businesses in a world without regulation. You’ve brought us back to the theoretical world we were trying to avoid…
- fragmede 4y ago
  Unless you're allergic to the entire concept of modern banking, I think most credit unions would apply. Local restaurants run by good people also would also seem to count.
- rqtwteye 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y ago

This exact thing is why I am not happy about Apple being forced by the EU to allow alternative app stores. The Apple App Store has served to mitigate some of the worse excesses and privacy abuses by various apps and social media sites. Now that there is a way apps can reach the coveted iPhone user demographic without having to go through Apple's strict privacy review, I fear that apps will slowly migrate their functionality/offer discounts for using alternative stores and will increase their abuse of user data.

simion314 4y ago
>This exact thing is why I am not happy about Apple being forced by the EU to allow alternative app stores. The Apple App Store has served to mitigate some of the worse excesses and privacy abuses by various apps and social media sites. Since USA is not part of EU, and USA is a giant market then I assume that USA citizens have no reason to get scared by your FUD, and if you are from EU and want the wall garden I am sure Apple will let you opt in in the USA version of the store.
- bspammer 4y ago
  Neither of those will help when some company whose app I want to use says “Hey, our app is only available on Evil Store. Install that first and enable all permissions”
  - simion314 4y ago
    This did not happen on Android, show me 2 or 3 example of a must have app that an USA citizen has to side load? There is not otherwise I assure the Apple PR army would have jumped on that occasion. Also as I said the USA is not in EU, so Meta/Facebook will still have no choice then put a iOS app of WhatsApp in the Store. I am 100% sure that this is FUD, reality shows that there is no must use app that a developer refuses to put on the Google Play store because they are evil, the apps are either not allowed in the store because ToS or the apps are small side projects.

cortesoft 4y ago

Yep, this is what is known as a Collective Action Problem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_action_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_action_problem): even if every individual would prefer if all businesses behaved ethically, the rational decision for each individual is to behave unethically. This is why I get frustrated with people who say we should influence businesses with our wallet, by choosing not to shop at stores who behave badly. However, my individual buying choice won't make any difference; for example, if I hate Walmart, my only two choices are to not shop there and not get the benefit of the cheaper prices, but still have Walmart around doing bad things, or I can shop there and get the better prices, and Walmart is still around doing bad things. My individual choice does not change whether Walmart is around or not, but it DOES have a big effect on how much money I save. There is no rational reason to pay more when there is no benefit. My individual spending is not even a blip on their bottom line. Of course, I would be willing to pay more if it meant the type of abuses that Walmart does would stop, but that is not the choice I am given.

scottLobster 4y ago
Yeah, it's also why I stopped feeling guilty about driving a ICE car and not choosing the more expensive renewable supplier option on my power bill. At the end of the day I'm not so rich that I can afford to make inefficient sacrifices. My kids' college funds still need filling, sourcing my power from coal/natural gas means thousands of dollars in those funds over the years that wouldn't otherwise be there. Or I can make a negligible dent in global carbon emissions and my kids can take on thousands extra in student loans. I'm happy to do my part when we're all (or at least most of us) playing the same game, but I have too many people directly relying on me to be an ineffective martyr. Back in 2016 I read a "human interest" story about some janitor who saved his pennies for months, keeping track with an excel spreadsheet, so he could make a multi-hundred dollar donation to Hillary Clinton's campaign. The article was clearly trying to frame this as some noble sacrifice from someone who doesn't have much to begin with, I just saw a poor person getting fleeced by an aristocrat, and she lost anyway.
- godelski 4y ago
  I think something difficult about this is that a big component depends on how much we weigh future outcomes. Obviously too much future weight is not good because we do a lot of harm now ("for the greater good" utilitarian philosophy has done extraordinary damage to our world) but also hyper focusing on the now too does substantial harm (existential threats like climate change can be traced to these effects). It also depends how we weigh collective actions vs individual. I do not think there is a correct answer here, at least one we can measure or define in a meaningful way, despite how much passion we have for certain views. But I also agree with your main message, that it is hard to encourage collective action if we are not willing to first go after the main contributors to the problem. Individuals who contribute to the problem several magnitudes above the median individual (e.g. independently, Gates and Musk both produced more emissions than the median American, in a single week, purely do to their aviation admissions). We get mad at those who are above the law, and it is unsurprising that we would be mad at those who are above our moral codes. How can we have collective action while we let hundreds or thousands of people like this persist in their actions?

nine_k 4y ago

There is an idea that sheer market forces should push things towards being honest and pleading to the user. If a customer buys rotten stuff in a store A, next time the customer goes to another store (B, C, D,..), and tells friends that store A is no good. If store A continues to mistreat its customers, it goes out of business. But this only works when the customer has some reasonable choice. If store A is the only store in town, it will have customers, no matter how bad it is. With a lot of daily-use software, there is a network effect: you have to use it because everybody else uses it, and you need to interoperate. Here choice wanes, and you're stuck with the same 2-3 choices. Each of the mega-businesses can inconvenience you, or screw you over, but you have little to gain by switching to a competitor, if it even exists. Google and Microsoft are AT&T and Standard Oil of our day.

andrepd 4y ago
Not only that. It is not reasonable for people to e.g. test themselves if their food or drink or medicine is not poisoned. That's why laws exist. Likewise, it is not reasonable to ask an average person to consider the minutiae of standardised data interchange or open-source modem drivers. That's why laws to protect the user and to protect competition should exist. I've had people unironically say to me (in person) "if you die from drinking tainted liquor your estate can just sue the shop; this is a deterrent so they won't do that".
- nine_k 4y ago
  > if you die from drinking tainted liquor your estate can just sue the shop I think that would be a right thing to do, and the shop would likely be sued out of existence, with a felony charges for some of the personnel and owners. This is one reason why shops try to keep things sanitary: a customer with an estate to speak of would ruin them if hurt. (But those without an estate may have been hurt for some time with relatively little consequence.) Another reason is, of course, inspections (they don't need to be strictly state-operated, but may have to be state-mandated), where the inspecting agency would sue / fine the shop out of existence if for presence of dangerously tainted liquor. An ounce of prevention, etc.

perfecthjrjth 4y ago

This is how manufacturing was moved to China. Walmart forced many manufacturers move their operations to China; otherwise, the latter companies would lose their contracts with Walmart.