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It’s funny to me that I’m reading this while listening to “Abolish Silicon Valley” by Wendy Liu. I don’t think any CEO can be moral if your primary obligation

It’s funny to me that I’m reading this while listening to “Abolish Silicon Valley” by Wendy Liu. I don’t think any CEO can be moral if your primary obligation is “shareholder value”. Or in plain language: making other people more rich at the cost of others. I’m just happy the guy got out when the company didn’t align with his values anymore and he has the means to afford himself a conscience.

sethammons 3y ago
> making other people more rich at the cost of others Not everything is zero sum. There is a reason that when you purchase something both sides say thank you.
- AndrewKemendo 3y ago
  The world is 100% legally zero sum unless you can legally appropriate property with no money or any other type of compensation then where is this magical free pie?
  - brigadier132 3y ago
    The world is trivially not zero sum. If it were zero sum we would all be living worse off than medieval peasants
    - rapind 3y ago
      Every “win-win” most certainly produces side effects, usually unmeasured, which leads to naive statements like “it’s not zero sum”. We may no longer be peasants (hard to prove), but a large number of extinct species and ecological disasters would like to argue the “not zero sum” point.
      - brigadier132 3y ago
        If the world were zero sum, that means no new value has been created for humanity, ever. The world population has grown ~22x since 1400s. Are we now splitting our meager peasant loaves of bread 22 ways? Nobody cares about your stupid degrowth ideology that advocates for death and people to be poorer. Just state what you actually are, which is anti-human.
        anon-3988 3y ago
        What he said that "its hard to prove if we are still peasants" is wrong. But you cannot argue that we human have benefitted at the cost of nature? Also, >Nobody cares about your stupid degrowth ideology that advocates for death and people to be poorer. Is also not true. Having a 1km lawn is excess. Flying solo on a private plane to visit an office halfway across the world for 1-2 days every other week is excess. No sane person arguing for this position is claiming that people who can barely find food every day is living in excess and must suffer degrowth. It is the privileged that needs to degrowth and redistribute their excess wealth. Do you really think that the Earth can sustain had every single person on Earth lives like the ultra wealthy? Or even as the middle-class American with single unit home in the suburb? We would probably annihilate almost all of "interesting" flora/fauna and be left with chickens and cows if that at all. Maybe that's a perfectly reasonable trade? AFAIK humanity must take priority over every other being AFAIC.
        rapind 3y ago
        > What he said that "its hard to prove if we are still peasants" is wrong. I think this depends on how you classify peasant. If we can agree that it's about income inequality, and not quality of life, then there was a study done comparing income inequality in the late eighteenth century to current day, which concluded that "Incomes were much more equally distributed in colonial America than in America today, or in other countries in the late eighteenth century". https://www.nber.org/papers/w18396 https://www.nber.org/papers/w18396 Ultimately it depends on the specifics and the dates we are comparing. I don't think people fully realize how significant income inequality really is today.
        3y ago
    - __d 3y ago
      Without (yet) having an opinion here, that's not necessarily true: resource consumption is adding value to the system at a level that might offset population growth?
      - greiskul 3y ago
        Who cares about population growth? We know human population will stabilize pretty soon. Malthusian arguments are meaningless when the very premise of unlimited population growth is false.
    - AndrewKemendo 3y ago
      We’ve strip mined the earth, decimated humanity, are globally hopeless (look at birth rates) and individual alienation has never been wider spread Suicide is quickly becoming the leading cause of death I’m not sure we’re any better off now holistically
      - greiskul 3y ago
        > strip mined the earth So... If you are complaining about destruction of habits for animals, and global warming, then yeah. If you are complaining about us extracting minerals... Rocks don't have feelings, they don't get a vote. If we could mine them without polluting and destroying ecosystems, not only we probably should, but we should start thinking on how to also mine asteroids and stuff. > decimated humanity How did we do that? There are more people now than in any previous point in history. There are a lot of people suffering, but quality of life by numbers is probably a lot better now than it has ever been. > globally hopeless (look at birth rates) So is population growth a good thing cause it shows people are happy, or a bad thing cause it means we won't have enough resources? I prefer us to have a stable population for the long run, at least until we can get to space. > individual alienation has never been wider spread How informed do you think illiterate peasants used to be? What is happening, is that the American empire is in a state of decay right now. But the world is bigger than just the Western cultural world. Yeah, it might suck to not get getting all the fruits of imperialism that the US and European countries used to get. It makes the imperialist countries poorer not to have that. But for the formerly colonized people, their life gets better.
  - sethammons 3y ago
    Can your zero sum hypothesis explain the following amazing video from Hans Rausling, economist, on rising prosperity? https://youtu.be/jbkSRLYSojo https://youtu.be/jbkSRLYSojo
  - mlyle 3y ago
    If we're looking at how many pies there are in the world-- yes, that's zero sum. But if we're considering utility-- how useful stuff is to me-- it is far from zero sum. If I produce lots of wheat, being able to trade some of it for my neighbor's beef makes both of us richer.
    - AndrewKemendo 3y ago
      Your example proves my point You have a fixed amount of already acquired property You do specified labor on that You exchange your labor + property for someone else’s labor + property That’s commerce and has nothing to do with the question I’m talking about, which is: How you acquired the property in the first place is the ethical question. What’s unethical is if your a neighbor was struggling to survive and instead of caring for him out of your property and labor, you convinced him to trade your excess money for a portion of his property in perpetuity. So no, there is no more uncaptured “pie.” It should have never been caputured in the first place - it’s equally everyone’s right
      - dnissley 3y ago
        If I develop and produce a fertilizer which doubles yields for a particular crop, that's uncaptured pie. Plain and simple.
        johndhi 3y ago
        Hehe hmm I think fertilizer might drain the soil faster though right?
- louwrentius 3y ago
  Some have more money than they can spend in a lifetime while others are homeless. This is the society we live in, created by capitalism that demands unsustainable growth.
  - l33t233372 3y ago
    Homeless people also exist in non-capitalist economies so I’m not certain that is evidence of anything. Scarcity is the problem, not capitalism.
    - johndhi 3y ago
      Scarcity of what? Certainly not money - there seems to be enough of that, it's just not in the poor people's hands
      - rightbyte 3y ago
        Scarcity of beds in mental institutions.
      - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
        > Scarcity of what? Attention and logistics. The cost of getting things where they need to go, the administration of an empire, frequently dwarves by orders of magnitude the cost of the materials being transported to and fro. The problem is not solved by localisation given the increased exposure to volatility that brings.
  - eastbound 3y ago
    The state takes 63% of our income here in France, and there are still homeless people. I’d say the capitalists do a better job.
    - louwrentius 3y ago
      You know that France is a capitalist society right?
rajanaccros 3y ago
> I don’t think any CEO can be moral if your primary obligation is “shareholder value”. I am really glad I am starting to see a lot more posts here on HN with regard to this fact. Capitalism is literally destroying everything and has proven itself not to be a viable system for long term sustainability and a healthy society and ecosystem. Some of the smartest people on the internet aggregate on HN and some have still not figured this out. Either because 1) They haven't taken the time to look into the n-order knock on effects that are produced by capitalism in it's current form, or 2) they are too interested in self-enrichment to make any changes to behavior for their own comfort and convenience. We should get of publicly traded corporations and Wall Street should disappear in my opinion. It is that publicly traded shareholder value that drives all the crimes against society/environment in this late stage. However, we are up against a severely selfish and entrenched minority with a ton of power who won't let that happen ... at the cost of everything.
- prottog 3y ago
  > Capitalism is literally destroying everything You can't give credit all the credit to capitalism. Communism destroyed what was the fourth-largest lake in the world, which was so big that it was called a "sea"[0]. > Some of the smartest people on the internet aggregate on HN and some have still not figured this out. Either because 1) They haven't taken the time to look into the n-order knock on effects that are produced by capitalism in it's current form, or 2) they are too interested in self-enrichment to make any changes to behavior for their own comfort and convenience. The age-old adage that anyone opposed to your viewpoint is either stupid or evil. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aral_Sea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aral_Sea
  - rajanaccros 3y ago
    > You can't give credit all the credit to capitalism. Communism destroyed what was the fourth-largest lake in the world, which was so big that it was called a "sea"[0]. The age-old adage that if it is not capitalism, it must be communism. > The age-old adage that anyone opposed to your viewpoint is either stupid or evil. Which one are you? Sure my take was reductionist, but you are using my critique to distract is disingenuous. You are trying to defend capitalism by saying that you are not stupid or evil. If I have missed an adjective to describe people who have not discovered this ruthless system of destruction what would it be? Ignorant? Willfully Ignorant?

sethammons 3y ago

> making other people more rich at the cost of others Not everything is zero sum. There is a reason that when you purchase something both sides say thank you.

AndrewKemendo 3y ago
The world is 100% legally zero sum unless you can legally appropriate property with no money or any other type of compensation then where is this magical free pie?
- brigadier132 3y ago
  The world is trivially not zero sum. If it were zero sum we would all be living worse off than medieval peasants
  - rapind 3y ago
    Every “win-win” most certainly produces side effects, usually unmeasured, which leads to naive statements like “it’s not zero sum”. We may no longer be peasants (hard to prove), but a large number of extinct species and ecological disasters would like to argue the “not zero sum” point.
    - brigadier132 3y ago
      If the world were zero sum, that means no new value has been created for humanity, ever. The world population has grown ~22x since 1400s. Are we now splitting our meager peasant loaves of bread 22 ways? Nobody cares about your stupid degrowth ideology that advocates for death and people to be poorer. Just state what you actually are, which is anti-human.
      - anon-3988 3y ago
        What he said that "its hard to prove if we are still peasants" is wrong. But you cannot argue that we human have benefitted at the cost of nature? Also, >Nobody cares about your stupid degrowth ideology that advocates for death and people to be poorer. Is also not true. Having a 1km lawn is excess. Flying solo on a private plane to visit an office halfway across the world for 1-2 days every other week is excess. No sane person arguing for this position is claiming that people who can barely find food every day is living in excess and must suffer degrowth. It is the privileged that needs to degrowth and redistribute their excess wealth. Do you really think that the Earth can sustain had every single person on Earth lives like the ultra wealthy? Or even as the middle-class American with single unit home in the suburb? We would probably annihilate almost all of "interesting" flora/fauna and be left with chickens and cows if that at all. Maybe that's a perfectly reasonable trade? AFAIK humanity must take priority over every other being AFAIC.
        rapind 3y ago
        > What he said that "its hard to prove if we are still peasants" is wrong. I think this depends on how you classify peasant. If we can agree that it's about income inequality, and not quality of life, then there was a study done comparing income inequality in the late eighteenth century to current day, which concluded that "Incomes were much more equally distributed in colonial America than in America today, or in other countries in the late eighteenth century". https://www.nber.org/papers/w18396 https://www.nber.org/papers/w18396 Ultimately it depends on the specifics and the dates we are comparing. I don't think people fully realize how significant income inequality really is today.
        3y ago
  - __d 3y ago
    Without (yet) having an opinion here, that's not necessarily true: resource consumption is adding value to the system at a level that might offset population growth?
    - greiskul 3y ago
      Who cares about population growth? We know human population will stabilize pretty soon. Malthusian arguments are meaningless when the very premise of unlimited population growth is false.
  - AndrewKemendo 3y ago
    We’ve strip mined the earth, decimated humanity, are globally hopeless (look at birth rates) and individual alienation has never been wider spread Suicide is quickly becoming the leading cause of death I’m not sure we’re any better off now holistically
    - greiskul 3y ago
      > strip mined the earth So... If you are complaining about destruction of habits for animals, and global warming, then yeah. If you are complaining about us extracting minerals... Rocks don't have feelings, they don't get a vote. If we could mine them without polluting and destroying ecosystems, not only we probably should, but we should start thinking on how to also mine asteroids and stuff. > decimated humanity How did we do that? There are more people now than in any previous point in history. There are a lot of people suffering, but quality of life by numbers is probably a lot better now than it has ever been. > globally hopeless (look at birth rates) So is population growth a good thing cause it shows people are happy, or a bad thing cause it means we won't have enough resources? I prefer us to have a stable population for the long run, at least until we can get to space. > individual alienation has never been wider spread How informed do you think illiterate peasants used to be? What is happening, is that the American empire is in a state of decay right now. But the world is bigger than just the Western cultural world. Yeah, it might suck to not get getting all the fruits of imperialism that the US and European countries used to get. It makes the imperialist countries poorer not to have that. But for the formerly colonized people, their life gets better.
- sethammons 3y ago
  Can your zero sum hypothesis explain the following amazing video from Hans Rausling, economist, on rising prosperity? https://youtu.be/jbkSRLYSojo https://youtu.be/jbkSRLYSojo
- mlyle 3y ago
  If we're looking at how many pies there are in the world-- yes, that's zero sum. But if we're considering utility-- how useful stuff is to me-- it is far from zero sum. If I produce lots of wheat, being able to trade some of it for my neighbor's beef makes both of us richer.
  - AndrewKemendo 3y ago
    Your example proves my point You have a fixed amount of already acquired property You do specified labor on that You exchange your labor + property for someone else’s labor + property That’s commerce and has nothing to do with the question I’m talking about, which is: How you acquired the property in the first place is the ethical question. What’s unethical is if your a neighbor was struggling to survive and instead of caring for him out of your property and labor, you convinced him to trade your excess money for a portion of his property in perpetuity. So no, there is no more uncaptured “pie.” It should have never been caputured in the first place - it’s equally everyone’s right
    - dnissley 3y ago
      If I develop and produce a fertilizer which doubles yields for a particular crop, that's uncaptured pie. Plain and simple.
      - johndhi 3y ago
        Hehe hmm I think fertilizer might drain the soil faster though right?
louwrentius 3y ago
Some have more money than they can spend in a lifetime while others are homeless. This is the society we live in, created by capitalism that demands unsustainable growth.
- l33t233372 3y ago
  Homeless people also exist in non-capitalist economies so I’m not certain that is evidence of anything. Scarcity is the problem, not capitalism.
  - johndhi 3y ago
    Scarcity of what? Certainly not money - there seems to be enough of that, it's just not in the poor people's hands
    - rightbyte 3y ago
      Scarcity of beds in mental institutions.
    - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
      > Scarcity of what? Attention and logistics. The cost of getting things where they need to go, the administration of an empire, frequently dwarves by orders of magnitude the cost of the materials being transported to and fro. The problem is not solved by localisation given the increased exposure to volatility that brings.
- eastbound 3y ago
  The state takes 63% of our income here in France, and there are still homeless people. I’d say the capitalists do a better job.
  - louwrentius 3y ago
    You know that France is a capitalist society right?

rajanaccros 3y ago

> I don’t think any CEO can be moral if your primary obligation is “shareholder value”. I am really glad I am starting to see a lot more posts here on HN with regard to this fact. Capitalism is literally destroying everything and has proven itself not to be a viable system for long term sustainability and a healthy society and ecosystem. Some of the smartest people on the internet aggregate on HN and some have still not figured this out. Either because 1) They haven't taken the time to look into the n-order knock on effects that are produced by capitalism in it's current form, or 2) they are too interested in self-enrichment to make any changes to behavior for their own comfort and convenience. We should get of publicly traded corporations and Wall Street should disappear in my opinion. It is that publicly traded shareholder value that drives all the crimes against society/environment in this late stage. However, we are up against a severely selfish and entrenched minority with a ton of power who won't let that happen ... at the cost of everything.

prottog 3y ago
> Capitalism is literally destroying everything You can't give credit all the credit to capitalism. Communism destroyed what was the fourth-largest lake in the world, which was so big that it was called a "sea"[0]. > Some of the smartest people on the internet aggregate on HN and some have still not figured this out. Either because 1) They haven't taken the time to look into the n-order knock on effects that are produced by capitalism in it's current form, or 2) they are too interested in self-enrichment to make any changes to behavior for their own comfort and convenience. The age-old adage that anyone opposed to your viewpoint is either stupid or evil. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aral_Sea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aral_Sea
- rajanaccros 3y ago
  > You can't give credit all the credit to capitalism. Communism destroyed what was the fourth-largest lake in the world, which was so big that it was called a "sea"[0]. The age-old adage that if it is not capitalism, it must be communism. > The age-old adage that anyone opposed to your viewpoint is either stupid or evil. Which one are you? Sure my take was reductionist, but you are using my critique to distract is disingenuous. You are trying to defend capitalism by saying that you are not stupid or evil. If I have missed an adjective to describe people who have not discovered this ruthless system of destruction what would it be? Ignorant? Willfully Ignorant?