Damn. Makes you wonder what kinds of horrible things big companies are doing now which will only be uncovered in the next 20 years or so. What makes tobacco com

Damn. Makes you wonder what kinds of horrible things big companies are doing now which will only be uncovered in the next 20 years or so. What makes tobacco companies less ethical than say big pharma or big tech companies? It's a systemic issue. At the core of this issue is the concept of a corporation. The real cancer are the legal constructs of limited liability and the concept of corporate person-hood. Companies are simply not meant to become so large; they are physically incapable of handling the kind of liability which they will inevitably be exposed to on a global scale. The scale of such companies gives them inertia which allows them to transcend ethical boundaries; with global exposure, they can always find enough people who are unethical enough to undertake the necessary cover-ups to keep things going in a way which maximizes short-term profits. Had the tobacco industry been made up of many smaller businesses, the information would have gotten out sooner as many small tobacco businesses would have voluntarily shuttered their doors in response to the research... But with a handful of gigantic companies headed up by some of the most ethically challenged individuals that all of planet earth could provide, it's not surprising that it didn't happen that way. Capitalism is meant to be composed of small, mostly short-lived businesses that are almost ephemeral in nature. It should be easy to start a new business just as closing an existing business should not be a big deal. Long term inter-generational wealth should be difficult but not impossible to preserve; though it could be preserved using a deflationary currency as a market-neutral store of value; its value would be derived either from trust in the institution or in the automatic mechanism which administers the currency (e.g. the government or public ledger). Imagine what we could achieve with today's technology if only we had kept the efficient capitalist system which our ancestors had designed; a system which proved itself to be efficient during hard times of technological and resource scarcity. Our current system evolved in a post-scarcity environment and therefore it is not optimized for resource efficiency. It's optimized for centralization of power.