5 ms·

Public companies have to put profit first. We need to solve this with regulations, we can't count on their goodwill.

by zb3 2y ago

segfaultex 2y ago
Shareholder primacy is legally dubious at best.
- dehrmann 2y ago
  Long-term profitability can be a goal, too. A lot of short-term profit behaviors can hurt long-term profits.
dietr1ch 2y ago
Does being publicly traded imply a company shouldn't have a moral code to stand by? Is it because the dumb ruling that companies are supposed to have the single goal of making money? Even if at the expense of cautiously ignoring or disregarding the law where it essentially acts as a fee?
- yapyap 2y ago
  > Does being publicly traded imply a company shouldn't have a moral code to stand by Shouldn’t? no won’t? yes
- verisimi 2y ago
  > Does being publicly traded imply a company shouldn't have a moral code to stand by? Yes. The appearance of a moral code is all that is necessary. And btw, companies cannot be moral, any more than any other object (chair, house) can be. People however, can be moral. Also, people at Google decided to drop their previous "don't be evil" motto, so perhaps that tells you something.
  - darkwater 2y ago
    > companies cannot be moral I don't buy this. Companies _are made_ of people. The ones that set the direction can be more or less detached from the outcomes of those decisions, but are people nonetheless. Shareholders? People as well.
    - verisimi 2y ago
      I assure you, that a company cannot have a morality. It also cannot have a preference for chocolate ice cream, basketball or have children. Companies are not made of people either. Similarly, if you want to speak to a company, you will speak to someone whose job it is to represent the company - you will not speak to the company itself - its a legal fiction. Companies are legal paperwork that real people engage with to get money - such is the way our society is organised. If you were to argue that some animals exhibit morality - I would see what you mean.
      - darkwater 2y ago
        Yes but who/what dictates the tone the company will use to answer you? Ultimately, a person. Even if they are just following a style manual, that was written by a group of people as well. And reviewed by some C-level, probably.
        verisimi 2y ago
        Individuals can take on groupthink idea (ie a company) - they can re-interpret the information in a relatively coherent way. Think of the idea of say 'Christians' - there is a relatively coherent idea there being animated in all those minds. But then, at an individual level, there is difference in what is believed (eg 'the Father' idea will be be different in each). Its just assumed that the groupthink idea is the same in all. Its a pleasing illusion for an individual to believe. There is no company morality - as companies and groups cannot feel or register value. The value is entirely in the individual. Yes, one individual can affected and be affected by another. Yes, an individual can say 'We at Google blah blah' and mean what they are saying, and still be wrong. The idea of a 'group' with feelings, morality etc is just an illusory projection.
hello_moto 2y ago
Regulation is a taboo word under the current administration. JD Vance has criticized EU during AI summit. Criticized to the point of threatening not to share "Americans" AI bandwagon to EU.
- cgcrob 2y ago
  He’s forgotten the EU has ASML clearly.
  - chrisjj 2y ago
    No. ASML is on the list after Greenland and Gaza.
- tadfisher 2y ago
  He and his ilk forget all too quickly why we have regulations in the first place. People wanted them, because they were tired of polluted waterways, bank runs wiping away their life savings, and dangerous poisons being sold as medicine. Now that a functioning democracy has voted for privacy protections, it's a pretty "mask-off" moment that these regulations are the ones he rails against.
  - openrisk 2y ago
    Conflating bureaucratic red tape with regulations that actually protect citizens is the deceitful, immoral strategy, by people who are basically... evil. Simplifying bureaucratic rules can be beneficial and can take countless forms (digitizing trivial manual work, removing duplication, applying materiality thresholds etc. etc.) The result is clearly a win-win for all. Removing protective regulations is instead a zero sum game. Each fradulent bank behavior not persecuted is siphoning wealth from their clients. Each further exploitation of personal data collection is enriching the surveillance capitalists at the expense of the user-product (and ultimately our very democracies). Society and politics has a lot of gray areas. This is not one of them.
  - okanat 2y ago
    It wasn't that the people requesting certain things politely that brought regulation. It was when things turned nonprofitable or outright violent. The New Deal was the ideal of Roosevelt but other politicians knew very well what people did to the Tsar and his family. It didn't end well for them but it did scare quite a lot developed governments in the world.
chrismcb 2y ago
Companies don't have to put profit first. But profit in a for profit is important.
scq 2y ago
This is a common myth, but is false. Direct quote from the Supreme Court: > “Modern corporate law does not require for-profit corporations to pursue profit at the expense of everything else, and many do not.” More information: https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-corporations-obligations-to-shareholders/corporations-dont-have-to-maximize-profits https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-co...
- pessimizer 2y ago
  It's not a myth. The person you are replying to did not say that corporate law requires companies to prioritize profit. Coroporations need to prioritize profit because that's what they're for. Whenever it looks like a company is not prioritizing profit, what you're seeing is the employees and owners of a corporation using it as a tool to express their personalities and preferences. This is usually not good, it is corruption. There's no reason to think that the personalities and preferences of arbitrary employees and owners are good, or that they would tend to do good things. The idea that companies have moralities, and that besides bringing in profit they also have some hazy duty to do things that I agree with personally is the myth. It's self-regulation propaganda. It's better to just have rules that keep companies from doing the things that we don't want them to do, instead of hoping that they will suddenly realize that money doesn't buy love, and that the only important things in life are health and family. That's not what they're for. That's what you're for. They're not real people.
  - wizzwizz4 2y ago
    > Coroporations need to prioritize profit because that's what they're for. I disagree. Corporations do things (e.g. provide goods and services): that's what they're for. The whole "money" thing is just a means-to-an-end: a system of accounting to allow the corporation to continue to do what it's supposed to do. Money, after all, is inherently valueless: it's only worth anything because it can be exchanged for goods and services. If powerful entities exist solely for making money, we risk the economy becoming completely decoupled from anything that actually matters.
    - 2y ago

Public companies have to put profit first. We need to solve this with regulations, we can't count on their goodwill.

by zb3 2y ago

Public companies have to put profit first. We need to solve this with regulations, we can't count on their goodwill.

segfaultex 2y ago

Shareholder primacy is legally dubious at best.

dehrmann 2y ago
Long-term profitability can be a goal, too. A lot of short-term profit behaviors can hurt long-term profits.

dietr1ch 2y ago

Does being publicly traded imply a company shouldn't have a moral code to stand by? Is it because the dumb ruling that companies are supposed to have the single goal of making money? Even if at the expense of cautiously ignoring or disregarding the law where it essentially acts as a fee?

yapyap 2y ago
> Does being publicly traded imply a company shouldn't have a moral code to stand by Shouldn’t? no won’t? yes
verisimi 2y ago
> Does being publicly traded imply a company shouldn't have a moral code to stand by? Yes. The appearance of a moral code is all that is necessary. And btw, companies cannot be moral, any more than any other object (chair, house) can be. People however, can be moral. Also, people at Google decided to drop their previous "don't be evil" motto, so perhaps that tells you something.
- darkwater 2y ago
  > companies cannot be moral I don't buy this. Companies _are made_ of people. The ones that set the direction can be more or less detached from the outcomes of those decisions, but are people nonetheless. Shareholders? People as well.
  - verisimi 2y ago
    I assure you, that a company cannot have a morality. It also cannot have a preference for chocolate ice cream, basketball or have children. Companies are not made of people either. Similarly, if you want to speak to a company, you will speak to someone whose job it is to represent the company - you will not speak to the company itself - its a legal fiction. Companies are legal paperwork that real people engage with to get money - such is the way our society is organised. If you were to argue that some animals exhibit morality - I would see what you mean.
    - darkwater 2y ago
      Yes but who/what dictates the tone the company will use to answer you? Ultimately, a person. Even if they are just following a style manual, that was written by a group of people as well. And reviewed by some C-level, probably.
      - verisimi 2y ago
        Individuals can take on groupthink idea (ie a company) - they can re-interpret the information in a relatively coherent way. Think of the idea of say 'Christians' - there is a relatively coherent idea there being animated in all those minds. But then, at an individual level, there is difference in what is believed (eg 'the Father' idea will be be different in each). Its just assumed that the groupthink idea is the same in all. Its a pleasing illusion for an individual to believe. There is no company morality - as companies and groups cannot feel or register value. The value is entirely in the individual. Yes, one individual can affected and be affected by another. Yes, an individual can say 'We at Google blah blah' and mean what they are saying, and still be wrong. The idea of a 'group' with feelings, morality etc is just an illusory projection.

hello_moto 2y ago

Regulation is a taboo word under the current administration. JD Vance has criticized EU during AI summit. Criticized to the point of threatening not to share "Americans" AI bandwagon to EU.

cgcrob 2y ago
He’s forgotten the EU has ASML clearly.
- chrisjj 2y ago
  No. ASML is on the list after Greenland and Gaza.
tadfisher 2y ago
He and his ilk forget all too quickly why we have regulations in the first place. People wanted them, because they were tired of polluted waterways, bank runs wiping away their life savings, and dangerous poisons being sold as medicine. Now that a functioning democracy has voted for privacy protections, it's a pretty "mask-off" moment that these regulations are the ones he rails against.
- openrisk 2y ago
  Conflating bureaucratic red tape with regulations that actually protect citizens is the deceitful, immoral strategy, by people who are basically... evil. Simplifying bureaucratic rules can be beneficial and can take countless forms (digitizing trivial manual work, removing duplication, applying materiality thresholds etc. etc.) The result is clearly a win-win for all. Removing protective regulations is instead a zero sum game. Each fradulent bank behavior not persecuted is siphoning wealth from their clients. Each further exploitation of personal data collection is enriching the surveillance capitalists at the expense of the user-product (and ultimately our very democracies). Society and politics has a lot of gray areas. This is not one of them.
- okanat 2y ago
  It wasn't that the people requesting certain things politely that brought regulation. It was when things turned nonprofitable or outright violent. The New Deal was the ideal of Roosevelt but other politicians knew very well what people did to the Tsar and his family. It didn't end well for them but it did scare quite a lot developed governments in the world.

chrismcb 2y ago

Companies don't have to put profit first. But profit in a for profit is important.

scq 2y ago

This is a common myth, but is false. Direct quote from the Supreme Court: > “Modern corporate law does not require for-profit corporations to pursue profit at the expense of everything else, and many do not.” More information: https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-corporations-obligations-to-shareholders/corporations-dont-have-to-maximize-profits https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-co...

pessimizer 2y ago
It's not a myth. The person you are replying to did not say that corporate law requires companies to prioritize profit. Coroporations need to prioritize profit because that's what they're for. Whenever it looks like a company is not prioritizing profit, what you're seeing is the employees and owners of a corporation using it as a tool to express their personalities and preferences. This is usually not good, it is corruption. There's no reason to think that the personalities and preferences of arbitrary employees and owners are good, or that they would tend to do good things. The idea that companies have moralities, and that besides bringing in profit they also have some hazy duty to do things that I agree with personally is the myth. It's self-regulation propaganda. It's better to just have rules that keep companies from doing the things that we don't want them to do, instead of hoping that they will suddenly realize that money doesn't buy love, and that the only important things in life are health and family. That's not what they're for. That's what you're for. They're not real people.
- wizzwizz4 2y ago
  > Coroporations need to prioritize profit because that's what they're for. I disagree. Corporations do things (e.g. provide goods and services): that's what they're for. The whole "money" thing is just a means-to-an-end: a system of accounting to allow the corporation to continue to do what it's supposed to do. Money, after all, is inherently valueless: it's only worth anything because it can be exchanged for goods and services. If powerful entities exist solely for making money, we risk the economy becoming completely decoupled from anything that actually matters.
  - 2y ago