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Tobacco lawyers "Putting that cigarettes are harmful on the box would be devastating to our profits!"
by pixl97 7mo ago
Tobacco lawyers "Putting that cigarettes are harmful on the box would be devastating to our profits!"
- reactordev 7mo agoLiterally every ceo
- deaux 7mo agoYou missed an adjective: literally every megacorp CEO. Plenty of small companies with transparent and honest CEOs. Also why we need much less megacorps than there are now.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- reactordev 7mo agoBeing good and profit motives will always be at odds.
- bko 7mo agoImagine NYT banning an ad in it's newspaper telling people how to cancel and sue NYT? Wild stuff
- akersten 7mo agoIt would be a better analogy if tobacco companies sold ad space on their packs and chose not to do business with a private for-profit anti-smoking solicitation group.
- adi_kurian 7mo agoNo it would not. Meta is an advertising company that sells ad space. More specifically, Meta is the dominant firm in the social advertising market which is an oligopoly. It is "the business", not an imagined side revenue stream.
- gowld 7mo agoAnd that would be a blatant admission of guilt.
- roysting 7mo agoI understand the impulse, but there are not only significant differences, i.e., the requirement to add labeling to cigarettes was mostly a judicial or legislative action, but there is also that rather perverse fact that this kind of legislation that people are championing is often funded by profit and greed just like the harm being sued over. The article even at least mentions that at least one of the suits is private equity funded; which generally will result in the partners and/or investors of the private equity firm and the attorneys suing, which are often all one and the same in what is just a financial and legal shell game, net tens of millions of dollars, while the supposed victims will end up with nothing but pennies on the dollar of harm and injury. I get the impulse to also “cheer” for the lawsuits, but if you thought Meta, etc. are bad; you really don’t want to look into the vile pestilence that is the law firms that are basically organized crime too by the core definition of crime being an offense and harm upon society. I don’t really know a solution for this problem because it is so rooted in the core foundation of this rotten system we still call America for some reason, but for the time being I guess, the only moderately effective remedy for harm and injury is to combat it with more harm and injury.
- pixl97 7mo agoI mean you see piles of the libertarian types here on HN that would tell you that unending civil suits is how the country should work. That is freedom to them. The other option is consumer protection agencies with teeth to put down actors like Meta quickly, but HN gets all mad about that as they are temporarily depressed billionaires that will hit it big at any moment.
- jquery 7mo agoWe had a consumer protection agency with teeth. Dunno where it went though.
- _doctor_love 7mo ago"But Black Dynamite! I sell drugs to the community!"