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How would this work for purchase, say, at a Grocery Store? The mom and pop grocer's down the road may have no evil corporate affiliation, but the makers of the

How would this work for purchase, say, at a Grocery Store? The mom and pop grocer's down the road may have no evil corporate affiliation, but the makers of the junk food they're selling - that's a different story. It's so hard to pick out every little piece. As a parallel, I am a vegan, and I just have to accept that no matter how hard I try - even if I did have an app - I'm going to be using or ingesting animal products at some point. An app just can't take into account every little piece of the puzzle.

jal278 13y ago
The problem is definitely nuanced; shopping at a mom&pop store in general may lead to less evil/dollar than at walmart, and even within that store, choosing junk food manufactured by less evil corporations may be better. There are separate levels within the hierarchy of where your dollar is going, and optimizing less evil per dollar may not be straightforward. However, any progress on this front would be good -- imagine if corporations really felt pressure to be better, because if not a news story would be aggregated into a evilness database that might convince many many consumers to choose their competitor over them as a result.
- zarify 13y ago
  "imagine if corporations really felt pressure to be better, because if not a news story would be aggregated into a evilness database that might convince many many consumers to choose their competitor over them as a result." I'm curious as to whether consistent consumer buying pressure actually makes a difference. We see companies making changes based on PR spikes relatively often, but it's less immediately apparent [to me, I don't have any data on this] whether a persistent negative image affects how they behave. Perhaps if there was data to go along with poorer sales, but you can't really corellate a lookup into a database on business practices or political activity with a lost sale either (ie X people looking up Product Y doesn't mean X less sales). This is looking at the situation with an eye to changing behaviour though, not simply putting bad operators out of business (or more likely just reducing profits) because there will always be bad operators.

jal278 13y ago

The problem is definitely nuanced; shopping at a mom&pop store in general may lead to less evil/dollar than at walmart, and even within that store, choosing junk food manufactured by less evil corporations may be better. There are separate levels within the hierarchy of where your dollar is going, and optimizing less evil per dollar may not be straightforward. However, any progress on this front would be good -- imagine if corporations really felt pressure to be better, because if not a news story would be aggregated into a evilness database that might convince many many consumers to choose their competitor over them as a result.

zarify 13y ago
"imagine if corporations really felt pressure to be better, because if not a news story would be aggregated into a evilness database that might convince many many consumers to choose their competitor over them as a result." I'm curious as to whether consistent consumer buying pressure actually makes a difference. We see companies making changes based on PR spikes relatively often, but it's less immediately apparent [to me, I don't have any data on this] whether a persistent negative image affects how they behave. Perhaps if there was data to go along with poorer sales, but you can't really corellate a lookup into a database on business practices or political activity with a lost sale either (ie X people looking up Product Y doesn't mean X less sales). This is looking at the situation with an eye to changing behaviour though, not simply putting bad operators out of business (or more likely just reducing profits) because there will always be bad operators.