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Comment by troughway | Hacker News Reader

Yes we had our 2 minute of hate thread on it a couple of days ago. Either do something about it or quit feigning outrage by submitting blog posts.

It was useless then, it’s useless now. There is no “bombshell” here. It’s on par business for billionaires.

Retweeting bullshit doesn’t improve your carbon footprint, get it through your head. You can scream all you want about what McKinsey is doing, but one thing you won't do is enact change by making blog posts with silly gifs inbetween bolded text proclaiming how outraged you are.

This is the pharma industry. It's been this way for decades. Don't pretend like you're woke and moralistic in light of this "bombshell" now please, it comes across as trite.

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Individuals cannot "do something about" issues like this. Even a lone wolf gun attack against a corporate boardroom would see the victims swiftly replaced by ideological clones. Collective action is the only possible route to remedy, and that requires building a common understanding of what the problems are and what should be done about them. Hence the beating of the drum. Having two minutes of hate isn't the goal.

>Collective action

Pray tell, what collective action? Are you going to boycott McKinsey? Write to the same congress representatives that companies like McKinsey personally finance and wine and dine and call in for favors?

Do share, we are all curious what is this collective action that will somehow lead to enlightenment of "building a common understanding of what the problems are and what should be done about them."

Billionaires are the untouchable class of people. They don't answer to anyone. They quite literally own and run the country. I don't know why it's difficult for the rational person to get this through their heads. The last thing you will see is them being in any kind of trouble about it. We can discuss the failing of a company like Enron another time. They really fucked the dog and in much the same way as Jeffrey Epstein hanging himself in a high security prison, pissed off other billionaires who are the only people who can get some sense of action out of the legal system on each other.

Pray tell, have you ever heard of the French Revolution?

No, writing to congresspeople is useless. There are a few possibly viable strategies: one, fill as many elected positions as possible with leftist candidates. Two, build power of labor unions to achieve democratic control over the sources of profit. Three, well... revolution, if the above two fail. The ultimate backstop. Would be happy to hear any other suggestions.

> This is the pharma industry. It's been this way for decades. Don't pretend like you're woke and moralistic in light of this "bombshell" now please, it comes across as trite.

So, you're saying it's OK, then? Otherwise, you just seem unreasonably mad at people who don't dutifully accept the status quo without comment.

There are endless examples of bad press forcing change in laws and companies. This article is making something much more publicly visible. Spreading it is better than nothing, and again there's plenty of times when the populace becoming outraged results in change

>bad press forcing change in laws and companies.

Big oil has entered the chat.

https://ohiohistorycentral.org/w/Cuyahoga_River_Fire

tl;dr: The Cuyahoga river caught on fire many, many times over the years. However, a fire in June 1969 spurred legislative action that finally solved the problem, even though that fire was not the most destructive nor the most deadly. The difference was society had changed, and that fire struck a nerve when the previous ones hadn't.

The moral of the story is: past performance is no guarantee of future results.

True. Totally unrelated, the example you cite is now fifty years in the past, and occurred in a time when local news still existed.

> True. Totally unrelated, the example you cite is now fifty years in the past, and occurred in a time when local news still existed.

It's related because it's a nice clear example of "bad press [eventually] forcing change in laws and companies," on an issue that's settled enough that one would be hard-pressed to argue the end result was wrong. The swipe at local news isn't exactly relevant, given this recent is a national one that did get coverage and the river fire spurred a federal, not local, legislative solution.

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