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You're trolling here, right? It is not actually your position that it is more ethical to be a steel baron who orders the shooting death of striking workers than it is to be an adtech CEO, right?

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Carnegie never ordered deaths of striking workers nor do I think you can make a defensible case that in general steel magnates do. Mining business is difficult and laborers in that industry sure do go through a lot; ore smelting laborers report having respiratory illnesses indeed quite regularly so I agree that steel barons are not completely inculpable if analyzed through an ethics lens.

But looking over the fact that the advertising industry is fundamentally about the exploitation of cognitive biases in order to convince folks to buy things that more often than that they do not need just betrays a certain naïveté of what's going on out there.

Violent suppression of labor organizing is a prominent part of American history. Read, for instance, Rick Perlstein's "Before The Storm" about what happened at the Kohler factory in Sheboygan, more recently than the steel strike we're talking about here.

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