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Comment by roody15 | Hacker News Reader

Why are they necessary grumpy. Its kind of true.

Lets look at Apple for example. They tout and market ideas of privacy, green energy, recycling, progressive social values etc... In reality they use slave labor in India and China that adhere to very little environmental standards. They also are not unionized.

As long as the concept of a corporation is based on a legal obligation to maximize profit.. then "globalizing" this structure will not necessary "improve" the world on a social or environmental level.

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Apple does include their supply chain in their labor & environmental reports: for example when they catch underage workers they get sent to school at the supplier's expense.

Many companies outsource their externalities but Apple isn't a good example of it.

>Many companies outsource their externalities but Apple isn't a good example of it.

Agreed. In general, "flagships of their economic niche" companies in fat margin industries are generally on the straight and narrow. They can afford the luxury of ethics.

You wanna see bad behavior, look at bottom of the barrel companies in razor thin margin industries.

> Lets look at Apple for example

Would be great - just once - to read a discussion on HN that didn’t drag in an attack on Apple.

Guess that’s too much to hope for.

They are the most valuable company in the world. Like it or not, it's entirely reasonable to use them as the go-to example when examining and/or illustrating the effects of capitalism.

My friend works at Apple. He doesn't tell anyone, if he can help it. He says "in tech" and "I'd rather not say". I didn't believe why until I witnessed him mentioning where he worked at a social gathering. All interesting conversation, within ear-shot, came to a halt, with most proceeding to apologetically shit on Apple for the next 15 minutes. When we would move to a new group of people, someone from the previous group would end up bringing it up.

Seems like a great place to work, and do good engineering, besides the downside that you, apparently, can't tell anyone.

What kind of weird social gathering was this? A group of die-hard Linux fanatics? (And I say that as one myself) In most circles, especially "progressive" Americans, Apple is the tech darling. They *all* have iPhones and refuse to even look at Android phones because they don't want to have the wrong color circle in their SMS chats (SMS... how quaint).

> They all have iPhones and refuse to even look at Android phones because they don't want to have the wrong color circle in their SMS chats (SMS... how quaint).

This is a great example of the negativity he attempts to avoid.

> As long as the concept of a corporation is based on a legal obligation to maximize profit..

That's not actually true, and never has been. Corporate law is more nuanced and flexible than that.

If we're talking about how to improve the world using corporate structures, there are also more options, such as corporations with obligations to non-shareholder stakeholders representing the environment and employees human rights, for example.

http://in-houseblog.practicallaw.com/fallacy-of-the-duty-to-...

https://www.thesustainableinvestor.net/blog/2016/02/23/fact-...

https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-co...

https://www.legislate.tech/post/does-the-law-require-public-...

>> In reality they use slave labor in India and China that adhere to very little environmental standards.

I would also add a lot of US companies export their toxic waste to China and India as well - then tout how much better we're getting as a country tackling climate change.

Recycling as well. Most stuff like plastic can’t be easily recycled so they just ship it to China. It’s just cheaper to ship it offshore to be someone else’s problem.

This is a piece [1] 60 minutes Australia did, but all Western countries are doing the same thing.

[1]https://youtu.be/lqrlEsPoyJk

That doesn't really happen anymore. China stopped accepting plastic waste because there was no economic way to recycle it, even using Chinese labor. The plastic industry talks a lot about recycling and even includes those helpful triangles on their products, but in reality the vast majority of plastics go straight to the dump, even when you wash them and separate them out into the blue bins.

There really should be a law against this kind of deceitful marketing.

But who is being deceitful? The company who marks their plastics for recycling as required by law? Or the governments who require people to spend time and effort separating their trash for recycling, and then just dump it all in the landfill instead of recycling it?

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