Comment by csours | Hacker News Reader

Comment by csours | Hacker News Reader

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> 2. Your company produces something hugely useful / beneficial for society; in other words, it produces something hugely valuable.

2. Your company extracts value from everywhere it can, to the detriment of it's counterparties: employees, the environment, customers, partners, contractors

For one example: Amazon warehouse employees (contractors?) are not paid very well for very hard work. I'm sure someone has a comeback for this, but it is an example of value extraction.

Another: Amazon does not do a great job of policing counterfeits, to the detriment of customers.

Another: Sellers on Amazon have a variety of complaints, you can look them up.

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If the business existed for the purpose of being ethical, these conditions would not exist. The business exists for the purpose of extracting value.

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Edit: Put another way - If your company ONLY produces something highly valuable, then someone can simply create a competing product and undercut you.

An example of this is looking at drug prices when patents expire. Generic drugs can be sold for MUCH cheaper than the patent protected "name brand" drug. The product is highly valuable, but may not be high cost, unless it is protected in some way.

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Edit edit: If you want to defend these companies or capitalism in general, that's fine with me.

I would like to gently point out that sometimes we dance on very fine lines of morality in the course of doing business.

I used to work at a car part store and the majority of the staff was teenagers looking to get into the car world (either future mechanics, or car parts managers) but they WAY under paid us for the type of work. Repair shops looking for specialty parts that someone with mechanics experience should really be looking for, not some teenager asking "whats a brake rotor?". We had a revolving door of workers and our customers knew we were terrible and likely to get the wrong part. Getting screamed at by customers was daily because we had no idea what they were doing. However the exploitation was a trade off of, "I'll get a year experience and go to a dealership" or "I just need a filler job until I get a better job". It was ""exploitive"" but it was extremely helpful to me, it was the only job willing to let me be part time while in school that didn't involve hard physical labour. I did more exploitive jobs before, working 10+ hours hand shoveling snow in -40 for $10/hour. That company didn't last very long because they drained the whole city of potential employees and never knew who was gonna show the next day.

I find it interesting how quickly people will defend their own exploitation.

It was a good opportunity for me since I had nothing much to offer most employers. It was between that or unemployed.

I understand that but it doesn’t justify why it had to be a bad work environment.

Whats your solution though? Strike? People will still apply and work there because it's bad, but not slave labour. Unionize? They'll entirely stop hiring people without experience and change their business model.

Their business model was to be the cheapest. Cheapest employees, cheapest parts. They filled the market share for people looking for cheap cheap parts. That involves crappy service.

If they raised their employee pay, the entire business model goes belly up. That means, no more cheap cheap parts for customers and no entry job positions for employees looking to break the field.

It was a delicate balance of ""exploitation"" and keeping them happy enough they are willing to stay.

If you have nothing to offer the company besides a pulse, you don't get to pick and choose. Why would that be fair to force a company to pay more for no reason? Sometimes you put up with bullshit for a couple years and then you get to be more picky.

You can read this as dismissive, but it does show the strength of the drive to rationalize; which is one of my biggest problems with things like "rational skepticism". It's too easy to rationalize something you already believe, or a situation you just happen to find yourself in. It's too fun to 'debunk' things, and too much of a chore to actually change beliefs.

I realize the obvious counter "That's not real rational skepticism".

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