Now as a secret unmentionable for any 2+ year sentence: lose access to all your google shit.
And even if they didn’t, they have 2 *years* to have a friend/family to log in for them.
For a free service.
This is fake concern created by people that just want to be mad at google.
Could someone start a subscription paid service for the incarcerated - “we keep your accounts alive while you are inside”? More broadly, could provide other “manage your affairs for you while you are incarcerated” services. I suppose many incarcerated people would have no income or assets to pay for it, but some would, or their family might be willing to pay for it.
What if the founder is a former inmate, and says “I wish there was something like that available when I was on the inside?”
Even if the business is officially classified as “for-profit”, there’s a big difference between a business seeking a living wage for its founders and employees versus one trying to make as much money as possible. In fact, it could even be owned by a charity - sometimes charities start 100% owned for-profit businesses, not because they want immense returns, but simply because sometimes the legal constraints on a charity can be too limiting, but a for-profit subsidiary isn’t subject to them
I have no interest in starting such a business myself, anyway.
Initial motivations are irrelevant. At some point, the motivations of a business reduce to "make money", and anyone or anything that gets in the way of that doesn't matter, including your ethics and initial motivations.
There are lots of innocuous reasons why that happens. For example, you believe your business is doing good, right? So your business has to survive to keep doing good. And you need to make money to survive. So surely it's okay if you make it easy to pay for your service while you're in jail, perhaps by making deals with prisons to allow them to sign up in prison. Hm, that didn't work, prisons aren't doing it. Perhaps you can give prisons a cut of the sales for the service. And voila, now you're profiting from slave labor because the prisons just automatically deduct it from prisoner's pay, which is already below minimum wage, for work they can't opt out of. Of course you don't know that, so you hire 10 employees with your sudden influx of money and start expanding sales to more prison systems. And then you find out that your income stream is... not perfect, but now you've got a responsibility to your employees. McDonalds and JCrew do it, you're not doing anything worse than anyone else. And it's not exactly slavery--they're paid $1/hour (nevermind that a tampon in the commissary is $20). You're practically paying them, just with a service rather than money, right? And your business is doing good, so you have to do this, even if it's not perfect, so your business can survive and continue to do good!
The thing end-stage capitalist circles can't or won't understand is that if it's not this compromise, it's some other compromise or set of compromises. In any individual situation, doing good and making money might be compatible or incompatible, but there's only so many of those situations where you can choose good over money before your competitor knocks you out of the market.
"When you sit down in the studio to make money, God leaves the room." -Quincy Jones
I mentioned more details about it in another comment - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35967694
This has some overlap with the structures used by OpenAI and Mozilla, but unlike OpenAI, the Guardian doesn’t have any “capped profits”, 100% of profits go to the not-for-profit owner. There are employee salaries to pay, and likely also some debt interest, but those are an expense not a profit distribution
Ask yourself: are you trying to imagine a way of helping inmates retain access to their Google services, or are you trying to shoehorn a business into the much more obvious solutions to that problem?
This is a dumb business to create, not because it’s technically hard, or because it wouldn’t help some people, but because Google is one policy email away from making your business obsolete. If you get traction, they’re fairly likely to do that for the PR.
Which strategy gives a better outcome for someone incarcerated today?
And in May 2033, you can lobby to keep the system broken so that you can maintain your business!
Businesses solve one problem, and one problem only: how to get money into the business owner's pockets.
Some businesses don’t even really want to make money; some intentionally lose it for tax purposes. :)
But seriously… in the course of doing business, businesses affect the world, which can indirectly lead to various impacts, some of which are good.
If you want to do something unambiguously good, do it, don't start a business.
> Businesses solve one problem, and one problem only: how to get money into the business owner's pockets.
I rebutted that by pointing out that businesses can and do solve other problems.
Are you changing your claim?
> If you want to do something unambiguously good, do it, don’t start a business.
Oh? And what is unambiguously good? This seems like a rhetorical question, but it isn’t. Try to answer it.
## Ethics
It can be quite hard to know what is unambiguously good, depending on your ethics.
- If you are a consequentialist, you’d have to pick a time frame, and even then you won’t really know until that time comes.
- Other moral philosophies might focus only on intentions, but these are not plausible, because good intentions are easily derailed by ignorance.
- I don’t have a clear answer for myself, so I can be confident that some particular idea of “unambiguous good” will not hold water for N > 1.
## Opportunity Cost
Next topic… even if we agree on an act being “unambiguously good”, that isn’t enough. Even the most “obvious” selfless acts might not be the best considering the other options available. To phrase it as a question: considering your opportunity cost, is a small scale good action really worth it?
## Life has Tradeoffs
The phrase “don’t let perfect be the enemy of the good” is apropos here.
If you want to solve a particular disease with high likelihood, you could well find it demands collaboration with flawed pharmaceutical companies.
Is it worth it? Weigh it.
But to dismiss such an idea solely because it is “impure” —- without some meaningful metric that trades off pros and cons —- is foolish and unmoored from reality.
Hello over-the-top idealist, meet entropy. Time to talk about acceptance. Do what you can with what is available. Are you trying to make change or are you more interested in trying to look like a saint?
## Organizational Structure
Practically, if your desired good thing is attainable without using a for-profit business structure, great, consider that. It can work.
Personal actions matter. By all means, give smiles, encouragement, constructive criticism, love, advice, and so on. Beware: not all kindness (such as advice) will be taken as you intended! (Whoops. Maybe not unambiguously good anymore.)
Community organizing matters. Volunteers can go a long way. (But they aren’t perfect!)
When you want to scale up your impact, you have to accept real world tradeoffs. Not all are clear at the outset.
For-profit or not, you want a plan. Often that plan demands longevity and thus some kind of sustainability. Even if you are happy to spend your capital without an eye towards building an endowment, you’ll want to think about effectiveness.
Even if you are a charity, you might face some trade-offs about what donors you want to let in your tent. Very little money comes without any kind of expectation. The expectations might be clear and totally fair such as: transparency as to how your organization spends the money. Other expectations might less savory: donors wanting to prop up their image.
## A Footgun Named Naïveté
All in all, the comment above strikes me as naive to the point of undermining one’s own goals.
## Efficiency, Corruption, Impact
It is my view that:
- maximizing impact is hard to do without trading off some efficiency
- reducing corruption is non-linear. Rooting out the big offenders is essential to keeping an organization’s mission intact. From there, fighting corruption will be beneficial but often with diminishing returns.
- At some point, trust and acceptance of human weakness may actually be more cost effective than fighting the lingering forms of corruption; e.g. personal networks having some influence over a process that is supposed to be completely blind
- In many cases, people breaking the rules based on good information and intentions isn’t corruption at all. Sometimes the system is flawed and people work around it. Figuring out which is which costs time and resources.
It's one more thing you have to know to think about - though if the system counts automated logins as logins, then maybe fetchmail has a purpose again.
Google isn't the only provider that would need regular logins. Twitter, Twitch, etc. have account inactivity policies.
People make mistakes, go down the wrong path and go to jail if their wrongs are bad enough. That doesn’t mean they should have even more of a mine stripped road back to society.
Don't rely on any cloud/SaaS provider to do that. Seriously.