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Comment by standardUser | Hacker News Reader

Unless they are operating outside of the law, I don't fault "Big Tobacco" or any "Big Business" for, you know, operating a business. Yes, it's kind of funny they went from one way of exploiting our brains to another, and I personally wish they had not. But companies don't operate to satisfy our wishes, hopes and desires, they operate to make money.

I've said it a million times, but if we don't like the way a company legally operates, the only solution is to change the laws the company operates under. Maybe the occasional boycott or shame campaign can force a corporation's hand, but the vast majority of the time when a company is forced to change the way they operate it is because a law was passed.

EDIT: terrible typo that undermined my entire point

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The problem with what you have said a million times is that by the time a company gets to the point where it is a major problem, it is also at the point where it has a lot of money going through it, and since corporations have absolutely no ethics, they are perfectly fine with spending a chunk of their profits on lobbying lawmakers to not change those laws.

I fault "Big Business" for completely ignoring ethics and morals in favor of profit. I fault every CEO who has made these decisions, I fault every minor worker who has done what they were told to do regardless of any moral qualms. They have all decided that they do not give a shit about the harm they cause as long as they are making enough money.

Then you ought blame society for seperating church and state, and substituting church with approximately nothing.

If the state is amoral, it will swiftly be overrun my amorality.

Minus the very strong assumption that religion is only possible source of morality.

Go right ahead and ignore my second sentence.

And the assumption that religion is not only moral on average (what's questionable), but also able to stay moral while given extraordinary power (shown to be false every single time people tried).

Ah, but "the problem with the world today is that everyone else doesn't believe what my religion teaches" has an enormous feature that your arguments do not:

It gives the one who holds this belief the comfort that _they_ have done everything that can and everything they should; all that is left is to be publicly smug. This is much easier to do than engaging closely with complicated ideas, and crucially can never result in deciding that it's necessary to go through the pain of changing one's own behavior or beliefs.

Funny thing is that this thought (the one you quote) is evil all by itself. No external help needed.

Yeah, this is a problem. Separation of church and state is a good thing, but centering the profit motive as the highest ideal of a society is a pretty bad thing.

Thanks for actually responding to my whole comment, rather than the half argument I didn't make in the sibling threads.

It's true that the only solution is to change the law.

> Unless they are operating outside of the law, I don't fault "Big Tobacco" or any "Big Business" for, you know, operating a business.

Why this casual dismissal? Operating a business. Are those the magic no-harm-done-here words? I'm not even saying that being “mad” about it would have any effect. But I still will argue for my right to be mad...

Businesses can also lobby the government to keep or change laws. Is that also to be with dismissed with the same attitude? Like, oh Big Tobacco lobbied against your candidate that would enact some kind of law that would put a wedge in their business plan? Well—you know—they're just operating a business. Lobbying is an investment, and clearly they made a calculation that said that lobbying would make them more money.

The puzzle piece that usually gets missed in these conversations is that a business is a public danger. It has to be, inherently, because as we see "just trying to make a profit" consistently does harm at a certain scale. Making a profit and doing public good are completely separate imperatives, and when push comes to shove prioritizing profit will reduce the ability to do public good.

A business can be too small or too inefficient to do much harm, but we are doomed (literally) if we can't wrap our heads around the fact that all businesses are enemies of the public (literally). So often the conversation simply reaches a full stop at "businesses are just doing what they do" as if we have to accept that - as if making a profit is a good thing.

Similarly, fire is a danger to the public. It consumes and destroys things. That doesn't mean we've sworn off fire - on the contrary, we use it to make new dangers (pollution, primarily). It's just that we have developed measures to contain fire. Without measures to contain profit-seeking behavior, humans can't coexist with businesses safely.

Your comment comes off as thinly veiled misanthropy.

What are you really promoting here?

Going back to freezing in the dark?

You're reading messages I didn't write. My point was stated openly. We can't allow businesses to operate without consideration for their impacts on the public (unless we're ok with being destroyed by them).

> a business is a public danger

Every business? A mom and pop grocery store is a business. A old-fashioned diner that serves actual cooked food instead of microwaved pre-processed junk is a business. Are they public dangers?

> Making a profit and doing public good are completely separate imperatives

No, they're not. "Making a profit", in a sane economy, means creating wealth. Businesses are an essential tool for creating wealth.

The problem is that we do not have a sane economy. We have governments that we have given vast regulatory powers, and that means corporations that are big enough to buy politicians can make a profit without creating wealth, by buying regulations that skew the economy in their favor. The effect of the regulations is not to make it easier to run a business but to make it harder, so much harder that only the large corporations can afford to do it--which means the mom and pop small businesses that actually create wealth can no longer exist. We also have governments that print money and give it to financial institutions in order to make cheap loans available to the same large corporations, so they can expand cheaply and drive out small business competitors. That's why we have big box stores and chain restaurants in strip malls next to freeways instead of mom and pop stores and old fashioned diners in actual town centers.

But, as the saying goes, the problem is not that politicians can be bought but that they have something valuable to sell. As long as large corporations can buy regulations that favor them, they will. And as long as we let governments print money and give it to those they favor, that will just make things worse.

> Every business? A mom and pop grocery store is a business.

And what kind of animal would oppose those? They have parents/grand-parents in their name. Surely they must be completely wholesome.

From your snark I gather that you don't think businesses provide any value. So I assume you don't use any goods or services provided by businesses, right?

First of all if that was the case then I would obviously not do it since it would be tantamount to throwing money in a hole. So the answer to that is trivial.

Second of all my snark was about being completely wholesome. If something is less than wholesome they can still be... okay, not outright bad.

Third of all, OP (I don't agree but that's a different matter) was clearly talking about finding a balance between letting businesses pursue profit and keeping them from interfering with the larger public good since they gave an analogy with fire. (The examples with fire seemed a bit out of tune with that though.) We do use fire for good but we also have to contain it very carefully.

Oh, you make a good point. I made a mistake with my fire analogy and didn't actually state that I'm pro-fire. I'm glad to have fire and to be able to use it. Not sure profit-seeking behavior is quite as useful, but whatever.

> Not sure profit-seeking behavior is quite as useful, but whatever.

In other words, as I said elsewhere upthread, you just dismiss all the benefits we gain from businesses with "whatever". But if you're able to post here at all, you are taking advantage of numerous benefits provided by businesses. I don't think you are taking that into account. You even admit as much since you're "not sure" businesses are as useful as fire (when in fact businesses are far more useful than fire--businesses overall have created a lot more wealth than our use of fire has).

This is so pointless.

> my snark was about being completely wholesome

If "completely wholesome" is your standard, does anything at all in our world meet it?

But if we allow wholesomeness to be evaluated on a scale, most businesses seem to me to be a lot more wholesome than the large corporations that buy government regulations and get favored by government policies. So tarring all businesses with the same brush does not seem to me to be a good idea.

...Nothing you wrote refuted the point that "making a profit and doing public good are completely separate imperatives."

> Every business? A mom and pop grocery store is a business. A old-fashioned diner that serves actual cooked food instead of microwaved pre-processed junk is a business. Are they public dangers?

Yes... I explicitly addressed this point already. It doesn't appear that you've actually read my entire post, despite its brevity.

> Nothing you wrote refuted the point that "making a profit and doing public good are completely separate imperatives."

Sure I did: I pointed out that making a profit by creating wealth is doing public good. Try living without all the wealth that businesses create (and have created over centuries) and see how you like it.

> I explicitly addressed this point already.

I don't see where. You mention businesses that are too small or inefficient to do much harm, but you never mention businesses creating positive value at all.

> I pointed out that making a profit by creating wealth is doing public good.

It's not. A rich person getting richer doesn't make society healthier or happier. Wealth can be used for public good, though.

> You mention businesses that are too small or inefficient to do much harm, but you never mention businesses creating positive value at all.

Because the positive value created by a business is, actually, not relevant to the discussion. Did you miss my fire analogy? Really doesn't seem like you grasped my points. Could be my fault if you can show me where my meaning was unclear.

I'm not anti-fire. At the same time, I think that we as a society should prevent people from running around starting fires whenever and wherever they want, because it's dangerous. (Yes, by force if necessary. I'm not ignorant of the logical conclusion of laws.) Fortunately, we already do this, because everyone agrees: fire indeed hot. You, on the other hand, are not acknowledging the danger of profit-seeking behavior. Again: that's my entire fucking point, so please address it.

> A rich person getting richer

Has nothing at all to do with what most businesses do. Most businesses are small businesses and their owners are not rich. And most businesses create wealth directly, instead of buying government favors to help get wealth transferred from other people to them.

> Because the positive value created by a business is, actually, not relevant to the discussion.

Yes, it is. "Business" does not just mean large corporations, and it does not just have negative effects. Focusing on the negative effects and ignoring the benefits is foolish.

> Did you miss my fire analogy?

No, I just grasp the fact (which apparently you don't) that you are focused only on the negatives and not the positives, so your analysis is flawed; it doesn't support your claims. That's just as true of your fire analogy, where you only focused on the dangers of fire (and the additional dangers we create by using fire), not the benefits we gain from fire.

> You, on the other hand, are not acknowledging the danger of profit-seeking behavior

Sure I am. I'm just balancing it against the benefits, which you are not. You are saying that everything businesses do can be described by analogy with "fire indeed hot". Which is even less of an apt description of businesses than it is of fires.

I am literally just asking you to discuss how we can deal with the dangers of profit-seeking behavior, and you're talking about something else. Every one of your comments is off-topic.

> please address it

Address what? The problem I described? Sure, that's simple: stop the government from favoring large corporations with regulations and money printing. Make it so the only way businesses can make a profit is by creating wealth. (IIRC pg advocated for much the same thing in one of his essays a while back.)

Will that address the problem you describe? I have no idea, because the way you describe businesses, it sounds like you're saying we should just shut them all down as public dangers.

> it sounds like you're saying we should just shut them all down as public dangers.

However, that's not what I'm saying.

This is not entirely accurate. Causing harm to people is not good. If you harm enough people egregiously enough, law enforcement eventually will notice and will figure which law said company broke. If the harm is bad enough, and intent obvious enough, they will find a law.

So, it's more true to ask: "Is intentionally manipulating food to cause harm to people-- is this consistent with existing legal norms?" I personally would not bet on it.

> intentionally manipulating food to cause harm to people

I seriously doubt that this has ever been done.

Companies "manipulate" food so it tastes good and they'll sell more of it. They don't intentionally do it to "cause harm". At most, that might be an unintended consequence.

It turns out that intentionally killing your customers is bad for business.

It's like (IIRC) Ozzy Osbourne's comment back in the days when metal was being blamed for teen suicides. "Why would we do that? That would tank sales for the followup album." Or Rob Halford on the same subject "If we were going to put backward-masked subliminal commands in our records, it wouldn't be 'kill yourself', it would be 'buy more of our records'"

(probably not exact quotes in either case, but that was the gist)

Maybe I misunderstand, but isn't your point "the only solution IS to change the laws"?

> Unless they are operating outside of the law, I don't fault "Big Tobacco" or any "Big Business" for, you know, operating a business.

Aside from concerns about memory safety, I don't get the criticism of C as a systems language.

Your post is a tautology because you define "wrong" as breaking the law.

Yes, of course, if a company is not breaking the law they are not breaking the law. And if we want them to stop doing what they are doing we would benefit from making it illegal.

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