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Comment by jcranmer | Hacker News Reader

> Imagine a company being told today that they now have to stop advertising on billboards, can't advertise to kids, and have to pay a fifth of a trillion dollars over 25 years for the harms they caused to Medicaid. Can't, can you?

That's what's happening to Juul right now. Juul e-cigarettes came out in 2015; 2018 had the first consent decree to not advertise anywhere kids might see the advertisements; by 2021, we had the first attempt to ban Juul from selling products in the US, period (something which never happened with cigarettes!). The current crop of lawsuits isn't at $200 billion, though, only a few billion. But for a product segment that existed for less than a decade, that's a pretty steep penalty.

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We had a minor scandal here in Canada. The same company behind Vuse vapes (Imperial Tobacco of Canada) got approval for an oral product that falls in the same category as nicotine gum, legally. Not heavily controlled. The regulators had apparently never considered that someone might try to market nicotine gum to children who do not use any nicotine products. It was approved as normal, just another off-brand nicotine replacement.

To quote the Health Minister, "We were duped." Within a few months in most provinces, orders in council had been drafted to ban the advertising, and prohibit flavours except mint, and there may now be amendments to the laws federally to go further. The slow bureaucratic march to patch the loophole began as soon as it was recognized, basically. Still, the brazenness is stunning. It's the same mentality behind the marketing of the vapes.

https://globalnews.ca/news/10142796/health-minister-nicotine...

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/nicotine-pouches-regulation...

I always laugh when governments express surprise when companies exploit loopholes in the law. Here we have an amoral entity whose only purpose and incentive is to find ways to make money, and you're surprised that they hire a bunch of staff to figure out all the loopholes and how to make money against the spirit of the law but while sticking exactly to the letter of the law?

You weren't "duped." You wrote a law without red-teaming it thinking like a corporation.

Personally, I find it deeply troubling that we've come so far along the "free-trade" axis that companies are presumed immoral by default. There is no way to have a high-functioning society when one large part is actively undermining the social contract of society.

That the general public sees this as fait-accompli and seems to be cheering it on is not funny, it's tragic.

Companies will do the most heinous shit imaginable and people will be like, "Well, yeah, what did you expect? Should've known better!"

GP said amoral not immoral. I think their intent is more along the lines of companies are not human, hence they are immune to discussions of morality.

I tend to agree with that. Moralizing corporate entities will not bring us the outcomes we desire because humans are great at creating internal structures to diffuse accountability. Strongly enforced well-defined legislation _is_ the social contract, might as well throw our weight behind that instead of presuming companies will fall in line out of the goodness of their hearts.

Yes, I deliberately used the word amoral. We need to stop anthropomorphizing companies (not just true for Oracle[1]). They aren't moral or immoral. They are simply unfeeling lawnmowers that chew up anything in their way and produce money. They neither like nor dislike you--they don't even think about you. They just robotically do whatever they can do to make money.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15886728

> They aren't moral or immoral. They are simply unfeeling lawnmowers that chew up anything in their way and produce money. They neither like nor dislike you--they don't even think about you. They just robotically do whatever they can do to make money.

That's a useful model, but it isn't the whole story. It certainly often feels like that. However, the 10% of the time where the model doesn't hold really matters. Companies are made up of humans, and humans aren't just money-robots. Groups of humans don't automatically turn into unfeeling profit-maximizers either.

The moments when humans at companies make decisions that aren't purely motivated by short-term profit are significant and can have a large positive impact. It would definitely be nice to see it happen more often and more effectively.

(To anyone who caught me in the act, sorry for all of the edits :)

I sometimes like to imagine a derelect business ai from the 50s running the whole show. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Management_cybernetics

Oh I know, that's exactly the part that I'm arguing against. Companies do not exist in a vacuum, the actions they choose to take directly affect the society they're a part of. Throwing your hands up in the air and saying "they're a company, why do you expect any better" is just burying yourself in apathy, and it plays right into these companies' hands -- $deity forbid voters might learn to grow a spine and vote against unbridled business interests!

Meanwhile all the clones and copies just keep right on selling in bodegas and everywhere else. If anything they now have a competitive advantage because they're not paying a dime in penalties.

Some of these vapes are even complete units that are "disposable" which means we've gone from "cigarette filters" to "e-waste" littering everywhere: https://hackaday.com/2024/04/25/reverse-engineering-a-fancy-...

It's steep, but I'd say it's the monetary damages that make the punishment.

That's still real money by 2024 standards; but it was a thermonuclear bomb in 1998.

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