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Comment by whimsicalism | Hacker News Reader

the discourse around “corporations” has gotten absolutely ridiculous at this point, especially on this website.

It’s not an unreasonable take given historic behavior. Rather than decrying the cynicism, what steps can we take to ensure companies like Tesla/Waymo/etc are held accountable and incentivized to prioritize safety?

Do we need hasher fines? Give auto regulators as much teeth as the FAA used to have during accident investigations?

Genuinely curious to see how addressing reasonable concerns in these areas can be done.

Why isn't allowing people to sue when they get hurt and general bad PR around safety enough? Did you see what happened to Boeing's stock price after those 737 crashes?

I’d counter that with the Equifax breach that raised thei stock prices when it became clear they weren’t being fined into oblivion. Suing is also generally only a realistic option if you have money for a lawyer.

Right. We have a precedent for how to have an ridiculously safe transportation system: accidents are investigated by the NTSB, and every accident is treated as an opportunity to make sure that particular failure never happens again.

South Park had a good satire on this sort of generic anti-corporation comment. paraphrasing

"Corporations are bad"

"Why?"

"Because, you know, they act all corporate-y."

https://www.tiktok.com/@plutotvuk/video/7311643257383963937 (sorry googles first result was titktok)

It's ironic given this forum began as a place for aspiring startup (Delaware C-Corp) founders.

Some of us came here because we were finding programming.reddit.com too mainstream (after all this thing was written in Arc! of which almost no-one knew any details for sure, but it was Lisp, so Lisp cool), for sure we weren't visiting this place in order to become millionaires.

Even though I agree, there was a time and a place (I'd say 2008-2010) when this forum was mostly populated by "I want to get rich!" people, maybe that is still the case and they've only learned to hide it better, I wouldn't know.

I feel like crypto has absorbed a lot of the "I want to get rich!", so that instead of posts about "Look at my burrito-as-a-service React app!" it's all "Invest in my Burritocoin!", which all kind of fades into the background like the ad banners our eyes pass over without seeing them.

Corporations are bad because the diffusion of responsibility and legal liability shield turns them, to a first approximation, into amoral paperclip maximizers that will employ slave labor to save nickels and dimes.

The invariably sociopathic leadership is a symptom, not a cause: they're the least encumbered by ethics, and the best fit for corporate leadership.

The cure is a strong regulatory state.

It really has turned into a bitter losers bitch fest in here

I agree, much of the people here are still way too lenient when it comes to big corps.

We feared the advent of LLMs since they could be used as convincing spam tools. Little did we know that humans would often do the same.

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