Anybody involved should also be prohibited from starting a private company using their IP and catering to the same domain for 5-10 years after they leave.
Non-profits where the CEO makes millions or billions are a joke.
And if e.g. your mission is to build an open browser, being paid by a for-profit to change its behavior (e.g. make theirs the default search engine) should be prohibited too.
B corps are like recycling programs, a nice logo.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/critics-call-out-plastics-indus...
E.g.: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/aug/17/plastic-...
Recycling mostly means "sent to landfills in the third world":
https://earth.org/waste-colonialism-a-brief-history-of-dumpi...
https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2023/03/rich-countri...
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/14/opinion/trash-recycling-g...
> Recycling mostly means "sent to landfills in the third world"
This is less true now that China banned plastic waste imports.
I agree though that the average person might overestimate how much of their waste can be recycled. However, many materials are recycled and then re-used, so it's not like the whole concept is a scam.
Weaker is fine if those working there are actually true to the mission for the mission, are not for the profit.
Same with FOSS really, e.g. I'd rather have a weaker Linux that's an actual comminity project run by volunteers, than a stronger Linux that's just corporate agendas, corporate hires with an open license on top.
Which just doesn't seem like it should be true?
Sure, some "public benefit" missions could scale sideways and employ a lot of cheap labor, not suffering from a salary cap at all. But other missions would require rare high end high performance high salary specialists who are in demand - and thus expensive. You can't rely on being able to source enough altruists that will put up with being paid half their market worth for the sake of the mission.
That's exactly what a non-profit should be able to rely on. And not just "half their market worth", but even many times less.
Else we can just say "we can't really have non-profits, because everybody is a greedy pig who doesn't care about public benefit enough to make a sacrifice of profits - but still a perfectly livable salary" - and be done with it.
The real danger is "We make mountains of money, but everyone dies, including us."
The top of the top researchers think this is a real possibility - people like Geoffrey Hinton - so it's not an extremist negative-for-the-sake-of-it POV.
It's going to be poetic if the Free Markets Are Optimal and Greed-is-Rational Cult actually suicides the species, as a final definitive proof that their ideology is wrong-headed, harmful, and a tragic failure of human intelligence.
But here we are. The universe doesn't care. It's up to us. If we're not smart enough to make smart choices, then we get to live - or die - with the consequences.
“Don’t be evil”. But yes, this behavior made me think about Google too. Context: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_be_evil
Could you describe the model that you think might work well?
That model already exists and has worked well for decades. It's called being a regular ass corporation.
the point is that it _is_ the only possible model in our marvellous Friedmanian economic structure of shareholder primacy. When the only incentive is profit, if your company isn't maximising profit then it will lose to other companies who are. You can hope that the self-imposed ethics guardrails _are_ maximising profit because it the invisible hand of the market cares about that, but 1. it never really does (at scale) and 2. big influences (such as the DoD here) can sway that easily. So we're stuck with negative externalities because all that's incentivised is profit.
I'm curious about your thinking on this subject, if you email me at the email on my profile I have some specific questions about your views on this matter.
We've already created a digital sovereign nation called State of Utopia which will be available at stateofutopia.com or stofut.com for short, our manifesto is here: https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/d6b35b81-0eeb-4e41-9628-5...
We have real services you can use immediately, such as this p2p phone/chat/video service without time limits (Zoom has a 1 hour meeting limit for free accounts) and no tracking: https://stateofutopia.com/instacall.html
Just yesterday we published a fitness tool proof of concept: https://stateofutopia.com/experiments/bodyfat/
We do believe that it is important to have market dynamics, and our model is for this state to own state-owned companies as well. Getting this model right is important to us and we would like to engage with you on this subject. We hope you'll email us to discuss your thoughts further.
If regular corporations are sued for not acting in the interests of shareholders, that would suggest that one could file a suit for this sort of corporate behavior.
I'm not even a lawyer (I don't even play one on TV) and public benefit corporations seem to be fairly new, so maybe this doesn't have any precedent in case law, but if you couldn't sue them for that sort of thing, then there's effectively no difference between public benefit corporations and regular corporations.
This is what we were all going on about 15 years ago when Maryland was the first state to make PBCs legal. We got called negative at the time.
“At this point”? It was always the case, it’s just harder to hide it the more time passes. Anyone can claim anything they want about themselves, it’s only after you’ve had a chance to see them in the situations which test their words that you can confirm if they are what they said.
The press always say "the Pentagon negotiates". Does any publication have an evidence that it is "the Pentagon" and not Hegseth? In general, I see a lot of common sense from the real Pentagon as opposed to the Secretary of War.
I hope Westpoint will check for AI psychosis in their entrance interviews and completely forbid AI usage. These people need to be grounded.
https://www.westpoint.edu/about/modernization-plan/artificia...