Comment by sadnvkse | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sadnvkse | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

At the risk of being downvoted to oblivion. Threads like this always have lots of people agreeing to people quitting the jobs, not even ones that are directly working on that but even ones just associated with the company at hand. This is an honest question, how do you decide what is Ok? A job with a company that was involved in this is not Ok, fair enough. What about working with a company that does business with Microsoft or uses Microsoft products? What about owning Microsoft stock and benefiting off it? what about owning Microsoft stock via index funds? Don't mean to be pedantic, but can I use Microsoft products, can I use outlook? can I use an xbox? What are my other realistic options, considering it feels like every industry (not just tech) has big 2-3 realistic options and they all likely have something bad headlines, even if I don't know about it. How much time can I realistically invest digging and fact checking this? I want to be good, but these threads generally leave me feeling judged.

I understand everyone has their moral compass, and they act accordingly. But, I find it hard to not ask myself, if this is not OK, why is this other related thing Ok? how do I decide what's Ok and seems when you ask the question you get downvotes and lots of judgement instead of answers.

I sold my Microsoft stock when they started talking about military AR headsets. Except the index funds. I'm not sure what to do about that.

I think you answered it. Everyone has their own moral compass and act accordingly.

The concept of “No Ethical Consumption Under Capitalism” and the moral framing of later seasons of The Good Place give good representations of how.

Ultimately each person makes a mark of what they can and cannot care about, and caring about literally everything is a fast-track to total impotence.

Some situations are (relatively) easy:

  * Harry Potter is a relatively isolated (though formative for many)
    franchise.

Some situations are way harder.

  * Nestle creates a HUGE amount of the food we eat.
  * Amazon powers half the internet
  * Microsoft is the backbone of a huge number of corporate sites.
    Excel makes the world go round.

Unfortunately, this is all up to you, and there are individual scales of “harm to the world by participating” vs “harm to you by abstaining” you have to personally weigh. There is no global answer.

I think a way-out exists if we accept that "shopping isn't politics" [0]. In a nutshell:

* Bad news: "Voting with your wallet" is actually pretty ineffective. Big companies know it, diversify around it, and they're happy when consumers are neutralized and busy infighting with one-another over consumptive purity, instead of...

* Good news: Organizing politically does work, and is so much more-effective that you can arguably redeem any evil taint on your shopping list by engaging in it.

[0] https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2026-05-21...

I agree that these are good questions to be asking and I asked myself many of them. It's a slippery slope imho, and it's easy to convince yourself that what you're doing is ok. At the end of the day, I was getting physically sick and I felt terrible about myself. I mentioned it up thread, I don't think I was brave, I was just forced to confront reality through increasingly difficult to dismiss cognitive dissonance.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com