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Comment by AndrewKemendo | Hacker News Reader

> Society doesn't allow dangerous companies to operate or exist

Can you please explain what you mean by this because where I’m standing extremely dangerous companies are (and have been) running the economy

Exxon comes primarily to mind

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Are you allowed to open a brothel? Or a murder for hire agency? Or a nuclear bomb manufacturing company? Or a child labor textile factory? Or sell a diesel VW golf sportwagen? Or a vaccine that hasn’t had fda clearance? Or an under capitalized insurance company? Or set up a dental practice without going to dental school?

Yes to all of those. In fact many of those are massive markets.

Hofs bunny ranch is a famous brothel in NV

Booz Allen makes and maintains the nuclear fleet including the Sentinel ICBM

Textiles factories are globally known to be industrial slave camps for a non trivial portion of the supply. Even worse for Mica mines.

Etc…you can fill out the rest

Booz Allen actually makes what now? The Sentinel is still in development by Northrop Grumman and there is some program management done by Booz, no?

You’re right on the Sentinel production, I got it confused with the Sentinel Program Management side which is massive also and who I mostly worked with.

I was in their offices at some point when that program was getting built out - Very much a Office Space bobs situation.

I think most textile factories in Western countries are not slave camps, precisely because we regulate labor.

Sure, that's why 99% of clothes are made offshore, but if we had something like tariffs on those (or requirements to prove that the actual factory adheres to labor and environmental standards), maybe more would be made "at home"? Similarly: Chinese cars undercutting US/German ones.

Most textile factories in the US are for bespoke items in small batches, not mass production commodity clothing

I mean there was just a video a couple of months ago of the giant room of sewing workers with cameras strapped to their faces capturing their hand movement so they could be automated

But that’s not how it was. I am from North Carolina, which at one point was the largest textile production region in the US and maybe the world. It emerged when progressives outlawed child labor and other practices in Boston and nyc so the mill owners moved to the south. It was off shoring across states.

I saw entire cities emptied out over my lifetime.

That whole region used to also be the furniture capital of the world specifically High Point North Carolina which is still a massive trade hub, but I was in furniture briefly and learned how basically from the 1950s till the 1980s the entire furnishings industry was exported to Asia due to rising costs of labor

Yep that was one of the reasons for sure as was environmental regulations and free trade agreements. I am not even opposed to that phenomenon as it’s now more affordable for people to buy furniture and clothes (my grandparents owned a fabric store and it was common to have sewing parties for new parents to make clothes for the kids because it was too expensive to buy clothes otherwise). But child labor was cheaper than adult labor and one of the drivers of these movements across state and national borders.

I think we’re on the same page ;)

The existence of something doesn’t prove the universality of that same thing. All of the things you cite are regulatory exceptions to broad prohibitions which proves my point: society can and does restrict commercial activity.

Go open a brothel in NYC. It isn’t legal.

Go buy a nuclear bomb. Your ownership is illegal.

Go open textile mill in the abandoned buildings in North Carolina where children used to work and hire children to work the line. That will be illegal.

Nothing is universal but entropy

And no those aren’t exceptions, I could open a legal brothel in quebec, the netherlands, Brazil and be perfectly legal

If you think the US laws = ethics then I got nothing else to say

But you can’t open one in New York City legally. Just acknowledge that point.

An exception by definition is a phenomenon with lower frequency than the general trend. Of the 50 us states only one has legal prostitution and only in highly regulated areas. Of the countries of the world it is similarly infrequent and thus an exception to the general rule that it is illegal.

Further the fact that it is illegal anywhere supports my point that it’s possible to regulate businesses based on their harm.

The original claim was;

“Society doesn't allow dangerous companies to operate or exist”

That has been falsified thoroughly

Whether certain jurisdictions ban it or not is irrelevant to the original claim

Nothing in my argument implies that any law = ethics. And I don’t even know what ethics has to do with the premise of my argument: society can and does prohibit commercial activity based on practical considerations of social good and social harm. Exxon clearly damages the world and society and also benefits society. It’s hard to get fresh fruit distributed around the country without refrigeration and transportation powered by burning oil.

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