Hacker News Reader

Comment by Wingman4l7 | Hacker News Reader

An alternate interpretation is that the OP doesn't want Monsanto to grow their food because of their involvement in the military-industrial complex and poisoning of the environment, not because their defoliant was contaminated.

View on HN

That's fine. Don't tell him about Boeing and Airbus next time he is flying :)

Or IBM.

But if you do and his head starts to hurt so he grabs some Aspirin, don't ever bring up Bayer. ;).

Or Fanta. ;)

All of these companies should have been shut down for immoral practices. If somebody acts shady in the past, it doesn't exactly reassure me to trust them in the present.

It's a view I used to hold, but now I'm not that sure of it. First, a company today is not run by the same people as it was 40 or 80 years ago. So the question is, how much of that immoral past is in the "company DNA", and how much of it was just the old management? Secondly, shutting down such company would work if and only if you went and jailed people responsible for atrocities. Otherwise, they'll just join other companies or start new ones and continue to do evil. And since what you really need is bad people in jail, you may as well just leave their company be.

The ecosystem of the company is what creates the immoral behavior. It's the combination of the management, shareholder expectations, etc.

If the shareholders are lax in demanding moral behavior, then immoral behavior will result. The company should absolutely be shut down.

> Otherwise, they'll just join other companies or start new ones and continue to do evil

Actually, nobody will want to hire them. After all, nobody wants to lose their money in a company that was shut down.

Bayer has got to have the worst history of any company still around. They used concentration camp slave labor and performed medical experiments on them as well. Then someone who went to prison for 7 years for war crimes was appointed the head of the board when he got out of jail. Of course they also invented heroin as a "non-addictive substitute for morphine."

Opposition on moral ground would be fair, but in case of Agent Orange there's enough blame to go around that one should probably put more blame on the US government, and to be consistent, avoid food advertised by them.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com