I believe what you are running up against is a tendency to externalize shame as anger.
Part of the tradeoff the parent comment references is a lack of thinking about the moral ramifications. Thus, when you mention your position which is grounded in that tradeoff's opposite, the reaction is not surprising. They are largely incompatible. Because your position hinges on a moral component, you are thus passing a moral judgement on others. This is often met with scorn, most especially because people have an aversion to shame, and it doesn't help if it's on the behalf of someone essentially randomly declaring they are morally better than you anytime the topic of their employment comes up.
So really, I'm not sure why you would be surprised, though I sympathize with your general sentiments, in a way you should know better. Surely you are aware of the aversion to shame writ large. That seems a logical predicate of your own conceptualization of your position.
Maybe because I'm not especially interested in passing moral judgment on others, for working at a company that isn't a "moral high ground" company, but isn't exactly NSO or Palantir (I used to work for a defense contractor). I feel profoundly lucky to have found a company that made me feel good about what I did. It was worth the low salary (and other annoyances). I understand that I'm fortunate, and I'm grateful (not snotty).
I find that people take the mere existence of others that have different morals to be a personal attack.
I know that it happens, but I'm not really sure why. It's not like I'm thinking about comparing to others, when I say that I worked for a company that inspired me. I was simply sharing what I did, and why.
I read comments about people that are excited about what they do, and even how much they make, all the time (I spend a lot of time on HN), and never feel as if they are somehow attacking me. They are enthusiastic, and maybe even proud of what they do, and want to show off. I often enjoy that.
To be candid, this is a common refrain that simply doesn't stand up to scrutiny.
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I'm not especially interested in passing moral judgment on others
Earlier:
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I chose to spend most of my career at a company that did stuff I found morally acceptable (inspiring, even). I made probably half what I could have made at places that were more dodgy.
Put more succinctly:
"I work somewhere that is morally acceptable. I could have made double or more if I had worked at a 'more dodgy', less morally acceptable place. Like where you work. No judgement though."
Honestly, I would have more respect for your sentiments if you would just stick to the logical conclusion of your position. Perhaps the scorn you meet is simply a reaction to this inability to simply follow the logical course of your own viewpoint. It has nothing to do with the mere existence of your morals it has to do with the fact that they are incompatible.
You want to have it both ways - you want to make a moral judgement and yet not make a moral judgement. Or you want to bound your moral judgement simply to yourself as if it is at all logical to not extrapolate it to others. If others can work for wherever they please, then what do you even mean by "morally acceptable" or "dodgy"? Simply places you prefer? That's not what morally acceptable means.
For someone who speaks of moral judgements, you don't seem to grasp their implications. I would suggest reflecting on this if you actually care about the reactions you elicit in others. This brief back and forth with you is certainly suggestive of a picture far different from the one you originally painted.
Genuinely interested: if you ask someone where they work, and they answer that they work in [place some TooBigTech here], do you consider that they judge you because you are not working for a TooBigTech? "I work for a TooBigTech so I'm probably better and richer than you. No judgement though"?
To me it's like with vegetarians. If someone tells you out of the blue "I am a vegetarian because I find it completely irresponsible to not be vegetarian. No judgement though", it's not the same as someone saying "I would like to inform you that I am a vegetarian, given that we are going to eat something and it is relevant for you to know it right now". Yet that latter situation will regularly offend non-vegetarians just the same.
I personally think this is an uncharitable reading, you can have a different internal benchmark or standard you want for yourself vs others
From a purely consistency perspective I don't think you're incorrect, but humans aren't purely consistent
We are able to accept that our personal preferences aren't the same as others and still like, respect or love them anyway
I read the GP as stating:
- he wanted to work for a place that made him happy
- he voiced that pleasure to others, "I'm glad I work at a place I find inspiring"
- they took that as an implicit attack on them
There are at least two parties to a conversation, each of them gets their own opportunity to interpret what occurs
It sounds like in this instance they interpreted his position much more negatively than he intended
Now to answer why is in my opinion is much more complicated and I honestly wouldn't hazard a guess without either being there or knowing both parties very well
Just FYI. You're right, and I probably could have phrased it better, but I wasn't talking about this post.
Most posts are "I worked at a company that did stuff I really liked, and was honored to work with some really inspiring people."
That's usually enough to cause people to assume that I'm insulting them.
I do my best to not be offensive, but some folks live in a world, where everything is a personal slight, and there's really nothing I can do about that.
These critiques are so tiresome. Like he forced people to buy macs or something. You're not the audience. For the average consumer the fact they don't even have to think about unscrewing something is a major part of the appeal. The walled garden is a plus for them not a negative.
And then ending with the sanctimonious line about selling. Like you eat off of selling nothing. Go screw in whatever you like just understand your critique comes across as little more than entitled griping against a majority. You're the people he fought against the entire time, people obsessed with their own personal agenda/minutia with no understanding of the overarching mission or who the customer is. This video comes to mind https://youtu.be/oeqPrUmVz-o
Design without an audience in mind is not design. Don't dismiss the work simply because you're not the audience.
I get it. Lots of people fall for design over usefulness. Not very technical, so a mac is enough.
but lets never fool ourselves into thinking they are more useful, more efficient or flexible. That's tiresome, and it's repeated endlessly as well.
People buy all sorts of things that are not very good. Audience is an excuse; salesmanship is not about selling what the customer needs.
I'm no newb, just ranting about macs. I've been around, even before the mac existed. Written code for them, for nearly every platform around. I'm not sanctimonious; I'm educated. The Mac OS was a pile of bad code. The current Mac OS, dev tools, documentation, deployment environment is among the worst.
You disagree and yet you agreed 100% and made the change. I thought the point the preceding parent comment is making is that you should have thought of that beforehand. Yet you seemed to already come to a judgement about it yet then quickly agreed to reverse yourself.
Sounds like a clear "lack of a depth of understanding" to me.
Someone has never heard of a medieval peasant. Or take your pick of ancient slave...
Maybe your theory is that if you weren't alive in the past to see "an asshole" for yourself, then the prudent conclusion is a sort skepticism about their very existence.
I wonder how you envision the past then... a vacant landscape? Perhaps you actually believe human nature has radically changed just in the past few decades? The odd thing is I think an actual analysis might contradict your claim, that is if the measurement is simply who is "an asshole". Perhaps we would find more surveillance actually reduces "asshole" behavior generally. Like how confrontational people often change their behavior when confronted by a camera, .etc
Are you under the illusion that greed and selfishness is a vice unique to the 21st century? You would think someone with an internet connection would know better. Humanity has always been this way. In most contexts where the concept "integrity" is evoked it carries with it at the very least a tacit acknowledgement of the strong temptation to do otherwise, that is part of the reason it is recognized as a virtue.
I really find these "in 2025" takes tiresome. There is no golden age, only your own personal nostalgia masquerading as analysis.
> Are you under the illusion that greed and selfishness is a vice unique to the 21st century?
That's a strawman. I'm pretty darn sure they're not claiming it never happened in the past. Only that it is becoming significantly more widespread than it used to be.
I think you're going to have an incredibly hard time making a compelling case that no such trend exists, given the statistics (even on this particular issue in the article, never mind other issues) would very likely strongly suggest the opposite.
exactly. This isn't a new problem. But what has been new is the recent growth in funding to "help" those who are deemed helpless - at someone else's cost (it could be taxpayers, it could be, in this case, other fee paying students).
The problem isn't the grift - it's the lack of any real oversight, and the ease with which such help is given lately (i would call it overly-progressive, but that might trigger some people). It is what makes grift possible.
I think if you capitalise the P it's fine. It's not actual progress, but the Progressive movement has pushed it. Because that philosophy has a naive view of people, and assumes the best. So their policies and spending allow tests with 100% sensitivity and 0% specificity.
Has the cultural attitude towards shame perhaps shifted?
There was a gilded age in the early 20th century and we appear to have entered another gilded age - do you think something structural or cultural has changed? I have a hard time a president like Trump getting elected in past elections - certainly he models himself after Nixon and even Nixon was a very very different kind of president both in temperament but also being less about self aggrandizement.
> do you think something structural or cultural has changed
Obviously it has? For one thing, we have billions more people on the planet. For another, we have far more constrained resources -- from the environment to education to everything else -- even for a constant number of people, never mind for the ever-increasing population size. (And there are more factors, but these are more than sufficient to get the point across.) These make competition more intense... in every aspect of life, for everyone. And it's only natural that more cutthroat competition results in more people breaking the norms and rules.
It would be shocking if this didn't happen. If there's a question at all, it's really around is when this occurs -- not if it does.
We've also been rebelling against traditional values for over fifty years and even celebrating it in song and movies. We've adopted a utilitarian ethic in lieu of the traditional values we've rebelled against. I think those are more salient probable causes than over-crowding, especially since the reasoning given for over-crowding as a reason uses a utilitarian ethic (people are only good because they can afford do be). A large part of virtue is doing the good thing regardless of hard times or good times.
Yeah people don't realise this, but shame and guilt (and fear) are our 2 society building emotions. Each society has it's own mix of these, and there are also "themes" depending on which is the dominant one.
Shame has practically been thrown out the window in certain places and we can see the effects of that - people scamming each other, lying in the streets, etc. Guilt is also being eroded across the west, leading to things like rampant criminality and punishments that are less than a slap on the wrist.
Fundamentally these emotions are designed to keep us in check with the rest of the group - does this negatively affect some: yes. But at the benefit of creating high trust societies. Every time I encounter this topic I can't help but think: Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Just to address parts of this where we may have some small slice of agreement:
No kings might be cringe in that way, but then again can you really say that the tea party wasn't? Are Sarah Palin and the like effective avatars for intelligent government reform? It seems to me evoking 1776 and literal revolution because idk the government might subsidize healthcare is about as silly as calling an opposing president a king. To be clear, I'm also going out of my way to be extremely charitable to your position despite my personal beliefs. And assuming you will also in good faith attempt a willingness to assess protests movements along lines that go beyond your individual sympathies.
I would contend the reason the tea party was "successful" is because mainstream Republicans co-opted it and thought they could control it to temper an extremely charismatic incumbent Democrat who they wanted to weaken as they feared the extent of his mandate. Cue mitch mcconnell saying he will make Obama a "one-term president". Fox News and others became incessant boosters of it. Of course, this turned against them in 2016 when their plans to nominate another Bush collided with Trump riding the grassroots insurgency, which now somewhat controls them (we'll see what happens in the coming post-Trump era).
Democrats have simply not had such an insurgency, although it seems obvious given the failures of both sides of the mainstream that such a thing is coming. In some cases vis a vis "the deep state" (as vacuous as I find that term) those farther from the center agree, even if from opposite sides of the spectrum. If nothing more one can say a move to populism on either side is self evidently a move to some shared common representation of "populism", even if both left and right strenuously disagree on implementation and so on.
So anyway, I wouldn't pat the tea party on the back too hard. Their success has more to do with institutional Republican hubris than their own effectiveness. It's not like the current administration is actually implementing limited government, if you haven't noticed. But I suspect any hope we have of a good faith discussion will quickly evaporate if I stray any closer to that topic. Fwiw I think the collapse of successful civil movements has far more to do with trends we see causing other declines in our society, that is the collective elevation of self-interest, greed, bombast and mob makes right. In that way, perhaps the lack of success of some movements - given the environment in which they operate - is actually in a weird way a credit to them. If you are successful in an increasingly inane society, what does that say about you? What benchmark would you even articulate to define a successful protest movement in the modern United States?
Odd, I've never seen a theory of state creation that starts with the benefits of scaling "electrical grids, public transit, and plumbing". Those are quite modern benefits, so seem like odd choices to illustrate your point.
I think the comment you were replying to has a better sense of things. Government becomes an entity onto itself, and prioritizes its own existence, far past the original mandate at its genesis. A constitution becomes acculturated as a default, not because each successive generation ratifies and legitimizes it anew, but simply because with its perpetuation comes power that is hard to displace.
This isn't merely cultural. The powerful interests as the head of the state have an interest in maintaining such a thing. Yes there are benefits, but your modern list ignores the true driver, which is far less luxurious. State formation is simply another form of human domination. Dressing it up as economic efficiency might make for good academic papers after the fact, but the reality is they arose out of the need to dominate others or be dominated. Feats of engineering in the ancient world were constructed to revere the state or benefit in wartime. The United States used the same rocket technology it contemplated annihilating the Soviet Union with to put men on the moon. In all cases some benefits do trickle down to the common man, but always the state itself ends up as the highest priority.
I think the issue today is, on balance if you look at the real equation between whose domination do I fear, increasingly it is your own state, there are less trickle down benefits occuring, and far more avenues for such "benefits" - like the phone in your pocket - to be deceptive, ie appear as a benefit while actually being another instrument of control.
Plumbing doesn't spy on you. And it solved a real problem and improved lives. Increasingly today in modern societies people see states with more contrived demand, "bullshit jobs", less external threats, and yet more and more state domination. Democratic checks may prove even more fatal - turn over the ancient apparatuses of domination over to a mob.
So anyway, I just ask you not ignore the obvious. People didn't want states to get cheap electrical grids. They submitted to it because they didn't want to be hacked and pillaged in their own beds. The true "natural needs" of our species are far more dire than any of those relative luxuries you have listed.
Corporate death penalty as in terminate the corporation?
Why not the actual death penalty? Or put another way, why not sanctions on the individuals these entities are made up of? It strikes me that qualified immunity for police/government officials and the protections of hiding behind incorporation serve the same purpose - little to no individual accountability when these entities do wrong. Piercing the corporate veil and pursuing a loss of qualified immunity are both difficult - in some cases, often impossible - to accomplish in court, thus incentivizing bad behavior for individuals with those protections.
Maybe a reform of those ideas or protocols would be useful and address the tension you highlight between how we treat "individuals" vs individuals acting in the name of particular entities.
As an aside, both protections have interesting nuances and commonalities. I believe they also highlight another tension (on the flip-side of punishment) between the ability of regular people to hold individuals at these entities accountable in civil suits vs the government maintaining a monopoly on going after individuals. This monopoly can easily lead to corruption (obvious in the qualified immunity case, less obvious but still blatant in the corporate case, where these entities and their officers give politicians and prosecutors millions and millions of dollars).
As George Carlin said, it's a big club. And you ain't in it.
In my conception, part of the corporate death penalty would be personal asset forfeitures and prison time for individuals who knew or should have known about the malfeasance.
In these cases, what is prison time going to accomplish that a severe enough monetary remedy would not? Putting someone in a prison cell is a state power (criminal remedy). I think that is a useful distinction generally, and a power that should be employed only when legitimized through some government process which has a very high bar (beyond a reasonable doubt, criminal rules of evidence, protections against self incrimination etc), as it deprives someone of their physical liberty.
It strikes me that if you also appreciate this distinction, then your remedy to corporations that have too much power is to give the government even more power?
Personally, I would like to see more creative solutions that weaken both government and corporations and empower individuals to hold either accountable. I think the current gap between individuals and the other two is too severe, I'm not sure how making the government even more powerful actually helps the individual. Do you want the current American government to be more powerful? Would your answer have been different last year?
I do not see any equivalence between corporate power and government power. The population as a whole controls government power. Corporate power is constrained only by government power. I think one of the most pernicious notions in our society is that the idea that "the government" is something separate from ordinary people.
Of course, our current government has a lot of problems, but that doesn't mean I don't want the government to have power. I just want it to have power to do what the population actually wants it to do (or, perhaps, what the population will actually be happiest with).
What would be your proposed mechanism for empowering individuals? How would such a mechanism not ultimately rely on the individual leveraging some larger external power structure (like a government)? I think if we want to empower all individuals roughly equally (i.e., not in proportion to their wealth or the like), then what we wind up with is something I'd call a government. Definitely not the one we have, but government nonetheless.
It's a fair rejoinder, except I think it mixes idealism about government for realism. In reality, the government becomes an entity unto itself. This is a universal problem of government. Democratic institutions are themselves supposed to be a check on this impulse. However, as you are aware these are not absolute. A check that foresees a need to restrain government also sees a need to empower the government to restrain people.
I think however when we acknowledge that men are not angels, and that therefore government itself is dangerous merely as a centralization of power, then no, you cannot simply say well government is supposed to be of a different type of power than corporations. Because again, in reality this is often not the case. This is why several of the American founders and many of those who fought in that revolution also became anti federalists or argued against constitutional ratification.
I don't know what the answer is, but I don't think there has ever been a situation where it is accurate to say the population as a whole controls the government. In practice it doesn't work that way, and is about as useful as saying well the market controls corporations. I think something more like anti federalism could use a renaissance... the government should be weak in more cases. Individuals should be empowered. A government power to hold a corporation accountable could then rest on simply its strict duty to enforce a civil remedy. That is of a different nature than the government deciding on its own who (and more importantly - who not) to prosecute.
But I appreciate your push back, there are indeed no easy answers.
I still don't really get what you're envisioning. If a government just has a "strict duty to enforce a civil remedy", how does that "empower individuals"? In particular, does it empower all individuals, or just the ones with the time and money to bring a civil suit?
Bullshit. I have no control whatsoever over the government. It is completely separate from me. I have 1000x more power over Amazon by my ability to choose to not buy from them than my vote gives me over government bureaucracy. That's why whenever I have a problem with an Amazon order it is resolved in minutes when I contact support. Good luck if you have a problem with the government.
Amazon are not resolving your issue in minutes because you have power over them. They do it because it is efficient and profitible for them to keep customers happy. Your actual influence over a trillion dollar company is tiny compaired to your influence as a voter.
One customer taking there business elsewhere does not affect Amazon in any meaningful way. One vote is counted directly. The gap is between how it feels and how the power actually works. This of course assumes you live in a democratic country.
How can a user become a customer in a sense that helps them with this? Not a business, an individual user. In any case, you're playing semantics - Google has effectively become unavoidable in daily life yet solving issues with them is at least as hard as with the government.
This is what China does. The problem is that the application is a little, uh, selective. As soon as you get any kind of corruption it becomes a power play between different factions in the elites.
You can't do any of this without a strong, independent, judiciary, strongly resistant to corruption. Making that happen is harder than it sounds.
And it still won't help, because the perps are sociopaths and they can't process consequences. So it's not a deterrent.
The only effective way to deal with this is to bar certain personality types from positions of power.
You might think that sounds outrageous, but we effectively have that today, only in reverse. People with strong moral codes are actively excluded from senior management.
It's a covert farming process that excludes those who would use corporate power constructively rather than abusing it for short-term gain.
My view is that the corporate death penalty is either dissolution or nationalization, whichever is less disruptive. If you make your company "too big to fail" without hurting loads of people, then use it to hurt people, then the people get your company. If it's a smaller operation it can just go poof. The priority should be ensuring the bad behavior is stopped, then that harm is rectified, and finally that an example be made to anyone else with a clever new way to externalize harm as a business model.
Sounds like a very extreme remedy. Not sure you want whatever government is elected every four years to have this power. Doesn't address the concern re regulatory capture, could lead to worse government incentives. Why not focus on allowing regular people to more realistically hold corporations and their owners/officers liable in civil courts? It's already hard enough given the imbalance of funds, access and power... but often legal doctrine makes the bar to clear impossible at the outset.
I would posit that we are in the current political situation precisely because we do not hold the capital class accountable. Do you sincerely believe that investors losing their investment is a “very extreme” response to gross corporate lawbreaking on their behalf?
We are in this situation because we elect people who do not hold the capital class accountable. Look at the people we elect. How would them running companies be any better?
The capital class chooses and presents the people you can vote for. They decide what issues are talked about in the media, they decide who gets the most funding, and they probably have ways of getting rid of or corrupt the people who somehow get popular without first being accepted by at least some people from the capital class.
We are in the situation because the capital class have turned the people we elect into servile puppets. Because they have simply been allowed to become too big and powerful.
They aren't servile puppets because they are children, they are servile puppets because that's what they are paid (and threatened, via financing their more pliable opponents) to do.
Why not make the civil case path easier then? The extreme nature of your remedy is the idea of a government taking over and owning a corporation. That creates bad incentives. I think if individuals could reasonably expect to be able to knock people like Mark Zuckerberg out of the billionaire class in a civil suit, then yes, he and the types of people he represents would behave better. Having the government run Facebook or Enron or Google or whatever both sounds less desirable than empowering individuals and weakening corporate protections in civil cases, and frankly; worse than the prevailing situation re the "capital class". If you think the current political situation is bad the last thing you should want is more government power.
Except drug dealers do not sell you fentanyl just so you can get high because they do not care. They do not care about YOUR OWN intention. People demand, they supply. And these people can have legitimate reasons.
I have not, but perhaps it applies to low-level drug dealers, sure, but big-time suppliers really do not care what your intent is. Many of them sell legitimate pharmaceuticals and they do not ask you what your intent is before they sell it to you, as it is none of their concern.
What would they fear about it? Nationalisation would include compensation (as per relevant laws), so the shareholders don't lose a lot. Maybe the compensation would be less than the potential highs of the stock price, but it's not like they entirely lose out
The actual death penalty is not a good idea for several reasons, including possibility of error (even if that possibility is small).
(In the case of a corporation, also many people might be involved, some of whom might not know what it is, therefore increasing the possibility of error.)
However, terminating the corporation might help (combined with fines if they had earned any profit from it so far), if there is not an effective and practical lesser punishment which would prevent this harm.
However, your other ideas seem to be valid points; one thing that you mention is, government monopoly can (and does) lead to corruption (although not only this specific kind).
Is this some parody of bad social critique? You know not every trope applies in all cases, right? A greedy CEO not using his own product doesn't readily apply the higher in the value chain you get. You replied to a comment mentioning how it's obviously silly to think Tim Cook uses a Samsung Galaxy. Yet it seems like maybe you missed the point... or do you also think decision makers at Apple are using Samsung Galaxy or Google Pixel phones? Or Windows surfaces or Dell laptops instead of MacBooks? Or maybe there is some designer bespoke OS or Ferrari level brand equivalent you are privy to that I'm missing? Or is your theory that he is so wealthy his use of personal butlers and subordinates ensures he never does any computing himself? He never sends a text or gets a personal phone call, or if he does some man-servant picks it up so he doesn't have to deal with the iOS interface that has been clearly designed for "poor people"?
Then the ending comment that again can't seem to distinguish a generalized slogan re a broad social grievance with a specific claim or discussion. And the sense of personal victimization. Because something is annoying you, well clearly you are being taken advantage of. You didn't even contribute anything pertinent to the discussion except to complain about a wholly unrelated UX experience, only to limply tie it together by doing nothing more than conclude that obviously both CEOs are richer than you are.
Such a silly comment. Is your theory that everyone with any decision making authority at Apple doesn't actually use the product? Even when it comes to "glaring annoyances or shortcomings"?
So odd of you to frame this as some sort of personal outrage. Like I'm so annoyed by this "glaring issue" on my device clearly the people working on this don't even use it or "it would be fixed in a day". Lol. Maybe people who actually have to get things done at a trillion dollar company don't have the same constraints as you, or relatedly, the luxury to obsess over your so-called glaring issues.
It’s not a silly comment, both macOS and iOS have been decaying into dog shit over the years from obvious bugs that anyone who uses the apps and features being sold would run into very quickly.
Tim and other executives might be using their devices as email machines, but it’s not obvious they’re using everything they’re quite literally selling us.
2: The Music app is barely functional, and will regularly fail to play music. Here it is bugging out, and stacking multiple album covers https://imgur.com/a/Sg8oU1p
> So odd of you to frame this as some sort of personal outrage.
Hey you try waiting 5+ years on a bug report/feature request for a simple thing. Or things like a rendering bug that survives all year throughout beta into the X.1 release (see the Tahoe Contacts app)
You'd give up. This "outrage" is all the outlet we have left. Shame the system that lets such crap get through!
Part of the tradeoff the parent comment references is a lack of thinking about the moral ramifications. Thus, when you mention your position which is grounded in that tradeoff's opposite, the reaction is not surprising. They are largely incompatible. Because your position hinges on a moral component, you are thus passing a moral judgement on others. This is often met with scorn, most especially because people have an aversion to shame, and it doesn't help if it's on the behalf of someone essentially randomly declaring they are morally better than you anytime the topic of their employment comes up.
So really, I'm not sure why you would be surprised, though I sympathize with your general sentiments, in a way you should know better. Surely you are aware of the aversion to shame writ large. That seems a logical predicate of your own conceptualization of your position.
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