> If you're going to interject yourself, as a company, into the political arena, you have to be all in otherwise you will get called out like this eventually.
A company selectively interjecting itself into the political arena highlights its hypocrisy, but any company having a significant public impact should be getting called out regardless of their actions in other spheres. Ethics are not an opt-in.
Making yourself an ethical arbiter is opt-in; deciding to pursue profit within the constraints of a particular legal regime (or indeed a particular religion ethical doctrine) but otherwise apolitically is entirely legitimate, and I suspect makes one more likely to act in a genuinely good way than chasing the hot-button issues of the day.
Can't a company just do what's best for itself and it's shareholders? Why does every organization need a moral/ethical complex which caters to the issues of modern day?
If we follow your logic to its logical conclusion the only way to change the way a company is behaving is through laws and regulations. I'm getting strawman-adjacent here but something tells me that if you think that a company should only "do what's best for itself and it's shareholders" you might also not like heavy handed regulations either, am I correct? And if so, how do you think the problem of unethical companies should be solved?
By instituting only those regulations that loosely serve a public good (say a carbon tax or sin tax) and then predominantly by customers voting with their wallets.
Yes, you have succinctly described the status quo. My point is that "only pass regulations that serve the public good" is vague to the point of being meaningless. That's akin to saying "cancel all the wasteful government programs" as an answer to the deficit.
Ah, I now see the disconnect. 5 posts or so up, someone suggested strong, targeted, heavy-handed regulation as a cure/control for an unethical company.
My "loosely serves the public good" was meant to suggest that instead you could target carbon or sin taxes, but you couldn't (read: ought not) target a specific company, say Exxon-Mobil or Philip Morris.
IOW, broadly target the thing you want to reduce with policy, not the company that does the specific thing.
I can see based on my text how you reduced it to a vague "pass smart laws", but I was trying to make a specific recommendation on how to do that, but then further leaving the majority of control for ethics to the choice of the consumers in aggregate.
Ok I'll bite, so if your company is based in Saudi Arabia you have to be okay with killing journalists because the charter was granted by the government?
I mean... you don't have to feel okay with it, but if you're paying taxes, you're certainly complicit in it on some level. Similar goes for Americans and the Iraq War.
In the old days, in some countries, we had a device for changing the government when it did stuff you didn't want to be complicit in. I think they called it an "election" ;-). Now, admittedly, even if I take a very broad array of American political parties, from the Greens to the Libertarians, their spectrum on foreign policy still ranges from bloody-stupid to fucking appalling, so I don't entirely blame actively anti-war Americans for the anti-war movement's failure to stop the war.
But that's because the democratic system has decayed to the point where, if you don't want today's fresh new war of choice, you're left choosing between two irrelevant third parties, one of whom puts forth a candidate who doesn't know where Aleppo is, and the other of whom are outright tankies on foreign policy and may be paid by Vladimir Putin.
Yes, but I'm not going to debate this, because I'm already appalled that this comment got +3 while my remarks on the Bayesian brain theory in another thread were ignored.
Well if you're a Saudi citizen and you don't have much of a choice then clearly no, it's just the way things are, you don't choose where you're born. If you're a foreigner and go out of your way to open a company in Saudi Arabia then clearly yes.
Companies should not be relied on to make these decisions. If dealing with Saudi Arabia is immoral, that is a topic of diplomacy and the country should be possibly embargoed. What industries are allowed to do business there should be left up to a nations people to decide.
Many companies believe that catering to the issues of the modern day often is best for itself and its shareholders.
Companies do seem to be taking more and more political stances, though, than they have in the past, and personally I think it's, at least in some cases, naive on their parts. I used to see more of "we'll donate 1% of our revenue to save pandas" type marketing, which is noble and universally applauded, but now it's replaced with taking political stances on things that are often hot-button issues.
Companies like that do exist. Profit at any cost, under the disguise of "serving the shareholders" - everyone/everything else be damned. Recent examples include the pharma companies hiking the cost to whatever levels they please ...
If everyone started behaving this way, it wouldn't be pretty.
Edit: You can downvote all you want, but politics are an outgrowth of human interaction at scale. The idea that you can get a couple thousand human beings running around with limited resources and various goals and not get politics is laughable.
How about American universities that educate people from KSA paid by KSA? Should they be called out for taking blood money? After all international students are basically the only ones that pay the full rack rate?
> But both Bloomberg and the author are pursuing long term strategies.
Are they though? Where's the metric that measures credibility, or is that something that's left to human discretion? People will optimize for the metrics they're measured against, and it sounds like in this case they've chosen a metric that conflicts with the aims of a news organization.
That people benefited from internet shopping and delivery is not a defense of a company treating it's workers badly or evading paying taxes. Let's not pretend amazon is the only company that might have delivered those efficiencies, they were just the most successful, the most ruthless.
You can't expect companies to fight for greater good and sacrifice their interests for the overall good. In fact it's against the law for them to do that. Amazon hires a lot of people and in many countries pay reasonably well. With taxes it does what the law allows.
If you want to change those things start with changing the law, ending policies hurting the working class (limiting low skill migration would be the first step) and getting rid of ridiculous taxes like corporate income tax you claim Amazon dodged (while in fact it pays what the law requires it to pay).
Blaming the player for playing the game well while taking care of what they are legally obliged to do (shareholder value) is neither smart nor constructive.
> In fact it's against the law for them to do that.
No, it’s not. The corporation’s interests must align with the shareholders, but there’s no law that says short-term profit is the only legal goal. Companies can and have sacrificed in order to build the community.
Public trading often leads to that however with activist investors.
Anyone who sees them acting suboptomally for the short term can buy in, pressure for more short term interests and lobby to get their way then jump off before it collapses with their gains. Even without that scheming continuous gains are demanded generally.
>You can't expect companies to fight for greater good and sacrifice their interests for the overall good.
You can if the society and law demands that. E.g. throw them a few huge fines for using bad labor practices (e.g. workers not allowed to go to the toilet when they need to, firing pregnant women, other kinds of discrimination) and let's see what happens.
I completely agree. One legal change that needs to happen to preserve the free market: company with a habit of employees using social assistance should not get tax breaks (or any other help) from the government. The taxpayer should not be subsidizing the paycheck of Amazon employees. The burden is on Amazon to pay their employees a competitive wage, it's their problem not mine.
Otherwise they have no incentive to pay their employees a competitive wage.
Without competitive wages you have no free market, you just have a corporate welfare state, where the cost of paying workers is taken from the workers themselves thru taxation.
That's basically what some UBI shills want. They want state taxation and welfare to replace the onus of corporations to pay competitive wages to employees.
>I completely agree. One legal change that needs to happen to preserve the free market: company with a habit of employees using social assistance should not get tax breaks (or any other help) from the government.
No enterprise-size company should get any tax break, period. Only small companies or enterprises that can show they had a bad run (and e.g. might otherwise need to close).
Add to that a rule that if they then just go and take their offices/factories abroad (where they get a big tax break) they get hit with the equivalent savings in import tax is they want to sell in the domestic market.
Combine that with tiny or no tax for individuals (like it has been before the 20th century and is still in several places).
Obviously I can't speak for all situations but often I'll ride towards the centre or vehicular edge of the path if there is a risk of pedestrian hazards, or parked cars on the other side. People jumping out in front of you or opening car doors is all to frequent, and almost impossible to avoid, particularly in areas where cycling is not so popular.
This is a reasonable post undermined by a ridiculous last sentence. Cyclists need to obey laws but those laws should not be the same as for cars because the impacts those laws seek to prevent are not the same.
Inside and Limbo do have puzzles, but they're fairly predictable, mostly just variations on things that have been seen before. They're nice diversions, and have a pleasing graphical style, but the general sentiment of your comment is pretty much correct.
What made Braid so special was that it introduced an entirely new mechanic, explored the entire possible space of puzzles for that mechanic, and explored a bunch of complimentary orthogonal mechanics at the same time.
100% agree, even for those who are not addicts, we're not always perfectly aware of/or in control of our actions, and social media platforms are designed to take advantage of this. When I deleted facebook on my phone I'd often find myself in a quiet moment idly scrolling through my apps looking to open it again.
Each person needs to set their own limits. For me this barrier was enough, but some may need more drastic barriers. I wouldn't judge people for trying to effect positive change in their life.
I get that this is an issue close to the heart of people on this site, but if you accept that this is a good law (which of course can be debated), then this is the only realistic way to introduce it. Perhaps they should have included a provision for gradually phasing out the existing cafeterias.
On a slightly off topic note, when your company gets to cafeteria size are you really a startup any more?
A company selectively interjecting itself into the political arena highlights its hypocrisy, but any company having a significant public impact should be getting called out regardless of their actions in other spheres. Ethics are not an opt-in.