1. work for a business man

2. become a business man yourself

3. do some other job to support yourself and think / tinker only as a hobby

The distinction between business and capital is pretty blurred right now, and it shouldn't be. Operating a charity that delivers donated food to orphaned victims of war is a business in the broad sense of the word, and there are many things that go into operating it well, including things like management and finance. Those things do not, inherently, have to be in the pursuit of capital growth; there are many humanistic ends they can be directed to. But in our world as it stands they usually aren't - they're directed towards capital growth and that fact corrupts them like it corrupts everything else.

Or, put another way, there is a difference between "making enough money to run a sustainable business" and "making all the money it is possible to make". Many large businesses run reasonably substantial profit margins, and every dollar of profit a business makes is a dollar it could afford not to make in the pursuit of more humanistic ends if it so chose.

You say "your average businessperson is not very interested in making the world better if it plays against their personal ambitions." But I claim that it's not your average businessperson it's your average person with business people just being a subset of that.

And that's not even getting into the problem of how does anybody really know how to make the world a better place. In my experience people with a "just doing my job" attitude make much better bosses than those who act like they have a higher purpose.

I tend to think, for example, that your average Boeing engineer probably wanted to do a good job and not have doors fall off their planes. But when you put multiple layers of abstraction in the way and have leaders looking through business metrics, it isn't hard for everyday crappiness to maneuver its way to the point where that isn't prioritized. Almost no one in the chain really thinks they're sacrificing safety, they think they're doing their job and improving efficiency by cutting redundant steps.

> In my experience people with a "just doing my job" attitude make much better bosses than those who act like they have a higher purpose.

Sure, because there's a difference between a performative "mission", a self-obsessed founder who makes their own success a story about the future of Earth, and someone who makes concretely difficult decisions when the chips are down.

This is kind of what I mean by the corruptive effects of growth. Having a mission is a good thing, but most companies' "missions" are implicitly always secondary to their financial growth, or worse, a cynical ploy for employee engagement. When people write crappy press releases about how "this will enable us to serve more of our users" (read: expand our market), that's not a statement about how serving users is bad, it's just that for most businesses it's necessarily with an asterisk of "we want to serve our users* *as long as it pleases our investors".

Just as people should specialize, institutions should too.

We should not have this whole movement to jawbone companies into being “nice.” All we are going to get is a creepy facsimile. See, e.g. greenwashing.

Instead we should understand that profit maximizing firms operating in competition with each other is an incredibly powerful but one dimensional tool. We in our sovereign capacity should set the incentives and rules such that those tools are used to accomplish the things we collectively desire to see in the world.

Incentives and rules (with enforcement) are reliable and durable. A “better businessperson” is just transient luck.

I wish this were true. But a largish slice of the US polity (headed by one of the two credible candidates for President) is dead against these things and attacks any sort of institutional infrastructure or notion of accountability whenever it's politically expedient to do so. In a less obvious way, that movement is also dedicated to the dismantlement of the administrative state - ostensibly in the name of returning legislative power and accountability to the Congress, pragmatically because it adheres to a vision of commercial activity with far less legal restraint.

The point is you have to convince these people. That’s the whole and only ballgame.

Trying to pressure companies into wearing skinsuits via external or internal pressure might be satisfying but it’s a waste of effort.

Convince one company not to work with UAE and another one will gladly take its place. Elect a President that takes human rights into account in foreign policy and now you might get somewhere.

But to do that you have to actually go talk to people that disagree with you. Not just post preaching to the choir posts about how terrible those other guys are.

The prevailing orthodoxy in this group is that losing elections or court cases is a priori evidence of fraud, violent action to overturn negative outcomes is often permissible, and that this right is reserved for future negative outcomes. They're not willing to be convinced, and loudly advertise their belief that it's OK to impose their point of view on others by force. I mean, if you're dealing with someone who avers that you should be fed into a woodchipper, it's not wise to put one arm in pursuit of a compromise.