It’s not really, companies like GM used to boast about how well they treated their employees and communities. It was Jack Welch and a legion of like-minded arseholes who decided they should be increasingly richer no matter who or what paid for it.

See also HP. Pretty much only Costco left.

This is where PBCs (Public Benefit Companies) and B-Corps may have a role to play. Something like that seems necessary to enable both (A) sufficient profitability to support innovation and viability in a capitalist society and (B) consideration of the public good. Traditional public companies aren't just disincentivized from caring about externalities, they're legally required to maximize shareholder profits, full stop. Which IMHO is a big part of the reason companies ~always become "evil".

The company I currently work for is both a B-Corp and an employee-owned trust. The difference in culture, attitude and behaviour to the previous place I worked at, which only cared about quarterly results is stark.

Costco is such a strange and stark case standing in opposition to this general rule. From everything I hear, I can only gather that the reason is because of extremely experienced and level-headed executive staff.

The previous deal was due to (a) a lower level of development of capitalism (b) a higher profit margin that collapsed in the 70s (c) a communist movement that threatened capital into behaving

"Is your washroom breeding Bolsheviks?"

Middle class productive population produces commons goods and resources which gets exploited by Elites. Tragedy of the Commons applied to wealth generation process itself.

It’s funny how corporations get a bar wrap. Have you ever worked with private equity? Bad to worse.

Most PE is ironically ultimately owned by publicly traded funds. If you have a 401k that you’re not personally managing odds are that PE is where most of your gains come from.

The problem is that people equate money to power and power to evil.

So no matter what, if you do something lots of people like (and hence compensate you for), you will be evil.

It's a very interesting quirk of human intuition.

A reasonable conclusion, considering that money and power seem to have their own gravity, so people with more of both end up getting even more of both, and vice versa.

Can't blame someone who comes to such a conclusion about money and power.

The unreasonable part automatically labeling power as evil.

It’s a sane default to label power as evil in a society driven by greed, usury, and capital gain. Power tends to corrupt, particularly when the incentives driving its pursuit or sustenance undermine scruples or conscientiousness. It is difficult to see how power is not corrupting when it becomes an end in itself, rather than a means directed toward a worthy or noble purpose.

Labeling power evil is not automatic, its just making an observation of the common case. Money-backed power almost never works for the forces of good, and the people who claim they're gonna be good almost always end up being evil when they're rich and powerful enough. See also: Google.

Google is the company that created a class-less non-hierarchical internet. Everyone can get the same access to the same services regardless of wealth or personhood. Google is probably the most progressive company to ever exist, because money stops no one from being able to leverage google's products. Born in the bush of the Congo or high rise of Manhatten, you are granted the same google account with the same services. The cost of entry is just to be a human, one of the most sacrosanct pillars of progressive ideology.

Yet here they are, often considered on of the most evil companies on Earth. That's the interesting quirk.

Lot of people and companies were responsible for that. Anyway, that says nothing about what Google has become.

> Google is the company that created a class-less non-hierarchical internet.

Can you explain what you mean by this? I disagree but I don't understand how you think Google did this so I am very curious.

For my part, I started using the internet before Google, and I strongly hold the opinion that Google's greatest contribution to the internet was utterly destroying its peer to peer, free, open exchange model by being the largest proponent of centralizing and corporatizing the web.

The alternative was a teleco AOL style internet with pay tiers for access to select websites. The free web of the 90's would remain, but would be about as culturally relevant as Linux.

Surely you have to recognize the inconsistency of saying that Google "corporatized" the web, while the vast majority of people using google have never paid them anything. In fact many don't even load their ads or trackers, and still main a gmail account.

If we put on balance good things and evil things google has done, with honest intention, I struggle very hard to counter "gave the third world a full suite of computer programs and access to endless video knowledge for free with nothing more than dumpy hardware", while the evil is "conspired with credit card companies to find out what you are buying".

This might come off like I am just glazing google. But the point I am trying to illuminate is that when there is big money at play, people knee-jerk associate it with evil, and throw all nuance out the window.

Besides, IRC still exists for you and anyone else to use. Totally google free.

No I actually do understand where your opinion comes from now and I partially agree. I had forgotten about how badly the ISPs wanted the internet to mirror Cable TV plans.

There’s several subjects to go into here and HN probably isn’t the best place for the amount of detail this discussion requires but I will just note the amount of people blocking Google’s ads and trackers is negligible and has significantly shrunk in the mobile first era.

The wave is shifting to other corporations now but for a good while most of the internet was architected to give Google money. Remember SEO? An entire practice of web publishing centered around Google’s profit share. That hasn’t disappeared- it’s just evolved and transformed into more ingrained rent-seeking.

*Was

Money and power are good when used democratically to clearly benefit the majority of the people. They are bad otherwise. It is hard to see this because we live in such a regime that exists in the negative space seemingly without beginning or end. Other countries have different relationships to their population.

Fair point.

Call me an optimist, but I'm still holding out hope that Amodei is and still can do the right thing. That hope is fading fast though.

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