163 points
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Literally every publicly owned corporation that is at the mercy of shareholders is on the wrong side of history.

As this shit gets normalized, watch all of them fall in line.

Apple is already back advertising on X.

Corporations only care about money, and they will change their values to match what makes money.

They never accepted women, blacks, latinos, LGBTQ+, and the disabled into their ranks because they thought those people were humans who had intrinsic value just for existing.

No, they accepted them because they knew they were leaving money on the table. They could market shaving to women to increase razor blade sales, because now women employees would have money to spend. They could market hair care products to the black community because now their black employees would have money to spend.

It was always about expanding markets and finding more people to sell shit to. Once that stops being profitable in the USA, treating those people like humans will stop. Watch it happen with the disabled and LGBTQ+ first.

It was never just Rainbow Capitalism, because this shit literally goes all the way back to Women’s Suffrage and the Civil Rights eras. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

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37 points

Corporations just reflect the values of their owners. There are companies that emphasize things other than revenue, but as soon as a company goes public and becomes controlled by Wall Street, profit becomes their sole motivation

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24 points

This is why the stock market was, fundamentally, a trojan horse. It was created so capitalism could intertwine the peoples wealth and retirement funds to the success of the wealth of the oligarchy, making the entire market too big to fail.

Now the entire system is designed to prevent damage to companies, no matter how moral, unethical, or criminal. The success of corporations IS treated as equal to “national security”.

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4 points

In the end, the stock market is a natural logical progression from the starts of capitalism, and the situation we are in today is again closer to capitalism logical conclusion

From capitalism’s basic principles, profit above literally everything was always bound to happen. Just how evolution happens through natural selection. It’s a similar process. Because ultimately capitalism is an economic system built on competition, not cooperation.

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1 point

Stock market was a bookie for rich people. I think you meant 401k.

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1 point

Yup, but most people have savings or some kind of pension, both are often put into the stock market by the bank or pension fund to give us the interest we want.

We need to try and exercise more of our power as stakeholder in these companies, in the end we still have the power to not use products from these massive corporations. Stop order from shit like Amazon, but go and order from smaller stores, switch search engine and browser, etc.

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12 points
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Capitalism is amoral

EDIT: to be clear that’s A-moral not IM-moral

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9 points

No ethical consumption under capitalism, yep.

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-5 points

Leave such takes for .ml, please.

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1 point

I assert it’s also immoral, especially in modern times.

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-6 points

Unfortunately alternatives aren’t any better…

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7 points

Your right.

Change is difficult so we should just give up.

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3 points

They very much are, there’s just little to no political will to implement them

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2 points

Man too bad all I’ve got to eat is this cyanide. Those cookies over there? Don’t you know how unhealthy those are?

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-2 points

They could market shaving to women to increase razor blade sales, because now women employees would have money to spend.

That makes zero sense. Paying people so they can spend a tiny fraction of it back to your company? Why not just keep the money in the first place?

No, they hire them because they’ve run the math and realized it costs less to hire them than that it costs them in sales due to public perception.

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7 points

You might need to pause and think a bit more. Corporations are competing for money. There isn’t just one big pile of money somewhere.

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1 point

Why not both?

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1 point

Why not both what?

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57 points

It’s a capitalist corporation that sold its soul to the highest bidder. Of course it’s evil. It’s based on greed and exploitation.

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3 points

Billionaire bad?? How could this be!!? I was told whenever two parties entered into a voluntary agreement it meant both of them mutually improved their situation and that if you got billions out of it, it meant by definition that you did a lot of good!

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9 points

Here’s a gun to your head, now, it would be beneficial to you to hand over your wallet m’kay?

No bullet in your brain, more cash in my hand, both parties benefit! See how that works?

Oh, you have a lump growing in your thyroid, mmmm… that is bad. We can cut that out for you and most people we do that to live a lot longer, but first we need you to mortgage your home and give us the proceeds. See how that works?

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2 points

Gun to the head is exactly why the word “voluntary” is specified

But yes, you could eventually say “I did not consent to be born please arrest my mom”

In that case, you can also solve your examole choice by gun grabbing ans shooting the guy if he lets you take it.

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1 point

Google’s parent is the alphabet Corp, who started with funding from, and working for the US alphabet agencies.

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56 points

Inevitably, all hierarchical organizations end up on the wrong side of history.

In hierarchies, people compete for position.

People with principles, morals, integrity and/or empathy will have choices that they simply will not make.

People without those things are not constrained. They can and will make whatever choices might benefit them, with no regard for the consequences to others.

So all other things being more or less equal, psychopaths actually have a competitive advantage in hierarchies, and hierarchies end up effectively rewarding and thus selecting for psychopathy.

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21 points

And if there is one uniting principle in conservatism, the singular reason why religious dirt-poor common-clay-of-the-West support billionaires, is that they all deeply believe in hierarchies.

Why do they go after trans-women but not trans-men? Because men are naturally higher in the hierarchy than women, thus wanting to exist in male spaces (but not actually crossing into them) is seen as the proper order, whereas wanting to exist in female spaces (read: lowering yourself in the hierarchy) is seen as unnatural.

Why do they fellate the rich? Because the wealthy are better people, which is tautologically why they’re rich.

Why are they racist? Because white people are better than not-white people, natch.

Why do they hate atheists? Because the very concept of religion implicitly enforces hierarchy. Sectarian disputes are just an offshoot of this.

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-9 points

Progressives are much the same way, but with different hierarchies. Progressives seem to love big government hierarchies which a strong executive branch enforcing a bunch of regulations.

That’s what you get from a two party system, you get two groups with a fetish for different types of hierarchies.

Reject hierarchy and push for local rule, it’s what we in the box like to call liberty.

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14 points

You’re conflating two unrelated things to make some weird anti-government point.

Conservatives believe that hierarchical structures are the natural order of things. That is, things on top of the hierarchy deserve to be there, because otherwise they’d be at the bottom. Conservatism as a political philosophy requires the belief that some people are just better than others.

A belief that a strong government is required to enforce equality in the population is nothing like that.

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6 points
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How in the hell is wanting strong regulations the same thing as believing in racial suppremacy?

Also there are endless examples of countries with strong regulations and more than two parties

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8 points

There are some offsetting factors that also prevent the “best and brightest” from rising to power: https://dealbreaker.com/2007/10/icahn-explains-why-are-there-so-many-idiots-running-shit

He moves up the corporate ladder, without a single original idea that might make his boss feel threatened by his potential.

Eventually, he gets to be the #2 guy at the company. He’s a little dumber than the C.E.O., but the board likes him, so he eventually gets to be C.E.O.

Of course, he assigns a #2 who is a little dumber than he is. “And eventually, we’re going to have all morons running our companies,” Icahn concluded. “We might not be that far off from that right now.”

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2 points

That sounds vaguely like The Peter Principal.

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1 point

It is, but the tellings I have heard of the Peter Principal generally have the incompetence leveling off at some lower strata where they can no longer do the job well so they don’t advance any further.

The unspoken implication of Icahn’s advancement theory is that management doesn’t really do much of importance in these companies, basically any idiot can rise to the top. Of course that’s not true, people can always actively undermine their own success, so they at least have to be smart enough to not do that.

Highly successful CEO I met over dinner once had this to say about his outstanding company growth performance: 1) it wasn’t him, it was luck of being in the right place at the right time and not screwing it up too badly. 2) The hardest thing was choosing who to hire. If at least half of his new hire choices didn’t actively make things worse, he considered that to be a good batch.

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6 points

This seems relevant here…

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1 point

And in turn, breeds more psychopathy. I’m fairly convinced psychopathy is, at least partly, explained by epigenetics.

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45 points

We knew this as soon as they got rid of the “Don’t be evil” slogan

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20 points

☞ We knew this as soon as they got the “Don’t be evil” slogan

if you need to remind yourself not to be evil, that’s already a bad start.

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38 points
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Deleted by creator
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8 points

You’re not from America are you?

I ask this because you seem to actually grasp what’s happening.

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