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0 pointsboogies5y ago0 comments

IMO especially when stock holders wanting a monetary return on investment are involved. I give my money to the FSF every month, because they provide value to me, but not because I expect them to surreptitiously extract it from others and give it to me as cash dividends.

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5 comments · 1 top-level

sebastien_b5y ago· 4 in thread

I think that's one of the big problems with public companies, especially those that have "regular people" as their main money maker (the "consumers") - invariably, the company's needs (duty) to make money for their real customers (the shareholders) will take precedence over what would be "the best thing" for consumers.

I wish we could do away with the whole "public company" thing - just imagine how much better Facebook, Google, and countless other companies (yes, Apple too) would be if they were private, and more accountable to their users.

tsimionescu5y ago

Privately owned companies are not accountable to their users, they are accountable to their owners, just like publically traded ones. It's just that they have fewer owners, and you sometimes get owners with really nice ideas. Other times, you get even more tyrannical owners.

Instead, what would be really nice is imagining how those companies would fare as worker-owned companies. Especially with these big internet behemoths, where the entire families of all the workers are users, the standard of user care would easily sky-rocket.

WesolyKubeczek5y ago

Or not, as Soviet Union with its workers-owned factories can tell. Ever rode a Soviet car that wasn’t copypasted from Fiat?

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smabie5y ago

private companies are still accountable to their shareholders. But I do think that the very public number of share price encourages slightly different behavior than a private, illiquid, and probably out of date number

stjohnswarts5y ago

Yeah not sure what the poster is trying to say here. Both distinctions almost invevitably result in doing anything that is legal to maximize profits (and oftentimes illegal or gray at best). However I haven't seen anyone propose a decent alternative to corporation status for such large entities. The other option is state owned and that is almost always an utter failure. Even China allows their "state owned" businesses a lot of leeway to account for the ups and downs of capitalism and market forces.

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