I'm not sure where that puts humans in an effort to defend ourselves. We must be moral, we are judged harshly otherwise.
A company uses psychology tricks against its customers(aka Ads/Marketing) making them feel status insecure or a group outsider, totally fine. Actually, those blue bubbles were a great idea, I made sooo much money on stocks. Really feel bad for teenagers though.
Boeing can replace their management and the company continues. These big companies are applauded for being amoral because their stock prices go up.
At the end of the day it seems there is some power sharing agreement between government, corporations, and to a significantly lesser extent workers/consumers. We only judge that latter group on morals.
Maybe we need to collectivize like the Physician Cartel does (American Medical Association), then workers/consumers can collectively be amoral.
If you were to make a Venn diagram of amoral and illegal (including civil malfeasance) have a pretty large overlap. Eventually, the illegal part gets people (even CEOs) sued, fired and/or jailed, but the company might continue if it can afford to pay the legal bills.
> These big companies are applauded for being amoral because their stock prices go up.
I don't think any investors are applauding the mismanagement at Boeing. I suspect the leadership team there is checking to make sure their "golden parachute" isn't an anvil. Being amoral works for a while, but it is a very poor long term strategy.
> Boeing can replace their management and the company continues.
Society has decided that closing down large employers is a cure worse than the disease. Closing a misbehaving company sure seems like justice, but to the 43,000 people who depend on that company for a livelihood, and the communities, even small manufacturing towns that the amoral company is keeping alive, well, the network effects are serious. So the consequences are usually in the form of inflicting financial pain to the company, or directly enforcing consequences against the people who do illegal/tortuous things.
This sort of thinking is exactly why companies like Boeing get a free pass to do whatever it wants. Local govs protect them like the mob because "jobs" and then Congress panics every time they see the market only has 1-2 options for national security stuff and then reinforces monopolies that slowly eat away at the country's competitive advantage for short term relief. And all were left with is the same small group of untouchable, completely mediocre mega corporations living off past glory when there was actual real competition and risk.
Every time you kick the can you just delay getting the medicine you need. Then instead of having a wildly successful company making new products and dominating the global market - which is something employees and govs benefit from via salaries/taxes/local development, foreign competition takes those jobs or protectionism creepingly increases the cost of doing business because a dying corpse is propped up. Then employees get squeezed and suddenly the mega corporation is getting billions in welfare. And the public gets worse and worse products, which impact other industries that depend on them.
What is moral about the American Medical Association using Taxes to fund their artificially scarce residency programs which causes consumer prices to go up?
Okay, so that one falls outside the venn diagram.
With lobbyists writing the laws, I'm really wondering if there is as much overlap as you think.
Even with everything going on Boeing’s stock price is higher than it was ten years ago. Five years ago it was 4x, I’m sure it’ll recover a good amount from today’s number.
My cynical take is that a lot of investors don’t see what Boeing is doing as mismanagement. They’re in a hugely enviable market position: only one competitor that can’t scale quickly, customers are captive. Boeing management moved to reduce costs (i.e. get rid of expensive unionized workers) while still churning out a large number of planes: success. Some people have died as a result of that, sure, but did you see those profit and loss numbers? Wow-eee.
A year from now Boeing’s stock price will have rallied and they’ll continue on. Maybe an exec or two will take a golden parachute for PR purposes but it won’t mean anything.
This really doesn't seem to be true anymore to those wise enough to lawyer. Arbitration clauses maybe the biggest culprit but I mean, Tesla Supervised Full Self Driving? Sure that cross country zero intervention demo in 2017 was great but...
Cure: Don't allow excessive consolidation/break up TBTF.
It's a common refrain, but there are no companies acting--there are people within a larger organization who are acting. You say "[a] company uses psychology tricks." Well, no, people within the company have made decisions to do that. There's no way for the company to act on its own.
This is a feature, not a bug.
We are system creators and let those systems do the work. We dislike getting our hands dirty and not just physically.
Companies are thinly veiled machines ran by grinding oiled up humans as cogs in intricate patterns that seem to produce useful results.
This is not a problem in and of itself, but we have to be honest about what we are doing and what the true endgame is.
“Powerful” people are just the top cogs in these machines and replaceable like all other cogs.
One day we will find out no one runs anything and we have slowly and inadvertently ceded total control to The Machine and have been ceding it for a long, long time already.
Maybe on a long enough timescale. In practice people at the top are much harder dislodge regardless of their function, because they wield the most power. Cases like Musk and Altman prove that even boards may be too weak to replace company heads; requiring absurd levels of effort like shareholder votes, legal action, political maneuvering, or all of the above. Worst case one must endure their reign until the CEO dies of old age, not unlike a king.
To me the whole Boeing debacle is just hilarious to watch from the outside. Like watching a known drug addict to pretend he's not and then pretend he's quitting. Then pretending everyone else is also on drugs because that's literally the only possible order of things.
As in we don't judge government or corporation on morals? Of course people do that.
Companies are their leadership.
I've worked places where I was actively encouraged to look the other way and I've worked places where I've been actively encouraged to do the right thing.
If someone's saying "they gotta be shady because shareholder value, yo" they're looking for an excuse.
This is not true. Some company’s value proposition is explicitly moral virtue, eg organic food brands.
They tend to be family-owned SMO rather than international publicly traded corporations. The issue has more to do with scale and diffusion of responsibility.
So far, not many for-profit companies have been successful long-term in balancing those two things, as net-positive for society is not strictly necessary for the ultimate goal, generating profits.
Companies are legal entities, they are amoral. What you are seeing is a leader. I really hope that leader that you believe in, and inspires you to believe and comment such things on HN never fails you.
No they're not. They very much have a morality, it's just not ours. Some include:
Greed is good.
Profits first and foremost.
Externalities are not our responsibility.
Can you elaborate on why you think this is the case?
Just 5 minutes ago I was reading this article: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2024/apr/24/in-the-...
Who would have thought that engineers employed by Boeing but working 'for' the FAA would cause an issue? It's the 'business friendly' relationship between the FAA and Boeing that's lost both credibility around the world.
This quote from Seattle Times article sums up the relationship:
> “The FAA basically takes orders from Boeing. That’s been going on for the past 10, 15 years for sure,” said Joe Jacobsen, who worked for Boeing from 1984 to 1995 and then at the FAA for more than 15 years. “At the FAA, they talked about being a partnership [between the regulator and the company]. I would call it more of an abusive-spouse relationship.”
https://www.seattletimes.com/business/faas-cozy-relationship... (archive: https://archive.ph/F5BWe)
We already have autonomous entities who are a danger to Humanity. They are called firms.
(No wonder that it's a bunch of very ruthless CEOs who seem the most worried by rogue AIs. But the lack of self-reflection - both with them and with the talking heads who invite them on conferences - is flabbergasting to watch)
Unfortunately, it has become accepted that raw greed is a great ideology for running a business. Which in turn attracts people who are driven by greed.
These days we have a lot of people leading companies making bullshit flowery descriptions of their company and how to run things. but sadly for the most part this is stripped away when reality sets in.
Especially if the company is beholdent to investors or shareholders or similar hands behind the scenes who have their own agendas.
A lot of horrible and inhuman things companies do are explicitly legal. More so in some countries than in others.
As long as we worship greed, things cannot improve.
The Oxford definition of greed:
"intense and selfish desire for something, especially wealth, power, or food"
Greed by its nature is depriving others of something. If there is an endless supply of food lets say. Post scarcity, anyone can eat as much as they want, a person eating a lot of not displaying selfishness. . It may be gluttony, but the person is only harming itself.
If there is scarcity of food, and a person is hoarding it for itself is greed and it means others go hungry.
That is not a hypothetical.
It is the way our society works right now. Some people, cities, states, nations, have far more than they could ever eat, while others in different places are starving to death. Even within the US, a place with a supreme abundance of food, peole are going hungry
Does anyone have more info about this?
