Employees are equally free to "screw over" companies by terminating their employment at any time; at-will is a two-way street. That seems like a fair and faithful manifestation of a free market.
Health care and insurance is also available without an employer, at least in the US.
Yup individual employees are definitely on equal footing with companies and health care is very affordable when purchased individually. The free market is very good and fair and everything is going just fine!
> Employees are equally free to "screw over" companies by terminating their employment at any time; at-will is a two-way street.
Wow. I guess that might seem like a convincing argument if you totally ignore the power imbalance between a terminated employee who loses the ability to pay for basic necessities vs a company that loses the labor of a single person.
The inability for an individual to guarantee payment for necessities cannot be the fault of any company. Each capable adult must be held accountable and responsible for themselves in this world.
Nah I’m pretty comfortable blaming a company for jerking around a new hire, thereby putting their financial status and healthcare needs at risk. That’s shit behavior and deserves to be called out.
The economy objectively only works that way because it’s designed to work that way, designed by people, people that should be held to their unethical behavior. The economy isn’t some mythical law of nature. It’s entirely a man made thing and I have every right to be disappointed in socially-made-up things called “corporations”!
Of course, even most free-market types don't belive this. After all, we collectively pay for things like national defense because it very obviously makes more economic sense than each individual trying to defend against a foreign adversary.
No, the "Each capable adult must be held accountable and responsible for themselves" is only trotted out against things a free-market ideologue doesn't like. It's a nonsense argument, and they know it.
Frankly, it is difficult to "address" a subjective opinion without having been given the criteria for a satisfactory answer. But I will try: being a responsible adult includes contributing to national defense.
Your original statement, that "Each capable adult must be held accountable and responsible for themselves in this world," is a subjective opinion--unless you meant it merely in the sense of a truism--and you did not give me any criteria for a satisfactory "counter-argument".
Regarding this:
>being a responsible adult includes contributing to national defense
you are equivocating between two separate definitions of the word "responsible." Being a responsible adult is not the same as being an adult who is responsible for their own defense or healthcare, for example. They can be correlated, but they have different meanings.
But honestly, this form of internet debating you started that derails from the topic and gets into quasi-logical nitpicking is uninteresting and makes me feel like I'm in a high school, so this will be my last comment. Please feel free to reply, and I will read it. But please make the reply have some substance.
In, say, Germany, are employees bound to stay with a company until the conclusion of some contract, or are they free to move at will while the employer must retain them?
I think most people in the US arguing for employee protections are assuming the latter, but I'm curious how it actually works in Europe.
In Finland there are fixed-term and permanent contracts. Fixed-term ones are extremely hard to terminate one sidely for both parties (excluding separate terms in the contract like probation period). Permanent contracts require certain amount of notice by default. Employees notice period is 14 days if contract has lasted less than 5 years, 1 month otherwise. Employer's notice period are: 14 days if contract has lasted less than a year, 1 month for 1-4 years, 2 months for 4-8 years, 4 months for 8-12 years and 6 months for over 12 years.
Contract and CBA can affect these. The only restrictions law has is that employee's notice period cannot be longer than employer's and that the maximum is 6 months, but CBA can set minimums. The CBAs that I have read set those law's default notice periods as the minimum. Vast majority (I believe about 80-85%) of employees in Finland are covered by some CBA.
I used to work in the UK. I once worked for a company that had a salesperson that wanted to quit. He was forced to do a non-sales job for thirty days stacking boxes and sorting old files before he was allowed to leave and he hated every minute of it.
So yes, sometimes strong labor laws have a hint of slavery to them, but certainly not equivalence to real slavery.
That unusual. He’d only be obliged to continuing his job during his notice period. Not a different job. Sounds like he didn’t know his rights.
Most UK contracts will also include a clause allowing the company to end the employment immediately as long as they still pay out what the employee would have earned during their notice period.
Having been through a few roles in the uk myself, the obligation on the company to give me adequate notice (and pay) has always benefited me.
It makes no sense to you because you're seeing it from the inside as a developer.
Step outside the echo chamber and realize macro-economic trends have replaced the need to innovate with a basic instinct to just survive the coming storm caused by a decade of free money.
What is all this about survival? Most of the giant companies and many of the other ones, all doing layoffs, are making money hand over fist and will likely be wildly profitable for years to come.
This is not about survival. Google and Meta and all these other companies are clearly not struggling to survive like some startup running out of runway.
I'm not sure if it's survival exactly, but it's comparatively bad outlook. They are making money now, but the profit rates are trending downward in some old reliable cash cows. If you look at say amazon, AWS is still very profitable but it's decreasing.
The part that is divorced from reality is when they manically over hire (because pandemic investment and consumption is permanent I guess?) then try to layoff their way back to the way it was which incredibly costly both in money and culture.
Oh god please don't exaggerate with 'survive the coming storm' when it comes to Google. They make like 60 B in profit each year. Survival is so far away from the right word to describe their situation. It's just about profit maximization. How about we step outside the cult of capitalism for its own sake.
How much (less) in profit each year would Google have to make for you to consider them in survival mode? And also, what qualifies you to be the expert on their financial status and needs?
I mean it's not even about innovation per se—we've run out of new frontiers to exploit. First it was a literal frontier, then it was an economic frontier, and finally a computer and internet frontier. Maybe VR is the next thing, but I think we may have hit peak technological usefulness (to consumers) and it's all enshittification from here on out.
Feels like nobody wants to sit down and work on those “frontiers” anymore. Because working on fundamental ideas don’t get you paid in dollars, maybe just a pat in the back.
Profound observation. Further technology from here onwards is only the science fiction level.
Computers that can display information on back of your eye lids maybe (with gadgets no more than an earphone while lasting several days on a charge) so that you don't even have to hold your phone.
But that's really far far into future and even probably downright forbidden by the physics.
The set of people who pass the hiring bar at companies like Google are not modelled as the normal distribution of the average person you come across in the grocery store.
Companies like Google are not known for hiring morons.
It is a self-aggrandizing dumb comparison, and should be dismissed as such. It reads as a desperate attempt to rationalize away these layoffs as something that only applies to others.
The quote from George Carlin, a comedian, is about the general population. The quote itself is from "Doin' It Again / Parental Advisory: Explicit Lyrics" a special in 1990 and predates Google.
I always point that out too. And someone always points out that with distributions average and median are the same. That still doesn't make it right. What's worse is it's a quote about intelligence, so you would think it would use the correct word. Maybe that's the joke, it's summer
dumbed down and smug in the knowledge that everyone that hears it thinks "thank god I'm above average!"
All business is inherently unethical and relies on hiding and externalizing costs of production unto the environment, a vulnerable population, or other forms of legal/tax trickery.
Advertising is no more evil than the for-profit healthcare system in the US, or the food industry, or really any other industry, when you really stop to consider it.
People who think they are operating or working for an "ethical" business are simply unaware or willfully ignorant of its costs. Typically it is the latter, or as Upton Sinclair beautifully put it — "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
My furnace broke after 15 years. I called a business to fix it. They replaced the dead pump motor and it worked again. The repair guy was paid well and I was happy to pay. What exactly is inherently unethical about this?
How about the cost of producing and shipping the new motor pump, and the cost of disposing of the old one?
And do you think the individuals who made the motor pump are treated and compensated fairly, or are they likely exploited in third-world dystopia to bring you (but mostly the business) cost savings?
And this is saying nothing of the actual use of the furnace and all the energy it requires.
And I have yet to see ONE example of a business which does not exploit someone or something, only cognitive dissonance.
So any lack of ethics in the supply chain (which presumably goes back to raw materials) means the entire thing is unethical? I am not sure what definition of ethics this is, but it is so strict as to render everyone and everything unethical, so perhaps not a very useful definition.
If you honestly believe the product is separate from the production and supply chains, you are either woefully misinformed or under the disillusionment of modern capitalist economics.
I didn’t say the product was separate; I merely asked whether you view everything as tainted if its supply chain has any unethical component. Sounds like you do!
What a load of rubbish... Your entire argument hinges on what you consider 'fair compensation' and your value judgement about energy cost. Guess what--living your life and using resources is not unethical
What is incongruous or dishonest about it? You have provided no counter-argument, no alternative theory, only petulance at my recognition of the facts of your sad life.
That is precisely my point though. Just to exist in this world is to have a negative impact on other humans, animals and the environment. The effect is magnified when you live outside of humans' ecological tropical niche as well. While I'm not judging or condemning humanity, I believe it is important to recognize it for what it is.
Ethics are not a law of nature, it's basically an opinion. Your opinion may be that all business is unethical, but most people disagree.
Most people consider it to be ethical to trade money for goods and services at an agreed price, for example.
Similarly I think most people would agree that hiding the truth from people in order to have them do things they wouldn't do if they knew the truth, is unethical. Tracking people's activity without telling them that you are doing it would be unethical by that standard.
what's the ethical alternative? everybody must produce everything they want/need without any sort of trading, and without owning any land? or does the government just force people to work and distribute everything anybody needs?
The ethical alternative is one that balances innovation and entrepreneurship with ecological and social responsibility.
You can use resources, invent stuff, and organise people to work on it, but you only get to do it if Reality-Based Accounting rates the project as a net positive for the planet, and you have to share some of the benefits.
And if you can't make it happen without being consistently cruel and exploitative to some individuals, groups, or locations, you don't get to do it again.
This is not trivial to organise. But it's far more likely to lead to an R&D explosion than the current myopic and manic-depressive comic book version of "the economy" we're all supposed to have irrational faith in.
nothing to spur innovation like panning every idea through a global counsel of magicians who know what's best for the planet.
aside from global consensus on ideas like 'the planet', it'd require mass labor force control and government assignment, two ideas i'm not thrilled about.
I could see it working in a sci-fi novel, but I have a hard time closing the gaps between them and us.
How is aggressive centralized gating supposed to lead to R&D when history shows freedom leads to innovation and prosperity? You don’t need to have faith in anything. The economy exists and is all around us providing great value.
This is so theoretical it will never work in an acceptable way.
Because of who will decide is responsible and on what grounds?
What will come of it will most likely be analogous to the Communist system where just a central committee was in charge of making all the decisions. and to be quite clear: this system failed utterly and completely. Without the capitalist west there would have been famines in DDR and the east.
On what I agree is, that we need a strong state factoring in stuff like ecological consequences via taxation- so the decision to buy or make stuff is distributed.
Fair point, but if we're stretching the definition to the point where nothing can be ethical, then there isn't any meaning to the word "ethical" as it relates to a binary "is" or "is not."
If we agree that nothing can be fully "ethical," there still should be some continuum on which to place the current system, unless you contend that every system and/or action is ethically equal, which I would further contend erases any meaning of the word rendering the premise moot.
So that said, is there any system that is more ethical than the current?
I made a simple assertion: business cannot be ethical, but it is inherently exploitative.
I asked for examples of businesses where this is not the case.
Instead of examples, I got back screetching, whining and whataboutism. People would rather bury their head in the sand and think they're acting virtuously in this world. The cognitive dissonance here is frankly alarming, if it weren't so expected for entitled first-world engineers.
But you only quoted the first part of my statement and not the proof, which I did state:
> All business [...] relies on hiding and externalizing costs of production unto the environment, a vulnerable population, or other forms of legal/tax trickery.
Are you aware of a business which does not have any externalized costs of production which have a negative impact on someone or something?
> I asked for examples of businesses where this is not the case. Instead of examples, I got back screetching, whining and whataboutism.
Please, point out where I did any of that sort.
And I asked for an example of a system that is more ethical, and got nothing but dodging and bitching. I don't think you have any ground to stand on to demand examples (certainly from me, who if you care to read again I'm not disputing your position that business can't be ethical, so it makes zero sense to ask me for an example). It seems unreasonable to expect of others what you aren't willing to give yourself. Dare I say that's ... unethical?
If you want to complain about the real world, then offer solutions that work in the real world. We can then consider and debate them and maybe get somewhere. If you just want to make philosophical contemplations, I'm actually up for that, but not if you aren't going to even bother getting your arguments straight. You just look like a troll in that case.
Actually I changed my mind. I am disputing your contention and here is my example. Please point out where the unethical parts are.
Person a and person b are stranded on an island in the South Pacific. There are no other humans around. Person A gets pretty good at catching fish, while person b gets pretty good at harvesting coconuts. Individually, person a can catch six fish and harvest two coconuts. Person b can catch one fish and harvest eight coconuts. Person b is concerned about not getting enough protein, so they approach person a and offer to trade two coconuts for one fish. Person a Agrees, and a mutually agreeable business transaction has taken place. Both parties are better off than they were before. What part of this is unethical?
By the way, please don't take offense by any of this. You seem to have thick enough skin to trade barbs, and honestly this has been an interesting discussion (minus some unneeded name calling but that's a minor detail between friends like us)
It is telling the only example of an ethical business is a contrived hypothetical scenario entirely removed from objective reality.
What makes it epically hilarious is it is also based on a completely false assertion "person b" needs protein from fish, because they cannot get it from coconut. Be sure to check the following links before you start clamoring about amino acids, too.
It's not entirely removed from objective reality. Firstly, there is no such thing as objective reality for humans. Secondly, the principles that underpin this scenario are highly active in the world today. Things like specialization, efficiency, division of labor, etc.
Not too long ago my neighbor cleaned the carburetor on my lawn mower, and I fixed his router config in exchange. He would have had to spend tons of time figuring out how to do it himself, but it took me 5 minutes. I could have cleaned my own carburetor, but he already had the cleaner and had freshly done one, so it took him 5 minutes but would have taken me 30 minutes plus a trip to the store. The same principles from the example are at play here.
And whether Person B can get enough protein from coconuts is entirely irrelevant. All that matters in this scenario is that Person B was concerned about it and wanted to trade.
> Firstly, there is no such thing as objective reality for humans
What? This is just silly. You don't know the difference between hypothetical fantasy and real life, or are you just being hyperbolic?
> Secondly, the principles that underpin this scenario are highly active in the world today
Still, it is irrelevant since I asked for a real world example.
> Not too long ago my neighbor cleaned the carburetor on my lawn mower, and I fixed his router config in exchange
Another contrived example which excludes the entire world. Who made the lawn mower? Who made the router? Literal slaves in a third world country. Surely you are not so ignorant you know this?
> whether Person B can get enough protein from coconuts is entirely irrelevant
It is not irrelevant; it is hilarious you don't know this simple nutritional fact.
It does not matter what I think; objectively and indisputably my existence in the world, especially in a first-world country, has an enormously negative impact on the planet. And I'm an individual with a conscience - now imagine a business with diversified shareholders!
Funnily I agree with this. But where you go with it sounds like a stubborn “iam14andthisisdeep”.
Language and values should be useful for us to make decisions on. Saying everything is bad and there’s no alternative can be true in a sense but it is not useful, and in most discussions just sounds inane.
Yet the true mental adolescence and gymnastics through this post is the abject failure to furnish even one example of a business which can be considered ethical, instead choosing to believe the false notion we can live, work and shop without consequence.
Maybe you’re missing the point. This is like having a conversation with a nihilist. Yes objectively there is no meaning in the universe. It’s all made up. Now what? We have to move on from that. We live in fictions and narratives that are useful for our success. Just calling everything unethical isn’t useful beyond a dorm room mental exercise.
I don’t think it does! But you shouldn’t be surprised when people are operating under a different framework when engaging with the world. And discussions won’t go anywhere trying to get different conclusions out of different starting points and motives. If everything is unethical then nothing matters, but people don’t want nothing to matter so they construct shades of grey to make choices and judgements on. Your “um actually everything is unethical” is irrelevant to the game they’re playing.
Not to mention it’s absurd a conversation this long hasn’t pointed out the relativity of ethical judgments or event attempted to define what ethical even means.
> Not to mention it’s absurd a conversation this long hasn’t pointed out the relativity of ethical judgments or event attempted to define what ethical even means.
> But you shouldn’t be surprised when people are operating under a different framework when engaging with the world.
The majory of people are idiots, so this part is almost certainly expected and acceptable.
> If everything is unethical then nothing matters, but people don’t want nothing to matter so they construct shades of grey to make choices and judgements on. Your “um actually everything is unethical” is irrelevant to the game they’re playing.
Where did I say everything is unethical? Where did I say nothing matters? This is the way people want to re-frame the conversation because it is too difficult for them to break through their conditioning to apprehend how the world works.
I can’t be bothered to look back up the convo tree. But I remember you saying or implying all commercial activity is unethical and refusing to discuss alternatives among other comments with similar thrust. Other people are trying to do comparative ethics and you’re not playing the same game so makes me wonder what you’re trying to accomplish with short comment bombs.
It’s like you’re walking onto a baseball field trying to play football. You should either surrender the field or undertake a much more in depth education session on the rules of the game you want to switch to. Else it’s just madness.
It wasn’t free money, it was COVID. We had low rates and low inflation for years before 2020.
Remember when the government used emergency powers and forced the economy to shut down over health mandates? Remember the thousands of dollars in checks the government mailed to every person or business with a pulse?
That whole operation completely distorted and screwed up the economy. It boosted tech companies with unnatural growth. It boosted real estate prices. It increased the cost of grocery staples. The market reacted in the rebound, the Fed reacted to the market, and we are playing out the effects of the bad decisions made in 2020.
AFAICT from recent quarterly reports, the big tech companies are still seeing double-digit YoY growth in profits and revenues. So from whence comes the pressure to tighten belts?
FYI it is spelled Tor, not ToR and not TOR.