News
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
view the rest of the comments
You cannot have that much wealth and operate in an ethical way, it's not possible. Just like you cannot have non-consensual sex with somebody in an ethical way, there is no scenario where that is possible.
Just because a system allows you to do something doesn't make it morally acceptable to do it. Right now, it's trivial to scam people out of tens of thousands of dollars using meme crypto-currency. But just because you can do it doesn't mean it's morally acceptable.
That's the classic, "don't hate the player, hate the game." incorrect, you can hate both the player, and the game, it's not mutually exclusive.
Capitalism is a fundamentally evil system. It allows and creates incentives for people to make effectively unlimited amounts of money by exploiting others. Billionaires are the ultimate example of what happens when Capitalism is allowed to run rampant for centuries. No one person should be able to amass that amount of wealth and power, it's wrong, and it indicates deep societal problems.
An ethical way to operate a company would be some kind of employee-owned structure, where everybody who works for the company has equal say in how it operates. They get to decide if they want a CEO, who it is, and what they get paid. They get to decide collectively what the company does with the profits. They might decide to equally distribute it to all employees. They might decide to reinvest some percentage in better workflows, better equipment, or nicer facilities. The point is it would actually be democratic.
Also, I know this guy wasn't a Billionaire. There are other ways to be a bad person than being a billionaire.
You are starting your argument off with two entirely different concepts. Employees are paid for their work because they are employees. Non-consensual sex is the explicit lack of agreement to be in the situation.
Please, tell me WHY it is unethical to employ people? How is it exploitive to run a business? At what point does a company make so much money that it's unethical for them to continue doing business?
I'm on board with a coop and democratically run operations. When in history has any company ever succeeded as such? To my knowledge, these are locally run organizations with no ability to scale up. So, how do we end up with big nation and world changing projects? Is it your belief that we shouldn't have large scale projects? We shouldn't have corporations like Google or Caterpillar or Visa? Is it your belief that we ~~should~~ must destroy everything we know and go back to village life? Are these real things that you think have to happen or is this in an idealistic world? How do you take what we have now and make it into your image?
Do you think merely agreeing to something makes the arrangement acceptable? A mugger sticks a gun to my head and says, "give me your wallet or I'll kill you." I give him my wallet. Was that actually a real, consensual choice? Of course not, agreement is a necessary condition for a fair contract, but not a sufficient one.
If you're doing the work, you're entitled to the fruits of your labor. Slavery is the exact inverse of that, where you are entitled to none of the fruits of your labor.
Capitalism tries to split the difference, where depending on a complex set of contractual agreements of dubious legitimacy, you are entitled to some arbitrary amount of fruit for your labor.
There are degrees of severity of course, some relationships are far more exploitative than others.
There isn't a magical number where a business becomes unethically profitable. The issue with Capitalism isn't one of degree. It's not like a bath that's too hot, where the only issue is the temperature needs to be lowered.
If your business operates in a way that is undemocratic, it's unethical. Doesn't matter if all the employees agreed to it, doesn't matter if they all signed contracts permitting it, doesn't matter that the legal system allows the business to operate like that.
Now of course, as I said, there are degrees. A mom & pop flower shop that employs local high school kids as part time workers, pays them well, and treats them nicely, that's not a huge issue. Unethical still, but not terrible. It's like cheating on a middle school pop quiz, still wrong, but extremely minor.
You also brought up the issue of practicality. This requires a lot of depth to respond to, so would you prefer to pivot to that, or stay on the more theoretical questions about Capitalism and exploitation?