Comment by rcr-anti
7 hours ago
I usually try not to judge, people have family, commitments, gotta put food on the table. But. I genuinely wonder how people working at some of these companies that actively make the world a worse place live with themselves. This is basically, and obviously, child abuse in the implied usage. Someone might make a tablet good for education, but I don't think Amazon is structurally capable of doing it.
A few years ago this would have made the perfect April Fools joke.
(Continue down below for an amusing rant - trigger warning maybe?)
Now it’s just part of insatiable corporate greed and the current sad reality.
I wonder if Zuck lets his girls use Instagram all day long or if Andy would gift his own toddler (if he had another one) this beautiful tablet. Probably not, he’d have a full time nanny to keep the kid busy.
Alas, these folks are the symptoms and the real problem is systemic folks. Companies are chasing targets to please…drumroll…the shareholders. Yes, each one of us holding index funds are also culpable. It’s a SNAFU. We’ve been sucked whole into the system and escape is hard (especially with the newly proposed Dell bank account for kids that can only be used to invest in stocks).
> especially with the newly proposed Dell bank account for kids that can only be used to invest in stocks
The ol' "The real evil overlord is just you and me" retort is a bit undermined by the existence of products like this one that actively constrain people's actions and pressure them to perpetuate the system. Like, who gave the order to design that product?
It's also not true. "Companies" on their own don't do anything. The operational decisions are made by CEOs and board members who do have a lot of leeway to decide how they want - and often do have an ideology they follow.
Shareholders are also not "you and me" in the common case - especially not with index funds, where you have zero agency to influence the market even despite being a shareholder on paper.
Significant amounts of shares are held by wealthy individuals or other companies with humans at the top - people who are in the same social group (or often the same individuals) as those in the C-suite.
At the level of wealth concentration we are in, I think talking about the "billionaire class" is more constructive than talking about "shareholders" and then noticing full of surprise that we all are shareholders.
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Ethics is taught. Directly or indirectly (i.e. environmental/cultural). Also for some, a loss of an employment has significantly higher consequence than others.
If you take these into consideration then it makes sense why one would make such choice. Whether they are aware of building an evil device is irrelevant at this point -- they're making best choice for themselves and their family. Employers love employees who follows orders so they'll craft environment where only those kinds of employees would survive.
IMO this isn't really the problem between employers and employees. They are doing what the system incentivizes them. It's the regulator's role to govern to protect individuals.
The irony is U.S. allows lobbying and SuperPAC which essentially makes the system in favor of those with money.
Everyone outraged at the companies while they are simply a product of the system. The outrage should be redirected to the system itself.
There should be outrage at both, but woefully it seems only a fraction of it trancends a company label.
I think the people who choose to hurt others for profit are basically psychopathic. No conscience. Lack of empathy or compassion. Inflated Ego. They're no different than muggers and rapists who are also willing to hurt others to get what they want, they just happened to end up finding a way to hurt people that they can (so far) get away with.
People like Jeff Bezos and Andy Jassy who already have more money than they could ever need but still feel compelled to cause others to suffer in order for them to make even more money likely have some other kind of mental sickness. Either some form of pathological greed that causes them to never be satisfied with what they have and obsess over hoarding, or something that causes them to derive some sort of sick pleasure from causing suffering.
Unless/until they can treated our world would be better off if we locked these kinds of people up to keep the rest of us safe from them, but right now those with enough money can get away with just about anything which only further emboldens them. They can bribe law makers to prevent regulations that would stop them from releasing harmful products and services. They can hide behind corporate shields. Hopefully we find a way to hold them accountable for the harms they cause soon because they're never going to stop hurting us, or our children.
That's exactly correct, The idea in itself isn't bad.
Amazon doing it will make it really horrible.
Unless this is 100 open source and ad/telemetry free? Right..
Neoliberalism is at a state where moral shaming has very little effect. If you shame someone for trying to build a career or better themselves, you are the problem to a bigger extent than the person doing the previously morally bad thing. People's shame in a neoliberalist society comes from personal failures, such as not working hard enough, eating too much, not looking good enough, etc.
Have you considered that they are making the the world better and your process of measuring is flawed.
Take my upvote, that made me snort chuckle.
150 years ago, people used to pacify toddlers with "cordial" containing laudanum, better known as opium.
Today we're still doing the same thing, only the drugs hit is being delivered by other means.
Child abuse is practiced by the parents who end up deciding to use such a thing. Please don't shift responsibilities away from those who have them. If a parent makes such a decision, they are prone to also do other bad things to their children.
If somebody was marketing cigarettes for children, I don't think "only bad parents would buy these anyway" absolves the company for knowingly setting this situation up and profiting off it.
Every day I see a celebrity in an ad for gambling and they all have the same defence "well, if people choose to gamble if they have a problem, then that's on them". Everyone knows it will destroy lives. But they say "that's on them for buying what I'm selling".
People are walking around perpetuating the moral compass of a heroin dealer like it's normal. You are responsible for your mark on the world and your fellow human beings. Yes, even if you only did the bad thing to get the money.
You could appy the same hyperbole to alcohol. Yet America learnt 100 years ago that prohibition isn't really s solution. As much as you might hate it, there isn't really a way around people being responsible for their actions to a certain degree. Besides, comparing technology to heroin on a site like HN is pretty hilarious.
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> I genuinely wonder how people working at some of these companies that actively make the world a worse place live with themselves. This is basically, and obviously, child abuse in the implied usage.
My guess: there are a lot more narcissists and sociopaths out there than you'd guess, and they bully the rest into submission.
Marx explained how the division of labor alienates people from what they produce, from the act of production itself, from their human nature, and from one another. People are forced to perform mind-numbing, degrading, or *harmful tasks* simply to earn the wages needed to stay alive, reducing human life to a commodity
Marx was also an adulterer and refused to take responsibility for children he fathered so I don't think he's the best person to listen to in this situation.
Unsubstantiated gossip doesn't address the topic.
~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Marx#Family
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I'm neither of those bad things, can my economic theories and, in fact, all of my points of view and opinions, be taken seriously?
Not agreeing with marxism here, but what you’re saying is just ad hominem. Marx could be a horrible person to his daughters and wife and still propose correct theory on economics. There are far more credible criticisms of his work.
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If not Amazon, someone else would ship this. At least if you ship it you can make it less shitty
Right, because it's profitable.
There are lots of wildly profitable enterprises that we regulate or make illegal.
If everyone else is selling boiled orphan elixir, you'd be leaving money on the table not to boil yourself some orphans. But maybe we decide that boiling orphans isn't an industry we want as a society, and legislate consequences for doing so.
> If not Amazon, someone else would ship this. At least if you ship it you can make it less shitty.
I'm sure someone's thinking that, and it's a bullshit rationalization. Don't turn yourself into a villain because you think someone else might beat you to it.
Also, if true, it's a stark indictment of capitalism, and how it pushes people towards malign and harmful activities.
I think we all understand capitalism is inherently flawed. I also think this a bit more nuanced than black and white.
The biggest issue with capitalism is that it rewards the people with no moral compass with power. In a broken system like this, no change will ever come unless people start to decide to do something about it. This comes in two forms: replacing the system, and reforming the system. Both of these require influence. The more influence a person has, the more change they can enact. And let's face if, we live in a system where money can directly be converted to power and influence (see our elections and politics as a whole). To make real changes you have to play the game, and unfortunately there are a lot more evil people playing the game than good. To try to skew that ratio in the right direction a little bit is a good idea in my books.
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This line of argument is popular bullshit.
Technology is not linear. There are many paths it can take.
Your contributions are somewhat unique. To a certain degree, if you don't make it, no one will.
It's not obviously child abuse. If you go back 100 years old children were abused far more than we possibly could simply by malnutrition, disease, lack of shelter. Giving them something that may or may not harm them is not obviously child abuse.
> If you go back 100 years old children were abused far more
I don't understand the argument here. 100 Years ago they were abused more, but last year they were abused less. So increasing the dosage of the abuse is ok as long as it doesn't exceed your random benchmark of 100 years ago?
Dunno if poverty (the things you mentioned) counts as abuse. This is closer to giving children cigs, but back then it was not recognized as harmful. Whereas we already know this technology is harmful.
> Whereas we already know this technology is harmful.
Technology is harmful, starting from fire and farming. So what?
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Research has shown there isn't any ambiguity here. Stuff like this isn't good for adults, and is even worse for kids. So yeah, obvious child abuse.
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wow what an endorsement