> Then it raised venture capital, hit scale, and needed to hit growth numbers and meet quarterly metric goals. The focus shifted from “authenticity” to “daily active users.”
Having spent a few years in the VC world I have been increasingly convinced outside investment is the biggest reason why companies lose their morals. The legal obligation to represent shareholders erodes morality. When the people running these companies feel they’re beholden to shareholders and can’t act on their own agency of course they will turn to addiction research not as a warning but as a guidebook. It’s Stanford Prison Experiment stuff.
I hate being reductionist, and I am posting this on a historically YC forum so of course there’s nuance, but there’s a pretty huge throughline of outside investment and addiction engineering. It sucks we’re seeing less grants and less security net to encourage risks under current administration, because it leaves investment as the quickest path to starting or scaling a company. Donate to open source, IMO
I feel that it's even simpler: The company is the product.
When we have that mindset, we absolutely don't care about the thing that we call "our product." It's just food for the actual product, where we want to fatten it up, and sell it to the biggest slaughterhouse.
That starts almost immediately. You can't even get an A round, without an "exit plan."
I feel that the very existence of an exit plan, dooms the user. No one cares about them. It's all about fattening the company, and making it look good. When we do that, we'll feed it nothing but junk food, in an effort to make it as fat as possible, as quickly as possible, with absolutely no thought as to long-term viability.
I would love to see the tech industry return to concentrating on truly delivering good to the end-user. It's still possible to make a decent living, but maybe not at the insane rates we see.
"The company is the product." -> When I'm feeling more optimistic I see this is how VC sees their portfolio and how you sell it to them, but not what the company is in reality. Like playwrights who write under authoritarian regimes selling it to the censor as promoting the regime while it actually satirizes and undermines them. But even if it's possible to walk that line, the data just doesn't back it up as common.
Side note, on "exit plan" - the most ridiculous thing about raising money is you need an exit strategy but you cannot explicitly say you have an exit strategy, you have to imply it while the whole time pretending it's not a focus for you. It's a very weird dynamic.
It helps to formally understand who is who. Every company has staff, customers, suppliers and product.
If you go the VC route then the VC is the customer. Since any good business is focused on customer satisfaction, a VC funded business is focused on VC satisfaction.
VCs want an exit. Which necessarily means switching funding model. The only switch that has worked so far is advertising. Advertising requires attention.
Of course a business can succeed with say SaaS subscriptions instead of advertising. This works well for B2B, but less so for B2C. Amazon is the poster child for B2C success, but makes most of its money from AWS (which is B2B).
The pattern is now well understood, and well demonstrated. If your business is B2C then figure out the funding model. If you can't do that, if you can't do it without VC money, then your path is predestined.
That's what you get when an expert financial trader makes a company. He wanted billions from the start ... so how to do it? There's only one way, really: a pyramid scheme. But an atypical one: get lots of sales, lots of revenue and change any profit into capital. This is quite a common plan in Western Europe, and that's why it doesn't work there.
Why would you do that? Well companies are taxed on profit. And the money you pay to investors ... is also paid out of the profit. No profit -> all the money stays in the company, under the control of management, ready to be deployed on yachts and castles for the CEO. Governments get nothing. Investors get nothing.
Jeff Bezos (and very early investors) get everything. If they get desperate there is a buyback (no doubt matched by a greater stock package for the top of the company).
This is a pyramid scheme because the whole company only works because it only makes extremely minimal profit. If it starts demanding profit it will be eaten alive by competition in no time at all. Money has to be invested in, flows to the top, and is taken out at the top. No doubt Bezos was utterly baffled by the success of it and therefore isn't yet out, but ...
> If it starts demanding profit it will be eaten alive by competition in no time at all.
At least until it becomes too big to fail and can build anticompetitive "moats" around itself to increase the amount of profit it can take.
For example, in the case of Amazon, they aren't just a retailer, they're a logistics and shipping company, too. And all of those are separate, itemized services that suppliers pay for, which increases revenue in a very opaque and difficult to understand way. On the customer's end that means higher prices and worse selection.
Any competitor to Amazon doesn't just have to get the same products for cheaper, they also have to build their own shipping company that can get products to people with <48hr turnaround. This provides a lot of room for Amazon to take a cut.
That being said, when you start building a giant business empire the direct profits matter less than the amount of control over the economy you get. In other words, you have the power to tax and subsidy, just like a government does. Amazon maintained minimal profit by deliberately subsidizing new business ventures until they could get big enough to become extractive on their own.
At no point does the business flip a switch and go from "deliberately burning money to avoid carrying a profit" to "extracting so much profit they get eaten by nimbler competition". They instead are always burning money, and always extracting, moving money to where they see fit.
If you've ever dealt with Investor Relations at a public company, this becomes very apparent very quick.
Core fundamentals as a business can be strong, but if you cannot craft a unique story or thesis (which does not have to be tangentially related with active initiatives) about your company, you will not succeed.
Usually, the onus should fall on PM, EMs, and Sales Leadedship to drive customer outcomes, but the hyperfocus on short term deliverables AT THE EXPENSE of a long term product vision makes it difficult to push back.
Very few newly founded or public companies can do the latter - the most recent ones I can think of are maybe Datadog and Wiz (not public but they did drive a customer centric mentality internally).
Of course, a lot of this is also due to the extreme bloat that formed in the tech industry in the late 2010s to early 2020s. Teams grew unrealistically large with limited financial justification beyond cherry-picked growth metrics, and this meant a lot of companies lost the ability to innovate frugally or nimbly. Unrealistically high valuations also played a role because towards the end, founders could end up demanding IPO-sized multiples in private markets even without the underlying fundamentals (eg. Lacework's $9 BILLION valuation on what was at most $90 MILLION in revenue).
A lot of the current AI products and stories are cost-competitive due to that bloat itself, so some amount of rightsizing will help the industry.
Isn’t all this company is the product stuff an obvious side effect of wealth inequality?
There is way way more money up top looking for investments than there is in the hands of customers, so it’s far more profitable to chase that money and make the stock the product than it is to care about the actual product much.
It’s a special case of the more general big dumb money problem that happens whenever too much money ends up in too few hands, whether those hands are a government or a few private rich citizens. You end up with this giant piñata of big dumb money and everyone whacking it.
In the old USSR instead of the stock is the product it was the appearance in the eyes of other bureaucrats is the product, but it’s kind of the same phenomenon. The customer isn’t the customer.
They are betting on whether richer people will bet on the same things so they can cash out. Repeat, all the way up.
The entire economy is to some degree a casino betting on itself. I think this is always true to an extent but the casino nature becomes much more dominant the more unbalanced things become.
I would be willing to bet addiction in general (gambling, drug, dopamine, etc) is probably a symptom/side effect of wealth inequality. Desperation -> "relatively cheap method of short term emotional/sensory boost" -> Further Desperation not mitigated by outside forces -> repeat
You must not know many rich people if you think addiction is not an issue for the wealthy. The drugs of choice are less immediately destructive, but cocaine, pills, MDMA and ketamine are all wildly abused by the 1%.
All humans are susceptible to addictions and addictive behavior, but the 1% that you mention are mostly shielded from their negative effects. It's far less of an issue for them, and it's not even just about choosing the less destructive drugs. If we talk about just drug addictions, their wealth ensures that:
1. They always have a reliable supply of their preferred drug. No matter how much they need, many of them will be able to afford it pretty much indefinitely. They can just live with the addiction.
2. They have first-class healthcare to mitigate the addiction and lessen its side effects.
3. They have the power to never run into any legal trouble over it. How often do 1%s get convicted on drug possession? This often applies even to the harshest regimes.
So, referring to what the other commenter said, the wealth inequality also affects addicts unequally. The rich, excluding the most extreme exceptions, are immune to the downward spirals of addictions and many of their consequences. The poor addicts become increasingly desperate as their drug habit consumes most of their income and savings. The poorest turn to the cheapest, most dangerous street drugs. Many get little to no medical help. Many are charged with drug-related crimes, ensuring their criminality keeps them down for the rest of their lives. This varies by country, but the patterns are all similar.
There's always going to be an underlying layer of people who tend to gravitate towards addictions, rich and poor - the real question is if more and more people are turning to them as they get desperate, who wouldn't otherwise have.
Then rich people would never be addicted to things, but a history of musicians dying from drug overdoses says that's not true. Addiction is a deep topic that doesn't simplify into one neat little pet theory for it.
Well it's not a neat little pet theory though, it's an opening up of the conversation, thinking in binary.. It's a "poor vs rich" disease isn't helpful. Thinking in gradients is... "It's 50% more likely in people with this income level vs 10% in this other population", that's still a problem. The point is to address problems, not hand wave them away as "complicated" etc etc, something something engineering
the article is about digital addictions, and not gambling or drugs.
The point of saying it's complicated isn't to dismiss the problem, but to invite a deeper understanding of the problem itself so as to be better equiped to help solve the underlying issue, rather than show up, guns blazing, and then not actually fix anything.
In the short run if you can get acquired then the long run fundamentals don't matter. They just become noise in some larger company's financial statements.
> A lot of the current AI products and stories are cost-competitive due to that bloat itself, so some amount of rightsizing will help the industry.
The problem is, any amount of rightsizing has the potential to tank the entire economy. Too big to fail, just that it isn't banks this time but a bunch of companies who went all in on "AI".
Capitalism as we know it so far only reacts after a crash happens because of the fear of crashing the economy with any corrective action. My very personal opinion is this is more psychological than scientific.
No, the reason is because these "crashes" are very small so on average you lose more trying to avoid them than just staying invested. The emotional part is trying to avoid them, the rational part isn't.
When you really think about it, this also applies to very many publicly traded companies. Tech especially, always searching to present next growth area. And then often shortly abandoning it or wasting massive resources on it...
We make fun of the state run businesses of old communist regimes, how wasteful they were, how mismanaged they were, how they produced stuff nobody wanted and so on. I'm increasingly getting a similar feeling for VC fueled tech. It's all smoke and mirrors of hype (was blockchain or web3.0 yesterday, AI and quantum today). There is so much wasted money, especially after quantitative easing and negative interest rates of the past decade.
Publicly traded is no better. Lets not forget whole Meta and Metaverse and VR "investment". Google basically launching entire physical products and then killing them and refunding everyone (Stadia)...
One might question would we as society be better off if that money was spend on more efficient factories or say nuclear powerplants?
The difference is that VC fueled startups is a very small part of the economy while communist regimes are the entire economy.
Imagine if every company was as wasteful as VC fueled startups and life would be hell, imagine going to the new smart grocery store where prices changes by the minute and now you have surge pricing since many wanted to buy toilet paper this minute...
They may be a small part of the economy as measured in imaginary numbers being shifted around but still have a significant negative effect on our lives that cannot be easily escaped. This is even more true when you also count publicly traded companies which have similar incentives to sell out their "customers" in order to benefit the real customers and are often just the final form of VC funded startups.
You force them to pay for the negative externalities they cause so that their profit incentives are not as misaligned with what is good for the rest of the world. This includes making companies pay for pollution but also for much more abstract damages like the reduced consumer choice from monopolies.
To be clear, business operators have extremely, extremely broad latitude in how they interpret their fiduciary duty to shareholders.
We actually need to combat this notion that somehow exclusive focus on short term returns is somehow legally, morally, or ethically required. It is actually antisocial and obviously destructive.
Well, there was one case in the law over 100 years ago in the USA. A company had decided to sell itself for cash and go out of business. The Court ruled, that in that situation, it should sell to the highest bidder. This is long before Milton Friedman began advocating that corporations had a duty to their common shareholders that provided the only valid yardstick for evaluating corporate activities. Friedman was an economist, and a controversial one, not a lawyer, and how he got the lawyers behind him is itself a long strange story.
The idea that common shareholders own the corporation was not really obvious to anyone from the start. Common shareholders get from the corporation only what is their privilege according to the corporate bylaws and charter. There are now, and have been in the past, many different kinds of and classes of common shareholders. For example, some big corporations today have many common shareholders who do not have any voting rights. The thing that sets common shareholders apart from the other stakeholders who also hold pieces of paper from the corporation granting them various interests in the corporation, is that the common shareholders get to divide up whatever is left over if and when the corporation is liquidated and everyone else is given what they are owed first. They are more heirs than owners. It is more realistic to hold that the corporation, as an artificial person, is not and cannot be owned by other persons, and owns itself.
It’s incredible how many people don’t understand this. Google is an obvious example that has multiple classes of stock and only some are voting shares.
There is the “shareholder lawsuit” but that really is about enforcing a company’s stated goals to its shareholders, which can and often are things other than “try to make the stock price go up as much as possible”.
It's not legally required in the state of Delaware (or Michigan where Dodge v Ford occured) to _maximize_ shareholder value.
It's that if you're going to make a decision that affects 1/3 of the companies value you need to actually claim it's in the shareholders interest that you do so.
I don't think maximization of shareholder value is really the interesting part, it's the mandate that they must be prioritized ahead of employees and customers.
> It's that if you're going to make a decision that affects 1/3 of the companies value you need to actually claim it's in the shareholders interest that you do so.
I'm not really sure where the 1/3rd ratio came from. Can you explain? To my layman's ear, "value" and "shareholder value" are the exact same thing.
> I don't think maximization of shareholder value is really the interesting part, it's the mandate that they must be prioritized ahead of employees and customers.
The problem is that Ford didn't try to claim that the factory was in the shareholder's best interest.
> I'm not really sure where the 1/3rd ratio came from. Can you explain? To my layman's ear, "value" and "shareholder value" are the exact same thing.
Nothing special about 1/3. It's the value of the dividend (19 M) / value of Ford (60 M). If you're going to spend 1/3 of the company on something you better at least claim it's in the company / shareholder's best interest.
---
To quote the wikipedia article
> Under some interpretations, the case also affirmed that the business judgment rule that directors may exercise is expansive, leaving Ford and other businesses a wide latitude about how to run the company, if management decisions can point to any rational link to benefiting the corporation as a whole.
And then to emphasis: "if management decisions can point to any rational link to benefiting the corporation as a whole."
Genuine question because I think I might be wrong on this one, or maybe misunderstanding what you're saying - aren't there cases of shareholders suing CEOs for not acting in shareholders interest and winning? If there was no legal obligation to act on behalf of shareholders how could they win those cases?
My understanding is those kind of cases aren't common because a) they are hard to prove, b) the people being sued if they actually have the money to make it worth suing them also have the money to fight it, and c) it's a really bad look for an investor to be suing a previous member of their portfolio and would a strong adverse affect on their deal flow
Unless you're saying there is no explicit legal obligation / fiduciary duty in law, but it does emerge from civil court cases, which is how I understand it, but short paragraphs are not a good place for the amount of nuance so I just said "legal obligation" as a shorthand for something real but very complex.
I think Matt Levine coined this phrase: "everything is securities fraud."
Activist investors will sue for anything alleging that executives broke securities law by doing anything that harmed their portfolio. It doesn't mean they win the cases, or that anyone is guilty.
There's also something worth noting that even if there isn't a legal obligation for executives to act on their shareholders interests, they have a really strong incentive when their compensation is mostly stock grants and the shareholders can fire them.
> The Court declared that, in certain limited circumstances indicating that the "sale" or "break-up" of the company is inevitable, the fiduciary obligation of the directors of a target corporation are narrowed significantly, the singular responsibility of the board being to maximize immediate stockholder value by securing the highest price available.
Seems to imply that under normal operation (i.e. no inevitable break-up) the fiduciary obligations are quite different though?
Yes, under normal circumstances, the "business judgment rule" applies which is much more favorable to boards. Satisfying it requires only that directors:
- act in good faith;
- act in the best interests of the corporation;
- act on an informed basis;
- not be wasteful;
- not involve self-interest (duty of loyalty concept plays a role here).
If I had to choose between common good and shareholder value all else being equal, I'd choose common good every time.
We should be suspicious of games that favor shareholder value over common good and repair them. Of course this is harder than it sounds, but letting the person with the most money in a Monopoly game also set the rules is absurd and and obviously wrong. Wrong even without having a consensus reality on what "common good" entails and this is important.
The "capital game" should serve us, rather than us serving it. A fatalistic lack of imagination is no longer an option. When we're more afraid of unintended consequences than accepting that we have a responsibility to the current consequences, our current consequences look rather intended.
You're never going to be able to change the economic system for the entire population where you live. Better to vote with your feet and move to a country where all economic activity is arranged for "the common good". There are many, many such countries. You're not the first with that idea.
That of course won't mean that you will have the privilege of deciding for everyone else what counts as "the common good". It's unfortunately not like the Arch Linux terminal where you are omnipotent.
I say that sincerely, as somebody who had to do just that. It's easier for Mohammad to go to the mountain.
Edit: To say: I voted with my feet and moved to a place which better aligns with my values. From a "common good" society to a "freedom" society.
I'm not sure this is true. My analysis shows that 75% of economic transitions are completed without violent revolt.
Just a quick glance at the 44 historic economic transitions in my dataset, most of them aren't well known. The most likely reason why we think economic revolutions are associated with violent revolt is due to selection bias - violent revolts are more memorable, take up a larger section of history books, etc.
Happy to take at look at your dataset and compare notes.
Many EU countries are pretty nice places to live, and didn't need a violent revolution to make it happen. All it took was democracy, a population willing to stand for its rights, and an elite which understood that building a welfare state is preferable outcome over having a violent Communist/Fascist revolution.
A capitalist system with right amount of social democracy to prevent worst concentration of wealth is the best model there is, at least for the well-being of its citizen and survival of its democracy.
"Stand for it's rights" is just weasel words for "Was willing to use violence in order to obtain their rights"
Even if they never actually had to become violent, violence or the credible threat of violence is the only thing that has ever in history convinced "The Elites" to change things
There was no such revolt in the country where I live, and in many others. Also if you are talking about France it was to create democracy, not to change the economic system, with democracy you can change the economic system without a revolution.
> Also if you are talking about France it was to create democracy, not to change the economic system
I'm no expert on the French Revolution but I'm pretty sure that "We're all poor while the monarchs are all rich" was a huge driving force behind the French Revolution. "Let them eat cake", etc
It also didn't create democracy, they more or less immediately wound up under Napoleon, a self crowned Emperor
> It also didn't create democracy, they more or less immediately wound up under Napoleon, a self crowned Emperor
It did create democracy, the French Republic, Napoleon did end that though but its much easier to reinstate democracy later than to create it from scratch.
> I'm no expert on the French Revolution but I'm pretty sure that "We're all poor while the monarchs are all rich" was a huge driving force behind the French Revolution. "Let them eat cake", etc
Revolutions to loot the rich happened a lot throughout history, but here the explicit goal was to end monarchy and create democracy not just looting the rich, that is a big difference.
I think the majority of European countries had a violent revolution. And the German invasion of many neighboring nations had the same characteristics, they were welcomed with their new world order by the populace in many places.
The war in general ushered in new economic systems.
After Stalin's death, the Soviet union wasn't a total failure. And few can argue that China is a total failure today. But they paid a much higher price than what's acceptable. To make a somewhat successful "common good" society you first need to exterminate large swatches of the population. (This includes Scandinavian countries, which is less common knowledge). Then you can build on the new generation which won't resist - for a while. And the results are still lack luster, depending on your measuring stick.
There's no general way to model, only empirical evidence. Unless I'm supposed to enter the mind and soul of people and see their motives and reasoning.
Kind of sounds like what is happening now in the west under our current financial/economic system, albeit slowly by manufacturing crisis's and health problems to whittle down the population.
>To make a somewhat successful "common good" society you first need to exterminate large swatches of the population
It sounds like you are conflating "common good" with authoritarianism.
Common good happens at the grass roots level and then spreads by consensus. Doesnt mean it will happen on a large scale, esp if there are larger forces at work.
It seems like this is a population size problem to me. Or at least a concentration of large populations in a small area (Cities). Maybe the trick is to spread out the population a bit more and prevent areas from becoming over populated somehow.
I don't have the data in front of me right now, but there are some sources that say when groups become to large people vie for attention which causes the most egoic people to try and dominate the areas that they are in.
Thus this creates social circles that try to gain power for powers sake and do not contribute to society.
> when groups become to large people vie for attention which causes the most egoic people to try and dominate the areas that they are in.
You may be interested in this essay from the feminist movement in the 60s: https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm. It describes how the lack of structure or process forces the group to be run primarily by social dynamics like friendship, charm and influence.
There are lots of effects that happen as groups scale. But this capture of consensus-based and flat groups by ego-centric charismatic members happens in even tiny groups.
That's why successful flat groups (e.g. parliaments) have structure (e.g. Robert's rules) and make decisions by majority vote rather than consensus.
Yeah I can see some truth in this. Structure and processes help us deal with this problem. And my experience has been that structures and process get corrupted, kind of like what has happens in or political systems over the years.
IMHO, it seems like it easier to deal with ego when the groups are smaller. When they get too large, we tend to use bureaucracies to manage decision making logistics. Bureaucracies make it easier for people that want power over others to hide.
> After Stalin's death, the Soviet union wasn't a total failure. And few can argue that China is a total failure today. But they paid a much higher price than what's acceptable. To make a somewhat successful "common good" society you first need to exterminate large swatches of the population. (This includes Scandinavian countries, which is less common knowledge). Then you can build on the new generation which won't resist - for a while. And the results are still lack luster, depending on your measuring stick.
What do you mean by exterminate large swatches of the population in Scandinavia? Yes the way the Sumi have (and to a degree still are) been treated is atrocious, but I'd argue that if anything this is not a feature of creating a "common good" society. I would argue that strongly capitalistic/mercetalistic societies have a horrible track record of treating (and still treat) indigenous populations.
They're called Sami, and I don't think they've been treated much worse than any other ethnicity in Nordic countries.
What I'm referring to are the eugenics programs in Sweden, where unfit people were sterilized and/or had their children taken from them. These kind of programs were also present in North America, for what it's worth. The complete extent of these programs will probably forever be unknown, in all countries. Scandinavian countries are probably the countries who are most open about this, just like with suicide reporting.
As for Finland, they had a communist revolution and a very brutal civil war about the same time as the Russians. So their "common good" society was also born from a bloodbath, although the communists lost the war.
Norway is probably an exception. They're building a "common good" society on oil fortunes, just like the Gulf states have no problem with giving generous welfare for all of their citizens.
Switzerland is not a good place for working moms. It is a very conservative country, for example working moms are systematically discriminated. The society, police, insurance, and banks enforce a conformity to a conservative, male-dominated society.
I hear you but disagree. Who decides what the common good is? You end up with companies moralizing, forcing employees to adhere to those common goods in both their work and personal lives. Forcing people to get the vaccine was for the common good. DEI was common good and that in turn led to Trump being elected. The pendulum swings.
At least with share holder value, you know where you stand. The common good is a constantly changing thing determined by the moral authority in charge at a moment in time.
Common good: humans, according to systems theory, have the same needs and there's a finite set. We can map them & then design systems so as to satisfice all of them.
If one of human needs is status and status is zero-sum, then why does it matter what economic system is in place at all? We could equally rely on feats of strength, or games of chess, or rolling dice for all I care.
Besides why can't one of human needs also be an economic system that doesn't have the failure mode of poverty?
> We could equally rely on feats of strength, or games of chess, or rolling dice for all I care.
Those aren't very productive, our current system makes people produce value for others in their chase for status. Older systems people destroyed value for others in that chase, creating wars or other miseries, we have much less of that today.
I'd much rather have another billionaire than another authoritarian warmongering dictator.
> our current system makes people produce value for others in their chase for status
I don't think most of the people who have extremely high status are doing anything remotely close to producing value
They just own capital which they use to pay other people to produce value, which they then take credit for, which boosts their status
So it would seem that we're pretty divorced from the idea of "produce value -> get status" these days, if you can just pay people to produce value for you instead
Billionaires are the warlords of the 21st century. The only difference is that we've switched the map. We don't compete on the land, we compete on economic territory. But the results are the same - they fill the same role.
Expansionism, cult of followers, dispensing boons, and absolute control over their territory? check. The only reason we don't recognize them as warlords is because they don't wave scimitars and wear turbans. Neolibrral warlords wear Patagonia vests and beige slacks.
We're terrible at mistaking asthetics for function. Fortresses have been replaced by platforms; trade routes replaced by data sharing agreements. Armies have been ursurped by legal teams and lobbyists. We barely escaped feudalism and it's not clear we're out of the orbit of neo feudalism.
If we're able to be honest with ourselves, we need to learn that asthetics and function are different things. Just because they look different doesn't mean they don't fulfill the same function.
If it's zero sum you can design a system where everyone gets three sane amount. That's what strict monogamy does for mating, and you can easily imagine some "everyone is equal" communism-like system.
In practice that doesn't work, and the most successful "common good" systems instead ensure the disparity is limited and access is as equal as possible (e.g. not everyone can be wealthy, but the wealthy are not too rich and anyone had a chance to become rich instead of needing rich parents; or everyone can only have one married partner at a time instead of people who can afford it amassing big harems and not leaving any partners for the rest; or anyone can become famous, and famous people pushing their kids into fame is looked down on)
Humans don't generally have the same needs, and to the extent they do they're competing over limited resources.
At one extreme you get theories like communism or socialism that treat humans as disposable cattle to be murdered or starved when they stand in the way of whatever the party leaders decide is the common good.
The common good is something that has to be worked out deliberatively and is more like taking the resultant of a huge number of force vectors than it is like mass producing units of the same good for everyone.
The word "Common Good" has a specific meaning. It steams from the word "Common" which means the people that share common values at our most basic levels, and "Good" means whats best for the people that share these common values.
What you are talking about is imposed self-interest at the level of the population from one or a small population that do not represent the common good. Not the same thing IMHO.
That's not what common good is. Common good never requires that people share core values.
Common good historically was what's good for the city/polis/country/band/family. Basically, you make some (ideally relatively small) sacrifice to your own interest for the sake of a larger group you share fate with.
There are more formal/mathematical versions of it, for example in Bentham where the common good is essentially a weighted sum over the good to each individual. Rousseau described it almost exactly as the resultant of force vectors. There are more authoritarian versions like in historical Sparta and more recently in Marx and Engels where it's imposed through violence.
> imposed self-interest
I'm not sure exactly what you're saying here, but self-interest is almost by definition not externally imposed. In Marxism one particular vision of the common good is imposed externally via a "revolutionary terror."
c. 1300, "belonging to all, owned or used jointly, general, of a public nature or character," from Old French comun "common, general, free, open, public" (9c., Modern French commun), from Latin communis "in common, public, shared by all or many; general, not specific; familiar, not pretentious." This is from a reconstructed PIE compound ko-moin-i- "held in common," compound adjective formed from ko- "together" + moi-n-, suffixed form of root mei- (1) "to change, go, move," hence literally "shared by all."
Your confusing political language with what came before this. Common good is the will of the people. It has nothing to do with cities, countries, or states. All of those things were created by people that wield political power. This is not the same as the common good. Common good directly relates to what is good for the people that share common values. You have been misinformed, by political society unfortunately.
The idea of common good is centuries older than the appearance of French or the English translation.
It has nothing to do with shared values. It's exactly as I described it above.
Notice the reconstructed PIE means to move together. Common good is about the interests of groups that co-move rather than groups that share values.
This makes sense even in family contexts. What is good for the family is often different from what any one person wants. Think about things like choosing dinner for a big hungry family on a long road trip.
Often the best solution is at best everyone's third or fourth choice because values and desires differ.
So "Common Good" is directly related to "Common Law" which showed up in 509-27 BC Rome during the Republic period and it was a way to have a common understanding between the "Common People" when Rome's political state was trying to use political law against non-Romans. The common people needed a way to protect themselves from the rising emperors and their decrees.
So I understand that you think its about families, but in this context, its really not. It was a way or a method to protect commoners.
When I say value, I mean if we both value freedom then we have a "Shared Value". This is really about the rights of the people which differs what rulers, want for the people. And I mean rulers that want to wield power against the people, for self-interested purposes.
Again that is not what common good is and it does not originate in the Roman Republic.
I'm honestly not sure it's worth responding here or what you're trying to say about Rome. It sounds like you may be confusing the Roman Republic with the Roman Empire, which started much later in 31 BCE. For one thing the Roman Republic did not have an emporer. For another it wasn't expanding militarily or ruling non-Romans.
And you also seem to be confusing different uses of "common".
Common generally means something held collectively by a group. By extension it can mean "customary" as in common law rather than statutory law. By extension it also can mean "ordinary" or "plain", as in "common house cat". "Commoners" or "common people" are just "ordinary" people; that is, people without titles.
The only connection between the "common" in "common good" and "common people" is the use of the string "common". The word means different things in the two contexts.
Rome most certainly was expanding militarily and ruling non romans far before it became an empire. The punic wars for example were more than a century before it became an empire.
No the original meaning of "Common Good" is related to "Common Law" And that actually originated in Rome between the Republic and Empire periods. Your focus on the specific dates have nothing to do with the actual originating use of the saying.
It can mean "ordinary" or "plain", but not in the context of "Common Good". I think you are trying to obfuscate the meaning by focusing on the peripherals of the context.
In this context, I disagree.
Its really clear what the good in "Common" means.
Its like principles of what the Constitution was written on. Life, Liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
Principles like these are qualities we all naturally exhibit and as such doesn't need any explanation or qualifications. I know in our modern world people have decided that everything is open to interpretation. But I believe this was indoctrinated into us, over a long period of time, not to consider the human value[0] aspect of our being that we are born with. This was done by watering down the direct meaning of words and slowly changing the perception that humanity doesn't have infinite value and has to rely on external power structures to give it meaning.
Not really - in practice on paper capitalistic countries need tons of socialist policies in order to prevent the system from eating the people it depends on.
This is capitalist mythology. You'll need to account for "best" here because millions of people under the thumb of large-scale genocide, such as the policy decisions to implement poverty (which capitalism requires), likely have something to say about what you think is "best".
Can you present me with an alternative that was implemented, ran for a significant period of time and resulted in a better quality of life for those under it? Also poverty is not genocide, if you are going to present an argument please make it factual. You insult victims of actual genocide and minimize what they have endured with this comparison.
I'm going by how people in the global majority, victims of imposed poverty by empires through debt slavery, who also experience OTHER forms of genocide & recognize poverty for the genocide it is.
Check out the quality of life of the Aka, Baka, and Mbuti tribes. They're genetically and culturally linked to a mother tribe 150k years ago.
So a culture has kept these people going for 150k years. Capitalism has no such capability.
Collaboration, spontaneous improvisation, counterdominant play/decision making/protection, egalitarian, matrifocality, immediate return. Those are values that flourish in an infinite game theoretically and in real life. We just have been taught so many backwards ideas these ideas seem foreign & barely recognizable.
Friend you are comparing civilizations that support hundreds of millions of people to small tribes of pygmies that total maybe 30k people and survive on hunting and gathering. Additionally they only exist in little groups of 50 to a few hundred individuals. How do you see billions of people surviving as hunter gatherers? Or do you forsee the need to cull 95% of humanity? This is not a realistic comparison friend and you know that. The only system that can keep hundreds of millions or billions of people fed and housed is capitalism.
Friend, go run the simulations at scale and get back to me before you keep peddling the religious belief that capitalism is the only way to feed billions.
You have no idea how to scale up collaboration due to separation from indigenous cultures that were praxised for tens of thousands of years & cultivated food forests across America without price tags.
I am sure you know this due to your extensive research and simulations but the average life span of the tribes you mentioned is in the low 20s... Some of your examples are even less than that.
Only 40% of the Aka and Mbuti actually survive to age 15 or greater
I look forward to you explaining how this is actually a good thing. Because currently it looks like your argument is that the 9 billion people on earth should adopt the life style of tiny groups of hunter gatherers that for the most part don't make it out of childhood and those that do generally die in their early 20s or younger.
For reference, the average lifespan in the United States is 77, so more than 3x, approaching 4x. Per your prior arguments, this is a genocide...
Businesses are powerful tools for the common good and the fact they produce returns for investors is absolutely critical to their continued existence and long-term viability.
But the point for businesses to exist at all is to produce positive externalities and they need to produce those externalities for more than just their owners.
It cannot be "either/or" and it's not immoral to pursue profits.
You can explicitly build the business to say "delivering shareholder value is not our highest goal, we must remember that we live in a society and upon a planet".
>But the point for businesses to exist at all is to produce positive externalities and they need to produce those externalities for more than just their owners.
I see little evidence that this is true. If anything, modern VC companies are "externality parasites". They produce positive externalities for some (ie. shareholders), by putting a lot of negative externalities on society as a whole (see for example the cost to democracy, societal cohesion, etc. that comes for Facebook and the like).
Their purpose is absolutely not "to produce positive externalities" (whatever that even means). What makes you say that? You can, and people do, run a business doing all sorts of heinous things
There's an old saying: The purpose of a system is what it does[1]. You can't (well, shouldn't) judge something by its intended purpose if what it ends up doing goes against it.
Human quality of life tends to be pretty shit without them though, and that is ignoring all of the competitively a necessity "choices" where not doing so is literally suicidal. Not adopting early agriculture and settling down leads to nomadic hunter gatherers being outnumbered and genocided by sedentary farmers sorts of necessity. Refusing to mine and pollute means bad things happen to you when you encounter metallic armed and armored foes.
Voting obviously works, you can vote away capitalism, some countries did that.
The only reason it "doesn't work" is that the countries that did vote away capitalism didn't fare very well, so other countries people are very reluctant to try that again. But they absolutely could if they wanted.
This is a dumb saying. And if you start to apply it to everything capitalism still seems pretty ok. For example: "The purpose of Communism is killing 20+ million people"[1]
I agree that when taken literally, it's a dumb thing to say: literally (i.e., the dictionary definition), the purpose of a system is the reason why it was built, not what it does. But it's a slogan, and slogans don't always make sense taken literally. The point of the slogan is to remind people of the (obvious, I hope) fact that, as I wrote:
> you can't (well, shouldn't) judge something by its intended purpose if what it ends up doing goes against it
If you check my Wikipedia link it shows that the original quote says more or less the same thing: "[this slogan] makes a better starting point in seeking understanding than the familiar attributions of good intention, prejudices about expectations, moral judgement, or sheer ignorance of circumstances".
In other words, it doesn't matter what's the historical context of why corporations were created, what matters is what they do now. You can argue, like it was argued, that corporations as a whole currently are a net benefit. My point is that bringing up the historical context of their original purpose adds nothing to the discussion.
As to your other point, I completely agree that it would be useless to try to defend the Staling regime by pointing out what communism was intended to be. That's more or less the point I was trying to make.
That line is blatant projection on the part of central planners. Both in the sense of how they see the world and it must be planned rather than arising from interactions of independent parties and random vatiables and because it is casting their own flaws onto others.
I'm curious to know why you see it that way, as I don't interpret it like that at all.
Quite the opposite in fact: if anything it's a reaction to people who do try to understand a system by looking at its original plan: it says that you should disregard that and look at what the system actually does (which includes "interactions of independent parties and random variables", as you say).
In any case, that's how I meant it: it's a bit useless to dig up the original purpose of corporations in history books to talk about how corporations work today, like the comment I replied to suggested.
It’s pretty rare for businesses to produce positive externalities. Businesses create value and some of that value goes to others, but that normally happens through explicit transactions.
The only way to make that happen is to have that common good be priced into the shareholder value, i.e., removing externalities that allow the privatization of profit and the public subsidies of the remediation of the damage done.
Then don't make a company with shares. This is like complaining in a tennis court that it's better to play football. Anybody who makes his business a company with shares will be beholden to shareholders, even if he's the only shareholder. There are plenty of venues for any activity, which isn't structured in this way.
1. Nobody forces you to use a smart phone.
2. Nobody forces you to have social media or use it.
3. Nobody forces you to watch Netflix.
#1 is rapidly approaching the practicality of “nobody forces you to have money.” Technically true but deeply impractical.
#2 is heading that way. Lots of official info is only available on social media. Travel to certain countries can be difficult if you don’t have any social media presence as they’ll decide you’re trying to hide something.
Would you give to charity? You are pointing at the heart of the prisoner's dilemma endlessly recreated by the very existence of capital: why choose long-term public benefit over a short-term personal gain?
I wish it were that simple, I think capitalism works best when personal self-interested incentives are aligned with what creates common good - IE policy is like game design where you design the rules in a way that provides an overall good outcome. In this lens, there is a huge problem with PE right now (the rules incentivize buying out industries and gutting them), and something wrong with VC (the rules incentivize enshittification) so the rules need to be adjusted to align with the broader outcomes we want.
There is no latitude. They have only one requirement: growth growth growth.
If you hit the growth targets, they will pat you in the back and will demand Hyperscale growth growth growth and will throw money at you to supercharge it.
If you refuse to chase the growth, they will simply kick you off the company via Board or fund your competitor that will chase the growth at all means
So you don’t get sued, but you lose control or even your stake or even the whole business. Remember how Uber founder got kicked out? He had a strong hand.
Chilling effect is there one way or another, and even when that does not work adverse selection does.
You have to have a very strong market position to resist the investor pressure. Kinda like Google had twenty years ago.
Or you can have a diverse set of investors who can’t or won’t be swayed by activist investors. But that usually means being public at which point your employees are incentivized by RSUs.
I'm not arguing there isn't an incentive problem. I'm arguing that it doesn't have any basis in statute. The distinction is important because it points to a different solution and different moral culpability for the system's outcomes.
Yeah, but you not getting what you want, you not having own little imperium is not the same as "you having legal obligation".
This amounts to an argument that if doing something immoral gives you money and power, you can not possibly say no and no one can blame you. That somehow more money and power is good enough excuse.
Yeah, I think it honestly lets founders off the hook too much.
In 95% of cases, the founder isn't smashing moral barriers because the VCs and shareholders are making them, or lording the threat of legal action or any some such.
In 95% of cases, the founder is smashing through moral barriers because their interests are aligned with the VCs: because they think what they are doing will lead to stupendous mega-wealth for them personally.
Like sure, I think the idea that corporate execs must be beholden to maximizing share price is a) corrosive to our society and b) not as true as often portrayed, but I don't think that's even a real factor here.
That really doesn't follow. Explosive growth guarantees amorality? What sin is inherit to success? Has envy become so embedded in our thinking that success alone is proof of guilt? Or is it just Original Sin style bullshit where everone is automatically guilty?
To succeed, you have to execute many things well and avoid bad luck. Add to this an extra constraint that one also needs integrity or morals and it will drastically reduce your success rate.
My statement will be true as long as having integrity or morals could hinder growth in some way.
> To be clear, business operators have extremely, extremely broad latitude in how they interpret their fiduciary duty to shareholders.
Legally maybe. The market and shareholders will punish you if you deviate from the current standard behavior.
We’ve all seen companies do layoffs just because “Wall Street” was concerned about the economy and then instantly see the stock price spike up.
These negative consequences are all results of bog standard prisoner dilemma issues that need government regulation to make sure everyone picks the good square, but the tech industry and this boards community as well is allergic to the idea that regulations can improve the situation for everyone
Maybe in theory, but in practice there is a strong power mismatch that causes investors to have a strong influence. Sand Hill learned it's lesson from Facebook/Zuckerberg and now always have a seat on the board. Only outliers like zuck/bezos/similar have the weight to push back against investors. Heck, even Dorsey couldn't for whatever reason.
And even if what you said is true, you can look at the results of years of this system, the difference between companies with outside investment vs without makes a strong case against what you're saying.
It's like saying educating people about their rights wrt police helps, but in practice police don't derive their power from actual laws and it comes at considerable personal expense to push it to courts, in the same way Delaware is very strongly biased towards shareholder rights.
> To be clear, business operators have extremely, extremely broad latitude in how they interpret their fiduciary duty to shareholders.
That may be true legally, but practically it's only true if they control the board. Otherwise they will simply be replaced by people who are willing to do what the board wants.
The annoying tone is unnecessary. Yes, legally speaking operators can go against the board and get replaced, which they certainly should do if they feel they're being asked to do something unethical. But it's not going to change how the company is run.
For the executive, sure. Not for the impact of the overall incentive structure on the trajectory of the business. Which is what this discussion is about.
The root comment this thread is in reply to had the implication that people are only acting this way because of an inaccurate idea of how strict the legal obligations are, and the other comments are about how that’s obviously not the only force producing the current outcome
Yeah, obviously that's not "the only force producing this outcome." Nobody claimed it was.
But it's important for founders to understand they are not legally obligated to do any specific thing for their shareholders. It is their responsibility to act morally. Yes, there are other incentives and forces at play. "Legal obligation" is not the cop-out excuse that executives claim it is.
Even focusing on short term profit would be fine, if you want to blow up the business go ahead, if those profits were actually shared fairly with shareholders. Too often companies can just dilute their stock over and over, which fucks over individual investors and benefits the 51% owners, and investors don't really get a say, yes there's a vote but if 51% is owned by a few it's not a vote.
Individual investors are largely operating on trust.
> The legal obligation to represent shareholders erodes morality
This "legal obligation" is an internet rumor that does not exist in the real world. Yes, if your company has competing buyout offers of $1m and $2m and the board takes the $1m offer because they received a bribe, it will come up. Otherwise, it never does.
The proof is in the pudding (please go find me even one case where shareholders have successfully imposed their will on a board or executives because of this obligation), but it doesn't even logically make sense. Other than the buyout example, it's hard to think of almost any action a company could take that doesn't have some justification that it is for the benefit of shareholders. i.e. if we make our app too addictive, we risk social backlash and regulatory intervention by governments which will hurt out shareholders. And that's all that is needed, because there is no associated time frame with this obligation.
To be clear, boards and executives might strive to please investors, but it is not based on a legal obligation. An executive that ignores the interests of shareholders might be concerned about their reputation as a capable entrepreneur, risk losing their job, or devalue their own shares, but they are no in legal jeopardy.
Just because the risk of getting successfully sued for making decisions against the interests of shareholders is low, it doesn't mean that it won't influence executive decision making. CEOs want to avoid legal risks above all else and thus the laws around fiduciary duty can have a chilling effect even if judges generally go along with the CEO's interpretation of what is in the interest of shareholders.
I think its bigger. Morality and social contract have eroded and continue to erode.
Look at Mozila for the most insidious example. Take a privacy focused product. Rope in a bunch of suckers. Then literally delete the privacy focus from your mission statment and start the "slaughter"
Craiglist is proof it can be done at scale.. Its just that so few people with them means and morality exist anymore. The Sodom and Gomorrah fable is a warning not to let this happen or your society will destroy itself.
> Craiglist is proof it can be done at scale.. Its just that so few people with them means and morality exist anymore.
I don't think this is a good example. Back then, the internet was a new thing only a small cohort of people cared about. Something small could just stay small because none of the big players with money cared. Nowadays, if someone wanted to start something like Craigslist, they would be outrun by someone else going the VC route before the small company could get big enough on its own. I think it boils down to the difference between slower growth, boot-strapped companies vs. VC-backed.
Another reason is optimization for profit, combined with competition making it a survival necessity to do this.
Early in a nascent industry, you focus on the core product. You bring scale and scope economies. You make the supply chain more efficient. You improve the logistics. More abundant basic food stuffs for everyone, and more profits for agriculture shareholders. A true win-win.
Later on when the industry matures, the easy wins are all gone. Logistics and agriculture is fully optimized. The only scope for improvement is in marketing, adding sweeteners, and cutting out expensive ingredients. Now it's a lose-win, but from the shareholders perspective only, it's a win.
The problem is, you can't just ask companies to act nicely. While that would be a good start, even if they genuinely wanted to, competition largely forces their hand. The solution is careful and minimal regulation, to deter the pathological late-stage optimizations.
This is what always frustrates me: why do companies need to bother with "pathological late stage optimisations" at all, if not for perverse incentives in the fundamental economic and political structure of how companies operate? Why is reaching a growth plateau perceived as stagnation instead of success? Why must a company feel pressured to grow forever, without bound? What's wrong with building a business to sustainability and equilibrium? Why does this almost never happen? Why do we instead see enshittification literally EVERYWHERE?
Cause some sociopath name Friedman wrote something that the ruling class/ generationally wealthy loved. That business should only serve the owner to the expense of literally everything else.
Since the rich and powerful get what they want. This race to the bottom mentality has saturated anything where a company accepts outside investment. This means any public company and any investment into the company outside of a bank loan. Which is basically every company nowdays since private equity company have bought stake in literally almost everything.
Just a heads up, the experiment was complete fraud and could never be replicated.[1]
I agree with you that outside investment can work as a strong accelerator for these things. It enables founders to externalize responsibility.
However, it is not the main reason. Exploitative companies have existed long before venture capital was invented. In the end every company exists to make money and so is inherently immoral. That is why the state is needed to regulate the market so companies don't hurt society too much.
Those founders didn't get corrupted by evil venture capital, they didn't have that strong of a morality to begin with.
I think the VC thing is indicative of the entire thing; the goal is profit and everything is subordinated to that. This is how the system works and how it is designed to work. When profit and some external thing like social responsibility are at odds, profit is going to win out every time. The mercenary mentality rules the scene.
In Magickal Faerieland, we have regulations to align those 2 things by incentivizing the "goodguy" path and/or disincentivizing the "cackling villain" path but we live in reality where money rules and regulatory capture is a thing. So a Facebook or other megacorp can get away with using neuroscience and psychology to engineer a virtual slot machine with a terrible payout and ExxonMobile et al can get away with being an architect of environmental degradation and the accompanying humanitarian disasters.
Of course VC loan sharking is a major part of the problem. But it's also tiring reading blog after blog of people who say they want to do the right things and do them right or whatever the trendy thing is that month, all as a thinly veiled pretence to get as much funding from whoever wants to give it to them and try to make themselves the next Zuckerberg or Bezos.
If people actually believed in something they'd make it open source or a non-profit, not a convenient vehicle for personal enrichment. Imagine if Wikipedia was a for-profit startup, it would've eventually ended up as an unusable cesspool of advertising.
Well, yes. Encouraging people to avoid Marxism and all the successive schools of thought has done irreparable damage to this country (and likely the entire west). And I'm not even dogmatic about this: you can read Schumpeter, the father of VC, to reach the same conclusion. Private investment will eat the world and our childrens' lives, even at the cost of self-preservation.
Yes, and there is a huge problem connected to that:
If you don’t play this game you’ll lose. Look at Europe for example, they haven’t played the VC game properly and thus have no really significant tech player compared to the US / China.
So what options are left? Play the game or be ruled by those that play it.
I’d rather play even if moral erosion is required.
I think Europe is moving g toward digital independence even more. They've still got Instagram and WhatsApp and everything, but I can see them moving more aggressively toward Facebooks core business model (ie, programmatic adverising) and essentially creating a European internet bubble. Would be nice for Europeans to be able to have their own social media sites which operate less aggressively on your attention span - like Facebook circa 2009 or even MySpace. Chronological feeds, less invasive advertising practices.
We are building a social network with chronological feed.
I am thinking how to make it sustainable without raising VC funding but not doing aggressive ad targeting. Obviously people are not going to pay for a social network. So maybe just very generic sponsered links?
Maybe the model should be more like public roads - for-profit companies are involved in building parts of them but they don't control the whole system.
Its not just shareholders, stock based equity also has all the employees pushing profit.
Engineering addiction is also probably more often than not intentional. When all the business metrics/KPIs are stuff like "engagement time", "$ spent", even AB testing of random features leads to manufacturing addiction
And how these shareholders materialize. I don't think show up at guileless founder's workplace with guns and make them offer they can't refuse?
> but there’s a pretty huge throughline of outside investment and addiction engineering..
Personally I don't doubt that. But if people are taking outside money while being aware of its effects I don't know what kind of sympathy they deserve.
It can end up being a more circuitous path than you might expect.
For instance, I took investment in my business, about five years in, from a very ethically and strategically aligned individual, as we mutually saw an opportunity to do something good together.
His life took a left turn. Two kids and wife in a horrendous car crash, all left extremely disabled, enormous medical and emotional costs. After a year or so he had little option but to sell his holding in our business, and we allowed it, knowing that his situation had become dire. He sold to a small PE consortium, who again, looked pretty well aligned with what we were doing.
The consortium all then had a falling out, as one member had brokered a deal with a large PE group to be bought out. This ground on for another year or so, us on the sidelines, until eventually the large PE group managed a hostile takeover.
And that’s how we found ourselves with blackstone as our corporate overlords.
It all went to shit over the following years as we were forced to squeeze margins, cut R&D investment, and depart from our original mission to instead gouge our customers.
I ended up leaving, as going to bat for the dark side every morning was beyond corrosive for me, and while it was a pretty terrible financial decision, it saved my life.
The company grinds on, a thing utterly different to what I founded. I don’t ask for sympathy, just… perhaps awareness that taking any investment, no matter how benign, can take you places you’d never wish to go.
It can happen even without investment. I’ve seen businesses where cofounders have had to sell out due to poor health or similar, and the outcomes have ended up pretty much the same.
> Having spent a few years in the VC world I have been increasingly convinced outside investment is the biggest reason why companies lose their morals. The legal obligation to represent shareholders erodes morality.
Oh 1000%.
I once worked at a company where the founder had famously said many times that he would never take the company public. But then, he had a stroke. And within two years they had an IPO. Started doing what every other 'big company' did instead of their own thing. And from what I heard from folks on the inside, Enshittification happened pretty quick after I left.
The lack of addressing the loose ethics of 'Behavioral Psychologists' working in these fields, is TBH a bit of a stain on the whole profession.
Reductionism is fine when a supermajority of available data paints the same picture, and that's what's happening here.
* Founders aren't trying to solve a problem, they're trying to grab table scraps from VCs and the already-wealthy to try and save their own skins. As a result, it's all about exit strategy, growth, and moat instead of business fundamentals and customer experience.
* VCs and their wealthy backers aren't looking for good business, they're looking for good profit. It's why they'll gladly invest into slop or outright grifts, and why they demand anything they invest into have an exit strategy (i.e., IPO) planned so they can cash out before the company collapses.
* Talent who wants to build a long-term career with a company - and accordingly focus on fixing its flaws, improving the customer experience, and saving expenditures - can't, because companies no longer fundamentally exist to provide long-term solutions and products, only short-term growth YoY. This ultimately ends up harming output and innovation, because why bother giving it your all when such efforts are counter to the "explosive growth" narrative and likely to get you PIPed?
* Retail investors and Business News are left feeding a monster that runs on Fairy Tales and ignorance, promoting big gains and huge losses rather than actual investing advice or corporate accountability.
It's all just a disgusting grift, is what I'm reducing it to, and I can't really fault Founders either since they're just trying to strike gold in an emptying mine shaft before it's closed off or collapses in. They're playing the game they think will net them safety and success...even though they may have better odds on some casino games instead.
While “maximizing shareholder value” is a huge problem, aren’t there other problems too? Founders wanting to get rich as quickly and as easily as possible, customers/users refusing to pay even for most important services (for example, how many people are willing to pay 5 bucks a month for something as important to modern life as email? But they’re happy to pay 5$ for a crappy Starbucks coffee), lawmakers too old or too corrupt to understand the negative effects of the products/markets they’re supposed to regulate, general public more interested in convenience and cheap entertainment than subjects like privacy, parents simply hooking their kids up with iPads so they don’t have to deal with tantrums (one of my colleagues told me he was raised by TV/internet, not by humans)… and on and on.
I suppose we’re living in an age of unchecked capitalism. But there are other issues too
“Shareholder value” is what turned “we’re a family here” into a joke and cliche. It turns people into lines on a spreadsheet and strips leadership of their ability to care or treat people as humans. It’s represents the very darkest side of capitalism. Im very much a capitalist but it doesn’t mean I have to ignore the realities of it, both good and bad. I’ll take it over all alternatives though as it actually works and improves the lot of society as a whole
For the last 5-10 years I've noticed a lot of people here are more willing to question VC as the sole or even ideal way to start a company, and since a major chunk of YC is to train how to raise money and connect people via demo day or mentors to VC, I think that marks how the HN community has departed from the YC community. Obviously there's a lot of overlap, and HN clearly has it's roots in YC by it's literal founder, but I think it's wrong to say HN community is the same as YC community, which I say "historically"
YC parted ways with the broader HN community at some ill-defined moment coming up on a decade ago. YC started as an inspiring rejection of credentialism and cronyism and slick people jumping the queue in front of tech-focused problem solvers from diverse backgrounds. The values of HN around curiosity, technical meritococracy, tangible solutions to real pain points in the lives of real people underserved by big money tech establishment dynamics were completely aligned with early YC, they went hand-in-glove.
But it got captured by slick dealmakers who managed to cop the hoodie aesthetic and youthful ambition vibe but were the same born-to-privilege punks that have always ruined everything good in computing eventually. Now its messaging is vibe code and gladhand and suck up to whichever political party won last. Its a more insular, more inbred, less substantial network of the "right" kinds of people than the Ivy League was when it stepped on the scene.
And there's nothing inevitable about it, no "big money always goes to shit" story here: its 4 or 5 key people who abruptly had a serious seat at the table and chose very fucking selfishly.
HN is still here geeking out and being a gem on the internet.
> Having spent a few years in the VC world I have been increasingly convinced outside investment is the biggest reason why companies lose their morals. The legal obligation to represent shareholders erodes morality. When the people running these companies feel they’re beholden to shareholders and can’t act on their own agency of course they will turn to addiction research not as a warning but as a guidebook.
As an outsider I don’t believe it. Morals? I don’t even see a nugget or trace of some elevated goal in all of these stories.
Shareholders or not, the companies have to make money. Now us users have been gaslit for years about us just being too stingy to “pay for the product”, therefore we “become the product”. But all of these gamification/social media platforms were made to be free. Obviously there had to be a path to monetization. Morals or not. And they all end up in the same place.
Duolingo was co-founded by the inventor of Captcha. One of the ideas was to use people as translators, similar to the Mechanical Turk idea of letting people do some chore and using the product. Anyway, they also monetized eventually. Now what has Duolingo actually done for langauge learning? According to many people now, nothing. Look on YouTube. People post about their streaks. I.e. the gamification. The last video I saw was barely about how Duolingo helped at all. They had the typical “of course you can’t use only Duolingo” and then they listed all the other approaches and techniques. Well, did Duolingo serve any role? They said repetition. Well the repetition is for very artificial and out of context words and phrases. That Duolingo learners are like fish out of water in a context where they have to apply their knowledge is a meme at this point.
Another fun, very SC thing[1] about DuoLingo is/was the volunteer community. Yes of course a volunteer community to boost the for-profit platform. That’s how you get Klingon.
The AI-fication, aggressive ads, and pay-to-streak (you can artificially pause a streak for a whole month apparently) has made people worry and complain. And not because they are making a good language learning app worse to use, even. It seems to be mostly that people are hooked to the streak and are now even more annoyed by the hoop they have to go through (the app itself) to maintain it.
So what did Duolingo (DL) achieve? It made people fret and worry about their streak. That’s it. I had a friend who was so glad that he was getting close to a one-year streak on DL. Why? Because then he could quit. I wrote like one or two sentences that I recalled in his target language. He didn’t understand it.
[1] See StackExchange. I remember Jeff Atwood’s very humble blog piece about how he made his millions. It was of course all him but he had a good upbringing and access to good schools of course. No mention of the employees, but that’s just normal capitalist things so that’s fine. But also no mention that he made a platform based on volunteer work. Hmm. Self-made man? In SC culture he is. Because getting users/fools to work for you for free is the ultimate disruption.
The fact that this is a legitimate question is very concerning. Some of these dyes are/were ubiquitous and there is very little research about them. IIRC a few have evidence of harm. Nothing should be this widely deployed without understanding them more.
If you were more questioning "Is natural actually better for people or just a nice sounding word" which could also be implied by your question, I agree with that, with the caveat that artificial stuff has more potential for surprises since it doesn't have the history of being used safely "natural" stuff does, and should have a higher bar of research.
Why did it take an insane person to actually get sensible regulation for food dyes in? Rhetorical question because I think people like RFKJr got into power because previous administrations didn't take care of the obvious things that need regulation, and if you ignore the basics for too long people flip over to someone who packages a couple of reasonable stances with a lot of damaging ideas.
I agree with RFK for pushing for change in this industry but I give him no credit, instead I blame previous administrations on both sides for not taking a better stance on regulating food like every other developed country in the world.
As a scientist I don’t think this change is really science based.
Banning artificial colors because “chemicals are bad” isn’t logical. Banning artificial dyes because one random paper maybe found a cancer link isn’t rational (generally if studies are all over the place the effect is so small you’re seeing noise).
If you want to avoid artificial dyes, cool, avoid them! But blanket bans of dyes where the data is questionable about harm isn’t logical.
The problem isn't that "chemicals are bad" but that we don't know which chemicals are bad. Ones that we have been eating for centuries are unlikely to be significantly harmful and we can stop consuming them them when evidence is found. But for things that we haven't been eating for that long we don't really know. Right now the system is sort of set up as default-allow. So what happens is that some company wants a blue dye because they think blue candy will sell. They try things until they find something that isn't obviously harmful and start selling it. Then in 20 years it is found that it actually was harmful in the long term and impacted a huge swath of the population. The company then searches around until they find another blue dye that isn't obviously harmful and the cycle repeats.
To some degree we do need to experiment and try new things. However for something like food dyes it likely isn't really worth the risk. Or at least they are far overused. Many of the foods with dyes aren't that healthy anyways, so maybe it is is best to have them less attractive to avoid ingesting more chemicals which we don't have strong long-term evidence that it is safe.
We see a very similar cycle with plastics, refrigerants and many other things. We use something for a long time before realizing that it actually has harmful effects, then industry just creates a new very similar chemical that isn't known to be bad yet (or at least isn't bad in the same way the last one is). In some cases it is probably worth it (refrigeration is a valuable technology) but in the cases where it isn't as valuable to society we should be much more conservative with what we allow.
That being said, the proposed regulation isn't scientific and doesn't play with this nuance. A more reasonable approach would be raising the standards for introducing new chemicals (natural or artificial) to food. Not just banning anything "artificial" (whatever that means).
Yes, and due to having been used for a long time we are aware of the effects (and at least for lead have implemented reasonable rules around its use).
My point is that the longer we have used and consumed something the better we understand it. We are more likely to know and understand the risks. So we should be extra cautious with new materials. Something that we have been eating for hundreds of years with no known negative effects is wildly different than something that a company discovered (naturally or artificially) last year and didn't find any negative effects with some short-term tests.
Trump admin is trying to prevent the banning of asbestos, and undo the regulations that have been banning it. Trump seems convinced that "it's all fine, actually" and policy is being based around that, but the catalyst seems to be that the Biden era finalized the last ban on the last type of asbestos still being used (which would take up to twelve years to take effect anyway).
It wouldn't surprise me at this point if the Trump administration started rolling back regulations on lead pipes and enforcing minimum cadmium concentrations in tobacco.
As a non-scientist, I am not really any more qualified to give an opinion on this than any random person, but the fear around food dyes seems way overblown IMO.
You can read the statement from the FDA where they banned red dye 3, it's very short. [1] Here's a relevant quote:
>claims that the use of FD&C Red No. 3 in food and in ingested drugs puts people at risk are not supported by the available scientific information.
As a scientist there are a few things to drive my opinion it’s overblown:
- you can’t prove a negative (“this dye isn’t harmful”), all you can do is run a panel of tests and interpret the data
- food additives are tested in animal models at levels that are several orders of magnitude higher than what any human might consume. Animals are then autopsied to see if there are *any abnormalities in any organ system. This is done with several species.
- Cell models are also used to test things like carcinogeniticity, cell-specific toxicity, toxicity of chemicals formed when the additive breaks down, toxicity of trace impurities, etc. It’s quite extensive.
- Data is rarely 100% clear. You may get a signal in some animal model at 1000x expected exposure. What does it mean? Plenty of animals exhibit toxicity not seen in humans and slight abnormalities may or may not translate to humans. But the FDA tends to err on the side of caution, especially with food additives as there is little benefit to offset any risk.
- It’s not unusual to run 10 studies, find 9 are negative, 1 shows a signal but it’s not statistically significant. What RFK tends to do is cherry pick the 1 study and say “there is data to prove it’s harmful!” That’s not how science works. You look at the totality and quality of the data and make the best conclusion you can. Is it 100% foolproof? Of course not, but it’s pretty solid evidence that likely no harm will result.
- The one risk is the “unknown unknowns”. If you don’t know what to look for, you’ll never find it. But that’s true with everything we ingest - drugs, natural foods (peanuts and aflatoxin!), synthetic chemicals, water purification chemicals, etc, etc. We can only do the best with the knowledge we have.
- If you see 10 studies and 5 are positive (barely) and 5 are negative, either the effect is really small (I.e. you should worry more about other things) or it’s just noise.
I have the same view, and I was hoping that someone would provide some evidence as to why they are harmful in typical quantities found in foods. It seems to me that because these additives are so widely used, we would know for sure if they were dangerous.
We have extremely pervasive health problems across the west, and many theories (you can surely think of 20), but all of them are weak under scrutiny, specifically because the phenomena are effectively impossible to isolate and pin down. You can't actually achieve a strong signal.
So if multiple studies link a low-value and/or easily replaceable additive to problems, we can remove it as a precaution.
Food colorants in particular serve _primarily_ an advertising role. In general, advertising junk food to children is often restricted and highly contested. The difference here is the child is expected to physically consume the artefact.
We should adopt a "default deny" stance and contested ingredients at least should show some kind of value. You can make a case for many preservatives. Paint is not like that.
That fails the scientific method in several places.
Science doesn’t ban things with questionable data from poorly designed studies when other studies say the opposite.
Science doesn’t ban things because of some other problem where a causal link hasn’t been proven.
We already have a “default deny” system in place. Unless you have data saying it’s safe (according to regulations), a chemical can’t be used as a food additive.
Edited to add:
GRAS definition....."the use of a food substance may be GRAS either through scientific procedures or, for a substance used in food before 1958, through experience based on common use in food Under 21 CFR 170.30(b), general recognition of safety through scientific procedures requires the same quantity and quality of scientific evidence as is required to obtain approval of the substance as a food additive."
It literally says “GRAS must meet the same standards as new additives”.
The only reason GRAS exists is that FDA regulations have changed over time.
Unless you wanted all food additives immediately banned until years of tests could be conducted, the FDA created GRAS based on the evidence at the time but also required additional studies to bring existing additives up to the same safety standards as new additives.
Feel free to click on any of the GRAS decisions to read all about the studies done.
Science is a tool for finding truth, or at least weighing evidence. It isn’t policy and doesn’t have anything to say about policy.
You can have a policy of waiting for overwhelming proof of harm before banning anything. But there are an awful lot of chemicals added to our food and environment, with precious few studies competently and honestly tracking their effects. I want a much more careful policy - don’t put unknown chemicals in my body without convincing me the benefit.
Easy, just avoid any processed food. Eat only fresh meat, fruit, and vegetables. Make your own bread, jams, pickles, etc. Never eat any fast food, anything from a cafe, or anything at a restaurant. Wrap all your work lunches in linen you made yourself from flax you grew yourself. Boom, problem solved, no more toxic chemicals in your food unless they were in the air or groundwater where your fruits and vegetables were grown, harvested, or processed, or your cattle grazed or were slaughtered or packaged.
Why would one color meat, fruit or vegetables? This can create false expectation of their freshness and quality and must be banned. This is much easier solution.
Also coloring cheese should be banned. I always choose cheese without dyes but many people might be not aware that many types of cheese are artificially colored.
It's called the precautionary principle. It's generally a good idea. And yes, you have to implement it at the regulatory level because otherwise Food Inc. will try to get away with everything they can.
As a chemist, I can tell you that nearly everything you can think of -- "natural" or otherwise -- has been correlated to some negative outcome, in some organism, by some (usually crappy) study. These get laundered and blurred into "linked to negative health effects", by the lay press, which is widely repeated by people who don't know what they're talking about. P-hacking virtually guarantees that this will be the case, as long as someone, somewhere has the incentive to publish.
If you apply the "precautionary principle" this broadly, there's nothing left. It's basically the same reason that everything is labeled as "linked to cancer" by CA prop 65 (e.g. coffee, or...trees [1]).
Dye is not an essential component of food and therefore should be banned, at least for food that has natural color (like meat or cheese). Not only it might be harmful, it causes false expectation of quality and freshness and should not be allowed. Because otherwise for a manufacturer it is easier to color low-quality product rather than make high-quality product.
The precautionary principle is not entirely benign. Here, though, it's not even apposite: the dyes being ditched here have been intensively studied for decades.
The precautionary principle is not "Ban scary sounding things", it's "Prove that chemical is safe before you can expose people to it", which places like the EU often attempt to do.
But notably, nothing about this action takes any steps or effort towards enforcing "Prove it is safe BEFORE you sell it" and "natural" does not make any impact there. Ricin is plenty natural, so is methanol, and this change would not stop you from selling people literal poison as long as it wasn't already banned.
If Bayer makes a new derivative of carminic acid ("Natural" red #4) tomorrow that is easier for production lines to handle but also gives you cancer if you eat it for 20 years, there's no legal requirement that they demonstrate it doesn't give you cancer before they can sell it. It is YOUR RESPONSIBILITY as a consumer to do that science for them! It being "Natural" is utterly meaningless marketing bullshit.
None of this bullshit safety theater makes any of us more safe.
As I note elsewhere, this isn't exactly damaging though. Most other countries already encouraged manufacturers to develop formulas without artificial dyes, primarily due to differences in consumer opinion (which is usually similarly not fact based), so companies are going to make a big hubub about how this will be so hard for them and then they just shut down the "this is American specific" production line and retool it for the international formula and then insist that they made such a huge change to help everyone.
But "natural colors only" has zero relation to "more healthy", and that goes double when you are talking about processed food. If you actually wanted people to eat healthier, you would be better off banning all food coloring additives, all food texture additives, and anything that lets you modify how food presents itself after processing. People would buy less processed food if it all looked like what it actually was.
Other countries have better food than the US because 1) They often force food additives to be PROVEN safe before any use and much more importantly 2) consumers are way more discerning about food. European bread doesn't have a spoonful of sugar or sugar syrup because Europeans don't want their bread to be addictively sweet, while Americans objectively buy more bread that's been sweetened than "normal" bread. I'm not a fan of treating "revealed preferences" as too meaningful, but it's hard to sell bread to people who wont buy it because they would rather eat the cake in bread form. So it's important to ask why Europeans want their cakes cakey, and their bread not.
>You wouldn’t eat something you don’t know if it’s edible just because it has a nice color
Easy for you to say while writing a HN comment, but people would certainly be turned off by gray yolks[1] for instance, even if theoretically they were safe to eat.
These colors are all extensively tested, precisely because people were scarred of them being "unnatural".
The "natural" colors HAVE NOT been tested so extensively.
So do you want to put "Natural" but utterly untested chemicals in our food or "unnatural" but extensively tested chemicals?
Because unless you ban food coloring outright, companies are going to color your food. They have the data that in the American market, (fake) bright yellow yolks sell more and for more profit than natural yolk colors.
Your assumption of "artificial dye" == "Untested" is currently wrong. The US requires almost no testing for pretty much anything put in our food right now, due to "Generally recognized as safe" bullshit. There are hundreds of chemical additives that have not really been tested that you can just put in food legally.
US food law does not distinguish between "artificial" chemicals and "natural" chemicals except in labeling. You can source a chemical from oranges, turn it into a completely different chemical, put that in your food product, and call it "natural". The only difference from a chemistry standpoint is that you sourced your chemical feedstock from some sort of plant or animal instead of taking simple hydrocarbons and building up your chemical.
Salicylic acid does the exact same thing in your body whether you process it from willow bark or build it up from Phenol, and both versions are simultaneously a horrible birth defect inducing toxin, as well as an utterly essential and safe modern medicine.
I think that's the biggest issue nowadays/back then: we don't test shit like at all and find out decades later that it destroys us. For what? Because the market incentivizes temporary gains for "competitiveness". The whole system is misaligned. We have those e/acc and silicon valley peeps telling us it's for the PrOgReSs and it's necessary. All the while they eat grass fed beef. You gotta live what you preach!
They may eat "grass fed beef" (which in no way magically makes a steak any healthier) but they are the same people who microdosed LSD for two years because it was the fad of the time.
They aren't super aware and taking advantage of us, they are actually that utterly stupid. They are the epitome of that software dev you worked with who only just learned about <thing> yesterday, read a few articles and wikipedia pages, and assume they must know enough about <thing> to have better takes than people who have been working knee deep in <thing> for 30 years. They love to say they are "reasoning from first principles" because they have no actual expert experience to how those "first principles" haven't been useful or relevant in that field for centuries.
It's the classic "I know just enough to be dangerous" problem we are all familiar with of Users of our software products, the kind that uninstall System32 to "speed up their machine" like the internet told them, but 100 million people gave them the power of the US government. They vastly overestimate how much of the space they have so far learned, and don't even know how much they don't know.
> Why did it take an insane person to actually get sensible regulation for food dyes in?
They still aren't regulating it, they just held a press conference announcing, literally "we don’t have an agreement; we have an understanding" (and, as covered in this article, no one in the food industry seems to know who exactly the "understanding" is with).
Meanwhile they're firing anyone at the FDA or HHS that can do anything, and the EPA is trying to not regulate coal plants while the Trump administration uses emergency powers to keep coal plants running even over the economic objections of the power companies running them. And of course the EPA is delaying and relaxing the new limits on PFAS in drinking water from last year.
So...no, not really any sensible regulations here.
But it is creating real change already? All you have to do is ask, apparently. Regulation is coming, but not going to complain that companies are preemptively taking action.
You should note, that Republicans only decided to go after artificial colors after the industry had already solved this "problem" for a hundred other countries.
Meanwhile, all this hubbub over "artificial" vs "natural" colors is fucking nonsensical. Very very few of the "artificial" colors have some evidence of maybe causing some harm from chronic exposure. Not that you should have chronic exposure to any of these foods in the first place since the sugar and fat and salt content alone is unhealthy and will cause you significant chronic health problems unless you exercise for a couple hours a day.
But it doesn't matter whether a chemical is produced by some process in nature or some process in a lab. What matters is how the human body reacts to it. Do we have tomes of evidence that eating "natural" colors is actually safe? No, we do not. Most of them are just GRAS (Generally recognized as safe, which is an outright misnomer) and therefore have no evidence of any safety other than "We used in the 50s so whatever".
Nevermind that "natural" food dyes aren't even! To make "natural red #4" involves taking large amounts of carminic acid from some bugs and reacting that with aluminum or calcium salts. In fact in the US, you can do pretty much whatever you want to a naturally sourced chemical and still call the product of that chemistry "natural".
Replacing well studied, simple, dyes with less studied dyes just because a core part of their chemistry was able to be sourced from """Nature""" is utterly stupid and pointless and meaningless. What actually matters is replacing ingredients that show some toxicity to chronic exposure with ingredients that have significant data to show they are not chronically toxic. There's no structural system in "natural" dyes to actually do that.
This push will not stop Dupont from extracting curcumin from turmeric, massively modifying it to make it easier for an industrial process to use without fouling up their equipment, accidentally make it cancerous after you eat it for 20 years, and poison us all with a "natural" chemical for decades.
"Natural" has no structural overlap with "Isn't unhealthy". Organic Ricin will kill you just as dead.
I despise the labeling around "Natural" and "Artificial" Colours|Flavours|etc. It's downright misleading to call one highly processed compound natural, while calling another equally processed compound artificial. I absolutely do not care what the feedstocks used were, I care about what the final product is.
On that note, I wish that food companies were forced to disclose which "flavours" they added to their products. Some of the artificial flavourings are the exact same compounds as natural ones (vanilla, cherry, and cinnamon are I'm pretty sure, they're just one isolated compound of many), and some of them absolutely are not. It would be really nice to know what I'm actually putting into my body, especially since so many flavourings are added to "natural" products like tea.
Does that kind of labeling exist in any country? I've never seen it on imported goods I don't think.
I'm not going to complain, but real change of what? It's no apparent loss, so I'm happy to say "cool", but we know we won't even be able to measure any public health benefit of what this non-binding, non-regulatory "understanding" is going to bring about.
Seems more like some number of food companies are happy to go along with something that costs them basically nothing, while anything meaningful won't actually be done or is actually in the process of being reversed.
One interesting thing about Trump is he’s so deeply popular with the Republican base that he can win elections despite being drastically outspent by the opposition. He also uses tools like primaries and executive orders against those who oppose him.
So whereas a normal candidate may be concerned about upsetting the corporations that fund their election, Trump has built a little bit of insulation against that. He can (and does frequently) take on big corporations other politicians would feel the need to not alienate.
No other Republican would dare cross agribusiness.
He also, for the same reasons, is able to make Republican politicians adopt his positions. So if he wants to do something that democrats already want to do (and that’s not as uncommon as you might think; he was a Democrat for decades) it gets done easily.
RFK Jr is the worst person, but he deserves credit when he’s right.
Even the whole notion of abolishing the food pyramid to advocate for more fibrous whole foods (e.g., vegetables, fruits) and stylizing it as a plate was her idea, later coopted by RFK Jr.
My favorite photo of Trump is him grinning his ass off because he forced RFK Jr not to kiss the ring, but to touch a cheeseburger. They really do deserve each other.
Google AI says: "While the term "insane" is subjective, dumping a bear carcass in Central Park is both illegal and highly inadvisable."
RFK believes "For decades, the CDC has kept a tight grip on the Vaccine Safety Datalink, concealing vital vaccine safety information from the public," - IE that CDC has conspired to conceal harmful effects of vaccines. If he finds that database, I'll gladly sit up and listen. But until he finds it I'll consider this a conspiracy theory and, according to Psychology Today, belief in conspiracy theories is not necessarily associated with mental disorders.
I disagree with a lot of people in the Trump administration, but I only use the word insane (in the subjective sense, not in the literally diagnosed sense) to describe RFKJr.
I don't give him credit because he comes to his view from a lot of dangerous mistrust of science and medicine. I know a lot of people at CDC who work on flu vaccines and AIDs research, and my step-father was on the team that eradicated smallpox. RFKJr has done unimaginable harm to public health and is pushing us backwards. The people at CDC genuinely want to help people. You can say they've done things wrong, overstepped in some way, or have too much research money from private industry, and that could be a good discussion. No group is perfect, but the answer isn't to destroy it all, or think the CDC is part of a conspiracy.
I think food dyes need more research and better understanding before deploying to millions of people, that is not the same as his anti-science stance. While breaking a lot of things, he also happened to do something good, I don't think that counts as "solving the actual problem".
And, as far as your last point about previous administrations I meant both democrat and republican, but it's been obvious a long time that Democrats pandering would cause a backlash.
At any rate, I don't discount peoples ideas as brainwashing or preconceived ideas, even people I disagree with. I want America to succeed. Trump even did a few things in his first term I agreed with. You seem to have a filter to think people who don't buy into this "new golden age" are brainwashed or tribal. This isn't true. Spend some time considering other view points.
I doubt you'll agree with any article sources I could provide, and for a lot of diseases it doesn't happen immediately. Measles is one - 285 cases in 2024, so far in 2025 there have been 1214. I'm sure you'll have a reason that is unrelated, so not sure what evidence I can provide.
Anecdotally, I know people who track flu to create the vaccine for next year, basically tracking trends in other countries that have leading indicators. People have been fired/rehired/fired from these positions across multiple rounds. Imagine not knowing if you'll be somewhere next week. The instability has caused a lot of people to look at other jobs. The smart people have options will leave when they think there's a better chance, the dumb ones will stay. Public health, which are like the roads - it's easy to forget how much work is involved to keep up - is going through a brain drain. These are people who are doing real work, for everyone, not just people who can't afford healthcare.
Since anecdotal stories probably don't sway you, check out reddit for public health and see how the actual workers: https://www.reddit.com/r/publichealth/
I'm sure none of this will affect your opinion, so can you provide hard data that what he is doing is good?
The writing was on the wall for this before RFK Jr got installed. He may or may not be putting it over the finish line, but things were moving in that direction anyway. In 2023, California passed a law banning some additives effective 2027 [1].
In 2016, Mars pledged to remove artificial dyes from their products by 2021 [2]; they didn't do it [3], but they pledged to.
Exactly this, it's hard to explain to a non-emacs user why TRAMP is so magical, but the number of times I tried to run something that was meant to run locally on my machine through TRAMP and it just worked is very impressive. It runs so smoothly that you forget you're executing things on a remote machine, and when that leaks through it's typically very easy to diagnose and fix - for instance I have ag (silver searcher) installed on my local machine, tried running a search with ag via tramp and the bin obviously wasn't on the remote machine, a simple apt-get later and I could run my search with all my custom settings remotely.
If anyones ever used the Plan 9 OS across network, TRAMP is like that for emacs
Nice, I unfortunately need to work on Windows while also doing a lot of remote editing, so switched to emacs on wsl just to use tramp - I wasn't aware of watchexec which seems like a much better solution. However part of what makes tramp great is being able to use emacs just like it's local, so things like ag/magit/etc wouldn't work as smoothly.
This article assumes people are primarily accessing these things at home. Maybe for most apps / websites that’s appropriate but people access these things internet on phones in places where connections can be spotty, and it’s very frustrating to be driving through a dead zone and have apps freak out.
I hope people making apps to unlock cars or other critical things that you might need at 1am on a road trip in the middle of nowhere don’t have this attitude of “everyone has reliable internet these days!”
Concrete example: I made an app for Prospect Park in Brooklyn that had various features that were meant to be accessed while in the park which had (has?) very spotty cell service, so it was designed to sync and store locally using an eventually consistent DB, even with things that needed to be uploaded.
Kubrick frequently uses a two act - Barry Lyndon where he rises from nothing to peak at the exact midpoint and then falls to nothing at the end, or Clockwork Orange where he does a bunch of horrible things in the first half and the consequences are mirrored around the midpoint of the movie.
One thing I've noticed in music composition (where I have more training/experience, but I suspect the same is true for narratives) is the rules get codified / standardized a generation after a style of music is popular. Bach, for example, "breaks the rules" of counterpoint at least once in every piece in Well-Tempered Clavier, which was supposed to be an educational piece so if he actually felt like there were rules to follow he'd be more likely to be "by the book" for educational purposes.
But the rules of counterpoint were codified after his death (IIRC there were two people who worked together to do it), and act like an averaging across all baroque composers. Making the rules is kind of like putting it in a glass box, sealing it off and preserving it - IE removing all life from it. A contemporary example is how punk became standardized, just wear leather jacket with safety pins and mohawk and play barre chords. The spirit of punk moved to post-punk and elsewhere but also this bizzaro copy of all the superficial aspects of punk moved elsewhere.
While I love Joseph Campbell and the heros journey, I do feel like sticking too strongly to it does the same thing for narratives. I especially hate insistence that everything needs a three act structure, not because it's inherently bad, but because stories that don't need it are shoehorned into it and given an unneeded third act with more set pieces than genuine character motivation and development. It's like people see a good movie with a three act structure, and think it's due to that specific structure.
Hollywood has the particular problem that the executives would really like a formula to follow to make people like the films, the screenwriters would really like a formula to follow to write something that they can sell, and so on. There's a lot of commercial pressure for a factory to mass-produce plot and stamp it out into films. People liked a film? Make the exact same thing and see if they'll buy it again. Franchises help, because at least there's some incentive to shuffle around some different characters and plot elements.
Though the never-ending soap-opera of comics aren't really that great a fit for wrapping everything up in a three-act structure. (I'm still confused by why the Marvel films felt the need to kill off 90% of their villains in the same movie they debuted.) But the hero's journey is an attempt to answer to "how can we make a film as popular as Star Wars?" So we just follow that pattern, I guess.
Not that there weren't other patterns--the Disney animators independently arrived at their own storytelling rules, for example. Disney Animation: The Illusion of Life (by Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston ) has a discussion of what they found worked for them and what didn't. It's worth comparing what they say there with the actual films and reflect on how the rules bore out in practice, of course. But it's another attempt at codifying a formula for appealing stories.
There's lots of attempts to try to describe the universal appealing story pattern. Whether narrative actually works that way has become bifurcated into separate questions: "what kind of stories are effective for humans?" and "what kind of story can we produce reliably as a commercial success?" are subtly different but have become conflated.
You're missing the constraints: what kinds of stories actually work for humans and can be told clearly, with mass appeal, in a 90-120 minute audio/visual format.
We already have spaces for broader or more experimental narratives, they're called novels. Music videos gave us popularized short form experimentation for a while. TV series give us longer form audio/visual storytelling. But there's a hard limit to how much complexity or diversity you can pack into a 90-120 minute block while still keeping it cohesive and broadly engaging. TV gets away with slower pacing and more meandering structures because viewers can dip in and out. People like/recommend a series even if one episode didn't keep their interest. If 30 minutes of a movie don't keep someone's interest they aren't going to recommend it, it sucks to spend 30 minutes in a theater detached from what you are watching. Movies have to convince audiences to stay locked in for the entire runtime, which naturally narrows the kind of stories that can work.
And part of the problem now is that movies were once novel. They evolved from stagey, non-gritty recorded plays basically to gritty, photorealistic stories. That leap kept things feeling fresh for a long time. But now that the tech curve has plateaued, now that dark/gritty has run it's course, it's like people want movies to somehow figure out how to be... not movies.
Punk was new/novel fresh. Then what was new/novel/fresh was identified and expanded upon. Then it become not new/novel/fresh. Other music genres were kept fresh by technical limitations slowly being removed by new tech/monetary limits limited who could do what/knowledge gatekeeping. Now that every tool is available to every person along with deeper knowledge of music theory, which theoretically should make it more interesting, music has gotten more boring. Because we don't want good. We want novel new experiences.
Yes, that's a really good point. I had this nagging feeling of there was a commercialization aspect driving when I was writing that, since that's obviously what happened to punk, and you hit the nail on the head. I do think students are taught the 3-act structure / heros journey as if it was the ideal structure, but the true reason for it's ubiquity is an attempt to commoditize art.
> A contemporary example is how punk became standardized, just wear leather jacket with safety pins and mohawk and play barre chords. The spirit of punk moved to post-pun
I just learned about kishōtenketsu thanks to this great video on How To with John Wilson (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-SwyF-Vvbs). I'm surprised that it's not as well known in the west, considering how many great directors use it.
Ozu is my favorite director, and learning about the 4-act structure helped me understand why - I always hated the third act of most movies, when character motivations go out the window in the interest of a big explosive ending. There is a lot of potential in kishōtenketsu structure to tell stories that are more realistic and introspective and don't require the kind of antagonistic conflict of 3-act structure.
Having spent a few years in the VC world I have been increasingly convinced outside investment is the biggest reason why companies lose their morals. The legal obligation to represent shareholders erodes morality. When the people running these companies feel they’re beholden to shareholders and can’t act on their own agency of course they will turn to addiction research not as a warning but as a guidebook. It’s Stanford Prison Experiment stuff.
I hate being reductionist, and I am posting this on a historically YC forum so of course there’s nuance, but there’s a pretty huge throughline of outside investment and addiction engineering. It sucks we’re seeing less grants and less security net to encourage risks under current administration, because it leaves investment as the quickest path to starting or scaling a company. Donate to open source, IMO
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