> In misleading its customers and censoring books, Amazon is violating its public commitments to both LGBTIQ and more broadly human rights.
Anyone who believes in such "commitments" in the first place is a fool.
As a reminder, Amazon is a business, and its first priority is to make money. Everything else does not really matter.
I think you're the fool in that comment, for letting Amazon give you this excuse.
Everyone and every organization has responsibilities to the community. They are parasites if they leave the community, on which they depend 100%, to others. Business depends 100% on a system of laws, freedom, peace, social goods (e.g., education for their workers and customers - who is going to read? - healthcare for them), infrastructure, security, order, prosperity, ......... Try operating a business without those things.
One could argue, successfully I think, that Amazon's business is 99% utilizing community resources and they add only a small bit of their own.
I don't know which utopia you are living in. I'd like to be there as well.
Cynicism-fried take imo. The discussion over what responsibilities private cooperative endeavors have towards the broader public is a couple dozen centuries old at least, and is in no sense finished. This arrangement has changed countless times before and is still changing now before our eyes. If you can no longer imagine how it could be different then yes, certainly sit down and give up, you have nothing to offer here. But so then why would you offer this? Is it your dream that others surrender as you have?
You're entitled to feel whatever you want about how Amazon behaves. It will not affect how Amazon behaves, even if presented in a very inspirational way. Inventing a 2400 year history of discussion of "private cooperative endeavors" that change "countless times," however, is not inspirational. Be specific about what has happened, when it happened, and how it has changed things. Point out when random people's feelings about "the arrangement" have mattered, and when the "cynical" opinion about that was wrong.
Or better, face the fact that Amazon responds to power, not to you. People who post just to call other people's opinions cynical, without adding anything of substance, could be replaced with AI with no loss. You don't know anything about people's dreams.
> will not affect how Amazon behaves, even if presented in a very inspirational way.
It does and will. Amazon has to respect laws and not alienate customers, and also has goodwill toward their community - even if it's trendy to talk like sociopaths.
> Inventing a 2400 year history of discussion of "private cooperative endeavors" that change "countless times," however, is not inspirational.
I don't know about the length of time, but the discussion has gone on for generations.
Your current position is tied to a 1980s theory, new at the time (and maybe from Milton Friedman?), that the only role of corporations is serving its shareholders. Somehow, people have accepted this one theory as an eternal truth. But clearly that doesn't happen; it's a matter of degree: Corporations pay taxes, fund workers compensation, etc.
More recently DEI and ESG have been widely embraced, one side of the argument, and currently the tide in the US is to reject them. The tide will change again.
In other countries, the degree of oblgation to other stakeholders is much greater. German companies are required (?) to have labor representatives on the board of directors, for example. Japanese companies traditionally have a very strong commitment to career employees.
He lives in the utopia protected by the public army and opines via the network invented by public research.
Just because someone frequently lies doesn't mean they're exempt from ever being criticized about it again.
Yes but dont pretend you thought they were having any moral qualms, their only goal is to maximize profit, even if that kills any future profits.
I recently learned that this idea of the responsibility of a business as being to maximize shareholder value is kind of recent, and that in the 50s and 60s, in the US, they actually applied a stakeholder capitalist idea, where the purpose of a business was to maximize not shareholder value, but stakeholder value, which would have been the employees, customers, communities, and society at large.
I think we are all a fool as well to simply accept that the made up institution of "business" has to be about maximizing shareholder value, like anything, this is all a political game, and it is what we agree to make it.
The next iteration of The Anarchist Cookbook going to include a trans protagonist so it becomes unbannable