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617 points jbegley | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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a_shovel ◴[] No.42938313[source]
I initially thought that this was an announcement for a new pledge and thought, "they're going to forget about this the moment it's convenient." Then I read the article and realized, "Oh, it's already convenient."

Google is a megacorp, and while megacorps aren't fundamentally "evil" (for some definitions of evil), they are fundamentally unconcerned with goodness or morality, and any appearance that they are is purely a marketing exercise.

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Retric ◴[] No.42938601[source]
> while megacorps aren't fundamentally "evil" (for some definitions of evil),

I think megacorps being evil is universal. It tends to be corrupt cop evil vs serial killer evil, but being willing to do anything for money has historically been categorized as evil behavior.

That doesn’t mean society would be better or worse off without them, but it would be interesting to see a world where companies pay vastly higher taxes as they grow.

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mananaysiempre ◴[] No.42938723[source]
Most suggestions of this nature fail to explain how they will deal with the problem of people just seeing there’s no point in trying for more. On a personal level, I’ve heard people from Norway describe this problem for personal income tax—at some point (notably below a typical US senior software engineer’s earnings) the amount of work you need to put in for the marginal post-tax krone is so high it’s just demotivating, and you either coast or emigrate. Perhaps that’s not entirely undesirable, but I don’t know if people have contemplated the consequences of the existence of such a de facto ceiling seriously.
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1. abdullahkhalids ◴[] No.42939993[source]
Higher taxes is the wrong solution to the very valid problem.

We all recognize that a democracy is the correct method for political decision making, even though it's also obvious that theoretically a truly benevolent dictator can make better decisions than an elected parliament but in practice such dictators don't really exist.

The same reasoning applies to economic decision making at society level. If you want a society whose economics reflects the will and ethics of the people, and which serves for the benefit of normal people, the obvious thing is the democratize economic decision making. That means that all large corporations must be mostly owned by their workers in roughly 1/N fashion, not by a small class of shareholders. This is the obvious correct solution, because it solves the underlying problem, not paper of the symptoms like taxation. If shareholder owned corporations are extracting wealth from workers or doing unethical things, the obvious solution is to take away their control.

Obviously, some workers will still make their own corporations do evil things, but at least it will be collective responsibility, not forced upon them by others.

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2. robertlagrant ◴[] No.42947368[source]
The alternative is to make consumption the will of the people, so people buy things they want, and from vendors they like.

I think "this isn't free; you pay with ad views and your data is sold" is something that should be on a price tag on services that operate this way, though. It doesn't work if the price isn't clearly advertised.