On Fri, Jun 07, 2013 at 03:30:26PM +1000, Brent Wallis wrote:
On Thu, Jun 6, 2013 at 4:54 PM, Lev Lafayette <lev@levlafayette.com> wrote:
Perhaps I just have particularly high standards (if not expectations) of what constitutes ethical behaviour in business.
Actually Lev, I would argue that your expectation is very valid. IMHO a great business is born of efficiency and a fundamental awareness of the greater good.
I thought it was the lefties and hippies who were supposed to be the hopelessly naive and impractical starry-eyed idealists?
IMHO a business that spends time on research,administration and justification of the "grey" and "dubious" is a business that wastes money on trying to game the rules.
gaming the rules - aka exploiting loopholes or breaking the law - is and always has been very profitable. that's why it's always popular with entrepreneurial types. it's fast and effective. (it's also why prohibition is always doomed to failure - black markets create huge profit margins, and there'll always be those who think the risk is worth it, especially if they can sucker others into shouldering the bulk of the risk)
In the end, there is on a "trick", bereft of any real value...and inevitably someone else loses.
well, duh! of course. someone else losing is the point. same as you can't be a successful thief unless you've actually stolen something from someone else. "real value" is irrelevant. "creating value" is not the goal or even the means. "extracting profit" is. you're mistakenly assuming that business is a game played only, or mostly, by honourable people. nothing could be further from the truth - the honourable few are the exceptions and the game is not to win "fairly", it is to win by any means at all. we live in a global kleptocracy. you only have to look at the giants of wall street, the global economic collapse their systematc pseudo-legal(*) thievery caused and the control they have over the US govt to see that. we may be slightly buffered from that here due to banking regulations useful for more than just toilet paper, but not much - we have our own collection of thieves and scoundrels who tell the government what to do and the public what to think and how to vote. big finance types sure, but also mining and media feudal lords like rinehart and even emperor palpatine himself...ooops, i mean rupert murdoch wielding the dark side of the fourth estate. (*) "pseudo-legal" not because what they did isn't actually illegal but because enough money and lawyers and convoluted, near-incomprehensible schemes and layers of subsidiaries and contractors let you get away with bare-faced lies dressing up fraud as over-enthusiasm and honest mistakes and "nobody-could-have-predicted-that" unforeseen market downturns. it wasn't a mistake and it wasn't a surprise, it was deliberate plundering of the economy with the big players out to grab as much as they could for themselves while they could get away with it and to hell with the consequences for everyone else. they wanted to win, increase their own personal scores - so everyone else had to lose. craig -- craig sanders <cas@taz.net.au>