this post was submitted on 16 Aug 2023
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No way I'm ever gonna trust a company that is chasing profits
Don't trust any publicly traded company, once a business has completed it's IPO it's owned shareholders and led by a CEO legally obligated to chase profits as the primary objective. Corporations spend money on PR and brand marketing to make us think otherwise, but under US law it's crystal clear they only chase profits.
It's kinda sickening to hear people say they "love" Apple, Amazon, Netflix, etc... These corporations derive their "right" to exist from one of the most horrible miscarriages of justice in history. The 14th Amendment was put into law to grant the rights of citizenship to freed slaves after the US Civil War in an effort to abolish a system created by greedy oligarchs to profit from the suffering of others. Unfortunately, the conservative Justices on the US Supreme Court decided in 1886 that a new system could be created to allow greedy oligarchs to profit from the labor of others. That ruling was called Corporate personhood.
Full disclosure, as a computer nerd in the 1990's, I really did fall in love with Google, it seemed it represent everything Apple and Microsoft did not. Back in the Pre-IPO days between 1998-2004 Google engineered some of the most useful and innovative services on the Internet for consumers. Now I view Alphabet Inc as possibly the most dangerous corporation in the realm of technology. Relentlessly striving to control the Internet through DRM tech like Widevine, the AMP framework, and proliferating a Surveillance Capitalist strategy to target everyone online, track them across the Internet and harvest their data for profit.
I do have some faith in companies like Valve and System76 because they are privately owned and do not always act in a "profits above all else" mentality.
Your first paragraph about only profit mattering isn’t even hyperbole.
I’m a computer nerd just like many here, but I went to business school too. There’s no “haha screw the consumers” snickering when you learn about business administration. It’s a simple well-meaning concept that the goal of going into business is to make money for the owners who invested their own money into the company.
Private companies are one thing, but then once they go public, a whole new set of rules and circumstances occur. The “owners” are a nebulous cloud of faceless investors & institutions, many (most?) of whom don’t give a shit about the company itself, just the risk/return and asset category it represents.
The C-suite has a fiduciary duty to make that money for those shareholders, plus those individuals generally have to own a bunch of stock in order to further align their priorities with profit and share price. You don’t want the investing community to see that you had a chance to double profits this year and didn’t take it, which can lead to the short-sighted decision making we see so often. Plus driving up the share price short term makes you yourself able to cash out and diversify a bit.
You should though. Because if the company is chasing profits you know for sure what they're doing. If they are not chasing profits, then no one knows what they will do next. Like non-profit American Red Cross, who laundered half a billion and did fuck all to help Haiti https://www.propublica.org/article/how-the-red-cross-raised-half-a-billion-dollars-for-haiti-and-built-6-homes
Yea, the Red Cross is fucked up, and I learned that from my dad in 1996 when he died. All about the money. I'll send my money to St. Jude, thank you very much...
Sorry for your loss...