[will_brown]

>For every one person saying: "Uber is evil, don't use them" There are ten saying "Meh, its cheap and convenient."

I guess there is actually an 11th person saying, awesome I can financially support this evil company in the short term and make a quick buck.

I've been talking a lot about boycotts lately on HN to curb unwanted corporate behavior, in particular as it relates to a lot of the recent 1st Amendment issues and concerns (because 1st amendment is a limit on governmental power, not private entities).

No doubt boycotts are hard, and I'm not sure there was ever a time in history where anyone ever felt real change was easy, or ever a time where the people seeking change felt others/the world cared.

From MLK's quote "all it takes for evil to succeed is for good men to do nothing". To Gandhi's, "be the change you wish to see it this world." Maybe above all people just need to be inspired, and some historical perspective of what people can accomplish working together.

And as disheartening as a comment likes yours is, it's truthful, and I personally find it motivating and inspiring. I guess it's sort of like telling someone something can't be done and that being the catalyst for action. I'm pretty motivated at this time to create an organizational platform for boycotts in a crowdsourcing-esq style without need for funding.

If you don't mind, I guess like a sort of prelaunch feedback, what would it take for someone like you, willing to profit on bad corporate behavior, to instead become a leader for change?

[djcapelis]

I created my HN account 2884 days ago and this comment is the first time in a long time I’ve felt this forum has had some serious conversations about the conflicts between ethics and profits. I am so glad to see people questioning the means leading to financial ends. Thank you for directly bringing the dynamics of how financial incentives are impacting the reality we live in into the conversation. I sorely hope the person you responded to manages not to feel too attacked and gives a frank and truthful answer on where their line is with respect to not wanting to profit off a corporate scandal. It is going to be important to understand. Activism is going to have a tough road of making an impact on corporations if there’s no market response or impact to help dissuade when companies engage in immoral, unethical or downright bad dealings.

[Z1nfandel]

>I sorely hope the person you responded to manages not to feel too attacked and gives a frank and truthful answer on where their line is with respect to not wanting to profit off a corporate scandal.

Nope, never felt attacked. Takes a lot to get me riled.

I don't go seeking companies that break laws to enhance profits.

However, I did notice a long time ago, that constant publicity will have an effect on stock price. This is fairly common knowledge. Bad publicity and "public outrage" will frequently result in lower stock prices. So I take a look at their underlying business, see if its sound, then make a bet (buy shares) that the public will move on shortly.

Is that profiting on corporate scandal, or market (public sentiment) overreaction? Up to you to decide.

[aaron695]

> Is that profiting on corporate scandal, or market (public sentiment) overreaction? Up to you to decide.

Who cares? What's wrong with profiting on evil.

Here's a crazy idea, how about worrying about not supporting and fighting evil rather than getting drawn it these philosophical debates.

[necessity]

Except Uber didn't do anything deserving of a boycott.

[will_brown]

May be, but may be not. So I'll take a purely Florida example, in many counties Uber was operating illegally, to the extent they trained drivers how to evade police detection, in some instances they even recruited drivers out of counties that they were operating legally to counties they would be operating illegal (unbeknownst to drivers) resulting in the arrest of drivers (criminal records). In Miami Dade county for example, if you were to have been pulled over you would have gotten two civil tickets resulting in over $2,000 of fines, a third citation converts the charge to criminal charges, Uber would fire driver for not evading authorities effectively enough.

Uber also had a secret program that in part helped them break the law by denying rides to users suspected of working with law enforcement (called Greyball). Another issue is Uber provided a lawyer for drivers (not an actual traffic criminal lawyer, but a Uber lobbiest), in legal terms that is a conflict of interest, plus very few of these fines have been paid after years and last I checked Uber (drivers) still owe millions to the county.

Again I'm not saying this is a boycott I would pursue, but perhaps it's worthy of discussion, and at minimum I could see boycotts getting Uber to take responsibility and pay these fines.

Here is a link that includes a copy of the Uber email instructing drivers to more effectively break the law: https://uberpeople.net/threads/welcome-to-miami-internationa...

[swang]

what exactly would be deserving of a boycott?

[hkmurakami]

The only boycott in recent memory that I know of with a meaningful impact on the corporate bottom line, ironically, was the conservative boycott of Target over its public support of transgender bathroom rights. http://www.businessinsider.com/target-ceo-blindsided-by-boyc...

[Analemma_]

To be blunt, your efforts to improve corporate behavior are better spent elsewhere.

The fact that boycotts never work isn't just a moral shame in the abstract; it has real, practical policy implications. It's one of the main reasons why I'm dismissive of libertarianism and its conviction that government regulation is unnecessary because consumer behavior will fix wrongdoings.

You say you want to build a platform to organize boycotts, but consider: your network can't possibly become larger than Facebook (with 2 billion users), and I see constant attempts on Facebook to organize boycotts, to no effect. There's nothing you can do to significantly improve on this outcome.

Honestly, if you really want businesses to behave better, your best ROI would come from advocacy both in favor of more government transparency, and against libertarianism (especially among developer-types, where it has spread like a highly unfortunate mind virus).

[cookiecaper]

It's important to recognize that that perspective is the default and it won't be changed. People assume that as long as you're on the market, it's fair and valid to do business with you. This is ultimately for the best; we shouldn't be raking people over the coals for every perceived moral or political slight. That's not a meritocracy.

What it does mean is that if you want to activate change, you must comply with the unaccommodating defaults, which are, broadly generalized, "no one cares". The people who accept this and work with it are successful. The people who don't aren't.

The difference in agility between insisting that everyone else should conform to your thought pattern as compared to learning to accommodate multiple styles so that your goal/cause/product meets a critical mass of demand is huge.

[gajjanag]

> I guess there is actually an 11th person saying, awesome I can financially support this evil company in the short term and make a quick buck.

Well, unless you belong to the minority of people on this forum with no assets in the stock market whatsoever (either directly or indirectly via a bank account, pension fund, etc), you are part of the system that profits off corporate activity. The only exception is if you traced your holdings in such companies (Wells Fargo is the example given here) and where they are getting used to within reasonable limits (some activity may not be disclosed to you as a member of the public for instance), and divested from all of them. A priori, I would find such a situation highly unlikely.

All that the grandparent commenter did was to allocate/deallocate to get a better return, and is honest about it as you point out. What more can one ask for or expect? Full divestment to within information limits as outlined above?

And as you point out, changing the system is super hard.

> And as disheartening as a comment likes yours is, it's truthful, and I personally find it motivating and inspiring. I guess it's sort of like telling someone something can't be done and that being the catalyst for action. I'm pretty motivated at this time to create an organizational platform for boycotts in a crowdsourcing-esq style without need for funding.

I am very happy to see people with energy for these sorts of things; feel free to email me to discuss more.

> If you don't mind, I guess like a sort of prelaunch feedback, what would it take for someone like you, willing to profit on bad corporate behavior, to instead become a leader for change?

I can give you mine:

1. I need enough savings to live on a "student budget" for the rest of my life in the United States. Until such an amount is reached, compromises will be made, such as what you term "finanically support this evil company in the short term and make a quick buck".

2. I do not wish to do this full time at any stage - there are other things in the world that interest me far more (chiefly scientific questions, usually from mathematics/applied mathematics). For example, if you provided a list of such-and-such companies engaged in such-and-such, and provided a summary of why you consider such a boycott worthy, I would evaluate it. Once upon a time I would have done the research myself; but I no longer have the energy and have a different set of priorities. On these lines, I have found http://www.givewell.org/ and more generally the "effective altruism" movement fantastic.

[pktgen]

> Well, unless you belong to the minority of people on this forum with no assets in the stock market whatsoever (either directly or indirectly via a bank account, pension fund, etc), you are part of the system that profits off corporate activity. The only exception is if you traced your holdings in such companies (Wells Fargo is the example given here) and where they are getting used to within reasonable limits (some activity may not be disclosed to you as a member of the public for instance), and divested from all of them. A priori, I would find such a situation highly unlikely.

As appealing as it is to just use Vanguard index funds for my retirement account and be done with it, I have so far resisted the urge to do that for this reason. If I don't want a company to exist, I don't want to own that company, even if it only makes up 0.05% of my money. I think cheap, broad, cap-weighted index funds are the best way to invest in stocks, but I want the ability to exclude stocks of companies I find unethical.

There's an opportunity for a roboadvisor to replace all index ETFs with directly-replicated indexes. Vanguard TSM has around 3500 stocks and the international index also has thousands. I'm sure it was impractical and not cost-effective a few decades ago to buy thousands of stocks in fractional units for each customer account, but I think the large roboadvisors could pull it off today: they have scale, automation, and the ability to aggregate and batch all customer trades daily (minimizing trading costs). Wealthfront's direct indexing is a good start, but it's only for US large-cap stocks, and the lack of support for fractional shares means a 6-figure minimum account balance and potentially meaningful tracking error.

[umanwizard]

How is buying a company's stock "financially supporting" them?

[jonny_eh]

Companies, and the people that run them, own a lot of that stock. By buying some, you're increasing the demand, and therefore the price, and therefore the amount of value owned by the company and its leadership.

[DMac87]

Decreasing the company's cost of equity capital...

[pretendscholar]

Directly

[umanwizard]

How? Buying stock doesn't transfer any money to the company (unless it's newly issued stock)

[jsfitzsimmons]

The act of buying stock signals demand and reduces supply, which will effectively cause the price to rise. Indirectly, rising stock prices are a positive indicator for the health of the company. Directly, if the company chooses to sell stock, it will be able to sell it at the higher price.

[FeepingCreature]

You can't wish away a tragedy of the commons. All you're doing is rewarding bad behavior.

[will_brown]

As to your first point I don't disagree, but are you saying taking steps to organize boycotts is trying to wish away something?

I was thinking organizing boycotts would have been an affirmative step towards turning wishes into action. Therefore, could you explain how organizing boycotts to address (at least) bad corporate actors behavior would be rewarding bad behavior? Is that a any press is good press argument or am I missing something else?

[FeepingCreature]

Boycotts only work for goods with fixed demand. The stock market is designed to be maximally responsive. You can't boycott a stock for moral reasons; you're effectively just donating money to people with no moral qualms.

You have to realize that the stock market is an engine for predicting profit. If you're boycotting something for reasons that are not represented in profit, then all you're doing is turning yourself into the sort of damage that the stock market is best at routing around. The only way to punish companies is to impact their bottom line, and boycotting their stock does not have that effect unless you control enough of the market that the rest can't pick up the slack, and if you don't have that influence then the effect will be negligible.

If, as they say, the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent, then certainly the market can stay rational longer than you can stay obstinate.

[shitgoose]

"to instead become a leader for change"

he is leading the change. by exploiting swings in prices driven by emotional (over)reactions, he flattens the price and excludes the emotional component from it. good for investors, good for everyone.

[1_2__4]

Um, the "for evil to triumph" quote was Burke, not MLK.

[FiveDegrees]

You might be interested in suitocracy.com

[Z1nfandel]

>If you don't mind, I guess like a sort of prelaunch feedback, what would it take for someone like you, willing to profit on bad corporate behavior, to instead become a leader for change?

I think it would take a few things, and I'll try my best to elaborate on why.

1. Ability to affect change. I like to be successful, its one of my primary drivers in life. If I spend X hours working on some task, I want to see the results. Changing large swaths of people to do anything, is a challenge. So there exists this function of needing to wield enough influence over a large enough population that you influence corporate choices. Until you reach that critical mass, you are insignificant. A company by law exists to make money for shareholders, so expect them to ignore your small voice for a more profitable choice until your voice is large enough that ignoring you is no longer profitable. Same mindset applies to corporate fines. "We the ORG hereby fine your company $100k for this practice allowing you to profit $10MM" Cool... so we made $9.9MM we otherwise wouldn't have made. "So hit me with a fine. We can afford it." -Jaime Dimon. Back to my original point, few people want to devote their working hours towards a problem they don't feel they can succeed at. You want me on your ship? Convince me my effort has a measurable effect. Make sure the effect is worth my effort.

2. Unified Direction A centralized boycott platform sounds great in theory, but there are people that want to boycott everything, for every reason you can think of. I guess you'll have an upvote system or some filtering mechanism so the most popular ones get visibility/funding, but you will far eclipse the reasonable number of companies to protest. Everyone has different thresholds, but I doubt I would want to live a life where I'm boycotting your platforms entire top 10 list. Remember the Occupy Wall Street protests? Tons of headlines all over the place, even Presidential comments. Without looking it up, what were their goals?

3. Passion I would have to care about the issue. Am I going to boycott YCombinator because their CEO built their house on an endangered sand flea population? No, I couldn't care less about the fleas. Would I boycott YCombinator if they decided my murder my family? Yup. Every issue falls somewhere on the scale of "does this matter to me." Its hard to become a leader for changes you don't care about. Some people are selfish, some aren't. Everyone decides for themselves.

4. Fads This one is almost what I directly referenced in my original comment. Its popular to hate a company for a month, then something else pops up in the news and steals attention. How long do you expect to keep the boycott strong enough to matter? I don't want to be a leader hopping on the latest headlines every 4 months.

You solve those problems, and I would be the "leader for change." However, if you've solved those problems, you have no need for me.

[will_brown]

Thanks for the response, it's thoughtful and well reasoned.

>However, if you've solved those problems, you have no need for me.

You would exactly be they type of person needed, based on the very idea of what you did/have been doing, you are smart, informed and most importantly not afraid to act(literally put your money where your mouth is).

If I could build a platform that successfully addresses these issues it would be nothing without people, same goes for platforms like Uber or even Facebook and Google. The pre-internet examples would be individuals like Gandhi and MLK who obviously solved problems to effect change, but even they were just leaders who relied on the support of people.

I think this second comment of yours is as encouraging/motivating as the first, it just reinforces my belief the opportunity is really about changing attitudes and thoughts about these power dynamics, rather than the power dynamics themselves.