[rayiner]

Quite the opposite. A Carnegie whose money comes from developing the American steel industry, or a Hershey whose money comes from chocolate, or the heirs of countless founders of companies that make real stuff, seems much more ethical than people today who make their money from one of the various heads of the advertising or finance hydras.

[TotoHorner]

Are you joking?

You should google the Pittsburgh steel strikes and Henry Frick.

You think someone who has to shoot their workers is more ethical?

It’s genuinely hilarious to see how poor HN’s grasp of history is.

[rayiner]

Stuff like that had negative localized effects, but the ad industry that fuels large segments of tech has negative effects across a much broader swath of the population and economy.

[tptacek]

You're trolling here, right? It is not actually your position that it is more ethical to be a steel baron who orders the shooting death of striking workers than it is to be an adtech CEO, right?

[pen2l]

Carnegie never ordered deaths of striking workers nor do I think you can make a defensible case that in general steel magnates do. Mining business is difficult and laborers in that industry sure do go through a lot; ore smelting laborers report having respiratory illnesses indeed quite regularly so I agree that steel barons are not completely inculpable if analyzed through an ethics lens.

But looking over the fact that the advertising industry is fundamentally about the exploitation of cognitive biases in order to convince folks to buy things that more often than that they do not need just betrays a certain naïveté of what's going on out there.

[tptacek]

Violent suppression of labor organizing is a prominent part of American history. Read, for instance, Rick Perlstein's "Before The Storm" about what happened at the Kohler factory in Sheboygan, more recently than the steel strike we're talking about here.

[xyzzyz]

> You should google the Pittsburgh steel strikes and Henry Frick.

You mean the guy who survived an assassination attempt by labor activists, who were running a totally illegal blockade of his business? And it’s not even like the laws have changed about it since then, their blockade strike would be totally illegal today as well.

[TotoHorner]

> And it’s not even like the laws have changed about it since then

Let me know if it's still legal to have your workers work with highly dangerous machinery for 12 hours a day, 7 days a week (for wages that would be comparable to federal minimum wage today ~ although it's hard to find a good inflation calculator that tracks back to the 1880s).

I'm sure that's totally comparable to the plight that Google/FB/Amzn employees have to put up with.

Obviously I admire what he did with the Gospel of Wealth & his philanthropy, but that doesn't excuse his horrible treatment of workers.

Honestly, it's just so astonishing that you can even argue in support of Henry Frick.

You should read up about the Johnstown FLood and the failure of the South Fork Dam.

I feel like the HN crowd just skims the wikipedia bio and uses that to craft a hilariously terrible argument.

[xyzzyz]

If they didn’t like the working condition, they could have striked or left, that’s not the point. What they did in fact do was to use violence to block people who did like these working condition and specifically came there to work there in their place, when they striked. Oh, and they tried to kill Frick too, don’t forget that.

I am not so much arguing in support of Frick but rather against a completely dishonest narrative where he is villainized for “shooting workers”, while completely omitting the details as to what events led to that situation.

[tptacek]

They did strike. And when they did, Fick had a private army of Pinkertons kill them.

[jacquesm]

I suspect that this is why end up repeating history in one form or another over and over again. Stuff happens, we learn some lessons, we forget about the stuff (or our institutional memory does) and then we forget the lessons setting the stage for stuff to happen again. Frustrating business, more so to see it happening on such a short timescale. If it was something that the Romans did I could get why it isn't remembered as acutely but this is recent history and even far outside the country where it happened this - used to be - is common knowledge.

[quickthrowman]

A counter-example is John Jacob Astor, America’s first multimillionaire, who earned his fortune smuggling opium.

[andsoitis]

Opium was just a part, and my understanding not the main part of how he made his fortune.

[ergocoder]

Worse labor law, worse justice system, worse worker right, worse compensation, worse working condition.

I could go on.