[ryandrake]

Companies don't "believe" things. They will amorally advocate for whatever is remotely favorable to the company.

There is no financial incentive for them to say "We don't need noncompetes" or even "You know, it really doesn't affect our bottom line either way." So instead they will always say "Of course we need it." There's no downside.

[CobrastanJorji]

Right, exactly. When Walgreens says "Walgreens feels very strongly that labor unions do not serve the best interests of our individual employees or the company as a whole," they are lying. Walgreens is not a person. It does not feel anything. You might apply this to their leadership instead, but it's also understood that Walgreen's leadership is also lying. They are quite aware that a labor union would better serve their individual employees. It's just culturally accepted that corporations can nakedly lie about this sort of stuff and it doesn't matter.

What a company says "We prefer thing X," everything they say after that is just the autocomplete of ChatGPT with a prompt "make up reasons why X is good." They're not their actual justifications. Their actual justifications are usually readily apparent, but it's comes across better to just make inane statements than to speak the truth.

Political interviews have the same problem. You ask the politician a significant question with a yes/no answer. The politician says "this is important" and then makes noises for 20 seconds. The noises don't matter. They don't say anything. What they're actually doing is declining to answer, but culturally it's acceptable to do it this way, and it's unclear why.

[danaris]

> Companies don't "believe" things.

This is technically correct. (The best kind of correct, right?)

> They will amorally advocate for whatever is remotely favorable to the company.

This is not (at least, not as universally as you state it).

Companies are legal fictions; they do not act on their own.

People act. People talk. People believe things. People often amorally advocate for whatever they believe will be most favorable for their employer, or for themselves.

People are often wrong.

As companies are made up of many people, those people's beliefs and actions don't always match up, so it's still dangerous to talk too carelessly about a given company "believing" any particular thing without qualifiers.

Any time someone talks about a company "doing something", they obviously mean that the people within the company did those things, and those people's actions are guided by their individual and collective beliefs. They do not suddenly become perfect automata operating solely for the best interests of the company, without bias of their own, and they certainly don't suddenly become perfectly able to determine what will best serve the interests of the company.

[AlexandrB]

> Companies don't "believe" things. They will amorally advocate for whatever is remotely favorable to the company.

I think this makes companies seem much more rational than they actually are. Plenty of companies do things because other players (especially larger players) in the space do it, regardless of cost/benefit to themselves. Where do you think the phrase "no one got fired for buying IBM" comes from?

[bell-cot]

If you've been around high-level exec's or their lawyers much - there's a whole lotta "what is the maximum amount of sh*t that we could get away with, or at least might benefit from attempting?" going on.

[red-iron-pine]

"What is going to get that stock price higher?" aka what'll trigger my next level bonus package

[yamtaddle]

> Companies don't "believe" things.

The people in charge of them cargo-cult like a motherfucker, though.