"competitive upgrade" - is it ethical?

[Renegade]

Regarding corporations as evil:

CORPORATION, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility. (Devil's Dictionary)

[url]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Corporation[/url]^w => http://www.youtube.c...t=PLFA50FBC214A6CE87

http://www.thecorpor...index.cfm?page_id=47

   * Corporations are required by law to elevate their own interests above those of others, making them prone to prey upon and exploit others without regard for legal rules or moral limits.
    * Corporate social responsibility, though sometimes yielding positive results, most often serves to mask the corporation's true character, not to change it.
    * The corporation's unbridled self interest victimizes individuals, the environment, and even shareholders, and can cause corporations to self-destruct, as recent Wall Street scandals reveal.
    * Despite its flawed character, governments have freed the corporation from legal constraints through deregulation, and granted it ever greater power over society through privatization.

Monsanto. Dow. BP. Shell...


The (general) perception of corporations as evil has significant cause for it.


 

[40hz]

Regarding corporations as evil:

CORPORATION, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility. (Devil's Dictionary)

-Renegade (February 01, 2011, 08:37 PM)

Much the same thing can be said of the so-called middle class. Herman Hesse handled that subject very nicely in his book Steppenwolf.

Here's what he had to say in the section entitled Treatise On The Steppenwolf, which was a fictional booklet quoted in full within the larger story. You can read the whole treatise here if you're curious.

(Note: below emphasis added.)

Now what we call "bourgeois," when regarded as an element always to be found in human life, is nothing else than the search for a balance. It is the striving after a mean between the countless extremes and opposites that arise in human conduct. If we take any one of these coupled opposites, such as piety and profligacy, the analogy is immediately comprehensible. It is open to a man to give himself up wholly to spiritual views, to seeking after God, to the ideal of saintliness. On the other hand, he can equally give himself up entirely to the life of instinct, to the lusts of the flesh, and so direct all his efforts to the attainment of momentary pleasures. The one path leads to the saint, to the martyrdom of the spirit and surrender to God. The other path leads to the profligate, to the martyrdom of the flesh, the surrender to corruption. Now it is between the two, in the middle of the road, that the bourgeois seeks to walk. He will never surrender himself either to lust or to asceticism. He will never be a martyr or agree to his own destruction. On the contrary, his ideal is not to give up but to maintain his own identity. He strives neither for the saintly nor its opposite. The absolute is his abhorrence. He may be ready to serve God, but not by giving up the fleshpots. He is ready to be virtuous, but likes to be easy and comfortable in this world as well. In short, his aim is to make a home for himself between two extremes in a temperate zone without violent storms and tempests; and in this he succeeds though it be at the cost of that intensity of life and feeling which an extreme life affords. A man cannot live intensely except at the cost of the self. Now the bourgeois treasures nothing more highly than the self (rudimentary as his may be). And so at the cost of intensity he achieves his own preservation and security. His harvest is a quiet mind which he prefers to being possessed by God, as he does comfort to pleasure, convenience to liberty, and a pleasant temperature to that deathly inner consuming fire. The bourgeois is consequently by nature a creature of weak impulses, anxious, fearful of giving himself away and easy to rule. Therefore, he has substituted majority for power, law for force, and the polling booth for responsibility.
 
It is clear that this weak and anxious being, in whatever numbers he exists, cannot maintain himself, and that qualities such as his can play no other role in the world than that of a herd of sheep among free roving wolves. Yet we see that, though in times when commanding natures are uppermost, the bourgeois goes at once to the wall, he never goes under; indeed at times he even appears to rule the world. How is this possible? Neither the great numbers of the herd, nor virtue, nor common sense, nor organization could avail to save it from destruction. No medicine in the world can keep a pulse beating that from the outset was so weak. Nevertheless the bourgeoisie prospers.

Just like corporations.  

[Renegade]

...
Just like corporations. 

-40hz (February 01, 2011, 10:46 PM)

I'm not buying it. 

The capacity for "naughtiness" isn't comparable. A single person has virtually no power, and the "evil" ones are exceedingly rare given the number of humans.

Corporations on the other hand have the capacity to grow their sizes far beyond the capabilities of any human. This is their core purpose. However, with that immense power, also comes a level of capability that easily eclipses the greatest men in history.

It's like comparing luminance in Bic lighters and suns.

[phitsc]

I just saw that SpiderOak has a "competitive upgrade" offer. Apparently Mozy has dropped unlimited storage plans so SpiderOak is offering 20% off with 'mozy' coupon code.

From Twitter:

#Mozy Drops Unlimited Storage - http://t.co/5fuZuvZ Get 20% our premium storage off via code 'mozy' when you switch to Spideroak.com #backup

-http://twitter.com/spideroak/status/32616496588918784

-Deozaan (February 01, 2011, 08:01 PM)

Does anyone have experience, good or bad, with SpiderOak?

[40hz]

Does anyone have experience, good or bad, with SpiderOak?

-phitsc (February 02, 2011, 12:24 AM)

Tried it close to when it first came out around the the time Linkup went bust. Spider Oak was offering free accounts (for the first year) if you were a Linkup subscriber. Worked well. Liked it. Didn't see anything special about it as such. Just took a look at the latest iteration. Seems they've jazzed it up considerably since I used it.

My current fav is iDrive. Primarily because I like their client app and all I really want it for is offsite backup. They also have a Wordpress plug-in, which is how I first heard about it. They'll currently give you 5Gb of storage free for personal use.

They also have some other products you can check out on their site. iDriveSync and iDriveLite may also be of interest.

Homepage link here.

Disclaimer: No affiliation whatsoever. Just a free account user.

[Paul Keith]

Edit: Sorry if this reads preachy. I'm not really Christian but I was born with a Catholic background so I can only reference Christ.

IMO banning competitive upgrade is worse than un-ethical, it's ethics destroying.

Whether that means the existence of the opposite is ethical or not, is up to the person and whether they are the victim and whether they are willing to accept a grand view of things.

At the heart of competitive upgrade is competition. At the heart of ethical competition is to bring forth the best. The exact opposite of what corporations do.

Therefore, it's a lot like the Pharisee questioning whether Jesus being the Son of God and therefore having a higher authority just for being the "Messiah" is ethical.

If you consider and follow a man who will break the Sabbath when it is necessary, would be fundamentalist but not in the dogma of God but in "maximizing" the good will of God, in giving people a choice (discipleship) versus by force (religion) ethical, then yes competitive upgrade is not only ethical it's necessary for just as it may bring forth greater evil (or at least corporations) - that greater evil incentivizes people to form a greater good and greater good means greater chance of progress. Bad for individual business, but great for ethics in the long run.

However real change produces victims. Some who might become martyrs. Martyrs who might become saints. Most who might become unsung heroes and unsung victims. That's not fun at all. Does it lead to greater ethics? Yes.

But not only in business, but in life, we can settle for good ethics. We can go to church. We can attend bible studies. We can make a business selling "inferior" quality and stable products sheltered from the greater evil...and we will be ethical. Possibly socially considered extremely ethical even. Apostles of "Do no Evil" like Google even before we get to become big and amass tons of haters.

So then the true philosophical question is... is protecting the sanctity of good ethics ethical?

Should we let the enemy of greatness, (good) win just to protect ethics?

Not many are willing to ask that question. Worse, not many are willing to live with their answers.

So it happens that the the bourgeois becomes a lie. Not because it cannot be true (in the same way Marxism isn't a lie)

...but it is a lie because it is inorganic. It is a lie because while we may want to "tackle the ethics of our time", we rarely acknowledge the "living ethics" of our humanity.

...and so those that gain that power to answer that question - they too do not have an answer to that ethics. For they realize answering whether it is ethical is also a lie. If they say corporations, people will not accept it is "bourgeois"-like. If they say "bourgeois", they cannot fully encapsulate the cancer of society that is bureaucracy...or what we nowadays know as corporation.

Worse - those in power cannot always educate those who are not and vice versa. The poor will gamble their lives on the lottery, the rich will gamble their lives on stocks and bonds and the bourgeois will gamble on wage slavery if not small business. All creatures structurally similar. Like the unethical hypocritical Jew being similar to the heathen Samaritan and the good Samaritan to the ethical Jew - they are the same BUT they are different!

...and so in the end, the more informed Christians become Atheists and Agnostics. The more ethical developer becomes the unethical trickster. Loki instead of Satan. Summon Bigger Evangelical Open Source Followers instead of Banning Competitive Upgrade. Legislation instead of Futurization. Anonymous vs. Big Brother.

Ethics in the end is not a question of "is this ethical" but rather "my ethics trumps yours".

Welfare trumps Independence. Healthcare trumps Debt. Destruction (or at least the desire to destroy and anarchize) trumps Better Government. That is the ethical answer to this question.

If you can summon angry mobs discrediting your competitor - competitive upgrade is ethical.

If you cannot and are awashed and cannot compete with him and the world turns the other cheek and Lady Luck curses your hard work - competitive upgrade is unethical and life should be given a "normal mode" when things become hard. No, beyond that: evolution is unethical and must be socialized despite the fact that competitive upgrade does not kill you, only make you poor. Poor is bad. How dare someone try to make you poor. How dare the cancer trample the other hard working organs!!!

P.S. I don't really know what I'm saying but this thread makes me want to babble.