Why does 3M still exist? Their company charter should be revoked. Their assets should be stripped and sold. Every employee fired. Everyone complicit should be in a prison cell. Every single one of them.
Because 3M does some of the best products on the market in their particular niche.
Adhesives, abrasives, protection equipment (ironic, heh), etc... You are probably using many 3M products personally, and whoever worked on your house, car, etc... even more so. If everyone complicit should be in prison, make the entire world in prison. Remove all 3M products from the market and everyone life will be a little worse.
Does it mean 3M shouldn't respond to all the environmental damage, of course not, but there are many products 3M makes that are not particularly bad for the environment.
Also, what would happen without 3M? There are needs to be fulfilled, other companies will take over (maybe directly by buying sold 3M assets), but there is no reason to believe they won't be as bad as 3M, especially if it is a company located in a country that doesn't care that much about the environment. China will probably love the idea.
Yes, they lie, spy and poison us, so work on the lying, spying and poisoning part on a company that can be controlled in some way instead of throwing off everything and have the problem move elsewhere.
Indirection, responsibility splitting, and accountability factoring are enormously effective organizational tools that allow formal influence to be wielded within organizations through informal means that are legally impossible to prosecute in practical timeframes, and give broad cover to bad faith actors. We have adversarially evolved organizational behaviors that are possibly not solvable through purely legal means applied to post facto acts deliberately obscured through nerfed information retention policies, and the very structuring of responsibility, accountability, processes, policies, influence and so on might be fair game for some manner of more formal scrutiny.
> Indirection, responsibility splitting, and accountability factoring are enormously effective organizational tools that ... are legally impossible to prosecute in practical timeframes, and give broad cover to bad faith actors.
It's not just at the organizational level, it's at the societal level in democratic politics, too.
Just take deregulated modern capitalism, broadly. It has all kinds of clearly-observed bad or unfair outcomes for lots of groups (to various degrees, pretty much anyone not in the ownership class), but its structure is so slippery that the ownership class and its lackeys have been able to use the characteristics you outlined stymie positive change.
For instance, there is market incentive for corporations to behave badly, but then that bad behavior is defended by pointing to those market incentives and making the bad-faith argument that, due the markets decentralization, the complainer is complicit unless they took the impossible action of being totally independent from the market we've used to organize our economy. That confuses the situation so much that a lot of people just tune out.
What is the point of a president? What is the point of a prime-minister? What is the point of a King, or Queen, or Emperor, or "People's Commitee" if there is no-one with the power to say "enough"? No-one with the power to say "no more"?
People make me fucking sick to my teeth. I bust my guts trying to make things a little better, and I earn very little and get back nothing. Then you realise every effort is undermined by an avalanche of shit from people actively trying to make things worse.
Fuckfuckfuck.
Why bother even trying? Why bother even being alive?
If the world is drowning, and all your work amounts to a millimetre off the water level of one city, what good have you done? A millimetre might make the difference between a submerged nostril, and not. The difference between the water flooding a building's walls, and it not. Nobody can determine the absolute level of badness in the world, but we can make local, relative changes to it. All big things are made of small things.
You can never know whether you have helped anyone. That does not mean you haven't.
We didn’t start the fire, it was always burning, since the world’s been turning.
Doesn’t mean it’s not worth trying to do good. It’s good for you, if nothing else. But you have to let go of the idea that you control more than the tiniest fraction of it.
> I bust my guts trying to make things a little better
Don't.
> I earn very little and get back nothing.
Exactly. You need to be more mercenary.
> Why bother even trying?
For things you care about. Your family, your self, maaaybe some close friends. If you're going to invest in a project, make sure you own it or have significant equity.
The world is chock full of vampires looking to exploit helpers. Don't let them get you.
> The world is chock full of vampires looking to exploit helpers. Don't let them get you.
More importantly, don't let this dissuade anyone from helping. Some caution is needed yes, but cynicism is the greater foe. A life of public service is a life well spent.
Most people with lots of power or money never want to lose any of it. They see it as if destiny has given them a right over others, so they feel superior
They spy on us.
They poison us.
Why does 3M still exist? Their company charter should be revoked. Their assets should be stripped and sold. Every employee fired. Everyone complicit should be in a prison cell. Every single one of them.