AT&T, Verizon, Frontier, and Lumen all get hammered after lead-cable reports.

AT&T’s stock price hit a 29-year low on Friday and continued to sink today as investors fled telecom stocks on reports that cleanups of lead-covered telephone cables could cost the industry tens of billions of dollars.

  • rm_dash_r_star@lemm.eeEnglish
    21·
    1 year ago

    Corporations are like governments, we need the services they provide to live a modern life. Both can do things that harm public welfare, and they do. If you find the solution to malevolent government, you’ll find the solution to malevolent capitalism. That solution eludes us and always will because of human nature. We will always compete for acquisition. You’d have to eliminate greed which is impossible.

    The problem with a non-capitalistic system is it suffers a much worse fate because there’s a single point of control. In the ideal it could work better, but because of human nature it works a lot worse.

    But yeah, corporations do a lot of evil greedy shit so fuck 'em.

    • bitcrafter@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
      3·
      1 year ago

      You are conflating capitalism with corporations; they are not at all the same thing. The former is an economic system, whereas the latter is the legal creation of a fictional “person” for the express purpose of shielding private individuals from legal consequences.

      Mind you, that is not always a bad thing. If someone decides to start a new business using a portion of their savings, it is arguably good to allow them to do so in such a way that if the business fails (and my understanding is that something like 90% of them do, so this is the overwhelmingly most likely outcome) then they lose only their investment and not their entire life savings or worse end up deeply in personal debt because otherwise we as a society would lose out on a lot of beneficial enterprises due to them being too risky. The problem comes in when this legal fiction acts as such a strong shield that it enables and encourages people to act in extremely harmful ways with virtual impunity because only the fictional person that is the corporation gets punished rather than the individuals who made the harmful decisions.