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Etsy is under pressure to start acting more like a conventional company

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Re: Etsy is under pressure to start acting more like a conventional company

#231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well that makes sense. I keep forgetting how articles incorrectly portray people, especially when it fits a narrative. I guess I was only too ready to believe that a company that bikes around leftovers would actually believe in craft-servers.

"Code as Craft" was the name of their engineering blog. I suspect the author found a post about Etsy running their own servers there and decided this juxtaposition fit the narrative they were building.

It looks (from the outside) like Etsy's core eng team, early, had its culture come from all of the ex-Flickr people working there.

Flickr's other direct descendant, culturally, is Slack. Those are nerdy, charming, funny cultures. "Code as Craft" is a cute pun. Taking it entirely literally is a really big point-miss.

Re: Etsy is under pressure to start acting more like a conventional company

#232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're correct that ultimately, at the end of the day, the shareholders are the owners of the business, and should have ultimate control over how their resources are allocated or spent. That doesn't mean that the shareholders interests are necessarily for profit above all else. If your shareholders were perfectly happy with being ecologically conscious and providing an above-average place of business for employees ir…

> If your shareholders were perfectly happy with being ecologically conscious and providing an above-average place of business for employees irrespective of profit, wouldn't demanding focus on profit above all else be working against the shareholder's interests? This argument of shareholders wanting to be ecologically conscious is such a privileged idea. The majority of money in the stock market doesn't come from the…

>We already know how to deal with negative externalities such as pollution. Evaluate how much it costs society and tax it accordingly.

I don't understand this, can it not be the case that the companies can 'afford' to keep polluting, even if paying the tax? Especially if pollution "cost on society" is relatively constant or not increasing according to profit. How is this cost on society determined, and what if I think that the cost is too high, even for taxation to deal with it?

This seems like a band aid on one of the problems inherent with the profit motive.

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