Who Are My Investors?

I appreciate OP's point about lack of clarity, because yes, the capitalist game has nothing to say about anything except following whatever you can get away with. But that narrow game is being played in a much broader context of society that exists because of a broader social contract and set of values which keeps everything running.

The reasonable answer to where you draw the line is: when something is no longer compatible with your value system. And if that's not clear, the issue is that you haven't yet spent enough time defining your values. That's the thing to talk about, research, consider, ask advice on, etc. People having a solid, well-tested personal value system is critical to society's function, because that informs how groups of people like companies then operate, and so forth on up.

To make a bit of a broader (and possibly controversial) point on this, we're in a situation right now where software engineering and finance are two fields with the highest leverage in society, yet these fields are some of the least concerned with values/ethics, from the point of view of both the education and experiences people gain in these fields. Small parts of these fields may care a great deal about values/ethics, but broadly speaking the situation we're in is "with great power comes great unawareness of responsibility." It's weird and scary.

The result of this lack of concern is that many powerful people have under-developed and unsophisticated personal value systems, and consequently do not know what to do in ethically nuanced, important situations like what OP is bringing up. There's a whole lot of people in tech waking up to this realization nowadays. It'd be nice if we were able to fix this at the source and raise the next generation right, rather than flail around rediscovering this every few years when yet another societal crisis hits.

On that, you and I are on 100% agreement! It is just that in my experience, the real problems are staggeringly prosaic, and thus hard to drum up real support for. Not many people (although I am willing to bet quite a few here on HN!) get excited about proper waste management/sanitation. But it is one of those comparatively cheap things that reaps vast societal and environmental benefit. And plastics provide a lot of benefits for very little cost- it's why they are used so heavily. Switching over to paper packaging would require vastly more energy and resource inputs, for example, and it is not immediately clear that this would, or would not, be a net benefit.

A truly biodegradable plastic that still had the required physical properties of what we currently use would be a big step forward, too.

As a slight aside, I am leery of banning as a first-choice tool for dealing with these kinds of problems. Look at what happened in California when anticoagulant rat and mouse poisons were banned from use. What was an excellent idea (reduce poison loads in the environment, stop additional kill of non-target wildlife) has instead become objectively worse, and the neurotoxin introduced as a replacement has no treatment, unlike the Vitamin K shots that could previously help stricken pets and animals, and is a far more agonizing way to die to boot.

Consider the wealth generated by Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg. I can't take away from them the fact that they worked hard when they saw a great opportunity and made themselves insanely wealthy in doing so, but history will may not judge their actions in a way that they are shown as messiahs.

So I find all this discussion just a bit hypocritical to be very honest.

Comments most welcome to change my, rather cynical, opinion.