Same problem as rating your pain on the pain scale: is 10 the worst pain I've experienced, or the worst I can imagine? Because I've got a... very vivid imagination. And still, that's the best we can do. I blame an imperfect universe.
To be fair, the US has never been peaceful, and it's the country that started the most wars since WW2. It's just that it used to be in our team, and human nature makes the aggressiveness of our team justified, or at least understandable, or at least ignorable, or at least not quite changing our deep feelings.
And, at least regarding the more recent ones in Iraq and Afghanistan, Europe witnessed the largest anti-war protests in history.
From that perspective, the current "emperor is naked" development might be positive in the sense that Europe can relatively soon have enough military power to be taken seriously, and at the same time become impossible to drag into an offensive war because none of its countries wants any war and we only went there because US pressured us into - but now that the USA has became unreliable, there's no reason to sacrifice oneself.
That's unnecessarily cynical. I've been in plenty of companies where the staff, managers included, enjoy going for a pint together. I'm in the UK, maybe it's cultural.
I agree, I made it too black and white. I should've said that some, probably most (in my opinion), of such decisions are made with productivity in mind, whether it's in the form of team cohesiveness or favorable view of management, but some are just because managers have the best interest in mind for their subordinates.
OTOH, if you've witnessed how most managers talk about their employees to one another, it's with a cold calculating language. Sure, a manager may feel bad for firing an employee, but first and foremost is the business analysis of whether it makes sense to do so - just pure math and predictions.
Personally, if I was in a management position and an employee asked me for a cigarette, I would happily give it to them. In fact, a few times a week I give a few cigarettes to 1 person who is not my employee, but who I talk to from time to time. I don't gain anything from this and I give them cigarettes because they are on a tight budget.
Also, if I, as a hypothetical manager, realized a lot of my employees would take an offer for free coffee, cigarettes, pure nicotine, beer or another drug, I would give it to them as long as it didn't hurt productivity too much. Of course some drugs like alcohol could hurt short term productivity, but it would make them happier overall, which would have positive long term effects. If asked why I do this, I would say that I'm both giving them out of my good will and to increase productivity, which would be true.
Don't forget driving, the most dangerous thing one can do in the West. It sounds be the first thing to be banned, really, the costs are just too enormous.
Western governments see car owners, smokers and drinkers as a steady income stream while preaching against them.
I was on a bus yesterday which took three times as long as it should have done. An hour and a half on a bus, and I still got in late despite setting out early. That was in a city. If you live outside a city, the public transport is even worse. I've missed job interviews, dates, other transport connections etc due to public transport. So yes, there are costs to that too.
This is the most toxic of urban legends. Fiduciary duty to shareholders means acting in the interests of the company rather than your own. There is no duty to maximise profits against all morals.
You're absolutely right, but the line between acting in the interest of the company and acting to maximize profits is so thin it might as well not exist.
It can be in the company's interest to act for the good of society and a CEO can claim that it is his fudiciary duty to act in the interest of society.
But when society's interests are in direct conflict with the interests of the company you cannot expect a CEO to act in the interest of society.
Even if a CEO is perfectly within their rights to act against the interests of the company, it doesn't change the fact that investors might replace him if the CEO does so consistently.
So you have a fudiciary duty to put the company's interest first and you have no legal duty to put the public interest first (as long as no crimes are being committed).
If you own an item you want to destroy, no problem. If a company owns an item it want to destroy, it can't anymore. The conflation of persons and corporations has been responsible for an enormous amount of evil, and it's time to start distinguish the two again.
What evil? I think it would be very hard to have a system of law without corporate personhood. Every time you wanted a law to eg ban x, you would need a separate law for corporations.
Your reasoning makes sense only if it's just as easy to sentence the group to jail time as it is to sentence the individual--and pretty much everything else about a corporation is set up to make it harder to do that.
If it's an unlimited partnership or something, _maybe_. Approximately no companies implicated are, though; they're typically limited liability companies of some sort. A limited liability company demanding human rights feels a bit like having your cake and eating it.
