[0] https://archive.is/t6tSb

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/sep/12/nhs-hospita...

[1] https://archive.ph/UDtZo/again?url=https://www.ft.com/conten...

[2] https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/nhs-privatisation-health-so...

[3] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/health-matters-ai...

[4] https://usa.streetsblog.org/2019/05/29/protect-yourself-sepa...

[5] https://digital.nhs.uk/news/2021/one-million-admissions-link...

But also, we are moving (slowly) in the direction you'd likely prefer: Norway and Germany are now doing supply chain due diligence[2]. Hopefully we continue moving in that direction so we can push the floor up and perverse human rights violations become more of a thing of the past.

[1] https://gfintegrity.org/press-release/new-report-on-unrecord...

[2] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/business-and-human-r...

> A 2013 report published by the UK Office for National Statistics showed that in the UK the rate of survival of cooperatives after five years was 80 percent compared with only 41 percent for all other enterprises.[5] A further study found that after ten years 44 percent of cooperatives were still in operation, compared with only 20 percent for all enterprises.

> A 2012 report published by The European Confederation of cooperatives and worker-owned enterprises active in industry and services showed that in France and Spain, worker cooperatives and social cooperatives "have been more resilient than conventional enterprises during the economic crisis".[47]

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative#Economic_stability

The claim that cooperatives act irrationally (and the implication that they're less efficient) requires some factual data to back that claim up, otherwise it's just that – an anecdotal claim. Here's academic data to dismiss those claims:

> Labor-managed firms are as productive as conventional firms, or more productive, in all industries, and use their inputs efficiently; but in several industries conventional firms would produce more with their current input levels if they organized production like labor-managed firms. On average overall, firms would produce more using the labor-managed firms’ industry-specific technologies. Labor-managed firms do not produce at inefficiently low scales

Source: Fakhfakh, F., Pérotin, V., & Gago, Mó. (2012). Productivity, Capital, and Labor in Labor-Managed and Conventional Firms: An Investigation on French Data. ILR Review, 65(4), 847–879. doi:10.1177/001979391206500404

Similar results were also found to hold in an older study by Craig and Pencavel in 1995.

Especially when you consider all the union busting tactics used by leadership at traditional businesses – how are you even supposed to form a union when they won't let you? Coops come at that from a different angle: you get democratic control, straight up. Don't like your leadership if you choose to structure the business that way? You can actually vote them out of their role.

Sure, but a startup using VC money to offer you something for free is very different from "I will personally volunteer to help you".

Also the entire point of sharing articles is that they're being read, so there isn't any way to avoid implying they're doing "self-promotion" – should people just stop writing and sharing articles?

Sometimes people aren't after some self-serving goal, and I think it's a little dangerous to think everyone is – charities exist. Cooperatives are more ethical businesses because they build democracy into their structure unlike traditional businesses, why would I assume whoever is talking about them isn't just hoping to see more of that in the world? Or do we reduce that to "that's just the author being selfish again"?

You mean the last paragraph where they _volunteer_ to have coaching sessions with people? "Selling" usually implies an exchange of money or an expectation of something in return, but there's no product here – the author is offering their time for free to help others start or join cooperatives. Is it fair to dismiss that as "being sold" something?

> [...] Additionally, "cooperative banks build up counter-cyclical buffers that function well in case of a crisis," and are less likely to lead members and clients towards a debt trap (p. 216). This is explained by their more democratic governance that reduces perverse incentives and subsequent contributions to economic bubbles.

> The cooperative banking sector had 20% market share of the European banking sector, but accounted for only 7 per cent of all the write-downs and losses between the third quarter of 2007 and first quarter of 2011. Cooperative banks were also over-represented in lending to small and medium-sized businesses in all of the 10 countries included in the report.

> [...] in France and Spain, worker cooperatives and social cooperatives "have been more resilient than conventional enterprises during the economic crisis".

> Public trust in credit unions stands at 60%, compared to 30% for big banks and small businesses are five times less likely to be dissatisfied with a credit union than with a big bank.

In other words, this behaviour doesn't happen everywhere. It's specific to certain types of businesses.

Paragraphs from here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative#Economic_stability

You can use measures that are less country-specific like the Gini coefficient and UN R/P to measure domestic inequality between countries:

The UK has a Gini coefficient of 35.1, a UN R/P 10% of 13.8

India has a Gini coefficient of 35.7, a UN R/P 10% of 8.6

For reference, Norway has a Gini coefficient of 27.7, and a UN R/P 10% of 6.1

(higher = more inequality)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_eq...

> Net Resource Transfers (NRT) for all developing countries have been mostly large and negative since the early 1980s, indicating sustained and significant outflows from the developing world (see graph below)

https://gfintegrity.org/press-release/new-report-on-unrecord...

The answer to this is that if it's nearly impossible to find a more ethical job (e.g. a non-profit medical research worker cooperative) when the system you're under doesn't economically incentivise ethical job creation. If your probability of finding one is incredibly slim, you're practically excused – you're just doing what's needed to have a normal life.

> The GPLv2 itself starts by saying, "To protect your rights, we need to make restrictions" - there is a coherent political view that this is contradictory.

There will _always_ be such restrictions. For an extreme, but derived from the same philosophical core, example: the act of murder is an individual freedom, but it imposes on other peoples' freedoms. So we have to make a choice between which freedom is more important: that of the person whose life is at risk, or that of the person who wants to take lives. The formal concepts are referred to as negative liberty (freedom from murder) and positive liberty (freedom to murder someone).

The modern world leans heavily towards negative liberty because we recognise that freedom isn't some absolute individualistic freedom, but rather that it is better to balance freedom in favour of most people. That's why stealing, killing, sexual assault, and many other things are freedoms we deem unethical and unnecessary.

Some people say, "well, it's just software" which is dismissive of the idea that software can have very bad effects, indirect and direct, on the world, so we must empower ourselves.

> Or, in the left-libertarian direction, consider the folks who want to abolish copyright entirely.

There are also those on the left who want this, but also to go _beyond_ simply abolishing. If you abolish copyright without requiring code and build instructions to be open source as well, you just end up with people and companies who instead keep their code secret.

It's why, when slavery was abolished, it wasn't enough. The former slaves were free, but were now in a world where the power structures were not in their favour, meaning they could still be taken advantage of and treated like slaves and were still being oppressed.

Libertarian views are usually rejected by the left as right wing, instead when you talk about leftists with less authoritarian views, they call themselves anarchists (or even reject that label, and say they're "doing anarchism" rather than being "anarchists").