A cadmium spill doesn’t really have any pretty pictures for the news to show until the cancer rates shoot up a few years later.
Not really. I made the comparison that ‘here’s something really bad that Exxon has done.’ I’m not saying apple is okay because they don’t do the same thing, but that I can’t find anything that Apple has done that approaches that kind of evil. I’m treating evil as a fungible quantity. Maybe that’s not appropriate, and maybe I don’t actually know the definition of ‘fungible’ but I don’t see any other way to compare.
And Exxon as a name isn’t so bad. Around here we have things like “Genzyme” and “Biogen” that sound properly 21st Century/Gotham City Evil.
Who put the gun to Exxon’s head to make them go into oil?
Why did being in the oil industry force Exxon to fight tooth and nail against paying for the damage the business they chose to go in caused?
If you’re a taxi driver, and you run someone over, should or should you not see that your victim is made whole again?
If you can’t pay for the damages your business causes you shouldn’t be in business. If you won’t then you’re a crook, and piece of shit, and not only shouldn’t be in business, but you should be in don’t drop the soap supermax.
Make room for those who can do it right.
An excellent point. Do you know of any Apple based cadmium spills? While that’d be a terrible thing, it’d be nice to get out of the disgusting position of defending Apple. I loathe them. For me this is basically like defending Bush II because someone said he was as bad as Hitler. Bush is evil, but he’s not Hitler evil. Apple is evil, but it’s not Exxon Evil™.
Well if you are a publicly owned taxi driver, you have a legal (and some would say ethical) responsibility to ensure that you don’t overpay to make your victim whole again.
No, I wasn’t
And yet a common complaint about Exxon is: OMG!!! Exxon just made 100 gazillion dollars in profit. Look how evil they are.
That’s nonsense, and demonstrates a completely misunderstanding of how business works, what profits are, and what gouging is.
Sorry, I should have been more clear. I was responding specifically to The Tao’s Revenge’s point that Apple has never caused a major environmental disaster.
Well define overpay. Think about that
Also, they fought paying for 2 decades, was that fair to victims of their incompetence?
Say the taxi driver manages to tie up the case in court for 20 years. Further he reorganizes his taxi business so a subsidiary, worth a small fraction of the damage he could cause assumes the risk. Meaning he runs over anyone else, they won’t be made whole, at most they be able to bankrupt his subsidiary.
Further let’s say the victim files a restraining order against the Taxi driver. Doesn’t feel safe with him around and the Taxi’s call letters are a terrible, offensive, and degrading reminder. Well let’s say the taxi driver fights tooth and nail to have that very same cab in service on the victim’s street. Would that not be a jackass thing to do?
Further Exxon’s profits in 1988 where $3.81 billion in 1988 dollars, which after inflation (74.46% (December 1988 to December 2008) works out to: $6,646,926,000.
So they’re just chugging along living the high life, enjoying the fruits, but spinelessly dodging taking responsibility while raking in the dough while their victims continue to suffer, to say nothing of the suffering their incompetence caused on the local animal life.
What do you believe is a fair figure, including negligence, and punitive damages, for the damage their business caused?
Do you believe $25 million is enough punishment for a company with multi-billion dollar profits? Exxon does:
So do you believe these fucksticks have any remorse? Why shouldn’t it be every citizen’s duty to punch Exxon Management soundly in the gut upon sight?
No Exxon worked very hard to earn their hate, don’t deny them their due.
For a publicly owned company - more than you have to by law, unless paying more than you have to by law generates sufficient customer goodwill to make it a financially rewarding course to take.
Public companies don’t exist to be fair.
villa, just because a company doesn’t have to legally do something doesn’t take them off the “evil” hook. Public companies spend money they don’t have to all the time for better PR. Charitable contributions, making wronged customers whole… etc. are all done because companies want to avoid the perception of being evil. Exxon chose not to. That their actions may be ‘legal’ isn’t actually relevant. Doing legal things should be status quo. What we are saying here is that if Exxon chose to reconcile the Exxon-Valdez spill in a more forthright manner, they would not have been labeled as ‘evil’ – at least to a lesser extent. They chose more money over avoiding negative publicity. I refuse to accept that simply because what they did was ‘legal’ that I can’t be mad about it and call Exxon Evil over it.
For example, many people use the court system to bully people by filing perfectly legal lawsuits, yet ridiculous lawsuits. I’m thinking of that guy who sued a dry-cleaning business for some trumped up reason. He of course didn’t win, but the process bankrupted the family-owned business. Legal, yes. Evil, YES!
So you’re saying it’s not evil, not worthy of hate, because it’s what they’re supposed to do? Because “it’s just business”?
Not true at all. The argument that was being made was that Exxon (and other majors) made relatively low margins in comparison to other industries. This is of course a silly argument as industries can’t really be compared like that. Nevertheless, they were always talking about the consolidated operations when justifying the margins as not exhorbitant.
It is also not an accounting or bookkeeping trick to account for sales to related companies or divisions of the same company in the way you described. It is in fact the ethical way of accounting for it. You are supposed to transact business with related entities on an arms-length basis. Otherwise, you are distorting the operations of them. Just think about it logically, what if you were a bank lending money to the Exxon refinery business. Wouldn’t you want them to paint that business in as accurate a picture as possible? If they sell that to another entity their profitability would be drastically different unless it was being handled as if it was a stand-alone entity. You would be completely screwed if you were relying on the upstream business of Exxon to subsidize the refinery business in your models of future profitability and they sold the entity and you lost that subsidy.
It is a separate point all together that retail stations operate on razor thin margins. That is certainly true; however, largely pointless since most of retail stations are independently owned even if they might have a sign out front that says Exxon, BP, Shell, Mobile, Chevron, Texaco, Arco, Amaco, or anything else.
Of course market cap is a much more meaningful way of measuring the size of a company. Comparison of margins across industries is an absurd and incorrect analysis as would be the comparison of revenue numbers. I understand you may be saying that revenue is the measure that the media uses and not one you agree with (or maybe you do); however, it is certainly not a correct measure of comparison while market cap would be.
Well, for one, those companies don’t make much money from people buying gasoline at a store branded with their name; they do it primarily selling oil they produce to a midstream company (which could be owned by them or another company). Second, they very well may be the supplier of gasoline to the Chevron branded gasoline station that you avoided the Exxon one to go to.
The only way people can have a major impact on Exxon’s profit is by using less oil and natural gas period. They produce and sell a commodity. Their product is interchangeable with all of their competitor’s and in fact comingled with their competitor’s products in many cases.
I am saying “evil” in the way you use it doesn’t apply to a corporation. If Exxon acted differently, ut would likely not be maximizing the return to its shareholders. And while on the one hand killing seabirds with oil spills isn’t good, nor is misusing Granny Perkins’ pension fund leading to her being unable to afford the hip replacement surgery after care she requires, and resulting in her dying a slow death from starvation on the floor at the foot of the stairs because her ungrateful children moved to Palo Alto and never come visit.
If we want corporations to act in a different fashion, we need to make them. If it is profitable to act in a certain way, corporations will do it. Remember the scorpion and the turtle. A corporation’s raison d’etre is to pursue profits. If you want to change its behavior, you have choices: change the profit motivation, or change the corporate law.
You are looking at it incorrectly. There are actually tremendous variations in margins and profit by individual gasoline station. Gasoline is a commodity just like oil. It has a basic defined cost per geographic location and quality. As such, each retail station in the same geographic area has the same basic cost of goods sold.
Currently RBOB gasoline trades at $2.4810. This is a good proxy to use for the cost of goods sold for the retail station. In Texas, we pay a 6.3% sales tax on gasoline plus $0.20 of other taxes. This brings the basic cost without any profit for the station to $2.8373. The average price of gasoline in Texas is $2.968. Therefore, on average there is $0.1307 of profit being made without factoring in any overhead costs or anything like that (employee salaries, equipment, maintenance, insurance, lease costs, property taxes income taxes). Therefore, the gross profit margin (as opposed to the net profit margin) is something like 4.4%. Obviously the net profit margin is much greater. I’m sure it is not uncommon for you to see $0.05 or $0.10 price differences in stations around town. If one gas station sells for $0.05 less than average then their gross margin would be 2.77%. If one sells for $0.05 more than average then their gross margin is 5.99%. I would say that a 116% increase in profit variability on a conservative basis (only a $0.10 difference in price) is considerable.
That’s absurd. When Exxon, just last year, bought XTO for $41 billion and made a major move expanding their position in the domestic shale gas industry despite horrid natural gas prices and growing public and political sentiment against shale gas was that not a betting the company type move? When has Apple ever done as risky a venture as that?
Further, considering that some of the world’s best scientists, engineers, geologists, geophysicists, etc work for Exxon, what the hell do you think they are doing if not real innovation? Is carbon sequestration and using CO2 for enhanced oil recovery innovation? Is geothermal energy innovation? Is there innovation going on in wind power right now? What about the simple fact that they can now drill 30,000 feet under 8,000 feet of ocean? You are clueless if you don’t consider that work innovative. I’m pretty damn sure they’re not sitting there waiting for oil prices to move up so they can make money.
According to the 10Q filed by Apple filed two days ago, they currently have two separate antitrust cases going on, one class action suit by shareholders alleging backdating of stock options, and one class action lawsuit alleging warranty fraud and the sale of used products marketed as new. They are also continuously involved in various lawsuits alleging patent infringement.
For those of you that are against outsourcing, they state directly in their 10Q that substantially all of their components and products are manufactured in whole or in part overseas.
I personally don’t see either of them as evil. Of course I might be unusual in that I actually take ten minutes to figure out some basic facts about a company and their industry before calling them the equivalent to Adolph Hitler unlike most of the people on this board apparently.
I’ll certainly admit a Texan knows the gas business better than me…
What I was meaning more is that the five cent price difference doesn’t affect consumer behavior - the gas companies themselves (as opposed to the station owners) aren’t competing on the basis of price.
Antitrust really isn’t an area where you can assume where there is smoke there is fire. The structure of antitrust law encourages firms to roll the dice on litigation, in particular seeking treble damages from a friendly jury that doesn’t like big companies.
Similarly patent lawsuits are hardly rare. I’m not involved with any MSFT cases, but I have defended multiple large corporations against specious antitrust and patent infringement cases.