My boss is currently on a visit to Saudi to drum up business ... the last 12 months has been nothing short of the full on capitulation of western businesses to Saudi money ... all concept of ethics has been completely dropped or 'explained away'.
Best to find another job that doesn't enable human rights abuses or enable despotic regimes that whip women if they dare to drive car and import slave labor.
Edit: It's a gray area of engineering ethics that can only remain intact by avoiding even the appearance of impropriety. If it feels bad, then it's work or business best avoided.
The vast majority of philosophers don't believe in moral relativism. It's actually usually the amateurs early mistake and you can read alot of the critique of it easily online.
I wouldn't trust most philosophers' judgment on the matter at all unless they were also deeply familiar with evolutionary biology and game theory. I suspect most of them are not. I'd much prefer Richard Dawkins' opinion on the matter.
The vast majority of philosophers believed that men were superior to woman and that those of lighter skin were superior to those of darker skin and in general that philosophers were superior to anyone who was not a philosopher. They either didn’t spend time debating this because they all agreed, or in cases where they did, their arguments are not hovered in teaching material because we “want to focus on the pats that are actually true”.
> The vast majority of philosophers believed that (...) those of lighter skin were superior to those of darker skin
Source? We don't know the actual skin tone of Ancient philosophers, but it's likely that Greek and Roman philosophers (many of which were born in and lived in Middle East or Africa) were of darker skin than the Germanic barbarians, whom they considered inferior.
That’s true. And how the Saudis choose to run their society is none of America’s business. The feeling that America is intruding into their societies is in fact a huge source of anger in the Muslim world.
But nothing about the principle that societies are entitled to decide for themselves how to govern themselves requires people in America to accept Americans doing business with other people who have very different values. That’s a completely different matter.
That would be fine if we didn’t selectively pick which countries we apply those rules to. China is an ethical nightmare but we have and continue to do business with them, why change that when it comes to the Middle East.
What makes you think people who disapprove of getting in bed with the Middle East approve of getting in bed with China? Did you ask them? Or did you want so badly to accuse them of hypocrisy that you simply assumed it to be the case?
There's no people who deny travel reimbursements that use Saudi gas.. Does that mean we all need to fly to Saudi Arabia to plan future businesses and garrison death squads in our houses?
I think there's a difference between doing the minimum that is not a disadvantage and making a relationship with an ethical discount country your competitive advantage.
And if a societal model causes catastrophe and collapse it contains that failure? If it wastes human potential and is a free loader compared to free societies? What then?
Justifying the beheading done there is just evil. By Sharia if you're just an apostate or kafir paying jijiya who has done some miniscule mistake which might include affecting the feeling of an Imandar(i.e Muslims). Now anyone can be a kafir because the definition of being a muslim is extremely vague in Quran and hadiths, so that's why you see violence between shia, sunni, ahmediya and all others. Even different factions between Sunnis.
The electric chair and lethal injection have both resulted in torturous, prolonged deaths for some victims. If beheading is done correctly, you essentially die right away.
I would argue that the masses of people that flock to see the beheading also result in some stress towards the victim. But the fact that it is not a clean room beheading but a public one culturally dependent too ...
If we argue which type of death is more or less pleasant we've directly descended into not just the Middle East, but the Middle Ages.
I mean Singapore has draconian punishments for crimes too but they correspondingly have next to no drug use. We lose tens of thousands of people to fentanyl every year, whole towns are devastated etc. Hanging a few drug smugglers is definitely the lesser evil.
That being said, I enjoy my individual rights in the US and wouldn’t live anywhere else but there is a valid argument to be made that our ethics are sometimes a little too short sighted/individualistic and not holistic enough.
(I’m also definitely against the death penalty, just trying to make a point)
The thing is, the death penalties in Singapore are in the single digits per year (out of a population of 6 million, effectively higher as this excludes non-citizens). People are not killed without thought, there is careful and lengthy investigations in each and every case.
The deterrence does work and saves countless lives that would have been taken from ODs and cartel-ish activities
Not true at all, I worked there for a week. Clearly very wealthy African group on top of the marina Bay sands where we were paying like NZD$30 per vodka soda and these guys had multiple magnums of champagne, openly smoking weed.
Singapore = if you have money all of their supposed laws etc do not apply (just like so many other places).
Until you realize that there's about a 5% error in the justice system and if you're unlucky you don't just spend a few years unjustly in jail, not you are also maimed for life.
People that don't realize that can just crawl back to their cave and live out the darwinistic dreams there. (Just speaking/ranting generally here now.)
> Who would have thought that cutting someone's limbs off as a punishment would result in nearly very little theft in those countries too.
Only people that don't read up on the science. Draconian measure affect crime rates much less than immediate negative feedback after the crime (which doesn't need to be draconian).
absolutely. it's a matter of perspective. thinking that you and only you have the "moral" high road, just leads to oppression. good and bad are relative to who's making the judgement
or because whataboutisms are extremely accurate criticisms of trying to blacklist a whole country over a matter unrelated to investment and revenues when your country or "the West" has objectionable things too, often the same things
they're not so important to ignore other considerations, just when you apply that standard to countries and individuals within country you happen to respect, you'll find the same reasons to boycott
the unwillingness of boycotters to see that makes me more willing to ignore them
You're pretty heavily downvoted, but I agree to some extent. Really, I'm just pointing out how marked the trend has been. The line in the sand with Saudi has just blown away in the wind ... of perceived easy money.
I don't agree with the point on blacklisting countries. We boycotted South African goods back in the day when were were pushing for the fall of Apartheid. And I'll be boycotting Israeli goods right now. And I'd stop my boss working with Saudi if I could.
I’m sure I would have a different opinion if I was around for the consumer South Africa boycott and feeling like that succeeded
but nothing remotely close to that has occurred in 30 years and trade is more interlinked as not to really affect countries the same way even if it did occur
with that in mind, how I feel is that harboring that sentiment requires having major blind spots about all the other places you do business with. and the disdain is 100% misapplied to other people or your employer. For example, its one thing if its the Prince’s investment fund, its another thing if its a random private equity fund or private office in Saudi Arabia. The boycotter’s broad, cognitively negligent, generalizations seem far more insensitive than the person disregarding their complaints about human rights abuses.
So you don't feel it is an issue, when you say "prince fund bad, random fund good" that it is fraught with all kinds of ethical issues to bring money and knowhow into a country that has public beheadings?
ah exhibit A: and The West has public extrajudicial executions, as well as semi-public ones more formally
…where is your boycott of Silicon Valley? you don’t feel it is an ethical issue to bring money and knowhow into that country? which country passes your standard exactly
The question is about the 'pretending' - if they pollute less or exploit their employees less to make more money based on the good PR, is that 'pretending'? I would say no, if we're interested in results more than motivation.
It's still pretending. Sometimes it works out for us, but don't forget that as soon as they feel that they'll make more money by polluting more or exploiting workers more they'll do those things.
Be cautious about putting your faith in an image spun by PR campaigns and advertisers. Corporations have shown time and again that they're perfectly happy to lie, greenwash, and spend huge amounts of money to keep up their PR appearances while not always living up the that image. If we're interested in results, we need better transparency and accountability than what we have. Too often what we get is just a comforting fantasy.
That's fair, but if they backslide we can at least serve up bad PR to bring them back into line, possibly? I agree though that there's always the chance they'll calculate the savings from being evil out weigh the costs of bad PR...
Not really and not all companies are like this even today. E.g. I knew someone who ran a business repairing some equipment for other businesses. He wasn't hustling. He wasn't interested in expanding globally. He wasn't battling competitors or doing anything like that. He was friends with his clients and workers, and ran a business that brought in enough to pay everyone fairly and that was that. Probably 25 workers I'd guess, if that.
Of course its different when you are a public company or take on a lot of investor money.
Most corporations are not run by psychopaths (even the big ones); the idea that they are has become a sort of meme, with little evidence in its favor, and a great deal against it. There's even a book about this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Psychopath_Test
Perhaps psychopath might be an exaggeration here but the primary desire for many is to grow income. The options chosen generally favor the path of least/resistance.
Until there's a law mandating morality in business decision making, why should a business entity care? Perhaps it might find comfort in using morality as a differentiator, but the companies that primarily focus on morality are the exception, not the norm.
i don't think you'll find widespread agreement on what's moral or not. what's moral for you maybe abhorrent to someone else. there's not necessarily any absolute good or bad, it's all a matter of perspective.
Consider the lamentably frequent situation where a corporation does something that would get a human person sent to prison or be subjected to a severe fine, but escapes with a token punishment. In some cases corporations become repeat offenders because the statutory penalties, though still for an individual, are small enough for a corporation that they can be accepted as a cost of doing business.
Sure, morality is subjective to an extent but not every company is Ben and Jerry’s or REI, two companies that are the poster-children of the more-ethical side of corporations.
One company actual advertised that they were looking for a psychopaths to fill their new business media sales executive position because they wanted someone who was money driven and willing to do "whatever it takes".
Don't know how many of big biz leaders are psychopaths, but many of them don't seem to be nice people
Elon refusing to pay ex-Twitter employees what they are owed in severance, Zuck wasting Billions of dollars on his shitty Metaverse idea while firing tens of thousands to save money at the same time, Facebook/Google etc hiring thousands of people during Covid without any plan except to pad their numbers (and prevent competitors from hiring those employees) only to fire them a couple of years later, people like that WeWork dude (don't even know where to begin), apps like Uber screwing over their drivers, forcing people to commute to office for no reason.... and on and on
They'll be in good company: Arms Dealers and Drug Lords Are Scooping Up Property in Dubai -- New leaks of property records reveal shady characters hiding out in Dubai, a haven for fugitives
The "Twitter Revolution" and the promise of changing the world to spread democracy seem so quaint now. These are tools for surveillance and crushing dissent.
When I see the eye-watering amounts of money that sovereign wealth funds are willing to pay for talent, I get very concerned for our countries national security. They regularly throw out 7 figures for the right folks.
All you have to do is starting reading about DarkMatter or G42 group. Somehow, working in AI on training new LLMs can put you into a direct line to the guys who murdered Khashoggi
I think back to that movie "Cube" and the philosophical discussion they have about the creators of the system that they're in. They end up agreeing that the individual cubes were built for possible benign or even good reasons, but in their combining together does it turn into a "torture" chamber. That individual good intentions can be subverted at scale to have "tyranny" without the mitigating factor of the tramua that it normally induces is scary indeed.
I’ve been to the UAE and they’ve been in a super fast track to modernization. In the 60s, the whole country had less than 90,000 people and now they are over 8 million. As a foreigner I could buy alcohol and this wasn’t even possible until more recently.
I expect in time the UAE might soften up even further. Many of their orthodox/conservative values have been eroding away for decades now. Their native Emirati population is an absolute minority now and there is no way they’re not going to be forced to continue liberalization.
Search online and look what Iran looked like in, say, 1975. Equally, what Afghanistan looked like in 1970. Or, maybe more relevant, what Russia looked like in, say, 2005.
Sadly, the words about eternal vigilance as the price of liberty are as true today as 250 years ago, and even that is not a guarantee :(
True and cca 8 years ago it was not all doom and gloom either in Iran, I had quite a few anti-regime talks with random folks who just came to me as visible outsider, not sure about now.
But his point still stands, things can and do go to shit, anywhere. 90s were a magical period when world consistently fell even from major news like moving towards bright future. 9/11 changed that for good and common americans let that fear-based manipulation (and 2 absolutely meaningless wars as we see now) happen and gradually roll over entire world, that's also one of 'super powers' of being a superpower.
Exactly. This is what they looked like for a casual observer in the West, who reads magazines and watches TV, but does not study such things in depth. Things looked liberal and Westernized, a few more steps, and these countries join the club of relaxed liberal democracies.
Not that these liberal vistas were not true, but they did not represent the whole truth.
The same applies to UAE, to the modern Saudi Arabia, etc, but also, say to European countries themselves (hi, Hungary, are you blazing the trail for Poland?) and the US (where suddenly half the population supports Trump).
Be careful now. I'm old enough to have seen how quickly it can be reversed back into dark ages. Big money can silence and oppress even 8 millions, no problem.
In the case of the UAE, it wouldn’t be the money. It would be a change in leader.
The current president (one of only 2) is the son of the first and he isn’t as liberal or as charitable, although his dad did create the country by unifying the region after Great Britain pulled out.
But he isn't too bad, but if he goes away, UAE being an authoritarian dictatorship, it could go both ways.
Inconsistent and unpredictable governance is the death knell of many countries and any organization. That’s why authoritarian governments are never stable long term.
Yes. The best, most effective form of government is a benevolent dictatorship.
However, the mega-fatal flaw is that it is not reliably sustainable.
Ultimately, every dictatorship becomes malevolent.
Then, the need to protect the malevolent leadership from the subjects forces closed, loyalty-based structures, and plants the seeds of the dictatorship's demise as mistrust and inefficiency rot the structure and the society. Meanwhile, millions rot and die.
In the actual history of the world, we mostly have had monarchies. In terms of actual "sustainability" I don't think any democratic government has surpassed the longest peaceful period of a monarchy yet. I could wrong.
I'm also quite sure that the longest monarchies have outlasted the longest democracies, but I think we'd have to define the "peaceful" qualifier.
It seems the nature of hereditary monarchies helps moderate the despotism, as there is an incentive to maintain the balance for the future of the monarchic family. If they get too despotic, they will get overthrown, and that's the end of the gravy train for not only them but also all their descendants; and they have the ability to train in these constraints from birth. So my conjecture is that this contributes to the longevity of the hereditary monarchies.
Given that the UK's gradual evolution involved lopping off one king's head and another king getting disposed when his military essentially refuses to resist an invasion, and that both of these were caused in no small part by the respective kings holding the wrong religion (and attempting to impose it!) according to their subjects, I don't think the UK is the model you'd want to see followed.
That's already the case; the king doesn't have absolute power, the sheikhs of each of the Emirates share power (proportional to how rich/powerful their emirate is). That's why Dubai's policies on so many things differ vastly from Abu Dhabi's; it's a bit like the US's federalism.
The native population is roughly 1M. All other 7M are immigrants. So they don't have to turn against no-one. Locals tend to get pretty good jobs and are actually expected to perform.
I lived there a decade ago, and as a foreigner it felt pretty free to me. There are rules you need to follow that are different from the West, but that's not a bad thing, it's just accepting the local customs. When in Rome...
Compared to other Muslim countries, it's pretty relaxed. Foreigners can buy alcohol, eat pork, and pre and extra-marital relationships are tolerated among foreigners as long as it's behind closed doors.
Locals of course get favoured for positions of power within companies, but most of them are pretty well educated, so that isn't so bad.
You don't want to piss them off, as you don't know what connections they might have. But that's no different from the elite class in any other country, such as the UK or Italy - it's just there are a higher percentage of them, and it's not hidden away.
Many of the locals feel repressed at home, which is why London is a popular travel destination for them. You see women in burka with their eyes covered get on in Dubai, and by the time they've landed in London, they have changed into jeans and a fashionable top and are showing off their hair. If anything changes, that's probably going to be the catalyst. But most likely the UAE will just become more liberal rather than a big shift in power.
That's an odd reference to DEI. I'd say the negative consequences of authoritarian regimes is that they suppress freedom, and therefore art and technological innovation.
China is authoritarian, but also has a huge political system, somewhat strong institutions. That can't be said of many authoritarian regimes, which tend to be more fragile. It takes a really long time to build civil institutions. For example, Russia has the money and an authoritarian regime, but repeatedly fails to innovate, and we can't predict what will happen when Putin leaves.
You're all over this forum spreading white nationalist and fascist sentiments, aren't you? Hard to miss you with a username like that.
The Soviet Union was an authoritarian regime and lost the technological arms race in silicon. Why?
The PRC is an authoritarian regime and lost every technological arms race it's ever participated in, often to its tiny little democratic neighbor, Taiwan. Why?
Japan built an HSR. So did Taiwan. What's so special about the PRC?
The PRC has become mall-ified. When was the last time you went? It's a static and sterile place. Alleys in Shanghai I used to love for the food stalls are now simply malls with chain food courts. Is that progress? Yuck. Not every country needs to go down the path of the USA.
Also it's simply not true that places like the PRC are culturally homogeneous. It is true that ethno-nationalist interests sell this lie, which is why the CPC propagandizes about international Han Communism and does genocide in Xinjiang. In reality, the PRC is composed of literally hundreds of ethnic groups. Every city has a language they speak alongside mandarin, and each is distinct from the other.
Elsewhere you're arguing that past societies were also culturally homogeneous, and I can't imagine what society on earth had the kind of innovations you'd acknowledge that was anywhere near culturally homogeneous. Ford's era was one of huge amounts of immigration to America (a peek into the white nationalist/ han chauvinist lie - remember, the Irish and Italians weren't white back then!), both Greek and Rome were flush with "foreigners," the enlightenment era was kicked off by European encounters with indigenous people, who then visited Europe and mocked them for their rigid social structures. So I just can't envision what you mean.
Basically, what you're saying isn't rooted in reality.
> That’s why authoritarian governments are never stable long term.
Authoritarian governments counter this issue with hereditary monarchy. The current leader can impart their knowledge and mindset on their next of kin, and having a clear successor removes power struggles and provides predictability. Even if the successor has different views this is often known far in advance, which allows people to take this into consideration.
It's by no means perfect and has lots of opportunities to go wrong, but over the last 1000 years or so hereditary monarchies have a much better track record of stability than democracies.
There's this little war called "World War 1" which resulted in the absolute collapse of the final world-power level monarchies.
As it turns out: the problems of monarchies is innate. Hereditary Monarchies lead to a separation into "Noble" vs "Peasant" classes, where Nobles have a genetic line to the throne. The Nobles believe themselves to be superior and start putting themselves into various sections of government, when in actuality many Peasants are actually better than the Nobles.
So when it comes to War (the only time societies can directly compare against each other), the side that has a bigger recruitment pool (ie: Peasant commanders, aka Napoleon's secret sauce), tends to win. This is also true of sciences, research, production, etc. etc. Every part of society, there are likely peasant leaders who are best at the job.
Peasants win not necessarily because Peasants are smarter, but because peasants are at "sometimes" smarter, and this "sometimes" happens in a large enough degree that anyone who cuts off their leadership pool into "Family members of the Monarch only" innately hampers their abilities to lead over time.
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Now colonial rule by far-away foreign powers is clearly a bad situation as well (as Britain's control over its former colonies can likely attest). But that's not "Democracy" either.
Hereditary monarchy may be an improvement over UAE's position (ie: better than foreign colonialism), but lets not get ahead of ourselves. The world gave up on monarchies over a century ago for a good damn reason.
I absolutely agree that monarchies have a lot of downsides. Democracies not only provide a bigger pool of potential talent but also align incentives between population and government much better. This seems to also be reflected in economic growth, where democracies typically perform much better.
Still, I think it's important to acknowledge that authoritarian governments have seen a lot of refinement over thousands of years, while democracies are historically the exception and only became popular 300 years ago. Expecting authoritarian governments to just implode without external influence seems unfounded.
Yeah I was going to say another factor is a large population of poor, unemployed/underemployed young people. That is fertile ground for the rise of an authoritarian populist or religious zealot.
The thing is SA is already an authoritarian country. They have an absolute ruler who does whatever he wants. No "magna carta" event has happened yet for KSA. Its still very old school and old world in the way that power is structured. All you need is the next heir to be a bit more sociopathic than even this current ruler is and life changes overnight.
> So do women have equal rights in the UAE or SA? Can they vote or drive cars?
The UAE and SA are very different.
Non-emiratis women are wearing bikinis everywhere on the Dubai beaches. You can buy alcohol there are the supermarket (you need a license for that but it's easy to get).
I thought it was ethically questionable when the startup I worked for sold to the Saudi DOD. I'm glad the concept of ethics isn't getting in anyone else's way either.
I don’t know what the past was like, but the tech industry seems happy to take anyone’s money. I’m not sure I can blame individuals - if you’re desperate to survive and are working hard, it’s difficult to throw it all away and say no. It’s not surprising to see a Middle East gold rush when you have companies saying yes to China, to private equity, etc. If we want any of this to change, it’ll take regulation.
Singling out Silicon Valley or the Middle East also doesn’t make sense when most of the economy has been outsourcing manufacturing to China, which annexed Tibet illegally and subjected them to re education, committed genocide in Xinjiang against Uyghurs, suppressed its citizens with the great firewall and social credit scores, violated agreements around Hong Kong’s governance, illegally attacked other countries ships in the South China Sea, etc. Comparatively, the UAE and Saudi Arabia feel friendly.
The big tech co I work at has filled thousands of back office roles in UAE this year. Political neutrality + fundraising + tax advantages have pulled them away from US/Europe/Asia
Political neutrality? The UAE owns the biggest soccer club in England, and UK MPs do not dare criticize the country's policies anymore.
Perhaps you mean that companies are insulated from politics because they operate in a business-friendly dictatorship where the majority of residents are migrant workers with no rights. No unionization worries when you can just confiscate passports and delay payment of wages as needed.
> UK MPs do not dare criticize the country's policies anymore
We have to remember that the UK is not a real country. It does not have a real government. It's all Potemkinised. It's all for show. It's not real. It's not run by serious people. It's run for oligarchs and money launderers.
Besides, the 2018 killing of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi is now a massive 6 years in the past, so no-one is tweeting about it or shaming any Saudi-friendly folks publicly about it any more, so the startup CEOs can come and busk on the Riyadh street corners without fear of retribution.
It's basically just this. Dubai is a way to hire Indians without having to set up shop in India. Likewise, Singapore for the Chinese. And all of Canada.
Much of this immigration-driven offshoring or, shall I coin it, "glamorshoring" will stop or even reverse once H1B fraud is reduced in the next few years.
Silicon Valley was once the domain of nerds and introverts trying to build a better future.
Now it's the domain of MBA-bros and idea guys- sorry, Thought Leaders- trying to measure themselves with their bank accounts.
They ditched even the most basic principles (like, "Don't be evil") in pursuit of obscene wealth and unsustainable growth, so why is anyone shocked they sold away their political principles as well?
It kinda was though. It was Stanford grads living inexpensively due to cheap agriculture land and creating lots of interesting things in a chill mediterranean climate. A way different place with way different motivations and very low stress due to cheap cost of living.
> It was always about money, and it always will be about money.
There were people like that in the old days (TJ Rogers, Larry Ellison) but also a lot of hippie-influenced folks with an idealistic world view. People literally talked about making the world a better place without irony.
But when the .com boom appeared people flooded here for the money and, since it appeared "make the world better" was one of the things people said, it was cargo-culted widely ("we're making the world a better place by allowing advertisers to reach audiences they were previously excluded from").
Fortunately the density of idealists is higher in SV and density of narcissists higher in SF. But yes, the quality has gone down.
> Silicon Valley was once the domain of nerds and introverts trying to build a better future.
Silicon Valley used to be "Defense Valley" because it built weapons systems for the DOD long before the web came around. It was never the domain of nerds and introverts trying to build a better future, it has always been evil and done evil for the sake of capitalism.
There's nothing wrong with doing business. But current business culture is not in a (morally) good state, and your average businessperson is not very interested in making the world better if it plays against their personal ambitions. And being answerable to investors (who almost by nature are focused on shortish term returns to the near-exclusion of all else) only exacerbates that.
The distinction between business and capital is pretty blurred right now, and it shouldn't be. Operating a charity that delivers donated food to orphaned victims of war is a business in the broad sense of the word, and there are many things that go into operating it well, including things like management and finance. Those things do not, inherently, have to be in the pursuit of capital growth; there are many humanistic ends they can be directed to. But in our world as it stands they usually aren't - they're directed towards capital growth and that fact corrupts them like it corrupts everything else.
Or, put another way, there is a difference between "making enough money to run a sustainable business" and "making all the money it is possible to make". Many large businesses run reasonably substantial profit margins, and every dollar of profit a business makes is a dollar it could afford not to make in the pursuit of more humanistic ends if it so chose.
There's nothing wrong with doing business. But current business culture is not in a (morally) good state, and your average businessperson is not very interested in making the world better if it plays against their personal ambitions. And being answerable to investors (who almost by nature are focused on shortish term returns to the near-exclusion of all else) only exacerbates that.
Just as people should specialize, institutions should too.
We should not have this whole movement to jawbone companies into being “nice.” All we are going to get is a creepy facsimile. See, e.g. greenwashing.
Instead we should understand that profit maximizing firms operating in competition with each other is an incredibly powerful but one dimensional tool. We in our sovereign capacity should set the incentives and rules such that those tools are used to accomplish the things we collectively desire to see in the world.
Incentives and rules (with enforcement) are reliable and durable. A “better businessperson” is just transient luck.
Incentives and rules (with enforcement) are reliable and durable.
I wish this were true. But a largish slice of the US polity (headed by one of the two credible candidates for President) is dead against these things and attacks any sort of institutional infrastructure or notion of accountability whenever it's politically expedient to do so. In a less obvious way, that movement is also dedicated to the dismantlement of the administrative state - ostensibly in the name of returning legislative power and accountability to the Congress, pragmatically because it adheres to a vision of commercial activity with far less legal restraint.
But a largish slice of the US polity (headed by one of the two credible candidates for President) is dead against …
The point is you have to convince these people. That’s the whole and only ballgame.
Trying to pressure companies into wearing skinsuits via external or internal pressure might be satisfying but it’s a waste of effort.
Convince one company not to work with UAE and another one will gladly take its place. Elect a President that takes human rights into account in foreign policy and now you might get somewhere.
But to do that you have to actually go talk to people that disagree with you. Not just post preaching to the choir posts about how terrible those other guys are.
People (including me) have been trying that for years; but dialog only works if both parties approach it in good faith. When you have a political movement that leans heavily on orthodoxy and loyalty, and whose response to repeatedly losing elections is to simply insist they're rigged and the results are invalid (absent any credible evidence) discussions based on mutually agreeable priors and conventional logic are not fruitful.
The prevailing orthodoxy in this group is that losing elections or court cases is a priori evidence of fraud, violent action to overturn negative outcomes is often permissible, and that this right is reserved for future negative outcomes. They're not willing to be convinced, and loudly advertise their belief that it's OK to impose their point of view on others by force. I mean, if you're dealing with someone who avers that you should be fed into a woodchipper, it's not wise to put one arm in pursuit of a compromise.
I agree with that, but I don't think it's too controversial to say that those checks are not working very well right now. Changing the nature of regulatory capture isn't in my power. Starting a company and trying not to be crappy is.
the issue is as soon as you enable the power for some to set incentives and rules to see certain outcomes, it gets taken over by the rich entrenched status quo that is easily able to use the tools of modern propaganda to drown out any true grassroots opinion, and see to it that their horse is the one to win the race. It almost takes a total reset event like a gigantic war to shake up the economic status quo but even then, what forms in the dust is almost naturally these oligarchs like stardust accumulating into black holes after the big bang.
How can you separate capital from human interest when the majority of people on earth spend the majority of their time in pursuit of it? Less people starve today than ever in the past, and that is because we have more capital, not because we are more charitable than back then. Charity is not any less corrupt, it is just more emotionally appealing because of the illusion of selflessness and a whole lot less effective.
You say "your average businessperson is not very interested in making the world better if it plays against their personal ambitions." But I claim that it's not your average businessperson it's your average person with business people just being a subset of that.
And that's not even getting into the problem of how does anybody really know how to make the world a better place. In my experience people with a "just doing my job" attitude make much better bosses than those who act like they have a higher purpose.
I agree with you that this is not unique to businesspeople, although I suspect it's probably disproportionately represented there - both because business is attracted to people pursuing self-interest ruthlessly and because it often presents excellent conditions for tilting people towards self-interest even if not naturally inclined to it. But I would also make a distinction between what a business does and what businesspeople are. It's not hard to build incentive structures that turn good people towards bad ends.
I tend to think, for example, that your average Boeing engineer probably wanted to do a good job and not have doors fall off their planes. But when you put multiple layers of abstraction in the way and have leaders looking through business metrics, it isn't hard for everyday crappiness to maneuver its way to the point where that isn't prioritized. Almost no one in the chain really thinks they're sacrificing safety, they think they're doing their job and improving efficiency by cutting redundant steps.
> In my experience people with a "just doing my job" attitude make much better bosses than those who act like they have a higher purpose.
Sure, because there's a difference between a performative "mission", a self-obsessed founder who makes their own success a story about the future of Earth, and someone who makes concretely difficult decisions when the chips are down.
This is kind of what I mean by the corruptive effects of growth. Having a mission is a good thing, but most companies' "missions" are implicitly always secondary to their financial growth, or worse, a cynical ploy for employee engagement. When people write crappy press releases about how "this will enable us to serve more of our users" (read: expand our market), that's not a statement about how serving users is bad, it's just that for most businesses it's necessarily with an asterisk of "we want to serve our users* *as long as it pleases our investors".
Do the majority spend their time in pursuit of money because they want to or because the rent is so damn high? Because it’s what we’re educated to do? I don’t mean academic education either. I mean Main Street social norms where there’s no longer being friends with neighbors. But they’ll mow your lawn for money if you’re ever too busy (had that exact conversation with a neighbor recently; we aren’t going to be friends/friendly but will serve you for $).
The Middle East’s play to rule global sports - Washington Post November 7, 2023 - How Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar are upending the sports world — and what they want from their newfound power.
Texas A&M pulls branch out of Qatar, citing regional instability - The Washington Post February 11, 2024 - The Qatari government pays hundreds ... to the universities each year and in return the branches provide elite higher education for hundreds of Qatari students as well as others from around the region.
Related: The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dictatorship of the Small Minority
It suffices for an intransigent minority –a certain type of intransigent minorities –to reach a minutely small level, say three or four percent of the total population, for the entire population to have to submit to their preferences.
Saudi Arabia is trying to entrench itself in the American culture, not just in tech companies either. The PGA tour-LIV drama is a bit of a fun read if you can find a decent summary article. So much mental gymnastics going on with how that shook out for all parties.
Basically SA started a golf league (LIV) buy paying hundreds of millions of dollars a piece to established pro golfers who are probably on their way out of pro sports in terms of their career anyhow. Great deal for an aging player unlikely to win many times again, so many took the money. PGA tour responded by banning these players from competing in their tournaments. Fast forward a year, the PGA tour commissioner sets up a secret deal to integrate SA funding into the PGA tour and blindsides the people resenting the players as well as most anyone else. Doesn't respond to comments when it breaks of course. Mind you this is after that same commissioner was grandstanding for a year against the LIV league about Saudi ethics and bloodmoney. Turns out he was just negotiating a price.
look, you can't just pretend that if the US weren't there they won't get their hands on AI software to do what they need done. if the US doesn't partner with them then China will or russia will or any number of other countries.
with the massive excess of software talent that's flooding the market, they're going to get what they're after one way or another.
Most alarmingly, many of the fruits of SV can be used to make dictatorships even more capable in crushing dissenters and extending the aegis of state into everyday life. Technology is morally neutral, it can be used for ill as well as good, and our worship of it as a panacea has blinded us to this possibility
It is worse than that: the most efficient way to make money in SV is to make the tools for enabling totalitarianism while covering them in a twee veneer of folksiness so people don’t notice.
You mean the Unabomber was right? Technology inevitably leads to totalitarianism?
Cars are not inherently tools of government, it's just they've been regulated such that that is their direction of development. Personal computers were similarly not that way either.
The key problem in both cases is imposing the requirement to be connected to the internet, after which it's game over.
> key problem in both cases is imposing the requirement to be connected to the internet, after which it's game over
My point is we can do this for anything. Clocks enabled capitalists to exploit workers. Lights took the night from rebels. Steam engines took farmers out of the daylight and put them in mechanised factories. Hell, agriculture enabled modern civilisation but also created such a wave of oppression and anxiety we're still worshiping the gods we invented to save us from it.
None of those statements is wrong. But they're also incomplete.
Clocks did not succeed because of their ability to exploit workers (they were way more useful on ships), nor lights because of rebels, but SV companies do succeed, spectacularly, once their utility for totalitarianism has been demonstrated. For example, the price of nVidia over time, the TikTok hysteria, Facebook, Twitter, Google, Palantir, Tesla, even Figma is like in a secondary market of helping to provide the veneer.
Conversely, if you are of no use to such a regime you will not get very far. The only meaningful question here is how organic this phenomenon is.
nVidia - existed for years before most people noticed just what they were up to, and their change in valuation reflects that. For them AI was the point from the start, games was just the bootstrapping mechanism. Prior to the AI explosion they were a decent business but not a spectacular success.
Facebook - succeeded where almost every other social media app failed before by enabling data gathering and narrative control for the most important demographics in society (MySpace, for example, did not)
Google - a gov funded research project to organise and index information
Tesla - people dependent on the electrical grid are far easier to control than those dependent on gasoline.
I live in Quebec where the gov electricity monopoly (Hydro Quebec) now insist that new homes have smart meters in, where they can remotely control your thermostat, while simultaneously campaigning to make all alternatives illegal. Curiously we're also a big Tesla market because of the cheap electricity, which is also the reason for the thermostats: they want to turn the heating down in Quebec so they can sell the same electricity for more south of the border.
> Tesla - people dependent on the electrical grid are far easier to control than those dependent on gasoline.
Where do you think gasoline comes from exactly? I can rechange an electric car completely off grid with solar/wind. I'm still working on my off-grid oil drilling and refinery operation.
Unless there is a revolution in batteries (which we all hope there is) you won't be able to store or transport electricity with anything like the ease you can gasoline.
If you try charging a car from a solar panel you aren't going to be going very far in a hurry.
For anyone doubting this, recall that OpenAI is already loosening it's "principles" with regard to the use of it's products for surveillance of innocent civilian populations that have not committed crimes, and yet who's behaviors are being monitored and recorded, and analyzed, not the least of which is Israel's current use which is open, naked oppression and targeting.
And despite the fact that OpenAI has incredibly low adoption everywhere outside of that, it is still worth tens of billions of dollars. Do you really think that valuation comes from being able to remove people from fuckin cellphone pictures with a tap, or generating royalty free images?
I remember running into a programmer at a MacHack conference (so you know it was a long time ago).
He was an Australian contractor, working for the UAE.
He was working on a database system, for tracking citizens. He flat-out told me it was a tool for their monarchy, to wield power.
In the US, people keep talking about the Second Amendment, as some kind of guarantor of liberty, but their eyes glaze over, when I tell them that the computer database is the biggest threat to human rights in history, and now, AI will make it much worse.
At the end of the day, someone has to do the actual enforcement though right? I'm not saying a government super database that knows everything about you isn't a threat to human rights as you say, but the biggest threat? I would have to disagree.
They don't threaten you per say but really they absolutely hamstring the one ability that matters if your incentive is to hold the seat of power: the ability to organize the population and form a new government or at the very least claw back some power that has been granted to certain individuals and groups. 1776 would be impossible today.
This NYT article had an article with some interesting history of one of the character who saw that opportunity.
I see almost all tech focused on advertising as an unfortunate continuation of this trend. And it feels like people are fooling themselves to say it will not be used for restrictive purposes. But maybe I'm wrong.
Well Nazis had like ~30% support in Germany so that's probably enough to monitor the remaining 70% (1 person to monitor ~2 others)
However, if your regime is even smaller like 5% or 10% it's going to be extremely difficult to manage the remaining 95% without more advanced technology than pen and paper.
Yet, they killed the Jews in occupied countries as well. Shockingly, the Nazis were the least efficient at doing their genocide at home where the support was highest.
I'm not sure that's accurate. By sheer numbers, it's pretty much Poland taking the lead and that's because the rest of Europe killed/displaced their jews in previous events (turns out hating jews is basically an European tradition).
Statista agrees you with in that comparing the deaths by country to its initial population by country shows Germany around 32% while say Poland is 75% [1]. But the big problem with that is it omits emigration; I would suspect jews in Germany saw the writing on the wall and left. The Germany jewish population dropped from 525k to 37k [2] (with 165k dead [1]) which means 323k jews must've left Germany while Hungary dropped from 445k to 190k (with 270k dead) which means -25k jews emigrated (aka 25k jews immigrated).
So it just appears that Germany is less efficient because the local jews emigrated to other countries where they were then killed juicing those countries stats.
People getting back to 2nd amendment are a funky bunch, they talk about need for automatic weapons to defend against government, when in reality they would be bringing say ar-15 to a drone fight.
If war in Ukraine showed anything its that armed single guy, or bunch of them, are meaningless against any modern threat. Other, say SHTF scenarios, are just wet fantasies of big kids doing some obscure form of LARP.
Not the OP, but the US has a shitton of laws that make basically everyone a felon [0] and only the sheer impossibility of tracking everyone everywhere makes ad-hoc prosecution complicated/impractical.
The advent of AI may bring down this last obstacle.
I get your point but suggest finding better source material. Harvey Silverglate has made a great living out of telling just-so stories with lots of emotional activation, that fall apart on closer examination. For example he'll tell a sob story about someone being charged for collecting oysters on a Sunday, only it turns out that it's a large commercial operation that ignores environmental or employment regulations and has been defying regulators for years on end.
I don't think it's the lack of tracking. It's that almost all of those "3 a day" violations are only technically violations. If you try to actually charge someone in front of a jury, they're going to return something along the lines of "not guilty because the prosecutor is an idiot".
That's assuming that the judge doesn't find a way to throw it out long before it ever sees a jury. Courts don't like wasting their time on stupid stuff.
Most trials in the US never go to jury, right? The risk of receiving a crushing sentence is just too big, so almost everyone accepts a plea bargain.
Notoriously, Hans Reiser (who is guilty, never doubted that) refused a rather low plea bargain of IDK six? years, tried his luck with a jury trial, and got life.
Assuming I don't want to pay money for that book, can you give me a single example of a law that your average American is likely to feloniously violate by accident?
> What changed is that SV used to have neither power nor money.
Surely SV had to have power (including knowledgeable people) and money to develop semiconductor manufacturing facilities (famously expensive). Not to mention the support of US federal government spending.
The UAE decided to welcome businesses and now has the biggest airport in the world by several metrics. They "stole" a great many businesses with attractive taxes (0% is attractive) and ease of company setups: e.g. my native Belgium used to be the place in the world where the most diamonds were traded (often by jewish families and the city of Antwerp in Belgium was the biggest diamond hub on the planet: I have friends from such families)... But now it's Dubai.
When countries tax companies at 30%+ then tax people at up to 69% on income (50% income tax + 19% social welfare tax in Begium if you're self employed and making "good" money: good money which is not so good anymore after 69% taxes) on one hand and, on the other hand, you can establish a company in a free-zone in Dubai that taxes at 0%, it's going to cost you business.
Now, I know, I know: "But ethics?". Well... Guess what: if countries in, say, the EU had reasonable taxation, maybe 10% to 15%, many who prefer to pack and leave for Dubai would likely stay in the EU (weather is really warm in Dubai: you basically live with AC and Dubai is polluted). But 30% tax on my company, then another 30% on my dividends? Or up to 69% if I'm self-employed?
You know what: at these levels just screw my native country.
I voted with my feet and my wallet and left (not for the UAE though).
As a friend of mine puts it: "I buy (physical) commodities in Africa, I ship them from Africa to China and sell them to China... Why would I pay any tax to the EU?". And, guess what: he's got companies (with a 's') in freezones in Dubai to do his trade. He also pays 0% on dividends but that's another topic.
Commodities, diamonds (you can criticize humans wearing diamonds: that's not the point), international aviation (Dubai is a gigantic hub and this brings in lots of money/tourism), now even cryptocurrencies (instead of having an ultra-regulatory approach they prefer to be open), etc.
Who's really the bad guys here? What are "our" states doing: say the EU and the US? Besides coming with ever more taxes, ever more laws, ever more rules, ever less liberties?
Meanwhile the novelty coming to the EU is this: the EU, who's supposed to have no fiscal competence, wants to impose, on top of all the national taxes, a new mandatory EU tax, that'd apply to every EU citizen.
I am fed up with these taxes.
Offer me, say, a music streaming service that'd be located in Dubai vs one located in France (like Qobuz), and I'll subscribe to the one in Dubai (even if it's a bit pricier): I know for I'm currently hesitating subscribing to Qobuz because I disagree with the french state and don't want to encourage business there and don't want that country to get any more of my money.
Wanna compete and attract businesses? Lower your fucking KYC/AML and lower your fucking taxes.
I do understand there's an ongoing attack on Dubai at this very moment : it's not because the EU and the US suddenly want to put criminals out of business though... It's because the EU and the US are pissed that money that used to be laundered home is now laundered in the UAE instead.
Piss people enough, and they won't try to optimize to pay less taxes to their home country: piss them enough and they'll leave forever and make sure to never pay a cent anymore to their native country.
Lower taxes, remove KYC/AML. And arrest criminals for the crimes they commit, not for the taxes they don't pay.
> Lower taxes, remove KYC/AML. And arrest criminals for the crimes they commit, not for the taxes they don't pay.
They can't arrest themselves, can they? Ursula and all that swarm of useless corrupted bureaucrats can only steal and wash money through black holes like ukraine, perpetuating wars and enriching similarly corrupted puppeteers there.
So do we actually wonder business flee to UAE/SA?
I personally find the place absolutely unlivable, but do understand 0% tax can make it less unlivable (not for me though).
I concur, screw the policy that was decided unilaterally anyhow. I never got the point of posting an article to a discussion board knowing it has a paywall that prevents a lot of people from engaging with it, unless you are some sort of a shill account looking to pad subscriptions. If archive posts are tolerated, probably in violation of publishers wishes anyhow, might as well pin these comments or even replace the link.
SV has always been heavily dependent on government spending- military or otherwise. I see no real change, other than perhaps more people are aware of the sausage making process.
The change I see is a cultural one. At its peak, the SV crowd had a very strong interest in doing cool things that could improve aspects of the world. That subcurrent still exists, but it is largely overshadowed by a stronger interest in making as much money as possible, as quickly as possible.
I dunno, I read Hackers back in the late 80s and it sure seemed like SV was chasing money... I believe Levy used the term "Croesus Mode" to describe the mental model.
Sure, there has always been that subset who is only in it for the money. The change I see is that what used to be a subset is now the dominant faction.
This matters because it affects what sorts of products come out of SV. These days, most of the products are about extracting maximal dollars from customers. In the old days, there was a genuine interest in making great products rather than products that prioritize maximize dollar extraction.
Also, the nature of the dev population has changed. These days, a very large percentage of SV devs chose that line of work specifically because it's lucrative. Before, a very large percentage of SV devs chose that line of work because they loved being devs.
At least, that's what the change looks like to me. I could be wrong. But one thing that is absolutely obvious is that SV today is very different than SV back when it was in peak form.
Well, the American tech industry as always had some big corporate players who are more than happy to sell census counting and alphabetization equipment to the third reich, and won't look too closely at what they're doing with it - so long as it's profitable and complies with local laws. So we shouldn't pretend there was some glorious golden age.
But there was a time when SV was a lot more passionate and freewheeling, and beliefs like "information wants to be free" were a lot more widely repeated.
That’s a shallow take. The Bay Area used to have a plethora of different types of companies and innovation. Sadly social media and ad companies took over.
Google AdSense became a load-bearing pillar of the Internet before we realized what that meant, and now we (seemingly) can't get rid of it. Every new product is Yet Anotherᵀᴹ free service with a paid subscription tier, which will get more expensive, and the free tier is ad supported. Then the ads get more egregious. Then the free tier becomes a cheap, ad supported tier. Then the ads infiltrate the original paid tier. Then a new service with a fresh round of VC funding sets up to be the "ad free" version of the service that's now infested with ads, and as soon as their AWS bills creep up, the ads enter the new service, but hey there's a cheap subscription if you don't want ads...
2. Advertising is a virus or tumor that will consume all available space in an ecosystem until there is no non-ad content left; it ultimately kills its host.
HN has advertisement. It has the sponsored hiring posts from YC, Show HN posts to projects, and the monthly who is hiring / wants to be hired posts, which are all advertisements. Seems far from cancerous.
HN is also not profitable and is not driven to be so. I don't think it's the ads in and of themselves that's the cancer, but rather that in order to make money, you need just shit-tons of the things. And as the number of ads goes up the amount of attention they get drops which just demands more ads to offset the lower-valued ones.
That being said, I absolutely vibe with the notion of ads being cancer. I would classify personally HN's "ads" as you describe as less advertisements and more just posted notices of things relevant to the community. I don't suspect money changes hands for those to be put up which I would personally classify as the line between the two. And, more importantly, they are likely to be relevant to a fair chunk of the users here, and for those they aren't, they're ignored easily enough too.
HN is only able to bet be profitable because it is backed by a company that is. And if you combine "posted notices of things relevant to the community" with a commercial intent, that is basically the definition of ads.
Also, when you say relevant to the community, what exactly is the definition of that? A job posting on "who is hiring" is likely to be relevant to maybe 0.001% of HN readers. If Apple put a big banner on the site saying "HN users get $100 off a MBP," I bet a much higher percentage of users would click on that (I would). But nobody would ever deny that is an ad. So I don't think community relevance is a great way to determine it. That community relevance factor is exactly what advertisers pay so much to targeted ad companies for anyway.
I do find ads annoying myself and use ad blockers to get rid of them. But I take exception to the idea that they are this cancerous destroying force. Published media has been an advertising platform since well before the internet and I just don't see a feasible way that business model can be replaced just because the medium is now the internet. Yes, there is subscription revenue, but even newspapers back in the day had ads on every page.
Newspapers no longer need to perform the overhead of printing and distributing which was a massive cost to the news org. They can also now sell to the world vs just the local market they can deliver papers to. So not only have their costs been lowered their customer base has expanded quite a bit in theory. Why should we therefore expect to see ads on subscriptions?
> HN is only able to bet be profitable because it is backed by a company that is.
I mean, yes, but also no. We had pages upon pages of unprofitable websites once. There was a time, believe it or not, when all kinds of people setup all kinds of websites, with no expectation whatsoever of making money off of them. I for one hosted a niche phpBB board for years on end at my own expense, offset only by occasional donations from the community we built.
> And if you combine "posted notices of things relevant to the community" with a commercial intent, that is basically the definition of ads.
Well, again, yes and no. I think there's a nuance there. A job posting for example does have commercial intent, but at the same time, it's a mutually beneficial relationship (hopefully anyway) for both the entity and the employee. I would much rather see job ads in a place like this than, I dunno, weight loss drugs and erection pills.
> Also, when you say relevant to the community, what exactly is the definition of that? A job posting on "who is hiring" is likely to be relevant to maybe 0.001% of HN readers.
I think it's much higher than that. Just because you're not unemployed doesn't mean you wouldn't be interested in a job posting. People move companies all the time.
> If Apple put a big banner on the site saying "HN users get $100 off a MBP," I bet a much higher percentage of users would click on that (I would). But nobody would ever deny that is an ad.
But, if the community overall benefits from that, even if that benefit is nothing more significant than a cheaper mac, I'd say that's an overall win for all involved.
> So I don't think community relevance is a great way to determine it. That community relevance factor is exactly what advertisers pay so much to targeted ad companies for anyway.
I'm not saying an ad is good because it's relevant. I'm saying an ad is less irritating if it's relevant. That's why I find most ads so grating, because they are for products I have zero interest in and they are occupying space and attention that would be better filled with something I'm at least vaguely interested in.
In what sense is it effective? I'd been lurking here for months before I learned that YC was a company and it ran this place. (Then again I guess I'm not in any sort of relevant target group).
Still does. Yes, two of the biggest are social media / ads, but out of all the engineers I know in the Bay Area only a small fraction work at ad / social media companies.
In Dubai right now, one of the things I really like about this place is the optimism they have for the future. It's exhausting working in tech and being in places that don't believe engineering will usher in a better future (but somehow think legal policy will). I'm visiting the museum of the future tomorrow, can't wait.
Having optimism about the future means it will change for the better. You are referring to the present. Weird how many people find this concept uncomfortable, and perhaps is a good example of my original argument.
There's foolish optimism too. E.g. what is stopping the dubai government from ending laws like death penalty for homosexuals and atheists, or being put on trial for violating ramedan as a nonmuslim? Nothing, except for their cruel leadership who is interested in harming groups they don't agree with in this manner. Why would you expect to change if it hasn't already? What evidence does the leadership need to wake up from their bigotry and hatred? Has logic and empathy ever shifted a bigots opinions before? I think not. You can argue well "the next generation will be better" but at the same time this current generation of leadership is the generation that should have known better, yet here we are.
Every culture at some stage has its dark ages, western countries did exactly the same thing not more than 200 years ago. They changed, all things change. Your argument regarding the high water mark of cultural morality could be used by Europeans about Americans currently (and frequently is). It doesn't make America a bad country in my eyes though, still find it amazing. I'm not going to judge each place by its lowest points but the gradient its on.
Given that I doubt you are following the high water of cultural morality as it shifts around the world, sounds to me like bigotry might be fueling you here.
Nothing stops them but it doesn't happen overnight. These laws have been in place for a long long time. Women weren't allowed to drive in Dubai until 2018 but it changed. Changes will come but not in a blink of an eye
