Pretty bold. A lot of people are saying this wont work, but speaking from my own experience, you'd be surprised what companies are amicable to when it comes to business.
Im an engine mechanic by trade, and our shops handle bids for cash strapped local governments that outsource their motor pool maintenance. We do things like fire trucks and police cars, but we were working on a new regional idea as a "service center" for municipalities that purchased MRAP combat vehicles for their police departments. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MRAP
We all, especially the veterans I work with, hated this idea. MRAP's are for combat, not police work, and have a dangerous propensity to roll over in city streets or escalate already violent situations. 14 of us sent a signed letter to the owner and senior management detailing our major concerns and heard nothing back for about a month. Then out of the blue we got a call for a meeting with 3-4 very senior managers at a local irish bar.
They paid for dinner and tried to explain how the business would be extremely lucrative. we would all see major bonuses, we could hire more workers, and grow the business faster than just large truck repair. It took 3 very emotional hours, but we eventually talked down a handful of people from making a very wrong decision.
for a week after, we were all sort of stunned that it actually worked at all. Tire cages meant for MRAP tires were cut up and turned into random parts holders, or as new hangers for air lines...one even replaced our mailbox post.
You deserve massive credit for striking a blow against this madness. A great example of how working people have more power than they think if they're willing to risk dollars and cents for matters of right and wrong.
I say that fully realizing that not everyone is in the financial position where they can risk a fight with their employer. You can't expect everyone to be Ghandi.
> A great example of how working people have more power than they think if they're willing to risk dollars and cents for matters of right and wrong.
I believe this is key. If more folks at more organizations were brave like this and willing to take the risk, a good chunk of the problems our civilization is facing might be greatly improved.
> Worker's unions helped win the majority of our rights in modern democracies. I wish this fact was more widely appreciated.
The problem with modern unions, particularly in tech, is that the legacy structure is inapt for current problems. Tech workers don't need a union to negotiate compensation, they're compensated fine already. They don't need a huge bureaucratic structure for engaging in long-term detailed negotiations. They don't need a contract at all.
What they need is a no-dues no-fulltime-union-reps union that operates through direct democracy. It does nothing unless the employer is doing something bad wrong. Then if the majority of the union members vote to refuse, either the employer concedes or they strike.
Because it's not about a thousand little things here, it's about a small number of big things. It needs to be able to address those and then go back to being invisible instead of succumbing to feature creep and destroying the host with overhead and principal-agent problems as we've seen with the auto makers.
> Tech workers don't need a union to negotiate compensation, they're compensated fine already.
Software one of the highest margins of any industry. They can afford to pay more, especially since they are constantly whining about "shortages" of tech workers.
Which is why they already do pay more than other industries.
The best argument you have against that is the anti-poaching shenanigans they've engaged in -- but that's already illegal, so the answer there is a courtroom rather than a union.
No, it really isn't. The court requires someone to notice the pattern, or be aware of the pattern, and be willing to risk their reputation. With a union, the onus is on the business to act right, or risk labour action where the SRE folks walk out, and all the little blinky lights turn off.
> The court requires someone to notice the pattern, or be aware of the pattern
How is that different with a union?
> and be willing to risk their reputation
Class action suit or submit evidence confidentially to the attorney general.
> With a union, the onus is on the business to act right, or risk labour action where the SRE folks walk out, and all the little blinky lights turn off.
If Apple won't hire Google employees then the Google employees can retaliate against Apple by not working for them?
I disagree, given the massive cash reserves the tech companies have.
Yes, having a higher salary would be ridiculous in a lot of these cases, but we should moderate that through legislation that benefits the most people - not by a public company further lining the coffers of its owners.
Apple and Google particularly have a lot of cash just lying around, and that cash is the result of the employee's efforts, and they deserve it. I think if we think their salaries are too high in that case, we need to talk about better taxation systems.
> I disagree, given the massive cash reserves the tech companies have.
They have massive cash reverses because the tax laws have encouraged that rather than paying it to shareholders as dividends. And that level of return is necessary because of the nature of the industry -- you have to spend millions of dollars trying to create the next tech giant before you know whether you've succeeded or not, and most of the time you haven't. The returns to success have to be enough to overcome the high failure rate.
Most of the employees aren't taking the same level of risk. If you work for a company for five years taking home a six figure salary and that company fails, you don't have to give back your salary and in a few months you're working for another company making the same amount of money.
If you think you can do better on your own, risking your own time and money instead of taking outside investment, go right ahead -- but then shouldn't it be you who gets more of the reward if you succeed rather than the people you hire in after you're already an established success?
On the one hand it sounds like you're saying that software engineers are paid enough already, then on the other hand you're saying you think the compensation given to the software engineers that founded the company - which is much MUCH higher than that of the average company engineer is appropriate.
It feels like what you're saying is that the risk of failing in a startup is massive enough for a founder that they deserve literally billions of dollars.
Could you let me know exactly what risks you think a failing startup founder faces that would entitle them to say, a thousand times more dollars than the average salaried employee? Are you saying that because a founder may go bankrupt they are entitled to thousands of times more money? Does this mean that any individual that takes out a loan larger than their assets to start a business is entitled to thousands of times more money than their average employee? Could you help me understand what makes you think that?
> On the one hand it sounds like you're saying that software engineers are paid enough already, then on the other hand you're saying you think the compensation given to the software engineers that founded the company - which is much MUCH higher than that of the average company engineer is appropriate.
Of course, because the level of risk is different. $100,000 guaranteed is worth more than a <50% chance at $200,000, much less a <1% chance. A very high reward is inherently necessary to offset the very low probability of major success, otherwise people aren't going to do it.
> Could you let me know exactly what risks you think a failing startup founder faces that would entitle them to say, a thousand times more dollars than the average salaried employee?
The less than one in a thousand chance of making that much.
> Does this mean that any individual that takes out a loan larger than their assets to start a business is entitled to thousands of times more money than their average employee?
There are many ways to turn a thousand dollars into a 0.1% chance at a million dollars. Then 99.9% of the time you lose the thousand dollars -- and it's your time/money, not the bank's. Nobody is going to give you an unsecured loan to gamble with.
But if you bet on your own horse at 1000:1 odds and win, how are you not entitled to the proceeds?
I'm assuming that you don't think risking making no money is enough to entitle a founder to their entire employees wage. How much does it entitle them to?
> I'm assuming that you don't think risking making no money is enough to entitle a founder to their entire employees wage. How much does it entitle them to?
The amount they mutually agree upon. The employee wouldn't agree to work indefinitely for no pay.
The high compensation of successful founders is actually one of the things keeping salaries up, because any of the salaried employees has the option to quit and found their own company. The existing company has to pay well enough to compete with that -- because if what they're paying wasn't actually competitive with that alternative given the relative risk between them, why would anybody accept the salary?
1) The collusion has presumably stopped now that they're caught.
2) It is possible for both to be true at the same time, because the industry is much larger than Apple, Google, Intel and Adobe. Even if they didn't compete with each other, they still have to outbid Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, etc. -- and pay enough to prevent the workers leaving to found their own companies. It's not unreasonable to expect that the effect on wages was marginal even when it was occurring.
The successful entrepreneur makes his money by capital gains in the share or venture capital markets and not by extracting it from his employees. Employees compete with each other for salaries. Employer competes with other employers for both a)market share b) hiring employees -bidding up their prices.
By comparing gains from entrepreneurship with regular salaries, you are comparing a stock variable with a flow variable. Even Marx got this part correct
> The successful entrepreneur makes his money by capital gains in the share or venture capital markets and not by extracting it from his employees.
Incorrect, that value is only sustained and increased by the efforts of company workers.
> Employer competes with other employers for both a)market share b) hiring employees -bidding up their prices.
Incorrect. Companies that don't have significant oversight in the form of government regulation or strong unions tend to collude to keep salaries low - which is exactly what has happened in the valley, and has meant that these companies have gigantic cash reserves that they aren't leveraging to hire the best talent.
> By comparing gains from entrepreneurship with regular salaries, you are comparing a stock variable with a flow variable.
No, I'm merely saying that the differences and risks suffered by investors and founders versus regular salaried employees are not a justification for the sometimes ridiculous difference between the compensation of the two.
If tech workers form a union, I'm sure it will look very different to the industrial worker's unions of the 20th century. And so it should, the needs of today are very different. The thing is, apart from the remaining unions from that time, most unions already look very different to that model so this is not really a good argument against unionising.
The other thing you aren't taking into account is the fact that this boom in the tech industry isn't guaranteed to continue forever. There will come a time, maybe pretty soon, where tech workers will become as precarious as those steel workers and autoworkers eventually became. Big tech companies are already putting a lot of effort and resources into educating the next generation of programmers to provide a more competitive labour market and drive down salaries. There's already talk of a coming recession, where I'm sure the belts will be tightened and people will be laid off. When we have a union, we will be more protected from the inevitable exploitation in such scenarios.
The temporarily embarassed unicorn founders among us need to realise that we are the creators of all the value in these companies and, collectively, we have the power to influence their direction and impact on society. We can help secure not only our own rights as workers but also have the power to change society at large and secure better standards of living for all workers (or non-workers). That's why these recent actions by Google employees have been so important. They can set a precedent for how other companies and even states can safely act in future, without fearing repercussions from their most valuable resource - the workers.
How do you get and pay for the infrastructure of this direct democracy without resources paid for by dues? How do you get the minority in any vote to go along with the result when there isn't any common binding agreement such as a contract that enforces majority rule?
> How do you get and pay for the infrastructure of this direct democracy without resources paid for by dues?
The technology needed to let people submit proposals and let other people vote on them is on the level what individuals do over a weekend as adjunct to a side project.
> How do you get the minority in any vote to go along with the result when there isn't any common binding agreement such as a contract that enforces majority rule?
Why do you need to force them to? By definition the majority will already agree, and then many in the minority would participate out of solidarity because that's the whole point of joining a union to begin with. You don't need 100.0%, a large majority is quite sufficient in general. And anything that actually required 100.0% is already lost, because then they could pay off the cheapest defector or contract it out.
The technology to submit and receive votes on proposals is only trivial until you think about the details, especially those required for security and authentication.
And your picture of humam behavior is all too rose-colored glasses if it's having all members of a minority vote just go along out of solidarity when it's non-binding. I've seen unions vote on issues, and it's often contentious with emotions running high on all sides. If the losing side in any of those could have just said "nope" to accepting the result, they would have. Sometimes they try to anyway.
> The technology to submit and receive votes on proposals is only trivial until you think about the details, especially those required for security and authentication.
This is a major problem for country-level populations. For corporations it typically comes pre-solved by the corporation itself, because each employee would have a company email address or Active Directory account etc. that could be used for authentication. (In theory the corporation could illegally tamper with the results that way, but the tampering would be immediately obvious to the person whose vote was changed.)
> If the losing side in any of those could have just said "nope" to accepting the result, they would have.
Because they're using the union for the wrong stuff. A lot of the votes would be for things like accepting a policy that gives raises to only senior people. No doubt the junior people being screwed over by that policy would strenuously object when they're the 49%, especially when being in the union deprives them of the opportunity to negotiate something else as an individual.
But how many Google employees have that kind of personal stake in a question like whether to censor search results in China?
Unions are rarely formed unless conditions are particularly bad. One upon a time in this country, the national guard with machine guns might have been called out to clear a strike/protest. Most people are very happy being ignorant of their surroundings or influence of.
The most I've ever done is threaten to quit if a project for the RIAA was accepted by my employer when I was invited into the pre-pitch meeting. It just depends on a specific case.
I'm part of a very privileged workforce and our situation, while not great, was a lot better than the average worker. We still managed to form a union. It can be done.
I wish more people knew that workers fought and died for those rights.
Its one thing to say maybe you'll quit, or skip your pay check for change, its another to actually put your life on the line for what you know is right.
4. Boycott silicon valley startups that have accepted chinese investments?
5. Boycott every product by US/Foreign company (Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Samsung, GE, Disney, Chevron, Exxon, Shell, etc.) doing business in China?
There's a difference between boycotting products made in China and protesting against building technologies that enable dictatorial regimes. They do not deserve to be conflated.
They're not "enabling" a dictatorial regime, they're just following the laws of a foreign government. Making a censored search engine isn't "supporting" the government, it's just abiding by it.
A censored search engine is a direct instrument of oppression.
Contracting to build a censored search engine is the moral equivalent of contracting to build a barbed wire fence around a concentration camp.
You're being an active participant that directly assists in making that oppression happen by building tools required for the actual act of oppression, as opposed to building something that merely done in the same country.
There are over a billion innocent people in China. The products themselves are mostly innocent and the people who build them make their livelihoods manufacturing them. That the government takes a cut is incidental. It's simply not comparable to a product specifically built to support dictatorship.
Over 5 trillion in US tax money has been used to prosecute unjust war in the middle East resulting in 100s of thousands of deaths. Is boycotting Disney movies that support the government through taxes the same as boycotting predator drones?
"You're not allowed to do anything good ever if you're not already a maximally good person. That would make you a hypocrite, which is way worse than someone who doesn't do anything to help in the first place."
I don't understand the context in which you're posting this quote. pompousprick's argument was that we shouldn't morally prosecute these companies as supporting dictatorships just because they do business in China.
Bargaining power. (Organized) working humans have it...but it will erode as robots and algorithms take on more and more work. An argument for striking while the iron is hot. (No pun intended.)
Historically, whenever there's advancement in technology. Powers that control the current will get challenged, and so far, it has been for the better for the majority.
We've gone a long way from being serfs who have almost no rights, even the right to read and write.. to citizens who can communicate via the internet.
Advancement in technology will/have make current powers obsolete. Robots and algorithms have been taking more work since the stone age.
Better tools, means more surplus, means more time to think critically, more time to comment over the internet, or read books.
The only problem is that we probably won't see any observable improvement in one lifetime. It is however, also very possible that the incumbent powers put an end to our civilization. Hopefully enough people like these Google employees, Snowden, Assange will be there to stop fascism.
I think technology has allowed power to become more and more concentrated. Never before has one state had the power to annihilate entire cities, or land entire armies worth of troops at any point on earth within 24 hours. Never before have large and powerful organisations and governments had the capability to read every word that every person sends to each other and track their every motion around the city with cameras.
Yes there is more surplus, but where is that going? People in developed societies are working more hours now than they were 100 years ago. Wealth inequality has risen to higher levels than ever existed in modern society. I wish it gave me more time to read books...
We definitely need to be more engaged in resisting these dangerous tendencies, particularly with recent political developments. I think organised tech workers have immense power. If Google employees could formalise their current actions and then even unite with other groups across other companies, they would be a force to be reckoned with.
Agreed. But this many Google employees acting collectively, including some very senior and long-tenured Googlers, meet that additional condition.
(Disclosure: having worked at Google I know some names on that list personally, and respect them greatly. I haven't worked at Google since early 2015.)
It's been a long time since my statistics and econometrics courses, but one conclusion that's definitely unwarranted would be to assume that the rest disagree with the signatories. People who speak up on an issue will always be a small fraction of the larger population of people who share the same opinion.
People downthread have remarked on the lack of Chinese signatories, commenting on how the Chinese government tracks their citizens abroad. With ramifications for their family and friends as actual, real possibilities, according to some commenters.
If that were true, then their silence can definitely not be construed as any kind of tacit agreement, or even disinterest.
How many Chinese citizens (or people otherwise susceptible to this purported pressure) work at Google?
> People downthread have remarked on the lack of Chinese signatories, commenting on how the Chinese government tracks their citizens abroad. With ramifications for their family and friends as actual, real possibilities, according to some commenters.
Even as an American with no family in China, I'd be slightly worried that putting my name on such a list might prevent me from getting a visa to visit the PRC. They've shown a willingness to factor politics into visa decisions:
That guy didn't even express a stance, like these Google employees have, he just happened to be the acting leader of the club when a speaker the PRC opposed was scheduled to give a talk.
While threats from the Chinese government may be valid, it's more likely that they don't want to / cannot risk their H-1B status or green card priority date. So their immediate threat is more likely (indirectly) coming from USG.
> While threats from the Chinese government may be valid, it's more likely that they don't want to / cannot risk their H-1B status or green card priority date. So their immediate threat is more likely (indirectly) coming from USG.
That doesn't make a lot of sense. I don't see why the USG would want to sanction them, especially since this letter has nothing to do with the USG.
If they're discouraged from signing due to their US visa status, the mechanism that makes more sense is that they fear Google could fire them and it would take them longer than 60 days to line up another job that could sponsor them.
They can get fired. If they're still an H-1B, that basically requires them to leave the country immediately.
There's a short grace period in practice (usually, and this isn't official) if you have another job all lined up that is ready to sponsor you. But if you were an H-1B applying for a green card via your employer, this basically resets your position in line, unless you're in late stages of the process. And keep in mind that the wait is measured in years for many countries (e.g. for India, >9 years right now unless you're in the "exceptional" category).
There's some statistic that says if one person is willing to speak out, then there's X number of people that agree but are unwilling to speak out. Don't know the accuracy of that, but I've taken it to heart and have been willing to be one of the first to speak out on multiple occasions at multiple jobs. Sometimes things change for the better. Sometimes things don't change, and I force a change by leaving. If nobody speaks up, then the status quo wins.
I could see it being considered both. I've also heard it applied to congress critters and senators. For every person that contacts them, they equate it to equaling a certain percentage of the people they represent. I've heard the weight of a phone call vs hand written letter vs email are different, but that was some time ago. It makes sense that when a small number/percentage of the people make contact out of a group in the thousands that some sort of statistical method would be used. These representatives should pay more attention the people as that is who puts them in their job. It doesn't really apply to corporations as they will just replace the squeaky wheels even if it's not the best thing to do morally/socially. They only care about this quarter's earnings. It's the rare company that will fix the squeak rather than replacing it, and they should be highlighted when it happens.
Yet 1 person in that company could kill it in 3 seconds even if this didn't happen. That's 1 in 88K.
My wife and I once went around and petitioned all 100 people that lived in a condo complex for a specific issue. About 80 people signed. We didn't even need to present the signature sheet - the one hold out on the board we had to convince had caved after learning about the efforts - not knowing the percentage of signers (only we had the number).
I'm more thinking from the side of all the other employees who either don't care, or have different perspetives on how well the Chinese government might or might not be doing with their tactics. I find the public internet form, especially sites like HN don't promote as much discussion from all angles as we think. I'm sure that anyone from Google who spoke up for moving into China would absolutely be skewered on here. Yet, I know they exist.
The activation energy to mobilize people is incredibly high, especially on issues that don't directly effect them. And even then it's still huge. People will always debate exactly why, but it does mean that the vast majority of people will remain mostly politically inert.
I think I covered ableness in the second paragraph. For a large and growing number of people in the US, taking on that fight could easily mean homelessness. I don't hardly consider them able on grounds of self preservation.
If we're talking about Ghandi, the man that fought for Indian rights (but not for Africans and in fact was a racist against them). And that is probably for the best:
Damn, good for y'all for sticking to your values. How did you argue against the inevitable "if we don't take this contract, dude across the street will"?
Google is well aware of the spyware that the Chinese govt is using to oppress it's ethnic minorities, but they don't lift a finger to thwart it. They don't blacklist the app that the government requires Muslims in Xinjiang to have on their phones at all time[1]. They could easily blacklist it.
How far is Google willing to go to be friends with China? Mass detainment and ethnic cleansing are well within the realm of possibility, especially in the likely event of an economic crisis.
Will Google help sniff out their Anne Franks? Imagine trying to operate an underground railroad against the full force of Google. There are so many ways that machine learning and modern private surveillance can determine things like if there are extra uncounted people living in an area.
If Beijing did decide to solve the Uyghur problem, would Google cover for them and purge search queries?
No, this is not at all hyperbolic or reaching. American corporations did business with our enemies right up until they were forced to stop during WWII. American machines have been used to commit horrific atrocities. And read Chinese history. Read about what China has done as recently as a few decades ago.
I'm glad to see Google employees taking a break from their virtue pageantry to actually take a stand on something that matters, finally.
If Google actually were to do anything to help they Anne Franks of China, do you think they would announce it to the world to debate on HN, or do you think they would do it in secret?
Perhaps. But "Maybe Google is just pretending to be evil" does not give me much comfort. Especially as I have friends who are ethnic minorities in SE Asia.
this 100%. The business made a business decision : either veteran, that is, most valuable assets get mad and all sort of problems affecting productivty/quality happen or, a few not-yet-realized business opportunities disappears.
Replacing people might be easy, but it's never cheap - even in industries with an abundance of candidates.
The real issue with having your work-force leave is three-fold. First, you lose all the accumulated knowledge of your team. Second, you lose the cohesiveness of your team. Thirdly, you have to _pay to get a new team_.
All of these things conspire to make all but the lowliest of jobs (think Target Associate) much more painful to replace than it seems.
In short, there are lots of hidden costs in recruiting.
There are hidden costs to taking a stand too. The costs to either side are not the point of the story.
Nor are the outcomes produced by a few brave people locally.
The point of the story is to draw a line in the sand. And that line matters when people are afraid to stand together on one side of it.
If you look at the example of Gandhi and the Salt Tax the mere act of picking salt of the ground and being threatened with arrest unified a country and sent a signal to the British were the line was. Sending that signal matters. Countries were that signal was not sent took many more decades to get independence.
I don't know man, I see so many companies voluntarily do this aftering being bought by PE -- only to flip the same company for 5 to 6x 3 to 5 years later.
I think it is a engineer's dream to think they can't be replaced. But they can, and the probs created by it simply don't matter.
Fifth, many of your remaining employees may be inspired to jump ship to a FAAN if the worst comes to pass. Much easier to be a silent follower than a vocal leader.
Point 4: the new people come in with knowledge of the walk out, which can cause all kinds of secondary reactions. If this goes through every new google employee will have something to think about during the HR feel good antics.
I think you maybe are now ignoring the number of H1B / Visa / or otherwise applicants happy to take a lucrative job that don't give 1/2 a damn about any of that.
My post about SCALE was apparently too hard to understand. There is a big sea of programmers that would be happy to work for Google censorship or not.
If you want to argue the cost of replacing people - I'd argue the cost of paying people who won't do the job you want them to do.
Allegedly the secret to Google's success is hiring (and more importantly, retaining) the best of the best. Presumably Dragonfly work can be done by any H1B, but all the people who no longer want to work at Google would impact plenty of other projects.
There's a difference between your coder who can build you a chat app and a coder who can keep you on the bleeding edge of innovation. In theory.
Negotiations like these aren't won by convincing the other side through making more points via logic or evidence. You must help decision makers to realize that their choice is not win-win, that hidden costs, unwanted consequences, or just plain bad publicity await. Almost always, bureaucrat decisions are driven more by fear of failure than prospect of success. As a naysayer, your goal is mostly to spread FUD and take the shine off their bauble.
>As a naysayer, your goal is mostly to spread FUD and take the shine off their bauble.
WOW. Yes, that must be it. I can't possibly have an opinion about the matter that doesn't align with yours because surely you are right!
The only logical option here is I am spreading fear uncertainty and doubt - because I'm Google and this directly impacts me. Anyone who disagrees must be silenced because they are wrong!
EDIT: Nope, opinions not allowed. Try and hide anyone that disagrees!
I think you misinterpreted that message. I think "naysayer" is still referring to the working people who take a stand against something they feel is morally wrong. They should focus on the more 'real' business concerns so they can affect actions if not minds.
Not that you are a "naysayer" and are trying to spread fear by commenting on this website.
Speaking of scale, while the world is big and a lot of people do all sorts of things in it regardless of what I do, I am the medium through which I experience the world, so betraying or not betraying myself affects everything, past, present and future, far beyond our galaxy -- as far as I am concerned.
There's always a break even point on where keeping an employee is worth less than letting them go.
It truly depends on the company and employee though. For many people that point can be extremely high so they have the power to push for ethical (or not) choices.
That power of course multiplied by the number of such people.
> There's always a break even point on where keeping an employee is worth less than letting them go.
Not if they are employees that are complaining about doing the job you're paying them to do.
Not that I don't agree with them, but in this case, Google Co has decided a route and the employees don't want to do it. I think they may find that they are more replaceable than the down votes implying the opposite are willing to accept.
How long does it take to get a sysadmin up to speed? And how much money do they lose while their websites are unavailable? What happens if YouTube.com doesn't work for a week while they get up to speed?
In what is ostensibly the best country in the world, and a massive proponent of free speech and human rights, you think it's bold to write a letter on the internet to your extraordinarily famous employer?
If it's considered bold in the USA involving Google, I shudder to think about anyone else doing this anywhere else.
In the year 2018 I would hope it's very much not bold to do so.
Publicly calling out your employer is bold anywhere. Perhaps less so in countries like the US where that sort of speech is protected, and in sectors like tech where the speakers are likely to be well-off and not fungible, but doing this sort of thing publicly always puts you at risk of losing your job (for "unrelated performance reasons") and of being quietly blacklisted by future employers (for "poor culture fit" or any other easy excuse).
> In what is ostensibly the best country in the world, and a massive proponent of free speech and human rights, you think it's bold to write a letter on the internet to your extraordinarily famous employer?
Free speech only applies to the government though? Your employer is still free to fire you.
Sure you won't be put in jail but for most people losing their job still certainly affects their livelihood.
Corporations are explicitly tyrannies. Check out Corporate Confidential for a flavor of what a typical corporate employee could expect for signing a letter like this.
Nobody is "focused on separating families" and if you think so you've just fallen victim to divisive propaganda.
I'm not sure why you scare quote free speech and then use an example of free speech to somehow disprove free speech. Free speech isn't supposed to be just for propagating popular ideas, that's the entire point FFS.
>And I guess with 'human rights' that goes along with the USA's tendency to start senseless[9] wars[10] over oil
Ugh, what a boring and incorrect trope. The wars are not about oil, oil companies aren't the ones making money off of them. Show us all of the successful US oil companies in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria. Additionally, the US produces enough domestic oil that it makes no sense to go after conflict oil even if that was a thing.
Finally, your whole post smacks of whataboutism. Pointing out shortcomings does not mean the US isn't leaps and bounds ahead of China/Russia/etc in human rights. Try running a newspaper truly critical of the government in China or Russia and then you'll see why 'free speech' matters.
>Additionally, the US produces enough domestic oil that it makes no sense to go after conflict oil even if that was a thing.
This was a post-Bush II, Hillary Clinton-driven innovation[1]. She helped popularize the practice of hydraulic fracturing (fracking) that has unlocked previously inaccessible domestic oil supplies. Before then, oil prices were virtually dictated by OPEC. Bush II's foreign policy was informed by this fact, and the ongoing war in Iraq he started opened their resources up to western multinational oil corporations[2]. Under Saddam, the oil in Iraq was extracted by a company that had been nationalized in 1961[3].
>Nobody is "focused on separating families" and if you think so you've just fallen victim to divisive propaganda.
It's pretty clear that Stephen Miller has been pushing specifically for family separation. He appears to be fairly "focused" on the issue as a strategy in his goal of limiting immigration (legal and illegal) in general.
> You said: "There has never been a better society than in the United States in 1958." What do you mean by that?
> FROMM: Well, I mean it, of course, in relative terms. The history of man so far is nothing to brag about, from the standpoint of our ideas--and what I mean is, that in comparison with most other societies, our present-day American society has achieved things which are remarkable: material wealth, greater than for any other nation; a relative freedom from oppression; a relative mobility; a spreading of art, of music, of thought, which is also rather unique. So, I would say, compared with the 19th century, compared with most previous history, this is as good or better a society than any which man has ever made. But that doesn't mean it is such a good one.
Not that I disagree with you, and a lot of things changed for the worse. But still, the US has a lot of tools to fix its problems that other nations never had, and currently don't have. If the US falls for good, it will have an incredible domino effect, I for one don't want to see that happening. Wherever you are, count your blessings -- not to rest on them, but to use them, fiercely.
Bush Jr. also did a lot of destruction with the war on terror, and before that we had the war on drugs... Etc. Its something ongoing since the early days with the US (and most countries). Sometimes someone gets into power, but even if they wished to do great things, I get a feeling that they would not be allowed to do so.
Despite what you want to believe, there is no virtue in having a first just to have a first. I’d rather have a kick-ass first female president than a “figurehead first”. You need to examine your virtues a little before getting uptight about missing a chance to signal.
Further, the US is not great because it’s progressive. It’s great because we are allowed to be progressive. It’s great because it is structured to systemically fight oppression. Does that mean we are absolutely free of all possible oppressions? No. But we have invented a society that limits the damage oppressive factions can do. In other countries the government, the monopoly on power, is allowed to oppress (and we’re trending that way in the US, which is unfortunate) for the “greater good”. Because the government can’t do that in the US, it means we e.g. can’t silence homosexuals or transgender people arguing for equality. It means you can call Trump a thing and not have the police at your door.
We are certainly not “the greatest country evar omgee” (I’m not into the imperialist stuff either). But the example we have set for the world has lead to the fastest expansion of human knowledge our species has ever seen. That’s pretty great.
I think you're getting downvotes because your statement brooked no argument, and people know if they comment they will be dragged into an off-topic back-and forth battle with a 9/11 truther that nobody could win.
The gap between rich and poor keeps increasing, the development of wages over the last few decades is GROSS. It's shameful. Yes, once again people in their despair got whipped into voting for a wolf in sheep's clothing, but also once again their despair is ignored.
Trump is a symptom, not a root cause. I was convinced he's a fascist nearly a year before he was elected, and even then was already annoyed by the circus around "what will he say next?". Then he did get elected (which I by the way considered to be a punishment for the popular support of Bernie Sanders... one thing is sure, the next president will just have to be a polite human being, and a lot of people will cry tears of joy and eat out of their hand, "progressive" now got reset to "not utterly mad"), and it go so much worse, instead of fixing their own mistakes, people just point fingers at him some more. He's a giant distraction.
Yeah, I guess blacks must hate record low unemployment. [1]
Lowest unemployment for the whole country since 1969 at 3.7% [2] 3.5-4.2 percent GDP growth [3] which Obama claimed Trump couldn't do, lacking a magic wand [4]
But I guess if you're interested in virtue signaling, checking boxes and waxing poetic about what could have been...rather than looking at actual quality of life stats for Americans...I guess the U.S. might look like a lost cause.
Oh and if you want to understand the electoral college, read The Federalist Papers [5]. It's far more resilient to corruption than a nationwide popular vote.
I hate many things about what the US is becoming--or has always been--but it does have some of the strongest free-speech rights in the world (though less so in recent decades as other nations catch up), and the world's highest public support for freedom of speech. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/11/freedom-of-speech-cou...
The Trump administration has stumbled backwards very publicly with regard to the people that the framers intended for free speech rights to protect: journalists. From overt anti-journalist rhetoric[1], to possible collusion in the murder of US national Jamal Khashoggi[2], a journalist critical of the Saudi regime. "Free speech" has been co-opted so effectively by the far-right movement that the same people who wave it around to defend debate of genocide simultaneously advocate for the prosecution of journalists.
> possible collusion in the murder of US national Jamal Khashoggi
Not central to the point, but Kashoggi was not a US national. He was a US-resident Saudi citizen. It's possible to be a US national but not a citizen, but Kashoggi wasn't one: https://www.immihelp.com/immigration/us-national.html
Quibbling over status is an interesting fallout of the same right-wing nationalist rhetoric. You're right though. He was a Saudi citizen, US resident on an O Visa with US citizen children on his way to a green card[1].
> Should we not care about his murder as much then?
Actually, the correction was so that people wouldn't continue making the mistake, not because his citizenship status is a critical point. The error is a distraction from the main point that is avoidable in the future.
I think that the USA is definitely a proponent of free speech, and actually that it takes it to extremes.
Pretty much the only speech outlawed is child pornography and that which a reasonable person would see as inciting imminent violence. That's a pretty high bar, higher than any other country I've ever heard of.
These are much bigger restrictions that impact far more people than the others you mentioned.
>Fighting words is essentially a dead precedent, and all that remains is inciting imminent violence, which I mentioned.
There's also huge limitations on commercial speech; obscenity (which covers more than child pornography); reasonable time, manner, and place restrictions; perjury; blackmail; harassment; solicitations to commit crimes (not just inciting violence); student's speech while in school.
Obscenity doesn't cover much more than child pornography. It used to, but not anymore. You should read Reno v ACLU.
The reasonable time, manner and place restrictions aren't enforced and also wouldn't be upheld, but you're right, perjury, blackmail and some kinds of harassment aren't covered. Solicitations to commit crimes actually aren't always illegal.
>Obscenity doesn't cover much more than child pornography. It used to, but not anymore.
The definition of obscenity isn't well defined, but there are still numerous laws throughout the US that ban obscene speech that have been upheld--zoophilia porn laws, and bans on selling sex toys are 2 examples I can think of off the top of my head.
>The reasonable time, manner and place restrictions aren't enforced and also wouldn't be upheld
The government very regularly enforces this. What do you think free speech zones and protest permits are for?
You're in for a bad surprise. A lot of people were opposed to Trump's "Make America Great Again" claim because the claim insinuates that the US might not be literally the greatest country in the world right now.
[1][2][3] Besides being a revised policy that no longer applies (and yes, policies take time to unwind)...there is no universal human right to emigrate to any country whatsoever. I know a lot of people think so...
but also this pales in comparison to the abuses of existing Chinese nationals by China, taking Muslim property [1], placing citizens in internment camps and abusing them, placing them under "deeply invasive forms of surveillance and psychological stress as they are forced to abandon their native language, religious beliefs and cultural practices" [2], imposing a nationwide social credit system that can deny citizens of China basic access to education, air travel, etc on a whim [3]...
Whatever your thoughts on Trump (besides being off-topic...he's not racist, by the way [4])...he's kept in check by a robust court system, a constitutional republic and the congress itself from imposing the systems listed above on U.S. citizens.
And yes, free speech is the right to say offensive things. There's no reason whatsoever to protect "inoffensive" speech. Yes, free speech (and liberty in general) allows you to be skeptical of the assessment on global climate change. It allows you to question what role if any, our government should have in attempting to control the climate. Sorry you hate liberty, maybe you would prefer if a social credit system imposed punishment on those not pre-disposed to your particular beliefs? If so, then China is looking like a good move for you.
And then he counter-sued the DOJ and then reached a settlement. The disagreement was over welfare applicants. That can be twisted a number of ways, but you can't misconstrue that to imply racism. Landlords (and banks by the way) have a legitimate, financial duty to lease to the most-qualified tenants. When you ignore financial qualifications...you get the 2008 real estate crash.
I'm sorry, but if 'liberty' includes the ability to reserve the right to deny science to continue destroying the entire planet, I'm not sure I can support it.
Sounds like liberty for humans, and not for the planet, which we have to live on.
What's the point in free speech if we destroy the place we live in? Who will be left to speak?
Yeah, and if the climate scientists are as wrong as nutritionists were about fats [1][2]...then what? We destroy the world economy for the wrong reason? In ANY complex system, there are trade offs for every choice. And would you starve a billion people to save the planet? Would you quadruple oil prices to cut emissions...hurting the poorest in the process? The point of free speech is that we DEBATE things like this so we can TRY to arrive at the best answer, knowing damn well we still might have to TRY AGAIN if and when we fail.
> there is no universal human right to emigrate to any country
You've really mischaracterized the situation. Check out "No Wall They Can Build" for a closer look, and maybe "An Indigenous People's History of the US" for an explanation of the sentiment that "we didn't cross the border; the border crossed us."
It's not ambiguous, to those of us holding the facts, that the US' encroachment onto Latin American life is a violation of human sovereignty, and dignity—if not explicitly the peculiarly circumscribed "legal rights to emigrate."
It seems like your anti-Trump sentiment is serving as a heuristic for general anti-Americanism. The reality is far from this. The US scores high on list of freedom indices[1] and HDI[2].
So yes, the consequences of making a "bold" statement from a 6-figure tech job in the US will be different than taking similar actions in less developed places. Don't let your hatred of Trump bias you.
This is a problem that my employer faces. We have a strong concept of corporate responsibility, and plenty of opportunity for employee pushback, but we repeatedly see our decisions simply subverted by competitors who don't have any sense of morals and just go where the money is. It becomes a nasty tradeoff where you think about building/doing things that don't feel good, just to maintain a position to have a positive influence on _other_ areas, where a competitor might simply act without morals everywhere. It's not fun to think about these things in a market with bad incentives.
I get what you mean and it's a case by case basis, if people didn't try and push any morals we would all live in vacuums where all we have is the law to tell us what is _right_.
A lot of people have no problem with their countries governments manufacturing and/or selling arms to dictatorships that inflict harm on innocents and supply extremists e.g. UK-Saudi arms trading. As far as some are concerned the UK is just doing what another country may do instead.
Because that's the only way to solve moral co-ordination problems?
If you leave a morally odious contract on the table (lets say it's cutting up human babies for baby veal) knowing your competitors will take the project, enrich themselves, expand, and develop the capacity to engage in larger, even more odious business, then what's the proper course of action?
Do you cut up babies because fuck morals? Or do you try to get no one to cut up babies? What if you have imperfect information and aren't certain if your competition would do it? What if they have imperfect information about your intentions and decide to take the deal purely on that basis?
Should be straightforward to recognize how corrosive this cycle gets.
EDIT: some people seem to be upset with the baby example. Just exchange that with anything you find clearly morally unacceptable. Like selling reverse mortgages to elderly people with limited capacity, or signing people up for ponzi schemes or adding intentionally addictive additives to a harmful consumable product, etc.
I mean, all I'm trying to say is that most companies are subject to the competition pressure in their market regardless of internal employees' morals, and it becomes hard to justify "standing up for your beliefs" in a business sense that isn't just "shut down the business or change industries," if there are inherent moral issues in the current industry.
When I say "have no sense of morals," I'm talking about competitors who were acquired by large PE firms a decade or more ago and do not have any internal discussions about the morals of what their employees are building/maintaining. They operate entirely by asking what clients want and then trying to build what they can of those requests.
I'm mostly talking about incentives and market pressures, not "imposing morals on others" or other such emotional nonsense that you are reading into here.
If that one employer made it public that they chose not to deal with MRAP repair, I would wholly choose to do business with them and spread the word that they have are a responsible corporate citizen like wildfire.
Great story dude. We can't pretend more people don't think like this. People working in and around corporations can make a difference by talking about it with other people. Thanks for sharing!
The key here is you acted together. Individuals acting alone have very little bargaining power. But once employees start acting together with a single purpose their power gets very difficult to ignore.
Whether people believe unions are a good idea or not, the key is to organize into something that allows people to work together and find common ground to address common problems.
It's not just about the equipment the police force use, it's also about the training. Given military equipment, the police force will also get military training matching the equipment they get. Military knowledge and tactics should not be used used to police a civilian population.
Thank you. We literally need more people exactly like you in this world. The militarization of the police force is something that started with George W., continued unabated with Obama, and will probably be accelerated under Trump, and it is anti-democracy in my opinion.
I wonder how this policy would interact with something like the Posse Comitatus Act.
Would it effectively require applying the label "terrorist" or "national security threat" to any criminal who shows they are prepared to use lethal force against a law enforcement officer?
Yeah, life isn't "Die Hard", if someone is using "high caliber armor piercing guns" against the local PD, then classifying them as "domestic terrorists" and calling in specialists to deal with them seems appropriate to me.
Police have to deal with enough crap that they shouldn't be expected to handle paramilitary situations as well, is what I'm saying.
As a counterexample, remember the "Bundy standoff"? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundy_standoff That's the kind of situation where the Posse Comitatus Act means you don't send in the Army. However, if they had shot a bunch of people I'm sure they would have had to face at least the National Guard, eh?
I considered working at Google last year after a recruiter reached out to me, but their decision to backtrack on their promise in China changed my mind. I do not morally condemn anyone who works at Google. I have many good friends that are both bright engineers and undeniably good people that work there. I just feel that as someone who's family is Taiwanese, I cannot in good consciousness support the company. I let the recruiter know this because I believe it's important that they know. I'm curious if anyone else on HN has had similar experiences.
Good for you, for real. It takes a lot sometimes to stand up against something that a lot of other people would jump for the chance to do.
While I think the average developer has a more negative opinion of Google these days, for years they have been considered one of the best places to work in the world.
I know if I told my parents, for instance, I had done what you did, they probably would've called me an idiot. :P They just know Google is one of the biggest tech companies in the world, they don't see a lot of their especially recent practices as bad.
To say 'no, thank you, I'd rather not as I don't agree with the company's practices' indicates a kind of moral standing I wish more people would confidently have. It shows you're taking a personal stand against what you believe to be corruption, and that's awesome.
> Good for you, for real. It takes a lot sometimes to stand up against something that a lot of other people would jump for the chance to do.
While it is a nice enough gesture, let's not kid ourselves that this was some difficult selfless act on the part of the OP. Apologies to the OP if I have misinterpreted their earlier post but:
> I considered working at Google last year after a recruiter reached out to me
This statement often becomes true by virtue of having a reasonable computer science qualification and living in the Bay Area - eventually a recruiter for a FAANG style company is going to spam you with an email. Actually converting an outreach from a recruiter to you know, an actual concrete job offer at Google, is another matter entirely.
If declining recruiters is the new (very low!) bar for high minded civic engagement, I'm accidentally a grizzled activist on the front line.
>eventually a recruiter for a FAANG style company is going to spam you with an email.
This. I have said 'no, thanks' to FAANG in the last 3 months because my life is in a bit of a flux right now. It was a bit more than a simple 'no, thanks' in case of Facebook, but that's a story for another thread :)
OTOH, AMZN and MSFT have never even hesitated to accommodate the Chinese govt's demands. Which other companies do you think would be more ethically conscious than GOOG in these circumstances? (I don't work there.)
Source? I was not aware there was any hesitation or even disagreement from Apple's side. Is there an Apple statement saying they disagree w/ Chinese government requests similar to the statements saying they disagree w/ US government requests? In their absence, is it safe to assume they agree since they have shown that when they disagree they make public statements?
They didn't really hesitate, they just dodged questions. Apple moved their user data and keystore to local datacenters in China [1]. Apple even updated their TOS and forced their Chinese users to accept (or drop service) to reflect this.
As of July, these datacenters were nationalized [2], giving the Chinese government access to all Apple user data.
It took only two years to go from refusing the FBI request for one user to handing over the encryption keys to millions of users.
> Which other companies do you think would be more ethically conscious than GOOG in these circumstances?
If you wanted to do software work for a company that didn't kowtow to Chinese government demands, chances are 99% of jobs are available to you. Does that mean they could if they would? Unknown, and since regimes change with frequency you can't rely on stated principles, only actions.
The idea that a foreign corporation has a duty to break Chinese law with regards to web filtering is very problematic, if that's what you mean by "give concessions to the government". How far should such a corporation go with breaking the law, is tax evasion against the Chinese state morally acceptable, since those taxes might be used for oppression?
We should recognize here a very thin line between respecting the Chinese law and actively collaborating to subvert human rights - because the law is defined by an authoritarian regime with a long history of human right abuses.
That being said, surely you cannot change Chinese law from outside China, and if respecting it's current iteration is not in itself an unacceptable violation of human rights, it stands to reason that expanding in China at least forces the government to stick to it's own laws under the threat of a public exit and protest if unlawful pressures are made. It puts ethical companies in a position where they can nudge the Chinese towards ethical behavior - or at least very publicly denounce unethical demands.
Are there any legal restrictions on what the Chinese government can ask websites to censor? I am not aware of any, so I don't see where there would be an opportunity to protest.
I believe it's already established that operating in China means responding to all censorship requests. Nonetheless, there are still many things an ethical company could refuse: access to the private searches and information of an individual without a due legal process, collecting sensitive information altogether knowing that it's fair game for the state, knowingly alter or influence results to promote official narratives and propaganda, knowingly use or profit from the proceeds of labor camps, underage or other forms of work exploitation; and many, many more, which are surely not positively codified in any Chinese law, yet are widespread.
I don't think it's fair to try and nitpick people's ethical decisions like this.
Imagine yes, this person would work for Amazon even though they're in China too. Does that make them not working for Google because they're in China a bad choice? I don't think so.
Are we really prepared to tear everyone down who isn't absolute in their morality?
A moral inconsistency is not a nitpick when it's the entire industry.
Their logic makes Google a better employer than Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook and any other tech company currently operating in China. Saying they spurned Google because the company was considering going to China is disengenious, since the majority of the substitute employers are already in China.
> Saying they spurned Google...the majority of the substitute employers are already in China.
There is life outside of the FAANG/GAFAM bubble. If you refuse to work at Google, it doesn't mean that you're then obligated to work at Amazon or Microsoft, etc.
Of course there is, but when considering substitute employers, in the economic sense, working in a small-town software shop isn't quite the same as working at a multinational tech company.
If we're looking at it in that lens, then GP's problem isn't with Google, but with large tech companies in general because that's the industry standard.
> Of course there is, but when considering substitute employers, in the economic sense, working in a small-town software shop isn't quite the same as working at a multinational tech company.
The life outside of the FAANG/GAFAM bubble isn't just "small-town software shop[s]." There's a lot more diversity than that, and to conceive of the industry in that way is too parochial.
There's a big difference between operating a business in China in general, and operating a business that necessarily involves implementing their surveillance infrastructure.
I honestly have no idea. Last I heard, Bing is blocked in China, which I assume means that there are things that come in its search result that Chinese government doesn't like.
But Dragonfly [ostensibly] went well beyond just censoring results, in that it implemented specific tools like linking search requests with phone numbers identifying people who made those requests. That's straight-up aiding and abetting oppressing people - political opposition, for example, or even unorganized dissenters. I can't believe we are even seriously talking about whether this is okay or not.
bing.com redirects to a Chinese version of Bing, which prioritises Chinese sites.
I have no basis for saying this beyond not knowing how they could do this otherwise, but I would assume that they must censor results to exist there. I don't know if they go further, such as you describe Dragonfly plans to do.
I sympathize with your position, especially regarding Taiwan, but I wonder if your early rejection was as effective as employees rebelling? One need not take the most effective route, but given the size of Google, when I was in a similar position to yours I justified it by saying if I got an offer, I'd make it very clear I'd want nothing to do with the censorship work for the exact reason you listed.
Both are good. I'm sure Google carefully tracks why candidates decline jobs at Google, and if enough of them say "I can't work with you because you're doing specific evil thing X," then it becomes more and more worth it not to do X.
Similarly, if internal morale is in decline and reports come back saying that it's because of X, that also has a real (and quite possibly quantifiable) cost.
Do you think that recruiters spend time forwarding your response to someone at Google who actually cares? I usually decline jobs/projects outright, but I wonder if I shouldn't waste some time on interviews before telling the company why I won't work for them. It's not like there's a shortage of projects, and I'd like to maximize my political "leverage".
Yeah, I have ignored recruiters hiring for companies I have moral qualms in regards to, despite the jobs being undoubtedly quite lucrative. Haven't ever let them know about my moral aversion though.
It's much easier to excel in the pursuit of something you believe in. Seems like folks who accept jobs that they don't believe in are liable to become increasingly demotivated and eventually burned out.
Do you in good consciousness support the U.S. government? I'm asking because the government doesn't recognize Taiwan as an independent country and kicked Taiwan out of the United Nations in 1971.
The United States did not kick the Republic of China out of the United Nations in 1971, the UN General Assembly did. The US voted against Resolution 2758.
> Do you in good consciousness support the U.S. government?
What kind of question is that? No citizen supports all the actions of their government. Government options are a lot more limited than employment options.
I, too, had a very similar experience. Although I am of Indian descent, I still strongly agree with your views. It's really unfortunate that the leadership at Google doesn't follow the "do no evil" mantra anymore. These sorts of decisions aren't in the hands of an every-day engineer, so they are not at fault here in my opinion. And by standing up and vocalizing that distaste, I believe they are doing the right thing. Google makes some amazing products, so I see the appeal of working there. But many of those engineers have been around before the company started going in this direction, so I can't blame them. It's the leadership that needs to understand values > profits. At least if they want my continued support.
Much of this is PR dominance as well. Corporate media has already done 90% of the hard work for people to be able to easily market and feel good about opposing specific issues. You just need to fill in the colors in the coloring book. But these issues have been done and accepted for the longest time, such as Google's State Department staffed Jigsaw branch that creates tools, shown in Wikileaks, to assist overthrowing foreign governments in collaboration with the State Department, or tools that AI-censors comments, or tools that delegates control of the discoverability of grassroot contents to other corporate conglomerates.
I'm fairly anti-China and loved Taiwan, can't wait to go back, loved it, loved the Taiwanese people.
Good for you on making a decision like that.
But... Just so long as you know that someone did take your job there. And they're almost certainly happy to do anything asked. That's something I think many idealistic users here aren't understanding.
> someone did take your job there. And they're almost certainly happy to do anything asked.
If talented engineers were that easy to find, Google wouldn't have participated in illegal wage-fixing; and that's without selecting for engineers that want to support an authoritarian regime. Statistically speaking, every rejection drives up the price. To wield even more power, we'd need to form some kind of industry-wide union.
I think, what these employees don't realize is: Even when a company places values over profits, it is still in an attempt to maximize profits over the long term. By placing values above profits, it increases it's goodwill with customers thus increasing it's moat and it's retention, as well as it's employee retention. This strategy made sense in the early days.
Not anymore.
As Google's position becomes increasingly strengthend (with all the market share it can capture in search already realized ~ and it slightly decreasing anyway due to it's slightly tarnished brand), it doesn't need to maintain this illusion of values over profits anymore.
The "values over profits" approach was always more of a recruitment tool than a PR tool. It did give a nice PR boost, but realistically Google's been the best choice of search engine since it came out in 1998. They don't need additional customer goodwill for people to keep using them, they just need to continue to give good results for esoteric queries.
Since 2005, though, good engineers have had lots of options for where to work, many of which pay better or have more growth potential than Google. And "Don't Be Evil" was a great way to persuade them to come work for Google rather than Yelp or Facebook or some hedge fund, and keep them there rather than have them go off and found their own startups that potentially could compete with Google. Because so much of their product moat depends upon technical excellence, keeping the best engineers within the company is critical for them.
I'll predict that if they don't reverse course on this, we'll see a mini-exodus of Googlers who either end up founding their own startups or start working on political-tech projects. Ultimately I think that may be good for the world, but it's not really in Google's long-term interests, although perhaps at this point their moat is entrenched enough and they're big enough that it doesn't really matter.
> Since 2005, though, good engineers have had lots of options for where to work, many of which pay better or have more growth potential than Google.
Growth probably, but very few actually pays better than Google considering all the perks and work life balance you would get from working for Google. And since the startup boom is almost over, it is even more so like that now...
Almost all wealth in Silicon Valley comes from equity price appreciation. Google stock has appreciated 7x since 2009, but Facebook has appreciated 38x in the same time period, Yelp 13x, Netflix about 35x, Apple about 6-7x.
I think the boom in web & mobile startups is basically over at this point, but there's a new boom in cryptocurrency & AI startups that's just beginning, along with a social movement (multiple social movements, actually) that's just beginning and will likely need communication technology to organize.
This is only really true at startups. At a bigco, your on paper comp can be 250 or 350k annually in cash equivalents. That quickly generates wealth even if you are given only cash.
You're comparing 2 pre-ipo companies to Google and apple.
Still true at BigCo. Total comp as a senior SWE at Google when I left (almost 5 years ago - it's more now) was something like ~$175K cash, ~$125K stocks + options, ~$50K bonus. With the 5x appreciation in stock that was going on while I was there, the stock portion could be worth $625K/year by the time it all vested. That's as employee 20,000+.
Right, but this is different from having higher expected value, or higher likely-case value. Most people don't value compensation offers based on 'growth potential' (aka 'best case').
(I'm assuming you mean growth in the sense of 'growth in value of equity', based on your reply to another commenter)
I was actually thinking of growth as in "professional growth" - getting promoted faster, having a chance to learn more skills, doing things you wouldn't be able to do. I was thinking of the equity growth in terms of "pay more".
OK, so I'm curious: do many companies in the bay area pay more for engineers (on either an expected value or a worst case basis) than Google does? Sure, some of those startups will make their early employees very very rich, but most will fizzle or fail.
By reputation, Netflix pays more cash than Google. Like I said in the other subthread, though, the majority of your compensation in a tech company is in equity. The biggest price appreciation in equity is for younger, faster-growing companies. When I was at Google, that was largely Facebook; by the time I'd left, it was companies like AirBnB, Pinterest, Medium, and Snapchat (though I dunno how well folks at the latter 3 are doing nowadays).
There's something you've overlooked: companies are ultimately run by humans. Humans who make decisions at all levels of the hierarchy, in order to further their own personal priorities, even if it dramatically conflicts with the shareholders' goals of maximizing profits.
In some cases, the personal priorities can be personal advancement. We see this all the time when managers hire/promote their friends, sexually harass their subordinates, and make decisions on the basis of politics as opposed to technical/business merit.
And in other cases, the personal priorities can be moral values. Values such as promoting free speech, fighting censorship, protecting consumer rights, and avoiding layoffs.
The idea that every single decision taken by a company is perfectly optimized to maximize long term profits, is baseless. There simply does not exist any mechanism to monitor and enforce such a requirement. The shareholders have only one lever to pull: accept the current leadership team, imperfections and all. Or fire them and risk destroying the company in the resulting churn. This gives both the executives and employees tremendous leeway to prioritize values over profits, as long as they are good enough to not get fired.
Yeah, and then the CEO decides he'd rather make $124M that year and feel good about himself in not kowtowing to totalitarian governments vs doing so and making $125M that year. The entire point of this comment thread is that individual people are not motivated solely by money. They care about many other things too, like their values.
Hell, this entire post exists because some Google employees care more about their values than about making as much money as possible.
The only people not motivated solely by money are those who used the very tactics that are in question to amass enough not to care... Or simply have no stake in it, Or have a stake in a competing company.
I can assure you if google employees revolt on a number of projects and that drops the stock price in half over the course of 3 weeks PEOPLE WILL CARE... Even the ones that today you say don't care.
> The only people not motivated solely by money are those who used the very tactics that are in question to amass enough not to care... Or simply have no stake in it, Or have a stake in a competing company.
What an absurdly preposterous thing to say. Money is a motivator and a large one for many, many people, but it's ridiculous to call it the sole motivator for everyone.
> The only people not motivated solely by money are those who used the very tactics that are in question to amass enough not to care...
There are an awful lot of people in this very comment thread who would claim to be counterexamples to this. Are you going to say they're all lying or deluded about their own motivations?
Well, a publicly traded company has the fiduciary obligation to make its shareholders money. So it really does not matter what the "the people" want, it matters what the shareholders want. In fact, the board and executive team are legally required to make the the decisions that make increase the value of the company. They could be in real trouble with the law if they knowingly do something that devalues the company.
It's not to say that the employees don't have some power. Shareholders may play along with their request while figuring out how to maximize the profits and avoid such road bumps as this in the future.
So in the end you have to weigh the wants/needs of the employees and how much money might be lost or gained if you go along with their demands vs how much money can be made or lost if you ignore them.
I could see a argument that upsetting your employees could lead to a value drop that might be greater than whatever contract they are protesting. But it is hard to judge, and it will often only be looked at quarter to quarter.
Now if you give the impression that you are all bout money but don't act like it then shareholders can be rightfully upset. But if you clearly state your values and ambitions and shareholders don't like it? Then, sucks to be them! There is nothing more to it than that.
Serving shareholders’ “best interests” is not the same thing as either maximizing profits, or maximizing shareholder value. "Shareholder value," for one thing, is a vague objective: No single “shareholder value” can exist, because different shareholders have different values. Some are long-term investors planning to hold stock for years or decades; others are short-term speculators.
I am sorry, I think both you and Lynn Stout, are wrong, regardless of her credentials -- she sort of is making a name of her self by swing this sort of nonsense -- so her articles are self serving.
And yes, we can define shareholder value -- its the stock price. But I see your point and why I have talked about the grey area of what is the best move. But you would be hard pressed to find a group of shareholders who who all agree not taking big contracts is going to be the best move.
It doesn't matter if the shareholders believe it is not the best move. It matters if the board believes it is the best move for the long term benefit of the company and its shareholders. The duty of loyalty does not require a board to do everything the shareholders want or to maximize short term profits. If a majority of the shareholders disagree they can vote to replace the board, but that doesn't mean the board hasn't met its fiduciary duty.
If the companies value and ambition is to maximize the stock price then the stock price is a good metric. If the companies value is something else then stock price isn't really a good metric.
It will also attract shareholders that share those values and thus going against them will cause an uproar.
It really depends on their charter. People don't park money in a company simply to have the stock value drop or stay the same -- with exception of companies who pay out dividends.
Most companies charters talk about their relationship and obligations to the shareholders -- people don't invest in companies that don't intend on increasing in value.
Again, value doesn't have to be monetary. Shareholders has the right to expect return on their investment, yes. If the company delivers on their ambitions and values then that is the shareholders reward.
If the stock market is as amoral as you think then it seems something ought to be done to the stock market. But I don't think most people would invest in something that goes starkly against their personal ethics, no matter how profitable. And if you regard following one's moral compass as just "virtue gaming" I'm not sure what to think.
That is not how that works. A company -- with a few special exceptions and special charters -- ONLY goal is to increase value for this shareholders. A single shareholder with a non majority holding can sue if the company knowingly does something that causes the values of his shares to decrease -- even if the rest of the shareholders are okay with the loss because they agree with the sentiment.
There is some grey area along strategy short game vs long game, but a company's charter is to increase the value of its shareholders -- THE ONLY THING that literally matters for a publicly traded company*
* Some companies can be setup with a different charter that does not prioritize profit, but google and most of the publicly traded companies on the market today are not those. And it would be very hard to convert to such a company.
> the positive corporate culture that small companies tend to lose as they grow.
It's more like regression to the mean; it gets harder to be different as you grow. Good companies get worse, bad companies better (just look at Uber's internal culture).
Dunbar's Number, I believe, gives some insight. Basically, humans can only maintain about 150 relationships. As organizations grow personal relationships are replaced with rules and structures as a matter of necessity.
Agreed. I suppose sociopaths can get away with more when there's so many people that the relationship/connections between everyone are weaker on average.
I used to think the same way, but then I came to a different understanding of sociopathy as an evolutionary adaptation. Those sociopaths are important and useful. The video below has a little deeper explanation.
> I think, what these employees don't realize is: Even when a company places values over profits, it is still in an attempt to maximize profits over the long term.
Come on. A lot of people create startups to do something interesting that they're passionate about. Customers and profit merely serve these ends, not the other way around.
What are some potential solutions here? Some form of intervention by the US government? I think many of us will agree that the sort of behavior these employees are speaking out against is at least unethical, and it also seems this "profits-over-values" behavior is a common one for large tech companies to gradually start engaging in. To your point, corporations in all sectors always do what makes the most economic sense, even if it means building internet censorship tech, dumping hazardous chemicals into the water supply, etc.
As a society which (hopefully) would like to have some sort of moral compass, how do we prevent large companies from seeking profit even at the expense of our freedoms/health/planet? It seems to me that if the punishment for unethical behavior is economically "less" than the costs or potential losses associated with acting in a good, ethical way, companies will continue to do what we're seeing them do now. My intuition is that capitalism (in its current Western incarnation) can't function without some strict controls to protect what our societies value most.
Or do we simply value profit over everything else? If so, that's kind of depressing, but I get the sense that most people don't think this way.
The US government? I find it hard to believe they would intervene with china unless they plan on using it as leverage in order to gain economic standing. However, seeing as google is already censoring content via prioritizing search results with favored websites before relevant websites and since the government is always happy to find new outlets to get personal information from its own and foreign citizens. I don't see this as being stoppable unless you make your own company and start competing with Google.
The tech sector has always been ripe for co-operatives and profit sharing. Politically speaking libertarian attitudes were the popular norm in most tech culture but now small co-opts could become the next phase for many small tech companies. That could be a first small step.
I think it's always a combination of factors. Unless you subscribe to the theory that every CEO is 100% sociopath.
There's the consideration of true values. Then there's the consideration of lost opportunities from following those values. Then there's the cold consideration of the money gained from PR boost due to following the values. Then there's the "game theory" consideration of altogether dying in the marketplace if your competition don't act on those values.
I think the best thing for all of us to do on the outside is to create a culture where every company benefits from the PR boost. Google executives are one concentrated interest, separate from Microsoft, etc. The employees, I reckon, are not as financially motivated (i.e. don't stand to lose _as_ much individually) and can afford to advocate their values. It seems to me (I'll phrase it conservatively, since I'm just throwing out ideas here) that Google employees should make friends with Microsoft employees to make sure they raise the same noise on their end as well. Make it okay for each company to gain (monetarily or otherwise) from good PR, and make it less profitable for all of their competitors to sell out.
If I was in China and had to choose between having a choice between censored baidu and censored google vs just censored baidu, I'd rather have both baidu and google. It's easy for us here in the western world as we have access to both and more uncensored sources to take the moral high ground and subject the Chinese to a "let them eat cake" attitude. Not sure if this will benefit people over there though to ban google completely.
I think the situation should be looked at more holistically.
Here are some other factors to consider:
- Does it soil our hands to build the "Mental handcuffs" of China, even if Baidu started it?
- Does it stop at China? Or what about Turkey? Iran? Would we build a search in Saudi Arabia that didn't let women look up divorce if the government wanted it?
- Does it come to America? What about searches that seem criminal?
This disagreement is much more fundamental than China. It's about the role of free-information and free-education being the basis upon which beliefs should be formed, rather than beliefs being used to block out free-information.
Google is already censoring specific searches all over the world, in the EU for example, the right to be forgotten and many "hate speech" laws already force google to censor many sites that are filtered out.
Censorship in the EU is generally intended to protect individuals; censorship in China is meant to protect the ones doing the censoring. The EU has democratically elected governments; China is an authoritarian dictatorship.
I'm sure the Chinese would say exactly the same thing that the EU does about their system; it "protects" individuals from what they don't need to know.
Comments like this make me glad I live in the USA. We don't discriminate on what types of censorship are acceptable or not. Less extraordinary exceptions (Child pornography, Libel), any censorship is in violation of our constitution and most closely held core values.
> I'm sure the Chinese would say exactly the same thing that the EU does about their system; it "protects" individuals from what they don't need to know.
It doesn't matter what the Chinese government says, because if they say something like that they're lying. Their censorship is meant to protect the power and privilege of the already powerful and privileged, and keep everyone else complaint to them.
The only way Chinese censorship "protects" individuals is by discouraging them from having dissident thoughts that the government may decided to personally and physically oppress them for having.
How is that any different from European censorship?
Nazism is despicable, but censoring the Nazi voice is effectively the same as preventing citizens from having those "dissident thoughts" that contradict modern western government, and you actually can receive prison time for expressing Nazi sentiments in Germany so the government absolutely does "oppress them" for having those thoughts.
China views western influence the same way. In China's history, rule by the west has seen terrorism, imperialism, and corruption, which have lasted far longer (since the 1800s when the First Opium Wars were fought), and I would argue have led to greater suffering (certainly the numbers are in favor of this being the case).
Accepting government censorship in the EU is, in principle, no different from censorship in China. The only difference is the flavor.
I also live in the USA. I think the differences between our censorship and the EU's are mostly of degree, but I wouldn't disagree too strongly with you if you think otherwise.
>I'm sure the Chinese would say exactly the same thing that the EU does about their system; it "protects" individuals from what they don't need to know.
I'm sure they would. I'm also sure that Donald Trump would say that he's not a liar. That doesn't mean it's an argument we need to take seriously. You can make judgments for yourself - I believe that the EU leadership is more or less acting in good faith (and is likely to continue doing so), and the CCP is not. That's a meaningful difference.
You do see what you're saying right? Essentially, you're saying the government is responsible for the laws regarding censorship, not the businesses that operate there.
If censorship existed in the USA, Google would have still started under it, and simply operated with that constraint. This is no different than operating in China.
Google can't influence one way or another what censorship laws exist in China, currently. If they had a significant market share there, then they might be able to negotiate terms, since they would have some leverage.
Why would they have leverage? Oh no, Google is threatening to leave if we don't change our censorship policy, and if Google leaves - then what? Citizens get upset? I don't think that's exactly a strong motivator to the CCP. That's kind of the problem with dictatorships; you don't have to win elections.
>If censorship existed in the USA, Google would have still started under it, and simply operated with that constraint.
"If the US were just like China, we'd be in no position to criticize them" - sure, but it isn't. The USA and the PRC are not the same, and I don't think it's a relevant hypothetical.
Laws passed by duly elected representatives (whether in the US, EU, or elsewhere) may not be perfect, but they certainly have more legitimacy than "laws" promulgated by an authoritarian regime that sends political and religious dissidents to "reeducation" camps.
Why single out China though? If Google had to stop doing business in any country that forces it to censor stuff, they would not be allowed anywhere, I think even the US forces them to filter out illegal gambling. Where does it stop?
It boils down to what the American culture, or I guess the employees at Google's culture, are willing to censor.
China wants to censor its own human rights violations, I think there morally bad. Certain EU Nations want to prevent fat right nationalist radicalization via censorship. I think that's clumsy, but good.
So hence "why single out China." It stops whenever the employees put up a fight. Isn't that the point of integrating a company-wide value system? You want to mimic an individual value system, in that you are clear on why you made certain decisions, because you can point to your value system?
> Certain EU Nations want to prevent fat right nationalist radicalization via censorship. I think that's clumsy, but good.
But, who will be deciding what is considered as ultra-nationalist? Some liberal government that might be overly corrupt and is about to lose the election could just label their political opponents as modern day Nazis and have them be censored on Google search. For example Germany treats the AfD as a far-right party, but in other countries they would be centrist at best. There is no middle ground, because morals wary from individual, we might try a consensus, but that would destroy individual rights. To me it seems that it's best to have a censor-free search engine, perhaps only censor stuff that is related to illegal activities or terrorism, but make everything else be publicly available.
>But, who will be deciding what is considered as ultra-nationalist?
Presumably legislatures, that are elected? I'm not sure how it works over there.
>Some liberal government that might be overly corrupt and is about to lose the election could just label their political opponents as modern day Nazis and have them be censored on Google search.
Well, that's happening in America right now, the executive branch is labeling his opponent political party as Communists, don't respect rule of law, saying they want Open Borders or to "Take the Guns Away!" despite the fact that this is factually incorrect. In the USA, we have several branches of government that helps balance when this happens - for example, our judicial branch recently restored the press pass of a journalist removed for being a thorn in the executive's side. I imagine a balance is similarly struck in these European nations? They are all democracies, right?
It seems very much an age of free flow information and rule of the people. Despite the warning-flag-waving of the alt-right in the USA that labeling people nazis will somehow cause totalitarian liberal rule, it really seems like the opposite is happening - far-right nationalism seems to be on the attack for totalitarianism, with the democratic systems keeping it at bay.
I am very interested in discussing this further, however, because I don't believe it's a simple, black and white issue, and I am curious if there's ways to prevent bad things like far-right nationalism without restricting speech (which, the argument goes, could backfire).
How about I said to you that all men are descendants of Genghis Khan? Well, 1 in 200 are, and Eric Swalwell is 1 of the 198 Democrat representatives (though that percentage gets much lower if we lump in total Democrats in elected office...) http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2010/08/1-in-200-men-...
My claim that the president's factually incorrect statements, are factually incorrect, remain unchallenged in any rhetorically effective way, though I invite you to try again if you please.
Picking some minority view and ascribing it to all of your political opponents seems to be a very popular tactic nowadays, on all sides of the political spectrum. All it does is raise the level of hateful rhetoric, and does nothing to actually help people discuss the actual issues. Because of flaws in the way our minds work, it continues to work, and people continue to use it.
> For example Germany treats the AfD as a far-right party, but in other countries they would be centrist at best.
That is an "example" of an "overly corrupt" government that labels them far-right, because they would otherwise have lost an election to them? What speech of the AfD got censored in any shape or form?
Yes, in other countries what is considered far-right in Germany is considered centrist. Those countries also consider what we consider centrist as leftists. So? They're a German political party, they will get judged by Germans, on the grounds of German history, thankyouverymuch.
> perhaps only censor stuff that is related to illegal activities or terrorism
So basically, back to square one, since you haven't really solved the problem of who defines that and how (which we do actually over centuries, it's not a problem to not have it solved once and for all perfectly, right now -- if anything the problem here is the misunderstanding that this could be possible), achieving nothing other than claiming that the AfD isn't far-right.
> Certain EU Nations want to prevent fat right nationalist radicalization via censorship
But why don’t they apply the same censorship to the far left? That’s where I have my problem with it, it isn’t to protect the people from the far right, it’s to control public discourse in a way that reinforces their leftist ideology. The Communist Party isn’t censored in Europe, but right-wing groups are. You can celebrate Stalin, but would be arrested for celebrating Hilter. How is that any different than Chinese censorship? Maybe degree, but definitely not intent.
Nazism is wrong, though. So is a good majority of what far right nationalists preach.
It's almost, but not quite, false equivalence. You could make a moral relativism argument, but at the end of the day the global zeitgeist is moving towards the "good" that some people associate with liberal values, and always has been.
From an anthropological standpoint, I'm with you - the ideologies are indistinguishable. From a moral standpoint, I disagree strongly - one is generally Bad, the other is generally Good.
Communism is not Good either I'd say. Better argument would be "Europeans at least liked Commies when they have taken over, Nazis just invaded everyone".
The best would be to just admit that Europe is wrong in censoring stupid far right (Nazis), while mostly ignoring stupid far left (Commies).
But some people liked the pseudo-communist regimes, while almost nobody liked Nazi occupation (which is still in fresh memory). So the opposition to banning Commies is real and noticeable. So not so simple.
Tl;dr: Simplified "moral standpoint" holds no water in these discussions.
Maybe google should commit to a policy of "protected free speech" on a wide range of political topics that it will never censor in any country (roughly in line with the first amendment).
So you do support censorship, just not on political topics you agree with. Problem is, what's politically acceptable is highly subjective and varies greatly from country to country.
I read the parent differently - just don't censor political speech. Regardless of whether we agree with it.
And that sounds reasonable. I hate FUD-spreading around e.g. immigration, but I don't support any censorship around it. Just debunk the FUD, hiding it won't solve anything, and might hurt a lot when some people get "redpilled" by discovering censored opinions.
>Does it come to America? What about searches that seem criminal?
My guess is that it is already here, just for things we deem acceptable. The problem with censorship is that everyone has something they think acceptable to censor, so the infrastructure to censor will be developed with mass approval.
I wonder if these things go in both directions though. Google becomes beholden to the Chinese government on threat of being kicked out of the country. Maybe in a few years Google is making a bunch of money in China, and then the govt asks them to censor search results in the western world too.
Also, as China requires more surveillance infrastructure to be built for Chinese google, that can bleed over to western google. Let's say Google starts to enhance China's social credit score system with users search behavior. It's easier for western governments to point to these capabilities on China's Google and request for them to be instantiated in their own countries.
But Facebook can influence elections. Something isn't adding up to 100% here.
More so, I'm not worried about Google influencing China, I'm worried about China putting pressure on Google to spy on the world or lose potential profits.
Come to think of it, that's exactly what it could do by refusing to do business with them. If China is left out in the cold for long enough they may move a little.
That said, they need to be rewarded for moving or a boycott wouldn't help anything.
I have to agree with this. Some search is better than no search. Not everything can be censored and people WILL find information they are not supposed to find, just with more digging than in the rest of the world. Saying that Google should not provide any search product in China is shortsighted and purely ideological.
> Not sure if this will benefit people over there though to ban google completely.
It won't really help them, and focusing on the Chinese market misses the most insidious problem: a censored Google search engine in the PRC gives the Chinese Communist Party leverage over Google outside of the PRC. Just look at what happened with the airlines: the PRC forced them to change their foreign websites to reflect a PRC political positions by threatening their access to their market.
Think of what they could do to "uncensored" American Google with similar leverage:
* Chinese human rights websites are deranked from relevant searches down to the second or third page. This is a subtle and deniable type of censorship.
* Ditto with critical coverage of Tibet or Xinjiang.
* Taiwan is shown on Google maps and infoboxes as part of the PRC.
* Google gives Xinhua, the PRC's English-language propaganda outlet [1], prominence on Google news.
You assume they don't already have leverage in Google. I would be more surprised if the Chinese haven't already found ways to leverage Google for external influence (akin to Russia, Iran, etc. via Facebook).
But I agree with the core point - the 'legal' influence would bother me just as much.
Totally agree with you. I guess that's the real reason that many Chinese googler don't want to sign.
I'm totally against censorship. But I also don't agree the those who see themselves stand on the moral high ground while don't understand the complexity of the issue. Also a lot of people don't differentiate facts and opinions. They blame those who don't agree them are influenced by China government.
Google is technically superior to baidu in many areas, specially for a developers. It gives better answers in many subjects, not just the censored ones. Besides who are we to decide for the Chinese what is best for them? Sounds a bit condescending and paternalistic. Here here, baidu is enough for you to play with, don't bother with google.
This argument is backwards - Google isn't the one preventing Chinese people from using Google! Nobody has said that China isn't allowed to have Google except the CCP.
Google has already provided China with a product: uncensored search. If the Chinese (for the sake of argument, naively assuming that the CCP acts on behalf of its citizens) don't think that's what's best for China, fine. They don't have to use it.
The Chinese appear to think, collectively, that authoritarianism is better than democracy. They could revolt. The Chinese military is under funded with failing equipment, though they are trying to improve in areas. The sheer size of their military makes it difficult to have common weapons and gear available. 100 million citizens throwing themselves against that machine, would wear it down quickly. They don't do this.
The Chinese had a century or more of bloody civil war recently, within historical terms. They don't like regime change.
They historically were fine under the emperor, who was authoritarian. They are use to autocratic, central government. Unless things get extremely bad, I don't see them thinking that democracy is better than their current stability. If Xi Jinping does a decent job of getting rid of corruption and improving the air quality, I doubt you'll see a revolt even with a depression in China.
Edit: for those downvoting, how about a dialog? Democracy is not a native idea for the Chinese. Their major philosophical systems support a rigid hierarchy, which is not compatible with the democratic norm of anyone can attempt to run for office. They've lost millions to wars before Mao calmed everyone down. Even with Mao's major famine, there wasn't a revolt. 45 million died, and no uprising. If 100k died at the hands of the US government, there would be blood in the streets. Probably true with 1k. The Chinese do not care about authoritarianism.
The military equipment is irrelevant; they are still far more coordinated than the civilians are permitted to be. Suppressing collective action is one of the central goals of authoritarian censorship.
Democracy is no more a native idea for western culture; 250 years ago every state was a monarchy, and political ideologies based in hierarchy still regularly win elections.
I think your notion here is naive. Assuming a majority of people in China is fine with the way the government runs, does not negate the fact that many people are not. In a country of a billion people, we are speaking of millions of people. For this, as a first step, you just need to look at minorities like Uighurs, Tibetians, Mongolians. It does not end there.
Also, you cannot use the word "choice" when no options were ever given. A large chunk of people can be unhappy with how the government operates while still not marching the streets. The world is not binary. People living in China also know that the government went to extreme lengths when it came to ending protests in the past: shooting at their own citizens.
The joy of market processes is that those who like Pepsi more and those who like Coke more can both be satisfied at the same time, unlike the Republican voters of San Francisco or the Democrats of Utah.
It's only condescending in a nationalist sense. I look at my own government and how well it chooses what is best for me, and I have to ask, who is the Chinese government to decide what is best for the Chinese people?
Unless you're an anarchist, that's exactly what the government's job is: decide what's best for people. That's why you have prescription only drugs, anti-vice laws, securities. All these things exist because the government think the people are too dumb to decide things by themselves. Not saying I agree with it, just saying you would need to argue for anarchism if you were to argue "who is the X government to decide what is best for the X people?".
I think the government's job is to provide the goods and services that the free market can't effectively provide or wouldn't provide to most citizens. Roads, military defense, healthcare, etc. I'm no anarchist but I very much disagree the government should be deciding what is best for people. Areas where it tries to are a mistake.
> that's exactly what the government's job is: decide what's best for people.
Wrong. The government’s Just is to protect life and liberty and ensure a legal framework for the enforcement of contracts. It’s just is most certainly not deciding what is best for people. Protect my rights and otherwise stay out of the way.
Why could we not protect ourselves? Many ancaps or ancoms would argue that would be possible. The government assumes they know better than you do on how to enforce contracts or protect yourself and impose a monopoly on force by force to make sure you can't build alternatives. So yeah, it is based on the premise that they know better than you do on certain areas of life. People just disagree how wide these areas should be. I may be mistaken though so feel free to prove me wrong.
Also, Baidu is completely in the pocket of the Chinese government. They are happy to censor anything and everything they're asked. Google is not beholden in this way and will censor the minimum amount possible.
Those are not the only two options. What if Google were to put some of its considerable technical resources toward undermining and subverting the Great Firewall of China? That would be in keeping with their mission statement, and might deliver a huge payoff in the long run.
Quick summary (if you don't know the name "Dragonfly", like I didn't):
> We are Google employees and we join Amnesty International in calling on Google to cancel project Dragonfly, Google’s effort to create a censored search engine for the Chinese market that enables state surveillance.
> Our opposition to Dragonfly is not about China: we object to technologies that aid the powerful in oppressing the vulnerable, wherever they may be.
> we object to technologies that aid the powerful in oppressing the vulnerable, wherever they may be.
And where's the actual research showing that Google in China would do such a thing? By all calculations, it would bring more knowledge and access to Chinese citizen that they already have.
This make it sound like Google is the reason why the citizen don't have access to information.
No? You're projecting your western values. They're not condoning anything, they are following local laws. And while Search will be crippled, they are still bringing dozens of other great and useful service to Chinese citizens. Almost any actual Chinese citizen I've spoken to would absolutely love to have Google back. Instead, Westerns are just outraged in their place and are trying to virtue signal.
Given how trash of a search engine Baidu is, Google would likely achieve market share dominance in China within a couple years - should they move forward with Dragonfly. Complying with demands of the Chinese gov't is the only way they can penetrate the Chinese market.
Search engine advertising constitutes close to 85% of Google's revenue. And unlike Project Maven, which was ended due to internal resistance from employees, doing business with the second largest economy in the world isn't an expendable venture.
Curious to see how they move forward. My guess is they will: human outrage never really lasts long, especially when their livelihoods are far from in jeopardy.
China has a vested interest in spreading it's influence globally, the same way the United States has (and is receding from a bit under the current administration). It would be far more valuable to China to get a global company like Google propagating their censorship requirements than continuing to prop up their own state-run option. If Google caves, other countries might ask for the same demands as well, which supports the notion that China's way of doing things is the 'right' way. In short, having global companies doing China's bidding expands China's influence.
Reading a bit about the Belt and Road Initiative is probably a good primer on some of China's global interests right now.
Google is dominant nearly worldwide. If China is able to get Google to cave and build the censorship machine then what barrier is there to turning the feature ‘on’ for other countries that ask for it? There are plenty of oppressive regimes interested in a censored Google but they don’t have the pull to get Google to build it right now. Once it’s built though why wouldn’t Google’s response just be shrugs “sure why not?”
I think it is indeed a slippery slope and legitimizes China’s plan to influence the internet for the worse.
Further, once Google depends on its China operations for revenue, what's to stop the Chinese state from leaning on them further? With enough leverage, they won't scruple at affecting what Google does in the west as well.
Any company that adds a customer that becomes the source of ~20% of the company's revenue implicitly gives the customer power over the company, the bigger share of revenue the more power. Google would be insane to give this much power over itself to China, ignoring that developing this technology sets the precedent for oppressive regimes to demand flipping on the "more speech suppression" switch.
You are spot on, and there already is a track record of this with telecom.
Remember all of the handwringing about BBM messages being difficult to intercept? Then the crying suddenly went away, and a few months later you heard about police breaking up organizers of riots.
> Complying with demands of the Chinese gov't is the only way they can penetrate the Chinese market.
You completely missed the point and failed to address any of the serious ethical problems they raised in the letter. We would be living in a dark dystopia if everyone's biggest priority was penetrating markets.
Tech workers are in high demand and have great salaries. Their livelihoods are not in jeapordy; they have their pick of where to work.
> Given how trash of a search engine Baidu is, Google would likely achieve market share dominance in China within a couple years
You can't be serious. Don't ever underestimate brand inertia, especially in a "super-patriotic" country like China. If Google had any chance at all, and assuming the Chinese government or Baidu's friends in the government wouldn't interfere with the "free market" in China to hurt Google at every turn, it would still take at least 5-7 years for Google to even get close to Baidu's market share.
Also this assumes this wouldn't catch a fire under Baidu's ass to start innovating and investing more into its search software and server farms.
I still believe it would be all but impossible for Google to beat Baidu in China. I just don't ever see it happening. If it was so easy, why hasn't even happened in Russia, where Google actually had significantly larger market share, had to deal with fewer political games than in China, and its Chrome browser I think was actually the most popular there until recently (or it may still be the most popular there).
If Google can't beat Yandex, it absolutely can't beat Baidu, no matter how much it "complies" with the Chinese governments' rules.
> Don't ever underestimate brand inertia, especially in a "super-patriotic" country like China.
OTOH Chinese consumers are recently obsessed with western products actually. Not with iPhones (you can buy Xiaomi smartphone, laptop, and Bluetooth headset for the price of iPhone), but with clothes, food, and many other goods.
> If Google can't beat Yandex, it absolutely can't beat Baidu
Baidu currently has no real competitors so they can afford to be a bit lazy. If Google enters the Chinese search engine market then Baidu won't just surrender, they'll improve their product to compete. They certainly have the capital and resources to do so if they make it a priority.
Baidu has been worse than Google at Chinese language search for its entire existence and only got traction because it was the best way to get porn and Google’s performance was highly degraded by package dropping. Google has no competitors in search. It’s so much better that the other search engines are just comical.
Businesses are not in the business of simply being profitable, they are usually in the business of increasing revenue and profits beyond the current state.
Is there even a market for Google? The median income in China is like $12k, and most Chinese net worth is tied up in property that's widely considered to be in a massive bubble. Not sure it would be profitable at all for Google. I work in the industry and we don't even waste our time in China, Russia, etc, since the advertising dollars are worthless.
Nothing about my question suggests Google wouldn't be able to continue to grow by focusing on the 80% of the world that isn't China.
China may be the lowest-hanging fruit of the search and ad market, but surely you're not suggesting Google would shy away from a challenge and only go for the easy win? That doesn't sounds like the Google we all know.
If I was a business I would avoid low hanging fruits in favor or more risky ventures that are perhaps less likely to succeed or yield profit. Businesses are in the business of business, not in the business of tacking hard problems just to spite the rest of the world. I think the image of Google being this almighty good intentioned soul is over blown because at the end of the day they answer to share holders, they profit of advertisement and the rest of it is ice cream that goes on their advertisement cake. I love google for the services they provide me but I also am not naive that a business is going got be a business first and a good hearted soul last.
I'd say it sounds exactly like the google we know.
People want a messenger app? Let's make one! Oh, it takes time and energy. Let's shut it down. Oh wait, people want a messenger app. Let's make one. Oh, it takes [........]
This is a universal argument for doing anything that makes a profit in the short term. Usually, apologists for corporate immorality bring up fiduciary duty, as if it explains and justifies things. But the argument falls apart if you poke at it even a little, because it completely omits the other side of the argument.
Why doesn't Google start a restaurant chain, or start making PCs, or selling servers, or licensing software defined networking stacks to other companies, or monetize many of their other assets? Surely they must if they're supposed to make as much money for their investors as possible?
Why don't they sell search data on individuals to repressive regimes, so people can be hunted down, imprisoned, tortured and executed? Would make some decent coin for investors, I expect, lots of repressive governments would probably pay a pretty penny for it.
How about selling searches emanating from US government IPs to the Kremlin, selling tracking data linked to Google accounts, or otherwise monetizing espionage interests?
The problem with doing these things is that it affects the value of the Google brand, both internally to employees and externally to customers. If you can't hire the best employees or encourage customers to trust your software and services, then long or even short term decline is pretty much assured.
And how about swapping cause and effect? You're positing the tail should wag the dog - that the stock market should control what the company does. How about the stock market chooses to invest in companies that are doing things that it believes will make money? From this perspective, the company is free to do whatever, and investors are free to sell the stock if they don't agree. In truth, there's a mutual dependence here - the company can't just fraudulently give away investors' cash, but likewise, if investors knew what was best for companies, we wouldn't need CEOs or leadership of any kind - we'd just advertise choices to the investors / market and go with whatever pushes up the stock most.
I agree, but there is an extent to which these companies by law are forced to operate against the positive value of their brand [0]; see Dodge vs. Ford Motor Co. I realize it's not the same, just that there's some amount of precedent.
And there's been pushback from subsequent cases, from that very article:
The general legal position today is that the business judgment that directors may exercise is expansive. Management decisions will not be challenged where one can point to any rational link to benefiting the corporation as a whole.
AMZNs stock price isn't driven by current earnings, but it isnt driven by investor magnanimity either. It's all about the promise of future earnings. If revenues flatline or decline, you can expect their stock prices to fall in line with their peers.
Because coordination problems are really hard and that’s what governments and the WTO are for. Also, I’d be very surprised if that kind of coordination didn’t bring national competition authorities down like a hammer on all participants.
Are there? You can’t open a business in China without it being majority Chinese owned. There are plenty of companies doing their manufacturing in China, but every example I know of the wforeigb company contracts the Chinese company to do the manufacturing. Often they’re even further removed, such as Apple who works with a Taiwanese company who just happens to have their manufacturing in China.
Any good China does for its people or for other nations? That will just serve to legitimize their totalitarian government and encourage imitations abroad. Ergo it's bad.
In general it's better to state your fundamental premises at the beginning of the argument rather than reveal them midway through
I guess thry could create a new China-venture Google owned company and hire lots of locals in cooperation with other development teams, be they in MTV or other campuses worldwide.
I find the Google/Chinese search engine troubling, but I do think people are playing this up to be a lot more than it should be. I think one fact is that Google is in an area and recruits people that are hyper liberal individuals. For example: not wanting to work with the U.S. military on projects, having AI use gender neutral writing, random PC things, little diversity in political thought etc. I don't think Google has so much changed as their employees have changed.
Look, I am a huge Google critic, you can view my past posts, but a lot of what employees are complaining about seems pretty laughable, unattainable and shows a lack of maturity. In my estimation, Google's power struggle between making money and its employees creeping political stances is and has been unsustainable. I think censoring results in China is one thing, but there are so many other cultural problems at Google that honestly just don't belong in a corporate environment. Google has long been seen as a playhouse, and has let employees be too dramatic and vocal about politics as well. In a normal company, it is -not- normal to have a sit down after an election to baby sit staff members, and offer grief counseling.
So while, yes Google certainly has some problems with "values," I think there are two problems, not just one. It's not so much that leadership has moved to drive profits no matter the cost (Google has long done that!) it's that while that is still happening there has been a shift in the company's politics. Again, I'm not talking about the Chinese censorship itself, I want Google/Microsoft/Facebook etc to not empower Xi. But it's all the other stuff going on that just seem so counter productive, not only to culture but to profits.
Declining to work with paid murderers is not a partisan position.
Opposing sexism is not a partisan position.
Attempting to reframe these sorts of things as “lefty silliness” and paint them with the same brush as being sad and disappointed that a rapist won the election is simply subterfuge.
> Declining to work with paid murderers is not a partisan position.
Calling military paid murderers is definitely a partisan thing. What else do you propose? Someone has to do the dirty work to keep the citizens safe.
> Opposing sexism is not a partisan position.
Are you talking about harassment cases. Have you been to Google or talked about it to a Googler? It generally is swift and works without any proof. What they are asking is anonymous complaint system and things like that, which can definitely have two thoughts.
What about Google giving huge advantage to women in hiring. Just one verified anecdote, in kickstart, which google uses to hire in Asia Pacific, men do get a call for interview within rank 50, many time lesser than that. And they have definitely called women if they got rank 1000, likely even more.
> Calling military paid murderers is definitely a partisan thing. What else do you propose? Someone has to do the dirty work to keep the citizens safe.
How exactly did US operations in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Nicaragua etc. keep you 'safe'?
As someone that worked to get someone asylum from Afghanistan, there are many many many citizens in Afghanistan that long to have the US back with a significant presence. It's not easy sleeping when a car bomb just went off outside your house and it was targeted at you for not being a religious hardliner.. The US isn't always about keeping its own citizens safe, it often steps in when there is genocide, etc.
> there are many many many citizens in Afghanistan that long to have the US back with a significant presence
Which would be true of any military force that invaded, slaughtered hundreds of thousands and then pulled out leaving a power vacuum.
The US didn't go into Afghanistan to save people from car bombs.
If the US has somehow done you a favour as a result of its wars of aggression, it's a complete coincidence.
> It's not easy sleeping when a car bomb just went off outside your house and it was targeted at you for not being a religious hardliner..
Sounds like Iraq and the rise of ISIS doesn't it? Another US war of aggression that left hundreds of thousands dead along with a power vacuum filled by religious extremists.
The US went in because it facilitated terrorism and led to the direct death of 3000 Americans. The rise of religious extremism was well before the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan. Am I for US intervention as "world police," absolutely not. I don't agree with our presence in Iraq, but there is certainly a point where US presence is warranted and needed. Anything else is just a naive world view. I was like that when I was in my early 20s, then I grew up and realized how complex the world really is.
None of this address the original point I was making, in that US wars in the last few decades have not made Americans safer. Or anyone else for that matter.
The fact that people might now be clamouring to have them back after they left a power vaccuum to act as blocker on warlords and religious zealots fighting for control doesn't change that fact.
> nything else is just a naive world view. I was like that when I was in my early 20s, then I grew up and realized how complex the world really is.
Implying that I'm immature because I disagree with you doesn't make you look as good as you think.
> None of this address the original point I was making, in that US wars in the last few decades have not made Americans safer. Or anyone else for that matter.
Can you just recite the number of American civilians killed due to terrorist attacks after 9/11 and compare it with how many terrorists have seriously threatened and even died to kill Americans. If someone is ready to die to kill less than one person on average, it needs to be taken seriously.
While, yes there are things which every military mishandles from time to time, certainly US, you are calling out all activities, for which I hate to say it but you are too naive.
> Declining to work with paid murderers is not a partisan position.
I think your statement speaks for itself. I suppose everyone in the military should just be thrown in jail, since they are just murderers. There is no "good" use for military. I'm sure you also blame the US for all of the world's problems. The world would live in tranquility were it not for the evil US military.
why not? not all companies should be money over everything. And google is still doing fine and turning on huge profits based on the work of these "liberal babies".
Western Europe, NZ, Australia, Canada. The US has always been an outlier amongst the rich nations: more religious, more violent, etc. None of the attitudes referred to by the parent would be 'hyper-' anything in most of these nations.
There is clear shift away from extreme social liberalism, and denying that just convinces people that shift is necessary. Even when it might have disastrous consequences for the economy ...
If you're defining extreme by the shifting Overton window of European politics then suddenly fascism is not going to be extreme and mild post-war social democracy looks like Stalinist communism.
> I don't think Google has so much changed as their employees have changed.
This is exactly it. A lot of people who genuinely loved technology, programming, were nerdy, etc long left the company.
Could just be an arrogant of becoming big, and selecting for physical attribute diversity.
I'm glad Google Employees are taking a stand rather than just leaving the company and having their replacements do bad things thinking it will be a one off.
> Google can kick them out and replace within a month.
Ah. A believer that software engineers are cogs and can just be “replaced” without training and learning of code bases.
Hiring software engineers, bringing them up to speed, and having them contribute to production features, is expensive. Also, you’ll never truly recoup the lost knowledge that goes.
Google has literally thousands of engineers. A significant percentage of those engineers leave every year as part of normal attrition. Google is certainly capable of dealing with the fallout these folks leaving without feeling a thing. While it's true there are some "one-in-a-million" type engineers that work at Google, I don't see any of the well-known ones on this list.
All that said, I commend the folks who signed this letter. If anything, the fact that most of the folks who signed are in relatively junior positions shows how Google has lost its way when it comes to it's morals. The more senior execs feel the pressure of serving Wall Street and have more to lose, while these more junior folks, while taking a risk know they can get hired anywhere else in a heartbeat. It's the kid standing up saying the emperor has no clothes.
Does a few engineers leaving hurt google? No. Does the massive PR storm that will never be erased from the Internet cause problems for them down the road? Absolutely.
The fact this is posted on HN and the regular gauntlet of tech sites is enough to have a major impact on their recruiting. I, like many of the people here, am a frequent target for Google recruiters and Dragonfly is more than enough for me to turn down an interview with them. Maybe they will have more luck with fresh college grads and interns who are less discerning.
At a size of Google, the company has to be mostly constructed out of "cogs", to be resilient. If Google couldn't handle losing ~40 (as of right now) employees, that would be something seriously strange for one of the most valuable companies on the planet.
I'm sure there are sets of 40 employees that would cripple Google, at least be extremely unfortunate if they left together. There are certainly important components with a bus factor of less than that.
The typical ramp up time for a new Google engineer is roughly 3-6 months. So it's more like replace them within 3mo at a generous estimate. Also a few of those were staff You can replace those in 2-3yrs maybe.
Does Google care about this cost? Hard to say from the outside. But for every signature on this you can bet there are many more inside being very vocal. One part of Google's culture is that it encouraged feedback from the engineers and the engineers take advantage of that freedom pretty frequently.
I listened to a longform interview with the head of their HR strategy which referenced the company consistently citing talent attraction and retention as the number one limitation on company growth.
They invest extremely heavily in minimizing attrition and widening their funnel for recruiting. That's why their offices are crazy, they do 3 meals a day for employees, they pay a ton of money for people right out of college and for interns, everyone gets free massages, etc. They take any effect that narrows that funnel or increases attrition very seriously, as they view the company as fundamentally being a stable of the best software engineers they can get competing with the best software engineers other people can get to put out better solutions to problems.
All of that is true, but it doesn't change the reality of how software engineers are perceived and treated in the vast majority of technology companies.
There are hundreds of thousands of developers around the world who dream every day about working at Google. If you think a few dozen engineers aren't replaceable by a company like Google, you are wrong.
I don't think you understand Google culture. Kicking them out would have far greater repercussions. It might also expose them to lawsuits. It also will likely affect what they'll have to pay for top talent: the idea that Google puts core values above profits (or at least that they prioritize them at all) is a major perk.
Google has little reason to kick them out. They can ignore them instead. Some will leave due to this. Others will stay. The effect of the action overall would be diluted.
Worst thing that can happen here from Google's perspective is for this to get a lot of media attention & a lot of signatures.
Firing all these engineers would be insanity, as the internal uproar over that would be much worse than that over Project Dragonfly. You might even see formalized organizing begin over it (look up what happened to Lanetix).
I don't have strong views either way on Project Dragonfly but I would absolutely be greatly pissed off if everyone opposing it were fired.
As someone who lived most of his life in a dictatorship, I really struggle to understand the logic of these employees. I was actually surprised Google stepped out of China a couple of years ago and felt like the decision was taken by a bunch of people who don't understand what it's like to live in a non-democratic country.
Do they think that everybody in China cares that their internet is censored or that they're being watched? I'm pretty sure if there was a poll conducted inside China to choose between censored Google vs no-Google almost everybody would choose censored Google.
It's not like a person who's opposing the Chinese government online is going to be using Google without a secure connection anyway. For the rest, you're providing a service that is significantly better than what they're currently being offered.
As a lifelong US citizen I have to say that, while I want the best for the Chinese people in every respect, I believe it is fairly obvious that any expansion of the Chinese government's power would be bad for the world (specifically w.r.t. human rights). Many people in this thread seem to be advocating for the abandonment of the West's moral aspirations based upon the idea that a censored Google being available in China is the best thing for Chinese citizens. To me, this perspective seems to be incorrect and and strangely myopic. If we accept the premise (and not everyone here will) that the moral aspirations of the west point toward a more human-centric and democratic global future than those of the Chinese government, then it follows that individuals concerned with the human condition must not support an expansion of Chinese government power in the name of short-term corporate profit. Essentially, anything that increases the efficiency of the Chinese government, or lessens the pain of government censorship, increases that government's power and its ability to enact its goals and is therefore a net negative both for Chinese citizens and for the world. Providing censorship-friendly versions of western technology to non-democratic countries may be in the short-term best interests of the subjugated populations of said countries (and other parties such as shareholders), but that strategy is undeniably in the long-term worst interests of the world and its peoples.
While i do understand where you are coming from, i think if google gave up it will set a precedence and many countries will demand their own censored version of google.
and it's one thing to accept censored Google as a Chinese consumer. what's the choice when all products are censored. whatever your values, you have no choice.
but it's another thing as a Google employee. I assume that working towards a censored product and passing on user data to the Chinese government is opposed to the values of a lot of Googlers. developers do have a choice.
>It's not like a person who's opposing the Chinese government online is going to be using Google without a secure connection anyway
How can you say something like that? What does "oppose" mean to you exactly? Being the leader of a 1 million-strong protest group? If so, then yeah, I would expect such people to be very careful about how they protest online.
But everyone else? Come on. Most people, even most dissidents, are not tech-savvy. There even was a recent story about NYT whistleblowers sending classified data to NYT via WhatsApp, without ever making the connection that their phone number used in WhatsApp could be linked to them.
The vast majority of people aren't infosec experts.
> The vast majority of people aren't infosec experts.
Although this is true my personal experience is that in non-democratic societies there is a huge overlap between people who are tech-savvy and dissenters, you just don't pump into an article about the Tiananmen Square massacre, you actively seek it and you understand the risk behind looking for something like this.
I'm not saying they're world-class experts but they'll at least know to use a VPN.
It's not just the censorship. Let's say Google opens up in China and then a month later China comes to them and says "we need the names of everyone who searched for the term 'Uyghur
concentration camp' and lives in such and such region." Google then has two choices: give over the names to the Chinese government or immediately pack up and leave China.
It's practically a given that China will eventually demand this of Google, which means that Google has presumably already evaluated this possibility and decided to go into China anyway.
Google could do it in a much more transparent way than others, for example by stating "Here is what we know about you, and this information may be given away to the government if you proceed with a search that they considered dangerous".
I think it would be better than the current situation, where Chinese people are left with a poor quality search engine, which won't find a good answer to the question, report them to the government, and do it in a very secretive way.
Yes it’s understand that the majority in China are completely fine with the ethnic cleansing of Uyghers. The rest of the world doesn’t need to take part in it.
1) International precedent: if China, why not acquiesce to more censorship in Turkey? Why not England?
2) optics of doing this after saying no to project maven for US intelligence
3) the very real risk that if google is successful it will create leverage for the Chinese government over google services. The Chinese government can say give me that gmail account of a Chinese dissident and former citizen or lose 20% of your market.
That said, having worked at Google there are many folks who were there prior to this shift (and unwittingly assisted by doing nothing previously). I don't blame them for trying to correct course and actually hope they can do so while remaining at a workplace they have spent so much time and effort developing and integrating within.
I’m not saying anyone should walk away from money. But the same people who want Google to walk away from the world’s largest country aren’t willing to walk away from thier stock but expect Google executives to make financial choices for moral reason.
I don't think walking away from all your stock vs. a company walking away from a deal that would account for a small fraction of its profits is a fair comparison.
A more fair comparison would be asking if employees would be willing to have their stock decrease in value 10% in exchange for their company being more moral. I expect many employees would take such an exchange, although not all.
But those employees who _did not_ care about morality also would have their stock decrease by 10% in value due to no fault of their own. Therefore, it's only ethically correct for those who want to take the stance to also accept a decrease in stock compared to those who didnt.
They can also quit now or yesterday. Why Feb 1? Also most of these folks will get another job that will provide a compensation that largely makes up for unvested stock they haven't got yet. They aren't really walking away from anything, and this seems like a virtue-signaling pat on one's own back.
It's one thing to work at a company with questionable business practices, even if they could hypothetically lead to a Black Mirror future.
It's another thing to work at a company which has decided to aid a government on the other side of the world that's forcibly relocating a million religious minorities to re-education camps.
It is far more effective for them to organize for change than for individuals to quit. Even if they reach the conclusion that quitting is the only option, if it's not organized, it will achieve nothing. The power an individual has is absolutely insignificant compared to the power of a company.
To be honest, Google might even prefer they quit. They could then just be sure to hire more amenable people in the future.
I’m not saying they should leave or stay. But, protestors in the 60s were willing to get kicked, beaten, arrested, etc for their moral beliefs. They were willing to make real sacrifices. On the other hand, Google employees had the “courage” to sign a letter.
What protesters were willing to do in the 60s or in 2018 is orthogonal to ensuring that Google maintains a workforce of "moral" people.
Suggestions that those who think that Google is going down a dark path should leave will just result in moral evaporative cooling, which leaves everybody off worse.
That sounds like the same excuse that companies and the government used in the 80s when people were trying to get the government to impose sanctions on South Africa over apartheid.
Signing a piece of paper knowing that it is of no personal risk to you is virtue signaling.
Why should that get a company to change? What will be the consequences if they go ahead with thier plan? A more harshly written letter?
Google entering China is morally equivalent to South African apartheid? Okay, I think we have fundamentally different views on what kind of "stand" this warrants.
The clear implication is that these people will quit the company if Google goes forward with Dragonfly.
No, I’m saying that companies used the same excuses and reasoning for doing business with oppressive regimes - that you can make a bigger difference by staying in than leaving.
Collective action by employees can be more effective than a boycott. These Google employees clearly believe there is a chance they can change Google's actions by writing this open letter. Employee activism has changed Google's behavior before, so there is reason to think this strategy might work.
I agree. Sometimes saying people should avoid working for a company, which does some things they don't like and some things they do like, sounds like telling people to leave the US if they don't like the current state of affairs. It may be a valid choice for some people, but it's not the only (or even the most effective) way to work against the company doing the things they don't like.
> And if the employees placed thier [sic] values over profits, why are they still there?
There is probably more than one kind of profit. I think that if you've got a mortgage on a SV condo or house, and made plans for your financial life based on your income without knowing what the company you work for was or would be up to, you may be in a pretty good position to say that it's okay for you to accept a salary as you protest the action or actions of the company. Not to mention, strikes or other means of civil (commercial) disobedience might have more of an impact than simply leaving. By placing the onus on Google to fire you, you have PR and legal leverage (wrongful termination, if your moves are careful (IANAL)) to change the situation, whereas if you leave, you just go quietly into that good night, and the situation is guaranteed to continue. Complicity isn't always a black and white matter.
> I wonder if they are going to refuse their stock based compensation?
Stock-based compensation, I imagine, is on a vesting schedule. The same discussion as above applies, except that some of that compensation represents value that may be notionally "clean," having been earned outside the scope of the bad acts, either temporally or organizationally. It also represents earned compensation. Finally, its refusal would only serve to enrich Google, the ostensible bad actor in this instance.
However, what sickens me most about the OP's drive-by rhetoric is its reflexive turn toward reactionary complacency. It seems to say that those without sin only are allowed to cast the first stone, but really universalizes something like original sin to justify complete complacency. Further, it ignores the power imbalance between employer and employee, and minimizes the bravery of those who are speaking and acting out against injustice. It's despicable.
Have you notice that when it comes to being “brave” and speaking out against moral wrongdoing in Silicon Valley, it’s always the highly compensated white collar workers? You never see factory workers at Amazon for instance protesting about Amazon’s government contracts.
I bet you anything if people at Google who are protesting were really afraid of losing thier jobs, not as many would be protesting.
Amazon factory workers protest over their working conditions. Those who have more secure employment have the ability to protest over more abstract causes. There is nothing new here; many political reformers and revolutionaries have been from middle or upper classes, who possess the financial security and education to opine about high-minded causes. This is Maslow's hierarchy at work here.
Someone may thing that the "Long March through the Institutions" is actually a viable strategy. There's enough warm bodies lining up at the recruiters that anyone leaving the company won't affect it in the least, but an insider may have a shot at improvement.
Presumably because Dragonfly hasn't launched yet. They are trying to prevent Google from making the same mistake that Apple and so many others have before it makes that mistake.
It really pains me how Google has changed. When I was younger I always wanted to work there. Now that I've graduated college, I would probably never want to work there.
It seems to be the nature of companies getting bigger and older. When I was 10 I wanted to work for Microsoft when I grew up - this was 1991, when Microsoft products were the clear leaders in most PC software markets but they had yet to seem like the evil monopolist they would become. By the time I was in college, I was running Linux on my laptop just so that I didn't support the evil empire. By 27 I was working for Google, which was the hip non-evil place to be at the time.
Go get involved in crypto and find some projects that are actually building stuff instead of pumping the price. That's the historical analogy - IMHO we're right about at 2002 in the cycle, after the new technology bubble bursts but before anyone knows who the winners will be, or if they even exist. If you're successful people will hate you anyway because that's the nature of success, but at least you can get a decade or two of feeling like your work means something in before that.
I think it has to do with size/status too, I couldn't imagine ever wanting to spend my life making a couple of the richest people in the world a tiny bit more marginally wealthy. Bezos, Zuckerberg, Page and Brin all still want more and work smart young people like dogs to get it. Not for me.
I agree. However, for every person who doesn't want to work there, five others are willing to join the company, especially those who live overseas and are willing to work for pennies.
As long as homes in the bay area are regularly going for $2m and Google is one of the extremely few companies that has an attainable $400k+ TC... I don't see a shortage of people applying in the bay area either.
The Dragonfly issue would be a line in the sand for me, but they haven't crossed it yet. (Though even starting work on it is more than I'd expect from the old Google.)
Really the Chinese market seems to be a greed trap. Companies drool over themselves at the prospect of the second largest economy, compromise themselves and harm existing sales only to find that China isn't a greenfield market like they arrogantly expected and if there wasn't already a local competitor there will be soon.
At this point I don't believe this project could be successful. Even if it's not canceled the Chinese government is never gonna let a foreign company get the market share against the local champions : even more as this company has internal disent about the project. Also the links with the US government won't help.
agree. i don't quite see what enduring, long-term competitive edge Google could actually have in China.
is it the huge quantity of computing resources behind their search engine? (wouldn't Baidu or other Chinese companies be able to easily outbuild Google?)
is it the incredible, mysterious superiority of the super-duper secret Page Rank algorithm? ( jk )
is it the sophisticated and complex home page design and superior google doodles?
i mean what is it exactly?
google won't be able to reach the monopoly level of market share it enjoys in the US search market so it would actually have to compete on a month to month basis for its very life. this means it will hire a lot of very hard workers in China. and that means google's secret sauce (if it even exists) will make its way out and into the competitive landscape before Google can get close to being a monopoly. it just seems like a losing game.
But then there's Outline, from Alphabet's Jigsaw.[0] It utterly simplifies the creation of private VPN servers on Digital Ocean droplets.[1] They use Shadowsocks obfuscation. It's apparently effective against China's Great Firewall, and seems popular among Chinese dissidents. So the main intended application is pretty obvious, no?
So are they playing both sides? Or trying to con the Chinese government? Or just a large and loosely coordinated organizarion?
Even though Google's search engine will censor some content in China, it will still be miles better than Baidu. People who use Google will find highly relevant results quickly when searching about health, academic research, and a million of other things. They won't have to worry about finding thinly disguised promotions of illegal hospitals (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Wei_Zexi) on the first page of Google. They don't have to worry about combing through pages of search results for something that should've been found in seconds. They don't have to play the game of mouse and cat just to get a usable VPN to use Google outside of the GFW.
So, the logic of this protest is that Chinese people do not deserve even incremental improvement, a huge improvement by the way, in their lives?
As a Chinese living abroad, I censor my internet voluntarily via custom ublock cosmetic filters that kick in automatically upon match of certain regex patterns. I call it my "outer great firewall". Very effective protection against hate speech
While I agree with their stand on this issue, there is a big level of hypocrisy in these statements since Google is well known for suppressing search results and banning people on YouTube etc. based on political ideology. So I'd like to see them stand up against that as well.
PragerU is a right-wing channel that Youtube is constantly suppressing by removing videos or demonetizing them. The content is about on-par with what you might hear on a politically slanted news show. It doesn't make sense that Youtube would expend trust capital to harass such an uninteresting channel.
Google has to comply with the laws of the countries they operate in. And in fact Google has been nothing but transparent in the requests they got.
And yes, that’s why they pulled out of China in the first place, because you can’t operate against the law.
I haven’t seen other software or hardware companies pulling out of China. Microsoft and Apple are certainly happy to do business there and nobody condemned them for it.
Microsoft for example was accused of censoring Chinese search results in Bing globally.
Mind you, that other companies are as bad or worse is not the argument I’m making. What I am saying is that I hope you apply the same standards to all the companies you’re interacting with.
Good for them. Any company claiming to have moral backbone should not cater to the demands of the Chinese government which has shown time and again that it is a tyrannical regime.
I have a counter question - what about Google's support to the US Government? Have people forgotten the PRISM project? The US Government has backdoors at almost every big tech company.
People have forgotten. Hey, as long as our searches are not censored!!
In all seriousness, I find this current dragonfly outcry ridiculous when you consider the NSA dragnet that’s currently monitoring most if not all US web traffic.
What am I missing? The cost of switching to an alternative search engine like Bing or Duck is next to zero. (Actually, I dropped Google for Duck just 2 months ago.)
Brand is the most valuable asset Google has. Is the Chinese search market - and other evil projects - really worth the damage to Google's public image?
It's a billion users potentially, and Google only has a few billion users to begin with. Which is to say, yes, corporate greed suggests the opportunity to grow by 20-30% is absolutely worth sacrificing petty things like conscience and morals.
Business don't decide that kind of things, consumers do.
If there were clear intention from the majority of Western people to stop using every Google product the same second Google launch the censored search service in China, then Google would never do it.
Western people don't really care much? Well, they should blame themselves then, not Google.
> Business don't decide that kind of things, consumers do.
This is a cop-out. Businesses have a responsibility for the decisions they make, and "it's profitable" should only be one factor.
> If there were clear intention from the majority of Western people to stop using every Google product the same second Google launch the censored search service in China, then Google would never do it.
I think you underestimate how much Google has become not just the default choice, but the only choice for a lot of people, who have never heard of alternatives and who use Google because it's what their browser defaults to (we even call the very act of running a search on the internet "Googling it"), and might not know how to switch, much less reasons why they should.
I find the "market forces will take care of it, and if they don't then people don't care" argument more than a little disingenuous, because it ignores the huge number of variables that account for why people choose product A over product Y that have nothing to do with the quality of the product or the company that makes it.
I respect the motivation of the people behind this but I disagree with the logic here. It seems to be a zero or none type of logic. Are Chinese better off with not having google search engine as a choice, even if censored and having only local options, or are they better off having at least some choice, even if that choice is censored? I think it's the second, not the first.
(Spoken as if to a Google employee) — Someone will build them a search engine. In fact several someones have already. Your company doesn’t have to do it, and you don’t have to work for them if they do.
well, the company doesn't have to do it, I agree. the discussion is, if the company were to do it, would it be a bad thing for the company to do, conditional on professed company values? I don't think so.
The Chinese people may or may not be better off with a censored Google. The rest of the world would be worse off with a Google that has to take orders from the Chinese government.
Hypothetically: Google starts making tons of cash from China. China threatens to cut off the cash-flow if certain results aren't removed from search results outside of China (or something similar).
We'd like to think Google wouldn't do this just for the money, but Dragonfly sets precedent that it would do something just for the money.
If Google makes enough money from China, they would have as much leverage against China as China has against it. The resulting social unrest caused by a major search engine disappearing in China would far exceed any benefit they would get from censoring other countries. In my opinion, it's much more dangerous to allow Chinese tech companies to have a free monopoly without any resistance.
> The resulting social unrest caused by a major search engine disappearing in China
There was no social unrest in China when Google pulled out and I’m pretty sure that in the scenario you’re describing, the Chinese wouldn’t give a fuck.
I mean they have had plenty of reasons for social unrest thus far, far better reasons actually and it did not happen.
> it's much more dangerous to allow Chinese tech companies to have a free monopoly without any resistance.
When Google pulled out of China, they has no market share. If Dragonfly isn't successful, they'll abandon that as well. There is a lot of social unrest in China. China does a good job at preventing it from escalating with supression, but that cost would certainly outweigh any benefits of China trying to mess with Google outside their jurisdiction. This isn't even considering how the US simply just wouldn't allow Google to do so.
> Seriously? Why?
Because this is actually happening. We're basically giving up billions of dollars to China for free.
So you're saying that people of a sovereign nation use local products and that is somehow dangerous. You're also saying that you're entitled to their money.
I find this line of thinking to be very troubling, to be honest.
Think of it kind of like sanctions. Sanctions usually hurt the people of the countries they target in the short term, but they also embarrass the government (if only slightly) and increase dissatisfaction with the government among the population.
Another way to look at it is legitimization - Google doing the Chinese government's bidding through censorship could be construed as tacit approval. Indeed, the Chinese government may advertise it as such.
What's the difference between choice A and choice B? It seems there is no difference. Let's move onto the next logical argument. If the argument is that someone else will do it if we don't then do morals and values ever come into play?
This is one reason why export controls on technology are important. The corporations don't mind helping oppressive governments lock up dissidents.
choice A is for google not to build a Chinese engine and for Chinese to use censored versions of locally built search engines.
Choice B is for them to have a choice of local search engines and a google search engine ( all censored ). Seems to me from moral point of view, Chinese are better off under B and so I don't see why it's wrong for google to go with B
If there was some way to ensure that this never got bigger than China, I doubt there would be as much opposition. The problem arises when you ask the question "Who, next?"
Who, next, wants all of Google's information about people in their country turned over to them?
As much as we in the US talk about out government compelling companies to turn over data, those companies _do_ have a say in what they will or can turn over and our government has some burden of proof that they need it. In China, based on my understanding, they have no choice, no say.
If the question was just "is this better for the Chinese?", I think I would agree with you. This _is_ better for the Chinese. The problem is that this raises the question of "where does this lead?" I don't think it leads anywhere good and, clearly, I'm not alone in that assessment.
> If there was some way to ensure that this never got bigger than China, I doubt there would be as much opposition.
Are you saying US companies should get one moral lapse for free?
> This _is_ better for the Chinese.
Neither you or the parent poster have indicated why it's better. You've described it as exactly the same as local search options. Is Google magical or what? Can the Chinese not make a search engine? Is it beyond them?
"Many of us accepted employment at Google with the company’s values in mind, including its previous position on Chinese censorship and surveillance, and an understanding that Google was a company willing to place its values above its profits."
When has it ever put values above profits? Google is selling our data to everyone. What values?
Even if Google drops Dragonfly, centralized tracking will always be a tempting honeypot for abuse.
DuckDuckGo [1], the non-tracking search engine, is seriously worth considering. It wasn’t good enough 5 years ago, but is now and serves well as my default search engine.
While the primary motivation of companies is to generate profits, Google has been in a unique position, thanks to its near monopoly, to generate profits while sticking to its values. It’s a shame they’ve started down this other path.
They may need to do more than demand, they may have to organize a strike. Get more people involved, unionize or not, you're going to have to strike.
Putting your name out there like this will just serve to have to replaced one at a time slowly which will kill the momentum until nobody is willing to take action again.
If these moral employees kept quitting, they'd keep being replaced by new employees which have increasingly bad moral compasses... And it would keep getting worse until it reaches the point of no return; aka Facebook.
Local Chinese here, Personally, I don't need Dragonfly because I can cross the GFW of China, but other people in China can't. They currently suffer from China monopoly - Baidu's shitty and annoying search results. So I'd like to see an alternative search engine come to here even if it does have some trade-offs. From another perspective, even Google does provide an uncensored search result here, most Chinese users still cannot access them because of the firewall. What's the difference of censored and uncensored result for them? In the long run, I do think China will close the firewall someday. So let us (Chinese) take the trade-off for now and move forward.
Extremely brave. Especially people putting their names down on paper as individuals.
I printed this paper out to look at the names more and to keep for the record. If you signed it and are reading this comment, I find what you did incredibly brave (US hasn’t had almost any labor activism like this in decades), and worthy of much more merit than any CEO or billionaire co-founder. Thank you.
On the other hand, I recall reading somewhere that people who were forced into making munitions for the German army during WWII got to be really good at manufacturing faulty products that would still pass rigorous inspection. If you're really concerned about the moral implications of a project like that, it might be worth keeping your mouth shut (since somebody's going to do it whether you do it or not) and finding ways to make it plausibly breakable.
It’s not just about having a search engine that’s fast and convenient albeit “censored.”
It’s very plausible that Dragonfly will be used to feed people in China flat out misinformation and lies, and then monitor them 24/7.
News that doesn’t toe the party line will literally be deleted. Try and search for a controversial book or subject, and you’ll be placed on a watchlist. Fake news and government created media will be the first and only result always. In other words, the Chinese government will have more access than ever into the minds of its people, and then it will try to either manipulate them or just repress the problematic ones.
This will happen whether Baidu or Google does it, but that doesn’t make it morally acceptable for Google to join in. We don’t get a free pass to do evil just because we’re not the first.
In fact, it’s worse for Google than Baidu. The people at Baidu don’t have a choice, it’s the country they were born in. But Google is one of the world’s richest companies, and if they chose not to operate in China, it would just maintain the status quo, not actively hurt them.
There’s no moral justification for this, even if now the search engine is faster and more polished.
I can't find even one Chinese name on the signing list. These people have no idea what Chinese people really want and what they really need. Chinese people already lost all their privacy. They have nothing to lose by having Google operating in their country. But in contrast, I believe having Google operate again in China can actually help human rights in there. Why? Because currently the Chinese search market is monopolized by Baidu, and if you read the story behind Baidu and Putian Medical Group, or know about how Baidu is making money by abusing all kinds of human rights, even putting lives in real danger, you would understand how necessary it is for Chinese people to have a search engine, that at least doesn't direct you to a fake hospital.
If you search the word "Baidu" in the first page of HN comments, you will find 0 results (at least at the time I'm writing this). No one cares the reality in China, because that's different than their imagination, and they live in their arrogant imaginations.
These people are just hypocrites. They don't care about human rights, or Chinese people's well-beings as they already lost human rights. They don't even bother to think in others' shoes. They are just feared. They are afraid that one day their own government will utilize the same practice and steal their little privacy. Cut the bullsh*t. If you really care about human rights, try to make some changes in China, start by making a better and healthier search engine than Baidu. There are many more evil business practices in China, like in food delivery, bike share, P2P loans, etc. Try make some healthier alternatives in these business as well. This is the way you should help human rights, not just keep ranting about something they have already lost.
Just do me a favor: ask any Chinese people you know, or think about this as you were Chinese: would you prefer a censored Google as an alternative, or the monopoly of Baidu? Please do this before you leave any comment.
It's nice to see a lot of signatures, 277 at the time of writing. Given the culture at Google I wouldn't call them brave (they aren't putting their jobs or future promo at risk, at least within Google), but certainly it's a powerful statement.
However, let's guesstimate 55k full-time staff. That's .5%. At that level, it's a gesture that will get addressed in corporate-speak if at all. It's a vocal minority. You will not hear from the 20% that are in favor and the 79.5% that don't care much either way.
Now if they would all commit to (say) a 6-12 month timeline to "divest" or they will leave, that's saying something that Google will have to listen to. Sure, there is an unlimited supply of equally capable others that will be thrilled to take their place, but it will be a cultural game-changer, a risk the powers-that-be probably don't want to see play out.
I know I am going to get a lot of criticism, but hey freedom of speech:
First of all, I live outside of China and I am not against freedom of speech and human rights.
Let’s take a look at it at another angle: if Google drops dragonfly, the Chinese netizens will end up using “Baidu”, is it better or worse for the netizens of China? For the very least, dragonfly improves the situation from monopoly and gives much better/accurate/scam-free/spam-free search results. That is one way to improve their online experience.
I could be very wrong, but what I understand is these people oppose dragonfly because the government can restrict results, okay that’s not very ideal, but at least the government cannot force it to give false search results, right?
TBH I am so divided on this. I did a little thought experiment over this and came up with two possible outcomes
Negative:
We live in a strange world where valuing morals limits our career opportunities. If I am a Google employee and I walk out now where does it end? If I am not a hypocrite I cannot work at Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, Uber or even Apple. I am limiting where I can work and hence will have to settle for lesser wage. This will discourage people from speaking against wrong practices.
Positive:
OTOH this activism has a potential to let companies know that some very smart people will not join you if your moral compass is faulty.
There are not many Chinese names in the signed letter, and I can fully understand. If you are a Chinese H1B or green card holder, and you signed this letter, it is almost certain the Chinese government will contact your family in China.
Can confirm, China watches its citizens abroad, closely, and in person sometimes. Their families can be affected, and if they go back home to visit, there can be problems.
Now with increased efficiency with Dragonfly technology. Find enemies of the state with our world wide database, US and EU results included. All brought to you by the Alphabet platform.
Think about the synergy that this could unlock, Alphabet comes with the citizen tracking service (not malicious, just for ads, obviously) and plug it to their citizen scoring service.
Further research could be done on integrating this new dataset with Project Maven, think about the opportunities of engaging only with end users with score below a threshold.
Can confirm your confirm is fabricated from thin air.
The difference would be: you might not know you are lying while I do. We are doing the same thing, confirm something not conformable. Theoretically that's lying
1989, downtown Cleveland, soon after Tiananmen Square. We'd all seen the "tank man" and people were talking about all the dead witnessed by those present (~10k?) versus the official cover story of 300 and denial.
So there were protests across the US, including downtown Cleveland, mostly visiting Chinese students from CSU and CWRU, and plenty of horrified locals there to support them. There were a couple of Chinese guys not marching but watching from the edges while people walked past. They both had the same sunglasses, trench coats, and SLR cameras with long lenses, and they were taking pictures of the marchers. If you've ever been in Cleveland in June, this is not appropriate attire for cloudy and windy, so they stood out from the locals. The Chinese on student visas told me they were government, often seen at such events, and they were cataloging Chinese there for later study and reprisals to family or when they returned home.
You don't know he's lying, you just assume it because he didn't cite a source. It's not the first time I've heard people make his claim, so it might not be baseless.
Did you see my 2nd sentence which implied I was lying? Which almost means making a baseless claim?
You assumed that I assume he was lying only because he didn't cite source. That assumption is not correct.
Now I can tell you that I originally had 3rd sentence:
the 2nd sentence is a lie. I do have solid evidence that he was lying (unintentionally I believe) but it's too difficult to present the evidence.
Might be less than by analyzing all their searches...
This might not be an exact relation, but my point is that it still may be worthwhile in a longer perspective. Social changes and engineering are nontrivial processes.
"If you are a Uighur, you automatically lose 10 points," recalls Seytoff. "If you pray? Another 10 points. You've been overseas? Another 10 points. You have relatives overseas? Another 10 points. If you're 50 or below, you're unsafe and you go to a camp."
By simply having relatives overseas, you lose 10 points. Now imagine how many points you will lose if you have a relative signed this letter.
I'm confused by these exact point values. My understanding that the social credit system is not yet implemented, and it's unlikely it will be a number, probably more a set of black lists for different purposes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_System
Too bad for the Chinese state. If you try to promote a view by threatening others who might express a different one, I'm not going to weigh that neutrally.
The thing is, ideas developed without free criticism are like programs without tests. (Only worse, because most programs aren't core to anyone's social identity, which puts extra pressure on the kind of ideas we're talking about here.)
I don't want to discount anyone's views, and it's not an all-or-nothing "they're brainwashed, ignore them", but to the extent the views were formed in a censored environment, I genuinely can't weigh them equally as evidence. Censorship is corrosive.
Well, presumably the ideas we are talking about are political/social/moral views. To base your acceptance/rejection of them, even in part, on your knowledge of their genesis is already quite intellectually lazy. ("John made such and such claim about topic X. When I consider the claim's intrinsic merits I'm not complete sure what I should think, but given these biographical knowledge I have of John I accept/reject the claim" is only acceptable reasoning when X is an empirical topic (say about genetics) but not when it's a moral/political one)
If someone were to say to me, say, "Pot should be legal everywhere", and you tell me it's unacceptable when considering this claim to consider that the speaker is high, then I don't accept your bounds of acceptable reasoning. (Yes, knowing enough directly about pot would screen off this evidence. I think pot should be legal.)
For an X about how an individual wants to live their own life, that is up to them: it's not for me to "accept" or "reject" it -- though I might think they're making a mistake. I wouldn't privilege moral/political claims to the same degree.
To me, that's further proof that this letter is spot on. Why should we ever cooperate with a government that has tens of thousands in concentration camps? It is becoming increasingly unethical to do any business in China.
Part of it is almost certainly due to fear of reprisal, but consider also that many people of Chinese descent simply may not agree with the letter. I grew up in a majority-Chinese neighbourhood, and one thing you come to realize is that while many Chinese expats have very complicated feelings about the Party, they still tend to be intensely nationalistic and are very sensitive towards perceived slights directed at China.
They may not want to sign the letter simply because they're offended by singling out China for opprobrium.
another possibility is that a lot of Chinese googlers wanted dragonfly to continue because they think that even a sensored Google search would be beneficial for the people of China.
The number of participants in these efforts are so small and unrepresentative, to a point where it is not material and these companies should not change their direction. It is unclear to me why the media gives these stories so much attention. I have to think it starts with these activists secretly working with 1-2 journalists who are similarly politically-motivated, which then leads to the story being given prominence on a couple media outlets. And from there it makes the rounds, even though it is an undeserved amplification of a non-story.
There are FAR more employees who either do not share these same views or are OK with the company pursuing its own profit-maximizing agenda independent of employees' personal political views. For example with workers not willing to build image recognition algorithms that assist/augment the capabilities of joystick-drone-operators, I bet there are a much larger number that are totally willing to work on it, and they are signaling that by not participating in employee activism even when it is socially/professionally safe to do so.
As for the others who are not just indifferent but are for the company's actions in pursuing new opportunities - they're just not screaming about it due to the intolerance exhibited by far-left progressives at these companies, especially with all the purposeful/malicious leaking,the Twitter outrage machine, and other vicious tactics used by the intolerant activists. And as a left progressive, I think that sort of behavior undermines all of us, and should not be tolerated.
The employees willfully obstructing potential revenues and profits, and hence styming Google's market cap should put their money where their mouth is.
These employees should be willing to accept a 50% reduction in compensation ( salary, bonus, stocks, etc). That would at least reduce costs for Google that's being actively blocked from revenue streams other American & European companies (Bing, Amazon, etc) are already participating in.
Ive been telling people, writing to people and complaining about google's increased censorship for years. The lack of transparency to webmasters and google search users is just as damaging as hiding content from people when the company spent years trying to develop trust, now many people believe what they find on google is truth - and they do not know how much of the internet has been filtered out, and ranked down by small groups of people with non-transparent agendas and algorithms.
For this reason is does not surprise me that this kind of thing was in the works and the ramifications to society being degraded in the name of big profits.
and if people started watching the pbs docu thing about the 2018 dilema of facebooks power and failures - and you started to watch part two at 43:11 till 45:30 ( https://www.pbs.org/video/the-facebook-dilemma-part-two-iev1... )- thinking it's about google - that sums way part of my feelings watching these things unfold over time on this side of the pond.
I am glad to see some people at google speaking outside the plex finally. These decisions have global consequences, and the culture of don't tell them so they can't use it against us, or steal our secret sauce, that omerta is part of the toxic culture that has created the faang monstrosities that are upon us today as they are.
To those that have chosen to speak out, thank you. I hope more open to the discussions occur.
Let's assume that this event is Google officially jumping the shark (in terms of workplace desirability, which has decreased due to moral turpitude and a gradually lowering engineering bar).
Who's the new Google? Is there a company that can pick up the mantle of near-universal desirability to software engineers? I don't think it's any of the other FAANGs.
Without stating an opinion on the topic itself, what does the community think about employees agitating against a company practice like this rather than just leaving and doing something else. Obviously they feel strongly about it and want to make sure it doesn’t happen at all, while the company feels they have a huge untapped revenue source.
It's refreshing to see people deciding that things can be important enough to warrant taking some sort of action other than washing one's hands of the matter.
Recognizing that there are paths available other than "doing what the company says" or "walking away" is a good thing, and people should speak up if they feel their work is being used in unethical ways.
There's a view that employees are subservient to employer's wills, to the extent they agree to stay under their employ. While obviously true to some extent, it seems silly to extend this to carte blanche for what employees must agree to be complicit in.
I think it is generally better to state your complaints to management first rather than leaving quietly. Give management a chance to fix whatever issue you have or to come up with an alternative. You can always leave as a last resort.
Try to do that at Oracle or IBM. This is the culture fostered by Google executives, so they shouldn't be surprised if employees are publicly outspoken about their business decision. Is it a good or bad thing? If the higher ups are OK with employees publicly voicing their opinion then I don't see a problem. Management doesn't seem to be fighting this and Google does seem to work that way. The only issue I'd see is if a public petition was created and employee were coerced into signing it by their fellow workers under threat of being put "on the list".
Agitating would be step 1. If enough employees speak up, perhaps the plans get changed or the practice stops.
Leaving is step 2. If the employer continues to make choices that don't align with the employee's morals, the employee should leave.
For employees at a company like Google, both are important. Google is massive and impacts many people across the globe. And the employees are extremely employable - they could leave and go elsewhere with little personal sacrifice.
Google is a publicly traded company, so they unfortunately answer to shareholders and customers not to employees unless they are one or both of those things.
In this case investors are who can make any worthwhile difference and they should be appealing to investors. However, I imagine a significant chunk of investors don't even know/realize they are due to whole/broad market funds.
Google sees 17% of the world's population as potential customers via China so who is going to have their attention more 'thousands' of employees or 1.4 billion potential customers? The only way they're going to get Google's attention is to get shareholders concerned. There will always be employees willing to be on board with this, fact of the matter is most people just don't care as long as they are getting paid. They need to get investors against it if they want to have any hope of getting Google to not do this.
A Medium article, or a petition, or a 'hey thousands of us think you shouldn't do this', is unlikely to do a damn thing. If they want to make a stand they should have Amnesty International create a video campaign that describes, FROM PUBLIC SOURCES (to avoid any potential blowback from sharing company secrets/violating NDAs), what Dragonfly is and have non-Google employees that are industry experts comment on why they think it is a bad idea. Then the Google employees should share this on all of their social media, share it directly to their friends. You want to get outsiders championing the cause and generating attention and you want to minimize any single employees risk as much as possible by using non-employees to be the public face.
If I were doing it I'd do a video as Amnesty International, try and get the Internet Freedom Foundation on board, reach out to college human rights groups and try and grass roots the shit out of it to get as much media attention as possible which would increase chances of reaching the eyes of investors.
Doing it as a group of employees though, ehhhh, that's almost certainly going to do nothing and if anything it'll have a negative impact on employees and potentially result in future policies designed to thwart future attempts like this.
It sucks because it's too big of a market to effectively deter Google from wanting to bend to the will of the Chinese government.
I have mixed feelings about this... I fully support free information not filtered by nation states, but abandoning search in China means you abandon the chance to make it a better place :/ I think developers and engineers we often do assign enough value to "progress" vs perfection.
I think you are misapplying the argument used for trade and doing the business.
The mechanisms that change the system from inside that come from trade don't apply in this case. Either you are able to use different rules to change the system or not.
I don’t follow your logic. If the first step to entering the Chinese market requires bending to the government’s will, what makes you think Google would have any leverage in the future to be able to “make it a better place”?
You inadvertently demonstrated exactly what I was talking about. You're thinking in absolutes, and I would point to the legalization of marijuana in Colorado to demonstrate the power of subtle resistance.
When you agree to play by someone else's rules hoping to "change the system from the inside," the system just changes you. Call it a flaw in human nature, that's just how it goes nearly every time.
I have a similar sentiment, but it's hard for me to put a finger on it. There is so many things happening over years. I'm wonder how much of this shift in Google could be attributed to Sundar Pichai and how much to just normal process of becoming soulless corporation.
Only founder CEOs really have the luxury of putting values over profits, and that’s because they can’t really be fired. Once they put someone else in charge, that is over, though it doesn’t become clear until much later.
One thing I've wondered about "don't be evil" is: what stories does the company tell itself about how that value gets put into practice?
Any value which actually drives organizational behavior in the real world is going to be complex -- complex enough that it cannot be fully conveyed in a 3-word-phrase. This is especially true when the phrase includes such a not-agreed-upon word as "evil". So the ways that the organization expects individuals to apply the phrase need to be explained. From to Lexington the data structure that humans have historically used to store those explanations-of-values is the story. So what stories did Google employees used to tell each other about "don't be evil" and what stories do they tell each other now?
Has anyone thought about the effects of NOT having google search product and services in China? I read a lot of negativity about how it is ruining the culture and personal beliefs about freedom. Has anyone balanced it with what is the upside to users (not money for Google)?
IMHO there isn't much effect of Google not being in China. Baidu works for Chinese uses. I've seen an argument that Google would be a better, freer experience, but Dragonfly shows that wouldn't really be the case.
The painpoint is, they will do it anyways. Maybe not Google leadershipt but someone elses management. Google and Facebook have shown that we can execute power over datasizes that are too big for any group of humans to understand themselves, and they have shown that by manipulating these datasets they can manipulate human behaviour. This is too big a power to not fight over. That's bigger than the nuclear bomb. So the question is not whether or not it will happen, but who will be the first. The first might very well be the one deciding the new world order.
What's wrong with that? US government already have that kind of under-the-table deal for years now and Chinese people wanted a similar project. Truth is, even a 10 years old kid knows how much an evil company like Google respect their users and how shamelessly they collectively spy everyone but if I was picked by Google I won't shouting out self-evident facts about the true nature of the company, instead I would be grateful that I got picked by thousands of other companies afterwards just for working at Google.
If Google kills Dragonfly it will be because of financial reasons. But because of this, they'll be able to claim it was because they were responding to employees.
I appreciate you sending this letter, and your concerns have been duly noted. After careful deliberation however, we regret to inform you we have decided to proceed anyway.
It's a trend -- Google employees raise voice more and more often. The Damore memo, the defense contracts, and now this. Clearly something is happening there.
You cant support diversity and cultural differences and not support it at the same time. But at the end of the day business is business and cash is king.
both the US and China want Dragonfly for different reasons. each thinks it will benefit from Google's presence in China.
China is confident it will control the flow of sensitive information Dragonfly might obtain, and, at the same time, gain valuable insights about how Google operates, paving the way to ultimate replacement of Google in China (and perhaps outside China). plus, in the mean time, Dragonfly gives China some new leverage over Google's current global operations (e.g. calling Taiwan "China", promoting positive news about China to the outside world, etc).
the US government intelligence agencies are confident they will gain valuable information about China's society, government, military, and economy through Dragonfly (somehow). they want any inside presence they can get.
google is lukewarm on Dragonfly but thinks of it as a necessity. google knows it won't be profitable, but also knows that running Dragonfly gives it leverage to keep the US government's regulatory and anti-monopoly enforcement at bay, protecting its leadership in its most valuable market: the US.
I think it is good that these engineers are standing up for what they believe in. It will be an interesting litmus test
for the leadership to see what type of company they want Google to become.
Also, I am interested how the tense China-US relationship will effect the broader tech investment strategy in East Asia. Are we going to see divestment in the next 18 months by US tech companies in China?
I'm glad this exists, but a bit disappointed that I don't see a single name I recognize.
Brad Fitzpatrick, Rob Pike, Ken Thompson, Jeff Dean, Sanjay, etc etc plus a lot of less famous people I know who work there. None of them have signed this open letter.
--
I recommend the author org add a call to action. There should be an easy way for other Google employees to add their name to the list!
As a 'tech worker' myself these folks have my respect. Along with Dragonfly and some of the egregious privacy and sexual harassment issues at Google I have stopped using any Google products.
However, between this and the 20,000 Google employee/contractor walkout I have gained a lot of respect for what the individual employees are collectively doing.
I find it troubling people take this to the political level -- China vs Taiwan. School me how is this related to the censorship? FYI, Chinese do not recognize Taiwan as independent, so there will not be censored comments here because Chinese has unified views on this historical problem.
A protest against censored search could hold the door open for creative alternatives.
Hopefully this effort helps by encouraging search-oriented sneaker nets and decentralized content platforms. I think Google itself could provide the former, which would be very welcome in remote locations like Haiti.
This is good for the ecosystem, as google's loss is a lot of other companies gain.
If Google's employees don't want to help the Chinese people and their government, no problem. There are literally thousands of corporations that will be helping instead of Goog.
Do you really think Google stepping in would prevent them from selling ads to unlicensed hospitals, etc.? If anything, this represents Google’s willingness to violate the moral standards of their own employees (I’m talking about the majority, and leadership prior to being corrupted by greed) no matter what, so long as it means growing their revenue/profit.
It was clearly demonstrated that all Google cares about is money, when they canceled project Maven immediately after protest, yet refuse to back down on Dragonfly. The only difference? Dragonfly promises to be immensely profitable, whereas Maven was small enough that the employees lost over it was assessed to cost more than the project’s profit.
So you really think that Google would then suddenly develop the moral fortitude, out of thin air, to reject bad ads in China that are nonetheless profitable? Even if their policy is to do so now, don’t expect that to stay — remember, their policy used to be ’we will not be complicit in censorship, because it is morally wrong, period.’
And even if it did, many would argue that it’s still a bad idea to seek a short term good at the expense of the long term. Enabling state censorship by giving the state more advanced censorship tech, could be seen as akin to enabling a heroin addict by giving them more heroin. Sure, they’ll feel good and they won’t suffer withdrawal. But overall it’s going to lead to a very dark place that ultimately yields extreme suffering and often even death.
P.S. In fact, here is evidence that Google does absolutely nothing about fraudulent directory listings and ads, like the one you seek to think will be solved by Google moving into China: https://youtu.be/5c6AADI7Pb4
Wow. It's fascinating to watch this issue grow in realtime: When I started reading, I saw earlier comments indicating the letter had 139 signatories. Then I checked and noticed it was at 250 and it's now at 276. Curious to see what the tally will be by tomorrow.
If this is immoral, it should also be illegal, no? Is anyone for also lobbying to create a law or executive order to that effect?
Otherwise, another company will simply step into Googles place, or they could be tempted later to try again. The market is too profitable to do otherwise.
Making everything that is immoral illegal is putting the government in charge of defining morality, it's a bad idea. It leaves little room for disagreement. Little room for nuance. Slows the ability to adapt to new situations or improved understanding. Opens up the process of deciding what is moral to abuse. Etc.
I hope they get somewhere. There's a tactic that has historically been quite effective. A strike. Sysadmins can't be replaced on a moments notice, taking weeks to get up to speed. If google.com 404s for a few minutes, management will talk to you.
To me the optics of refusing to work for the US government on maven but complying with censorship in China seem very bad in the US’s politics climate. There is nonzero risk that the brand will be, for lack of a better word, fucked.
I understand they want to hold the principles they value, but practically, I think it will do good to Chinese living there to have Google's presence in China, by providing a not-so-much-censored alternative/competitor to Baidu etc.
This from employees of the company that argued (successfully) in a United States court that no one has a reasonable expectation of privacy when connecting to any Google service. Sorry, Googlers, you need to get your priorities straight.
I recall 'dont be evil' was the motto, but it's removed a while ago, maybe it's removed because Google realized as far as company&profit goes, it is not different from any other companies.
Both types give organizations increased power over territory.
People are the blood of an organization. Ethics and people determine culture which determines goals.
Innovation is the strategic foothold for keeping an organization alive as it travels into the future.
EDIT: I want to add that all organizations (even non-business) need innovation. Civilizations, Empires, Protests, Support groups, Religious groups, etc... This is due to environments constantly changing. This is what Strategic Planners help with.
It's a buzzword in marketing, and it's a buzzword in corporate strategy. Or "soundbite", if you wish. It's not as if the latter was a hard science.
> Incremental and Disruptive
I'm guessing you're taking this from a particular philosophy, perhaps a particular known book. Even if the word makes sense in there, it's not necessarily how other people are using it.
For comparison, if you look at the first paragraph of Wikipedia's article on innovation, you'll find so much wiggle room in there that you could call every business "innovative".
Was this always the case, or is this the face of 21st century?
I used to see so many Mom-And-Pop shops that are now being replaced by the bigger power seeking companies.
If this is the way we are heading, then I am kinda scared and feel like the only way for me to not be in the chopping block is to join them.
21st century. I highly recommend the book "The Psychology of Innovation in Organizations"
I help a lot of mom'n'pop type shops introduce innovations into their operations. Most places just need a solid online presence with a proper SEO strategy. Others need unique solutions that are foreign to their industries.
I don't see anyone above Staff level or many product/marketing/sales people in the signed letter. Are staff+ engineers, manageres and non-engineers at Google mostly supportive of Dragonfly?
It is interesting to see the standard to which these big internet companies are being held lately. The mere fact that Google debated and waited many years before jumping into China with a censored search engine puts it into the top of the most ethical for-profit corporations to ever exist, in my book.
All this bad-will seems to come from their advertising business models, which I find is loudly criticized with rather thin arguments, given that these companies are often the only ones defending the users from the dirty tactics of advertisers (who get none of the blame). I've neve seen criticism of coca-cola for using Google's targeting abilities to its advantage and shove ads down our throats for money without a moral concern. And rightly so.
While they're at it, why not protest the NSA dragnet? Somehow being compliant with China is terrible but monitoring millions of Americans through their searches doesn’t call for any action?
I find it ironic that these employees complain about an unethical search-engine project but have no issues stalking & violating the privacy of billions of people across the world.
Instead of comparing what chinese have to what westerns have today, try to compare what chinese have without Google to what chinese will have with Google.
> Maybe engaging China is the first step to them opening up their society? Similar to the arguments against the Cuban embargo.
No. Them "engaging China" will not open up Chinese society, because Google will have to implement the exact same censorship regime that all the other Chinese sites do.
The Chinese government doesn't give a shit about Google's prestige in the West. They'll kick it out the second it gives them a little lip or is non-compliant with their demands. Google has zero power to change anything for the better.
Also, China has discredited the idea that capitalist engagement will cause liberalization. They've shown that an autocratic regime can have its capitalist cake and eat it too.
This is nonsense, they did not cry against PRISM like that. Ohwait, they did not know at all, until Snowden told everyone. So STFU Googlers, precentant has been set already.
It might be interesting to hear the answer Eric Schmidt himself gave to the question: "Is Google willing to accept internet censorship to enter China?" here: https://youtu.be/3tNpYpcU5s4?t=4296.
(I find I had to update the old aphorism for the late 20th and 21st century. After centuries of studies on how to use words to manipulate people, words are now simply nearly useless and while I'm human and I can't claim total success, I try to just ignore them now. )
I morally judge (not condemn) people who work at Google. If you can get a job at Google, you can get a job almost anywhere. There is tons of great work out there for you. People who work at Google are choosing to aid in the suppression of human freedom.
>> People who work at Google are choosing to aid in the suppression of human freedom.
The fact that there's a large number of employees who signed this document provides great evidence to contradict this claim.
It's kind of a blanket statement - I'm sure a bunch of the folks here on HN work at Google and are trying to do exactly the opposite.
Heck, some of the people who signed off on this document could be HN'ers!
You can sometimes change a corrupt system from the inside. It takes a lot of work and dedication and it certainly doesn't always work out - but it's a choice some people make. It certainly isn't mine! :)
I would also like to add that companies encouraging freedom of speech internally to a level that makes such protests possible are exceedingly rare.
In most companies employees have no freedom of speech unless unionized and not even then. And protesting against projects based on moral principles publicly is a sure way to get you fired.
Don't forget the Damore case. Regardless of people's views on content of his memo, this was a case of Google essentially baiting an employee to express their honest views on internal forum, and then firing them for not agreeing with the prescribed party line.
Agreed with all your points here. Clearly from this letter and the opposition other projects have received at Google there are those inside the company actively working to influence change.
It's definitely true that part of the reason Google+ dropped its real names policy was internal employee activism, alongside external pressure.
Unfortunately, that reversal and Facebook's more weakly enforced continuation of the same old type of policy both went mostly unnoticed. (Yes, I realize G+ is going away for consumer accounts in August. This change was years ago.)
> If you can get a job at Google, you can get a job almost anywhere.
Yes, but the job probably will pay less, at a smaller scale, with fewer perks, and be less interesting. Instead of judging them, perhaps you should support them in condemning their employer for this particular act.
To some extent, I believe all tech companies are capable of moral failures like this. It's impossible for the profit motive to always align with ethics. It's all a question of scale, really.
But when the state was the US and the data it was trying to censor was from Wikileaks, Google (Schmidt) adopted a right wing stance and offered no help, and openly criticized Wikileaks like one would expect a defense contractor to do.
This absurd righteous indignation about China censorship is unbelievably hypocritical considering that nobody at Google tried to help Wikileaks shed light on US Government crimes.
While they were designed for combat, they are effectively the same thing that Brinks uses to transport money. They are meant to stop bad things from killing the people inside. They have 0 offensive weapons.
They are entirely defensive vehicles that have been used to rescue downed officers, civilians in harms way (gunfire), and multiple times in natural disasters where other vehicles would have gotten stuck.
While I get that they "look scary" to some people, they do have utility and come very cheap from the federal government that is trying to get them off their books. Local police pick them up because when there is a gunfight/hostage situation/disaster it's better to have one 5 mins away than an hour away.
They are not the same thing as a standard armored truck. The name itself gives that away (Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected). Police do not need mine-resistant vehicles.
MRAPs have high maintenance and running costs. The simple fact that they are former military vehicles contributes to the military mindset of many police depts, something that should be avoided. Militarization of police forces is bad for citizens.
Serious eye roll here. You're discarding all of the other capabilities and suggesting that because it is ALSO mine resistant it must be bad.
> MRAPs have high maintenance and running costs.
That's assuming they are used all the time. Most departments have them parked at their HQs and only use them for call outs or training. Regular maintenance wouldn't reach the same levels of cost as buying a bearcat + maintaining that. Also as more depts get them, the maintenance costs will go down (excluding the OP comment here's area).
> contributes to the military mindset of many police depts
While I generally agree with that notion, I would much rather them buy the cheaper milsurp vehicle with more capability than buy one from Lenco, or not buy one at all and have to wait an hour during an active shooter.
> You're discarding all of the other capabilities and suggesting that because it is ALSO mine resistant it must be bad.
Having driven and gunned on an MRAP... yes, the mine resistance makes it bad. You resist mines by 1. moving away from them and 2. presenting armor at an angle. On a truck like an MRAPs, you mount it very high above the ground and for the size and weight, the interior space is limited because the chassis is sloped upwards.
For smaller depts that cant afford a custom Bearcat, I'm sure the smaller space and height burdens aren't too bad compared to not having armored cover at all.
Because we have a constitutional right to said guns so we don't take removing them lightly. That said if someone has any history of violence, crime, or mental disorder I'm 100% in favor of removing access to weapons.
There was no Constitutional right to carry a gun- or to own a gun- until 2005, and the 2005 Heller decision only covered keeping handguns in the home. Exactly how far the right extends beyond that is very much not settled law.
For most police departments it's a smart choice since it's armored, can be used to provide impenetrable cover, and has lower upfront costs than alternatives. For cash-strapped police departments, that's a great opportunity.
if the police have armored vehicles, that means that they perceive a need for armored vehicles. When officers walk past them, they are reminded that they are needed. When officers are inside them, they feel simultaneously invulnerable and threatened -- all this armor means that someone must want to kill them.
From the other side, a community that sees MRAPs going past has to believe that there's a need for armored protection for the police -- so there must be a corresponding threat from armed criminals. The affluent parts of the community perceive more of a threat, and the disadvantaged part of the community has solid evidence that the police are an occupying military force, not protection.
In other words, the presence of the MRAPs creates a problem for everyone. It escalates tension.
So we are talking about perception above all else?
Great, but there are use cases for armored vehicles. Whether its an MRAP or a Bearcat.
There are always going to be barricaded persons, hostage situations, active shooters, riots, and natural disasters that need responding to and those seem to be the best tools for the job. The goal is to get as close to the subject as possible without anyone getting hurt. From there you can control the scene and use it as a position to de-escalate.
If these tools are being used inappropriately, I am all for legislation to curb that.
The idea that first you roll up in a tank, and then you pretend that you're going to de-escalate, is inherently ludicrous.
"Barricaded person": doesn't need an MRAP, they need a therapist.
"Hostage situation": generally also doesn't need an MRAP, they need a specialized therapist.
"Active shooter": here's note from a company that really wants to sell you training on how to deal with an active shooter -- http://www.activeresponsetraining.net/10-lessons-learned-fro... -- note that even with their spin, they can't come up with any evidence that an MRAP would be helpful.
"Riots" -- There's a list on Wikipedia. What percentage were caused by the police murdering people? 12 of 29 in the last ten years.
"Natural disasters": don't require tanks. Heavy trucks? Rugged 4WD? More investment in firefighting equipment? Sure. Hauling around tons of armor on a vehicle with a high center of gravity? Silly.
Perhaps concerns about 'the over-militarization of police' is essentially a concern for situations where an extreme power imbalance exists between police and civilians, creating a much higher risk of totalitarian abuse and oppression by police in situations where the police force in question becomes corrupt or 'bad' in some way. (Disclaimer: I'm not making an anti-LEO argument; quite the contrary, I'm very pro-LEO, and in many cases I see, LEOs are disrespected very unfairly.)
The problem isn't where police are good; the point is to design a system that inherently protects against abuse by the very small percentage of LEOs that do become corrupt and abuse their special powers that civilians do not have. How do we protect against this?
Perhaps the simplest and most robust way to protect against this abuse is simply to limit the magnitude of power imbalance between the government and the people! One could argue that this principle applies to physically defensive equipment as much as it does to computer and information systems, and any other mode of power. Additionally, this notion is encoded into our country's constitution at least in some ways.
Therefore, this leads to the question: Can a civilian buy an MRAP? If so, I think your argument works very well -- especially since they're defensive machines. If a civilian cannot buy one though, I could see the argument against police using them gaining favor.
> Can a civilian buy an MRAP? If so, I think your argument works very well
Yes you can if you found one for sale (not sure what that market looks like). Civilians can also buy decommissioned tanks, Two ton trucks, humvees, etc.
I have personally seen Humvee's driving on the roads so I dont see why not.
Basically an MRAP is just a big truck so as long as it didn't break any traffic laws (too wide, too heavy, etc) then I'd assume its fine. Would depend per state though.
Anecdote from 6 months ago: Humvees are often sold without title for $4K to $8K in GA. Titled vehicles (the ones that can legally drive on public roads) go for $22k for a beater on up.
In that case, I'm definitely convinced to your side of the argument! If a civilian can buy it, I see no reason why a police force shouldn't be able to as well. That said, I'd love to hear any counter-arguments to this notion, if they exist.
I've read that police departments were literally given these vehicles. I challenge someone to call BAE up and actually get a price quote and delivery timeline, here's the website to get you started. https://www.baesystems.com/en/product/rg33-mineresistant-amb...
My point, is these were given to the police. While a civilian may technically be eligible to buy one for $500k (bulk pricing) but we realistically have no opportunity to purchase. So the parent's comment applies.
It is an excellent idea. An armed populous is an excellent deterrent of tyranny. And with the way the US is headed, an armed populous may be the only thing that stands between freedom and absolute tyranny.
Nitpick: you can buy automatic rifles made before 1986 (might be off on the date but you get the idea). You can't go buy a brand new automatic.
* you can however buy a modern rifle that's made to have its automatic mode disabled, but my understanding is that it's trivial to modify to become automatic (but it will no longer be legal)
Also the ones that are on the market (pre-86) go for tens of thousands of dollars to start. They are basically coveted by rich collectors who show them off at designated "machine gun shoot" days at specialty ranges.
> but my understanding is that it's trivial to modify to become automatic
It's not trivial. Requires decent gun-smithing skill, the ability to craft an auto sear, and some extra parts. To my knowledge no one has been confirmed to have done that and convicted of it in recent history.
The reason why it's legal is because these will only fit in a full auto receiver, which is the regulated part. But most semi-auto lower receivers can be converted to accept said full auto trigger group simply by drilling a single hole in the receiver. Which is also fairly trivial, given that you're drilling aluminum, and jigs are readily available:
I had an old 12-gauge semi that you could break a match stick off in the breach, and it would unload the entire magazine automatically with one pull of the trigger. That was pretty trivial.
The counter argument would be police departments rarely buy this equipment - it's given to them as part of a program between the Pentagon and law enforcement. They get the vehicles (and lots of other military grade equipment) for a huge discount or free.
There is also the fact that even if a civilian could technically buy one, it's not really feasible to actually do so.
> The counter argument would be police departments rarely buy this equipment - it's given to them as part of a program between the Pentagon and law enforcement. They get the vehicles (and lots of other military grade equipment) for a huge discount or free.
> There is also the fact that even if a civilian could technically buy one, it's not really feasible to actually do so.
Keep in mind that these vehicles were originally bought by the Pentagon using civilians' money (tax money). So far for feasibility.
Civilians can buy heavily armored vehicles, yes. They can also buy military vehicles, provided they are certified (like not carrying weapons) but it is definitely possible to be rolling around in a MRAP style machine completely legally.
You can buy armored vehicles with many kinds of weapons, too. But then you'll need to register them as destructive devices with ATF, pay the NFA tax etc.
Look up "The Big Sandy Shoot" on YouTube. All vehicles and artillery pieces you see there are privately owned.
I don't see how an MRAP would be any less street legal than one of those large dump trucks. At worst you would need a CDL based on the weight but probably not in most states.
Right - an MRAP is a 'battlefield taxi' - it's a basic vehicle to move around a hostile area - it's defensive. You aren't doing anything offensive from inside an MRAP unless it has a remote weapons station on top. Great for collecting casualties.
"The November 2015 Paris attacks were a series of coordinated terrorist attacks that took place on Friday, 13 November 2015 in Paris, France and the city's northern suburb, Saint-Denis. Beginning at 21:16 CET, three suicide bombers struck outside the Stade de France in Saint-Denis, during a football match. This was followed by several mass shootings and a suicide bombing, at cafés and restaurants. Gunmen carried out another mass shooting and took hostages at an Eagles of Death Metal concert in the Bataclan theatre, leading to a stand-off with police. The attackers were shot or blew themselves up when police raided the theatre."
As you can see, the streets of Paris did indeed become a battlefield, filled with hostile attackers, leading to many casualties. It's easy to see why even Paris was not immune to terrorism/armed assailants and needed to have armored vehicles.
You’re being unnecessarily snarky and sarcastic. In active shooter situations, which are not uncommon in suburban US areas, you have hostile areas and need to collect casualties in a defended vehicle while possibly under fire.
However, the French Gendarmes are a paramilitary police force. It’s part of the French military and under interior ministry control. Does France have concerns about this military-style police force? Just saying militarization is a “bad idea,” seems to be an opinion based on emotion rather than facts. It seems like any police force can be bad or good; the militarization doesn’t seem to have much to do with that. French Gendarmes are reasonably respected. Actual armed soldiers patrol tourist areas in France, and that hasn’t led to any particular oppression unique to militarization. It does however make French tourist sites vastly safer than most places in the world that don’t have such patrols.
It’s really a question of training rather than equipment or appearance.
Exactly. Even NYC has the "Hercules" team which is effectively a SWAT team that shows up at high risk locations as a show of force to deter terrorism.
Last time I was in Time Square some of them were lining up for photos with the general public. The crowd seemed pretty at ease knowing that if shit went down those guys were there to stop it.
In most cities in US, SWAT and local police are the same people wearing slightly different uniforms. This is not so in Europe, where there's a clear distinction between beat cops (who don't get MRAPs) and special forces.
Sure. But the French police barely use their guns, whereas the US police famously kill lots and lots of people.
So for the purposes of the topic at hand, giving the US police military equipment is probably a bad idea. At least until there’s been an institutional culture shift, which will take decades at least.
> I'm going to go with the vets' opinion on this one.
Anecdotal opinions. I know plenty of vets who don't think MRAPs are a big deal at all.
> If Brinks trucks do the same work, use Brinks trucks.
Armored cars cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy and outfit from companies like Lenco. MRAPs are bought for ~$1k (transport costs) from the federal government.
> Militarization of the police force is a very, very, very bad idea.
If the vehicles do the same tasks, in mostly the same way, what's the difference?
It's exactly the riot cop problem. On the cop side, the more armor you have, the less you see and the more hostile the world /seems/; this increases the chance of using force instead of diplomacy in any given situation.
On the civilian side, you get to feel like you live in a goddamned war zone, with the police as combatants. It's not a nice feeling.
My own approach is to treat cops as large, gun-wielding wild animals: maybe they'll be fine, but in any interaction there's a chance they'll fuck up your life permanently. And that's a direct consequence of having police on 'war footing' with the community, where the default reactions to problems are either violence or long-term imprisonment. And the ethics of this extends beyond my own interactions: if I see something illegal happening, calling the cops means putting people in extreme danger. As a result, I'm not going to call the cops for anything less than assault. Thus, police militarization works against actual enforcement of the law, because it estranges police from the population. (For a whole lot more, go listen to season 3 of the Serial podcast...)
> this increases the chance of using force instead of diplomacy in any given situation.
I'm not sure diplomacy works when someone is actively shooting at you or other people.
If people are rioting (actually rioting, not protesting) then I honestly don't care how the presence of a MRAP makes them feel. It's the police's job to stop the riot and they need tools to do that.
> I'm not going to call the cops for anything less than assault.
I'm glad you're not the majority. Because the world would be pretty shitty if all the police responded to was physical assaults and above.
> I'm not sure diplomacy works when someone is actively shooting at you or other people.
Most of the time, police aren't being shot at. And they tend to react to peaceful protest exactly as if it were a riot. This is well documented.
Here's an example I was present for: Peaceful protest at the university. Cops in riot gear show up, fly around in helicopters, etc. One of the cops pushes/bumps a girl who then bounces into another cop, who slams her against the hood of cop car, arrests her, charges her with assault, and tries to get her expelled from the university. (The same department, six months later, gave us this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6AdDLhPwpp4 )
> I'm glad you're not the majority. Because the world would be pretty shitty if all the police responded to was physical assaults and above.
If that's not the world you like, let's fix the police!
Key phrase there. We expect our police to be equipped for any situation. So what happens when something like the North Hollywood shooting happens again and you have pinned cops/civilians? In that case officers had to commandeer actual money trucks and raid gun shops to get the equipment they needed to stop the shooters.
> Here's an example I was present for
If that's true then I'm all for punishments / legal action against officers that do wrong.
> If that's not the world you like, let's fix the police!
I'm all for police reform where evidence shows it can help.
If they only used that stuff when called for, that would be nice.
In practice, most of the time, all that gear is used to serve no-knock warrants on non-violent offenders (usually involving drugs).
Maryland used to publish statistics for their use of SWAT teams; look that up, and note the breakdown on kinds of circumstances they were called in for, and whether it was no-knock or not. No-knock generally means busting doors and sometimes ramming walls (with those very MRAPs), throwing flashbangs etc.
It really depends on the exact location of the cops.
As a younger person I personally witnessed local police use those vehicles in ways that were very much overkill.
I've also personally winessed those same police officers lie " on the stand" in court to " make" thier case and the judge always buys it.
Doesn't take a genius to understand that there is a huge problem with law enforcement in the US.
Isn't this a thread about Google?
>I'm not sure diplomacy works when someone is actively shooting at you or other people.
I mean, not only is it required by law, as per Graham v. Connor, but the current trend in national standards for dealing with riots is trending towards implementing de-escalation techniques and other measures designed to protect the sanctity of life rather than using escalating violence to disperse the crowd.
> > I'm not going to call the cops for anything less than assault.
> I'm glad you're not the majority. Because the world would be pretty shitty if all the police responded to was physical assaults and above.
Only ancentotal, I know, but every time I have called the cops for any reason in my life, the situation was arguably made worse for everyone present... In some cases, severely so.
In m several cases, the threat of deadly force was brought into cases where nothing but a stern hand was needed. In one, it almost resulted in the death of the person that was actually doing the most to help the situation.
I will never again call the police for any reason unless I think with some certainty that a life will be lost if I dont.
> I'm not sure diplomacy works when someone is actively shooting at you or other people.
So the best option is to go to the other extreme, and give our police military weapons, vehicles, and armor--except that police get a looser RoE, they investigate themselves, and have a great history of murdering civilians.
> If people are rioting (actually rioting, not protesting) then I honestly don't care how the presence of a MRAP makes them feel. It's the police's job to stop the riot and they need tools to do that.
These vehicles show up at protests. Someone else here suggested we look them up on YouTube so we can see how they SAVE LIVES when police use them. Except the only video that I found in my admittedly short YouTube search was the police using these at a protest, lol. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=71-R2D0-wOI&t=3462s I'm so glad the police had all of that protection there. Phew. Saved so many police lives.
Because outside the bubble of HN, people generally support their community police and don't feel threatened to call them when a crime is occurring to them / in front of them.
> If the vehicles do the same tasks, in mostly the same way, what's the difference?
The difference is that the 1033 program comes with a use-it-or-lose-it utilization requirement, which means that the cheap transfer of military equipment has a built in incentive to overuse it. They are often suitable for tasks that police rarely face, which at a steep discount makes them seem like good deals anyway. But then they must be used soon to be kept. So they get used in less appropriate circumstances as a direct consequence of the terms of transfer.
> The difference is that the 1033 program comes with a use-it-or-lose-it utilization requirement
It's my understanding that the requirement is a stop-gap for a single dept ordering 500 of these vehicles and parking them in a warehouse or selling them off. Basically if they use it for training and have it at the ready for call-outs then they satisfy the requirement.
Wouldn't a Ford Focus wagon be limiting for many police duties in the US? Police have to be able to handle many rough situations, so a vehicle designed with utilitarian prowess should be essential for that job.
Maybe it could get a cute paint job like the Focus and split the difference?
Citation needed. Police all over the world do their jobs without these tanks. Is there any data proving crime goes down in cities where they are deployed? Is there any data proving that less lives are lost when these tanks are deployed in US cities?
> Better wording would be "if you throw rocks or shoot at us we are still going to arrest you".
People have been throwing rocks at and shooting at US police for two centuries. How does having a tank help in arrests? Officers can't arrest from inside the tank. They have to get out of it and approach on foot. How is this different from stepping out from behind a building or any other vehicle and approaching on foot?
They could drive to the scene in a yellow school bus and the result would be the same. They have to exit the bus and approach on foot.
You could look up videos on YouTube of police deploying an AMRAP to an area with an active shooter (a shooter with military-grade rifles and armor) and using it for cover. That's how they save lives.
Several active shooter situations where they need to retrieve downed officers / civilians without exposing the rescue team to gunfire. Most recently in the Pittsburgh shooting it was reported they used an armored vehicle to get to injured officers outside.
> Police all over the world do their jobs without these tanks.
First of all they are not tanks. They have no offensive capabilities so they would be classified as armored personnel carriers.
> People have been throwing rocks at and shooting at US police for two centuries. How does having a tank help in arrests?
Allows officers to take cover behind it while the vehicle moves forward. When it reaches the people throwing rocks they can move to effect the arrest.
For shootings it allows them to much closer to barricaded subjects and make sure they cant escape / provides a platform to negotiate peaceful surrender.
If you think that denying information to Chinese people because their Orwellian government demands it is the same as the stone you use to grind your obviously conservative axe on, you may need to pause and think a bit more on it.
This comment breaks the site guidelines. Ideological warfare, flamewar, and personal attacks are just what we're trying to avoid here, and here you managed to combine all three.
On HN, the idea is: if you have a substantive point to make, make it thoughtfully; if you don't, please don't comment until you do. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and use the site as intended in the future, we'd appreciate it.
Even if Google did not remove blacklisted sites from results, users clicking on the link would still not be able to load the site because it's China censoring the content, not Google.
How do you feel about Google respecting the EU's right to be forgotten? Over 40,000 requests from politicians have been received to remove themselves from search results. Do you agree with Google abiding by this form of censorship?
Which is better - access to the information that's made available, or access to no information at all?
You can solve this "if against Z, then what about X"?
Think of the user. Does a user benefit from being able to clear a permanent record, long after punishment has been served?
Does a user benefit if Google facilitates government spying?
You can be for the right to be forgotten (and admit to its abuses by politicians and rich hucksters), and against government censorship.
This distinction is powerful and therefor often abused: "It is for the good of the people that people can not dissent and revolt". But hard to argue that's the case for EU user protection laws.
> Does a user benefit if Google facilitates government spying?
Yes. Chinese users will most definitely greatly benefit from having a censored Google in China instead of having just a censored Baido.
The only people who won't benefit from it are self entitled 20-year-old Google employees across the ocean who in reality don't give a shit about Chinese people, what they want, or how the average Chinese person feels like, but care a lot about appearing righteous in front of their peers.
I find the idea of rich western individuals debating in their exclusive social club the theoretical moral faults of allowing to give the Chinese access to modern technology extremely condescending, and completely disconnected for any actual concern or understanding of real people. It's obvious that all of those people would feel better with themselves if people in China rotted for eternity with their existing tools, as long as they don't have to hear anything about it.
Would you like it if technology you created was used in disagreement with your personal moral compass? Or are you completely agnostic about this?
Google is free to create a censored and wiretapped search engine app for China. But it should give transparency to everyone contributing to Google (especially those indirectly contributing insights or technology), so they can make an informed decision to work there.
> allowing to give the Chinese access to modern technology
This is not a problem or an issue. Nobody would have a problem with a Chinese Google Search engine. It is about facilitating spying, potentially contributing damage to free speech and human rights, about organizing the world's information vs. a government controlled propaganda machine.
What then is the issue, is that Google is very powerful at search and modern technology. And these systems are thus extra damaging in potential. Slapping Google brand on it carries responsabilities.
I do agree this issue has reached the stage of moral outrage. I think this is largely due to the leaks and surprise revelations. Senior Google AI now silent on this issue, yet vocal against Facebook or changing name of conferences.
I would hope the outrage would be the same or louder when this happened in the US, not China, so I don't think it is very much a thing of priviledged West vs. poor East.
That you called it "Baido" (unless typo) implies to me that you're not Chinese, and with that assumption, your post also reads incredibly condescending. Chinese tech is not subpar across the board, there are very smart people there who choose to work on the problems they choose to work on. Some in support of greater state surveillance, others not.
What you have here are American engineers choosing to not work in support of greater state surveillance for another country. Reducing it to thinking that all they're doing is wanting to virtue-signal is condescending.
Can you not see that the crux of your post, calling out others' supposed condescension, appears to be projecting a bit?
Your use of the term "condescending" as you paint the picture of elite Western saviors uplifting the poor, rotting Chinese clamoring for access to modern technology is pretty ironic.
I'm personally against the censoring for china... but I'm also against the results tweaking that Google has done across a lot of its' properties. From defunding conservative channels in YouTube, to creating custom results during the elections in favor or against given candidates.
I do find the lack of objections there to be rather hypocritical at best. Doing the right thing isn't always easy. Especially if the wrong thing was helping your POV. The ends to emphatically not justify the means.
>Does a user benefit if Google facilitates government spying?
This is irrelevant because Dragonfly is about bringing search to China, not handing over access to user data to the government.
The Chinese firewall blocks 18k websites. The Right to be Forgotten is censoring way more information than China's firewall because it is allowing government officials to specifically target and censor all information about themselves, not just generic websites.
Obviously Google doesn't place values over profits. Let's be brutally honest here. Nor do the employees.
Are the employees that make $200,000/year donating the extra income to those in need or are they buying things to engage in lifestyle inflation like most people? Are they going to quit Google and work for a non-profit?
I deleted Youtube, maps, chrome, hangouts, sheets, docs, drive, Authenticator and nearly every other G app from my phone, fuck this shit.... working on migrating gmail. That’s a hassle tbh, but I’ve only raised my Google alert status from “Don’t be evil”
To “Experimenting with Evil”, so we’re not full blown Orwell yet.
I say google should go for it. If they don't build it, someone else will. If a lot of people start using the tool, google will have a lot of influence to actually make change happen.
Can you provide more details regarding your cosmetic filter and why posters from a post on China would be good candidates? It’s not clear to me from your post.
I'm not a programmer, I'm an academic. Topics in my academic specialty routinely get posted on HN. When they do, I browse the comments section, look for users who exhibit many signs of lacking rigor and/or intellectual honesty, and add to my filter accordingly, on the grounds that their opinions on programming topics are probably not worth reading either.
I'm also a Chinese person. China matters is like an extra AOS for me and so I apply cosmetic filters for the same reasons
Is it possible that people are kinda upvoting it as a "Yay for this!" type upvote without having anything to say on the topic and possibly not even reading the article?
It almost looks like it's a breaking news story and everyone's waiting for the mods to notice and condense them all into a single thread, like they always do.
I also feel like they've changed search so much for profit purposes that it's impossible to find certain things without receiving pages of irrelevance. I've been using Google since the early 2000's and it's so easy to tell Search has dropped in quality. Certain words & phrases I know would produce legitimate useful search results in 2008 will now just pull pages of unrelated ads.
It's still the best, but the profit motive is harming the amazing work that Google once did.
Not OP, and not sure this is what OP's talking about, but I have examples.
First, anything piracy related. Previously you could search something like "albumname zip rar torrent" and get vast lists of downloads. It's unclear whether the presence of scam links or the illegality of filesharing prompted the removal of valid results for this class of searches, but it's nonetheless true that this type of search returned useful results in the past and is now fully, intentionally, and obviously nerfed.
Second, the filtering GUI for searches has degraded over time. Timeboxing and verbatim searches will negate one another when trying to build some queries. I brought this to the team's attention [1] and received a response last June, and it's still broken as of last week. Attempting to bypass the GUI by combining the desired URL params from two searches also yielded broken results, IIRC.
Google's search is in many ways improved since 2008, but it's also worse in some ways. Subjectively, it feels that in the last decade, search has transitioned from "show me what is on the internet, limited by the power of our algorithms" into something more like "show me what is on the internet, limited by the overton window[2] of our legal, PR, and advertiser-relations departments".
I liken google's transition, in search and elsewhere, to apple's. As they've grown, their customer base has changed from "small number of hackers" to "large number of laymen" and the preferences and tolerances of those groups shifts in a way that causes these products to be less useful for the HN crowd. One of the core shifts is away from "build abstractions to wrangle reality in custom ways" to "build abstractions that obscure reality in convenient ways".
I don't have the answers here. It seems that if you want your reality to be unbounded by such filters, you're doomed to be some kind of hacker/pirate/outlaw/non-normie.
>search has transitioned from "show me what is on the internet, limited by the power of our algorithms" into something more like "show me what is on the internet, limited by the overton window[2] of our legal, PR, and advertiser-relations departments".
I'd say it has gone full; "Show me what your advertisers and other sources of income, would like someone like me to find on the internet."
I refrained from going so far in part because there's places you can still get great info on things like pihole, which would violate the interests of those departments.
But my gut says that it's not that google is defending the sanctity of such results, but that those results are an annoyance and not a real threat, so are just off the radar. When someone with enough sway wants them gone, I've got no doubt they'd be nerfed too.
That's an uncharitably reductionist take. Please refer to the original comment that started this thread.
> Certain words & phrases I know would produce legitimate useful search results in 2008 will now just pull pages of unrelated ads.
A person asked for examples. I delivered examples. I'm not contesting that the search is illegal in some jurisdictions. Merely pointing out that there are searches for which google used to return results with utility, and now intentionally do not return such results, and fall back to irrelevant suggestions.
Although the comment I made said more than what you implied it to, I will explicitly make the complaint you're mocking: Yes, I am unhappy that such results are censored. But it's not merely "I want free albums". I want to be able to search the internet. Not someone else's ideas of what the internet ought to be. It's a legally and ethically difficult problem, to be sure, but I think mocking the idea of supporting searches that the government dislikes is a step too far.
The Chinese and US governments' censorship regimes are not equivalent in magnitude, so it's not fair to compare them simply, but just as we can entertain the idea that the chinese are unfree in their searches for information, and as a result the breadth of what they can think about and experience, let's recognize that so too are we in the western world.
When searching for roms Google will now return sites full of malware rather than sites offering the rom.
I don't mind that they're blocking rom sites. I do mind that they don't have the courage to just say "We're not going to return anything for those terms".
Which reality is it distorting? Is the old desktop search reality? Why is it more real than mobile results? In truth, none of them are reality. Google Search is an algorithmicaly curated list of web pages - it’s an unfortunate error to believe it represents any reality other than Google’s opinion of what its users want in that second.
> it’s an unfortunate error to believe it represents any reality other than Google’s opinion of what its users want in that second.
That was also true when search results were purely based on terms entered, barring the domain name affecting the default language, and user configuration.
> A filter bubble – a term coined by Internet activist Eli Pariser – is a state of intellectual isolation that allegedly can result from personalized searches when a website algorithm selectively guesses what information a user would like to see based on information about the user, such as location, past click-behavior and search history. As a result, users become separated from information that disagrees with their viewpoints, effectively isolating them in their own cultural or ideological bubbles.
I remember when was totally normal to settle how a word was spelled by looking what spelling had how many results. I'm not saying that wasn't silly, but I actually remember people actively using that "consensus reality" in forums, all the time. "how did you find that", "I entered X and then it was the third result", "oh yeah I see, thanks". The traditional exception was things blocked on youtube in various countries, but otherwise we took it for granted that if you visit a certain public URL, you get the page someone else would get.
That doesn't mean one confuses those Google search results with reality anymore than every person in the cinema seeing the same movie means they confuse it with reality. It just means that experience is part of the common world they inhabit. When I go into a library, the selection of books there is rather arbitrary, but that's still very different from there just being a clerk who might recommend one book to me, to then lie to someone else and pretend to not know that book.
Google has evolved; whether it's for the better is open to debate. But we agree that it was never reality even if it used to be the same for everyone.
One difference between Google and an old-fashioned library: however arbitrary the collection was, you'd always find the canon, the best selected by the people who could reasonably be expected to know the best. Today, especially on YouTube, there is no canon, no conception of best at all. It's just whatever Google selects according to the signals it deems likely to keep you watching.
Google consensus has never been a good way to verify words or meanings. Just look up the definition of the word "definition" in google. The google supplied definition matches no major dictionary online.
Google has been the equivalent of an IT Gulag for a long time. I always pitied the poor souls working there thinking they've racked up some sort of prestige. Not worth the 7000 days in Siberia.
I know it at least since the 2008 crisis. Google made a choice, manipulate search results /display on page to stop sending as less visitors as possible to non-Google sites.
I'm not sure what exactly you're referring to, but as someone who's used Google since back when it had a bunch of serious competitors, I'd also pick 2008-2010 as about the time they stopped even appearing to match words with actions and became just another company, from an outside perspective, at least. It surprises me that people are just now forming this opinion about them.
Perhaps not coincidentally that's about when the fundamentally-a-bad-idea service of Facebook started to get huge as it grew past college campuses, and showed it was really easy—like, incredibly easy—to convince all these new Internet users to give strangers tons of information about themselves, in gross violation of previous Internet norms of avoiding posting personal info anywhere, and that one could make stupid amounts of money by facilitating these poor choices.
Is it not inevitable that where the ethical Code sees Injustice the corporate bottom line sees a dollar sign? I believe the correct avenue of approach for this type of issue is to offer an alternative. Simply telling your higher-ups to stay out of the market is not going to be sustainable. And given that you all work at Google, I expect there are many alternatives you could come up with. Such as banking on Google scholar to help bridge misunderstandings with China. Google is an advertising company and asking Google to not show ads to billions of Chinese people is like asking a shark to go vegan. The ethical imperative is not a part of the reward system that the corporate algorithm known as Google optimizes for. If you really want to change Google's core mission you must change what is positively reinforced. However it seems like any capitalist endeavor aimed at the Chinese market must first be subservient to that bright red flag. China is well aware of this and doesn't care if Google doesn't have a market share. Google, seen as a foreign company, also doesn't get any special perks or connections in China. At any rate, there are plenty of untaken letters in the alphabet, I'm sure the higher-ups will find one that will suit the purpose of a censored search engine. I'm sorry to seem dismal in my analysis but a Google employee who is fed by advertising dollars must also understand that the party wants to control entirely what people see hear and think. Google doesn't have to provide this functionality, plenty of other firms will and are already. I think what would make a bigger difference is asking Google to acquire Chinese companies and slowly unfold them from the inside out. I would be cautious about mixing volatile compounds such as Chinese information technology and a global tech giant, and I think efforts of both the higher-ups and the upset employees would be better aimed at ending censorship, instead of asking the bear to avoid some incredibly tempting honey. Currently the big G believes that doing the right thing must involve a dollar sign. However the argument can be made that the purity of the franchise is at stake. Of course like most big companies, you can always make two versions of something and sell the upgrade. For example that could be a censored version in China but magically with a certain USB key other results get through. But even with something that sly and sleuthy, I don't understand why Google would want to control opinion in China. The party is in the business of controlling opinion. It's like the Jesuits going to Japan and greeting the shogunate with the Bible, explaining that the character of the Bible was even higher than the Shogun. Naturally this did not sit well with the Shogun. So began a long period of ostracization and casting out of Christians in Japan. Google makes hardware, it's not like Google isn't in China, but if Google wants to get into the rich multimedia aspects of a Chinese person's everyday life, it will either be through government certified hardware, or otherwise attained hardware and software. the biggest challenge is that the network is entirely controlled by the party. Honestly though, de- censorship of a large area of China for a long enough period of time would probably have real life sociodynamic consequences. In short instead of chanting "Chinese money is no good here" how about you start chanting "mesh networks that circumvent centralized data storage for all"? As long as the party controls the network you must play by their rules. So why don't we have a fully mesh distributed decentralized internet yet? It is almost 2019, do you know where your bits are?
They (google employees) enable capitalization and market of leaky personal data made more leaky through browser and protocol but put a brave face on something overt like this?
It’s shameful that google employees supported google’s attacks on Wikileaks but now find so much righteous indignation when the state that doesn’t want secrets out is China. Wow.
That's nice that the kids are standing up for something (that's unlikely to affect them, of course). But I would be far more impressed if they stood up against something closer to home, like personalized search results, dark patterns to make sure they monitor you, or monitoring whether you agreed to it or not, misuse of private data, creation of filter bubbles etc. etc. But that might actually affect their paychecks, so no, can't have that.
So, 36 people (at present, anyway) sign a letter. What in the flying frig is that actually supposed to accomplish? There's nothing really actionable here; you've got the nothingness of "that leadership commit to transparency, clear communication, and real accountability."
Are these people going to actually do anything - quit in protest, sabotage, what? No, they are going to whine, and keep drawing their very lucrative salaries and benefits. Put up or shut up.
Activism takes many forms. They’re not mutually exclusive. Your contribution to this discussion (with a throwaway account) is to put boundaries on what activities you deem acceptable.
You're criticizing a snapshot of a process. I'd agree with your criticisms if we knew this was the end-game, but we don't know that it is. It is not, in general, the correct move to escalate to the maximum level in situations like this, so considered as a process this isn't necessarily a bad thing. The next move is currently Google's.
Why would you start with ultimatums and demands? I think it's better to start soft and get a discussion going. Maybe these people are smart enough to realize that they don't know everything.
OH these fresh young naive minds, who think censorship never happens. Censorship happens ALL THE TIME. The Radio, TV, and Film industries in the USA - they have all been censored, from the very beginning.[1] So it was self-censorship at the behest of the government. What's the difference? Censorship is all around us.
Americans self-censor tits and genitals, Europeans self-censor violence. Censorship is everywhere.
I find the way you phrase this super-alienating. If anything, it pushes me away from your cause.
1. Comes across as ad-hominem
2. Comes across as emotional/pedantic
3. For example, yes "pornography" is censored on broadcast TV, but many other things aren't. There are obviously degrees of censorship.
4. If your goal is to convince people that things are more censored than they realize you might want to cite some real world examples of political censorship that happened in America that support that point.
5. Your whole comment is pretty much irrelevant to the discussion at hand. Regardless of whether censorship is common or uncommon in the US, it's still meaningful to take a stance against creating a politically-censored search in China.
I don't think the user you are responding intends his comment to be putting forward some watertight argument. It sounds light-hearted to me. It's puzzling to me that you'd pick on this one particular comment to produce a detailed, five-point rebuttal in a thread like this one where there are so many other more important targets to go after.
Here's my motivation - I think there are actually some pretty scary problems out there. However, I think it is possible to talk about an important issue in a way so emotional that it actually backfires and creates a negative impression of those who care about an issue.
For example, Alex Jones is right to lament the pesticide atrazine that changes frogs sexes [1], but by virtue of being Alex Jones actually may look a wider swath of environmentally-conscious look somewhat unreliable by association.
Another example is Al Gore: even though he had an important message on climate change his manner was so distasteful that it's hard to argue he helped the cause.
When I see someone who agrees with my beliefs but comes across as hysterical I try to metaphorically "hold a mirror up" so they can learn to phrase their message in a way that won't drive people away.
Ah! My bad for not realizing that. I would only add that those who give so much weight to tone/delivery heuristics are also to blame. But I see your point, I feel similarly frustrated sometimes and I can definitely imagine myself acting the same way you did.
> I think this whole discussion is extremely naive.
As in, every single comment in it states that censorship wouldn't exist if Google didn't cooperate with China on this? Or that there is just "censorhip" or "no censorship", without any further qualification or context?
That's clearly not the case, so what is this even in response to?
If only giving up salary was equivalent to serving more ads. I get paid by serving ads so by actively not serving ads they actively not get paid. On top of that offering some of what you do get paid to make up the difference leads to zero quickly. I do agree with you in principle, more alternatives should have been offered if they really wanted to catch someone's ear in upper management
Im an engine mechanic by trade, and our shops handle bids for cash strapped local governments that outsource their motor pool maintenance. We do things like fire trucks and police cars, but we were working on a new regional idea as a "service center" for municipalities that purchased MRAP combat vehicles for their police departments. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MRAP
We all, especially the veterans I work with, hated this idea. MRAP's are for combat, not police work, and have a dangerous propensity to roll over in city streets or escalate already violent situations. 14 of us sent a signed letter to the owner and senior management detailing our major concerns and heard nothing back for about a month. Then out of the blue we got a call for a meeting with 3-4 very senior managers at a local irish bar.
They paid for dinner and tried to explain how the business would be extremely lucrative. we would all see major bonuses, we could hire more workers, and grow the business faster than just large truck repair. It took 3 very emotional hours, but we eventually talked down a handful of people from making a very wrong decision.
for a week after, we were all sort of stunned that it actually worked at all. Tire cages meant for MRAP tires were cut up and turned into random parts holders, or as new hangers for air lines...one even replaced our mailbox post.