its makes me wonder if media is responsible for the hypocrisy in most of us?
Saudi Money Fuels the Tech Industry. It’s Time to Ask Why
121–130 of 289 posts
Re: Saudi Money Fuels the Tech Industry. It’s Time to Ask Why
#122Saudi oil fuels most of the world for that matter. Maybe we should all be asking ourselves questions about how we live?
Re: Saudi Money Fuels the Tech Industry. It’s Time to Ask Why
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
I took that as people need to be a little more honest and accept that those slogans are lies and bullshit. This kind of attitude is exactly the problem. Sure, they are for profit, but since when is that the only thing that matters? I would never knowingly take blood money from a dictator, even if it meant I lived an impoverished life. If the company I worked for took such money, I would begin looking for alternate em…
I would never knowingly take blood money from a dictator, even if it meant I lived an impoverished life. Even if you would need this money to keep your own wife and children alive?
The point is made in the article that a lot of this money was not taken in order to stay alive at all. The concrete example is Slack taking $250 million that they haven't even earmarked for anything in particular, just "operational flexibility".
It's a nice play on emotions to bring up "wife and children", but that's not reality here.
Re: Saudi Money Fuels the Tech Industry. It’s Time to Ask Why
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wouldn't say "nobody." I am personally aware of people who have, for example, turned down money from Yuri Milner/DST for reasons that were at least somewhat moral in nature. So it does happen. But these people had other good options so it was really a choice of who they were going to take money from. It's when you don't have a choice or a questionably moral party offers significantly better terms that it's hard to…
Just curious, what's the moral problem with Yuri Milner? I don't know much about him except that he's Russian, which I sure hope isn't considered a moral problem in its own right.
There was a lively discussion yesterday surrounding Milner and a NYT article: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/05/world/yuri-milner-faceboo...
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15631084
Re: Saudi Money Fuels the Tech Industry. It’s Time to Ask Why
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
Same answer: simple avarice. There is a lot of Saudi money and they are willing to invest it. And their money is just as good for hiring programmers and renting servers as anyone else's.
yep kind of confused to. The silicon valley is a for-profit sector, when they write "diversity, inclusiveness, fairness" and so forth on their banners they are very much qualifying this within a business context. People need to be a little more honest and accept that those slogans are marketing messages, nobody in the valley is seriously going to turn an investment away for moral reasons
Surely there's some people they'd turn down money from. I doubt anyone in the valley is gonna accept a check publicly from harvey weinstein right now. You're right that it's a business decision more than moral, but given enough pressure, the business decision will tilt the other way.
Re: Saudi Money Fuels the Tech Industry. It’s Time to Ask Why
#126There is something to this argument, but it's ruined. The author and many others don't like Saudi Arabia and Russia. That's the main reason for advocating a boycott of their investment money, because while the author mentions the poor human rights records of those two countries as the reason, there are plenty of other countries with such records. The main example of which is China, which is of course not mentioned. T…
I kind of agree with you, but I think you muddy your argument by getting into the weeds somewhat. For me this whole thing is pretty simple - where do you draw your line?
I mean, off the top of my head here's a rough list, in my extremely rough estimation, of human rights offenders from bad to good:
badness country
100% DPRK
90% Saudi Arabia
80% Dubai
70% Russia
60% China
50% USA
40% India
30% Japan
20% Australia
10% Norway
0% Antarctica
Stating "My line is 65% bad or less" is a reasonable argument.
Re: Saudi Money Fuels the Tech Industry. It’s Time to Ask Why
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
Same answer: simple avarice. There is a lot of Saudi money and they are willing to invest it. And their money is just as good for hiring programmers and renting servers as anyone else's.
A very good explanation of why capitalism is an imoral system. Anyone who can't understand this simple fact is just losing their times. The shadier your scheme for making money, the further away you get (as long as you don't go to jail) because that's the whole nature of the beast.
Yeah, I'm not sure what the fruit of this is going to be. It's a nice reminder that most business/industry is outside of morals. It's not that all of it is immoral, but rather that it exists without any moral requirement and most of the times not having morals is an advantage.
Also, if people really thought SV had any care at all for ethics and morals even before this they must've missed pretty much all of the news about SV for years and years. Not caring about what's right is expected, as long as you don't get caught. It's just a risk/reward thing.
Re: Saudi Money Fuels the Tech Industry. It’s Time to Ask Why
#128So taking money from a government is now "losing your moral compass"
OKAY. Yes, keep trying to tell us what to think that worked out SOOOO well last year.
Re: Saudi Money Fuels the Tech Industry. It’s Time to Ask Why
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well if you want to talk sanctions, I'd say selling them $110 billion in weapons a few months back is slightly more concerning than slamming shut the bank counter screens on them.
Selling weapons to Saudis has been going on for decades, Trump, Obama, Clinton, Bush... all have been selling them weapons for billions of dollars. It's pretty big hypocrisy of US, on one hand you consider Iran the most evil nation state in the world (or at least ME region) and have been sanctioning them for decades (with slight easing of that approach recently), on the other hand nobody bats an eye for selling weapo…
> I never could understand this big glaring hypocrisy from my European point of view.
Surely you're joking. All the major European nations have been masters of exactly what you're describing for centuries. It has been historically routine European behavior.
There are plenty of modern examples of it. See: the French, UK and German relationship with Iraq pre Gulf War and their assistance with Iraq vs Iran. Germany massively supplied Iraq with the ability to make chemical weapons.
Before the US made the mistake of deeply intertwining itself throughout what goes on in the Middle East, the major European nations had been at it for centuries (and several of them are still very actively doing exactly the same things the US is doing, usually in proportion to their economic or military capabilities).
Re: Saudi Money Fuels the Tech Industry. It’s Time to Ask Why
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
...How? How do you get a diverse and often quarrelsome world to agree on something that huge?
Minimum standards of conduct before a nation is allowed to do trade another nation or to join a trade agreement...or basically like most other negotiations.
Ok, and if one country does that, then other countries have an incentive to ignore the agreement, and accept all that sweet sweet money.