251–260 of 305 posts
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Not a good example though. Many Chinese see the current Taiwan government as a failure and use it as an argument that China should NOT adopt western democracy
"Many Chinese"... where did you get this number from?
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It's not big enough or fast to stop Google in China.
Not with that attitude, no.
I'm saying if this is important to you, don't be complicit... because the current response to this isn't enough to stop it.
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It is not that westerners come from a different set of base assumptions, it is that western society has moved past those base assumptions. Western monarchies were divine rights, people died fighting against those viewpoints. It is not an assumed superiority. We learn the lesson through our history, whether this lesson is right or wrong. We too had traditions of divine right, holistic medicine, censorship and similar,…
Good point. We changed as a society, and what we have now would not have suited us a few hundred years ago, and what we had then would not suit us now. If we had tried to introduce democracy into medieval Europe, it would have failed just as badly. But by forcing our values onto SE Asian cultures, we are assuming that they cannot come up with "better" answers, and assuming that our way is the only way. Maybe there's…
There's a lot of "forcing [of] values" going on in many SE Asian cultures, but the forcing is indigenous and towards maintaining existing power structures against other indigenous desires for reform.
If left alone, those "'better' answers" you speak of could be to the question of how authoritarians can suppress the kinds of cultural and political changes that happened in the West to bring about democracy.
In the end, I don't think SE Asian democracy would look exactly like modern Western society, but that doesn't mean that the status quo should be left undisturbed as some kind of experiment.
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Pushback from employees, human rights groups, and congress has already significantly set back the project. The fight has to continue, but I don't understand your defeatism. Source: I publicly resigned from Google over dragonfly and dedicated months of my life and income to fighting it.
I admire you courage but have you considered the possibility that you might be wrong on this? Probability that China would change anything because of lack of Google products is about zero. In fact, not having Google benefits them even more because now there is no one reviewing of any censorship rules. If Google is there (1) they can minimize censorship as much as possible by pushing back frequently (2) people in Chin…
The CCP doesn't value Google, and they will ban them if they "push back." If Google wants to operate in China, they will have to be the most slavish of lackeys.
You're also ignoring the leverage the CCP will gain over Google's non-PRC operations by allowing them in. It's not hard to find recent examples of the CCP/PRC using economic leverage on foreign companies to make them fall in line with its political positions (e.g. representation of Taiwan on airline websites, treatment of Tibet and the Dalai Lama, etc.). I think the most important aspect of Project Dragonfly is that leverage.
Google execs know that as long as they have the best benefits in the industry and keep their workers cushy they'll also have complete control over them. This is because when you're at the top of the food chain, very few people are actually willing to put their money where their mouth is and take meaningful action. It's deliciously hypocritical to see Google workers here (and HN posters in general) lament Facebook wor…
I don’t think I would want to develop a censored search engine (though I’d certainly reconsider for enough money), nor do I think it’s “right” (whatever that means), but I still think that in the intetests of its shareholders, it has a moral and fiscal obligation to make as much money as possible, in perpuitity. I think this implies that Google should go into China. It’s unlikely that Google would make less net profi…
> it has a moral and fiscal obligation to make as much money as possible, in perpuitity. This is simply untrue. Also a 'moral obligation to make as much money as possible' is fucking hilarious.
I don't get the pushback....you signed up to work for a for-profit publicly traded corporation. You received your benefits and compensation. Now suddenly, you have a problem with your employer trying to do its job which is continue to please wall street that impacts the share price? it's kinda like that pushback from MS that was puzzling too....whether you like it or not, the very work you are doing in university to…
People often have some amount of morals that go into which job they have. This typically plays into the choice of jobs. Taking a job that has military contracts is a moral stance, as is taking a job that does not. Taking a job that supports dictatorships is a moral stance, as is taking a job that does not. When a company changes their moral stances, this acts against the previous choices of the employees who work the…
The difference is a corporation is void of moral conscience, so you can't really expect to bring your own Judeo-Christian ethics here
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There are many different fronts to wage this fight on; changing consumer behavior is only one of them. Getting the project halted is important in its own right for the reason that it helps prevent the normalization of American tech companies actively aiding political oppression under the guise of abiding by 'local laws and regulations'. As I stated in a few comments down below: if we let American tech companies build…
I totally understand and support your stance. Total respect for resigning for idealistic reasons. But I have another point of view on the subject after having worked in SE Asia. I'm not trying to contradict anyone here, just give my (hopefully informed) opinion. There are no democracies in SE Asia. There are a couple of countries that pretend to democracy (Cambodia and the Philippines spring to mind), but even these…
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Same with Facebook's app. I legitimately think the outrage over this was overblown (and I said as much at the time [1]), but I can see the other side of it. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19031055
Onavo didn't disclose that and then FB Research went targeting teenagers. Doesn't that feel like it deserved more backlash?
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> it has a moral and fiscal obligation to make as much money as possible, in perpuitity. This is simply untrue. Also a 'moral obligation to make as much money as possible' is fucking hilarious.
How’s that? And what is untrue about the obligations to its shareholders? Not maximizing shareholder value is illegal.
Someone already explained much of it to you 13 hours ago, in a reply to another comment of yours expressing the similar ideas: