I'm not sure that more nefarious aims need to be posited than 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.
maybe you didn't mean it this way, but i was struck by the nonchalance of this statement, as if being able to spend money justifies taking the investment. and i presume that's exactly why the article was written, to question that kind of stance.
now i love tech, and will defend our ability to progress and advance and make new things where there were none. and sometimes that requires compromise, like taking money from flawed people and institutions (as we all are). but none of us gets a free pass from morality, not even in business. these need to be considered, weighed and balanced decisions.
just because we codify our morality in law and abdicate enforcement to police doesn't mean that we shouldn't hold each other acccountable as well. in fact, holding each other accountable is crucial to ensuring a fair and just society. sometimes we must sacrifice a bit today to make sure we have justice tomorrow. a functioning society requires that we keep each others' avarice in check.
What? That's news to me. What about the entire defence industry? What about all the politicians that take a cushy job in the companies they helped during their time in office and who can be directly held accountable by the electorate? And why should anyone question the Saudis when they just signed a multi billion dollar weapon deal with the US government. Your statement sounds very naive.
To a degree I agree with this statement though. Morality in politics and corporations seems to be purely a tool for those without morality. That is to say, "X would never do that, why do we need laws for it?"
As far as I'm concerned, morality is for a person, unique and without power. If any (meaningful, I guess) power is obtained, such as in companies and politicians, checks and balances need to be in place to prevent abuse, corruption, etc.
We seriously need vast and in depth auditing in politics, because morality is long failed the world.
My point is that politicians cannot be relied upon to have morality. Checks and balances are needed to ensure even those without morals adhere to some sane laws.
To the list of examples of people getting a free pass from morality, I'd add the entire advertising industry, and quite a lot of stuff done in journalism. And many small business owners.
/sarcasm
If most people had the same philosophy you described, USA would have stopped ALL oil imports after 9/11, and start massive investments in electric vehicles and public transportation right then.
If a US investor offers you $50m for 10% of your company, and a Saudi investor offers you $100m for 10% of your company -- which one would you take?
What? It's certainly not the business role to make any moral decisions - while we don't yet have true simple responsibility principle in our society, we're thankfully have some separation of responsibility. If you think that a certain country is immoral and we shouldn't do business with it, lobby for sanctions - this way all businesses will have to abide, without (1) doing things that are completely out of their responsibilities (passing judgement) and (2) failing at their main mission - ROI - by voluntarily giving up competitive advantage.
You forget that businesses don't make decisions at all. A business is not a person, it has no capability to make decisions. The employees that work for the company make the decisions, and they certainly have an obligation to behave ethically.
What? How exactly did they enter into this obligation? Also, how on Earth can you have an obligation that involves a term that everyone interprets in his own way?
By being born.
You're right; it would be much more honest to ask about the influence of Saudi money and Saudi oil in American business, government, and society more generally. But that's not a conversation anyone close to power wants to have; for one thing, the conclusions are uncomfortable, and for another, no one's hands are clean.
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
It's when you don't have a choice or a questionably moral party offers significantly better terms that it's hard to turn it down.
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15631084
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 employment.
No one is asking why do people take money from bad people, no one is that naive and it's naive to think that they are. We're all familiar with the concept of greed. What they're asking is why do we let this happen in a country that boasts about its commitment to democracy and human rights?
don't get me wrong, I care about this as much as you do. I'm just saying that the valley itself is not the right place for this, it's a political matter. we shouldn't waste our time going on a deep introspection tour into 'tech values', they have a duty towards their shareholders as much as BP or Exxon.
Or as little. The concept of fiduciary duty is just a hack to keep corporations working in the service of capital, rather than, you know, the common good or whatever. It's neither a legal standard nor an economic imperative, just a convenient myth. I guess it can be encoded into the charter of a company, in which case it is their imperative, but I digress.
But I totally agree that it's absurd that this debate is being scoped to the tech industry.
Basically Silicon Valley companies are very vocal about protecting human rights (which is good), and turn around and accept funding from nations that don't value them.
And it's not like these SV Companies didn't have any other source of funding.
The let part is very curious for its implication. What would the proposal be exactly, other than using violence and bureaucracy (every investment goes through an inherently corrupt government investment approval board) to curb free association and dictate capital flows through a command & control filter?
Want to invest in Coca Cola? No you may not, they've killed millions of people with obesity, diabetes and cancer over decades. So says some government tyrant dictating what you're allowed to invest into.
Want to start a marijuana company and take an investment from another marijuana company? No you may not, it's a schedule one drug that is evil, according to some government drug enforcement tyrant. They're not about to let you do such a thing.
You'd have to isolate yourself from half the planet economically to follow it to its proper conclusion. That includes: China, most of Africa, most of the Middle East, half of South America, several Eastern European nations, Russia, along with plausibly India and the US. And really where would we draw the line (other than arbitrarily by previously mentioned government tyrants)? Let's review the historical slave trade practices of various European nations for example, surely that counts against them in this absurdist premise. No investments are to ever be allowed from the Netherlands accordingly.
We live in the real world, where things are not black and white, but that line you talk about? It's called law and we will be spending at least the next couple of centuries working out the kinks.
Because talk is cheap, but comfortable lies work.
The case can easily be made that part of the American rise to power was basically war profiteering.
Even Russia enjoys whataboutism wrt to American morality...
Heck did you take money from a Bank? Would you surprise you to know that virtually every bank actively launders money for drug lords, terrorists and every other sort of undesirables?
Money by definition isn’t clean, Saudi Arabia, UAE and the likes have one of the largest investment funds in the world you can’t withdraw a dollar from a bank without touching that money.
Do you think I'm an idiot? I know that basically half the things I own are at the expense of others, like my nice monitors and other electronics. However, this is a huge step away from taking money from dictatorships and slave traders. Let's be sure we are both talking about the same thing here. I hope to one day apply the skills I have gained at the expense of others to better the lives of the less fortunate to a much greater extent than I have harmed them. It is my ethical duty to do so.
I'm not some confused idealist and I don't appreciate your condescending attitude. I do not personally have a bank account. It is unavoidable that my company has a bank account, and the fact that the money is dirty is a separate issue and needs to be addressed. On the other hand, it isn't unavoidable to turn down investments from bad characters. In the event that my company would knowingly accept such money, I would leave. So I don't understand your point.
You're not the first person to try this angle, and honestly others have made a better argument than you. Stop playing devil's advocate, and let's talk about the reality we actually live in.
Are you wearing your glasses? What VC are you talking about?
I would never knowingly take blood money from a dictator, even if it meant I lived an impoverished life.
If my wife hates me for not taking blood money, I have failed to find a compatible life partner.
If my children hate me for it, I have failed to educate them about morality.
Whatever kind of ill will falls my way as a result of sticking to my guns and valuing the herd over the individual, I will take it with a smile. Because I can sleep at night knowing that I didn't decide that my own petty little problems are more important than the problems faced by people living under dictatorship.
Love can be an incredibly powerful thing. Love can be an incredibly selfish thing. Love can bring peace to all who accept it. Love can be the spark that leads to war. It is neither purely a good or evil thing. It cannot be used as an excuse for supporting the systematic degradation of human rights. That is love being selfish. Because it's not about the wives and children of the world, it is about your wife and your children.
> If I had a friend and loved him because of the benefits which this brought me and because of getting my own way, then it would not be my friend that I loved but myself. I should love my friend on account of his own goodness and virtues and account of all that he is in himself. Only if I love my friend in this way do I love him properly.
-- Meister Eckhart
> If a person loves only one other person and is indifferent to all others, his love is not love but a symbiotic attachment, or an enlarged egotism. Yet most people believe that love is constituted by the object, not by the faculty. In fact, they even believe that it is proof of the intensity of their love when they do not love anybody except the "loved" person. [..] Because one does not see that love is an activity, a power of the soul, one believes that all that is necessary to find is the right object - and that everything goes by itself afterward. This attitude can be compared to that of the man who wants to paint but who, instead of learning the art, claims that he just has to wait for the right object - and that he will paint beautifully when he finds it.
-- Erich Fromm, "The Art of Loving" (1956)
I will read the Mark Twain story you referenced in the other post tonight, and will share my thoughts with you on it later.
It seems we both see the forest for the trees with this issue, and I appreciate the quotes you've left me. They've given me something to chew on.
It's a nice play on emotions to bring up "wife and children", but that's not reality here.
"But what if you were hanging from a cliff and only a job offer from Pol Pot could save you.. "
Because that's not missing the point at all.
My principle on this matter is more important than any emotion I may have.
Some people feel like it's ok to be selfish as long as they don't directly see the results of their selfishness. Yet imagine if every time you went to pick up your check, you were forced to watch a woman get stoned to death because someone raped her, and the ones doing the stoning were the ones handing you the check.
Any person that is okay with this scenario is a scourge on this planet.
Any person who isn't okay with this scenario, but is ok with taking blood money from foreign countries where they do not have to see the violence actually taking place, well honestly I just pity them for living their life in such a state of confusion.
People love to argue for the abuser. Any argument you can make for "having" to, say, become an SS officer to feed your family, is outweighed by the much more justifiable need to kill that SS officer to protect many more lives.
The people who are on the receiving end of stuff like this usually don't get to post on HN, and to signal obedience towards their murderers, while giving no real thought to those they murder, well... as Ilse Aichinger said, to forget the dead is to murder them again.
If I'd live under circumstances where I indeed had no other choice, maybe. Luckily, I live in Western society, so the answer to your question is "can't happen here".
... right now. But it could not that long ago, and when the wind changes, maybe it could again. Why does the West take oil/blood money? Because we are - no pun intended - a society built on sand.
I can't think of an example that a modern corporation has done something against their benefit for purely for moral reasons.
This is the responsibility of effective government regulation and consumer choice. If we leave it up to the market, we will be continually disappointed.
The thing is each of those serves useful functions so it would be harmful to eliminate or neuter any one of them.
So it seems clear to me there is a lot of value in a division in power between all three. But the trend has been towards more government power, and to more private capital in fewer hands.
I'm sure there is a better way than having this framework, I just don't know if anyone has come up with it yet.
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.
I move among different circles of friends. Some studied philosophy and political science, others arts in general, and others computer science.
It's scary that tech people have this very "blase" attitude (oversimplification perhaps?) that one's motive when it comes to how to handle distribution of money comes down to simple "meritocracy" and/or "greed."
As if the very fact that blaming the innate human debility of giving in to avarice or greed does not presuppose much more problems, such as ulterior motives, cultural bias, nepotism, etc.
There is, of course, the notion that the bigger a corporation gets (e.g., a conglomerate), the more dehumanizing it is. With such large sums of money being moved around (to whatever end or outcome) comes more "bottom line" interests and "corporate interests," and as such, it is less about the individual. The repercussions of this, which are pretty evident to me, is that it creates an institution or entity or agent ("corporation," if you want) that does not have a moral framework or acts not humanely but immorally, while its shareholders and investors can sleep comfortably at night because they distance the self from the company, so it is not the person acting immorally, but some "unknown force" (the Company), which, using reason, cannot actually be "immoral," because surely only humans can act in such a way.
What a world.
but even then I disagree, just look at the life expectancy of the billions of people under capitalism.
Milton Friedman - Is Capitalism Humane?
And no, nobody is 100% innocent and nobody is 100% guilty. Nobody made themselves out of nothing. Everybody started out as a helpless baby and the range of experiences one can get exposed to before even being able to attempt defend oneself is vast. But so what if every abuser got abused in some way or another, or was withheld some crucial things needed for development? Then don't hate them, but absolutely stop them.
Islam forbids them from charging compound interest, but allows them to seek riches in the shared profits of successful ventures.
Without making any comment on the issue of Saudi money, I take issue with the reasoning there. That's effectively saying "there is a simple potential explanation, therefore there's no need to investigate". It's not like being simple therefore means it is the correct explanation, not does it mean that other potential explanations are therefore wrong or invalid.
Are we more likely to see more inherited value come from net negative cash ROI investments? (example - campaign donation) Sure. However, I think it's wrong to assume that just because we return a net positive cash ROI on a financial investment that we shouldn't assume that a non-cash ROI value is achievable.
Is it just me or does the NYC article sound screamly racist
How about an overall view of broader things like human rights, corruption, democracy etc?
The Arab Spring began in 2010 and lasted several years. The (first) Saudi investment in Twitter didn’t happen until December of 2011, and by then much of the region was already on fire. In fact, it’s notable that after the $300M investment, the following summer is when Syria devolved into total Civil War - with February being when Assad invaded Homs.
So, no, I’m still skeptical that we should be allowing this. Given the regional alignment of the Saudis, seeing Syria (an Iranian ally) devolve into chaos wouldn’t have been something they’d exactly move mountains to stop.
Who is we. It's a very different thing to say that there is an ideological compromise or hipocrisy, to State enforced commercial blockades.
And the dire situation of syria doesn't have anything to do with Tweeter. Its as relatable as saying that we should ban dates because they come from the middle east, funding terrible wars.