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Comment by tmpz22 | Hacker News Reader

> "HR told me that Sergey's response to it was, 'Why not? They're my employees,'" Ayers said. "But you don't have employees for f---ing! That's not what the job is."

Ooooof. That shatters the "Early on Google's culture was great!" narrative...

[1]: https://www.businessinsider.com/google-sergey-brin-employees...

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Not really. Eric Schmidt (also a notorious womanizer) had a saying while I was there: "More revenue solves all known problems." When everybody at the company is getting rich, they're all working on exciting problems, Fortune and Time and BusinessWeek and Playboy magazines are featuring employees on the cover, and everyone you meet is impressed at where you work, then employees are willing to overlook a large number of shenanigans and petty injustices. It's only when there's no chance at getting rich that people care about the little things like being treated fairly, not being sexually harassed, and so on.

Lest you think I'm being cynical (I am, but also realistic), note that similar cultural shifts have also played out at other Silicon Valley startups (notably Uber and Zenefits), that the financial and cryptocurrency worlds have even worse cultural problems, and that 49% of America elected a president whose attitude toward women is "grab 'em by the pussy!", usually explicitly citing his promise to bring back jobs, glory, and power to America as the reason why they overlook his personal failings.

I don't think the 2016 election is a good analogy, as both candidates had their share of skeletons in the closet, with the non-winning party arguably having skeletons that were more of a national security risk than a cultural one. People seem to conveniently forget this fact though.

1. That is unarguably false. 2. There were other candidates. 3. Mr Trump also won the primary.

We'll have to agree to disagree on point 1, as there's plenty of common knowledge out there that I don't need to muddy the thread with.

The parent comment was referring to the general election of 49%, and the "grab by the pussy" story broke after the primary was over, so point 3 is a straw man argument.

Edit: Sometimes I underestimate how in the dark people really are on the subject so I did a quick search to find this op ed which shows that, yes, there really were issues that voters were concerned about from a national security perspective, namely the contributions to multiple civil wars. https://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/political_co...

Point 3 is not a straw man argument; he was objectively a horrible person before that quote came to light. It wasn't remotely surprising to anyone.

Did he start 4 civil wars though? That's my point, a lot of voters weigh that heavily against what you bring up. Don't shoot the messenger.

Who exactly do you think started four civil wars?

Just because some right wing opinion piece thinks Hillary Clinton started 4 civil wars doesn't make it true.

she convinced Obama to back military coups against the democratically-elected leaders of Honduras and Egypt.

The Intercept (no friend of the Clintons!) writes:

A retired U.S. military intelligence officer, who helped with the lobbying and the Honduran colonels’ trip, told me on condition of anonymity that the coup supporters debated “how to manage the U.S.” One group, he said, decided to “start using the true and trusted method and say, ‘Here is the bogeyman, it’s communism.’ And who are their allies? The Republicans.”

A network of former Cold Warriors and Republicans in Congress loudly encouraged Honduras’s de facto regime and criticized the newly elected Obama administration’s handling of the crisis.

https://theintercept.com/2017/08/29/honduras-coup-us-defense...

By the time Clinton got involved the coup was complete.

The others are the same.

Read the US reaction to the Egyptian coup: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_Egyptian_coup_d%27%C3%A9t.... It's easy to criticise it, but hard to come up with what the reaction should have been. It's worth noting that both parties had fairly similar reactions here.

Does anyone really believe that Clinton and Obama were backing militant Islamists in Syria and Libya? The countries were a mess and they were stuck trying to find a way forward - they didn't (and shouldn't have!) wanted Gaddafi or Assad in power, but both conflicts were multi-sided messes where one group would get taken over by another.

Ignoring USA politics for a moment, can we admit that the current state of Syria is better for both residents and the world than the current state of Libya? I.e., that it's better not to completely destroy society, subjecting everyone who lives there to unrelenting death, violence, poverty, and slave markets?

Err I think you have that back to front?

It's Syria that is mostly destroyed and has millions of refugees. Libya is bad but not quite as bad.

I agree with your point that there is degrees of destruction though.

Yes they both have produced lots of refugees. The Bosporus is easier to cross than the Mediterranean, so more Syrian refugees have ended up in Europe. Lots of people died and had their lives destroyed in both wars. The Syrian conflict, even though it started later than that in Libya, is at this point largely winding down except for one location in which "rebels" still remain. The recognized sovereign government maintains public order and provides life-improving services. Libya OTOH is still entirely a hellscape of violence and privation. They have regular public slave markets, etc.

You'll see occasional media content stressing the horrors of Syria, but there's never anything about Libya. That's because reporters (justifiably) fear to go there.

I'm not trying to underplay the Libyan situation at all, but do you have any evidence that it's worse than Syria?

They both started in 2011. The Syrian conflict maybe winding down, but has started a new phase (in Syrian Kurdistan).

Syria had slave markets too.

The UNHCR data[1][2] shows a lot more refugees from Syria than Libya (don't forget Libya is often used by refugees from other parts of Africa as their outgoing port to Europe, so news reports on refugees arrivals from Libya don't mean the refugees were Libyan).

One source on the Wikipedia article claimed 1/3 of the Libyan population had fled to Tunisia. This seems non-credible: Neither Tunisia nor any refugee agency makes this claim. [3] claims "there are 2 two million Libyans abroad, mostly in Tunisia", but this is still less than half the number of Syrian refugees (over 5 million) and less than the number of registered in Turkey alone (over 3 million).

I think your "That's because reporters (justifiably) fear to go there" statement is also unfounded - in Syria journalists were targets of both ISIS and the Syrian state, and frequently murdered by either of them.

[1] https://data2.unhcr.org/en/situations/syria

[2] https://data2.unhcr.org/en/country/lby

[3] https://www.brookings.edu/blog/future-development/2015/03/17...

We've had many presidents who were not great people, it turns out that's never been a requirement for the job.

> I want the Iranians to know, if I am the president, we will attack Iran if Iran were to attack Israel -- even if there were no Congressional authorization or a clear and present danger to the U.S

I mean, as a "Clinton is the worse option" quote, that hasn't aged well this week, has it? Mind you, the entire article is just the same old "Trump is visibly awful and we can work with that" many idiots ran with and were completely wrong about.

Often bankrupt property tycoon riddled with dubious overseas Russian debt and has historic shady dealings in a number of countries doesn’t have skeletons in his closet that would impact national security?

Right. There was a reason he was Russia’s preferred candidate, and it wasn’t because they had too much kompromat on Hillary to know what to do with.

The Wiki page for CIA activities in Syria - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_activities_in_Syria#War,_2... - includes the choice quote "CIA-armed units and Pentagon-armed ones" battling each other.

If Russia had a preference, theories of kompromat look pretty weak compared to theories that maybe Trump just looked less likely to topple regimes basically on Russia's southern border. Hillary was probably going to continue in the same vein as either Bush or Obama, at least Trump would have appeared as a new draw from the deck.

Trumps "peace with Russia" pronouncements are one of his best features. It is a good year when the US president isn't flattening countries a la Bush. If there was a path to swapping out the missiles for insulting tweets that is a big win for everyone. Not to say Trump is particularly good, but really the US has an impact on the world and wide-eyed anti-Russia conspiracy theories help nobody. At least his administration has been better than Bush's for the Middle East.

I think this sums up not just big cooperate, but large part of our society in general as well. ( May be a bigger problem in US than other parts of the world, but still a problem )

I often wonder why realistic people are called cynical, even when they are facts happening everywhere in a statistically large sums. Do others live in fairy land?

Because when you simply accept the world as is, it looks a lot like you're endorsing the status quo. Especially on this site where a lot of people seem to take a weird pseudo-detached outlook. Trying to analyze things in an almost entirely emotionless judgement free manner. I think this is seen by people as enlightened.

Personally I find it genuinely disturbing. It becomes hard to tell where this sort of detached analysis ends and where it becomes just actually not caring about or not seeing the moral issues here.

This isn't really the site for people who want to create genuine social change in the world, other than through startups. The site guidelines say that what's on-topic is "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity". Curiosity is more about knowing things than doing things. I think one implicit belief held by the folks who started this site is that if you do want to challenge entrenched power structures, the best way to do that is to be very circumspect about who you tell that you're challenging power structures, because you can expect to have a strong negative reaction from the power structures themselves. (Peter Thiel describes startups as "a conspiracy to change the world".)

There are other sites on the web that are attempting to organize people for large-scale social change, ones that are presumably watched (and cared about) by the FBI, as opposed to just being watched (with idle curiosity) by the FBI.

Peter Thiel has an extremely vested interest in preserving the status-quo. Frankly I think the notion that he knows all that much about genuinely creating any sort of movement to be questionable at best.

It's not about changing the world it's about not dehumanizing everything.

I love how you defended not trying to make the world better because HN has a ToS.

I think GP is merely suggesting that, if you are doing something truly subversive, it is best not to shout about it on a public internet forum.

Its telling that the people touting this view most often directly benefited from the situation they are now conveniently apathetic towards.

1. Make millions of dollars doing grey area work

2. Grey area work is now identified as black hat work

3. "Thats just the way it is"

Because when you simply accept the world as is, it looks a lot like you're endorsing the status quo

It looks that way only to a particular subsection of society (leftists). Given your staunch defence of unions the other day I guess that's very much consistent with your expressed outlook here.

For conservatives accepting the world as it is doesn't automatically imply endorsement or support for the status quo. It only means you accept that the world is big, you are small, and for almost all problems on a social scale there's either nothing you can do or - just as likely - any attempt to fix it via social engineering will make things worse rather than better.

This is because they view most social problems as inherent to human nature and human nature as essentially fixed. If you can't change human nature then many apparent social ills are unfixable, and indeed can't even really be described as problems to begin with, no more than people's inability to fly by flapping their arms is a "problem".

To leftists this conservative acceptance often looks like coldness, lack of compassion or outright support for the existence of problems, a view which unfortunately can often then be used to justify nastiness, no platforming, aggression or even violence against them. But it's not any of those things. It's just acceptance.

    "The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it."

--- George Bernard Shaw

I can give the cynical answer to that. Being correct is a lousy strategy for social creatures, and making the best decision within the limits of what a person knows is a nearly guaranteed way to lose out to someone who takes risks. In that context, realists are not encouraged by the broader society. Better to be surrounded by and encouraging of irrepressible optimists, they explore more and are more likely to try to change the world for the better because they don't understand the essential futility of it all.

Realists live humble, modest lives. Seek to change themselves themselves and such. Accept the futility of it all. Realistically the difference between comfortable and opulent is not as large as it is made out to be. The optimal strategy is to use an approach that is excessively risk tolerant and then hope that you are in the group of people that are lucky. Almost all the people who are 'winning at life' are using some variant of that, or descendants from someone who was.

Your risk-taking realist needs at least one more quality -- a high pain tolerance. There are two pains you need to deal with, the pain of fearing failure, and the pain of failure itself.

Failure, as in "that machine is halted, and it's not going to move ever again" kind of failure. (Of course, I guess you can always clear out some entropy and start feeding it input again..)

That to me is optimist are taking the VC route and growing at all cost. Realist are tacking the DHH route and simply just grow.

I dont see how Realist cant succeed. There are lots of Realist winning in life we just dont hear about it. There is also the assumption of realist dont take risk.

I just dont think optimist are the recipes for succeed, but neither are realist destined for failure.

>>It's only when there's no chance at getting rich that people care about the little things like being treated fairly, not being sexually harassed, and so on.

Make me a star Harvey...

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