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Comment by fshbbdssbbgdd | Hacker News Reader

A lot of people seem to think this is bad because it looks like colonialism. I think that’s a bad take. Indeed there’s an evil history of western exploitation of Africans. That consists of territorial conquest, slavery, stripping of natural resources.

Every country that managed to get out of poverty did it by moving up the value chain from subsistence farming to eg. textile manufacturing to eg. electronics.

Here, Twitter is hiring knowledge workers and paying them a good wage. They aren’t enslaving anyone. Ghana is growing a middle class, entering the tech industry, and will be able to enjoy a bigger share of the wealth created in the global economy. It’s great news.

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When countries get excluded from trading with the West and from accessing western tech, it does great harm to them. (e.g. the history of trade embargoes against Iran, something which is a serious problem for both the country and anyone from there wishing to leave and move elsewhere)

Self exclusion isn't necessarily a better thing. It's complicated to actually remedy this history.

> Every country that managed to get out of poverty did it by moving up the value chain from subsistence farming to eg. textile manufacturing to eg. electronics.

Yes, but they also built domestic industries which had its gains taxed and used to improve the nation. Doesn't work as well when an international corporation books all of the profits overseas.

It would be nice if Twitter’s presence helped kindle domestic entrepreneurship in the long run.

Twitter’s operating margin in 2020 was 1% (in previous years it was negative). Most of its revenue went to compensating employees. Governments can make a lot more money taxing Twitter’s payroll than they can by taxing its profits.

There is a lot of tax revenue to be had - but we still can't excuse the elephant in the room which is that tech companies avoid taxes like nobodies business since the tax code still isn't well suited to actually evaluating how they earn money.

They still haven't figured out how to avoid payroll taxes, however. This argument is a red herring, as it usually focuses exclusively corporate income taxes and ignores the multitude of other taxes corporations have to pay to conduct business.

I should be clearer. I don't mean corporate taxes, I mean capital gains. Ghanaian engineers will produce intellectual capital for Twitter, whose value will be primarily sent back to the United States.

On other hand those engineers get wages which are taxed and spend on local economy. So I think that side is positive, even if intellectual capital is moved. Now if local market share will be lost to big international companies, that is certainly negative for a country.

They also get experience, exposure and connections that they can leverage to grow the local economy over the course of their careers.

The trick is that your local employees receive training and good salaries from the international corporations and create their own companies.

It's very interesting to me that the people who get paid frankly obscene amounts of money to build tech are suddenly full of concern when people in the developing world also have a chance to make said obscene amounts of money.

Suddenly everyone is an expert on colonialism and international relations.

Please don't post flamewar comments to HN. It's not what this site is for.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

If that growing middle class becomes dependent on westerners for employment, they will become westernized. Colonization can be extremely 'peaceful'.

Ghana is a former British colony (Gold Coast) that gained independence in 1957, it is already highly westernized, certainly in Accra (where I have to assume Twitter GH is going to be based - maybe Kumasi?). I'm firmly anti colonialist but I don't think this is that at all.

This is absurd. I don't know why but modern politics is just plain self destructive.

You get people like this criticizing even the most minor form of foreign employment from a western corporation but absolutely nobody gives a crap when foreign aid is used to subsidize weapons manufacturers and directly destabilize a country by providing perverse incentives.

You dismiss dependence on westerners for employment but do you know what the alternative is? The alternative is to do everything yourself and there is no way you can compete against western nations because they band together while every African nation tries to stay independent and dislikes their neighbor just as much as they dislike westerners.

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