Hacker News Reader

Comment by oliwarner | Hacker News Reader

Except that by this point, all this is expected behaviour.

If companies don't want to be complicit in these crimes, they need to extricate themselves from the country and cut all ties.

If they do want to put profit ahead of everything else, then whatever, but you don't get to defend them as doing the right thing for their employees. They're enabling the whole situation.

[Edit to bring in a sister question] "Why don't Apple pull out of China then?" - because they put profit and cheap manufacturing ahead of their morals. And apparently we don't care enough that China effected a genocide while we watched.

View on HN

> If they do want to put profit ahead of everything else, then whatever, but you don't get to defend them as doing the right thing for their employees. They're enabling the whole situation.

IMHO, cooperating with an authoritarian regime in this way should be illegal, sort of like a sanctions violation. Cook and Pachai should go to jail for this. That consequence might clarify their thinking a little.

Define "authoritarian regime"

Just because there are shades of grey, doesn’t mean we can’t tell black from white.

it's an excellent question which your reply doesn't address.

There's black and white with grey in between. Whether you report the shades of grey as black or white depends on who you ask and what is offered for comparison.

Is india an authoritarian regime? You'll find plenty of evidence going both ways. What about Belarus? Hungary? Venezuela?

The grey is precisely why having yes/no binaries like this leads to more confusion.

I am not convinced that we can tell black from white.

I also think that there ought to be a certain level of relativism when it comes to judging political systems.

Is it democratic that an unelected group of 9 people can unilaterally essentially decide the law of the land in the US?

How is the US constitutional system remotely relevant in this discussion?

Because every political system has elements of "authoritarianism"/decisions being made by unelected officials.

For instance, we often criticize Iran as being authoritarian, but compared to many of our allies elsewhere, Iran is actually relatively democratic, even if they have authoritarian "checks" just like we do with the Supreme Court.

I have a hard time understanding what you mean about Iran:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supreme_Leader_of_Iran

Seems like a dictatorship to me.

>Is it democratic that an unelected group of 9 people can unilaterally essentially decide the law of the land in the US?

Are republican (little r) systems inherently authoritarian in your view?

Do you actually fear that SCOTUS is going to start imposing some sort of autocratic control over American government? I'm not. You probably aren't either. There are institutional explanations for this.

I actually consider myself a staunch (little r) republican.

That said, Machiavelli's Discourses on Livy (a seminal republican text) was quite clear that republican mixed government does involve mixing a bit of democracy with a bit of authoritarianism/autocracy. I do think it is "authoritarian", but I don't think it is necessarily bad.

My question is merely: why can we extend this sort of support to mixed government in our country, but seemingly consider many of the other forms of mixed government in action as pure authoritarian tyranny?

I would describe qualified immunity as starkly autocratic, and it was written whole-cloth by the supreme court.

The CCP

> Define "authoritarian regime"

A simple rule of thumb definition (that could probably use some refinement) is regimes that are either explicitly anti-democratic or a sham democracy. Russia certainly falls into the latter category, as this very story demonstrates.

In most cases, it's not that hard.

Where does the US MSM and social media refusing to cover anything about Hunter Biden put us?

> Where does the US MSM and social media refusing to cover anything about Hunter Biden put us?

I'm not a huge fan of Joe Biden (as you can probably infer from my comments here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28550896), but the Hunter Biden stuff was a shameless distraction with no real substance.

So to answer your question: if the US MSM and social media was required to run smears of a sitting president against his opponent, the US would be far closer to being a sham democracy.

>but the Hunter Biden stuff was a shameless distraction with no real substance.

Uh, that's really not a strong affirmative justification for taking active measures to stop people from using your platform to share a story. And of course the real problem is not simply that the story was suppressed, but that we all know that media platforms do not in fact have a blanket policy against reporting on "shameless distractions with no real substance", and that this sort of post-hoc rationalizing of obvious partisan bias is intellectually insulting.

They do have policies against spreading misinformation.

Yes, and those policies are not evenly applied. That's the issue. iirc Twitter caught some flak for initially justifying the suppression of the story based on the fact that it had come from "hacking" the laptop, and then only let up after it was pointed out that there were many other examples of stories like this that were not suppressed.

A presidential candidates crackhead son laundering payoffs from foreign governments is a distraction?

In our case the sham is that the MSM is independent from the political powers. It’s quite elegant really. And regardless of how transparent it is, roughly half the population will reliably believe the MSM is somehow impartial, because it tells them so.

Cognitive dissonance is a hell of a drug.

US MSM did cover hunter Biden extensively. Fox and other right wing propaganda stations are still a part of the MSM.

Mind you, every other station covered it heavily too. The sitting president was impeached over the hunter Biden story

Hmmm.

Withdraw the app and you go to jail. Don’t withdraw the app and your Russian employees go to jail

Fire your Russian employees.

Then withdraw.

Hurts but if history should learn us a thing or two one of them should be not to give in to dictators.

The younger ones here are allowed to take a few minutes off to use their favorite search engine to look up the quote "peace in our time" by Chamberlain.

Edit:

It looks so simple the way I wrote it above. Please note that doing the right thing isn't easy. Telling lots of people their job is gone. Telling investors the money invested in one of the most promising markets is gone etc etc.

But I am afraid that sooner or later the alternative will be worse.

> Fire your Russian employees.

More like move them to a better place if they prefer this to simply terminating the contract. Benefits are numerous - retain already-hired quality personnel, have a good PR campaign about being moral and holy and doing the extra mile with bureaucracy (which would be true), grow some extra hairy balls overnight. Or something similar.

Good points.

Russia unlike certain others probably won't torture their loved ones because of this.

Of course, if they ever go back to Russia, they risk prosecution. Rather rough deal.

“Leave and never be able to visit your family for as long as the current regime lasts” is a tough call. People do do that, but the pain of remaining has to be very high to make the tradeoffs palatable.

Pavel Durov knows a bit of this I heard.

He doesn't. He regularly visited Saint Petersburg office after being "exiled".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_for_our_time

It won't be worse for either Cook or Pichai though.

The only winning move is not to play (i.e. don't have offices in authoritarian states)

Bingo. Those who do have offices should also feel heat from unfair competition, so this should be legalized somehow.

Option 3: choose to make less money and don't have offices in countries with human rights records as bad as russia. I know this isn't realistic, because we can't expect a company to make less money. that'd be crazy!

Surely option 4 is the best option - the US government issues a list of countries within which no US business can have any operations or sales. Better than leaving it to individual companies.

Don’t forget to write up your list and start lobbying your congressional representative

No - this is elementary game theory. By precommitting to "if I withdraw the app I will go to jail", then the Russian threat would become ineffective and they wouldn't make it to begin with.

Granted, the real world is more complicated but this is equivalent of using the strategy of disabling your steering wheel before playing a game of chicken.

It's not a game of chicken. Russia is well prepared to collide - did that many times. Threats won't work - actually jailing important Russians abroad for supporting Russian organizations under sanctions will.

Direct action is the primary working approach here.

For those reasons Google and Apple should be considered aiding and abetting Russian government now. Not quite illegal as of now - but how well it looks?

> Google and Apple [are] aiding and abetting Russian government now. Not quite illegal … - but how well it looks?

Meh, no quite as bad as the US quietly making Russia its second largest supplier of oil, no?

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-08-04/russia-ca...

If you want to starve Crazy Ivan of his forex…

The irony here is that your idea sounds pretty authoritarian!

'authoritarian regime' is a slippery slope. There can be clear human violations, but at what point does a government become authoritarian? USA has plenty of violations on its shoulders, perhaps complicit in many others. I would not call it authoritarian but it has been repressive (Citing USA as a clear example, not picking on particular politics). Genocide is distinctively clear from freedom of expression, so by no means should this be constructed to justify that. A war has many battles, so perhaps in this case there would be compromises. Why these companies are working with China needs a deeper discussion.

Why do you always bring up USA when people are talking about injustices in other countries?

Every time.

They could be simply paid opinions.

If you mean discussions at HN then that may be because folks here are mostly Americans who are interested in and aware of things in their country like any other nation. As a Russian (concluded from your post history), don't you see the same thing in Russian communities?

Assumablely in this hypothetical, it would be the USA arresting Cook and Pachai, no?

I do not support Cook and Pachal getting arrested over submitting to Putin over their employees being held hostage, but they should definitely pull Apple and Google out of Russia and Communist China. US government should help out, at least by prohibiting US citizens from traveling to these regions without a special exception. Should be easy to do during the pandemic anyway, beats me why the government is so weak about it.

I agree. All US companies should be required to fully withdraw from countries with active dictatorships.

Unfortunately, US companies have lost all trace of ethics. Most product companies now have planned obsolence, and use regulatory capture and abusive patents to grow revenues rather than putting customers first.

We are truly in the twilight of the free market.

I have an easier solution that doesn’t require making a false moral choice.

Give your customers the ability to install their own software or app stores on the hardware that they own and paid for, without requiring a monopolistic walled garden. Of course, companies like Apple would never do this because they are far too greedy.

There is F-Droid but Navalny app is not on it https://search.f-droid.org/?q=Navalny&lang=en Android does also allow installing apps directly from APK. (Crapple separate issue.) Too bad Navalny team did not try to go open-source route.

They also could have just uploaded their database of candidates to Github.

Some of Americas closest allies are authoritarian regimes. Why would anyone expect profit moticated companies like Google or Apple to have higher moral standards than the elected representative US goverment where it operates from itself?

> Why would anyone expect profit moticated companies like Google or Apple to have higher moral standards than the elected representative US goverment where it operates from itself?

Because elected representatives are not moral authorities

Neither are major corporations.

Indeed a good point. Had the US elected representatives had better morals none of this would have ever happened. It would have been pre-empted decades ago. But we have no influence over their morals, only an ability to vote for or against them. Those elected by definition are the best people available. So if they don't have good morals that means the whole society does not have good morals. I suppose the best we can do is to try to have better morals ourselves and hope to positively influence the rest of society to make better moral choices...

All that is hard, and that's why evil like Putin prevails...

> Those elected by definition are the best people available.

If by "available", you mean political candidates, then yes. If you mean of the society in general, then no, quite the opposite, actually.

> So if they don't have good morals that means the whole society does not have good morals.

No, it means two of the worst people in the society (namely, the 'republican' candidate and the 'democratic' candidate) do not have good morals. This a slightly stronger measure than the society's minimum level of morals, but not by very much, and says nothing about average or about particular non-politician cases.

I think this distrust in democracy as a system to elect representative people to legislate and govern is widespread and to a certain degree based on facts, but also deeply worrying. In a way it signifies a failure of democracy.

> In a way it signifies a failure of democracy.

I'd say "demonstrates the", but... yes? Obviously?

Democracy worked well early on because institutions hadn't yet figured out how to exploit it, not because it had any inherent resistance to exploitation; now it's like Merkel-Damgaard hash functions[0]: it was always broken, but now we (and the attackers) know it's broken and are seeing the consequences.

0: eg, MD5, SHA-1

At least those are "allies" and not existential threats.

Where does that stop though? I agree with you, but I don’t see how the basic observe-eval-withdraw loop ever terminates.

Or put from a flip side… Building apps in highly democratic Norway just for Norwegians to use because they’re the best democracy (for example) doesn’t make enough money to feed my family. So why do anything at all?

The fact that you have to draw the line somewhere is not an argument for not drawing a line somewhere.

Indeed. Can you say that the parties involved do not have lines? Everyone has lines, they’re just not always visible.

My point that the observe-eval-withdraw loop is difficult to terminate is not meant to argue we shouldn’t run the loop, but rather how difficult it is to code the withdraw conditions. As I tried to allude to in the second paragraph, you have to balance out the withdraw conditions with the pragmatic need to let the loop get some worthwhile work done.

How about using the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as a score sheet? 30 Articles there. I doubt there are many countries that score a perfect-30 but is Russia even in double-figures?

I agree, there's some arbitrary hand-wringing to be done to work out where to draw the line, but doing nothing while you're paralysed trying to decide what pencil to use, seems just as bad as going along with the acts in the first place.

https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-huma...

I would believe this is way more complicated, even if set the profit apart.

Arguably having access to technology is important for the regular citizen, even under less democratic countries. There is the privacy angle, and also if you have an Android monopoly it becomes easier for the government to exploit/enforce what they want. You don't help people to understands the benefits of participating on a democracy, or even fighting to have a democracy by withdrawing and hiding what democracies around the world are able to produce and manufacture. Withdrawing the apps as required by government censorship is just one of the battles lost, but not the entire benefit Apple presence has.

All this is certainly expected behavior. If companies don't want to be complicit in these crimes, then they need to remove themselves from keeping remote power over devices that are purportedly sold to end users. Dell doesn't get flack for what Debian chooses to put in their repositories. And when Debian itself gets bullied (eg decss and other video codecs), even-less-exposed organizations can create another repository that coexists with the main one.

This is the kind of moral framework that creates cancel culture. Pulling out from Russia will decrease many Russian's standard of living, but will have zero impact in stopping them from rigging elections. If everyone cuts trade for moral reasons, then there's no incentive for us not to point nukes at each other again.

"If I don't become complicit, somebody else will be. Might as well do it myself."

I haven't decided if I agree with the comment you're replying to, but this isn't a fair summary of it. Either engage with it or don't but posting a caricature doesn't exactly raise the level of debate around here.

Citing "cancel culture" as the final boss doesn't start us in a place of elevation.

Good point. I glazed over that. But still...

Yes. Yes. Maybe. Similarly unknown.

In this case we're talking about propping up the existing Russian government who actively interfere in democracy around the world, assassinate political enemies and draw immense influence from the fear it spreads around it. Yeah, sure, why wouldn't we want to keep that going as long as we can?

Because it will end one day. Putin isn't Russia's greatest love machine. When that day comes, all the instability you'd blame on me and my ideals will rain down on us all anyway.

If you want to reduce my reasoned moral objections to "cancel culture", I'm sure you're somebody's hero, but yes, I think we should demand better from the companies we fund. Russia's instability is inevitable, either way.

We only have a limited bandwidth for action. While I don't think that everyone should be hyper-utilitarian and focus all of our effort on distributing antimalarial medication like Bill Gates is doing, you need to have some threshold of ROI if you want a proposal to be taken seriously. For example, the US government values a human life at $10 million dollars.

Bullshit. The Russians won’t be able to stop using iPhones, and with Apple out of Russia, the OS can be free from Russian influence.

If Apple didn't bend the knee, Russia could block its banks doing business with Apple, as well as simply blocking their networks.

Russia has a lot of power to flex against its own citizens.

And leave its citizens with what alternative? The smartphone OS duopoly is stronger than one authoritarian little shit.

> This is the kind of moral framework that creates cancel culture.

Cancel culture means a lot of different things to different people. You might want to clarify your interpretation here.

> Russia will decrease many Russian's standard of living, but will have zero impact in stopping them from rigging elections.

Wow, this was a mental leap. So by giving into already established corruption of government officials in Russia, you're making it better for Russians standard of living by further having a corrupt government? I don't know how you reached this conclusion. There are thousands of businesses in Russia (and probably hundreds that are large and US centric), but only one government. One company pulling out is hardly going to make a dent in providing jobs in a country as large as Russia.

> If everyone cuts trade for moral reasons, then there's no incentive for us not to point nukes at each other again.

So, you're implying that if we didn't have global trade then nations would fight more? I don't think I've ever heard this interpretation before - care to elaborate?

> If everyone cuts trade for moral reasons, then there's no incentive for us not to point nukes at each other again.

I don't agree with OP but this is actually a pretty common talking point around the benefits of globalization. If you depend on some other country for some essential resource (e.g. natural gas) you're less likely to want to go to war with them because it would be quite inconvenient to suddenly have half your population freezing in the winter.

Here's some research from Cato that shows that trade interdependence generally promotes peace https://www.cato.org/research-briefs-economic-policy/does-tr...

It would have a negative impact. The Russian government would be very glad to ban platforms like Google even though Google cooperates with them because it would help to control the population even more. Google discloses emails after request? A local social network will monitor every message for them. Youtube removes a video when it's already viral? A local video platform will ban the channel before it gets views.

Pulling out of Russia might have zero immediate impact on stopping Putin rigging elections which are rigged anyway, but it would definitely reduce his and his mafia's wealth and power, thereby helping bring about the inevitable regime change sooner, and in a less turbulent way.

Casually suggesting that Apple should pull out from all authoritarian countries is both funny and naive

That is what I think, but that's not the point of my post.

The part you're reading around is the people here defending Apple and Google's behaviour, because they're just doing what's right for their employees.

Doing what's right for Apple and Google's employees is not setting up offices in front of Russia's loaded gun, which we've only known about for… hundreds of years. Apple and Google put their employees at risk. They don't get points for doing more bad things to further delay that risk (and feed the machine that made that enables the risk).

My naïveté is certainly worth considering, but we're all so wilfully blind to atrocities. It was one thing to let another country beat up its citizens and attempt to sanction them, but now we're each personally entangling our lives with companies that aid and abet. We have to demand better.

I'm also naive, and regardless, fully in agreement with you.

Im just saying you cannot just pull out and work remote in a country wide situation and with the scale of Apple. There will be much more effects, maybe I’m paranoid in that sense.

The benchmark here is employee threats. China does not threaten Apple employees located in their country, nor do many other authoritarian countries. I don't think it's unreasonable to pull out of countries that present clear and present dangers to your workforce.

Apple would pull out of China if their sales dropped 50% because they wouldn't.

Cutting all possible connections with China is counter-productive to de-escalating tensions with them and integrating them into a rules-based system.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com