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Comment by SavantIdiot | Hacker News Reader

A) On what basis do you claim that all public companies are not ethical? (You said "any", but by definition that means "all".)

B) By that logic, isn't all money tainted? And everyone of us? And every thing?

This is the starting point of every person's decisions regarding being ethical.

How far back do you need to "follow the money" before you consider it "ethical"?

That is up to every person. Theil has actively engaged in dubious ethics, I won't belabor them again. With him it is one hop to "dubious", compared to other organizations where you have to make several graph node hops to get to something dubius. This is a personal choice and everyone has to do their own research if they care about it.

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I’m not claiming that all public companies are unethical. I’m claiming that all public companies have some unethical investors. That is, the operations of the company directly benefit some unethical actors. This has nothing to do with “money being tainted” in general.

Just to be clear, this is what you said that I was responding to:

> I think the concern is that they are taking money from someone with highly debatable/questionable ethics.

Some investors in almost all public companies have highly debatable ethics.

It's the "Thiel Foundation". It is in his name.

But that is why I said it is up to the individual. Some people could care less, other people at least want to know if the board is ethical.

I would put in the effort to know if any shady people were on the board of the company I'm taking money from. And if new information came to light after the fact, I would cease taking money.

You can't know everything about everything, and not even attempting to be ethical because you don't have all the information without doing any research is, IMHO, cowardly. It's the "if we can't fix this one big thing why bother doing any of these other things" fallacy. But that's just me and my ilk.

It's easy to make fun of someone trying to be ethical or who cares, because you can't know everything. That's what trolls do for fun. But I think it takes courage to try to stand for something you believe in. Again, that's just me and my ilk.

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