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Comment by adlep | Hacker News Reader

This is exactly why Yuri's Milner's involvement in YC is controversial. Most likely, given the political and economical climate in Russia he did not earn his wealth by playing fair.

Now some of that tainted money are being handled over to our best for a quick wash...

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What do you mean by "playing fair"?

Like, in post-war Japan and Korea they decided how many big corporations they are going to grow, allocated resources and appointed people in control. Those became for-life managers to multi-billion corporations because they were in the right time in the right place. Was that fair?

The "wealth" had to go somewhere and some people got it with some effort. What should have they done?

How would you differentiate between someone who got a piece of USSR industry and pillaged it, and someone who ran his piece wisely?

Common opinion between Russians is that anyone who accumulated a lot of wealth in early 90s and managed to stay alive was in mafia or had very close ties with it - either a criminal or a state one. The reason is simple. If you start legitimately and your business is successful, you would be approached eventually by power people offering protection in exchange for sharing profits and/or company share. No exceptions. You earn - you share. The choice between the criminals and corrupted officials was yours though.

This applies to running small and medium business, but not to "inheriting" large chunks of [especially mining and extraction] industry.

There, mafia doesn't have any business commonly associated with them. Mafia does loans, racketeering and vice. Large industry isn't about any of those things. Maybe I'm wrong but I think you should not overextend the meaning of term "mafia".

Anyway, this does not answers the "fair" question. Oneself fairness is not direcly affected by people the person in question has to deal with. You still have to prove unfairness, "he was seen near where the mafia usually manifests" doesn't cut it.

You are arguing just for a purpose of arguing. I am not going to play that game. The way of doing big business in Russia involves bribes, corruption, ties to organized crime, cronyism, very close ties to the ruling class and government, and also Russian security apparatus. Also, the idea that a random "Russian Businessman" can just flash his money and be accepted as an investor in Silicon Valley should be in fact investigated by the FBI. We do not need to enrich "Russian Businessmen". We should be working with people from countries who are our close allies.

Does it make everyone who manages a high-profile international mining business unfair without trial? Because they are known to do the things you mentioned.

I'm not arguing just for a purpose of arguing. I'm trying to challenge your idea of "fair rules". If we would not find even one person in this subset who plays by "fair rules", (and you seem to imply there are indeed none), how do we know that "fair rules" exist? Who sets those?

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