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Comment by CedarMills | Hacker News Reader

It's a great post with realities of war. Being focused on work is a great distraction as well. My issue is how do we respond to businesses who are clearly exploiting the crisis for monetary gain?

It's one thing to ask for support for humanitarian aid purposes (such as fundraising to distribute food, helping someone's family get out, etc.), it's another to exploit the war to grow your business.

When the war started, I had numerous cold emails from Ukrainian businesses offering services (primarily outsourced marketing, design, software engineering) with the first paragraph containing emotionally charged, guilt-tripping statements. Those emails started to cause me to have some resentment and I marked them as junk. I will not be pushed to support a business that's trying to guilt trip me, regardless of what's happening.

War is bad, majority of world supports the Ukrainian side. I pray for the conflict to be over soon.

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hi! Thank you for the reply and what a great point. I can relate and yes, a lot of business in Ukraine are urged to switch to other markets to survive. I assume their cold outreach attempts might look naive and exploiting. I still believe that begging for help and offering some services are different, and sorry that disturbed you, really.

I assume they still need to make payouts, keep workplaces and support the economy. From my perspective, begging for charity is not okay when you can bring value. Maybe I am just too optimistic about examples you mentioned.

Keep up the good work and thanks for providing a sense of normalcy to your employees in the midst of this crisis, I'm glad something like that is going on at this time.

this is not how the west works nowadays. we are anti-survival because we do not feel threatened(big mistake), we are all about appearances and passing judgments.

I understand why you might not like getting these emails, but is there any reason you think they're bad in some general sense (at least worse than any other email advertising). I'm sure there are some customers out there who would like to buy from Ukrainian companies given what's going on.

I strongly suspect many are not actually Ukrainian; I recently got Facebook ads for a "Ukrainian educational toy maker" selling puzzles I'd seen on AliExpress.

> majority of world supports the Ukrainian side

And one way you can support it is to support the Ukrainian economy by doing business with companies there.

So helping people to have a job bad but once they loose the job and have to rely on handouts helping them is good hm...

If you still have them, can you share those emails with names redacted?

>>My issue is how do we respond to businesses who are clearly exploiting the crisis for monetary gain?

Yep, and not only that, what I see in those pictures are many young, military age healthy males that are hiding out in 'safe places' while other men and women are literally putting their lives at stake to save the country and the lives of the residents - while this group is pimping their business. Doesn't feel right to me.

Putting those young healthy males without significant training and enough effective military hardware right into the trenches being shelled/bombed would be a typical Russian approach which produces a lot of dead and wounded without any positive result. As it has become obvious over the last 3 months Ukraine had learnt to fight differently, smarter.

>while this group is pimping their business.

From the macro scale POV, the large wars are won by economies. USSR and USA won over Germany and Japan by running larger economies (USSR starting 1942/43).

One of the significant part of the war being waged by Russia is to decimate Ukrainian economy. These guys are successfully fighting it back. Them continuing to exist and even thrive and grow is one more piece of war lost by Russia. It is a long game/war. It is very possible that the conflict would go into ceasefire smoldering mode for years during which the survival of Ukraine as independent nation would be decided not by occasional artillery exchanges across ceasefire lines, it will be decided by whose economy would continue to develop successfully.

>hiding out in 'safe places'

They aren't hiding from the draft. Most of them could easily be reached and drafted by army when/if needed. Ukraine drafting offices are overwhelmed with people ready to sign up.

>>They aren't hiding from the draft.

Yes, they are...pimping their business while other older and less physically capable people are dying for them.

>>Ukraine drafting offices are overwhelmed with people ready to sign up.

Yes, except these 'men' apparently.

Perhaps you could arrange a conference with them and give give a master class on how to get out of the comfort zone and become the real men? You could share your experience, give a few useful tips on survival in warzones, teach them a lesson on managing emotions under pressure and have a Q&A session. I suggest to upload the recording to youtube, so we could learn too.

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