Tech companies are flocking to the Middle East

I don’t think your example supports the point you think you’re making.

Source? We don't know the actual skin tone of Ancient philosophers, but it's likely that Greek and Roman philosophers (many of which were born in and lived in Middle East or Africa) were of darker skin than the Germanic barbarians, whom they considered inferior.

The deterrence does work and saves countless lives that would have been taken from ODs and cartel-ish activities

Singapore = if you have money all of their supposed laws etc do not apply (just like so many other places).

People that don't realize that can just crawl back to their cave and live out the darwinistic dreams there. (Just speaking/ranting generally here now.)

> Who would have thought that cutting someone's limbs off as a punishment would result in nearly very little theft in those countries too.

Only people that don't read up on the science. Draconian measure affect crime rates much less than immediate negative feedback after the crime (which doesn't need to be draconian).

As it turns out: the problems of monarchies is innate. Hereditary Monarchies lead to a separation into "Noble" vs "Peasant" classes, where Nobles have a genetic line to the throne. The Nobles believe themselves to be superior and start putting themselves into various sections of government, when in actuality many Peasants are actually better than the Nobles.

So when it comes to War (the only time societies can directly compare against each other), the side that has a bigger recruitment pool (ie: Peasant commanders, aka Napoleon's secret sauce), tends to win. This is also true of sciences, research, production, etc. etc. Every part of society, there are likely peasant leaders who are best at the job.

Peasants win not necessarily because Peasants are smarter, but because peasants are at "sometimes" smarter, and this "sometimes" happens in a large enough degree that anyone who cuts off their leadership pool into "Family members of the Monarch only" innately hampers their abilities to lead over time.

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Now colonial rule by far-away foreign powers is clearly a bad situation as well (as Britain's control over its former colonies can likely attest). But that's not "Democracy" either.

Hereditary monarchy may be an improvement over UAE's position (ie: better than foreign colonialism), but lets not get ahead of ourselves. The world gave up on monarchies over a century ago for a good damn reason.

Compared to other Muslim countries, it's pretty relaxed. Foreigners can buy alcohol, eat pork, and pre and extra-marital relationships are tolerated among foreigners as long as it's behind closed doors.

Locals of course get favoured for positions of power within companies, but most of them are pretty well educated, so that isn't so bad.

You don't want to piss them off, as you don't know what connections they might have. But that's no different from the elite class in any other country, such as the UK or Italy - it's just there are a higher percentage of them, and it's not hidden away.

Many of the locals feel repressed at home, which is why London is a popular travel destination for them. You see women in burka with their eyes covered get on in Dubai, and by the time they've landed in London, they have changed into jeans and a fashionable top and are showing off their hair. If anything changes, that's probably going to be the catalyst. But most likely the UAE will just become more liberal rather than a big shift in power.

I tend to think, for example, that your average Boeing engineer probably wanted to do a good job and not have doors fall off their planes. But when you put multiple layers of abstraction in the way and have leaders looking through business metrics, it isn't hard for everyday crappiness to maneuver its way to the point where that isn't prioritized. Almost no one in the chain really thinks they're sacrificing safety, they think they're doing their job and improving efficiency by cutting redundant steps.

> In my experience people with a "just doing my job" attitude make much better bosses than those who act like they have a higher purpose.

Sure, because there's a difference between a performative "mission", a self-obsessed founder who makes their own success a story about the future of Earth, and someone who makes concretely difficult decisions when the chips are down.

This is kind of what I mean by the corruptive effects of growth. Having a mission is a good thing, but most companies' "missions" are implicitly always secondary to their financial growth, or worse, a cynical ploy for employee engagement. When people write crappy press releases about how "this will enable us to serve more of our users" (read: expand our market), that's not a statement about how serving users is bad, it's just that for most businesses it's necessarily with an asterisk of "we want to serve our users* *as long as it pleases our investors".

I wish this were true. But a largish slice of the US polity (headed by one of the two credible candidates for President) is dead against these things and attacks any sort of institutional infrastructure or notion of accountability whenever it's politically expedient to do so. In a less obvious way, that movement is also dedicated to the dismantlement of the administrative state - ostensibly in the name of returning legislative power and accountability to the Congress, pragmatically because it adheres to a vision of commercial activity with far less legal restraint.

My point is we can do this for anything. Clocks enabled capitalists to exploit workers. Lights took the night from rebels. Steam engines took farmers out of the daylight and put them in mechanised factories. Hell, agriculture enabled modern civilisation but also created such a wave of oppression and anxiety we're still worshiping the gods we invented to save us from it.

None of those statements is wrong. But they're also incomplete.

That's assuming that the judge doesn't find a way to throw it out long before it ever sees a jury. Courts don't like wasting their time on stupid stuff.

The notorious example is the Dutch Jews who basically filled in a register of themselves and provided it to the Nazis.

Just look at the name of this website :)

This matters because it affects what sorts of products come out of SV. These days, most of the products are about extracting maximal dollars from customers. In the old days, there was a genuine interest in making great products rather than products that prioritize maximize dollar extraction.

Also, the nature of the dev population has changed. These days, a very large percentage of SV devs chose that line of work specifically because it's lucrative. Before, a very large percentage of SV devs chose that line of work because they loved being devs.

At least, that's what the change looks like to me. I could be wrong. But one thing that is absolutely obvious is that SV today is very different than SV back when it was in peak form.

Given that I doubt you are following the high water of cultural morality as it shifts around the world, sounds to me like bigotry might be fueling you here.