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Comment by apples_oranges | Hacker News Reader

These news depressed me. Am I the only one who is saddened by this pathetic show by our industry leaders? Made me pessimistic about the future.

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At this point, it is really important for everyone in the industry to recognize that the industry leaders (in terms of "running the most successful companies") should not be considered ethical or moral leaders.

It's a categorical error. Like expecting a boat captain to be Descartes because they're good at leading people to operate a boat (or, for that matter, expecting Descartes to take first in a marathon because he was really good at applying logic to philosophical questions).

Moral neutrality is one thing. It may be disappointing (but not unexpected) for the CEO of your favorite company to wine and dine the leader of an unsavory political party. But... this person is currently all over the news for being best friends with one of the most prolific pedophiles in America, as well as trying desperately to suppress the release of documents where he and prominent members of his circle may be implicated. This meeting is not just morally neutral, not just immoral, but utterly depraved.

They may not be moral leaders, but I expect them to be leaders who are moral. Well, I don’t expect that they will be, but that’s my standard.

And the key thing to recognize is that there's nothing in the system to enforce that standard. "Good at making money" or "Good at running a business" doesn't mean one is good at anything else, or, indeed, is good.

I think it's easy for people to make this error because humans like heroes; heroes simplify things. We want to believe that the people who are succeeding are succeeding because they're virtuous, not because (just spitballing here) the mechanisms we use to evaluate success are fundamentally detached from (if not opposed to) "virtue" as most people would understand the concept. if the latter is true, the world is far messier.

Sometimes it takes all those people voluntarily sitting at the same table as a convicted, unrepentant, and unpunished sexual abuser for the outside observer to "get" it.

Perhaps the still-open question is "Now what should one do with that knowledge?"

> And the key thing to recognize is that there's nothing in the system to enforce that standard. "Good at making money" or "Good at running a business" doesn't mean one is good at anything else, or, indeed, is good.

I’m well aware of that, no need to get all pedagogical. The system is quite far from what I favour. I’m saying that we shouldn’t be shrugging and saying “well that’s just what they are”, it’s no excuse.

Oh, agreed. If anything, I'm asking people to stop shrugging and saying "that's just what they are." Physicists had their come-to-Pugwash moment two (three?) generations ago and I'm hoping this generation of computer scientist can get there without waking up one day to discover their research was directly contributory to removing a quarter-million people from the face of the planet.

Their forebears, sadly, did not. Specifically the ones who worked at IBM, but others as well.

Yup, standards are the best thing applied to others.

This is devastating enough on its own. But what makes it even more troubling is that the United States has a president who demands such transparently false praise. What's going on in this man's head? Does he not understand that these people are lying to him because they are afraid of what he will do to their companies? Or does he know, and that is the point?

What in the world is wrong with this man?

In general, when there are no consequences for people's actions they don't change those actions.

The power is real. The fear is real. The praise is the only fake thing.

It's about enforcing a power dynamic. Groveling and empty praise is about showing loyalty and control. Trump thinks enforcing this level of control over others is what success looks like.

This is what kissing the ring looks like. It's a loyalty test.

In Soviet Union it was a sign of loyalty not to question obviously false statistics and news. In Joe Rogan's circles is laughing at his shit jokes and praising his comic abilities in his podcast.

I think people are laughing at atrocious jokes forever just to be on right side of political climate at that time.

let it be the curtain pulled back on how this class of people operates. just because we can see it now doesn't mean this kind of thing hasn't been happening behind the scenes for... ever.

not to excuse the brazenness of it - i'm as disgusted as you are.

The troubling fact is that the country's owners no longer feel the need to put on a show of democratic values. It's like witnessing Diocletian do away with the republican pretense of earlier emperors.

I feel like this curtain drop started in earnest in tech as well, when Musk took over Twitter and declared (along with certain VC) that engineers are no longer "special" and need to be treated like cattle.

The entire industry gladly dropped their masks. Quite the irony, for a group of people that takes so much pride in "thinking different" and "changing the world".

Business has always been this way. It’s the nature of power.

It just so happens when you have a fragile ego in power, people seeking power will naturally play to that ego for a leg up.

We knew before 2015 that he was easy to manipulate. Easy to push his buttons, easy to flatter.

Frankly if you are a CEO in 2015 and you aren’t flattering this idiot to profit then you are violating your duties to your shareholders

Indeed. It is a calibrated, lawyer-defined behavior called executing their fiduciary duties.

In other words, they are behaving as necessary (and as advised) to avoid later being exposed to a lawsuit.

The cray part is they're doing it by openly doing stuff that's clearly and unambiguously classified as illegal (eg the gifts in exchange for benefits)

This is routine; businesses don’t follow laws because they are laws, they follow laws to the extent that the perceived cost of violations exceed the perceived benefits. The whole reason the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act exist is to impose a domestic cost on foreign bribery by US entities to dissuade them from engaging in corruption abroad where enforcement is weak. But this President, who is explicit against that, is also very obviously, if less explicitly, also against enforcement of the laws against domestic corruption when it is him or his friends benefiting. So, there is literally no cost to weigh against the benefits.

As always, in business, if the penalty for breaking the law is less than the benefit you get out of the violation, then you have to go for it.

Or your competitors will. It’s the cost of doing business.

"I avoided a possible lawsuit, and all I had to do was help plunge my country in to fascism!"

>Frankly if you are a CEO in 2015 and you aren’t flattering this idiot to profit then you are violating your duties to your shareholders

It's all fun and games til his policies crash the economy.

Short-sighted perspectives yet again. Short term gains at the cost of long term viability.

If you're keeping score at home, that's one point for shareholders, and a big fat goose egg for any and all other stake-"holders".

The Western system has roots in the Norman conquest of England. After 1066, land wasn’t held communally or with meaningful checks on aristocracy, as under the Anglo-Saxons. Instead, William the Conqueror carved up the country and handed it to his allies, creating a feudal landlord class that had no attachment to 'their' conquered peasants/community and whose only mandate was to extract maximum rent, so long as the higher lords and the crown got their cut. Instead of vanishing that rentier system evolved. Over centuries, the same logic of conquest and extraction was repackaged as “the market,” and eventually exported to the world through finance, trade, and empire.

What began as feudal rent-seeking in England scaled into global capitalism, a system where those at the top still practice Norman-style exploitation for maximum extraction with no care about those being extracted from. It's all Norman-style exploitation for maximum extraction, stripped of any sense of community, obligation, or service.

A key factor in this calculus is that the current president holds a grudge whereas the vast majority of consumers, shareholders, and workers do not.

Unless a nontrivial number of the people who are outraged either boycott Apple, Alphabet/Google, OpenAI, Microsoft, Meta/Facebook, or sell their shares, or stop applying to work there then it'll prove that these CEOs were indeed making the right (financial) decision.

> if you are a CEO in 2015 and you aren’t flattering this idiot to profit then you are violating your duties to your shareholders

Ah yes, because that's the only thing that matters. Nihilistic capitalism at its finest – there no morality beyond economics. Everything that makes economic sense is moral because it makes economic sense. Whether it actually does is rather dubious by the way, as all of this has the very real possibility of massively damage these businesses in the medium to long term – so also nihilistic short-termism at its finest.

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