I initially thought that this was an announcement for a new pledge and thought, "they're going to forget about this the moment it's convenient." Then I read the article and realized, "Oh, it's already convenient."
Google is a megacorp, and while megacorps aren't fundamentally "evil" (for some definitions of evil), they are fundamentally unconcerned with goodness or morality, and any appearance that they are is purely a marketing exercise.
It is partially the markets fault. If they were demonized for this, there's at least be a veneer of trying to look moral. Instead they can simply go full mask off. That's why you shouldn't tolerate the intolerant.
This is a very important point to remember when assessing ideas like "Is it good to build swarms of murderbots to mow down rioting peasants angry over having expenses but no jobs?" Most people might answer "no," but if the people with money answer "yes," that becomes the market's objective. Then the incentives diffuse through the economy and you don't just get the murderbots, you also get the news stations explaining how the violent peasants brought this on themselves and the politicians making murderbots tax deductible and so on.
I have full faith that the market[1] will direct the trolley onto the morally optimal track. It's invisible hand will guide mine when I decide or decide against pulling the lever. Either way, I can be sure that the result is maximally beneficial to the participants, myself included.
The magic market fairy godmother has decided that TVs with built in ads and spyware are good for you. The market fairy thinks this is so good for you that there are no longer any alternatives to a smart TV besides "no tv"
The market fairy has also decided that medication commercials on TV is good for you. That your car should report your location, speed, and driving habits to your insurer, car manufacturer, and their 983,764 partners at all times.
this, but broader. Goodness and morality is a subjective and more importantly relative measure, making it useless in many situations (as this one).
while knowing this seems useless, it's actually the missing intrinsic compass and the cause for a lot of bad and stupid behavior (by the definition that something is stupid if chosen knowing it will cause negative consequences for the doer)
Everything should primarily be measured based on its primary goal. For "for-profit" companies that's obvious in their name and definition.
That there's nothing that should be assumed beyond what's stated is the premise of any contract whether commercial, public or personal (like friendship) is a basic tool for debate and decision making.
I guess a question becomes, how does dropping these self-imposed limitations work as a marketing exercise? Probably most of their customers or prospective customers won't care, but will a cheery multi-colored new product land a little differently? If Northrop Grumman made a smart home hub, you might be reluctant to put it in your living room.
They are dropping these pledges to avoid securities lawsuits. “Everything is securities fraud” and presumably if they have a stated corporate pledge to do something, and knowingly violate it, any drop in the stock price could use this as grounds.
Being a defense contractor isn't a problem that a little corporate rearrangement can't fix. Put the consumer division under a new subsidiary with a friendly name and you're golden. Even among the small percentage who know the link, it's likely nobody will really care. For certain markets ("tacticool" gear, consumer firearms) being a defense contractor is even a bonus.
"We won't use your dollars and efforts for bad and destructive activities, until we accumulate enough of your dollars and efforts that we no longer care about your opinions".
> while megacorps aren't fundamentally "evil" (for some definitions of evil),
I think megacorps being evil is universal. It tends to be corrupt cop evil vs serial killer evil, but being willing to do anything for money has historically been categorized as evil behavior.
That doesn’t mean society would be better or worse off without them, but it would be interesting to see a world where companies pay vastly higher taxes as they grow.
You're taking about pre-Clinton consumerism. That system is dead. It used to dictate that the company who could offer the best value deserved to take over most of the market.
That's old thinking. Now we have servitization. Now the business who can most efficiently offer value deserves the entire market.
Basically, iterate until you're the only one left standing and then never "sell" anything but licenses ever again.
The bait-and-switch model is absolutely amazing as well. Start by offering a service covered with ads. Then add paid tier to get rid of ads. Next add tier with payment and ads. And finally add ads back to every possible tier. Not to forget about keeping them in content all the time.
If you have ever seen the prank interview between Elijah Wood and Dominic Monaghan, "Do you wear wigs? Have you worn wigs? Will you wear wigs?" and Elijah breaks down laughing in total shock at how hilariously bad the interview is...
...I just picture a similar conversation with a CEO going: "Sir, shareholders want to see more improvement this quarter." CEO: "Do we run ads? Have we run ads? Will we run ads this time?" (The answer is inevitably yes to all of these)
That creates limits to growth of an Ad based ecosystem.
So the thing to pay attention too is not Revenue growth or Profit growth of a Platform but Price of an Ad, Price to increase reach, price to Pay to Boost your post, price of a presidential campaign etc etc. These prices cant grow forever just like with housing prices or we get the equivalent of a Housing Bubble.
Want to destabilize the whole system pump up ad prices.
Advertising is just the surface layer—the excuse. Digital ads rely on collecting as much personal data as possible, but that data is the real prize. This creates a natural partnership with intelligence agencies: they may not legally collect the data themselves, but they can certainly buy access.
This isn’t new. Facebook, for example, received early funding from In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital arm, and its origins trace back to DARPA’s canceled LifeLog project—a system designed to track and catalog people’s entire lives. Big Tech and government surveillance have been intertwined from the start.
That’s why these companies never face real consequences. They’ve become quasi-government entities, harvesting data on billions under the guise of commerce.
Years ago a friend working in security told me that every telco operator in Elbonia has to have a special room in their HQ that's available 24/7 to some goverment officials. Men in black come and go as they please, and while what is actually happening in that room remains a mystery, they can tap straight to the system from within with no restrictions or traceability.
Growing up in soviet bloc I took that story at face value.
After all democracy was still a new thing, and people haven't invented privacy concerns yet.
Since then I always thought that some sort of cooperation between companies like Facebook or Google and CIA/DOD was an obvious thing to everyone.
PRISM [1] is the best evidence of how short-lived most people's memories are. Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, and Facebook were the first 4 members. It makes it pretty funny when companies like Apple (who also joined more than a decade ago) speak about trying to defend customer's privacy against government intrusion. There's so much completely cynical corporate LARPing for PR.
And if one wants to know why big tech from China isn't welcome, be it phones or social media, it's not because fear of them spying on Americans, but because of the infeasibility of integrating Chinese companies into our own domestic surveillance systems.
It's been happening since the invention of the internet. Wait, probably because that's where it came from. OK OK not the web itself, but first there was ARPANET.
To quote the email from Hulu that recently dropped into my inbox:
> We are clarifying that, as we continue to increase the breadth and depth of the content we make available to you, circumstances may require that certain titles and types of content include ads, even in our 'no ads' or 'ad free' subscription tiers.
So at this point they aren't even bothering to rename the tier from "ad free" even as they put ads in it. Or maybe it's supposed to mean "the ads come free with it" now? Newspeak indeed.
This goes back to the release of the no-ads Hulu plan. Due at the time to fun shenanigans and weirdness around the exact licensing deals for a few shows. (At least one of those shows is VERY long-running now https://www.reddit.com/r/greysanatomy/comments/12prhpf/no_ad... - not sure if there have been any new ones through the years or currently )
Yes that's definitely newspeak! It's also the reason why I run adblock. It's gotten me in trouble a few times with streaming services, they don't love it. I still run it.
Right now, I use adGuard. Any adblocker such as uBlock origin should do this. However they tend to ban uBlock origin, because it's widely known. Or at least when they go after adblock, they go after that one first.
Don't forget get your stock on and index that almost all retirement funds are required to put money into every month versus the old school stock market where it was a market not a cable bill (you have to pay for the whole bundle if you want it or not).
It's easy to set up an IRA where you can trade individual securities instead of index funds if that's what you want. Most people aren't competent traders and will underperform the index funds.
I prefer the angle that describes this as a shift from value production to value extraction. Value production means coming up with new goods or services, or new/better ways to make existing ones. Value extraction means looking at existing economic exchanges, and figuring out how to get X percent of some of them.
It was always a game of maximizing captured value. In such a game, creating value and capturing some portion of what you're producing is far less effective than value extraction, moving value around such that it's you capturing it, not someone else. A market, then, will by default encourage the latter strategy over the former. However, if the society in charge of a market observes value extraction occurring, it can respond by outlawing the particular extraction strategy being employed, and punish the parties participating. Then, for some time, market participants will turn to producing value instead, making more humble profits, until another avenue for extraction becomes available and quickly becomes the dominant strategy again. This cycle continues until the market eats the forces that would seek to regulate it and reign in extractive practices. That is what we're seeing here, at least in the US there is basically no political will behind identifying and punishing any new forms of harmful behavior, and we barely enforce existing laws regarding eg monopolies. Common wisdom among neoliberals and conservatives both is that big companies are good for the economy, and it's best to tread lightly in terms of regulating their behaviors, lest we interrupt their important value production process. One wonders if there are perhaps financial incentives to be so pro-corporate.
I would argue that since the dawn of capitalism (whenever you place that), there have been moral structures in place to promote value production and stigmatize value extraction. The precise balance between the two moral verdicts changes back and forth over time. In the USA in the 21st century we seem to have entered a period where the promotion of value production is unusually low and simultaneously the stigmatization of value extraction has dropped close to zero.
All the more ironic nowadays because the most popular politicians are the highest value extractors who moved the value production overseas, leaving the now jobless voters angry instead with... immigrants/lgbtqa+/other races/other religions, who basically had no saying and no role in the above move.
Most suggestions of this nature fail to explain how they will deal with the problem of people just seeing there’s no point in trying for more. On a personal level, I’ve heard people from Norway describe this problem for personal income tax—at some point (notably below a typical US senior software engineer’s earnings) the amount of work you need to put in for the marginal post-tax krone is so high it’s just demotivating, and you either coast or emigrate. Perhaps that’s not entirely undesirable, but I don’t know if people have contemplated the consequences of the existence of such a de facto ceiling seriously.
> Most suggestions of this nature fail to explain how they will deal with the problem of people just seeing there’s no point in trying for more. On a personal level, I’ve heard people from Norway describe this problem for personal income tax—at some point (notably below a typical US senior software engineer’s earnings) the amount of work you need to put in for the marginal post-tax krone is so high it’s just demotivating, and you either coast or emigrate. Perhaps that’s not entirely undesirable, but I don’t know if people have contemplated the consequences of the existence of such a de facto ceiling seriously.
I think if you look at quality of life and happiness ratings in Norway it's pretty clear it's far from "entirely undesirable". It's good for people to do things for reasons other than money.
Great, so we only want the real high risk takers, the top gamblers,to play in the big league. Those who are so rich they no way to lose their personal comfort and are blind to the personal risk - and probably are careless about anyone's else just as well
Don't we have that already? Bootstrapped startups with the founders money on the line typically don't play in the 'big league's till way after the founder is at risk..
And I prefer cold committee who measure risk and are committed to some public values. You choose silicone valley, VCs and no public healthcare. I prefer the Norwegian model.
Hardly per capita they export similar amounts of petroleum products, but Norway’s GDP is 80k/person vs 30k/person in Saudi Arabia. Norway exports slightly more/person but their production costs are significantly higher which offsets it.
The difference is Norway’s economy being far less dependent on petroleum which is only 40% of their exports.
We're talking about corporations here, where are they going to go? If you had a competent government, you would say "fine, then leave. But your wealth and business is staying here" at some point the government has to do its job. These corporations pull in trillions of dollars, its wild to me to suggest that suddenly everyone would stop working and making money because they were taxed at a progressive rate. Its an absurd assumption to begin with.
We could literally have high speed rail, healthcare, the best education on the planet and have a high standard of living... and it would be peanuts to them. Instead we have a handful of people with more wealth than 99% of everyone else, while the bottom 75% of those people live in horrifying conditions. The fact that medical bankruptcy is a concept only in the richest country on earth is deeply embarrassing and shameful.
"the amount of work you need to put in for the marginal post-tax krone is so high it’s just demotivating"
Sounds like the effort needed for bonuses here in the US. Why try if the amount is largely arbitrary and generally lower than your base salary pay rate when you consider all the extra hours. Everything is a sham.
Which industry? Bonuses in the tech industry tend to be somewhat arbitrary and thus ineffective for motivating employees. Bonuses in other industries like trading or investment banking tend to be larger (sometimes more than base salary) and directly tied to individual performance and so they're highly effective at motivating ambitious employees.
Increasing marginal income tax rates on highly compensated employees might be a good policy overall. But where are we on the Laffer curve? If we go too far then it really hurts the overall economy.
> This is a cliche you hear from right winger in any country that has a progressive tax system
Not a cliché - a fact. I'll explain to you.
The incentive structure of progressive taxation is wrong: it only works for the few percent that are extremely money hungry: the few that are willing to work for lower and lower percentage gains.
Normal people say "enough" and they give up once they have the nice house and a few toys (and some retirement money with luck). In New Zealand that is something like USD1.5 million.
I'm on a marginal rate of 39% in New Zealand. I am well off but I literally am not motivated to try and earn anything extra because the return is not enough for the extra effort or risk involved. No serial entrepreneurship for me because it only has downside risk. If I invest and win then 39%+ is taken as tax, but even worse is that if I lose then I can't claim my time back. Even financial losses only claw back against future income: and my taxable income could move to $0 due to COVID-level-event and so my financial risk is more than what it might naively appear.
Taxation systems do not fairly reward for risk. Especially watch people with no money taking high risks and pay no insurance because the worst that can happen to them is bankruptcy.
New Zealand loses because the incentive structure for a founder is broken. We are an island so the incentive structure should revolve around bringing in overseas income (presuming the income is spent within NZ). Every marginal dollar brought into the economy helps all citizens and the government.
The incentives were even worse when I was working but was trying to found a company. I needed to invest time, which had the opportunity cost of the wages I wouldn't get as a developer (significant risk that can't be hedged and can't be claimed against tax). 9 times out of 10 a founder wins approximately $0: so expected return needs to be > 10x. A VC fund needs something like > 30x return from the 1 or 2 winning investments. I helped found a successful business but high taxation has meant I haven't reached my 30x yet - chances are I'll be dead before I get a fair return for my risk. I'm not sure I've even reached 10x given I don't know the counterfactual of what my employee income would have become. This is for a business earning good export income.
Incentive structures matter - we understand that for employees - however few governments seem to understand that for businesses.
Most people are absolutely ignorant of even basic economics. The underlying drive is the wish to take from those that have more than them. We call it the tall poppy syndrome down here.
I'm also on the 39% marginal income tax rate in New Zealand. That income tax rate isn't the problem. Keeping $60K out of every $100K extra salary I make is plenty of motivation to work harder to make the extra $100K... especially because the taxes paid aren't burned, they mostly go to things I care about.
The income tax rate isn't all that relevant to the costs and benefits of starting a company, so I don't understand that part of your story. The rewards for founding a successful company mostly aren't subject to income tax, and NZ has a very light capital gains regime.
I have started my own company and I do agree that there are some issues that could be addressed. For example, it would be fairer if the years I worked for no income created tax-deductible losses against future income.
But NZ's tax rates are lower than Australia and the USA and most comparable nations, and NZers start a lot of businesses, so I don't think that is one of our major problems at the moment.
> Keeping $60K out of every $100K extra salary I make is plenty of motivation to work harder
That's good that it motivates you. It doesn't motivate me any more. I'm not interested in "investing" more time for the reasons I have said.
> the taxes paid aren't burned, they mostly go to things I care about.
I'm pleased for you. I'd like to put more money towards things I care about.
> The income tax rate isn't all that relevant to the costs and benefits of starting a company
I am just less positive than you: it feels like win you lose, lose you lose bigger. I'm just pointing out that our government talks about supporting businesses but I've seen the waste from the repetitive attempts to monetise our scientific academics.
> The rewards for founding a successful company mostly aren't subject to income tax
Huh? Dividends are income. Or are you talking about the non-monetary rewards of owning a business?
> NZ has a very light capital gains regime
Which requires you to sell your company to receive the benefits of the lack of CGT. So every successful business in NZ is incentivised to sell. NZ sells it's jewels. Because keeping a company means paying income tax every year. NZ is fucking itself by selling anything profitable - usually to foreign buyers.
The one big ticket item I would like to save for is my retirement fund. But Labour/Greens want to take 50% to 100% of capital if you have over 2 million. A bullshit low amount drawdown at 4% is $80k/annum before tax LOL. Say investments go up by 6% per year and you want to withdraw 4%. Then a 2% tax is 100% of your gains. Plus I'm certain they will introduce means testing for super before I am eligible. And younger people are even more fucked IMHO. The reality is I need to plan to pay for the vast majority of my own costs when I retire, but I get to pay to support everybody else. I believe in socialist health care and helping our elderly, but the country is slowly going broke and I can't do much about that. I believe that our government will take whatever I have carefully saved - often to pay for people that were not careful (My peer-group is not wealthy so I see the good and the bad of how our taxes are spent). Why should I try to earn more to save?
I find it hard to understand how $60K means no motivation but $100K would be highly motivating.
> I'd like to put more money towards things I care about.
You said later that you care about the public health system and helping the elderly. That's where a large percentage of our taxes go.
> Huh? Dividends are income. Or are you talking about the non-monetary rewards of owning a business?
No, I'm talking about selling all or part of the business. I agree with you that it's a problem our businesses often sell out to overseas interests who hollow out the company. But the general pattern of making most of your money by selling shares in the business is completely normal worldwide.
Perhaps "loss aversion" is important to me: I'm not a spherically rational Homo economicus.
Our society mostly works because of our non-monetary rewards, not because of monetary incentives. My teaching and nursing friends work for their own satisfaction, and more money is not a high priority to them.
I am not particularly motivated by money. I suspect you are a businessperson that believes money is strongly motivating? I chased financial success for 15 years when I started from $0: however I now hope I have enough and I hope it won't be unfairly taken from me. Yes, money was a big incentive then (and my personal costs have been very high), but now I have other goals.
I suspect I psychologically find high marginal taxation demotivating (48% if we include GST). Maybe because I have too many acquaintances and family sucking at the government tit. I see where government money goes because I have a wide variety of acquaintances including retirees, elderly, unhealthy, and unemployed. Yeah, I know they are not living the high life (well, maybe my drug-abusing anti-social acquaintances think they are).
> No, I'm talking about selling all or part of the business
Which requires an intense amount of work, and sometimes a significant loss, and usually requires selling 100%... Why should I sell at 4x earnings when I can hold on to the business - even if I don't want it? Taxation has too much influence on my investments because rebalancing across other investments has too high a cost/risk.
I guess I'm an idealist. I believe in startups, and I believe they help all New Zealanders. But the incentives of our taxation system mean that founding a startup is foolish: I don't recommend to anyone that they should be a founder (even though I have won the gamble). The unrecoverable costs of anything but spectacular success are too high. The non-monetary rewards are poor in my experience. The expected median return for a startup founder is about $0. Our social systems and taxation systems need to encourage business inception and growth so that all of NZ can be better off.
Thank you for your questions. It is always good to be asked why!
> For example, it would be fairer if the years I worked for no income created tax-deductible losses against future income.
Hard to avoid cheaters.
A policy could be that the government could pay for 2 years of current salary and you only get one chance per person -- however I can't imagine how the government could get that into the budget.
The policy I implied is be to reward winners with a tax break to offset their risk. Difficult to sell to any voters that don't understand risk/reward or voters that believe business owners are greedy worthless bâtards.
Ha: if the business fails you lose money (the wages you didn't receive), and if the business wins you are taxed: "Privatise the losses, socialise the gains" ;)
I’ve seen a lot of people in European countries and former European colonies decry the high tax rate as a reason for low entrepreneurship and just accepted it as a good enough reason but looking at the numbers and the reasoning specifically here made me start questioning things.
The marginal rate in NZ is 39%!? That’s LOWER than in California, the land of “serial entrepreneurship”, for anyone with a successful startup. Not to mention the US tax rate doesn’t include a myriad of other small taxes that for some reason are not included in that number. On top of having a higher tax rate the average Californian entrepreneur also has to source extremely expensive healthcare.
It sounds more like an excuse to keep doing what you already wanted to do rather than an actual demotivating factor.
I pay for private healthcare insurance because I want better outcomes than waiting for years to get urgent surgery. I have seen loved ones literally killed by our healthcare system (unnecessary death - not just normal risks of medicine). Our public health system is good when it works but it has some sharp edges. Although I assume poor NZers are better off than poor Californians for heathcare access.
> It sounds more like an excuse to keep doing what you already wanted to do rather than an actual demotivating factor.
I am telling you that it demotivates me. We don't always know why we think things and I don't have to be perfectly rational. You might be right, but calling it an excuse is extremely rude.
Higher taxes is the wrong solution to the very valid problem.
We all recognize that a democracy is the correct method for political decision making, even though it's also obvious that theoretically a truly benevolent dictator can make better decisions than an elected parliament but in practice such dictators don't really exist.
The same reasoning applies to economic decision making at society level. If you want a society whose economics reflects the will and ethics of the people, and which serves for the benefit of normal people, the obvious thing is the democratize economic decision making. That means that all large corporations must be mostly owned by their workers in roughly 1/N fashion, not by a small class of shareholders. This is the obvious correct solution, because it solves the underlying problem, not paper of the symptoms like taxation. If shareholder owned corporations are extracting wealth from workers or doing unethical things, the obvious solution is to take away their control.
Obviously, some workers will still make their own corporations do evil things, but at least it will be collective responsibility, not forced upon them by others.
The alternative is to make consumption the will of the people, so people buy things they want, and from vendors they like.
I think "this isn't free; you pay with ad views and your data is sold" is something that should be on a price tag on services that operate this way, though. It doesn't work if the price isn't clearly advertised.
> but I don’t know if people have contemplated the consequences of the existence of such a de facto ceiling seriously.
One of the second order consequences of progressive taxation is that it increases gross wages for higher earners, as people care about their net pay being larger, not their gross pay.
An extreme example, in the UK the tax rate is an effective 60% between £100k and £120k (ish), so people's salaries get driven through that zone quickly. This obviously means there's less money to give to other people.
Those people are full of shit. I'm Norwegian and a software engineer. Income tax generally tops out at about 46%, if you earn $200k you'll pay around 40%, at $500k you'll pay like 46% or so and it doesnt go much higher than that even if you earn a million dollars (10 million nok).
So the difference between earning a decent salary of $80-100k and a great salary north of $150k isn't much tax-percent-wise. If you make another $1000 you take home about $500.
Also keep in mind we don't have to pay for health insurance, we don't have to pay for our kids to go to school, if we get sick and can't work we have a social security net that will take care of us indefinitely. Norway is a great place to live. The people who complain about taxes are idiots who don't know how good they have it. If you make $200k+ you're living a fucking great life, if you make $400k it's even better. Hell i used to make like $35k and I got by on that. $50k is perfectly liveable. And those people pay like 20-25%.
I'm happy to pay taxes, I'm doing great and I don't even earn that much yet. I expect to nearly double my salary within the next 5ish years. Maybe more than double.
Then you have middle class+ Norwegians with a big house, $100k+ car, sweet boat, cabin in the mountains etc complaining about taxes. Man shut up you're literally top .1% in the world you won the damn lottery.
My problem with this take is that you forget, the corporations are made up of people, so in order for the corporation to be evil you have to take into account the aggregate desires and decision making of the employees and shareholders and, frankly, call them all evil. Calling them evil is kind of a silly thing to do anyway, but you can not divorce the actions of a company from those who run and support it, and I would argue you can't divorce those actions from those who buy the products the company puts out either.
So in effect you have to call the employees and shareholders evil. Well those are the same people who also work and hold public office from time to time, or are shareholders, or whatever. You can't limit this "evilness" to just an abstract corporation. Not only is it not true, you are setting up your "problem" so that it can't be addressed because you're only moralizing over the abstract corporation and not the physical manifestation of the corporation either. What do you do about the abstract corporation being evil if not taking action in the physical world against the physical people who work at and run the corporation and those who buy its products?
I've noticed similar behavior with respect to climate change advocacy and really just "government" in general. If you can't take personal responsibility, or even try to change your own habits, volunteer, work toward public office, organize, etc. it's less than useless to rail about these entities that many claim are immoral or need reform if you are not personally going to get up and do something about it. Instead you (not you specifically) just complain on the Internet or to friends and family, those complaints do nothing, and you feel good about your complaining so you don't feel like you need to actually do anything to make change. This is very unproductive because you have made yourself feel good about the problem but haven't actually done anything.
With all that being said, I'm not sure how paying vastly higher taxes would make Google (or any other company) less evil or more evil. What if Google pays more taxes and that tax money does (insert really bad thing you don't like)? Paying taxes isn't like a moral good or moral bad thing.
People making meaningful decisions at mega corporations aren’t a random sample of the population, they are self selected to care a great deal about money and or power.
Honestly if you wanted to filter the general population to quietly discover who was evil I’d have a hard time finding something more effective. It doesn’t guarantee everyone is actually evil, but actually putting your kids first is a definite hindrance.
The morality of the average employee on the other hand is mostly irrelevant. They aren’t setting policies and if they dislike something they just get replaced.
You'd never figure out who was "evil" because it's just based on your own interpretation of what evil is. Unless of course you want to join me as a moral objectivist? I don't think Google doing military work with the US government is evil. On the other and I think the influence and destruction caused by advertising algorithms is. Who gets to decide what is evil?
I take issue with "don't blame the employees". You need people to run these organizations. If you consider the organization to be evil you don't get to then say well the people who are making the thing run aren't evil, they're just following orders or they don't know better. BS. And they'd be replaced if they left? Is that really the best argument we have against "being evil"?
Sorry I'd be less evil but if I gave up my position as an evil henchman someone else would do it! And all that says anyway is that those replacing those who leave are just evil too.
If you work at one of these companies or buy their products and you literally think they are evil you are either lying to yourself, or actively being complicit in their evil actions. There's just no way around that.
Take personal responsibility. Make tough decisions. Stop abstracting your problems away.
If your defense is trying to argue about what’s evil, you’ve already lost.
Putting money before other considerations is what’s evil. What’s “possible” expands based on your morality it doesn’t contract. If being polite makes a sale you’re going to find a lot of polite sales people, but how much are they willing to push that expended warrantee?
> Sorry I'd be less evil but if I gave up my position as an evil henchman someone else would do it!
I’ve constrained what I’m willing to do and who I’m willing to work for based on my morality, have you? And if not, consider what that say about you…
> Putting money before other considerations is what’s evil.
Depends on the considerations and what you consider to be evil. My point wasn't to argue about what's evil, of course there is probably a few hundred years of philosophy to overcome in that discussion, but to point out that if you truly think an organization is evil it's not useful to only care about the legal fiction or the CEO or the board that you won't have any impact on - you have to blame the workers who make the evil possible too, and stop using the products. Otherwise you're just deceiving yourself into feeling like you are doing something.
I was writing about the general case. I apologize if that wasn't clear from the start. I don't know anything about you personally though I'm sure we'd have some great conversations over a glass of wine (or coffee or whatever :) )!
> The fact you assume people are going to do things they believe to be morally reprehensible is troubling to me.
This seems to be very common behavior in my experience. Perhaps the rhetoric doesn't match the true beliefs. I'm not sure.
> I’ve constrained what I’m willing to do and who I’m willing to work for based on my morality, have you? And if not, consider what that say about you…
This sort of discussion gets a bit tricky because it often turns out one person is not having a discussion; they're trying to advertise something about themselves.
I’m not really judging other people here. I remember working on a project and realizing I was one of those cogs keeping ICBM’s operating and it really just hit home.
Not thinking anything about who you’re working for is just kind of the default. However, IMO if you do feel something is wrong then that’s when the obligation to carry through comes in.
I don't think it's the default. Lots of people think about what they do, in my experience. If you think ICBMs are purely bad, fair enough, but I imagine lots of people believe they - particularly when not fired - perform a vital defensive service, and are worth working on for that reason.
I don't really agree with some of your assumptions. At many companies, many of the people also are evil. Many people who hold shares and public office are also evil.
I don't think it's necessary to conclude that because a company is evil then everyone who works at the company is evil. But it's sort of like the evilness of the company is a weighted function of the evilness of the people who control it. Someone with a small role may be relatively good while the company overall can still be evil. Someone who merely uses the company's products is even more removed from the company's own level of evil. If the company is evil it usually means there is some relatively small group of people in control of it making evil decisions.
Now, I'm using phraseology here like "is evil" as a shorthand for "takes actions that are evil". The overall level of evilness or goodness of a person is an aggregate of their actions. So a person who works for an evil company or buys an evil company's products "is evil", but only insofar as they do so. I don't think this is even particularly controversial, except insofar as people may prefer alternative terms like "immoral" or "unethical" rather than "evil". It's clear people disagree about which acts or companies are evil, but I think relatively few people view all association with all companies totally neutrally.
I do agree with you that taking personal responsibility is a good step. And, I mean, I think people do that too. All kinds of people avoid buying from certain companies, or buy SRI funds or whatever, for various ethically-based reasons.
However, I don't entirely agree with the view that says it's useless or hypocritical to claim that reform is necessary unless you are going to "do something". Yes, on some level we need to "do something", but saying that something needs to be done is itself doing something. I think the idea that change has to be preceded or built from "saintly" grassroots actions is a pernicious myth that demotivates people from seeking large-scale change. My slogan for this is "Big problems require big solutions".
This means that it's unhelpful to say that, e.g., everyone who wants regulation of activities that Company X does has to first purge themselves of all association with Company X. In many cases a system arises which makes such purges difficult or impossible. As an extreme, if someone lives in an area with few places to get food, they may be forced to patronize a grocery store even if they know that company is evil. Part of "big solutions" means replacing the bad ways of doing things with new things, rather than saying that we first have to get rid of the bad things to get some kind of clean slate before we can build new good things.
You could use this logic to posit that any government, group, system, nation state, militia, business, or otherwise, isn't "evil" because you haven't gauged the thoughts, feelings and actions of every single person who comprises that system. Thats absurd.
If using AI and other technology to uphold a surveillance state, wage war, do imperialism, and do genocide... isn't evil, than I don't know if you can call anything evil.
And the entire point of taxes is that we all collectively decide that we all would be better off if we pooled our labor and resources together so that we can have things like a basic education, healthcare, roads, police, bridges that don't collapse etc.. Politicians and corporations have directly broken and abused this social contract in a multitude of ways, one of those ways is using loopholes to not pay taxes at the same rate as everyone else by a large margin... another way is paying off politicians and lobbying so that those loopholes never get closed, and in fact, the opposite happens. So yes, taxing Google and other mega-corporations is a single, easily identifiable, action that can be directly taken to remedy this problem. Though, there is no way around solving the core issue at hand, but people have to be able to identify that issue foremost.
By definition we can never know for sure, but I believe the number of people who stay silent is many times bigger than those who voice their opinion. They've learned it is unproductive (as you say) or worst case, you're told you've got it all wrong technically speaking.
Complaining is not unproductive, it signals to others they are not alone in their frustrations. Imagine that nobody ever responds or airs their frustrations; would you feel comfortable saying something about it? Maybe you're the only one, better keep quiet then. Or how do you find people who share your frustrations with whom you could organise some kind of pushback?
If I was "this government", I would love for people to shut up and just do their job, pay taxes and buy products (you don't have to buy them from megacorp, just spend it and oh yeah, goodluck finding places to buy products from non-megacorps).
My point was that complaining isn't enough and in my experience most people just complain but don't even take the smallest action in line with their views because it inconveniences them. Instead they lull themselves to sleep that something was done because they complained about it, and there's no need to adjust anything in their lives because they "did all they can do".
Instead of taking action they complain, set up an abstract boogeyman to take down, and then nobody can actually take action to make the world better (based on their point of view) because there's nothing anyone can do about Google the evil corporation because it's just some legal fiction. Bonus points for moralizing on the Internet and getting likes to feel even better about not doing anything.
But you can do something. If someone thinks Google is evil they can stop using Gmail or other Google products and services, or even just reduce their usage - maybe you can switch email providers but you only have one good map option. Ok at least you did a little more than you did previously.
corporations, separate from the people in them, are set up in a way that incentivizes bad behaviour, based on which stake holders are considered and when, along with what mechanisms result in rewards and which ones get you kicked out.
the architecture of the system is imperfect and creates bad results for people.
A large corporation is more than the sum of its owners and employees, though. Large organizations in general have an emergent phenomenon - past a certain threshold, they have a "mind of it own", so to speak, which - yes - still consists of individual actions of people making the organization, but those people are no longer acting as they normally would. They get influenced by corporate culture, or fall in line because they are conditioned to socially conform, or follow the (morally repugnant) rule book because otherwise they will be punished etc. It's almost as if it was a primitive brain with people as neurons, forced into configurations that, above all, are designed to perpetuate its own existence.
Historically, unchecked corporate power tends to mirror the flaws of the systems that enable it. For example, the Gilded Age robber barons exploited weak regulations, while tech giants thrive on data privacy gray areas. Maybe the problem isn’t size itself, but the lack of guardrails that scale with corporate influence (e.g., antitrust enforcement, environmental accountability, or worker protections), but what do I know!
I guess corrupt cop vs serial killer is like amorality (profit-driven systems) vs immorality (active malice)? A company is a mix of stakeholders, some of whom push for ethical practices. But when shareholders demand endless growth, even well-intentioned actors get squeezed.
That word comes with a lot of boot-up code and dodgy dependencies.
I don't like it.
Did Robert Louis Stevenson make a philosophical error in 1882
supposing that a moral society (with laws etc) can contain within
itself a domain outside of morals [0]?
What if coined the word "alegal"?
Oh officer... what I'm doing is neither legal nor illegal, it's simply
alegal "
As scale grows the moral ambiguity does also. Megacorps default to “evil” because action in a large number of circumstances for a large number of events does as well, particularly when economic factors are motivating behavior (implicitly or explicitly). Essentially being “non-evil” becomes more expensive than the value it adds. There is always someone on the other end of a transaction, by definition.
Agreed, I think part of it boils down to the concept of 'limited liability' itself which is a euphemism for 'the right to carry out some degree of evil without consequence.'
Also, scale plays a significant part as well. Any high-exposure organization which operates on a global scale has access to an extremely large pool of candidates to staff its offices... And such candidate pools necessarily include a large number of any given personas... Including large numbers of ethically-challenged individuals and criminals. Without an interview process which actively selects for 'ethics', the ethically-challenged and criminal individuals have a significant upper-hand in getting hired and then later wedging themselves into positions of power within the company.
Criminals and ethically-challenged individuals have a bigger risk appetite than honest people so they are more likely to succeed within a corporate hierarchy which is founded on 'positive thinking' and 'turning a blind eye'. On a global corporate playing field, there is a huge amount of money to be made in hiding and explaining away irregularities.
A corporate employee can do something fraudulent and then hold onto their jobs while securing higher pay, simply by signaling to their employer that they will accept responsibility if the scheme is exposed; the corporate employer is happy to maintain this arrangement and feign ignorance while extracting profits so long as the scheme is kept under wraps... Then if the scheme is exposed, the corporations will swiftly throw the corporate employee under the bus in accordance to the 'unspoken agreement'.
The corporate structure is extremely effective at deflecting and dissipating liability away from itself (and especially its shareholders) and onto citizens/taxpayers, governments and employees (as a last layer of defense). The shareholder who benefits the most from the activities of the corporation is fully insulated from the crimes of the corporation. The scapegoats are lined up, sandwiched between layers of plausible deniability in such a way that the shareholder at the end of the line can always claim complete ignorance and innocence.
We judge morality when there’s some meaningful downside and people at their worst, because a little unpleasantness can dramatically outweigh a lot of nice behavior.
“I love hanging out with Tim he’s a funny guy helped me move a couch last week, kind of which he hadn’t pushed me in front of that bus that one time but ehh I doubt he’d do that again…”
Right! I was going to say something like that. Google is in all honesty, corrupt. Then again, most big corporations are this way. Google and Microsoft seem to be a bit more than others, though.
A megacorp is amoral. They have no concern over an individual anymore than a human has concern for an ant, because individuals simply don’t register to them. The ant may regard the human as pure evil for the destruction it rains upon its colony, but the ants are not even a thought in the human’s mind most of the time.
> they are fundamentally unconcerned with goodness or morality
No, no. Call a spade a spade. This behavior and attitude is evil. Corporations under modern American capitalism must be evil. That's how capitalism works.
You succeed in capitalism not by building a better mousetrap, but by destroying anyone who builds a better moustrap than you. You litigate, acquire, bribe, and rewrite legislation to ensure yours is the best and only mousetrap available to purchase, with a token 'competitor' kept on life support so you can plausibly deny anticompetitive practices.
If you're a good company trying to do good things, you simply can't compete. The market just does not value what is good, just, or beneficial. The market only wants number to go up, and to go up right now at any cost. Amazon will start pumping out direct clones of your product for pennies. What are you gonna do, sue Amazon?! best of luck.
"The market" is just a lot of people making decisions about what to do with their money. If you want the market to behave differently, be the change you want to see, and teach others to do the same.
Not evil, perhaps, but run by Moloch[1] -- which is possibly just as bad. Their incentives are set up to throw virtually all human values under the bus because even if they don't, they will be out-marginal-profited by someone that does.
What is Googs going to do, leave money on the table?
And if Googs doesn't do it, someone else will, so it might as well be them that makes money for their shareholders. Technically, couldn't activist shareholders come together and claim by not going after this market the leadership should be replaced for those that would? After all, share prices is the only metric that matters
I think the poster is applying your statement about leaving money on the table. Structural requirements to not leave money on the table is a Moloch results that leads to the deterioration of the system into being just stealing as much shit as possible.
I don't buy that argument. There are things Google does better than competitors, so them doing an evil thing means they are doing it better. Also, they could be spending those resources on something less evil.
Remember when the other AI companies wanted ClosedAI to stop "for humanity's sake" when all it meant was for them the catch up? None of these companies are "good". They all know that as soon as one company does it, they all must follow, so why not lead?
What are you are saying is: optimising for commercial success is incompatible with morality. The conclusion is that publicly traded megacorps must inevitably trend towards amorality.
So yes, they aren't "evil" but I think amorality is the closest thing to "evil" that actually exists in the real world.
Paperclip maximizing robot making the excuse that it's just maximizing paperclips, that's what it was designed to do, there's even a statute saying that robots must do only what it was designed to do, so it's not evil just amoral.
Weird thing is for corporations, it's humans running the whole thing.
> they’re amoral and are designed to maximize profits
Isn't that a contradiction? Morality is fundamentally a sense of "right and wrong". If they reward anything that maximizes short term profit and punish anything that works against it then it appears to me that they have a simple, but clearly defined sense of morality centered around profit.
> they are fundamentally unconcerned with goodness or morality, and any appearance that they are is purely a marketing exercise
This is flatly untrue. Corporations are made up of humans who make decisions. They are indeed concerned with goodness and/or morality. Saying otherwise lets them off the hook for the explicit decisions they make every day about how to operate their company. It's one reason why there are shareholder meetings, proxy votes, activist investors, Certified B-Corporations, etc.
A megacorp is made up of people. So it's people who are fundamentally evil.
The main thing here I think is anonymity through numbers and complexity. You and thousands of others just want to see the numbers go up. And that desire is what ultimately influences decisions like this.
If google stock dropped because of this then google wouldn't do it. But it is the actions of humans in aggregate that keeps it up.
Megacorporations are scapegoats when in actuality they are just a set of democratic rules. The corporation is just a window into the true nature of humanity.
You're half right. Corporations are just made of people. But, they're more than the sum of their parts. The numbers and complexity do more than provide anonymity: they provide a mechanism where individuals can work in concert to accomplish bad things in the aggregate, without (necessarily) requiring any particular individual to violate their conscience. It just happens through the power of incentives and specialization. If you're in upper management, the complexity also makes it easier to turn a blind eye to what is happening down below.
>A megacorp is made up of people. So it's people who are fundamentally evil.
That is to make a mistake of composition. An entity can have properties that none of its parts have. A cube made out of bricks is round, but none of the bricks are round. You might be evil, your cells aren't evil.
It's often the case that institutions are out of alignment with its members. It can even be the case that all participants of an organization are evil, but the system still functions well. (usually one of the arguments for markets, which is one such system). When creating an organization that is effectively the most basic task, how to structure it such that even when its individual members are up to no good, the functioning of the organization is improved.
Not a useful framing in my view. People follow private incentives. Private incentives are by default not perfectly aligned with external stakeholders. That leads to "evil" behavior. But it's not the people or the org, it's the incentives. You can substitute other people into the same system and get the same outcome.
People have the incentive to not do evil and to do evil for money. When you abstract the evil away into 1 vote out of thousands then you abstract responsibility and everyone ends up in aggregate doing an inconsequential evil and it adds up to a big evil.
Ethical pledges from corporations, especially ones as large as Google, are PR tools first and foremost. They last only as long as they align with strategic and financial interests
> they are fundamentally unconcerned with goodness or morality,
I would argue that is fundamentally evil. Because evil pays the best. Its like drunk driving, on an empty road it can only harm you, but we live in a society full of other people.
Well, the US gov blew away its opportunity to break down Google and other mega-corps and restore any sense of decency. Google just entered the Trump bandwagon, which means the monopoly lawsuit will go nowhere, and in exchange Google will do Trump's bidding.
Being unconcerned with goodness and morality is literally the definition of evil. Megacorps are sociopathic and evil by design. The only thing that matters is shareholder value, not ethics or morals. Morals and ethics only seem to have value, if they result in increased value for tye shareholder, which again is the only thing that these sociopathic entities are concerned with.
> while megacorps aren't fundamentally "evil" (for some definitions of evil)
A couple years ago, my state banned single use plastic bags. The very moment they did, all of my local Walmarts switched to heavier plastic bags that technically weren't single use. They still gave them away for free just as they did with the first ones. (These we're good quality bags and I was frustrated that Walmart didn't just give them away by default). Eventually my state banned those too, and like clockwork, Walmart was giving away paper bag bags -- decent quality ones, too. Though I still really liked the thicker plastic ones since I could use them for other things.
This made me realize that no corporation would do anything slightly better for the environment unless forced. I think this is the case for anything a corporation would do, including evil things. I think they just follow the money, no ethics, and it's up to the government to provide those ethics.
Google is a special case because they specifically removed the "Don't Be Evil" clause, therefore, I can only assume they are in fact fundamentally "evil"
The new administration seems to be dropping "soft power" in exchange for an emphasis on hard power... but hard power is more expensive and backfires more spectacularly than soft power. I think they are digging a hole for themselves and can't stop because a few rich people are making a lot of money on kickbacks.
History shows that they aren't really digging a hole for themselves.
This whole thing where the average person feels that they can use rules against a more powerful person? That's really an invention of maybe the last 80 years, if not more recently than that.
With the exception of that human lifetime-sized era, the vast majority of history is a bunch of psychopaths running things and getting to kill/screw whoever they wanted and steal whatever they wanted. Successful revolts are few and far between. The only real difference is the stakes.
I think you misread what I was saying. Hard power is really costly to deploy. It can work, but it is incredibly expensive and the U.S. couldn't even suppress resistance in Iraq, Afghanistan, or Gaza on a durable basis. Blunt deployment of these techniques will cause the U.S. to lose friends, territory, and civil unrest as the treasury drains and life domestically just gets worse and worse.
What is a $1M TC when you'll get jacked on your way to the tech bus for turning America into mad max? You're not rich enough to have your own billionaire bunker.
There are plenty of people on here working for Boeing, Ratheon, etc, actively contributing to actual killings of actual people. Those folks don’t get confronted, why would it be different here?
The whole point of Mad Max is that your TC and RSUs and whatever aren’t worth shit anymore, and the people you thought useless and weird and poor suddenly have the chance to kick you in the face.
- you assume this will turn America into a dystopia. more likely it contributes to restoring and maintaining uncontested American overmatch, especially in the long term, where effectively no other nation can challenge us.
- 1mmTC is enough to do this depending on how one allocates spending. land in many parts of the country is not that expensive.
It's not exactly unheard of for certain weapons to be declared off-limits by most countries even if the "bad guys" are using them - think chemical and biological agents, landmines, cluster munitions, blinding weapons and so on. I doubt there will ever be treaties completely banning any use of AI in warfare but there might be bans on specific applications, particularly using it to make fully autonomous weapons which select and dispatch targets with no human in the loop, for similar reasons to why landmines are mostly banned.
Landmines and cluster munitions have been among Ukraine's most effective weapons for resisting the Russian invasion. Without those, Ukraine would likely have already lost the war. It's so bizarre how some people who face no real risks themselves think that those weapons should be declared off-limits.
Nobody said they're not effective during a war, the problem is they remain effective against any random civilians who happen to stumble across them for a long time after the war is over. Potentially decades, as seen in Cambodia.
It would be a bit of a Pyrrhic victory to repel an attempted takeover of your land, only for that land to end up contaminated with literally millions of landmines because you didn't have a mutual agreement against using them.
People who are defending against an existential threat today don't have the luxury of worrying about contamination tomorrow. I think at this point Ukraine will take a Pyrrhic victory if the alternative is their end as a fully sovereign nation state. And let's be clear about the current situation: if Ukraine and Russia had a mutual agreement against using those weapons then Ukraine would probably have already lost. Landmines in particular are extremely effective as a force multiplier for outnumbered defenders.
They're declared off-limits because the military doesn't want them. Biological and chemical weapons aren't useful to modern militaries. Landmines and cluster munitions are, so none of the countries that actually matter have banned them!
Analogy is not apt. If other countries are trying to pry into our data and systems, then the right move for google or any other tech company is to advance our defenses and make cybersecurity stronger, more available, and easier for companies and people to use. If someone is trying to hack me, it's much smarter for me to defend myself rather than try to hack the other guy back.
Personally I don’t care if ML is used for weapons development assuming there are standards
It’s the companies that horde everyone’s personal information, who eroded the concept of privacy while mediating lives with false promises for trust turning into state intelligence agencies that bothers me
The incentives and results become fucked up, safe guards less likely to work I get not a lot of people care but it’s dangerous
Yes, but there should probably be some kind of separation between the AI weapons and surveillance parts and something having to do with providing communications and search services.
It's not really appropriate for an AI weapons firm to be an integrated part of something which has access to information from which sensitive information such political beliefs etc. can be easily extracted.
It's a problem if someone is looking at sensitive user data one day and at how to categorize people so they can be put on kill lists the other.
Is this more or less ethical than OpenAI getting a DoD contract to deploy models on the battlefield less than a year after saying that would never happen, with the excuse being well we only meant certain kinds of warfare or military purposes, obviously. I guess my question is, isn't there something more honest about an open heel-turn, like Google has made, compared to one where you maintain the fiction that you're still trying to do the right thing?
I think it's unfair to bring up OpenAI's commitment to its own principles as any sort of bar of success for anyone else. That's a bit like saying "Yes, this does look like they're yielding to foreign tyrants, but is this more or less ethical than Vidkun Quisling's tenure as head of Norway?"
At least Google employees will sign petitions and do things that follow a moral code.
OpenAI is sneaky slimey and headed by a psycho narcissist. Makes Pichia looks like a saint.
Ethically, it’s the same. But if someone was pointing a gun at me I’d rather have someone with some empathy behind the trigger rather than the personification of a company that bleeds high level execs and… insert many problems here
> At least Google employees will sign petitions and do things that follow a moral code.
It hardly matters what employees think anymore when the executives are weather-vanes who point in the direction of wealth and power over all else (just like the executives at their competitors).
In case you missed it, a few days back Google asked all employees who don't believe in their "mission" to voluntarily resign.
That's not at all what happened. One of Google's division offered a "voluntary exit" in lieu of or in addition to an upcoming layoff, and the email announcing it suggested that it could be a good option for some folks, for example people struggling or for folks who didn't like Google's direction.
That is not the same thing as asking everyone who doesn't believe in the mission to please resign.
Which rhymes pretty well with not believing in their mission. They are telling people to leave instead of trying to influence the direction from the inside.
I have been pondering about such subject over the past weeks. Maybe one could compare it to people who worked for Allianz, Audi, Bayer, BMW, IBM and others before 1945.
> "There’s a global competition taking place for AI leadership within an increasingly complex geopolitical landscape. We believe democracies should lead in AI development..."
This is extremely disconcerting.
Google as a tool of surveillance is the kind of thing that could so easily be abused or misused to such catastrophic ends that I absolutely think the hard line should be there. And I only feel significantly more this way given the current geopolitical realities.
... did they just present themselves as the saviors of all democracies?! Really?
By weaponising AI?
Who else right? If not them, there will be no one saving democracies with weaponized mass-surveillance AI. It is their quest and privilege, right? Medicine, just society, and all such crap have to wait!
One of my chief worries about LLMs for intelligence agencies is the ability to scale textual analysis. Previously there at least had to be an agent taking an interest in you; today an LLM could theoretically read all text you've ever touched and flag anything from legal violations to political sentiments.
This has already been possible long before LLMs came along. I also doubt that an LLM is the best tool for this at scale, if you're talking about sifting through billions of messages it gets too expensive very fast.
LLMs can do more than whatever we had before. Sentiment analysis and keyword searches only worked so well; LLMs understand meaning and intent. Cost and scale are not bottlenecks for long.
It's only expensive if you throw all data directly at the largest models that you have. But the usual way to apply LMs to such large amounts of data is by staggering them: you have very small & fast classifiers operating first to weed out anything vaguely suspicious (and you train them to be aggressive - false positives are okay, false negatives are not). Things that get through get reviewed by a more advanced model. Repeat the loop as many times as needed for best throughput.
No, OP is right. We are truly at the dystopian point where a sufficiently rich government can track the loyalty of its citizens in real time by monitoring all electronic communications.
Also, "expensive" is relative. When you consider how much US has historically been willing to spend on such things...
But now instead of a human going "yes yes after a few hours of work i have chosen the target" they can go "we did more processing on who to best blow away, and it chose 100 more names than any human ever could! efficiency!"
At what point does a public promise carry any legal weight whatsoever? If it carries none, then why not leave it in place and lie? If it carries some, for how long and who has standing to sue?
Genuine questions. Unlike "don't be evil," this promise has a very narrow and clear interpretation.
It would be nice if companies weren't able to just kinda say whatever when it's expedient.
However, when you change a promise publicly, you signal a change in direction. It is much more honest than leaving it in place but violating it behind the scenes. If the public really cares, they can pass a law via their democratic representatives (or Google can swear a public oath before God I suppose).
I'm guessing this will be a somewhat controversial view here, but I think this is net good. The world is more turbulent than at any other time in my life, there is war in Europe, and the U.S. needs every advantage it can get to improve its defense. Companies like Google, OpenAI, Microsoft, can and should be working with the government on defense projects -- I would much rather the Department of Defense have access to the best tools from the private sector than depend on some legacy prime contractor that doesn't have any real tech capabilities.
> the U.S. needs every advantage it can get to improve its defense
That’s one of the reasons for the turbulent times.
Let’s face the truth, most of the defense can easily be used for offense and given the state of online security every progress gets into the wrong hands.
Maybe it’s time to pause to make it more difficult for those wrong hands.
I guess you could put that on the U.S.'s plate and no doubt America has caused many issues around the world, but I think in generally its a good actor. Biggest conflicts today: Ukraine -- I would squarely put this on Russia, nothing to do with the U.S.; Sudan -- Maybe lack of knowledge, but I don't think it's fair to place much responsibility on the U.S. (esp relative to other actors); ditto DRC/Rwanda
Yes, many defensive uses of technologies can be used for offense. When I say defense, I also include offense there as I don't believe you can just have a defensive posture alone to maintain one's defense, you need deterrence too. Personally I'm quite happy to see many in Silicon Valley embrace defense-tech and build missiles (ex. recent YC co), munitions, and dual-use tech. The world is a scary and dangerous place, and awful people will take advantage of the weakness of others if they can. Maybe I'm biased because I spent a lot of time in Eastern Europe and Ukraine, but I much prefer the U.S. with all our faults to another actor like China or Russia being dominant
> Ukraine -- I would squarely put this on Russia, nothing to do with the U.S.
Every kinetic reaction by Russia in Georgia and Ukraine is downstream of major destabilizing non-kinetic actions by the US.
You don't think the US fomenting revolutions in Russia's near-abroad was in any way a contributing factor to Russian understanding of the strategic situation on its western border? [1] You don't think the US unilaterally withdrawing from the ABM treaty[2], and then following that up with plans to put ABMs in Eastern Europe[3], were factors in the security stability of the region? You don't think that the US pushing to enlarge NATO without adjusting the CFE treaty to reflect the inclusion of new US allies had an impact? [4][5] It's long been known that the Russian military lacked the capacity for sustained offensive/expeditionary operations outside of its borders.[6][7] Until ~2014 it didn't even possess the force structure for peer warfare, as it had re-oriented its organization for counter-insurgency in the Caucasus. So what was driving US actions in Eastern Europe? This was a question US contrarians and politicians such as Pat Buchanan were asking as early as 1997. We've had almost 3 decades of American thinkers cautioning that pissing around in Russia's western underbelly would eventually trigger a catastrophic reaction[8], and here we are, with the Ukrainians paying the butcher's bill.
In the absence of US actions, the kleptocrats in Moscow would have been quite content continuing to print money selling natural resources to European industry and then wasting their largess buying up European villas and sports teams. But the siloviki have deep-seated paranoia which isn't entirely baseless (Russia has eaten 3 devastating wars originating from its open western flanks in the past ~120 years). As a consequence the US has pissed away one of the greatest accomplishments of the Cold War: the Sino-Soviet Split. Our hamfisted attempts to kick Russia while it was down have now forced the two principle powers on the Eurasian landmass back into bed with each other. This is NOT how we win The Great Game.
> Maybe I'm biased because I spent a lot of time in Eastern Europe and Ukraine, but I much prefer the U.S. with all our faults to another actor like China or Russia being dominant.
It would help to lead with this context. My position is that our actions ENSURE that a hostile Eurasian power bloc will become dominant. We should have used far less stick to integrate Russia into the Western security structure, as well as simply engaged them without looking down our noses at them as a defeated has-been power (play to their ego as a Great Power). A US-friendly Russia is needed to over-extend China militarily. We need China to be forced into committing forces to the long Sino-Russian border, much as Ukraine must garrison its border with Belarus. We need to starve the PRC's industry of cheap natural resources. Now the China-Russia-Iran soft-alliance has the advantage of interior lines across the whole continent, and a super-charged Chinese industrial base fed by Siberia. Due to the tyranny of distance, this will be an near-impossible nut to crack for the US in a conflict.
tbo I'm really glad that other americans aren't as wise and calm as you are.
otherwise, we may be surrounded by both the US and Russia
or, maybe, the current situation is the result of decisions made after careful consideration at the time, by whom deeply understand all you said now.
maybe, they just considered... EU is also a threat to them, they don't want a united europe, so a conflict between two enemies... is just fine? an angry russia will make EU more united(with the US)
> In the absence of US actions, the kleptocrats in Moscow would have been quite content continuing to print money selling natural resources to European industry and then wasting their largess buying up European villas and sports teams. But the siloviki have deep-seated paranoia which isn't entirely baseless (Russia has eaten 3 devastating wars originating from its open western flanks in the past ~120 years).
It is important to stress that the money-oriented kleptocrats and siloviki (KGB-oldtimers) are two opposite groups. Kleptocrats dominated in the 1990s, but lost to KGB oldtimers like Putin, who consolidated power by the late 1990s, because they were more ruthless. In the following decade, they crushed all opposition and turned the country from a dysfunctional democracy into a full dictatorship, and then set their sight on their long-term goal of restoring "the lost empire", which includes roughly 100 million Europeans who regained their freedom when the USSR collapsed. Revanchism has always been at the very core of siloviks.
The countries in Eastern Europe were first to recognize which way the ball was rolling by mid-to-late 1990s, and that's why they set EU and NATO integration as their main foreign policy goals, hoping that tight integration into international organizations would increase their security. Your notion that the US "pushed" NATO enlargement is just plain wrong. Almost the entire Eastern Europe was begging to get into NATO, against very lukewarm reception.
Their completely rational fears were dismissed by existing members with the erroneous belief that Russians were motivated by money, and would not risk harming piggy banks like Gazprom by invading Eastern Europe again. Ironically, that made the eventual entry into NATO easier, as existing members didn't think at the time that Russia posed any real danger. The largest entry took place in 2004, as the NATO was being transformed into an anti-terrorism force in the aftermath of 9/11.
If there's anything to blame the Americans for, then -- according to Andrei Kozyrev, the foreign minister of Russia from 1990 to 1996 -- the Americans could've put more pressure on Russia already in the 1990s to prevent it from declining into a dictatorship. But it was more convenient to remain ignorant of the destruction of Russian democracy and the long downward spiral into a totalitarian dictatorship, and remain seduced by naive illusions like the ones you present us.
For example, the entire idea of Russia as an ally against China is ridiculous. Russians don't care about China one bit and China is not a meaningful part of the public discourse. Russia is a colonial empire run by the city-state of Moscow, with St Petersburg having some historical importance. Take a look at a map. Both St Petersburg and Moscow are few hundred kilometers from the European border. This is where the mental center of Russian government lies, and this is the area where their ambitions are. China, in contrast, is many thousands of kilometers away, and culturally even more distant. China is a strange, faraway place. The Russians who matter (elites in Moscow and St Petersburg) have very little to do with it. Russia does not have a huge outsourced manufacturing in China, nor do they compete in science or technology. Russians are completely outclassed, simple consumers of cheap Chinese goods like most of the world.
Instead, Russians fantasize about the "multipolar world" and other alternative realities where they could be a carbon copy of the US in Europe, but they are in no position to make it a reality. The post-WWII Europe with a hundred million Europeans living under Russian dominance was a historic glitch. Russians cling to this as a mythical "golden era" and are willing to throw everything away in a futile attempt to turn back time. Relations, money, people -- everything. Nothing else matters.
These fantasies are driven by the fact that Russia is a still a feudal society that has not gone through enlight...
>Every kinetic reaction by Russia in Georgia and Ukraine is downstream of major destabilizing non-kinetic actions by the US
Russia has been invading and massacring their neighbours for centuries. They just use whatever bs excuse that sounds kind of plausible or amusing at the time. You know - they have to invade Ukraine because the popularly elected jewish comedian is a nazi dictator etc. I think they just like tolling their victims as they rape, murder, steal and torture.
So the US needs to develop AI faster than the dictators to keep ahead of them, but not so fast they leak advancements that accelerate the dictators AI?
There is no keep being ahead.
If one side progresses the other side gets access to it too. Too many people involved and too little security to keep it secret.
Agreed. Any other answer is just burying your head in the sand. Our adversaries are forging ahead: China plans to integrate AI into every level of its military, and Russia is getting a crash course on drone warfare in Ukraine. You can build a FPV drone with Chinese parts and the warhead scavenged from an RPG for about $500 [1]. Every month, tens of thousands of these drones fly on Ukrainian battlefields and kill thousands of people. This is happening whether we like it or not; the train is leaving the station and we can either get on board or be left behind.
That's the thing everyone forget, Hitler was never a socialist, capital thrived under his reich.
Capitalist know socialism means their doom and are actively financing, forming and promoting far right politics accross the occident. Playing on people fear of the unknown to make them vote for parties that are counter-beneficial to them.
Nothing is going to stop USA's adversaries from deploying AI against US citizens. Pick your poison, but I prefer to compete and win rather than unilaterally disarm and hope for goodwill and kindness from regimes that prioritize the polar opposite.
Google has already made multiple commitments like this and broken them. One example would be their involvement in operating a censored version of Google.cn for the Chinese government from 2006 to 2010.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 341 ms ] threadGoogle is a megacorp, and while megacorps aren't fundamentally "evil" (for some definitions of evil), they are fundamentally unconcerned with goodness or morality, and any appearance that they are is purely a marketing exercise.
... or at least that's what these people have to be telling themselves at all times.
This is a very important point to remember when assessing ideas like "Is it good to build swarms of murderbots to mow down rioting peasants angry over having expenses but no jobs?" Most people might answer "no," but if the people with money answer "yes," that becomes the market's objective. Then the incentives diffuse through the economy and you don't just get the murderbots, you also get the news stations explaining how the violent peasants brought this on themselves and the politicians making murderbots tax deductible and so on.
Edit: answered, not asked
1. https://drakelawreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/lrdisc...
The market fairy has also decided that medication commercials on TV is good for you. That your car should report your location, speed, and driving habits to your insurer, car manufacturer, and their 983,764 partners at all times.
Maximally beneficial indeed.
while knowing this seems useless, it's actually the missing intrinsic compass and the cause for a lot of bad and stupid behavior (by the definition that something is stupid if chosen knowing it will cause negative consequences for the doer)
Everything should primarily be measured based on its primary goal. For "for-profit" companies that's obvious in their name and definition.
That there's nothing that should be assumed beyond what's stated is the premise of any contract whether commercial, public or personal (like friendship) is a basic tool for debate and decision making.
I think megacorps being evil is universal. It tends to be corrupt cop evil vs serial killer evil, but being willing to do anything for money has historically been categorized as evil behavior.
That doesn’t mean society would be better or worse off without them, but it would be interesting to see a world where companies pay vastly higher taxes as they grow.
That's old thinking. Now we have servitization. Now the business who can most efficiently offer value deserves the entire market.
Basically, iterate until you're the only one left standing and then never "sell" anything but licenses ever again.
...I just picture a similar conversation with a CEO going: "Sir, shareholders want to see more improvement this quarter." CEO: "Do we run ads? Have we run ads? Will we run ads this time?" (The answer is inevitably yes to all of these)
That creates limits to growth of an Ad based ecosystem.
So the thing to pay attention too is not Revenue growth or Profit growth of a Platform but Price of an Ad, Price to increase reach, price to Pay to Boost your post, price of a presidential campaign etc etc. These prices cant grow forever just like with housing prices or we get the equivalent of a Housing Bubble.
Want to destabilize the whole system pump up ad prices.
This isn’t new. Facebook, for example, received early funding from In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital arm, and its origins trace back to DARPA’s canceled LifeLog project—a system designed to track and catalog people’s entire lives. Big Tech and government surveillance have been intertwined from the start.
That’s why these companies never face real consequences. They’ve become quasi-government entities, harvesting data on billions under the guise of commerce.
Growing up in soviet bloc I took that story at face value. After all democracy was still a new thing, and people haven't invented privacy concerns yet.
Since then I always thought that some sort of cooperation between companies like Facebook or Google and CIA/DOD was an obvious thing to everyone.
And if one wants to know why big tech from China isn't welcome, be it phones or social media, it's not because fear of them spying on Americans, but because of the infeasibility of integrating Chinese companies into our own domestic surveillance systems.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM
> Years ago a friend working in security told me that every telco operator in Elbonia
See info about the fictional country of Elbonia here, from the Dilbert comics:
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dilbert
Allallarmia https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sichere_Inter-Netzwerk_Archite...
(Really süperspeciälly VPN-hardware used to securely suck data out of ISPs with extradeutsche Gründlichkeit,
mandatory to be installed by law,
just in case,
for some random chase.)
Edit: Thinking of it this is bubbling up https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dagger_Complex ,
where Magagagia built some little base just 'a stones throw' away from Allallarmias former monopol government Telcos early internet exchange and HQ .
( https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fernmeldetechnisches_Zentralam... )
What are the odds?
> We are clarifying that, as we continue to increase the breadth and depth of the content we make available to you, circumstances may require that certain titles and types of content include ads, even in our 'no ads' or 'ad free' subscription tiers.
So at this point they aren't even bothering to rename the tier from "ad free" even as they put ads in it. Or maybe it's supposed to mean "the ads come free with it" now? Newspeak indeed.
That's why it's being tentatively called "Technofeudalism".
I think if you look at quality of life and happiness ratings in Norway it's pretty clear it's far from "entirely undesirable". It's good for people to do things for reasons other than money.
Want to make more? then take personal risk.
It either takes risk of private capital or future taxpayers' taxes to create big leagues. I'd take the former over the latter.
Their entire economy and society are structured around oil extraction.
There are no lessons to learn from Norway unless you live somewhere that oil does from the ground.
The difference is Norway’s economy being far less dependent on petroleum which is only 40% of their exports.
We could literally have high speed rail, healthcare, the best education on the planet and have a high standard of living... and it would be peanuts to them. Instead we have a handful of people with more wealth than 99% of everyone else, while the bottom 75% of those people live in horrifying conditions. The fact that medical bankruptcy is a concept only in the richest country on earth is deeply embarrassing and shameful.
Sounds like the effort needed for bonuses here in the US. Why try if the amount is largely arbitrary and generally lower than your base salary pay rate when you consider all the extra hours. Everything is a sham.
Increasing marginal income tax rates on highly compensated employees might be a good policy overall. But where are we on the Laffer curve? If we go too far then it really hurts the overall economy.
This is a cliche you hear from right winger in any country that has a progressive tax system.
Regarding Norway, taxes aren't in the same ballpark as in some US blue states.
Also, it's a very simplistic view to think that people are only motivated by money. Counter examples abound.
Not a cliché - a fact. I'll explain to you.
The incentive structure of progressive taxation is wrong: it only works for the few percent that are extremely money hungry: the few that are willing to work for lower and lower percentage gains.
Normal people say "enough" and they give up once they have the nice house and a few toys (and some retirement money with luck). In New Zealand that is something like USD1.5 million.
I'm on a marginal rate of 39% in New Zealand. I am well off but I literally am not motivated to try and earn anything extra because the return is not enough for the extra effort or risk involved. No serial entrepreneurship for me because it only has downside risk. If I invest and win then 39%+ is taken as tax, but even worse is that if I lose then I can't claim my time back. Even financial losses only claw back against future income: and my taxable income could move to $0 due to COVID-level-event and so my financial risk is more than what it might naively appear.
Taxation systems do not fairly reward for risk. Especially watch people with no money taking high risks and pay no insurance because the worst that can happen to them is bankruptcy.
New Zealand loses because the incentive structure for a founder is broken. We are an island so the incentive structure should revolve around bringing in overseas income (presuming the income is spent within NZ). Every marginal dollar brought into the economy helps all citizens and the government.
The incentives were even worse when I was working but was trying to found a company. I needed to invest time, which had the opportunity cost of the wages I wouldn't get as a developer (significant risk that can't be hedged and can't be claimed against tax). 9 times out of 10 a founder wins approximately $0: so expected return needs to be > 10x. A VC fund needs something like > 30x return from the 1 or 2 winning investments. I helped found a successful business but high taxation has meant I haven't reached my 30x yet - chances are I'll be dead before I get a fair return for my risk. I'm not sure I've even reached 10x given I don't know the counterfactual of what my employee income would have become. This is for a business earning good export income.
Incentive structures matter - we understand that for employees - however few governments seem to understand that for businesses.
Most people are absolutely ignorant of even basic economics. The underlying drive is the wish to take from those that have more than them. We call it the tall poppy syndrome down here.
(reëdited to add clarity)
The income tax rate isn't all that relevant to the costs and benefits of starting a company, so I don't understand that part of your story. The rewards for founding a successful company mostly aren't subject to income tax, and NZ has a very light capital gains regime.
I have started my own company and I do agree that there are some issues that could be addressed. For example, it would be fairer if the years I worked for no income created tax-deductible losses against future income.
But NZ's tax rates are lower than Australia and the USA and most comparable nations, and NZers start a lot of businesses, so I don't think that is one of our major problems at the moment.
That's good that it motivates you. It doesn't motivate me any more. I'm not interested in "investing" more time for the reasons I have said.
> the taxes paid aren't burned, they mostly go to things I care about.
I'm pleased for you. I'd like to put more money towards things I care about.
> The income tax rate isn't all that relevant to the costs and benefits of starting a company
I am just less positive than you: it feels like win you lose, lose you lose bigger. I'm just pointing out that our government talks about supporting businesses but I've seen the waste from the repetitive attempts to monetise our scientific academics.
> The rewards for founding a successful company mostly aren't subject to income tax
Huh? Dividends are income. Or are you talking about the non-monetary rewards of owning a business?
> NZ has a very light capital gains regime
Which requires you to sell your company to receive the benefits of the lack of CGT. So every successful business in NZ is incentivised to sell. NZ sells it's jewels. Because keeping a company means paying income tax every year. NZ is fucking itself by selling anything profitable - usually to foreign buyers.
The one big ticket item I would like to save for is my retirement fund. But Labour/Greens want to take 50% to 100% of capital if you have over 2 million. A bullshit low amount drawdown at 4% is $80k/annum before tax LOL. Say investments go up by 6% per year and you want to withdraw 4%. Then a 2% tax is 100% of your gains. Plus I'm certain they will introduce means testing for super before I am eligible. And younger people are even more fucked IMHO. The reality is I need to plan to pay for the vast majority of my own costs when I retire, but I get to pay to support everybody else. I believe in socialist health care and helping our elderly, but the country is slowly going broke and I can't do much about that. I believe that our government will take whatever I have carefully saved - often to pay for people that were not careful (My peer-group is not wealthy so I see the good and the bad of how our taxes are spent). Why should I try to earn more to save?
I find it hard to understand how $60K means no motivation but $100K would be highly motivating.
> I'd like to put more money towards things I care about.
You said later that you care about the public health system and helping the elderly. That's where a large percentage of our taxes go.
> Huh? Dividends are income. Or are you talking about the non-monetary rewards of owning a business?
No, I'm talking about selling all or part of the business. I agree with you that it's a problem our businesses often sell out to overseas interests who hollow out the company. But the general pattern of making most of your money by selling shares in the business is completely normal worldwide.
Our society mostly works because of our non-monetary rewards, not because of monetary incentives. My teaching and nursing friends work for their own satisfaction, and more money is not a high priority to them.
I am not particularly motivated by money. I suspect you are a businessperson that believes money is strongly motivating? I chased financial success for 15 years when I started from $0: however I now hope I have enough and I hope it won't be unfairly taken from me. Yes, money was a big incentive then (and my personal costs have been very high), but now I have other goals.
I suspect I psychologically find high marginal taxation demotivating (48% if we include GST). Maybe because I have too many acquaintances and family sucking at the government tit. I see where government money goes because I have a wide variety of acquaintances including retirees, elderly, unhealthy, and unemployed. Yeah, I know they are not living the high life (well, maybe my drug-abusing anti-social acquaintances think they are).
> No, I'm talking about selling all or part of the business
Which requires an intense amount of work, and sometimes a significant loss, and usually requires selling 100%... Why should I sell at 4x earnings when I can hold on to the business - even if I don't want it? Taxation has too much influence on my investments because rebalancing across other investments has too high a cost/risk.
I guess I'm an idealist. I believe in startups, and I believe they help all New Zealanders. But the incentives of our taxation system mean that founding a startup is foolish: I don't recommend to anyone that they should be a founder (even though I have won the gamble). The unrecoverable costs of anything but spectacular success are too high. The non-monetary rewards are poor in my experience. The expected median return for a startup founder is about $0. Our social systems and taxation systems need to encourage business inception and growth so that all of NZ can be better off.
Thank you for your questions. It is always good to be asked why!
Hard to avoid cheaters.
A policy could be that the government could pay for 2 years of current salary and you only get one chance per person -- however I can't imagine how the government could get that into the budget.
The policy I implied is be to reward winners with a tax break to offset their risk. Difficult to sell to any voters that don't understand risk/reward or voters that believe business owners are greedy worthless bâtards.
Ha: if the business fails you lose money (the wages you didn't receive), and if the business wins you are taxed: "Privatise the losses, socialise the gains" ;)
The marginal rate in NZ is 39%!? That’s LOWER than in California, the land of “serial entrepreneurship”, for anyone with a successful startup. Not to mention the US tax rate doesn’t include a myriad of other small taxes that for some reason are not included in that number. On top of having a higher tax rate the average Californian entrepreneur also has to source extremely expensive healthcare.
It sounds more like an excuse to keep doing what you already wanted to do rather than an actual demotivating factor.
Sales tax 15%, 91 petrol USD5.34/gallon, means testing for many things, no tax friendly retirement savings (IRAs/ROTHs whatever). Auckland housing is less affordable than San Francisco https://www.visualcapitalist.com/least-affordable-cities-to-...
I pay for private healthcare insurance because I want better outcomes than waiting for years to get urgent surgery. I have seen loved ones literally killed by our healthcare system (unnecessary death - not just normal risks of medicine). Our public health system is good when it works but it has some sharp edges. Although I assume poor NZers are better off than poor Californians for heathcare access.
> It sounds more like an excuse to keep doing what you already wanted to do rather than an actual demotivating factor.
I am telling you that it demotivates me. We don't always know why we think things and I don't have to be perfectly rational. You might be right, but calling it an excuse is extremely rude.
This ad hominem stuff is very out of place. Why not solely engage with the argument?
We all recognize that a democracy is the correct method for political decision making, even though it's also obvious that theoretically a truly benevolent dictator can make better decisions than an elected parliament but in practice such dictators don't really exist.
The same reasoning applies to economic decision making at society level. If you want a society whose economics reflects the will and ethics of the people, and which serves for the benefit of normal people, the obvious thing is the democratize economic decision making. That means that all large corporations must be mostly owned by their workers in roughly 1/N fashion, not by a small class of shareholders. This is the obvious correct solution, because it solves the underlying problem, not paper of the symptoms like taxation. If shareholder owned corporations are extracting wealth from workers or doing unethical things, the obvious solution is to take away their control.
Obviously, some workers will still make their own corporations do evil things, but at least it will be collective responsibility, not forced upon them by others.
I think "this isn't free; you pay with ad views and your data is sold" is something that should be on a price tag on services that operate this way, though. It doesn't work if the price isn't clearly advertised.
One of the second order consequences of progressive taxation is that it increases gross wages for higher earners, as people care about their net pay being larger, not their gross pay.
An extreme example, in the UK the tax rate is an effective 60% between £100k and £120k (ish), so people's salaries get driven through that zone quickly. This obviously means there's less money to give to other people.
So the difference between earning a decent salary of $80-100k and a great salary north of $150k isn't much tax-percent-wise. If you make another $1000 you take home about $500.
Also keep in mind we don't have to pay for health insurance, we don't have to pay for our kids to go to school, if we get sick and can't work we have a social security net that will take care of us indefinitely. Norway is a great place to live. The people who complain about taxes are idiots who don't know how good they have it. If you make $200k+ you're living a fucking great life, if you make $400k it's even better. Hell i used to make like $35k and I got by on that. $50k is perfectly liveable. And those people pay like 20-25%.
I'm happy to pay taxes, I'm doing great and I don't even earn that much yet. I expect to nearly double my salary within the next 5ish years. Maybe more than double.
Then you have middle class+ Norwegians with a big house, $100k+ car, sweet boat, cabin in the mountains etc complaining about taxes. Man shut up you're literally top .1% in the world you won the damn lottery.
So in effect you have to call the employees and shareholders evil. Well those are the same people who also work and hold public office from time to time, or are shareholders, or whatever. You can't limit this "evilness" to just an abstract corporation. Not only is it not true, you are setting up your "problem" so that it can't be addressed because you're only moralizing over the abstract corporation and not the physical manifestation of the corporation either. What do you do about the abstract corporation being evil if not taking action in the physical world against the physical people who work at and run the corporation and those who buy its products?
I've noticed similar behavior with respect to climate change advocacy and really just "government" in general. If you can't take personal responsibility, or even try to change your own habits, volunteer, work toward public office, organize, etc. it's less than useless to rail about these entities that many claim are immoral or need reform if you are not personally going to get up and do something about it. Instead you (not you specifically) just complain on the Internet or to friends and family, those complaints do nothing, and you feel good about your complaining so you don't feel like you need to actually do anything to make change. This is very unproductive because you have made yourself feel good about the problem but haven't actually done anything.
With all that being said, I'm not sure how paying vastly higher taxes would make Google (or any other company) less evil or more evil. What if Google pays more taxes and that tax money does (insert really bad thing you don't like)? Paying taxes isn't like a moral good or moral bad thing.
People making meaningful decisions at mega corporations aren’t a random sample of the population, they are self selected to care a great deal about money and or power.
Honestly if you wanted to filter the general population to quietly discover who was evil I’d have a hard time finding something more effective. It doesn’t guarantee everyone is actually evil, but actually putting your kids first is a definite hindrance.
The morality of the average employee on the other hand is mostly irrelevant. They aren’t setting policies and if they dislike something they just get replaced.
I take issue with "don't blame the employees". You need people to run these organizations. If you consider the organization to be evil you don't get to then say well the people who are making the thing run aren't evil, they're just following orders or they don't know better. BS. And they'd be replaced if they left? Is that really the best argument we have against "being evil"?
Sorry I'd be less evil but if I gave up my position as an evil henchman someone else would do it! And all that says anyway is that those replacing those who leave are just evil too.
If you work at one of these companies or buy their products and you literally think they are evil you are either lying to yourself, or actively being complicit in their evil actions. There's just no way around that.
Take personal responsibility. Make tough decisions. Stop abstracting your problems away.
Putting money before other considerations is what’s evil. What’s “possible” expands based on your morality it doesn’t contract. If being polite makes a sale you’re going to find a lot of polite sales people, but how much are they willing to push that expended warrantee?
> Sorry I'd be less evil but if I gave up my position as an evil henchman someone else would do it!
I’ve constrained what I’m willing to do and who I’m willing to work for based on my morality, have you? And if not, consider what that say about you…
Depends on the considerations and what you consider to be evil. My point wasn't to argue about what's evil, of course there is probably a few hundred years of philosophy to overcome in that discussion, but to point out that if you truly think an organization is evil it's not useful to only care about the legal fiction or the CEO or the board that you won't have any impact on - you have to blame the workers who make the evil possible too, and stop using the products. Otherwise you're just deceiving yourself into feeling like you are doing something.
The fact you assume people are going to do things they believe to be morally reprehensible is troubling to me.
I don’t assume people need to be evil to work at such companies because I don’t assume they notice the same things I do.
> The fact you assume people are going to do things they believe to be morally reprehensible is troubling to me.
This seems to be very common behavior in my experience. Perhaps the rhetoric doesn't match the true beliefs. I'm not sure.
This sort of discussion gets a bit tricky because it often turns out one person is not having a discussion; they're trying to advertise something about themselves.
Not thinking anything about who you’re working for is just kind of the default. However, IMO if you do feel something is wrong then that’s when the obligation to carry through comes in.
I don't think it's necessary to conclude that because a company is evil then everyone who works at the company is evil. But it's sort of like the evilness of the company is a weighted function of the evilness of the people who control it. Someone with a small role may be relatively good while the company overall can still be evil. Someone who merely uses the company's products is even more removed from the company's own level of evil. If the company is evil it usually means there is some relatively small group of people in control of it making evil decisions.
Now, I'm using phraseology here like "is evil" as a shorthand for "takes actions that are evil". The overall level of evilness or goodness of a person is an aggregate of their actions. So a person who works for an evil company or buys an evil company's products "is evil", but only insofar as they do so. I don't think this is even particularly controversial, except insofar as people may prefer alternative terms like "immoral" or "unethical" rather than "evil". It's clear people disagree about which acts or companies are evil, but I think relatively few people view all association with all companies totally neutrally.
I do agree with you that taking personal responsibility is a good step. And, I mean, I think people do that too. All kinds of people avoid buying from certain companies, or buy SRI funds or whatever, for various ethically-based reasons.
However, I don't entirely agree with the view that says it's useless or hypocritical to claim that reform is necessary unless you are going to "do something". Yes, on some level we need to "do something", but saying that something needs to be done is itself doing something. I think the idea that change has to be preceded or built from "saintly" grassroots actions is a pernicious myth that demotivates people from seeking large-scale change. My slogan for this is "Big problems require big solutions".
This means that it's unhelpful to say that, e.g., everyone who wants regulation of activities that Company X does has to first purge themselves of all association with Company X. In many cases a system arises which makes such purges difficult or impossible. As an extreme, if someone lives in an area with few places to get food, they may be forced to patronize a grocery store even if they know that company is evil. Part of "big solutions" means replacing the bad ways of doing things with new things, rather than saying that we first have to get rid of the bad things to get some kind of clean slate before we can build new good things.
If using AI and other technology to uphold a surveillance state, wage war, do imperialism, and do genocide... isn't evil, than I don't know if you can call anything evil.
And the entire point of taxes is that we all collectively decide that we all would be better off if we pooled our labor and resources together so that we can have things like a basic education, healthcare, roads, police, bridges that don't collapse etc.. Politicians and corporations have directly broken and abused this social contract in a multitude of ways, one of those ways is using loopholes to not pay taxes at the same rate as everyone else by a large margin... another way is paying off politicians and lobbying so that those loopholes never get closed, and in fact, the opposite happens. So yes, taxing Google and other mega-corporations is a single, easily identifiable, action that can be directly taken to remedy this problem. Though, there is no way around solving the core issue at hand, but people have to be able to identify that issue foremost.
Complaining is not unproductive, it signals to others they are not alone in their frustrations. Imagine that nobody ever responds or airs their frustrations; would you feel comfortable saying something about it? Maybe you're the only one, better keep quiet then. Or how do you find people who share your frustrations with whom you could organise some kind of pushback?
If I was "this government", I would love for people to shut up and just do their job, pay taxes and buy products (you don't have to buy them from megacorp, just spend it and oh yeah, goodluck finding places to buy products from non-megacorps).
Instead of taking action they complain, set up an abstract boogeyman to take down, and then nobody can actually take action to make the world better (based on their point of view) because there's nothing anyone can do about Google the evil corporation because it's just some legal fiction. Bonus points for moralizing on the Internet and getting likes to feel even better about not doing anything.
But you can do something. If someone thinks Google is evil they can stop using Gmail or other Google products and services, or even just reduce their usage - maybe you can switch email providers but you only have one good map option. Ok at least you did a little more than you did previously.
the architecture of the system is imperfect and creates bad results for people.
I guess corrupt cop vs serial killer is like amorality (profit-driven systems) vs immorality (active malice)? A company is a mix of stakeholders, some of whom push for ethical practices. But when shareholders demand endless growth, even well-intentioned actors get squeezed.
That word comes with a lot of boot-up code and dodgy dependencies.
I don't like it.
Did Robert Louis Stevenson make a philosophical error in 1882 supposing that a moral society (with laws etc) can contain within itself a domain outside of morals [0]?
What if coined the word "alegal"?
Oh officer... what I'm doing is neither legal nor illegal, it's simply alegal "
[0] https://edrls.wordpress.com/2021/02/16/a-moral/
Also, scale plays a significant part as well. Any high-exposure organization which operates on a global scale has access to an extremely large pool of candidates to staff its offices... And such candidate pools necessarily include a large number of any given personas... Including large numbers of ethically-challenged individuals and criminals. Without an interview process which actively selects for 'ethics', the ethically-challenged and criminal individuals have a significant upper-hand in getting hired and then later wedging themselves into positions of power within the company.
Criminals and ethically-challenged individuals have a bigger risk appetite than honest people so they are more likely to succeed within a corporate hierarchy which is founded on 'positive thinking' and 'turning a blind eye'. On a global corporate playing field, there is a huge amount of money to be made in hiding and explaining away irregularities.
A corporate employee can do something fraudulent and then hold onto their jobs while securing higher pay, simply by signaling to their employer that they will accept responsibility if the scheme is exposed; the corporate employer is happy to maintain this arrangement and feign ignorance while extracting profits so long as the scheme is kept under wraps... Then if the scheme is exposed, the corporations will swiftly throw the corporate employee under the bus in accordance to the 'unspoken agreement'.
The corporate structure is extremely effective at deflecting and dissipating liability away from itself (and especially its shareholders) and onto citizens/taxpayers, governments and employees (as a last layer of defense). The shareholder who benefits the most from the activities of the corporation is fully insulated from the crimes of the corporation. The scapegoats are lined up, sandwiched between layers of plausible deniability in such a way that the shareholder at the end of the line can always claim complete ignorance and innocence.
Even megacorps will do categorically good things if it helps their bottom line.
“I love hanging out with Tim he’s a funny guy helped me move a couch last week, kind of which he hadn’t pushed me in front of that bus that one time but ehh I doubt he’d do that again…”
No, no. Call a spade a spade. This behavior and attitude is evil. Corporations under modern American capitalism must be evil. That's how capitalism works.
You succeed in capitalism not by building a better mousetrap, but by destroying anyone who builds a better moustrap than you. You litigate, acquire, bribe, and rewrite legislation to ensure yours is the best and only mousetrap available to purchase, with a token 'competitor' kept on life support so you can plausibly deny anticompetitive practices.
If you're a good company trying to do good things, you simply can't compete. The market just does not value what is good, just, or beneficial. The market only wants number to go up, and to go up right now at any cost. Amazon will start pumping out direct clones of your product for pennies. What are you gonna do, sue Amazon?! best of luck.
[1]: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
And if Googs doesn't do it, someone else will, so it might as well be them that makes money for their shareholders. Technically, couldn't activist shareholders come together and claim by not going after this market the leadership should be replaced for those that would? After all, share prices is the only metric that matters
Moral character is something that has to be taught, it doesn't just come out on its own.
If your parents don't do it properly, you'll be just another cog in the soulless machine to which human life is of no value.
You need to try another search engine. Years ago...
What are you are saying is: optimising for commercial success is incompatible with morality. The conclusion is that publicly traded megacorps must inevitably trend towards amorality.
So yes, they aren't "evil" but I think amorality is the closest thing to "evil" that actually exists in the real world.
This is a meme that needs to die, for 99% of cases out there the line between good/bad is very clear cut.
Dumb nihilists keep the world from moving forward with regards to human rights and lawful behavior.
Most people consider neglect evil in my experience.
Weird thing is for corporations, it's humans running the whole thing.
Isn't that a contradiction? Morality is fundamentally a sense of "right and wrong". If they reward anything that maximizes short term profit and punish anything that works against it then it appears to me that they have a simple, but clearly defined sense of morality centered around profit.
Seems it would be informative to many of the people posting on this thread.
This is flatly untrue. Corporations are made up of humans who make decisions. They are indeed concerned with goodness and/or morality. Saying otherwise lets them off the hook for the explicit decisions they make every day about how to operate their company. It's one reason why there are shareholder meetings, proxy votes, activist investors, Certified B-Corporations, etc.
The main thing here I think is anonymity through numbers and complexity. You and thousands of others just want to see the numbers go up. And that desire is what ultimately influences decisions like this.
If google stock dropped because of this then google wouldn't do it. But it is the actions of humans in aggregate that keeps it up.
Megacorporations are scapegoats when in actuality they are just a set of democratic rules. The corporation is just a window into the true nature of humanity.
That is to make a mistake of composition. An entity can have properties that none of its parts have. A cube made out of bricks is round, but none of the bricks are round. You might be evil, your cells aren't evil.
It's often the case that institutions are out of alignment with its members. It can even be the case that all participants of an organization are evil, but the system still functions well. (usually one of the arguments for markets, which is one such system). When creating an organization that is effectively the most basic task, how to structure it such that even when its individual members are up to no good, the functioning of the organization is improved.
Obviously because they don't give a shit.
People have the incentive to not do evil and to do evil for money. When you abstract the evil away into 1 vote out of thousands then you abstract responsibility and everyone ends up in aggregate doing an inconsequential evil and it adds up to a big evil.
The tragedy of the commons.
I would argue that is fundamentally evil. Because evil pays the best. Its like drunk driving, on an empty road it can only harm you, but we live in a society full of other people.
Seems fundamentally evil.
A couple years ago, my state banned single use plastic bags. The very moment they did, all of my local Walmarts switched to heavier plastic bags that technically weren't single use. They still gave them away for free just as they did with the first ones. (These we're good quality bags and I was frustrated that Walmart didn't just give them away by default). Eventually my state banned those too, and like clockwork, Walmart was giving away paper bag bags -- decent quality ones, too. Though I still really liked the thicker plastic ones since I could use them for other things.
This made me realize that no corporation would do anything slightly better for the environment unless forced. I think this is the case for anything a corporation would do, including evil things. I think they just follow the money, no ethics, and it's up to the government to provide those ethics.
This whole thing where the average person feels that they can use rules against a more powerful person? That's really an invention of maybe the last 80 years, if not more recently than that.
With the exception of that human lifetime-sized era, the vast majority of history is a bunch of psychopaths running things and getting to kill/screw whoever they wanted and steal whatever they wanted. Successful revolts are few and far between. The only real difference is the stakes.
- 1mmTC is enough to do this depending on how one allocates spending. land in many parts of the country is not that expensive.
It would be a bit of a Pyrrhic victory to repel an attempted takeover of your land, only for that land to end up contaminated with literally millions of landmines because you didn't have a mutual agreement against using them.
This is an excellent overview of why: https://acoup.blog/2020/03/20/collections-why-dont-we-use-ch...
It’s the companies that horde everyone’s personal information, who eroded the concept of privacy while mediating lives with false promises for trust turning into state intelligence agencies that bothers me
The incentives and results become fucked up, safe guards less likely to work I get not a lot of people care but it’s dangerous
It's not really appropriate for an AI weapons firm to be an integrated part of something which has access to information from which sensitive information such political beliefs etc. can be easily extracted.
It's a problem if someone is looking at sensitive user data one day and at how to categorize people so they can be put on kill lists the other.
OpenAI is sneaky slimey and headed by a psycho narcissist. Makes Pichia looks like a saint.
Ethically, it’s the same. But if someone was pointing a gun at me I’d rather have someone with some empathy behind the trigger rather than the personification of a company that bleeds high level execs and… insert many problems here
It hardly matters what employees think anymore when the executives are weather-vanes who point in the direction of wealth and power over all else (just like the executives at their competitors).
In case you missed it, a few days back Google asked all employees who don't believe in their "mission" to voluntarily resign.
That is not the same thing as asking everyone who doesn't believe in the mission to please resign.
Which rhymes pretty well with not believing in their mission. They are telling people to leave instead of trying to influence the direction from the inside.
Ultimately every sufficiently large company seems to become an arms dealer, a drug dealer or a bank.
We need look no further than Lavender [1] to see where this ends up.
[1]: https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/
The difference is about 250k/yr. Kinda big.
This is extremely disconcerting.
Google as a tool of surveillance is the kind of thing that could so easily be abused or misused to such catastrophic ends that I absolutely think the hard line should be there. And I only feel significantly more this way given the current geopolitical realities.
By weaponising AI?
Who else right? If not them, there will be no one saving democracies with weaponized mass-surveillance AI. It is their quest and privilege, right? Medicine, just society, and all such crap have to wait!
I bought that!
(not)
Really if a company wants people to trust claims like this, they should make them legally binding. Otherwise it's all PR.
I'm gonna presume "the new leadership of the FBI".
Who's paying for that tho ? The same dumbass who get spied over, i don't see it as a reason why it wouldn't happen. Cash is unlimited.
No, OP is right. We are truly at the dystopian point where a sufficiently rich government can track the loyalty of its citizens in real time by monitoring all electronic communications.
Also, "expensive" is relative. When you consider how much US has historically been willing to spend on such things...
Genuine questions. Unlike "don't be evil," this promise has a very narrow and clear interpretation.
It would be nice if companies weren't able to just kinda say whatever when it's expedient.
However, when you change a promise publicly, you signal a change in direction. It is much more honest than leaving it in place but violating it behind the scenes. If the public really cares, they can pass a law via their democratic representatives (or Google can swear a public oath before God I suppose).
That’s one of the reasons for the turbulent times. Let’s face the truth, most of the defense can easily be used for offense and given the state of online security every progress gets into the wrong hands.
Maybe it’s time to pause to make it more difficult for those wrong hands.
Yes, many defensive uses of technologies can be used for offense. When I say defense, I also include offense there as I don't believe you can just have a defensive posture alone to maintain one's defense, you need deterrence too. Personally I'm quite happy to see many in Silicon Valley embrace defense-tech and build missiles (ex. recent YC co), munitions, and dual-use tech. The world is a scary and dangerous place, and awful people will take advantage of the weakness of others if they can. Maybe I'm biased because I spent a lot of time in Eastern Europe and Ukraine, but I much prefer the U.S. with all our faults to another actor like China or Russia being dominant
„Yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.“
Propaganda and disinformation were problems before the AI hype but now it got worse.
In the race for AGI they ignored the risks and didn‘t think of useful counter measures.
It’s easier to spread lies with AI than to spread the truth.
We enter dark aged where most people can’t distinguish fake from real because the faked became so convincing.
Audio, photo and video lost their evidential value.
There are many 'interesting' event that happened because of the invasion of irak, looking for weapon of mass destruction that never existed.
This led to the destabilization of the entire middle east, several war and ISIS.
One could say that the unconditional support to the israelian policy in middle east since 1950 also brought it's load of conflicts.
The whole south America is fcked because of usa illegal intervention from WW2 to the end of cold war.
And the list goes on and on.
I mean it would be much faster to stay what good impact had the usa foreign policy on the world in the last 100 year.
It could have wondrously good impacts, but that only matters in a moral framework where good actions morally cancel out bad ones.
Every kinetic reaction by Russia in Georgia and Ukraine is downstream of major destabilizing non-kinetic actions by the US.
You don't think the US fomenting revolutions in Russia's near-abroad was in any way a contributing factor to Russian understanding of the strategic situation on its western border? [1] You don't think the US unilaterally withdrawing from the ABM treaty[2], and then following that up with plans to put ABMs in Eastern Europe[3], were factors in the security stability of the region? You don't think that the US pushing to enlarge NATO without adjusting the CFE treaty to reflect the inclusion of new US allies had an impact? [4][5] It's long been known that the Russian military lacked the capacity for sustained offensive/expeditionary operations outside of its borders.[6][7] Until ~2014 it didn't even possess the force structure for peer warfare, as it had re-oriented its organization for counter-insurgency in the Caucasus. So what was driving US actions in Eastern Europe? This was a question US contrarians and politicians such as Pat Buchanan were asking as early as 1997. We've had almost 3 decades of American thinkers cautioning that pissing around in Russia's western underbelly would eventually trigger a catastrophic reaction[8], and here we are, with the Ukrainians paying the butcher's bill.
In the absence of US actions, the kleptocrats in Moscow would have been quite content continuing to print money selling natural resources to European industry and then wasting their largess buying up European villas and sports teams. But the siloviki have deep-seated paranoia which isn't entirely baseless (Russia has eaten 3 devastating wars originating from its open western flanks in the past ~120 years). As a consequence the US has pissed away one of the greatest accomplishments of the Cold War: the Sino-Soviet Split. Our hamfisted attempts to kick Russia while it was down have now forced the two principle powers on the Eurasian landmass back into bed with each other. This is NOT how we win The Great Game.
> Maybe I'm biased because I spent a lot of time in Eastern Europe and Ukraine, but I much prefer the U.S. with all our faults to another actor like China or Russia being dominant.
It would help to lead with this context. My position is that our actions ENSURE that a hostile Eurasian power bloc will become dominant. We should have used far less stick to integrate Russia into the Western security structure, as well as simply engaged them without looking down our noses at them as a defeated has-been power (play to their ego as a Great Power). A US-friendly Russia is needed to over-extend China militarily. We need China to be forced into committing forces to the long Sino-Russian border, much as Ukraine must garrison its border with Belarus. We need to starve the PRC's industry of cheap natural resources. Now the China-Russia-Iran soft-alliance has the advantage of interior lines across the whole continent, and a super-charged Chinese industrial base fed by Siberia. Due to the tyranny of distance, this will be an near-impossible nut to crack for the US in a conflict.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/nov/26/ukraine.usa
[2] https://www.armscontrol.org/events/2001-12/abm-treaty-withdr...
[3] https://www.realinstitutoelcano.org/en/analyses/americas-abm...
[4] suraci ↗ tbo I'm really glad that other americans aren't as wise and calm as you are. mopsi ↗ > In the absence of US actions, the kleptocrats in Moscow would have been quite content continuing to print money selling natural resources to European industry and then wasting their largess buying up European villas and sports teams. But the siloviki have deep-seated paranoia which isn't entirely baseless (Russia has eaten 3 devastating wars originating from its open western flanks in the past ~120 years). tim333 ↗ >Every kinetic reaction by Russia in Georgia and Ukraine is downstream of major destabilizing non-kinetic actions by the US
otherwise, we may be surrounded by both the US and Russia
or, maybe, the current situation is the result of decisions made after careful consideration at the time, by whom deeply understand all you said now.
maybe, they just considered... EU is also a threat to them, they don't want a united europe, so a conflict between two enemies... is just fine? an angry russia will make EU more united(with the US)
It is important to stress that the money-oriented kleptocrats and siloviki (KGB-oldtimers) are two opposite groups. Kleptocrats dominated in the 1990s, but lost to KGB oldtimers like Putin, who consolidated power by the late 1990s, because they were more ruthless. In the following decade, they crushed all opposition and turned the country from a dysfunctional democracy into a full dictatorship, and then set their sight on their long-term goal of restoring "the lost empire", which includes roughly 100 million Europeans who regained their freedom when the USSR collapsed. Revanchism has always been at the very core of siloviks.
The countries in Eastern Europe were first to recognize which way the ball was rolling by mid-to-late 1990s, and that's why they set EU and NATO integration as their main foreign policy goals, hoping that tight integration into international organizations would increase their security. Your notion that the US "pushed" NATO enlargement is just plain wrong. Almost the entire Eastern Europe was begging to get into NATO, against very lukewarm reception.
Their completely rational fears were dismissed by existing members with the erroneous belief that Russians were motivated by money, and would not risk harming piggy banks like Gazprom by invading Eastern Europe again. Ironically, that made the eventual entry into NATO easier, as existing members didn't think at the time that Russia posed any real danger. The largest entry took place in 2004, as the NATO was being transformed into an anti-terrorism force in the aftermath of 9/11.
If there's anything to blame the Americans for, then -- according to Andrei Kozyrev, the foreign minister of Russia from 1990 to 1996 -- the Americans could've put more pressure on Russia already in the 1990s to prevent it from declining into a dictatorship. But it was more convenient to remain ignorant of the destruction of Russian democracy and the long downward spiral into a totalitarian dictatorship, and remain seduced by naive illusions like the ones you present us.
For example, the entire idea of Russia as an ally against China is ridiculous. Russians don't care about China one bit and China is not a meaningful part of the public discourse. Russia is a colonial empire run by the city-state of Moscow, with St Petersburg having some historical importance. Take a look at a map. Both St Petersburg and Moscow are few hundred kilometers from the European border. This is where the mental center of Russian government lies, and this is the area where their ambitions are. China, in contrast, is many thousands of kilometers away, and culturally even more distant. China is a strange, faraway place. The Russians who matter (elites in Moscow and St Petersburg) have very little to do with it. Russia does not have a huge outsourced manufacturing in China, nor do they compete in science or technology. Russians are completely outclassed, simple consumers of cheap Chinese goods like most of the world.
Instead, Russians fantasize about the "multipolar world" and other alternative realities where they could be a carbon copy of the US in Europe, but they are in no position to make it a reality. The post-WWII Europe with a hundred million Europeans living under Russian dominance was a historic glitch. Russians cling to this as a mythical "golden era" and are willing to throw everything away in a futile attempt to turn back time. Relations, money, people -- everything. Nothing else matters.
These fantasies are driven by the fact that Russia is a still a feudal society that has not gone through enlight...
Russia has been invading and massacring their neighbours for centuries. They just use whatever bs excuse that sounds kind of plausible or amusing at the time. You know - they have to invade Ukraine because the popularly elected jewish comedian is a nazi dictator etc. I think they just like tolling their victims as they rape, murder, steal and torture.
If you can fault the Americans it was propping them up after WW2, after they started it in collaboration with Hitler, so they could continue the evil. Patton had the right idea https://www.quora.com/When-Patton-said-we-defeated-the-wrong...
There is no advancement that won‘t end up in the wrong hands and most likely it will be a leak from an US company.
[1] https://www.kyivpost.com/post/44112
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_companies_involved_in_...
The subject being, how far large corporations are willing to go for the sake of profit maximisation.
Nothing is going to stop USA's adversaries from deploying AI against US citizens. Pick your poison, but I prefer to compete and win rather than unilaterally disarm and hope for goodwill and kindness from regimes that prioritize the polar opposite.
Looks very incomplete....