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While corruption won't be good, the rational might be Schmidt is a "lesser evil". Is corruption preferable to ignorance? In other words, are decisions made to s
by hendler 11y ago
While corruption won't be good, the rational might be Schmidt is a "lesser evil". Is corruption preferable to ignorance? In other words, are decisions made to serve a few, or with ignorance, serve chaos.
More than corruption, my concerns would be respect and understanding of privacy, checks and balances through neutrality, transparency, and decentralization, and creation of open standards and protocols, etc.
- grandalf 11y agoSchmidt is a technocrat-for-hire. He is able to effectively lead and represent an organization's views. However his worldview is out of the industrial age. He was largely responsible for building Alphabet, a modern IT conglomerate built on the same principles as any conglomerate. We need to demand more from our government than competent technocrats. I would not say Schmidt is corrupt, he is acting fully in the interest of his firm or organization. Like a defense attorney helping a murderer avoid jail his actions are broadly ethical, but if you consider in aggregate all of the betrayals of "don't be evil" that Google suffered under his command, it's clear that he is not in any sense a leader in any area where values or principles are important. Net Neutrality is a perfect example of an issue where Google has a big stake in a particular outcome, and there is nothing idealistic or principled about its advocacy of one side. This is fine as an aspect of the incentives of capitalism, but the scary part is that so many people bought into the propaganda and did not see Google's true motivation.