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Except that by this point, all this is expected behaviour. If companies don't want to be complicit in these crimes, they need to extricate themselves from the
by oliwarner 5y ago
Except that by this point, all this is expected behaviour.
If companies don't want to be complicit in these crimes, they need to extricate themselves from the country and cut all ties.
If they do want to put profit ahead of everything else, then whatever, but you don't get to defend them as doing the right thing for their employees. They're enabling the whole situation.
[Edit to bring in a sister question] "Why don't Apple pull out of China then?" - because they put profit and cheap manufacturing ahead of their morals. And apparently we don't care enough that China effected a genocide while we watched.
- travisgriggs 5y agoWhere does that stop though? I agree with you, but I don’t see how the basic observe-eval-withdraw loop ever terminates. Or put from a flip side… Building apps in highly democratic Norway just for Norwegians to use because they’re the best democracy (for example) doesn’t make enough money to feed my family. So why do anything at all?
- pigeonhole123 5y agoThe fact that you have to draw the line somewhere is not an argument for not drawing a line somewhere.
- travisgriggs 5y agoIndeed. Can you say that the parties involved do not have lines? Everyone has lines, they’re just not always visible. My point that the observe-eval-withdraw loop is difficult to terminate is not meant to argue we shouldn’t run the loop, but rather how difficult it is to code the withdraw conditions. As I tried to allude to in the second paragraph, you have to balance out the withdraw conditions with the pragmatic need to let the loop get some worthwhile work done.
- oliwarner 5y agoHow about using the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as a score sheet? 30 Articles there. I doubt there are many countries that score a perfect-30 but is Russia even in double-figures? I agree, there's some arbitrary hand-wringing to be done to work out where to draw the line, but doing nothing while you're paralysed trying to decide what pencil to use, seems just as bad as going along with the acts in the first place. https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-human-rights https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-huma...
- deelly 5y ago* If companies don't want to be complicit in these crimes, they need to extricate themselves from the country and cut all ties. You live in a quite simple world, no?
- chronofar 5y agoKeeping employees out of a country due to hostile government behavior is actually the simpler world.
- rattray 5y agoIf you're starting from zero, sure. Moving all employees in Russia to another country (and/or firing/replacing them) sounds like quite a major headache to me.
- chronofar 5y agoSure on a 6-12 month timescale. Beyond that it seems much easier. This is true of any infrastructure decision, they generally require work in the short term but are taken on to relieve pain and facilitate the ongoing future.
- rattray 5y agoI definitely hope that this is how Google and Apple respond to Russia's actions here. But I can't claim to know the difficulties they would face on a 12+mo timescale.
- oliwarner 5y agoThe simple part is not being able to wash away actions when they choose to be in the situation, and do worse elsewhere. Google, Apple, Facebook, etc are not in this for the moral benefit of mankind, they're here to make a buck. That much is simple. Actually putting things right is more complex, but almost complete inaction isn't good enough.
- ogma 5y ago
- tablespoon 5y ago> If they do want to put profit ahead of everything else, then whatever, but you don't get to defend them as doing the right thing for their employees. They're enabling the whole situation. IMHO, cooperating with an authoritarian regime in this way should be illegal, sort of like a sanctions violation. Cook and Pachai should go to jail for this. That consequence might clarify their thinking a little.
- a123b456c 5y agoDefine "authoritarian regime"
- michaelt 5y agoJust because there are shades of grey, doesn’t mean we can’t tell black from white.
- eldaisfish 5y agoit's an excellent question which your reply doesn't address. There's black and white with grey in between. Whether you report the shades of grey as black or white depends on who you ask and what is offered for comparison. Is india an authoritarian regime? You'll find plenty of evidence going both ways. What about Belarus? Hungary? Venezuela? The grey is precisely why having yes/no binaries like this leads to more confusion.
- whimsicalism 5y agoI am not convinced that we can tell black from white. I also think that there ought to be a certain level of relativism when it comes to judging political systems. Is it democratic that an unelected group of 9 people can unilaterally essentially decide the law of the land in the US?
- lovecg 5y agoHow is the US constitutional system remotely relevant in this discussion?
- Aunche 5y agoThis is the kind of moral framework that creates cancel culture. Pulling out from Russia will decrease many Russian's standard of living, but will have zero impact in stopping them from rigging elections. If everyone cuts trade for moral reasons, then there's no incentive for us not to point nukes at each other again.
- dannyr 5y ago"If I don't become complicit, somebody else will be. Might as well do it myself."
- andybak 5y agoI haven't decided if I agree with the comment you're replying to, but this isn't a fair summary of it. Either engage with it or don't but posting a caricature doesn't exactly raise the level of debate around here.
- pessimizer 5y agoCiting "cancel culture" as the final boss doesn't start us in a place of elevation.
- andybak 5y agoGood point. I glazed over that. But still...
- oliwarner 5y agoYes. Yes. Maybe. Similarly unknown. In this case we're talking about propping up the existing Russian government who actively interfere in democracy around the world, assassinate political enemies and draw immense influence from the fear it spreads around it. Yeah, sure, why wouldn't we want to keep that going as long as we can? Because it will end one day. Putin isn't Russia's greatest love machine. When that day comes, all the instability you'd blame on me and my ideals will rain down on us all anyway. If you want to reduce my reasoned moral objections to "cancel culture", I'm sure you're somebody's hero, but yes, I think we should demand better from the companies we fund. Russia's instability is inevitable, either way.
- m3kw9 5y agoCasually suggesting that Apple should pull out from all authoritarian countries is both funny and naive
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- oliwarner 5y agoThat is what I think, but that's not the point of my post. The part you're reading around is the people here defending Apple and Google's behaviour, because they're just doing what's right for their employees. Doing what's right for Apple and Google's employees is not setting up offices in front of Russia's loaded gun, which we've only known about for… hundreds of years. Apple and Google put their employees at risk. They don't get points for doing more bad things to further delay that risk (and feed the machine that made that enables the risk). My naïveté is certainly worth considering, but we're all so wilfully blind to atrocities. It was one thing to let another country beat up its citizens and attempt to sanction them, but now we're each personally entangling our lives with companies that aid and abet. We have to demand better.
- tailspin2019 5y agoI'm also naive, and regardless, fully in agreement with you.
- m3kw9 5y agoIm just saying you cannot just pull out and work remote in a country wide situation and with the scale of Apple. There will be much more effects, maybe I’m paranoid in that sense.
- jimbob45 5y agoThe benchmark here is employee threats. China does not threaten Apple employees located in their country, nor do many other authoritarian countries. I don't think it's unreasonable to pull out of countries that present clear and present dangers to your workforce.
- frogpelt 5y agoApple would pull out of China if their sales dropped 50% because they wouldn't.
- whimsicalism 5y agoCutting all possible connections with China is counter-productive to de-escalating tensions with them and integrating them into a rules-based system.
- CreateAccntAgn 5y agoSome of Americas closest allies are authoritarian regimes. Why would anyone expect profit moticated companies like Google or Apple to have higher moral standards than the elected representative US goverment where it operates from itself?
- megabless123 5y ago> Why would anyone expect profit moticated companies like Google or Apple to have higher moral standards than the elected representative US goverment where it operates from itself? Because elected representatives are not moral authorities
- sehro 5y agoNeither are major corporations.
- 2xpress 5y agoIndeed a good point. Had the US elected representatives had better morals none of this would have ever happened. It would have been pre-empted decades ago. But we have no influence over their morals, only an ability to vote for or against them. Those elected by definition are the best people available. So if they don't have good morals that means the whole society does not have good morals. I suppose the best we can do is to try to have better morals ourselves and hope to positively influence the rest of society to make better moral choices... All that is hard, and that's why evil like Putin prevails...
- a1369209993 5y ago> Those elected by definition are the best people available. If by "available", you mean political candidates, then yes. If you mean of the society in general, then no, quite the opposite, actually. > So if they don't have good morals that means the whole society does not have good morals. No, it means two of the worst people in the society (namely, the 'republican' candidate and the 'democratic' candidate) do not have good morals. This a slightly stronger measure than the society's minimum level of morals, but not by very much, and says nothing about average or about particular non-politician cases.
- irae 5y agoI would believe this is way more complicated, even if set the profit apart. Arguably having access to technology is important for the regular citizen, even under less democratic countries. There is the privacy angle, and also if you have an Android monopoly it becomes easier for the government to exploit/enforce what they want. You don't help people to understands the benefits of participating on a democracy, or even fighting to have a democracy by withdrawing and hiding what democracies around the world are able to produce and manufacture. Withdrawing the apps as required by government censorship is just one of the battles lost, but not the entire benefit Apple presence has.
- mindslight 5y agoAll this is certainly expected behavior. If companies don't want to be complicit in these crimes, then they need to remove themselves from keeping remote power over devices that are purportedly sold to end users. Dell doesn't get flack for what Debian chooses to put in their repositories. And when Debian itself gets bullied (eg decss and other video codecs), even-less-exposed organizations can create another repository that coexists with the main one.
- oceanplexian 5y agoI have an easier solution that doesn’t require making a false moral choice. Give your customers the ability to install their own software or app stores on the hardware that they own and paid for, without requiring a monopolistic walled garden. Of course, companies like Apple would never do this because they are far too greedy.
- 2xpress 5y agoThere is F-Droid but Navalny app is not on it https://search.f-droid.org/?q=Navalny&lang=en https://search.f-droid.org/?q=Navalny&lang=en Android does also allow installing apps directly from APK. (Crapple separate issue.) Too bad Navalny team did not try to go open-source route. They also could have just uploaded their database of candidates to Github.