There's actually quite a large Indian hacker community on platforms like hackerone, and when you look at their Twitter profiles, it seems like quite a lot of them are from these remote village type places, which I think is fascinating. This is the first time I've read about mercenary hacker for hire groups from India but I guess it's not surprising.
I think it's covered in the Dark Basin episode of Darknet Diaries, but India apparently has a reputation for especially aggressive private investigators, who were historically used to dig up dirt on families before committing to marriage pacts, but in the modern era are used regularly for PR and corporate blackmail. Apparently this practice is ingrained enough into the culture that digging up dirt on people by any means necessary is widely accepted, and not even illegal in most contexts.
"digging up dirt on people by any means necessary is widely accepted, and not even illegal in most contexts."
Well, digging up dirt is also legal in the west, the question is what "any means necessary" is. I cannot believe that it is legal to hack someone for example.
(knowing almost nothing about indian culture) The boundary between what's legal and what's culturally accepted can be pretty broad. Just two days ago a coworker was describing his friend getting arrested for flipping off a cop, and when I pointed out that precedent going back hundreds of years clearly shows the cop abusing their authority to violate the constitution with almost no exceptions (proportionally), they still responded that their friend deserved it and should have known that flipping off a cop wouldn't have any positive outcomes. Culturally, a substantive chunk of the country is totally fine with clamping down on offensiveness, especially if it's directed at people risking their lives to make the country better, despite that not being a part of our legal framework in the slightest.
Similarly, I wouldn't be shocked if "by any means necessary" is also illegal in India but is culturally accepted.
On some level it's no different from the stop-sign culture in California. Almost nobody stops, ever, including the police force, and it results in dozens of deaths annually just in my community. The act is blatantly illegal for good reason, but it still happens out in the open, and it's "not illegal" in the sense that if a person blows a stop sign and the police witness it or are sent a video of the act then there's approximately a 0% chance of any negative repercussions for the perpetrator.
It's interesting, because India is also a hub for these "hacker scams" where so-called hackers on Whatsapp will promise to change your grade, see if your partner is cheating, or get you a pay raise and then run off with your money. I wonder how one is able to tell the difference between actual hacking services and scams claiming to offer the same.
This seems bizarre to me. Under what context would would it be legitimate for any of those things to occur? A pay raise maybe.
But, why would someone (crucial part, here, being someone you don’t know) be negotiating it for you?
There are some good hackers in India, no doubt. But having managed a few bug bounty programs, the majority of submissions from that part of the world are spam. People run vulnerability scanners, count on ignorance on behalf of the company triage teams, or just plain count on being able to badger someone into paying small amounts.
One thing that I should point out, is that he is not going after the WSJ, for any impropriety in his firing. They are really the ones that damaged his career.
So I suspect that there is more to this story than is apparent.
Or he believes he was justifiably fired, but would have been able to get another job had the emails not been made public. The Journal is not interfering in his future prospects.
From what I can tell, there’s not necessarily more. It’s a clear conflict of interest to do business with a source for a story. Doesn’t sound illegal, but certainly gives the appearance of bias.
Publications like the Wall Street Journal have stricter ethical rules than apply in a lot of other situations. Accepting a "yacht ride" would be OK under some circumstances but possibly not in this case--and at least suggesting an openness to business deals could well cross the line as well.
How do you figure? The WSJ didn’t initiate or take part in the hacking scheme. They fired an employee that appeared to be engaged in impropriety / not meeting the organizations ethical standards.
It’s like if someone broke into you house and found letters to a lover and published them, and your partner then divorced you, would you blame your partner or the person that broke into your house?
I am curious why he is not naming the Emerati prince that hired the law firm.
> I am curious why he is not naming the Emerati prince that hired the law firm.
I suspect that he doesn't have enough evidence to prove it, or he doesn't want to poke the bear, because the Prince wasn't really after him; it was just collateral damage.
It seems to me that his beef is not with the WSJ because he was aware of the possible consequences regarding the potential conflict of interest.
WSJ is entitled to fire someone if they have verifiable evidence supporting that decision. If the evidence was illegally obtained....well, it would be an trial admissibility issue, but that wouldn't apply to a work/employment matter.
Employment is generally at-will. Employers can and do fire for a broad range of reasons, including suspicion without evidence.
9 times out of 10, in case of improprieties, a person is fired, and no further action is taken. In most cases, there is no upside to prosecution, and a lot of potential downside. In every legal case I've been involved with, there were deep improprieties, such as fabrication of evidence. If you're right, that's no guarantee of winning a case, and in most cases, both sides come out scarred and tarnished.
The legal system is random, and a high risk for everyone.
> Employers can and do fire for a broad range of reasons, including suspicion without evidence.'
Employers can, but those that are at the size of the WSJ probably don't. The bad PR, reputational damage and legal damages of an unfounded firing, isn't worth it.
I believe... In the USA you cannot sue your employer for firing you unless it's for membership of a protected class or whistleblowing. If your employer wants to fire you because it's Thursday or they're just having a bad day or they don't like something you wrote in an email, tough.
so you're talking about at-will employment and it's generally the rule in America. however there are some states that have a good faith rule where you can't terminate a employee for malice. here's a map of which states are which: https://www.paycor.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Employment...
i believe WSJ employs in NY state so this doesn't apply.
Every single person is a member of a protected class. Men are just as much a protected class as women are, and whites are just as much a protected class as blacks are. At least, this is what the law says, because I don’t think that all of these classes are actually equally protected by law in practice.
"Indian hackers"...sorry but being an Indian, this sounds bit odd. India is not able to even defend itself from hacking attacks. That is the state of India when it comes to hacking skill-sets. So the words "Indian" and "hackers" does not blend together very well. Just sayin.
It's a whole lot harder to defend yourself from hacking attacks than to hack. The US government has been hacked as of a couple of years ago, and you better believe they can hack you.
Another click bait by HN to attract anti Indian haters. Because just saying mercenary was not enough. Media including HN continue to profile issues around race or ethnicity instead of action because that way they sell more . Is it too hard to imagine ther are good and bad people in every country and what matters is their action and not their fucking culture or ethnicity?? It is not but media will not do it for their own vested interest.
1. Foreign hacking groups are often beyond the reach of Western law enforcement. If a domestic threat had been to blame here, there would be legal/financial recourse for damage done. That's not the case here. Implicit in this article is the report of a new kind of warfare for which many Americans have no good defense against.
2. Standard editorial racism a la "The Oriental Threat".
You've misunderstood what racism is if you think it's defined by whether or not the victim is aware of racism. Of course that's often very relevant but absolutely not necessarily.
If I walk into a friend's business, and say "woah, I did not know you hired a <derogative racist term>, they're all stupid you should fire him" and the friend immediately goes "ooh I forgot to be racist, yea I'll fire them immediately" then their firing would absolutely be racist despite the person being fired not witnessing the racist logic that causes it.
Equally with voter ID laws, they're not racist because they put mean racist message onto the ID cards or something, and whether or not victims of that sort of racist politics notice doesn't mean racism isn't involved. If somebody says "I don't think we need voter IDs, but in my district only the <some race of people> don't have photo IDs and they would all want to vote for my opponent, so let's require ID to vote!" then those people have had a racist and very unfair thing happen against them, regardless of whether they are "thinking of racism".
edit: and as a slightly easier example, if I edited a newspaper and decided that for every negative story about one skin colour would get front page billing, and every negative story about my own skin colour would get binned rather than published, then all my paper's readers might be able to look at every single article without seeing any racism in them - but their not knowing doesn't change that my theoretical editing was racist.
- Even if you use the broader definition to include nationality, in this case, the "hackers" are physically located in the geopolitical boundaries of India
- Nearly every major country with a large enough population has people in whitehat/blackhat infosec professions. It is an incredible reach to suggest that newspapers should not identify the national origin of these individuals because of what some racist readers might start to believe or become biased towards, by drawing non-existent lines to patterns that don't exist except in their own bubbles. Editorial standards and responsibility should not be driven by the weakest minds.
I wasn't making any argument about this specific case (which I didn't mention at all), just pointing out that "recipient of racism (or anything similar like sexism or xenophobia) doesn't notice = there was no racism" isn't a valid argument.
"Indian" is not just an national identity but also an ethnic one. A person of Indian origin born in America or the UK is still very easily identifiable and is identified by their Indian identity.
The usage of the word "racism" to include xenophobia is common enough in a casual context that I cannot believe that you are simply not aware of that usage. By choosing to argue over the semantics of the word racism over usage you probably already are familiar with, you are diverting attention from what really matters here: that said racism or xenophobia exists and negatively affects real human beings.
Good luck trying to control how people use language. I was just saying that it was already a common enough usage that you should be aware of it, even if you disagree with that usage.
Has common usage subsumed any geography-based xenophobia into the word “racism”?
(Not that any xenophobia is particularly better than any other, but it’s difficult to talk to people when they use broader meanings for words you thought meant very specific thing. See also terrorism vs insurgency, genocide vs occupation, etc.)
Racism as something based on skin color only would make Nazi basically not racists in their worst acts. Cause their racism was literally Aryan race against all other races - Slavic, Jews (European Jews where white, the physical features were like somewhat bigger nose), British, French. With Jews on the bottom, as the wort enemy worst then blacks. And they would not care a bit about different kind of Indians either.
If anything, attempts to redefine racism as only American variant where it is all about shades of color is redefinition.
And obviously, ethnicity and geography goes with races.
- Because Indian in this context is not a reference to the ethnicity but of location - i.e. it's not the DNA of the people that is Indian, it's the borders in which they are physically present while hacking. Many are unaware that India has a lot of phenotype diversity in its 1 billion people. There are dark skinned people in the south, light skinned people in the north, and almond shape eyed people in the east. Merely saying "Indian" does not really paint an image of anyone since we all look different, so it's a bit strange to allege racism.
- Because just mentioning it adds the following dimensions to the headline: geopolitics, outsourcing, human resources in the developing world, cybercrime & jurisdiction challenges
"I think it's covered in the Dark Basin episode of Darknet Diaries, but India apparently has a reputation for especially aggressive private investigators, who were historically used to dig up dirt on families before committing to marriage pacts, but in the modern era are used regularly for PR and corporate blackmail. Apparently this practice is ingrained enough into the culture that digging up dirt on people by any means necessary is widely accepted, and not even illegal in most contexts."
Please tell me more about how India can ever be used purely as a location.
I'm not sure I follow the point that is being made here
The comment is referring to the standard practices of private investigators in this country, and the nature of the corporate world based on what has been seen in some TV show
What's the problem with this?
Hypothetical example: I once watched a documentary about Africa and smuggling of ivory and it showed X, Y and Z. What does this mean? That because of this documentary I have a bias about Africa which now shapes all my decision making? Where does that line get drawn? I consumed the information, what does that have to do with how it affects my opinion of the people there?
If you can't see a problem in making a broad stroke judgment on the culture of a billion people on the basis of a single documentary, I am not sure that I can have a conversation with you. Have a good day.
Racism does not have to focus on skin color. As a super easy example, with Nazi did not defined races and their hierarchy by color.
Also notably, people that have a thong against Indians and Asians I encountered in real life have literally zero idea about internal subdivision. They could not tell sub-groups apart, not by look and not by language. If you have a thing against people from India, it is India in general and you don't care about anything else.
The publisher here (Reuters) is well aware of everything I've mentioned. They don't need to customize their headlines to modify the reaction of the people you are referencing. Those people should not be leading the decision making process for excluding facts from headlines.
>They don't need to customize their headlines to modify the reaction of the people you are referencing
Why not? Doesn't media regularly customize their headlines to avoid stating factually true things that would propagate negative stereotypes against minorities and other protected groups?
I think most responsible media organizations do avoid putting headlines like "Muslim man stabs three in church in Nice". Even if they do mention the religion, it is usually called "Islamic terrorism", and they have also invested quite some significant effort into emphasizing that most of regular Islamic people do not in fact have anything to do with Islamic terrorism.
As far as I can tell, media companies certainly seem to be aware of the effect their headlines can have on propagating negative stereotypes and good editorial judgement usually involves an attempt to avoid doing that as much as possible.
They absolutely should not be customizing headlines for fear of how it affects a small fringe of people who are going to think that way regardless of a Reuters headline
US and India have very enforceable bilateral cybercrime treaties. And it is very well enforced on both sides.
The article makes it seem that India as a whole is operating in some North Korea-ish way.
A US citizen can well complain to CERT-IN (https://www.cert-in.org.in/) for any reported cybercrime with proper documents and it will be treated as an enforceable crime.
They aren't beyond the reach of the law, it's just logistically hard. Imagine getting the cops to bother investigating your stolen laptop or something. Now multiply that by an international multi-agency investigation spanning 10,000 miles.
> one of the few results that comes up when you search for the keywords, fbi + justice + india + scam
Your link [1] mentions no sign of Indian law enforcement. Instead, “Singapore authorities apprehended Patel at the request of the United States…after Patel flew there from India…charges remain pending for other India-based defendants.”
It's because it's a relatively new occurrence. Likely due to the rising employment crisis around the IT industries in the country.
Baltic hackers have been around since the internet became mainstream really. The fall of the Soviet union lead to economic hardship in most of the areas well known for hacking - and those kids coming of age shortly after had the brand new age of information to take advantage of.
Incidents and stories related to Indian hackers-for-hire have been rising in the past couple of years. A few companies have built a workable model out of it. It’s relevant context from the cyber security industry perspective, tangentially related in this case.
More important than a nationality of the hackers (to me at least) is the personality of the payer for services. It’s clearly mentioned in the article:
Solomon and Azima allege that Dechert undertook the hack-and-leak operation in the interest of its client, Sheikh Saud bin Saqr al-Qasimi, ruler of the Middle Eastern emirate of Ras Al Khaimah.
What kind of gun was used in a killing is much less important than who paid for the killing, no?
to me it's not racist, it just tells me more how competitive indians are when it comes to the tech industry.
during our college days our profs literalt recommended studying online resources in youtube made by indians, because they got better coverage than most of our curriculum. we laugh at their accent but we owe them a lot.
securedrop, pastebin GPG communiques from coffee shop WiFi + VPN, i2p, or something with a buffer between them and their sources. Perhaps include journalism security hygiene similar to foreign intelligence HUMINT and compartmentalization. Journalists have to realize they don't know their adversaries and should "fail-safe" to assume they include state actors and megacorps with unlimited resources. To not do so is to recklessly underestimate the threat.
Maybe not careless, but not a good convention. Incidentally, securedrop is set up only to communicate with specific journalistic organizations. I'd be very hesitant to send information to a journalistic org without an understanding of who's involved. In no way have the vast majority of journalistic orgs established the trust necessary to receive leaks:
Why put "Indian hackers" in the headline when the story is about the WSJ reporter, the Iranian business deal and the UAE Sheikh that hired the law firm to orchestrate the hack?
Was the Jamal Kashoggi story about NSO's Pegasus (Israeli-made), or the risks reporters face when covering powerful individuals that operate in the shadows of spying and information warfare?
This is an angle of the uneven distribution of wealth that you seldom hear about. As long as there are rich and poor people, a rich person can hire a poor person to do basically anything.
Overriding legality, decency, safety. Because the poor person just needs the money that bad.
So you get people renting out their backyard as a toxic waste dump. Or murdering people. Or breathing smog. Or selling children. Crazy horrible stuff that no sane person would do. Because they need the money.
And the rich guy is untouched.
So, to a significant degree, as long as there is rich and poor, there is no law or morality. It reduces society to a dog-pit.
I assume this has more to do with absolute poverty than relative poverty. If a person is starving they’ll do almost anything to eat. If they’re merely relatively poor, having an old car instead of a new one, a small house instead of a large house, it’s unlikely they’d go to extremes.
Relative poverty is also involved imo. Many people would go to extremes to ensure their children and their loved ones are guaranteed brighter economic futures. Life insurance companies wouldn't both explicitly exclude suicide and also do investigation to ensure a death wasn't suicide if it people weren't willing to literally die to ensure a brighter economic future for their dependents.
Hell, I live very comfortably, am not at risk of homelessness or starvation. But there is a lot I would do for money that guarantees the best start in life for my children, the best end of life (medical care, treatments, etc) for my parents.
> Life insurance companies wouldn't both explicitly exclude suicide and also do investigation to ensure a death wasn't suicide if it people weren't willing to literally die to ensure a brighter economic future for their dependents.
Most life insurance does cover suicides. Just not in the first year or two.
> But there is a lot I would do for money that guarantees the best start in life for my children, the best end of life (medical care, treatments, etc) for my parents.
For children specifically, the most valuable thing that money can buy is time.
It doesn't seem credible that ordinary people, who happen to see a giant megayacht one day, can suddenly turn into a maniac for hire just because they live in 'relative poverty'.
The vast majority of people value safe neighbourhoods, friendships, family get-togethers, etc., far more than they do in procuring mega yachts, or being wealthy enough to do so. Especially when old enough to have children.
> Life insurance companies wouldn't both explicitly exclude suicide
Not enforceable in most places. Even if you lie on the forms or commit suicide, the insurance company still has to pay out as long as you've had the policy for 2 years.
the solutions are there, we implemented them in the post-war era, and they worked, massively reducing inequality until about the early to mid-1970s, where due to a number of reasons, lots of Western economies slowed down, especially the UK and the US, and the free-market Milton-Friedman-inspired right got into power and more or less has been since then. their policies creating overall growth, yes, but at the expense of wage growth and (after an initial bump from selling off public property) living standards.
as a related aside, if someone ever tells you that taxes are at an all-time high so we must reduce them, take a look at the top marginal tax rates in the UK and US in the mid-60s. or corp tax back then
the way to actually solve these problems was told to us by Keynes. the problem is that the political will is just not there. that's where we need a solution. how do you circumvent the capital-holding elite [to use a meaningless word]?
Individuals need better morals imo. The corporate entries of this works however do everything for the benefit of the share holder which isn’t always the right moral thing.
individuals can have all the morals they like. there are always going to be sociopaths and opportunists in this world, and corporations - and, as you point out, their shareholders - benefit from hiring them. the improvement must come from society as a whole. public organisation, whether that's government, or unions, or even charities, must have the balls to stand up to profit-mongering, and properly regulate this mess
>So you get people renting out their backyard as a toxic waste dump. Or murdering people. Or breathing smog. Or selling children.
Yet, despite all of this, these people are living longer, healthier, more educated, and less violent lives. A more redistrutive society would have the exact same number of greedy assholes as we do today, and they wouldn't be any more altruistic. The difference in our society is that a greedy asshole who wants to outsource a jobs to a developing country will accidentally give the residents of this country the means to buy antibiotics.
> A more redistrutive society would have the exact same number of greedy assholes as we do today
Are you sure? Doesn't culture impact human behavior? Won't a society that encourages getting ahead at all costs produce a different social environment (with its own distinct behavioral incentives) than one with alternative priorities?
>Won't a society that encourages getting ahead at all costs
First of all, this is a anticapitalist meme that has no basis in reality. In American Factory, you can argue that the Chinese workers are encouraged to "get ahead at all costs". They likely share the same work ethic as Americans 100 years ago when they were similarly blase about safety, but this certainly isn't the case today. Today, we use marathon as a verb describing passively consuming media, and we glorify inactivity (FIRE, rest and vest, Office Space, etc) and these attitudes are unique to recent decades. We still celebrate hard work to a certain extent, but that's nothing new.
As far as cultural impact goes, your best case scenario is that people are more altruistic towards their in-group. Norway is renowned for it's redistribution of wealth, yet they're only .07% of the world's population and their sovereign wealth fund alone holds 1.4% of the the world's stocks. This is great for their citizens, but they aren't so keen on redistributing that wealth with Muslim immigrants and their children.
When you look at countries that are actively hostile to private wealth creation, you'll notice that they're all incredibly corrupt. This tells me that at least amongst the elite, they're just as greedy their counterparts in capitalist nations. The difference is that their economic model incentivizes them to chase zero-sum political power, rather than produce something of value.
I wasn't implying that more redistribution would create more altruistic citizens, but that a more redistributive society (or any departure from the status quo, really) might alter the behavioral incentives that exist today. The desire to "get ahead at all costs" doesn't exist because Americans simply love hard work and competition - it's a result of social + economic incentives. If you reduce the "cost" of not constantly striving (for example: improve the social safety net, the average American's work-life balance, etc.), those incentives shift.
We seem fairly well-insulated against the reality of the "Average American's" life here on HN, but it's not as comfortable as US GDP-per-capita might suggest. The way out of stressful financial insecurity, at least for most Americans, is the (necessarily) selfish pursuit of individual advancement. Likely no one will fault a low-level employee competing for a promotion that would enable them to afford a more reliable car, however Machiavellian their approach, but those same tendencies will look very different when exhibited by someone with a 9-figure net worth.
I don't think today's "greedy assholes" are anything more than people responding to existing incentives. You want fewer greedy assholes? De-incentivize being a greedy asshole.
This is a typical problem with technical people, where they're used to perfect authoritarian control.
Some children are going to see a puppy get run over and at a very young age and it's going to affect them in ways we can't even fully understand. One child may grow up just fine, the other may find themselves doing bad things 10 years down the road because it started them on a path due to whatever lesson they learned from it.
The fact that paedophiles exist is the glaring counter-example. There is no culture on this earth that finds it ok to have sex with a 5 year old, yet these people exist DESPITE that.
this is a very salient way of explaining the need for wealth redistribution in society. this doesn't necessarily mean communism or socialism, but it should mean more Keynesian economics. high taxes on the rich - including rich corporations - and strong public spending in the right areas: education, small businesses, healthcare, and safety nets so people feel like they can take risks without having the fear of becoming homeless
Yeah, one of my big shifts politically as an adult was debunking more naive libertarian views I held when younger.
I think an honest reading of post ww2 history shows you need both a healthy private and public sector. There's arguments about exactly where to draw the line, but evidence is countries prosper with 1/4 to 1/2 of their economy being redistributed through the public sector. Where to draw the line within that window is more a matter of what society you want than a pure economic question.
A key detail is that you need functional institutions, and those take generations to build.
It doesn't matter it's illegal, it can happen and people get away with it, and the fact that it can happen has deep reaching chilling effects even when it does not.
Look at the case of Daphne Caruana Galizia, the Maltese journalist killed by two idiots who got paid 150.000€. The killer brothers are in jail and the rich asshole who ordered the killing is free. The fact that such a thing can happen in an EU country means that every shady business man can threaten and silence a journalist, not by killing them, just by hinting it could happen, and you will never learn anything about such cases.
An underappreciated negative aspect of equality is total lack of enthusiasm and incentive.
As inequality is a guarantee - no two people are alike in any aspect and neither are their abilities as an employee - mandating (either by gun or union contract) lockstep equality in payments and job security, the highest performers are demoralized and put in the bare minimum or quit (if they can). The result is the ever-increasing shitty quality of the firm and its behavior. For modern examples see the NHS (bleeding doctors and nurses to the private sector) and American public schools in inner cities (highest global costs per student yet abysmal results).
There are valid criticisms about inequality but the pros far out way the cons.
This is mostly a strawman, since I don't see almost anyone arguing for complete equality of pay, status or position, merely that a handful of people shouldn't be able to accumulate the wealth of small nations on the back of others.
In countries in Europe, and places in Asia, there are plenty of examples where there is less inequality and the students perform better.
Europe has many poor countries and even developed ones (UK) are having quality of life decreases due mostly to a lack of private sector success - the government eventually runs out of money without private business to fill its coffers.
Happy to be in the US especially with the global economic recession incoming
Sounds to me like we should eliminate the idea that high performance and achievement should be rewarded with wealth or being raised above others. Perhaps it would be better if people learned from a young age that achievement is its own reward? Are we such animals that we need special treats in order to do the right thing? I think it’s a childish attitude that if you don’t get more cookies than someone else that you’ll throw down your work and have a tantrum.
I work 70 hours a week and there is 0% chance I would do that without having significant upside in my firm. I get more money and I deserve it, this is a free country and I don’t want anyone’s potential capped (and certainly not my own!).
I find that most people arguing for top-down redistribution don't seem to care about if it makes everyone poorer as long as "equality for everyone" is the modus operandi. They see it as a moral imperative, the measurable outcomes and realities of the economic systems always get second rate treatment.
It's always much, much easier to argue for 'fairness' and to rail against the rich... than it is to be realistic and accept that there will be very visible downsides but that alternatives are much worse in practice.
Ditto with free speech, censorship is almost always a greater evil, with small exceptions, but when you try to defend it they try to pretend you only care about nazis/far-right. Sometimes doing the right thing is not easy and yes - it requires plenty of effort to weed out the assholes and wrong-doers (which the courts are doing now by punishing the law firms), but it's worth it in the end.
And you don't have to tolerate the bad guys just because you didn't compromise societies freedoms and wealth to prevent them from existing in the first place. There's more ways to stop it than throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
> Bezos and Musk would work just as hard if they only had 10% of the financial equity share in their companies that they have today.
This is absolutely not a given. Not because the value changes, but because it implies they no longer own a controlling interest in the company and have to answer to a board. Musk explicitly does not want to take SpaceX public because shareholders are terrible bosses for long term visions (colonizing mars).
One person deciding where all that money is invested is a sort of economic dictator. Trying to live on Mars is polluting our planet. If you don't agree with that use of resources, it's not a benevolent dictatorship.
It's far more democratic than that, at least insofar as people voluntarily gave the person money vs. it being collected in non-voluntary ways.
And yes, that may be non-binary in that some of Elon's money has likely come from the government where we have less choice about spending it, other money may come from voluntarily purchased Teslas and whatnot.
This. The problem is a dstribution of power most of all.
If power is concentrated in government, it's as bad if it's concentrated with an individual with his own private police force. Private espionage force etc.
All this strawman about the failures of absolute equality are just slight of hand to ignore the very obvious problem with a world where a single person have the power of a state.
The state legitimacy should come from the people participation in govering themselves. Not from some psuedo meritocracy. Concentrated power without checks and balances is the problem, not specifically "the state".
I wish all libertarians would wake up and see that very obvious threat to freedom.
Huh?
Never talked about "flat democracy" I consider a representative democracy to be a form of self governing.
You really missed the whole point of my post
> implication and conclusions don't need to be explicitly stated.
But you would do well to ask, because you got it totally wrong.
The commenter said that they are against this type of libertarian idealism. Because the result is that it isn't a flat democracy. Instead folks like Musk end up with huge amounts of power.
Specifically you need to understand what they said here:
"If power is concentrated in government, it's as bad if it's concentrated with an individual with his own private police force."
The implication is that the commentator wants power evenly distributed. The opposite of your wrong accusation of the commenter wanting power concentrated in a majority. Nowhere was flat democracy mentioned. You invented that line of thinking.
flat democracy in this case means no power concentration and everyone votes on everything.
as opposed to what the US currently has, which is a representational democracy where power is concentrated at the government level with people electing others to represent them (and to wield more power than they, themselves, do).
----
If someone tells you power concentrated in the government is bad and power should be evenly distributed, they're talking about a flat democracy (aka direct democracy).
Which goes back to what I said initially. What if the people want slaves? What if they want segregated schools? Because at one point the majority actually did want these things.
People who argue for things like this imagine that only good will come from it. Not only is that not true, we have precedent that it's not true.
Never talked about evenly distributed power. Just not too concentrated.
A power differential is not inherently bad, I can't see a system working without it. But the size of that differential should be kept to a minimum that allow the system to work.
> If someone tells you power concentrated in the government is bad and power should be evenly distributed, they're talking about a flat democracy (aka direct democracy).
You're wrongly inferring that. No need to assume stuff when you can just ask the other person.
> they're talking about a flat democracy (aka direct democracy).
That does not describe a system where power is evenly distributed. Because of the already widely known problems you mentioned. Lots of folks learn this stuff in high school.
How does one evenly distribute power without giving the same level of power to everyone?
When you answer that you cannot do so, you're admitting to asking for a direct democracy.
"Oh, but what about this adaptation that ..." puts more power into certain hands than another. Maybe it's flatter, but it's not even.
It's sort of like saying people can fly. The second you add the requirement that it be actionable (aka, grounded in reality) is the same second you conclude people need something external to assist rather than flapping their arms really fast.
you can't get around that no matter how much you'd like to.
> The votes of elected officials in a representative democracy may not always reflect the will of the people. The officials are not bound by law to vote the way the people who elected them want them to vote.
hummm.... that sounds like more power in the hands of less people.
IOW, your argument is based in fiction. Which is cool, we need stories about people flapping their hands to fly. It's fun!
We just need to be clear earlier in the conversation on whether or not reality is part of the goal or not.
