Eric Schmidt set up a data company for the sole purpose of getting Hillary elected. Google also had 427 white house visits during the Obama Admin. Not sure what your definition of bribe is but they are as tight with DC as any wall street bank
it's not a very convincing argument to quote the dictionary at someone who is clearly trying to make a more sophisticated point about political and cultural attitudes w.r.t influence peddling and interaction of money and politics.
The supporting evidence of their argument was two separate items, that Eric Schmidt set up a data company for the sole purpose of getting Hillary elected, which is entirely unsupported by the reference they provided, and that Google visited the white house a lot, which while supported has nothing to do with bribery when taken by itself.
I took "depending on your definition of bribery" to be implying that these visits indicate some behavior akin to or equal to bribery, and quoting the definition as a succinct way to note that they aren't equivalent at all as currently explained. I thought that was sufficient because unlike you I did not interpret that comment as clearly trying to make a more sophisticated point, but as trying to allude to misconduct from facts which have entirely benign explanations. It's possible there was misconduct, but assuming so from the information presented is not a way to have a rational discussion on the topic.
quite a lot of perfectly legal behavior, that would not be called misconduct by a prosecutor or investigator, can still be on shaky ethical grounds for various reasons.
surely Google does not visit the white house just because they enjoy the breakfast buffet. they're lobbying for their business interests. this isn't necessarily unethical at all, but when you look at the pattern of campaign contributions and think tank funding (and various other kinds of pulling of influence levers) you start to find the grey area.
I probably wouldn't go so far as to call it bribery, but it's not a clear cut thing. I'm nearly certain that is why the poster said "depending on your definition of bribery". He/she was (in my interpretation) intending to discuss that grey area. Shutting down that discussion by throwing the dictionary at him/her is both rude and unhelpful. There might really be an interesting discussion of ethical grey areas in political lobbying activities to be had, but not if you're gonna shut it down with that kind of reactionary literalism.
Yes. But some visits could also have been the White House soliciting information from the industry, or from multiple industries, since Google is in many markets. Indeed, Google's own response called out the many different subjects discussed.
Asked to respond, Google spokesperson Riva Litman referred The Intercept to a blog post written when the Wall Street Journal raised similar questions a year ago. In that post, Google said the meetings covered a host of topics, including patent reform, STEM education, internet censorship, cloud computing, trade and investment, and smart contact lenses. The company also claimed to have counted similar numbers of visits to the White House by Microsoft and Comcast — but it did not explain its methodology for parsing the data.
You've let the initial description of the visits already influence your assessment of what they were about. Were some traditional lobbying as expected from large corporations with interests? Undoubtedly. But that doesn't mean every visit was, especially for a company that has been very open about investing into research in forefront technologies, the type of thing the White House might want to keep abreast of, or about increasing certain types of educational outcomes, which is also a subject often addressed by the White House. Also note, in the referenced article their numbers they appear to be including state dinners and white hours tours in their numbers, as they had to distinguish why their chart doesn't actually show the same number they quote in some instances.
> I'm nearly certain that is why the poster said "depending on your definition of bribery". He/she was (in my interpretation) intending to discuss that grey area.
Then they should have discussed that grey area more specifically rather than case allusions.
> Shutting down that discussion by throwing the dictionary at him/her is both rude and unhelpful.
The only way it shuts down the conversation is if they didn't have anything valid (such as a larger discussion about corporate influence in politics) to respond with. Given the actual response I got from the author, I don't feel particularly sorry that I came down a little harder than I usually do. At this point I can only assume that if they had more interesting, sourced, or nuanced points they would have brought them forth at that time. Instead we get more conflation of Eric Schmidt and Google, and the appeal "You think Google wasn't trying to influence the Obama white house during those 427 visits?", to which I think I've adequately explained my thinking here.
There are many useful conversations to be had about Google's influence on the government, and the referenced article actually does a good job of bringing them up, and providing a measured interpretation of what they mean, and why the pure numbers are not a smoking gun without context. That it's used in this way doesn't do it justice, nor does it do justice to those of us that might see numbers referenced from it without context in this way, which was to make an allusion such as "lots of visits equals bribery".
1. "money or favor given or promised in order to influence the judgment or conduct of a person in a position of trust"
2."something that serves to induce or influence"
Eric Schmidt spending millions to create groundwork isn't a favor? You think Google wasn't trying to influence the Obama white house during those 427 visits?
from wikileaks
"He’s ready to fund, advise recruit talent, etc. He was more deferential on structure than I expected. Wasn’t pushing to run through one of his existing firms. Clearly wants to be head outside advisor, but didn’t seem like he wanted to push others out. Clearly wants to get going. He’s still in DC tomorrow and would like to meet with you if you are in DC in the afternoon. I think it’s worth doing"
Do you consider every political donation to be a bribe? You may very well be correct, but a definition that includes nearly every corporation or wealthy individual may not be particularly useful as a term.
Unless the subject is a rare individual ( mother Teresa, spirituality ascended personalitie etc), rarely who shelves out resources not hoping to get something in return.
Especially not a corporation in a field heavily regulated to prevent that.
I've never seen anything like the censoring by Google and Youtube over the last few weeks. Ron Paul of all people got all his videos demonetized for being "controversial". The most disgusting thing to me is that they don't delete the videos because they don't actually break any policies but they instead remove them from search and remove the ability to comment or share the videos, stifling any potential discussion.
I think the only reason people aren't yet as afraid of Google as they were Microsoft circa 1996-2000, is that Google has yet to fully flex its ability to abuse its monopoly (not to mention there are a few other equally powerful juggernaut companies roaming tech now). That appears to be starting to change. No question the anti-trust hearings come next, the DOJ will pursue them over the next five years.
The supposedly business friendly Republicans now view them as a left-wing enemy, so a party shield (regarding anti-trust intervention) will not exist going forward. Obama kept them from DOJ interest during his time in office because of how close they all were, that's also not likely to be seen again in a future Democrat administration. Should be easy to carve them into pieces, with search + adsense + adwords on one side, and one or two other companies getting everything else. The new Search Co would then be put under a ten year government dictated operational agreement that would limit some of its abusive behavior.
This is the New York Times we are talking about, a company that got blindsided by the internet and social media. NYT is firing editors and renting out office space to stay solvent, it makes sense they would write this article
Can you think of any major old media company that didn't take it in the pants over the internet? I'd argue that there is something to be said for the ones that managed to survive at all.
SiriusXM (27 years old) is financially the only music subscription service that is thriving in terms of printing cash. Not only did they not take it in the pants due to to the rise of the Internet, their fortunes have radically improved over the last 15 years and they've perpetually added to their subscriber base. While Pandora and Spotify bleed red ink by the barrel, Sirius earned $800m in the last four quarters (with $1.5b in operating income).
Fox and its various properties transitioned just fine and have had several record profit years in the last five years. The stock of Twenty-First Century Fox, Inc. has been hovering near all-time highs (its stock history going back to 1989) the last three years, and that's after spinning off the smaller Newscorp.
Disney has thrived big time in the Internet era. They're far larger than they used to be. Their market cap is five times larger than it was in 1995 (and that's with a modest 17 PE ratio).
CBS Corp's stock is near an all-time high (spun off in 2005) and their sales are as well.
Thomson Reuters is doing just fine in the Internet era. They didn't take it in the pants at all. They're a century old media company (156 years for Reuters, 83 for Thomson), whose stock is at all-time highs, and their operational condition is strong. They're presently worth 10x what the New York Times is.
> US essentially defends the world, allowing other countries to spend money elsewhere.
The US doesn't “defend the world” by any stretch of the imagination. As for what it does commit to defending, well, other countries wouldn't let the US put the forces and facilities in their countries that the US wants there for global force protection of the US didn't also make a credible commitment to mutual defense; the US doesn't “defend the world” as a charitable service, it agrees to assist with the defence of select countries in order to contain others, secure access to key resources, and be in a position to project force to advance US interests anywhere in the world.
I can tell you're someone who has actually read the core objectives of branches of the military and has experience with their relationships with other countries.
If you're reading this and would like a concrete example of what the guy above me means, take a look at the U.S. history in major foreign bases like Okinawa. Okinawa does not exist so we can defend Japan. It serves as an Asian FOB, helps contain North Korea / China, secures our access to important shipping routes, and of course "projects force".
The "U.S. protects Europe and the rest of the world" is just some jingoist narrative with no factual basis.
> Pharma companies develop drugs with US subsidies and make their profits off US citizens while European countries put price ceilings on their drugs.
You conveniently forget the European drug companies who develop drugs—and completely pay for the research—while negotiating price ceilings, and then export the same drug to the US, selling it 5x the price for pure profit (minus distribution/marketing/lobby costs).
Disclaimer: my Dad managed research at one of those large European pharma companies.
You proved my point, if US did what Euro countries do to us, European pharma companies would lose their primary profit source. It's a wealth drain from US citizens to Europe.
I appreciate that you've moved toward civility in your comments on HN, but we need you to go further, because comments like this add no information and are just rude. Could you please just be scrupulously civil and respectful and only post comments that have good signal/noise ratio?
Other users have reformed themselves this way (I'm one of them), so I'm sure you can, once you internalize the value of what we're shooting for here (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). It isn't primarily an ethical issue, if that helps; it's about trying to avoid degradation into boredom. Flame-style comments provoke worse, both quality- and quantity-wise.
No, it obviously doesn't, unless of course you think the US manages to lead the world by acting against its own interests.
In addition, and as far as agitprop goes, this particular argument begs the question: if this is the case, why are we doing it in the first place?
This kind of juvenile ideology, claiming some pretended affront to some national interest to justify some weakly supported exceptionalism and eventually supremacism, is old as the world. As I don't want to invoke Godwin so early in the afternoon, I'll just mention this is also quite a popular theme amongst wife beaters.
A significant segment of the US population is following a well known path for all of those acquantied with early 20th century European history. It's only that the US is still catching up with all that, being such a young nation, and not having been vaccinated against fascism like pretty much most of the old world. It's gonna get rough I'm afraid.
Drug makers spend more in marketing than R&D, and I strongly suspect that most of their marketing dollars are spent in the US. So all we're really subsidising is more marketing to doctors via our high cost health care system.
This was very apparent to me when recently on a visit in the US. There were a lot more TV commercials for different kinds of drugs than I'm used to. Ironically the required(?) list of potential side effects at the end of each ad often sounded worse than the condition the drug was supposed to treat in the first place.
The US chooses to do this though. The US can stop doing this anytime it wants to, nobody is forcing us to.
If we don't like subsidizing Pharma companies maybe it should just stop doing it. It's not like Europe is asking us to. Similarly, I'm all for closing bases. If the US wants to close bases and cut military spending, who's stopping us?
Russia has 144 million people and a GDP on par with Italy. The EU has 500 million people and - even without NATO and the UK - French nukes, with the ability to develop them in other countries if necessary. Russians aren't stupid, they would never attack us.
Fun fact: Russia has never once invaded Central Europe. Central / West European countries have invaded Russia a few times.
Russia does not need space or natural resources and it would be difficult to conquer its way to the soft factors it is missing.
Given the strength of most European countries and their lack of natural resources, the chance of a large war being a net positive for Russia is small. Of course, sometimes there are internal reasons to start a war. Falklands and some US wars and, I think, most of Russia's small wars after the cold war come to mind.
Russia is part of Europe, Russia invading other countries in Europe is presumably a threat those countries would be highly motivated to address. The US keeps forces there and defence commitments because we're afraid of how Europe might act to protect itself if we weren't there, and because we want other countries in the region to feel inclined to accommodate US interests. (In both cases, “Finlandization” is an applicable concept.)
Of course US does. We really need to acknowledge that. Don't believe it? Support US withdrawing from mutual defense pacts with South Korea and Japan and NATO.
>Support US withdrawing from mutual defense pacts with South Korea and Japan and NATO.
I wouldn't support the US reneging on its current security agreements, particularly with Japan, since we forced them into their current pacifist regime, but if South Korea, Japan and/or NATO wanted the US out, I wouldn't oppose it.
I'm afraid there's a point at which America's overwhelming military, cultural and political dominance itself becomes a problem. Even if one can argue that, as hegemonies go, you could do worse, superpowers and their chess games are also holding the world back.
People greatly underestimate the magnitude of bloodshed that would come with American isolationism.
Because of Pax Americana, most people can't even grasp the concept or seriousness of, say, a neighboring nation dropping bombs on your city just because they want your territory. The US is insulated from such concerns, Europe is rife with them :)
> Because of Pax Americana, most people can't even grasp the concept or seriousness of, say, a neighboring nation dropping bombs on your city just because they want your territory.
Because of “Pax” Americana, many people have a vivid and direct understanding of a remote nation dropping bombs on your city because they aren't satisfied with your internal politics, even though they don't want to be bothered with the general burden of governing the territory.
Pax Americana can't last forever. The world must inevitably move on from the the old "gods playing chess" paradigm of East vs West. Something has to come next.
> I wouldn't support the US reneging on its current security agreements, particularly with Japan, since we forced them into their current pacifist regime, but if South Korea, Japan and/or NATO wanted the US out, I wouldn't oppose it.
Why? If US does nothing for their security, then there's zero point of US spending money on it. It is like code - if the line is NOOP, then it should just go.
I don't believe the US does nothing for their security, certainly in the case of South Korea and Japan I think the US has been both an asset and a burden. I'm just not certain that what the US does is entirely necessary, meaning I don't think it's impossible for the world to go on without American interference and it shouldn't be a unilateral decision on the part of the US to simply opt out.
If the US has treaty obligations that require its military engagement, then those need to be upheld, or else the US should try to renegotiate them. Otherwise, even if the security situation is made worse, the US should respect other countries' sovereignty if they want them gone.
Yeah seeing the refugee crisis, the uprising of ISIS, terrorist attacks that are indirectly related to a lot of American invasions we Europeans are getting definitely the long end of the stick.
I find it really weird how over the ocean they are always pounding the self on the chest but they never think about how some of us need to deal with the consequences of the decisions they made in the past. You can bicker a whole day of keeping people out and travel bans but you need to ask yourself what is one of the reasons we have them in the first place.
Military spending is also not about the bill but funding the American military complex by forcing shoddy products (JSF) to other countries. I know this is the reason why this country is still debating about replacing our old F16 fleet.
America is not perfect in that regards that they only brings safety to the world or they do everything because they have high moral values.
>You can bicker a whole day of keeping people out and travel bans but you need to ask yourself what is one of the reasons we have them in the first place.
Because they know you're a soft touch? How many 30 year old "Syrian children" from Pakistan and North Africa are you going to settle before you realize most of the people coming to Europe are coming for the free benefits and not because they're fleeing war? Shouldn't Syria be pretty much empty by now?
Besides, there was a country which kept migrants bottled up in Africa until France and the UK decided to settle old scores.
>Military spending is also not about the bill but funding the American military complex by forcing shoddy products (JSF) to other countries. I know this is the reason why this country is still debating about replacing our old F16 fleet.
Nobody's forcing you to do anything. You could buy from the Swedes, or the French, or even the Russians. And no, the JSF is not a "shoddy" product. It's just too expensive. Do you expect the US will bomb your country if you don't buy it? Don't buy it.
>America is not perfect in that regards that they only brings safety to the world or they do everything because they have high moral values.
Nobody's claiming to be perfect. All I'm saying is we're wasting money protecting Europeans who are perfectly capable of defending themselves. Europeans who refuse to spend more than a token amount on defense and then expect the US to "take the lead" whenever something bad happens. If it were up to me you'd be on your own.
"... before you realize most of the people coming to Europe are coming for the free benefits and not because they're fleeing war? "
The majority is definitely not coming for what you call 'free benefits', and most of those who do will be sent back home in due time, if their home countries accept them back.
Unfortunately it's quite common that they don't, and then there's not much left to do but allow also these people to stay. Can't really deport people when their home countries won't let them through the border control.
>The majority is definitely not coming for what you call 'free benefits', and most of those who do will be sent back home in due time, if their home countries accept them back.
Those people are not leaving. You may tell yourself they're leaving. Your government may tell you they're leaving (someday), but when push comes to shove the media will be blanketed with sob stories and accusations of racism if anybody actually tries to repatriate them.
US spends more on military than every Euro country combined. If they are attacked we have to defend them and they know it. They would contribute a relatively insignificant amount if we were ever attacked.
> If they are attacked we have to defend them and they know it. They would contribute a relatively insignificant amount if we were ever attacked.
If? In the entire history of NATO, the mutual defense provisions of the treaty have been invoked exactly once, and that in response to an attack on the US, and the non-US NATO contributions were not insignificant.
Sure, deterrence is the point of the treaty, but the claim upthread was about the significance of contributions that would be made in the event of an attack, a claim which contradicts the facts of the time when an attack resulting in the mutual defense provisions being invoked actually occurred.
> They would contribute a relatively insignificant amount if we were ever attacked
Many Europeans gave their lives in Afghanistan, responding to an attack on the U.S., and also in Iraq on a fools errand. The U.S. is the predominant power, but that doesn't make others insignificant.
The fact that we spend too much by an order of magnitude or two doesn't mean the rest of the world is dependent on us. We don't spend this much because it's the only way to make the world safe. We spend this much because every Congressman has a some part of a defense contractor in their district and they'd rather build billion dollar boondoggles that the military leadership explicitly doesn't want than vote to close the local plant.
Instead of spending billions on refugees, 75% of whom still won't be working for years, why not spend that money to get Germans to have more kids? That would actually make sense, unlike importing unskilled labor that won't be needed due to automation.
Because the goal of mass immigration of unskilled workers isn't what's best for the country, its to bring in people who will be reliant on the government and thus always vote for more government, thus further consolidating power. Also has the benefit of driving wages down resulting in more natives being reliant on government.
If we really needed more workers why wouldn't we incentivize our own citizens to have kids instead of spending that money on refugees and immigrants?
Singapore, a multicultural society, has a pretty progressive baby bonus[1], among other countries. They think that's what works best for their society. They could import labor, but they prefer do it their way. It seems to work for them.
Will those uneducated immigrants earn money when they are no longer needed due to automation? If you have to pay to educate them anyway why not just have your population have kids instead of importing?
The uneducated ones we need to fill the jobs that educated locals won't do and won't be automated in their lifetimes. But a lot of them are educated and we need them too.
That's my point, incentivize our own citizens to have kids using the money that would otherwise be spent on immigrants. Preferably you would make it a tax cut so that middle class would have kids.
Why encourage more population growth? To me it's natural that some more developed societies have less children, and other less developed societies have more, encouraging immigration is a win win without increasing the total population.
Gonna need some evidence to back that up. Wouldn't the treatment get rid of the birth control?
From what I was reading, this seems to be an anti-BC talking point, but I couldn't find any evidence to suggest that any estrogens in tap water is caused by BC.
Seattle's socialist member of the city council fired the Unversity of Washington team after the results came out and hired an anti-capitalist professor from berkeley to ensure the study finds the right results.
Please don't use HN primarily for political or ideological battle. We ban accounts that do that (regardless of which flavor they favor) because it's destructive of what HN is for.
Why stop there? Just make it 100$ and hour and everyone will be rich!
This argument -- "well, if you think a little increase in the minimum wage is good, then you must think any increase in the minimum wage is good, or you're not being consistent!" -- gets trotted out by somebody on HN every time the subject comes up. And c'mon. If I believe that San Francisco's minimum wage hikes to $14 and $15 an hour are not going to cause undue economic collapse here, that does not somehow obligate me to believe "hey, if that works, we can raise the minimum wage to ELEVEN BILLIONTY DOLLARS AN HOUR with minimal impact, too!" Real life is full of examples, from salt in your soup to water behind a dam, where we understand that's good to increase the level to a point, but only to a point.
Oh wait, arbitrary wage increases don't really work out in real life.
"Most past research has found that modest increases to the minimum wage have little impact on employment, and that if employers do eliminate jobs or cut back hours, those losses are dwarfed by the income gains enjoyed by the majority of workers who keep their jobs." That quote is...from the FiveThirtyEight article that you linked to. The evidence so far seems to be that some of the time, for some levels, minimum wage increases do really work out in real life. The UW study criticizes the methodology of past studies, but it's at least worth acknowledging that there's criticisms of the UW study which are not, despite Fox's take, "this is not the result the socialists wanted." Notably, UW's study excludes businesses with multiple locations but only one account with Washington State's unemployment office, which eliminates 38% of the state's workforce from consideration, including all chain fast food and retail workers. They exclude them specifically because they can't get "location-based" data for workers in those cases; while that may be true, being inconvenient to UW's methodology doesn't render that data irrelevant.
> Real life is full of examples, from salt in your soup to water behind a dam, where we understand that's good to increase the level to a point, but only to a point.
And somehow this point is lost on many proponents of raising the minimum wage, who find obvious that any increase in minimum wage can only be good and anyone saying otherwise is evil. Sometimes the soup would be better with less salt, minimum wages could be too high already!
Note that your fivethirtyeight article even mentions a caveat to the study:
> The paper’s findings are preliminary and have not yet been subjected to peer review. And the authors stressed that even if their results hold up, their research leaves important questions unanswered, particularly about how the minimum wage has affected individual workers and businesses.
> Many economists, meanwhile, have acknowledged substantial uncertainty over the likely effects of the recent wage hikes. Most — though by no means all — past research has found that modest increases to the minimum wage have little impact on employment, and that if employers do eliminate jobs or cut back hours, those losses are dwarfed by the income gains enjoyed by the majority of workers who keep their jobs. But those studies were mostly based on minimum wages that were much lower than the ones beginning to take effect now. Even some liberal economists have expressed concern, often privately, that employers might respond differently to a minimum wage of $12 or $15, which would affect a far broader swath of workers than the part-time fast-food and retail employees who typically dominate the ranks of minimum-wage earners. Other economists said there simply wasn’t enough evidence to predict the impact of minimum wages that high. The new laws in Seattle and other cities, then, could provide an ideal testing ground.
Additionally, here is a post by Jared Bernstein related to the minimum wage hike[0]. Here is the book mentioned in the aforementioned post [1].
Another analysis[2] finding that "Once this publication selection is corrected, little or no evidence of a negative association between minimum wages and employment remains."
While I also do not know for certain the effects of a minimum wage, one of your sources fairly lists caveats and uncertainty for the study it mentions, and the other is fox news.
This post is an insult to hacker news. You are not deploying any kind of rational logic. If $100 is good, then make it $1,000,000. That is your logic and it is dishonest at best.
As an ADD person who has to take it regularly, I can say that it can just easily focus you on replying to anything of interest on Hacker News... so no, doesn't work this way.
Yeah I've lived it. You have to get to work right away so when it kicks in otherwise you'll generally keep doing whatever you were doing when it did. It can turn you into a god of productivity if you use it right or a degenerate jacking off for 12 hours straight.
Time to sit down for 11 hours and learn 5/6, weeks of diffeq for an exam. Eyes burning. Member disappearing into my body. Digestive system not functioning.
But then it's done. And then you forget all the mass information you absorbed and shat out onto a page.
https://theintercept.com/2016/04/22/googles-remarkably-close...