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Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

Don't forget that China is ultimately a far more collectivist society, and stuff like this happens all the time. The money just provides additional motivation; people's natural tendency is to share things.

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Where possible Bezos has Western employees pissing in bottles and penalized for taking sick days, working without vacations, retirement savings and health care supplemented with food stamps and tent-camps so it's pretty generous to blame Chinese culture for toxicity from the top.

Indeed, the "data leaks" that Amazon experiences in the US are people taking pictures of their working conditions and sharing them with the public.

Eh, how do you define collectivist? Ever tried to get on a Chinese subway or stand in a Chinese queue? I'm not sure you can compare e g. US and Chinese collectivism unidimensionally.

I'm not a sociologist but this is a fairly common distinction in sociology. Countries like Russia or China are considered to be more collectivist. For example in China they are very OK with using eminent domain to seize individual property to build rail roads. America is considered to be more individualist. We also have eminent domain here, but it's much less common to use it, (eg. see California high speed rail).

That's not true. Selling data for their own profit is completely individualist.

So-called collectivist is just another way to say government could seize anyone's personal property without permission and compensation for 'greater good', which translates to government officials's pocket.

Collectivism can manifest itself behavior like this. I can't speak to China, but I have a lot of family that migrated away from Cuba, am a descendant of Cuban immigrants myself, and met many Cubans during my time in Florida. Those that grew up in the socialist system often have a sense that cheating is okay as long as you're cheating "The Man". Maybe these days we call it cheating "the system". Basically, stealing and fraud is more tolerated if it's stealing from some faceless group or organization, like governments or companies.

I think the distinction is shame vs guilt society if anything. Guilt is more intrinsic while shame is more external socially. China is more shame with their concept of face. Telling the customers their meal might be a bit late is loss of face even if it arrives on time. Insisting everything is fine and stalling up until it may or may not arrive is the "proper" thing to do.

Essentially that seems promotes both "do what it takes" and "do what you can get away with".

i think it's more likely that people generally (anywhere) would feel little natural allegiance or loyalty to a foreign multinational corporation

Doing whatever it takes to get personal benefit even though it screws over others is the opposite of collectivism. As somedy who lived in China, Europe, and the US the notion of people in China being less selfish and less likely to cheat the system is just absurd.

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