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Comment by PhantomGremlin | Hacker News Reader

Here's a summary of the current meaning of "Don't be evil":

re. the USA: No, we can't possibly bid on the US Department of Defense cloud computing contract. because the contract may not align with the company’s principles.

re. China: Yes, we want to build a censored search engine for Chine because there are a billion potential users there.

To me the hypocrisy is astounding. What I don't understand is how Google's employees deal with the cognitive dissonance. I guess they're real good at compartmentalizing.

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> What I don't understand is how Google's employees deal with the cognitive dissonance.

There are so many Google employees that I won’t expect them to all agree on these things. There are probably enough number of Chinese employees who would want to make such a product

> There are so many Google employees that I won’t expect them to all agree on these things.

At some level there are shot callers at Google that simultaneously reject the DOD for "values" and green light Dragonfly. I'm left to wonder how many euphemisms they'll need to employ to obscure their inherently unavoidable facilitation of China's Social Credit System. Good news for Google is they'll be ahead of the curve when the stars eventually align and the establishment gets its opportunity to deal with wrongthinkers in the the US.

God help us.

My guess is they knew they weren’t going to win the JEDI contract so they decided to make it a PR win by “withdrawing” based on principle.

> What I don't understand is how Google's employees deal with the cognitive dissonance.

They don't. The era of top notch engineers picking Google because of the company's vision and ethics are long gone.

Most employees at Google these days are just here to collect a (very fat) paycheck and don't give two hoots about the whole "don't be evil" thing.

I wonder how many H1B visa employees are working on Dragonfly?

According to CNN Google just dropped a bid for the DoD Cloud Computing project JEDI

https://www.cnn.com/2018/10/09/tech/google-defense-contract/...

... because they’re technically so far behind AWS and Azure that they aren’t even in the running. They even say they would have bid if it was multicloud so clearly it’s not on ethical grounds really.

It makes a lot more sense when you realize how many Google employees are Chinese citizens, and how many of the remainder are outright communists.

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