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Comment by mc32 | Hacker News Reader

Heh. Just wait till they get wind of XinJiang or labor conditions in Foxconn factories and see how the management responds to those concerns... oh, nevermind. We’ve known that for years but that must okay to activists since silence is violence and I haven’t heard peep.

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Yup. Radio silence on that front for years. But it’s not just them, it’s many others on this new trendy virtue signaling dance until they later do something incompatible with their public statements and ignore it once again when called out.

Perhaps Coinbase and Basecamp are the clever ones to resist accidentally signing up to the lifetime of demands from extremely politically charged activists that thrive from catching out employees and cancelling them for wrongthink and screaming about their dramas all over Twitter.

My wish they’d all eventually gravitate to one particular state (Calif or NY, whatever) attracted by their common goal, do their thing there, let the rest of us work in peace and they can go on with their forever revolutionary activism to their hearts’ content till they realize that someone has to do actual productive work to ensure continuity.

As a New Yorker, I'd agree with you. My anecdata is that the activists are generally the most productive and engaged employees. Yours, I guess, is otherwise. We should just put this to the test - the activist leave the professional centrists alone, the professional centrists leave the activists alone, and we see who's better for business.

It'd be nice to get some actual real-life results and this would get us there, so yeah, it'd be pretty nice if it happened.

The response to this argument from the activists is "don't let perfect be the enemy of good", and they will carry on ignoring the stuff they want to ignore without feeling bad. (It's not true that they don't know though.)

There is some logic here and I've not found a good way to argue against it.

Well, the way to respond to it is “wait, no, Apple as a company is a much more direct contributor to working conditions at Foxconn than it is to violence against Palestinians. You are concentrating on an empty statement from management in lieu of demanding corporate actions that would actually have an effect. Your priorities are misordered.”

And nothing about the ongoing Uyghur genocide. So you know these activists are not sincere actors. It's about flexing political or tribal power and signaling to other tribal members.

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