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Comment by andrewmcwatters | Hacker News Reader

I understand that, but I’m the guy you’re selling to, and I don’t see any difference.

I need quality resources, and you can’t avoid the fact that you’re sourcing labor at the end of the day.

You’re effectively an agency to me. I pay you for labor. Whether I pay for labor on Upwork or your platform or an outsourcing agency makes absolutely no difference to me. I look at all of them as resource funnels.

And frankly, I don’t want to work with kids who call their company fucking awesome. Are you going to take my business needs seriously?

Imagine if Bloomberg called his company Jack-Off Capital. Or if Walmart called their business Cheap Bastards.

Is labor arbitrage fucking awesome? You bet. For the owners. You should call your company fuck the little guy. At least in western culture we don’t intentionally bring undue attention to the fact that we’re offshoring labor beyond a business transaction.

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Hey, please don't break the site guidelines. You can make your substantive points without crossing into this sort of attack. The nationalistic swipe at the end is particularly not cool.

We've had to ask you this sort of thing more than once before. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and fix this going forward, we'd appreciate it.

I understand you’re particularly sensitive as an administrator to nationalistic comments, but I would appreciate it if you didn’t categorize my matter-of-fact statement as some sort of nationalistic sentiment.

That wasn't a matter-of-fact statement—it was an us-vs.them swipe drawing a line ("western culture") which itself is already provocative in this context.

Also, please don't ignore the other ways in which you broke the site guidelines with your post.

It was a matter-of-fact statement. Observational life will show you that we don't call out the fact that we arbitrage labor. Tim Cook doesn't tell customers that Apple keeps prices attractive enough by utilizing cheap Asian labor. It is tasteless.

If you find my statements to be "us-versus-them," that's your opinion, but I would find no fault in what these people are doing if they were Americans versus Ukrainians. I find fault in how immature the business approach is.

I acknowledge that I am not being nice. Neither is building a business, arbitraging labor and calling it awesome that you can exploit workers globally. But you suggest to me that you believe otherwise. Is that not a fair opinion? Besides, you call my comments nationalistic when they are clearly not.

A nationalistic comment would be, "Western culture is superior because we do not..." versus an observational statement which is "In western culture we do not..."

However, it's a common theme here that posters, versus commenters, have favoritism preemptively due to the good faith guideline. So, believe me, I'm well aware of them.

But if I posted an article here that wasn't nice, you would, by these guidelines, expect me to just be nice, and yet that's not how the world works, and plenty of posters here call out things all the time. It's a strange dynamic to assume otherwise.

I agree with this commenter, and I see nothing nationalistic in their statement.

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