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Comment by sdiacom | Hacker News Reader

Perhaps it's interesting to consider who the bad thing is being done to. Consider, for example, working for outlandishly impractical VC-funded ideas, where the main "evil" that's being done is conning venture capitalists into paying for the expenses of a company that will never produce anything of value.

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I had a friend who said he wanted 'He did little harm' on his gravestone. At the time I was irritated by how defeatist that attitude seemed, but these days it seems like a surprisingly high bar.

Defining which companies are evil is difficult because different people have different morals. From your example, I'd see it as the VCs who are conning small companies into taking VC money and driving for growth over sustainability in order to be one of many lottery tickets for that VC as the evil aspect of such scenarios.

Or maybe both sides are evil because they ultimately are seeking money, not positive change in the world.

You have a point. A related question is, is being useless at being evil equivalent to being neutral? And is profiting of such useless evil, in turn, also neutral?

That is, if the VCs are intending to do something evil by turning a company into a growth lottery ticket, but they're so useless at picking potential lottery tickets that they might as well be setting their money on fire.

Then what is the moral standing of someone who collects a paycheck from that company, grabs some popcorn, and sits in the sidelines to watch bad decisions unfold?

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