> pg or my investors wouldn't care about the social issues of the young people working in my sweatshop
I think it's rude to accuse people of hypothetical malfeasance. If there's evidence that someone is callous, show us the evidence. If you think you know of scenarios in which they would be callous, then just tell us what evidence led you to that conclusion instead.
Considering pg praises Ronco's investing background without even mentioning his controversial high-profile political background, I think its fair to say that pg probably isn't too concerned with the social issues at play here. None of his essays seem to address labor rights either. I'm certainly using him in a hypothetical for my argument, but its not an entirely fictional and unfair strawman. I think on the investor level, at least from my personal experience, skill workers are just cogs. They are part of a money making machine, and their concerns are very much at the lower end of importance. This is why we can have things like secret deals not to poach engineers and the H1B problem.
I think by the standards of casual internet commentary, my comment is perfectly acceptable and appropriate and using high-profile characters in hypotheticals to make a point is fine. If NVIDIA did something displeasing to the FOSS community and someone wrote, "Oh man, Linus is going to full asshole on them tomorrow," I doubt you would be white knighting him. Lets maybe turn down the pg fandom a bit, eh? He's certainly not above criticism.
The recent support pg gave to expanding the H1B program is arguably prima facie evidence of this "hypothetical malfeasance" behavior. Except I wouldn't characterize it as malfeasance. It is human nature to shy away from fractally complex issues, and supply chain ethics are very fractal. It would be a sufficient nightmare to validate the ethics of a lead pencil supply chain (cf., classic essay, "I, Pencil" [1], leaven with healthy critiques [2]), not to speak of programmer labor markets and laptop manufacturing supply chains.
It is counter-productive to use a binary evil/not-evil bit switch here. Rather, once you realize we all value our time, and an "I can't be bothered with those details" is an expression of that time preference (albeit in a manner that can be interpreted as malicious), it becomes easier to understand why we see this behavior. This doesn't mean you have to condone it and throw your hands in the air; understanding is the first step in debugging.
The line-crossing and bit flip can happen when someone else performs the dogged time-consuming legwork, assiduously gathers the evidence, and presents it on a silver platter, and the response is still a reflexive "I can't be bothered with those details". When that happens, at the very least Upton Sinclair's pithy observation is at play, and yes, at the very worst the basest of human nature is on full display.
There are nuances beyond all this of course, but that's a wall of text I shan't inflict upon you.
[3] It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it! From I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked (1935), ISBN 0-520-08198-6.
I think it's rude to accuse people of hypothetical malfeasance. If there's evidence that someone is callous, show us the evidence. If you think you know of scenarios in which they would be callous, then just tell us what evidence led you to that conclusion instead.