>the most effective thing you could do is create a bullshit startup and get them to invest, and then frivolously waste their money

Yeah, that sounds like a great idea to employ against a regime perfectly willing to violently murder people.

The most effective way to affect the change in KSA is to block KSA's citizens access to the non-KSA. It is that easy. The KSA is stable because its princess and princesses and its middle class enjoys unrestricted access to the West. For that they are willing to compromise with those that would stone women and cure homosexuality with whips.

Block that and KSA will fall apart within months as having hundreds of thousands of dollars means nothing if there's no access to Gucci purses and houses in London.

What replaces it if it loses stability or falls apart? Would it not be replaced by a government dominated by the people engaged in behavior you detest? It seems more likely that enacting more freedoms would instead result in civil war dominated by those who are more repressive, and likely the domination by the princes aligned with those perspectives.

Instead, we see a slow progress which is painful, but may be the best that can be hoped for.

I'm having a hard time figuring out what kind of olympic level mental gymnastics I need to engage in to be able to view a butchering of a US permanent resident who works for a major US newspaper in a consulate on a territory of a NATO country and lying about it being a "progress" but I'm probably just not understanding the delicate picture

I was referencing the broader program of social change Mohammed bin Salman has begun to enact (driving, concerts, movie theaters, women working, anti-corruption), as contrasted to the more regressive opinions of his predecessors any likely successors.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/saudi-women-drivers-face-one-la...

So in this case the end justifies the means, right?

Why would it lose stability and fall apart? Saudi Arabia is about as stable as bad places come, which is what makes it is so terrible. This is exactly the sort of country you should pressure to reform. Otherwise might as well just come out and say that it was all just an excuse to freely meddle with countries we don't like.

I don't think it would, but that is what the parent comment suggested.

How has that strategy worked out for Cuba / Iran / North Korea?

> How has that strategy worked out for Cuba / Iran / North Korea?

It hasn't been attempted. Kim Jong-un, for example, has been raised in Switzerland, dito for MANY children of autocracies, dictatorships and other detestable regimes from all over the world. Their blood money (or, in earlier times their blood diamonds) was, is and always will be welcome for Western banks.

I don't think you'd even need to block the non-royals for this to be effective.

If France and/or the UK put anyone with "Al-Saud" in their last name on a no entry list, MBS would be gone in weeks.

well, you're already dead, Metheny.

Anyway, levity aside regimes that will violently murder to silence critics might not to get even for bad business investments.

As for me I'm hoping to get some investment on my new grocery list tracking app that uses machine learning on the blockchain to automatically buy what you want to eat before you know what it is!

>regimes that will violently murder to silence critics might not to get even for bad business investments

I don't really disagree with that but at the same time it doesn't really feel all that wise to whack a hornet's nest with a baseball bat. If anyone feels like taking the risk, then I wish them the best of luck in swindling them for as much as they can get away with, but playing stupid games can lead to winning stupid prizes.

but can it identify hotdogs?

not hotdog! (but most other things)

> Mark my words, this will blow over in a month or two and we'll forget all about it, like we always do. Softbank has a lot of sweet, sweet petro-dollars to wave around.

This type of cynical, defeatist attitude is part of the problem.

Perhaps, but on an ordered list of contributing factors "a defeatist attitude" is pretty near the bottom.

> this will blow over in a month or two and we'll forget all about it, like we always do

We always don’t. That’s how some countries end up under sanctions. (In any case, this is a bad moral defense.)

Its not clear that the sanctions have anything to do with the moral considerations, as opposed to the domestic and geo-political considerations, which actually dominate the decision making process. Sanctions on Russia after Ukraine had no more to do with the moral significance of their invasion than the absence of French/German sanctions on the UK/US after the invasion of Iraq. We only sanction bad behaviour when either geopolitics or domestic politics makes it convenient to do so.

> We only sanction bad behaviour when either geopolitics or domestic politics makes it convenient to do so

I'd say when both make it convenient to do so, or one makes it an overwhelming necessity.

I hate to be pulling this thread into politics on HN, but you mentioned sanctions so I believe you speak about political sanctions.

All 19 hijackers of 911 attacks were Saudis. We have sanctioned many countries and murdered 100,000 innocent children and civils in last Iraq war that most americans still don’t know the reason we invaded, yet Suadis remain off the radar. Now the greencard holder got in altercation at the embassy and ended up treated with bonesaw, meanwhile POTUS tells we invested 1B in their contracts so we have to be careful what we say. On the top of that he has multiple private businesses at the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars at stake with Saudis. Tell me again about some sanctions against them, please?

>this will blow over in a month or two and we'll forget all about it, like we always do

>There are decades where nothing happens and there are weeks when decades happen

The house of saud can't be on the top of the throne forever. Their monopoly on oil is diminishing (as is the importance of oil) and they don't have anything else even remotely comparative.

You could have predicted that nothing would happen to the Assyrians for 16 thousand years and you would only be wrong once, but that was the one time it did matter. You could have predicted it about the romans for a thousand years; about the soviets for 70 years; about the third reich for 15; iraq for 40. In the end they all fell.

Now, I am not saying that this won't blow over in a month, just that it is really difficult to predict the future, especially in international relations.

Like those food delivery startups and ride sharing apps that all lose money?

Saudi may kill my journalists, but at least they subsidize my lunch.

Nations that sincerely object to what happened have it within their power to pass something like the Magnitsky Act[1] against those involved. The act was signed in to law after the murder and torture of Sergei Magnitsky, who had uncovered Russian corruption.[2]

The parallels in the two cases are striking.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnitsky_Act

[2] - https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/death-sergei-magnitsky-bil...

> I'd posit that the most effective thing you could do is create a bullshit startup and get them to invest

This sounds like a long-term con that would take years to implement - sovereign wealth funds are more into late-stage pre-IPO rounds and not as much into $5k AngelList syndicate rounds.

For short-term reducing personal dependence on oil sounds like a good start.

If this were 2010 I'd agree with you, but technology is changing very quickly.

We are very close to the ability to use bonds to pay for goods instead of cash. This allows you to buy things with "strings attached" so the bond becomes valueless under certain circumstances. E.g., I will buy your eggs, with a $8 bond which will lose its value if you are proved within my network of trust to have paid a worker less than a living wage.

Of course this $8 bond is worth less than $8 in cash, but the eggs purchased with the bond are worth more to me than eggs purchased with cash.

This will enable people to spend money and ensure that their revenues are reinvested according to their values.

This is one of my candidates for a "killer app" for Ethereum.

This is absolutely necessary as a key check on dirty money, since cryptocurrency has dramatically loosened up the ability for cash to flow between regulatory regimes.