IBM CEO Ginni Rometty's Letter to the U.S. President-Elect | Hacker News Reader

IBM CEO Ginni Rometty's Letter to the U.S. President-Elect

ibmpolicy.com

14 pointsmaxbrown23 comments

Hey IBM, maybe instead of offering to create "new collar" jobs, you should stop shipping your existing jobs to India:

http://insights.dice.com/2013/09/27/justice-department-hits-...

$44,400 in penalties? Is that a joke? I would be surprised if that even covered 10% of the price of the investigation.

The US has the trade deficit of mere ~2 billion with India. The US can try to stop moving the jobs to India. But surely it will backfire in some other way.

IBM allegedly helped the US government run the camps where citizens of Japanese descent were imprisoned during WWII (and allegedly provided technology to the Nazis that was used for the Holocaust).

What will IBM do if the U.S. government tries to lock up masses of Latinos or Muslims? What will your company do?

Come off it, there have been four generations of workers and leadership since then. If IBM isn't a responsible corporation, bring up modern examples.

Or maybe we should boycott Ford, Volkswagen, BMW, Mercedes, GM, Coke, Puma, Adidas, Bayer, Siemens, Zeiss...

What is it that you theorize immunizes modern workers from the forces that led IBM's employees to participate in the Holocaust? Do you think IBM's 1930s employees didn't realize that genocide and mass relocation was wrong?

Further: tech giants have for the last several decades been arming the world's most repressive regimes with information technology. What do you think the Great Firewall of China was originally made up of? Whose databases do you think track activists in Iran and Egypt? What evidence do we have that modern tech companies will do anything different than IBM did, faced with the same "opportunities"?

I don't mean to suggest that IBM is more prone to such things than other companies; I'm using them as an example of what has happened in the past. Currently many companies, and I don't know if IBM is included, help dicatorships oppress their own citizens by building the systems and assisting in surveillance.

Rometty doesn't address issues of liberty or diversity in her letter. Offering to work with a man who has openly promoted prejudice and who has given an ally of white nationalists a high-level position in the White House, but not mentioning these issues, I believe is a failure of hers and IBM's obligations as leaders in society. The message they send is: It's ok to overlook these things and continue business as usual.

Imagine if Rometty had said: 'IBM remains committed to diversity and to the freedom of all Americans in our great country.'

Almost none of these measures can be unilaterally actioned by the President. They will all require Congress to pass bills. The very same Congress who have been completely incapable of addressing the biggest issues facing the country.

Great ideas though and relevant in many countries in particular around a combined high school/vocational education program.

It remains to be seen how Trump will use "Executive Orders" if things don't go his way. As things are going, there's hopefully 2 groups of people in his cabinet. One to tell him what he can do and another to tell him what he cannot.

Virtually no discussions I've seen on the Internet about executive orders seem to involve people who really understand executive orders. Executive orders do not in fact give the President the power to override Congress. All they do is define the manner in which the administration will execute the authority granted to it by Congress and the Constitution.

So it is indeed true that Obama altered immigration policy through executive order by changing enforcement priority to avoid deporting children, and it is indeed true that Trump will change that back. But in neither case is a President making new law by doing so: US immigration law doesn't require the administration to have or not have those priorities.

This is transparently a government sales marketing flyer. Why are we discussing it?

This read to me like:

"We need to be relevant! We are not one of the FAANGS! Please hook us up with some sweet, sweet deals!"

I would imagine their consulting arms placement on the H1B listing might be a concern for them which makes point 1 of their letter a bit disingenuous.

Hard to really tell what the policies will be until the secretaries are actually picked.

Just a reminder: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust

Please don't drop flamewar-style comments into unrelated threads like this.

I'm not sure this qualifies as that. IBM's role in politics has been historically fraught. Is everyone here really aware of IBM's role in the Holocaust? That really happened.

The whole thread is problematic. I dug into some of the claims --- for instance, I'd like to see IBM's "15 ideas" for saving 900 billion in healthcare costs (I was unable to find anything other than anti-Obamacare spam sites suggesting IBM had offered to foot the bill for the whole system in exchange for running it on IBM hardware).

I'm not sure there's much to this story, and so I don't think there will be much to the thread.

If it doesn't qualify as entirely unrelated, I think it still qualifies as flamewar-style (“Here—fight!”). The story might be different if the commenter had something to say, as the guidelines ask when broaching these topics.

Scott - Is this comment appropriate?:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12962658

I understand it's tricky. I certainly don't want to start a flamewar, but I do think that these issues are critically important and should not be ignored.

I'd appreciate your feedback if you think it could be improved somehow.

One thing in that comment that could be stronger is the connection between IBM's behavior then and now ("connect the dots" as a prominent commenter might say). It's perhaps enough to just be reminded of past behavior of the same corporation in order to warrant asking the question in the present context, but saying so may have addressed the objection that you've received.

Fair enough. I want to find ways to address these issues and get people thinking, not flaming.

Politics in general has been historically fraught: go back a century and almost every player has taken some terribly unseemly positions or actions. It's pretty irrelevant to single out IBM mostly because they've happened to exist for that long, unlike the majority of other tech companies.

I'm not singling IBM out, I'm singling this story out: it is nearly content-free and volatile given the company behind it and the context of the election.

It wasn't intended to provoke a flamewar, and it wasn't unrelated to the subject. IBM, who provided technology to the Nazis to track the Jews for the holocaust is now cozying up to a President-elect who promised to create a database to track Muslims.

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