Another reminder that bad press and community/customer pressure indeed works. And there's nothing wrong with that.
I think there's something to be said for listening to your customers and community. But how much of the pushback was from the community? Certainly the developer who yanked their code. And from what I've read the internal developers too.
But I think having to fear crowds of probably less than completely informed people generally lacking nuance is not something to be lauded.
Thwarting ICE? Incredibly unlikely and impractical . Slowing ICE down? Probably.
Even for those that do think halting border crossings is bad, the consequences of making ICE change to a different IT solution is likely that ICE's bureaucracy is hampered and people detained at the border take longer to process and thus result in more hardship.
If the objective is to gain some immediate press exposure for immigrants rights issues, it seems totally rational, and it appears to have achieved the goal.
If the objective is to improve conditions for immigrants in ICE/CBP custody in the near term, it's not clear it will help, and it could definitely have unintended negative consequences. For example, ERO agents under increased pressure due to IT systems going down may be less likely to offer DA on humanitarian grounds, if it's just easier and less paperwork to deport en masse. Maybe there's a strong rational argument to be made in favor, but average citizens don't have complete information or authority to investigate, so it really seems to boil down to more of a "gut instinct" decision.
If the objective is improvement in conditions for immigrants in the longer term, it might be rational if it's part of a persistent, steady application of pressure to reform ICE/CBP/ORR through a combination of protests, opening cases to trigger judicial oversight, and lobbying to achieve change through legislative processes. But it's unclear if this kind of boycott is particularly effective use of time/resources towards that goal.
Please give a counter example so we have evidence to back it up to the contrary.
"Why not?"
nothing else works, people work with the tools they have at their disposition, and if companies don't have any morals when it comes to us (results driven approach no matter the consequences), why should we have any morals when dealing with companies? We're just playing at their own game, and getting good results, and there is nothing wrong with that, so keep on going as long as there are results.
1) The first time
2) Later than that
They did the second. It’s sucks that it isn’t the first, and it sucks that they didn’t pick the right horse during the race up until this point. But they changed their mind, openly and in plainly spoken terms.
“Worked” doesn’t need a qualifier here. Their failure to implement #1 correctly, and their pivot to implement #2, will help them serve as a lesson to others.
1. Insufficiently.
2. Sufficiently.
The question is on this aspect.
No, I disagree. What they have done is literally the minimum amount of effort.
The right thing to do is not to "continue to do what we're doing, offering a passive promise to not get more money."
Disclaimer: I bid on federal gov projects. The work is fairly fungible.
Let them pick the contract up. Hopefully they charge more, take longer to implement, and are generally worse.
No one is ever going to deprecate ICE because it’s too expensive. They’ll just pull the money from someplace like NASA (unfortunate reality, not a policy I endorse).
No one is going to deprecate ICE because it's too expensive, but they might do it due to extensive political pressure from all sectors. I'm okay with paying 0.001 USD or so to send that message.
Maybe a compromise between voters picking where their taxes go and a minimum for what tax payers have to pay for a certain area?
Where does it end? Maybe next year Chef decides they don't like DEA. Or ATF. Or something else.
It is not noble to deny work with the US Government. It's inefficient, bureaucratic, and deeply flawed. But it does a powerful lot of good.