GitHub renews $200k contract with ICE
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I definitely think companies have a moral duty to spend their efforts on good things, and there are many examples of deeply immoral companies.
But any society will also have political questions where people disagree, without there being a strong good/evil aspect to it. For example 'should the tax rate be 25%' or 'how should we organize our healthy system for the lowest cost / GDP'?
Forcing every company to debate these questions internally, and kicking customers off their product for violations, seems like an inefficient system.
But I think employee demand for such things will be higher in countries where they don't feel represented via the political system.
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-echochambers-27074746
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-past-the-post_voting#Cri...
My main point wasn't to argue which weight this particular topic should be given.
Rather, I'm curious whether employees in countries with non-functioning governments are more likely to try to influence policy through their job?
From a European perspective it seems like this may be the case.
Either way, the whole question of dealing with ethics from the efficiency perspectice is one that bothers me and a whole discussion in itself.
Since the $200,000 is immaterial to you, just cancel that deal entirely. You’re certainly going to lose more than that now this this letter is public.
This shouldn’t be this hard to figure out.
> Like many Hubbers, I strongly disagree with many of the current administration’s immigration policies, including the practice of separating families at the border, the Muslim travel ban, and the efforts to dismantle the DACA program that protects people brought to the U.S. as children without documentation. The leadership team shares these views. These policies run counter to our values as a company, and to our ethics as people. We have spoken out as a company against these practices, and joined with other companies in protesting them. You can read our public statements in the Keep the Families Together Act letter, the Muslim travel ban amicus briefs, and the DACA business leaders letter of support. We also joined an amicus brief last year to protect Sanctuary Cities.
> Our parent company, Microsoft, has also publicly opposed these same policies. Microsoft is the sole business that is a direct plaintiff in the litigation that will be heard by the United States Supreme Court next month challenging the rescission of the DACA program. Microsoft has a long history of advocating for migrants and immigration law reform. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has spoken passionately about his own experience as an immigrant to the United States, and how Microsoft has consistently stood up for immigration policies that preserve every person’s dignity and human rights, and advocated for change.
I admit that I skimmed but I does say that they're not providing professional service aandthat this is an on premise install. So... self managed, contract renewal, no assistance... This one hardly bothers me. Can't any one do the same with the (not literal) swipe of a credit card? It doesn't seem that they're doing custom work for ICE. But it's hard to decide where to draw the line here. Should we also get mad at anyone who sells them pizzas?
These situations are usually framed on how it bothers us, as outsiders to these companies. We tend to put outselves only in the shoes of the pizza consumers, neither the evil entity, nor the pizza maker. But these companies have workers, who put their labor into some product, only then to see that product in the hands of entities that go directly against their core values and existence. I find very understandable that they are mad. Shouldn't we also question these problems from this perspective?
When there are many employees uncomfortable with things like this, maybe it's not a necessity, but I still think it's very nice for outsiders to support them.
However that was in the case where the product is something innocuous, like pizza. Because you know, it might also be case that the product is actually enabling or helping evil to be evil. Such as "being part of the critical toolkit to conduct invasive surveillance". So getting mad could be even more substantiated in those cases.
(not Internal Combustion Engine, which was the only thing that came to my mind...)
Let alone the mother of all unrelated controversies and generic tangents.
For some reason mentioning obvious and strong historic parallels to the Nazi Germany is considered controversial here in the US - well, i come from USSR, a country which lost close to 30M of people due to the Nazi Germany, among them millions of Slavic (my ethnicity) and Jews (both are "subhuman races" with Slavic slated for 90% extermination with the rest to be enslaved, Jews - for 100%), my grandmother was a highly decorated veteran of that war, and a number of the members of extended family fought in the war too with some getting killed, and i see no reason to forget the history. If anything, i think we have to be vigilant in discovering, highlighting and fighting today anything and everything (like the complacence and cooperation with sub-humanization of a whole class of people) that back then resulted in such a catastrophe. Identifying the historic parallels is among the main tools here.
It's about the cheap and trivial dynamics of internet flamewar, which will flood everything if you let it and which has nothing at all to do with the noble things you're describing. Your comment upthread was guaranteed to provoke that, no matter how sincere your intention and how significant your reason for holding it.
If ever there was a case of "the medium is the message" this is it. No matter how elevated the material you put into that machine, you're going to get garbage out. We have many years of experience with this medium and others had decades of experience before us, and this experience teaches that if you throw Nazis into an arbitrary internet topic—especially one with any emotional charge, and especially if you do it quickly and glibly, as in your comment upthread—the forum will react like a chicken with its head cut off. What good or what honor does that do anyone? We need to be wiser about how we approach these things.
and here i hoped it was short and to the point - contrasted the 2 behaviors and pointed to the context which historically shown the critical importance of that difference and its consequences. Seems to be another case when we'd perceive ourselves in one way, and the world would do it in a completely different way. Among many things on HN i find extremely valuable is that exposure to completely different, including critical, opinions/views/etc. I see your point and appreciate your detailed explanations in this case and the effort you put into your role here on HN in general.
Thanks for the kind response. I appreciate it.
I don't mean this personally; I'm sure that trhway is sincere. Sincerity isn't enough. The burden is on the commenter to distinguish the comment from flamebait, and when it comes to Godwin effects the bar for that on HN needs to be high. Otherwise we'll end up with the nastiest, most repetitive and stupidest of flamewar. (The GP comment failed to clear that bar. The response downthread is of course more substantive.)
I'm not denying what you say about political developments. I'm saying that such important things deserve better. There are constraints on what the medium of an internet forum can bring to them, and to maximize what's possible we must respect what is known not to work.
"The Associated Press details grave conditions inside a Texas migrant detention facility where 250 infants, children and teenagers were being held without adequate food, water or sanitation during a recent visit"
2. not many knew back then that it were to become death camps, at least not at the beginning. For typical citizen back then it was presented and looked like a detention/concentration camp, and the citizens were ok with the people being taken there just on the mere basis of being some "other" people. It became death camps in the process and the populace complacence was a major factor here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_concentration_camps#Pre-w...