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Comment by EpicDavi | Hacker News Reader

I would say this is a bit misleading. Personally, I was able to access my FB building this morning (after the outage started) and have continued to be able to use my badge with no problem since. Not saying that there are no employees experiencing this issue, but it is not affecting all Facebook employees.

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Apparently this issue is effecting specifically some of the people who are trying to fix the outage https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28749244

Facebook isn't by chance experimenting with an advanced self-aware AI with access to its security systems, is it...?

I wish I could look at this as a joke...haha

Fat chance.

I'm afraid I can't let you into the building today, Dave.

I imagine the authentication systems for the datacenters are more rigorous than most Facebook buildings, right?

In fairness the tweet doesn’t say all employees but the title here is ambiguous.

Given it's a routing problem, doesn't it matter where your office is on the network with respect to the servers that control the door locks?

You could be in a zone of stability that's not affected by the overall chaos.

Honestly having buildings automatically lock down like this sounds like an absolute worst practice. FB headquarters is in california. What happens when the big one hits? server is killed and no one can get inside and look for survivors? Shouldn't need a functional network connection to be able to open the door of a building, but here we are I guess.

This is why firefighters practice breaking into buildings.

Having all of the locks open due to a failure is a very, very common Hollywood movie scenario.

Honest questions!

Do you have any ethical qualms working for Facebook?

Do you feel the criticisms are blown out of proportion?

Tell me your industry and I can probably tell you ethical problems with it.

The fact that almost all industries have some level of ethical problems does not mean that there aren't worse industries than the rest, or that you should somehow take no moral responsibility in choosing a job.

>does not mean that there aren't worse industries than the rest, or that you should somehow take no moral responsibility in choosing a job.

Only person suggestion that was you. In fact if you say, "well my job isn't as bad as Facebook," well then you're ignoring or passing the ethical dilemmas in your own industry, aren't you? Facebook isn't a free pass to ignore everything else. That's like saying, "well Stalin was pretty bad and we aren't as bad as Stalin, so we're probably ok." Not ok. It's really easy to justify working in immoral industries. I would wager that in the US, you have to do it just to put food on the table.

How about effective altruism, trying to evaluate the usefulness of charities ethics to do the most good in the world?

I'm not even sure that's an industry, but in the US, a surprisingly large number of charities take up to a 90% administration fee. If that's your industry, you probably aren't doing a very good job if those sort of things exist. I wish you luck though, it's a friggin travesty that a 90% administration fee is even legal.

This sounds like fun!

Controls Engineering - Specifically Agricultural: Grain handling, cleaning, processing.

Almost half of US farm labourers are illegal immigrants;

https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/farm-economy/farm-labor

https://www.ers.usda.gov/webdocs/charts/63465/LegalStatus201...

Pretty crazy how they're treated considering that.

Cool job tho, thanks for feeding people!

Arguably someone working on automating farming systems would be reducing demand for labor in that work.

So really, "isn't this putting impoverished people out of the only job they can get?"

Do you ask for consent before all this handling and cleaning? You know, consent from the grain.

Ok but seriously, the best I can imagine might be a generic environmental impact concern that could be levelled far and wide. Honestly seems pretty legit. Are there any ethical issues we should know about in the field of agricultural grain handling?

I can't really think of anything directly immoral about the business I participate in. Anything that could be pointed as an ethical grey area is more like a side-effect of the capitalist society we exist within.

So maybe more specifically, I'm not working with the farmers directly. I'm working with the businesses buying and selling the grain. The "capitalism grey areas" fall into effect when a farmer signs a contract saying they're going to deliver "Wheat" at a "Grade 2" spec and show up to the elevator with a truck full of wheat. It goes through the grading specs and even though that farmer brought them a "Grade 1" they're only getting paid at a Grade 2 rate.

So the grain elevator itself grabs that top quality stuff, shoves it in a silo with the other top quality stuff and sends the farmer away. They sell that grain at a Grade 1 and make immense profit that is never realized by the farmer who did the work.

It gets fishier the further into it you go. Because a "Grade 1" spec implies certain qualities in the grain: protein, moisture, dockage, etc. etc etc. So if the elevator needs to sell a Grade 2 product, the grading is taken as a sample and likely averaged over the entire load. They can take 10% of that Grade 1 stuff, shove it into a bunch of Grade 3 stuff and sell it as a Grade 2... the blending is where they make their money.

Then it gets even worse, because a grain terminal filling a vessel for export would sign off on a load that contains up to 1% dockage, but after the product in the silos is cleaned its likely to have <0.1% dockage or whatever anyway. So what is the terminal going to do? Surely they don't give the customer free "good" product right? Nope, they fill that vessel 99.5% full of product, then shove worthless garbage in to hit the 0.5% remainder and ship it out. So a vessel with 20,000MT of Soybean likely contains a bunch of garbage wheat or chaff or whatever else they have on hand that can't be sold.

It gets absurd to think they take in those Soybeans, then run them through the clean systems to remove the garbage, but then when it comes time to fill the vessel, they just put all the garbage back in so the customer has to clean it again.

Thanks for such a thoughtful, detailed, and interesting answer.

Do your control systems enable producers of GMO grain to handle and clean their grain with greater efficiency? Then you’re contributing to the GMO problem :)

(I have nothing against GMO personally)

Doesn't the Agricultural industry have one of the highest mortality rates? Grain handling, everything from gases in an enclosed space to being buried alive by a quicksand like effect.

You're contributing to the monoculture of our planet by designing systems that make only certain grains profitable.

(I don't actually think this but it was a reasonable ethical dilemma I thought)

Agricultural automation is part of why Uyghur slavery is so profitable (similar to how the cotton gin led to a revitalization of slavery in the US- with a modicum of training, a single slaves productivity was drastically increased)

Closer to home, assuming you're in the US, the glut of cheap corn syrup plays a big role in our obesity epidemic (especially in underprivileged communities). Obesity and related issues are some of the top killers in the US.

Sure, you're putting small and medium sized farmers out of their homes / farms and contributing to mega-farms. Anyone who can't afford your product will not be able to compete and lose their homes / farms. The way that works is the more efficient farming is, the more land required to live off of. Land is the expensive part. It used to be 40 acres and a mule could get you and your family by, now it's probably 500 acres just to make a decent living due to efficiency in automation. 500 acres of good farmland costs in the millions. It's not like quality food is getting cheaper either, that profit goes into the pockets of the automaters and the mega farmers and middle men mostly. All he food everyone else eats is loaded with fake sugar (high fructose corn syrup) to make it addictive, but its nutritionally garbage. People sure buy it though, because it's addictive.

Also, there's a lot of suicide as a result of that farming efficiency with small / medium farmers. When they can't run their farms effectively because they can't afford the automation or acreage it requires, they off themselves out of shame, leaving their families to pick up the pieces. Don't feel too bad though, you're just at the end of the line of something that's being going on since the 1920s. It really picked up in the 1980s with computerization though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farmers%27_suicides_in_the_Uni...

https://www.southbendtribune.com/story/news/2020/03/07/farme...

Facebook cannot be compared to any other industry. Facebook's ethical problems is not about the services they provide, it is about the quantity of data collected with consent(ignorance). I hope everyone working inside is ethical as believed by the upper management.

>Facebook cannot be compared to any other industry.

As far as ethics? As deplorable as Facebook is, there are way worse industries. The defense industry just made trillions murdering people in Iraq and Afghanistan for 20 years for starters, and that's trillions from middle and lower class Americans and the sons and daughters too. I think someone calculated that Afghanistan alone cost $300 million a year for 20 years. That's alot of money taken away from the betterment of the country: schools, safety nets, infrastructure, a lot of things that were neglected. The incarceration industry also comes to mind. I'm sure I can think of others if you asked.

I'll have a go

Legaltech - namely, automating the legal process behind startup funding rounds. We have lawyers on staff to help if needed, but we automate 95% of the work.

Sure, you are automating away the jobs of lawyers and paralegals and secretaries, janitors, marketing people, sales people, etc. Most automation jobs have ethical problems in that, if successful, they permanently remove jobs from the job market. I should know, automation is what I do, but a different industry. Also, I'm sure if the lawyers on staff make good money, as good as private industry, they certainly won't in about 5-10 years after automation has taken over. So basically you're helping to put thousands of lawyers who spent $200k in degrees to specialize in startup legal work out of work, plus all their support staff they would ordinarily hire and give benefits (healthcare/retirement) to and the families those employees support.

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