> It should be noted that no ethically-trained software engineer would ever consent to write a DestroyBaghdad procedure. Basic professional ethics would instead require him to write a DestroyCity procedure, to which Baghdad could be given as a parameter.
There's nothing nefarious about Zyklon B itself. It was simply found to be a very cheap way to kill a lot of people because prussic acid is apparently an order of magnitude more toxic to vertebrates than to insects. Of course at a certain point the company that produced it knew what it was being used for, but that doesn't seem to have influenced the development of the product itself.
To be clear: the reason the smell was irrelevant is that by the time you could smell it, you were already locked in a room with other people. The victims tried to tear down the walls and break the door with their bare hands, climbing over each other fearing for their lives as they slowly and painfully suffocated because every cell in their lungs sealed shut. You can still see the marks in those walls to this day.
There was no need to hide what the gas was doing. The victims were unarmed, they were surrounded by armed guards behind bars and barbed wire. They would often be sent directly to the "showers" upon their arrival at the camps, especially if they were children or too old to work. Even if they could have disarmed one of the guards they wouldn't have had anywhere to escape to. Even if they had somehow made it to the border, no country would have taken them.
EDIT I remember my source it was that news show with the English guy .. John Oliver … he was doing a special on how brutal death by lethal injection was. That it wasn’t humane and it wasn’t developed scientifically because you could never get medical scientists to develop such a thing, and he drew parallels to cyclon B. He could well have been perpetuating that myth or his researchers could have been.
As I understand it, lethal injections are designed in such a way to paralyze the victim but the actual process is actually quite grueling, the victim just loses the ability to indicate the level of distress and pain they are in. This is unlike the euthanasia vets typically administer, which start with a sedative so the animal is unconscious, which seems not to be desired for executions.
So I guess there are parallels, the Zyklon B story just doesn't serve as a contrast but rather another example: it was designed as a delousing agent but its ease of use, storage ability and relative safety enabled the industrial scale mass murder even if none of the engineers would have agreed to that. Of course to the company producing it, it was just another big government contract.
It's why Walmart and Amazon were the biggest corporate supporters of raising minimum wage and getting stricter on Internet sales tax.
They will aim to eliminate tiktok as, everyone in the us higher ups agree it has to go, but who will be next afterwards? If in the future, Facebook doesn’t bend its knee to shovel out state propaganda, will it too go?
The very scary part of the bill, if true, is the outright banning of VPNs.
As a Finn, I’m not too worried about myself right now, but should USA fall into a complete Surveillance State with monitoring and it’s own version of China’s Social Credit system, it will have huge ramifications on EU and probably my country Finland.
They get an insane amounts of data requests from governments on a daily basis.
It's not clear to me this is worse than not being under state control.
I mean - our government sucks - but it is our government. Law and order is nice. Ideally the laws wouldn't be terrible.
It shouldn't be up to companies to make their own rules - even if our government sucks.
Worked great for years, until Madison really started booming…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_of_attainder#United_State...
But sanctions can, and they don’t even need legislation. If the goal was to ban TikTok, Biden could do that all by himself by sanctioning away their access to app stores, ad revenue, and probably a lot of the rest of their supply chain as well. That’s what Trump originally said he was going to do when he announced he was going to ban TikTok.