It would be nice if the recent instances of employee pressure in Google and Microsoft are early signs of software workers organizing.
How would employees at Google or Microsoft benefit from unionizing?
Microsoft Employees Pressure Leadership to Cancel ICE Contract
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Re: Microsoft Employees Pressure Leadership to Cancel ICE Contract
#42It would be nice if the recent instances of employee pressure in Google and Microsoft are early signs of software workers organizing.
How would employees at Google or Microsoft benefit from unionizing?
The same way any other unionized employees do: higher wages, better benefits, collective bargaining, serious representation in the corporate hierarchy, better job security.
Re: Microsoft Employees Pressure Leadership to Cancel ICE Contract
#43It would be nice if the recent instances of employee pressure in Google and Microsoft are early signs of software workers organizing.
How would employees at Google or Microsoft benefit from unionizing?
By being able to influence management decisions, like working on drone assasinations, forced child separation and imprisonment, etc. etc. ad nauseam.
Re: Microsoft Employees Pressure Leadership to Cancel ICE Contract
#44> “Our current engagement with ICE is focused on moving legacy infrastructure such as mail, calendar, messaging and document management to the cloud using Azure.” I don’t understand why this makes it any better. I’m sure there’s a lot of “messaging and document management” needed to run those detainment centers. And besides, what’s going to happen in the future when they do ask to use Cognitive Services in their miss…
This sounds like the standard Microsoft marketoids. When asked about privacy and telemetry or anything critical the answer is always for a question that wasn’t asked followed by some template brand reinforcement followed by a metric ton of blog posts about improving insignificant things that aren’t related.
No one at MSFT will answer a question straight ever.
Re: Microsoft Employees Pressure Leadership to Cancel ICE Contract
#45Governments will always do evil. Not to everyone, all of the time - but they are by nature evil.
When I wrote the War FTP Daemon in 1996, as freeware, this became a problem to me. I did want to give away my work for free, but I did not want any government agency to abuse it. So I came up with a solution - a GPL license with an additional clause - that the government - any government - could not use it for any purpose.
Someone actually complained to the Free Software Foundation about this clause, and they concluded, at that time, that it was permissible.
In years to follow I received many emails from universities, schools, hospitals, research facilities - with requests to use the software. In most cases I granted them permission. But by doing it this way, I could sleep well at night - knowing that my software could not - legally - be used to separate children from parents, or for any other evil purpose by any governments around the globe.
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War Software series Copyright (C) 1996 - 2018 by Jarle (jgaa) Aase (www.jgaa.com) This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation version 2 of the License - WITH THE FOLLOWING RESTRICTIONS:
* GOVERNMENTS, GOVERNMENTAL AGENCIES OR COMMERCIAL
COMPANIES OWNED 50% OR MORE BY THE GOVERNMENT ARE
NOT ALLOWED TO USE THE SOFTWARE OR SORCE CODE FOR
ANY PURPOSE. THIS RESTRICTION ALSO APPLIES FOR
PROGRAMS DERIVED FROM THE SOURCE CODE, OR PROGRAMS/
SOURCE CODE THAT USE SPECIAL TECHNICS/ALOGRITHMS
INVENTED IN THIS SOFTWARE.
* THE FULL SOURCE CODE IS WITHELD FROM A PUBLIC RELEASE
UNTIL THE LINUX VERSION IS RELEASED.
Re: Microsoft Employees Pressure Leadership to Cancel ICE Contract
#46As I get older, it's becoming clear how intertwined our morality is with our politics. And how that bleeds into business, sports, religion, etc. It's nice to think of aspects of life that should be free from politics, but in reality that seems hard to achieve.
This situation in particular is more complicated than the media portrays. Separating children from parents is obviously bad, and needs to stop. Zero tolerance for illegal crossings, on the other hand, is probably actually good. The prior policy of letting anyone with children go & handing them a court date heavily incentivized human trafficking of children, because a child was a golden ticket into the USA (and indeed…
From my experience talking to different people in US, most of them on both sides of the immigration debate have zero clue what their immigration laws are even like. One theme that's particularly common is hearing "they should just get into the line and wait for their turn". They genuinely don't understand that there is no line for the majority of those people - they don't have any legal avenues for immigration at all, except for winning the diversity visa lottery (the chances for which for any individual person are so slim, no-one in a sane mind would plan around that as a strategy).
Re: Microsoft Employees Pressure Leadership to Cancel ICE Contract
#47As I get older, it's becoming clear how intertwined our morality is with our politics. And how that bleeds into business, sports, religion, etc. It's nice to think of aspects of life that should be free from politics, but in reality that seems hard to achieve.
Any time three or more humans interact, it's politics.
Re: Microsoft Employees Pressure Leadership to Cancel ICE Contract
#48I just don't think we're tracking towards a healthy world where your email vendor pulls the plug on your contract because of your activities. I don't think any business should be allowed to deny their offering to any paying customer.
Edit: Does that mean I have to sell lumber to the KKK even though they will likely burn a cross with it? Yes, unless they explicitly say they're going to. Leave those policing problems to the police, don't ask everyone to become a member of the police.
Re: Microsoft Employees Pressure Leadership to Cancel ICE Contract
#49>part of a backlash against the agency’s policy of separating children from their families at the U.S. border. Is that a policy that ICE can simply drop?
Not without the senate changing a ruling that has been in effect since before Trump or Trump choosing not to enforce a law that he is required to enforce.
Re: Microsoft Employees Pressure Leadership to Cancel ICE Contract
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
These people are asylum seekers. What they are doing is literally not illegal. According to USCIS, asylum seekers must be physically present in the US to apply: To obtain asylum through the affirmative asylum process you must be physically present in the United States. You may apply for asylum status regardless of how you arrived in the United States or your current immigration status. https://www.uscis.gov/humanitar…
The legal way to claim asylum is to do so from official points of entry.
https://www.theatlantic.com/video/index/563084/us-border-asy...
U.S. agents have started to turn back asylum seekers at [official] ports of entry in recent weeks, leaving throngs of hopefuls at bridges all along the border.