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Microsoft Employees Pressure Leadership to Cancel ICE Contract

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Re: Microsoft Employees Pressure Leadership to Cancel ICE Contract

#111

Post by adjkant »

sheepmullet wrote: post #102
adjkant wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The basic problem with that line of thinking is that most don't think immigration is such a large problem that we must have a zero-tolerance policy that does such harm. Immigration is a highly politicized issue that in reality has limited effects. Yes, it's more nuanced than "this is evil", but it's pretty inhumane and overly nationalistic / American-centered if you ask me.

> is that most don't think immigration is such a large problem that we must have a zero-tolerance policy that does such harm. According to who? I don't think that's true at all. I think immigration is the most important policy to get right.

What are the day to day effects you face every day due to current vs ideal immigration policy? What about most people? Do you really think that harm is more than the huge amounts of suffering this policy is causing?

Where is your judgment for importance coming from? What's your reasoning for making it such a huge priority? In a country with over 300M people, how is this relatively small amount of people having this vast of an effect? What is it affecting?

In terms of public opinion, consider this: https://news.gallup.com/poll/1675/most-important-problem.asp...

I wish there was a ranked system to see more than the single importance, but the point being that very few see it as a high priority issue.

I don't have specific data for this claim, but I think it's also safe to say the issue is a polarizing one: the group who sees it as the #1 issue thinks its a huge problem while many others see it as almost nothing. The disconnect there is exactly why I led with those questions above.

Re: Microsoft Employees Pressure Leadership to Cancel ICE Contract

#112

Post by TeMPOraL »

pavelludiq wrote: post #98
Angostura wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Governments are never good, at best they are not actively harmful. Except of course, when they are doing good. Government is essential and its hard - attempting to juggle the needs and rights of diverse and disparate people. I get tired of the mantra that the people involved in government are inherently evil, bad, out for themselves etc. Many people who get into politics do so out of a true desire to make the lives…

I'm not saying that it is inherently evil, I'm saying that you as a member of the public must assume that it at least has that potential at all times for it to function as intended.

And the grand-(N)-parent 'bkor already answered this by saying that it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Yes, the government has potential for doing enormous evils, which comes from its very nature - it's large and has monopoly on violence. But people having a cooperative, instead of antagonistic approach to government helps that potential to go unfulfilled.

Re: Microsoft Employees Pressure Leadership to Cancel ICE Contract

#113

Post by tome »

salvar wrote: post #97
hueving wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People in general are far too immature to discuss politics. They are happy to spew opinions an complain about the ignorance of 'the other side' but they don't actually want to listen to other perspectives. Look at this thread for examples. Comparing ICE agents to Nuremberg, etc. This platform (due to the vote-based sorting) and this community are not capable of discussing politics in any meaningful sense. It's just p…

> People in general are far too immature to discuss politics. But not you, right?

Did you see hueving discussing politics?

Re: Microsoft Employees Pressure Leadership to Cancel ICE Contract

#114

Post by swift532 »

cm2187 wrote: post #66

The problem is that "doing evil" is in the eyes of the beholder. To some it is performing a gay wedding. Are we supporting a world where it is ok to refuse to sell a cake because it would be used in a gay wedding? Is it a good thing that the major cloud providers and OS makers enforce a democrat agenda on their clients? I think this is undesirable and dangerous. Already there are many calls for social medias to step…

I don't think that's an accurate analogy. An accurate analogy would be forcing someone to officiate a gay wedding.

To take an extreme example, I actually don't think someone selling cake to concentration camp guards is guilty of anything - but someone selling fenceposts, guns, gas and census software(cough IBM) is complicit.

Re: Microsoft Employees Pressure Leadership to Cancel ICE Contract

#115

Post by sheepmullet »

adjkant wrote: post #111
sheepmullet wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> is that most don't think immigration is such a large problem that we must have a zero-tolerance policy that does such harm. According to who? I don't think that's true at all. I think immigration is the most important policy to get right.

What are the day to day effects you face every day due to current vs ideal immigration policy? What about most people? Do you really think that harm is more than the huge amounts of suffering this policy is causing? Where is your judgment for importance coming from? What's your reasoning for making it such a huge priority? In a country with over 300M people, how is this relatively small amount of people having this v…

> What are the day to day effects you face every day due to current vs ideal immigration policy?

It's the key reason one of the richest states has some of the worst public schooling in the country.

It impacts hundreds of thousands of school kids and ensures they end up with a worse education.

I wish the techies who didn't care about the negative impacts had to send their kids to these schools.

Re: Microsoft Employees Pressure Leadership to Cancel ICE Contract

#116

Post by tome »

adjkant wrote: post #111
sheepmullet wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> is that most don't think immigration is such a large problem that we must have a zero-tolerance policy that does such harm. According to who? I don't think that's true at all. I think immigration is the most important policy to get right.

What are the day to day effects you face every day due to current vs ideal immigration policy? What about most people? Do you really think that harm is more than the huge amounts of suffering this policy is causing? Where is your judgment for importance coming from? What's your reasoning for making it such a huge priority? In a country with over 300M people, how is this relatively small amount of people having this v…

> What are the day to day effects you face every day due to current vs ideal immigration policy? What about most people? Do you really think that harm is more than the huge amounts of suffering this policy is causing?

I'd be interested in your answers to your own question. What are the day to day effects you face every day versus a much more liberal or a much more stringent immigration policy?

Re: Microsoft Employees Pressure Leadership to Cancel ICE Contract

#117

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

jgaa wrote: post #45

Governments 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…

Corporations are no less evil than governments. If anything, they may be more evil, as they are motivated solely by profit and have no particular reason to care about the population at large.

Why single out governments?

Re: Microsoft Employees Pressure Leadership to Cancel ICE Contract

#118

Post by adjkant »

sheepmullet wrote: post #115
adjkant wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are the day to day effects you face every day due to current vs ideal immigration policy? What about most people? Do you really think that harm is more than the huge amounts of suffering this policy is causing? Where is your judgment for importance coming from? What's your reasoning for making it such a huge priority? In a country with over 300M people, how is this relatively small amount of people having this v…

> What are the day to day effects you face every day due to current vs ideal immigration policy? It's the key reason one of the richest states has some of the worst public schooling in the country. It impacts hundreds of thousands of school kids and ensures they end up with a worse education. I wish the techies who didn't care about the negative impacts had to send their kids to these schools.

Do you have the stuff to show it's actually hundreds of thousands? How much of a difference is the education quality?

Public schools are mostly funded by local taxes, yes? How exactly does this come into play?

All of this is still to say that you think your kid going to a slightly worse school is worth messing up all these lives so horrifically?

I'm not saying let's take every single person that goes to the US or that we shouldn't enforce immigration laws. I'm just saying let's not make a Holocaust in its name, and these policies are literally starting to mirror those types of events. I don't see how any equation of such direct pain to such a large number of people can possibly be justified by small effects on masses. That's a central utilitarian flaw in thinking this was a good idea. That and not caring about the lives of those being harmed. There's a difference between allowing one to immigrate and treating them as human.

Re: Microsoft Employees Pressure Leadership to Cancel ICE Contract

#119

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #67
everdev wrote: post #9

As 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.

People answering to you that "everything is politics" or that "separating tech and politics is naïve" are - perhaps unwittingly - doing a motte-and-bailey argument. The motte here is "whenever 3+ people meet, it's already politics" and "if it impacts people, it's politics". The bailey is political parties, ideologies, rallies, buzzwords, presidents. There are two definitions of "politics" at play that are being mixed…

“Ideology” is sufficiently broad a concept that it infects literally everything.

Re: Microsoft Employees Pressure Leadership to Cancel ICE Contract

#120

Post by TeMPOraL »

Folcon wrote: post #110
TeMPOraL wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason HN tries to avoid discussing politics is because it's not suited for productive political discussions, so everything would be drowned in noise. I honestly don't know of any place on the Internt suited for a productive political discussion. I'd join such a space in a heartbeat. Given how politics is both complicated and universally triggers all the bugs in human minds, such a place would have to both struct…

Actually, what properties would such a place have? I keep thinking that a defining problem of the present day is the absence of such a platform. I'm even willing to dig in and help put something together. I wonder if an ask HN around: - How people would like to interact with such a system. - What it would need to have/do to be useful. I mean is there even a good format for such a thing? Debates for example are explic…

A bunch of ideas:

1) It would need to have good mechanisms for structuring knowledge and discovery (and deduplication) of previous points. Instead of time-based approach, where people read and respond to streams of comments, it should be easy to review past discussions and maybe add updates based on new information or situations that develop.

Structuring and discovery is hard. I spent some time on Kialo[0], which is a "debate platform" that encourages tree-structured arguments. For any stated problem, people post arguments for and against, and each of those arguments can be recursively subdivided into for and against points, ad infinitum. It's a cute concept, but my impression was that the tree structure isn't good enough fit for the problem - frequently, you'd find the same points repeated at many different levels. A point "X" can be found simultaneously as a top-level "against" argument, and as a support argument three levels deep inside a top-level "for" argument, etc. The experience reinforced my feelings that problem spaces tend to form cyclic graphs.

2) It would need to have some mechanisms to encourage proper discourse standards. Moderation is one of them, but also some structural things more focused than just free-form comment textbox.

3) Ultimately, the goal of a platform should be to flesh out the problem space. The result should be an explorable artifact. This would help keep people on the same page, as well as get new participants up to speed (and inform non-participants who just want a honest overview of a problem they're interested in).

I have no clue how such system should be built, but I'd love to see and play with any experiments in this space.

--

[0] - https://www.kialo.com/tour/

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