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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

#121

Post by adjkant »

tome wrote: post #116
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? 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?

I don't want a much more liberal policy for the record. I'm frankly not too worried about the policy in terms of numbers/requirements so long as it's somewhere in the middle. What I have a huge problem with, as many I think do, is the method of enforcement. I'm not saying I have the solution either. I'm just saying this sure as hell isn't it.

Re: Microsoft Employees Pressure Leadership to Cancel ICE Contract

#122

Post by cm2187 »

swift532 wrote: post #114
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.

I'd argue selling a wedding cake is actually more involved than selling cloud compute time or office software if that is what is at stake in Microsoft's case, and which is really generic by nature.

I have more reserves on the concentration camp analogy. I don't think the shoah should be pulled in every debate.

Re: Microsoft Employees Pressure Leadership to Cancel ICE Contract

#123

Post by rumcajz »

jhanschoo wrote: post #19

It would be nice if the recent instances of employee pressure in Google and Microsoft are early signs of software workers organizing.

It's not just software industry btw: https://www.houstonchronicle.com/local/gray-matters/article/...

Re: Microsoft Employees Pressure Leadership to Cancel ICE Contract

#124

Post by makomk »

sheepmullet wrote: post #107
dagmx wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Discussion involves multiple views not multiple sides. Not every discussion needs to be adversarial or black and white. Discussions can be constructive with all members on the same side talking about ideas . Most development discussions that happen daily are just that, constructive with people throwing ideas around. For example if we are discussing the best design pattern in a c++ API , and someone comes in and says…

> but I think anyone arguing for the detainment of children is not adding anything of value to the discussion or humanity and is worthy of being disregarded with reason. I think it is a sensible policy. Can you articulate why you think it is any worse than child services putting a kid into foster care when the parents go to jail for any other crime? Illegally immigrating to the US is a serious crime but you can't jai…

Well, in principle it's worse because normally child services avoid doing that if at all possible; they try and place the kid with relatives or other people who've cared for them in the past, whereas these kids are pretty much all institutionalised in big warehouses.

I don't think that's actually what people object to though. Remember the big (bogus) claim on social media that ICE had lost 1475 children who'd been seized from their parents? That was about unaccompanied kids who'd been united with family members. The entire thrust of that complaint is that it was some kind of Nazi-esque atrocity that ICE weren't totally controlling and tracking those kids.

Fundamentally, I think the objection is to two things: Trump being president, and the border being controlled. The only politically acceptable position right now is for every person to cross the Mexican border with a kid to be let through, and even that might not be enough because Trump.

Re: Microsoft Employees Pressure Leadership to Cancel ICE Contract

#125

Post by sheepmullet »

adjkant wrote: post #118
sheepmullet wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 tha…

> 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 think you have been mislead by the media - at worst it is applying the existing long standing detainment practice to another maybe 20% of cases.

> Do you have the stuff to show it's actually hundreds of thousands?

More than 20% of public school students in California are classified as English learners - aka don't speak English.

https://www.cde.ca.gov/ds/sd/cb/cefelfacts.asp

These people are not evenly distributed among schools/classes so in some schools half your class might not speak English.

What impact do you think that has on education levels?

The idea that this is a minor issue and results in only a slightly worse education is ludicrous.

And education is not a minor issue - when my kids were younger probably 30% of my income went towards my kids education.

That's 30-40% fewer hours I could have worked if the public system was any good.

Re: Microsoft Employees Pressure Leadership to Cancel ICE Contract

#126

Post by Folcon »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #120
Folcon wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Ok that's interesting, you've clearly done a lot in this space already, are you still working in this space and would you be up for a quick discussion about it?

I was actually thinking about it from a different direction.

Allow people to enter free text and then aggressively parse it out into a structure. Make the structure visible and then work with the structure. But allow the free text to stand as metadata.

Allow the person writing to highlight/markup blocks in the main text that support their argument.

The structure I was thinking of as a starting point was a list of clauses. You could then surface people stating a clause, saying that it's sometimes true or false, disagreeing with it, and detect it across the nodes in the graph making discovery a bit easier.

Or even taking a clause and using it as a starting point for a new discussion.

The other thing I think that's necessary is what kind of environment you foster. Something like changemyview[0][1] with the delta system [2] comes to mind. Simply speaking a person awards delta's when they've had their mind changed in any meaningful way by a person, and they're required to give a short explanation or statement about why they awarded it.

--

- [0] https://changemyview.net/

- [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/

- [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/deltasystem

Re: Microsoft Employees Pressure Leadership to Cancel ICE Contract

#127

Post by pluma »

Consultant32452 wrote: post #91
macspoofing wrote: post #12

>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?

My post is describing the status quo as I understand it. I'm neither supporting nor condemning it. There is an important legal distinction which determines whether or not you're arrested and separated from your family: asylum seeker vs criminal migrant. If you walk up to the border patrol checkpoint and request asylum you will not be separated from your family. Once we make sure you're not a known criminal we basical…

That's not entirely true, though. Affirmative asylum seekers have been deported aggressively as well:

https://eu.freep.com/story/news/2018/05/17/troy-cile-preceta...

Re: Microsoft Employees Pressure Leadership to Cancel ICE Contract

#128

Post by TeMPOraL »

adjkant wrote: post #106
TeMPOraL wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We seem to be in agreement after all. I wish there were two simple, distinct words - one for what you meant by "politics", and one for what I meant. My gripe isn't with US political climate though - it's the same thing everywhere , at every level. The same issues apply to New York and San Francisco, and to my hometown of Kraków. They apply to my country of birth, Poland, and they apply to every other country in Europ…

Here's the thing: that "how to use the result" part means that you have to get involved in politics as known by common definition and all its mess, inefficiency, terrible campaigning, and more. It's a game of slowly moving things by inches (not to say that radical thinkers and politicians don't have their effects, but rather they help pull towards a side). You clearly care about the morality and would want to have po…

I think you can avoid involvement with the common-definition politics to a large extent, and this is in fact a part of a change being effective. I see the political world as molasses; you stick your hand too far into it, and you won't get out. You (should) want people to have a say in how the new tech impacts their lives, but you probably don't want to get sucked into partisanship and endless bickering about political ideologies. It's a waste of time that doesn't help anyone (except the print & media business).

I can't remember who said it, but I read once that developing technology is about giving politicians more options. The complicated incentive systems governing modern politics may not allow the rulers to solve some problem right now, but if you give them more options, then maybe one of them can be used. E.g. with climate change, there's no way politicians will just shut down coal plants and build nuclear ones instead. But dropping prices of renewables give them an option to achieve the same end goal more gradually.

Ultimately, my (current, always subject to change) view is that if you want to help effectively, you need to avoid touching the dysfunctional parts of modern politics as much as possible, lest they suck you in.

Re: Microsoft Employees Pressure Leadership to Cancel ICE Contract

#129

Post by pluma »

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 know. "Does it violate the UN Convention on Human Rights?" is a good start. Also "Does it violate the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child?". Or, y'know, the Kantian Imperative.

Re: Microsoft Employees Pressure Leadership to Cancel ICE Contract

#130

Post by detaro »

sheepmullet wrote: post #107
dagmx wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Discussion involves multiple views not multiple sides. Not every discussion needs to be adversarial or black and white. Discussions can be constructive with all members on the same side talking about ideas . Most development discussions that happen daily are just that, constructive with people throwing ideas around. For example if we are discussing the best design pattern in a c++ API , and someone comes in and says…

> but I think anyone arguing for the detainment of children is not adding anything of value to the discussion or humanity and is worthy of being disregarded with reason. I think it is a sensible policy. Can you articulate why you think it is any worse than child services putting a kid into foster care when the parents go to jail for any other crime? Illegally immigrating to the US is a serious crime but you can't jai…

> Can you articulate why you think it is any worse than child services putting a kid into foster care when the parents go to jail for any other crime?

I'd hope normal foster care in the US looks slightly better, and is better communicated (assuming the reports about ICE not telling parents what they are doing with their children are accurate). E.g. normally I'd expect incarcerated parents to still know about the whereabouts of their children, being allowed to communicate with them, ... unless there's strong reasons to forbid this.

While I think it's at least an interesting question if it is strictly necessary to separate families, I'd guess that if the process appeared less horrific there'd be a lot less of an outcry.

From what I've read, it also appears that the vast majority cases are first-time entries, which only is a misdemeanor in the US? While it makes some sense to "keep" people somewhere in this case (can't just let them go with a fine like you'd do for a traffic offense), it seems less than clear to me that this has to be to the same "standards" as people being jailed for serious crimes, and regular access to the children can't be possible. (And to be clear, I'd generally argue for such policies, not just in the case of immigrants)

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