Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Microsoft Employees Pressure Leadership to Cancel ICE Contract

gizmodo.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 251 posts

Re: Microsoft Employees Pressure Leadership to Cancel ICE Contract

#211

Post by ggg9990 »

madaxe_again wrote: post #74
ggg9990 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it conflicts with the business owner’s sense of morality I just don't think this should be allowed to matter. If you want to sell widgets, sell them or don't sell them. The problem of controlling what people do with those widgets should not be allowed to rest in business owner's hands, because the largest corporations are more powerful than they ever were, and that is allowing a few CEOs, completely unaccountable t…

But they are accountable. Money talks, bullshit walks - and as more and more businesses move towards a service rather than ownership model, this becomes more and more likely, and the power of other businesses and consumers to use a different service and hit them in the wallet grows. I mean, as it is, I cannot use Microsoft or Apple products to design or proliferate nuclear, chemical or biological weapons (its in the…

Federal law already prohibits you from making nuclear weapons, whether you’re using Excel on iOS or not. Why should a company draw a line anywhere?

For example, most grocery stores don’t sell eggs to youngsters near Halloween for fear they will egg people. But there are teenagers who have to run entire households and cook breakfast for several kids, and need eggs. In a locally owned corner shop this isn’t a problem because the owner knows the kids and their situations. But as Walmart’s and Safeways displace these stores, policy is set by headquarters, and local employees can’t deviate. At that point, who does the kid take the grievance to? If it’s a local ordinance the kid’s advocates can go to a town meeting. If it’s a Walmart how do the kid’s advocates petition headquarters?

Re: Microsoft Employees Pressure Leadership to Cancel ICE Contract

#212

Post by woodruffw »

firic wrote: post #61
woodruffw wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. The legal way to claim asylum is to do so within a year of entering the country, regardless of whether your entry was official[1]. The US is currently breaking its commitment to the 1951 UN convention on the rights of refugees by not ignoring "irregular entry." [1]: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/8/1158

Sure, they may apply for asylum. However, if they entered illegally, then they should be detained so that if they are not accepted for asylum then they can get deported.

First: They are not entering illegally if they intend to report within a year. Entering illegally is something that non-refugees do. This is why Nielsen's claims about "criminal refugees" are misleading at best -- she's talking about the "crime" of entering the country in the way we explicitly allow.

Second: Consider what an actual refugee crisis looks like. You can't detain hundreds of thousands of people crossing over a massive border, both for logistical and humanitarian reasons. That's why we're a signatory to the 1951 agreement.

This is probably what 45 is referring to when he talks about a "loophole" in immigration law, and why he feels politically safe asking for a legislative rather than executive solution. But to be absolutely clear: nothing about our current laws requires that we separate children from their parents, or detain refugee applicants indefinitely. Those are both cruel options, chosen to terrorize an already vulnerable population.

Re: Microsoft Employees Pressure Leadership to Cancel ICE Contract

#213

Post by JakeAl »

briandear wrote: post #54
int_19h wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

But that isn’t true. Asylum applications can be submitted to a US consulate. There is a process. Syrian refugees didn’t just show up in Laredo. Asylum can also be requested at a legal port of entry. These unlawful entry arrests are from aliens entering the country while avoiding ports of entry.

Just to clarify, a refugee as someone who is outside of his or her homeland, and has been persecuted in his or her homeland or has a well-founded fear of persecution there on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion.

Political asylum is for someone already in the United States, and protects an individual from removal to a country of feared persecution.

In either case the problem is people entering the country illegally versus legally and how to handle them in a way that doesn't create a queue of 600,000+ asylum seekers (which is what we have now). Think about that number given that I'm sure many of you know what limits we put on the number of legal immigrants each year.

For those who may argue for open borders I recommend studying the field of cultural pluralism. We're talking about a risk versus reward scenario where the risk is the existing culture being required to accommodate (replaced by) the incoming culture rather than the incoming culture assimilating to the existing culture and both changing at a manageable/stable rate. This is a function of two things most notably, the desire to assimilate to the culture and fit in, and the rate at which newcomers are allowed. The studies have shown it takes on average six years for a person who wants to assimilate to the culture to do so completely (this is from the field of cultural pluralism studies). From other studies about tipping points I can say that at most 25% can be allowed because that's all that's needed for a major shift and displacement of an existing culture, and that would be the number of people that are a part of a culture versus total immigrants (so unassimilated must remain below 25% at any given time).

Make of that you will, but as far as I can tell those are the major variables and numbers that need to be carefully considered and measured when it comes to the diversity, qualifications, and numbers of those we choose to allow emigrate legally and the criteria for the limitations we and other nations implement and control through the law. The reality is without significantly affecting an existing culture, meaning changing it at a rate faster than the resident population can accommodate reasonably without causing widespread problems/disruption for them or those coming here.

Re: Microsoft Employees Pressure Leadership to Cancel ICE Contract

#214

Post by mindslight »

joeframbach wrote: post #208
SlowRobotAhead wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haven’t seen anyone non-ironically use M$FT in like 20 years. It on the same fringe scale as wiring “First!” on a comment section.

By all means they should keep typing the "$" so I can more quickly skip over their post as someone who hasn't changed their worldview since the 90s, and someone who is susceptible to memetic bandwagonning.

Yeah after two decades and the adoption of Unicode, everyone knows the contemporary problem is Fac€book.

Re: Microsoft Employees Pressure Leadership to Cancel ICE Contract

#215

Post by patrickg_zill »

jadedhacker wrote: post #38
deegles wrote: post #3

> “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…

Child concentration camps run a lot smoother on Office 365, now on Azure! EDIT: Anyone that collaborates with ICE from this point forward is complicit. In a just world, collaborators, ICE officers, and high officials would be tried in the International Criminal Court. Following orders or making money was not an acceptable defensible at Nuremberg, nor will it be in the coming future when the US loses enough internatio…

This is an utterly ridiculous statement. ICE buys their envelopes from Office Depot (example), they buy cell phones from ATT (example) - is Office Depot supposed to physically stop ICE agents from entering their stores and paying for office supplies? Is ATT supposed to refund ICE their money and immediately cancel all their phone service.

The rhetoric is really getting ahead of the reality here...

Re: Microsoft Employees Pressure Leadership to Cancel ICE Contract

#216

Post by s2g »

6t6t6t6 wrote: post #59
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…

Any entity with enough power, may use this power to do evil. It can be a government or a corporation. Al least, in our democracies, you can decide the government with your vote.

> Al least, in our democracies, you can decide the government with your vote.

and depending on hwere you are, you get bonus points added!

The "all government is evil" idea sounds ridiculous to me. Governments can be evil. Perhaps by their nature they will almost always do some evil. But evil in general, nah.

Re: Microsoft Employees Pressure Leadership to Cancel ICE Contract

#217

Post by s2g »

wilsonnb2 wrote: post #196
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…

Governments are not evil by their nature. They are amoral , meaning they lack a moral sense, not immoral , meaning they are evil. The same is true of companies and any other large group of people. Amoral entities do things that moral entities consider evil, but it's because they have no moral sense, not because they are actively immoral.

Then we don't punish the supposedly moral beings in charge.

It's a great way to allow the evil to rule society.

Re: Microsoft Employees Pressure Leadership to Cancel ICE Contract

#218

Post by blindwatchmaker »

jgaa wrote: post #151
TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> 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. Corporations are accountable. They are accountable as entities, and as individuals (owners, managers, employees). If they do fatal decisions, the corporation may go bankrupt. If people act immoral, they may get fired. If they…

Meanwhile in the real world, many corporations get away with doing all these things, abusing labour, regulatory capture and the people running them get rich as Croesus doing it.

Re: Microsoft Employees Pressure Leadership to Cancel ICE Contract

#219

Post by SlowRobotAhead »

cr1895 wrote: post #182
SlowRobotAhead wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

>How is this policy changed from when Obama was in office again? The fakenews that started all this was a few photos from 2014. Under the Obama administration, families were not separated because the parents were not jailed. The photos to which you refer pertain to unaccompanied minors. What is happening now is that the Trump administration is jailing parents and removing children from their custody; in some instance…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TK92pCdBKBs

Seems like you're 100% wrong on that.

Re: Microsoft Employees Pressure Leadership to Cancel ICE Contract

#220

Post by allenz »

weiming wrote: post #153
allenz wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When ICE violates human rights, it's no longer a free speech issue. Microsoft shouldn't work with ICE in the same way that banks shouldn't work with sanctioned oligarchs.

ELI5 what human rights is ICE violating in this case? Is due process not being followed?

It is official US government policy to separate children from their parents as a deterrent: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/16/us/politics/family-separa...

Children have the right not to be abused. The UN human rights chief calls the practice "unconscionable": https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/18/world/europe/trump-migran...

Post reply on HN