471–480 of 708 posts
I question how much an employee should concern him/herself with how a product is used once it's created. You have to let certain control go after a point. Or if your product is open to everyone, you'll have to live with the fact that people may use it in ways you disagree with. Xerox or Canon (or whoever) probably makes copiers that ICE uses to make copies. Lenovo or Apple probably makes hardware that they use also t…
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_concentration_and_inte... From the article: > In 2019, many experts, including Andrea Pitzer, the author of One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps, have acknowledged the designation of the detention centers as "concentration camps" [227] [228] particularly given that the centers, previously cited by Texas officials for more than 150 health violations [229] and re…
41,000 deaths in Dachau.[1] 15 deaths in ICE detention centers.[2] If you add 2017 it would be about 25.[3] I have family who immigrated to the US last year with their children. We have the largest immigrant population and we want people to come here.[4] [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dachau_concentration_camp [2] https://www.ice.gov/death-detainee-report#wcm-survey-target-... [3] https://www.cato.org/blog/annua…
I question how much an employee should concern him/herself with how a product is used once it's created. You have to let certain control go after a point. Or if your product is open to everyone, you'll have to live with the fact that people may use it in ways you disagree with. Xerox or Canon (or whoever) probably makes copiers that ICE uses to make copies. Lenovo or Apple probably makes hardware that they use also t…
Often when moral question pops up on HN, the top comment is some variation of
> But where do we we draw the line? > I wonder whether we should even try.
Counterpoint: cynicism is too easy. Actually giving a shit is harder, it's uncomfortable, it involves compromise.
Yes, there's ambiguity.
Yes, the line the law draws is very loose. Github can't legally let someone from Iran or North Korea host repos, but just about anything else is legal. If Golden Dawn (the greek fascist party) wanted to use your product, nothing legally prevents you from having them as a customer.
This is no excuse to avoid the question.
Every person has to decide for themselves the boundaries of who they're willing to work for. If you work for a company, you have a voice in that company's decisions. I think many tech workers underestimate how much power they have. Good engineers are in tremendous demand.
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If the conditions of imprisonment are all that matter then the Japanese internment wasn't that big of a deal, they were treated quite well and humanely and in relatively good living conditions. But of course that's not the point. The point is a group of people were persecuted arbitrarily by their government for belonging to an ethnic group, something held today as universally reprehensible. You are using loaded langu…
"The Japanese internment wasn't that big of a deal" is certainly a claim a person can make, but I don't feel compelled to continue discoursing with someone who does.
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The difference is not serving black or queer people isn't a moral judgement -- it's just discrimination (there isn't anything inherently wrong with being Black the same way there isn't anything wrong with being queer or Asian or Indian, those things aren't a choice unlike being a Nazi). At best, not serving minorities is a shitty moral judgement. Not serving ICE is a more legitimate moral judgement because ICE has th…
So can a business refuse to serve democrats?
It seems that these kinds of demands are becoming more common. Is it because conflict resolution is becoming a dying art, is it because people don't rise to the level of maturity of past times? I just find it to be confusing. Non PW link: https://archive.ph/IkYQ3
It's because circumstances in the United States regarding how the government interfaces to the world are getting dangerously fascist, and people in the tech sector are sensitive to the risk of repeating the history of IBM and the Nazi party (i.e. enabling a government's ability to commit atrocities at scale). It's an open question how much responsibility one has regarding how one's technology is used and what service…
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The difference is not serving black or queer people isn't a moral judgement -- it's just discrimination (there isn't anything inherently wrong with being Black the same way there isn't anything wrong with being queer or Asian or Indian, those things aren't a choice unlike being a Nazi). At best, not serving minorities is a shitty moral judgement. Not serving ICE is a more legitimate moral judgement because ICE has th…
There is nothing inherently wrong with serving ICE. You might not like it, but many of your compatriots do. I don't like what they do at all, I think it's reprehensible, backwards, and purely uncivilised. But people you utterly hate have friends too, and they see something different than you do, and we do not have a singular moral world-view. This situation with ICE should totally change, but that change is a functio…
So because shitty people have friends, we should throw in the towel and refrain from enforcing moral codes in our own lives, behavior, and economic decisions? That's pretty weak stuff.
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You’re one person trying to change the definition, but you’re correct there are others trying to do the same.
I mean, if anyone should have some stake in the definition, it should probably be Holocaust survivors. Which is one of the reasons (to pop context back to the up-thread post) I find the claim the comparison cheapens the memory of the Holocaust somewhat worthy of skepticism.
It's 100% expected that people who break the law will be imprisoned if caught. A prison is not a "concentration camp", a detention center for illegal aliens is not a "concentration camp". People end up in those places because they broke the law, not because people rounded them up out of their homes and shipped them there.