IBM CEO Ginni Rometty's Letter to the U.S. President-Elect • Hacker News Board

Re: IBM CEO Ginni Rometty's Letter to the U.S. President-Elect

#21

Post by hackuser » Tue, Nov 15, 2016, 11:09 PM UTC

sctb wrote: post #19

hackuser wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scott - Is this comment appropriate?: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12962658 I understand it's tricky. I certainly don't want to start a flamewar, but I do think that these issues are critically important and should not be ignored. I'd appreciate your feedback if you think it could be improved somehow.

One thing in that comment that could be stronger is the connection between IBM's behavior then and now ("connect the dots" as a prominent commenter might say). It's perhaps enough to just be reminded of past behavior of the same corporation in order to warrant asking the question in the present context, but saying so may have addressed the objection that you've received.

Fair enough. I want to find ways to address these issues and get people thinking, not flaming.

Re: IBM CEO Ginni Rometty's Letter to the U.S. President-Elect

#22

Post by tptacek » Tue, Nov 15, 2016, 11:10 PM UTC

arcticfox wrote: post #17

hackuser wrote: post #14

IBM allegedly helped the US government run the camps where citizens of Japanese descent were imprisoned during WWII (and allegedly provided technology to the Nazis that was used for the Holocaust). What will IBM do if the U.S. government tries to lock up masses of Latinos or Muslims? What will your company do?

Come off it, there have been four generations of workers and leadership since then. If IBM isn't a responsible corporation, bring up modern examples. Or maybe we should boycott Ford, Volkswagen, BMW, Mercedes, GM, Coke, Puma, Adidas, Bayer, Siemens, Zeiss...

What is it that you theorize immunizes modern workers from the forces that led IBM's employees to participate in the Holocaust? Do you think IBM's 1930s employees didn't realize that genocide and mass relocation was wrong?

Further: tech giants have for the last several decades been arming the world's most repressive regimes with information technology. What do you think the Great Firewall of China was originally made up of? Whose databases do you think track activists in Iran and Egypt? What evidence do we have that modern tech companies will do anything different than IBM did, faced with the same "opportunities"?

Re: IBM CEO Ginni Rometty's Letter to the U.S. President-Elect

#23

Post by waterphone » Tue, Nov 15, 2016, 11:44 PM UTC

sctb wrote: post #4

waterphone wrote: post #3

Just a reminder: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust

Please don't drop flamewar-style comments into unrelated threads like this.

It wasn't intended to provoke a flamewar, and it wasn't unrelated to the subject. IBM, who provided technology to the Nazis to track the Jews for the holocaust is now cozying up to a President-elect who promised to create a database to track Muslims.

Re: IBM CEO Ginni Rometty's Letter to the U.S. President-Elect

#24

Post by sujal99 » Wed, Nov 16, 2016, 6:06 AM UTC

AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #10

Hey IBM, maybe instead of offering to create "new collar" jobs, you should stop shipping your existing jobs to India: http://insights.dice.com/2013/09/27/justice-department-hits-...

The US has the trade deficit of mere ~2 billion with India. The US can try to stop moving the jobs to India. But surely it will backfire in some other way.