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GitHub tries to quell employee anger over its ICE contract

latimes.com

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Re: GitHub tries to quell employee anger over its ICE contract

#391

Post by Ar-Curunir »

tomschlick wrote: post #355
supernova87a wrote: post #348

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…

> Why don't the employees at all these other companies object like Github employees? Why do Github employees get a special right to withhold consent for their product to be used in a setting they might object to? Why is ICE the only company that they object to? Why do some causes get their favor and not others? Wokeness and the recent trend of trying to cancel anything that doesn't align within a narrow spectrum of p…

This is a garbage opinion. Opposing concentration camps is not a "narrow progressive viewpoint"

Re: GitHub tries to quell employee anger over its ICE contract

#392

Post by the_pwner224 »

ganitarashid wrote: post #359

It's not an employee's role to determine with whom the employer does business. The employee is always free to switch to a different employer if they can't support the work.

Having 'leave if you don't like it' be the only choice never ends well (except for those who do leave).

It's a great way to make extremist toxic echo chambers.

Re: GitHub tries to quell employee anger over its ICE contract

#393

Post by KyeRussell »

si1entstill wrote: post #373
supernova87a wrote: post #348

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…

I would think that employees at those companies would probably prefer if they weren't doing business with some of those people, but I think it is much more difficult in cases where there is just a good being purchased through retailers (there are intermediary steps). With these kinds of contracts it feels much more akin to a partnership, so I think the feedback makes more sense. Its odd to me that we question why emp…

Yes. Something tells me that if ICE just signed up to Github, nobody would even notice.

Re: GitHub tries to quell employee anger over its ICE contract

#394

Post by KyeRussell »

tomschlick wrote: post #390
KyeRussell wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"ICE is currently doing some bad things" is a viewpoint shared by a pretty large group of people. Honestly it just sounds like you're projecting.

ICE is getting raked over the coals in the court of public opinion because they don't have the funding nor the manpower to deal with 100k people coming over the border each month. Many asylum seekers are just exploiting the asylum system with invalid cases as economic migrants to delay the process so they don't get sent back home. All the while congress hasn't done much at all to fix the obvious problems in the law (…

K.

Re: GitHub tries to quell employee anger over its ICE contract

#395

Post by _7bxa »

slykat wrote: post #381

I find it ironic that the same people protesting the contract would also protest a bakery that refuses to sell a product for say a same sex couple (or if you were in the 60s, restaurants that refused to serve blacks). You either have a viewpoint that: 1) a business shouldn't make a moral judgement on its customers and be accessible to all 2) A business can make moral judgements on its customers and choose not to do b…

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 the option to change their behavior and ICE is genuinely bad.

Slippery slope is one of those silly things I see from free speech advocates. I tend not to see the bad impacts in real life because if the government isgoing to restrict free speech, they will do it regardless of what anti-hate speech laws currently exist.

Re: GitHub tries to quell employee anger over its ICE contract

#396

Post by Ar-Curunir »

zarkov99 wrote: post #363
supernova87a wrote: post #348

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…

But what will your peers at brunch say if you do not show how virtuous you are?

Caring for the well-being of imprisoned asylum seekers is not virtue-signalling.

It says more about your own morals that you think it is.

Re: GitHub tries to quell employee anger over its ICE contract

#397

Post by jcims »

akhilcacharya wrote: post #331
jcims wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would a racist care enough to specify the legality of their presence in the US? That doesn't even stand up to basic reasoning. 'Illegal', while possibly indelicate, gets to the root of the immigration discussion...people sidestepping the process of lawfully entering the US because it's too difficult for them or too slow for their circumstances or just impossible because they are ineligible. Saying that everyone t…

> Why would a racist care enough to specify the legality of their presence in the US? That doesn't even stand up to basic reasoning. Have you ever heard of dog whistles? Anyways, Ive never met someone that says things like this but also opposed efforts to reduce legal immigration like the RAISE act or refugee/travel bans. As it turns out, there’s a high correlation!

Yes, I'm convinced people that hear too many dog whistles in conversation are either intellectually lazy or borderline paranoid schizophrenic. Rather than trying to engage with the person to really understand how they are thinking about something, 'dog whistles' are used to neatly package them into subhuman categories not worth consideration as peers in democracy.

Re: GitHub tries to quell employee anger over its ICE contract

#398

Post by tomschlick »

KyeRussell wrote: post #394
tomschlick wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ICE is getting raked over the coals in the court of public opinion because they don't have the funding nor the manpower to deal with 100k people coming over the border each month. Many asylum seekers are just exploiting the asylum system with invalid cases as economic migrants to delay the process so they don't get sent back home. All the while congress hasn't done much at all to fix the obvious problems in the law (…

K.

Glad to see reasonable discussion is still alive and well on HN. /s

Re: GitHub tries to quell employee anger over its ICE contract

#399

Post by daveFNbuck »

tomschlick wrote: post #390
KyeRussell wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"ICE is currently doing some bad things" is a viewpoint shared by a pretty large group of people. Honestly it just sounds like you're projecting.

ICE is getting raked over the coals in the court of public opinion because they don't have the funding nor the manpower to deal with 100k people coming over the border each month. Many asylum seekers are just exploiting the asylum system with invalid cases as economic migrants to delay the process so they don't get sent back home. All the while congress hasn't done much at all to fix the obvious problems in the law (…

They have the manpower, they're just doing everything as inefficiently and inhumanely as possible in order to arrive at this outcome. This is a choice that the administration is making, and ICE is implementing it.

Re: GitHub tries to quell employee anger over its ICE contract

#400

Post by Ar-Curunir »

azirbel wrote: post #354

The comments here seem very negative compared to e.g. the Google employee protests over Project Dragonfly. [1] There are two questions here: whether GitHub should allow ICE to buy its software, and whether employees should influence the direction of their company via protests, petitions, and threats to quit. GitHub specifics aside, I think employees absolutely should organize and quit over issues they feel strongly a…

Thats because HN is a US-based website, and that automatically entails "US = good, China = bad" comments. (Even though in this case both US and China = bad)
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