But how is Github's product enabling human rights violations? I can understand if Github employees were protesting a product that created human rights violations (for example if Github offered a security service for ICE detention centers that was abusing prisoners). Would you be ok if Github was a restaurant and it had a policy of not serving anyone who is an ICE employee?
Can you point to some sources so I can understand how they are concentration camps? I’ve been to Dachau and nothing on the news shows anything like what I saw there.
> 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 reported deaths in custody,[230] reflect a record typical of the history of deliberate substandard healthcare and nutrition in concentration camps.[231] Though some organizations have tried to resist the "concentration camp" label for these facilities, [232] [233] hundreds of Holocaust and genocide scholars rejected this resistance via an open letter addressed to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. [234]
There always seems to be a conflation of concentration camps with Nazi death camps in these discussions. ICE running concentration camps (a facility for holding "people, commonly in large groups, without charges") seems wholly unremarkable.
Judging by the definition of "internment" linked from that wiki page....Japan runs "concentration camps", as it regularly imprisons people without charges and without trial for up to 23 days, under harsh conditions.
Seems like a pretty low bar for defining the term, and obscures the pretty real distinctions in overall human suffering that occur at different places.
I just wanted to see if dunstad would support such a ban. And they did, as you can see by their agreement. This shows how real that slippery slope is for many people...
Hello, I'm a real boy! I happen to support both of these positions, but it is indeed possible to condemn ICE without feeling the same about the GOP in general, and jumping immediately from one to the next is exactly the kind of thing people mean when they talk about moving the goalposts.
You are right - I always forget that political affiliation is not a protected class within our legal system. However, I think it should be, because we've seen the whole ugly side of persecution and discrimination that came about during the McCarthy era and beyond where people like MLK, Chaplin, WEB Du Bois, and Linus Pauling were targeted for their political beliefs.
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 business with customers considered immoral
If you are ok with #2 you are running into a slippery slope in my view. And if you are ok with #2 and you are one of the largest companies in the world, it is a very huge slippery slope.
The actual (IMO correct) position most of these people share is the following two points at once:
- businesses should have a moral position, since businesses are just a set of people
- that moral position should be right!
This isn’t rocket science! Stuff like “don’t support a business doing bad stuff” and “support businesses doing good stuff” is just really basic consumer activism.
There’s no need to go deep in metaphysics. It’s literally just “support good things, don’t support bad things”
That moral position should be right? According to who? The business itself? Then that second point is redundant. Everybody thinks their moral position is right, that's what morals are. It's a tautology otherwise.
GitHub employees think their moral position on ICE is right. Many disagree. But according to them that's fine, because they think they're right so should be able to boycott who they like.
Replace Github with bakery refusing to serve same-sex couples. Bakery thinks they're right. Many disagree. But according to them that's fine, because they think they're right so should be able to boycott who they like.
You only think it's a false dichotomy because you personally disagree with the bakery and (presumably?) agree with Github. By saying "the moral position should be right", is you simply saying "and they should agree with me otherwise they are wrong".
> GitHub employees think their moral position on ICE is right. Many disagree. But according to them that's fine, because they think they're right so should be able to boycott who they like.
A lot of music artists in the 50s and 60s refused to play on segregated crowds (where black people is separated from white people, usually blacks in the back), they did it because they though they were right and should be able to boycott doing business with those who disagree (despite their record-label or manager thinking otherwise) you think those artists should have done otherwise?
I didn't say they should have done otherwise. I'm actually arguing in favour of private individuals/businesses being able to make the decision on what they sell and who they sell to.
I'm simply pointing out what is almost definitely hypocrisy on the part of these Github employees. Tech companies are usually more progressive, and no doubt these employees would object to a private company, such as a family run bakery, choosing who they sell to. When the Github employees are advocating for their own company to do just that.
Please don't take HN threads further into ideological flamewar. Such discussions are repetitive and predictable and deteriorate as they go along. That makes them off topic here.
dang, this is clearly on-topic. ICE is in the title of the post.
Not every response to a political post that is apathy incarnate is an "ideological flamewar".
Some things have to be named as what they are, this is not hyperbole. This is happening right now. And I'm sorry anything but your typical "but what about refusing services to the gays" makes you uncomfortable.
What makes political flamewars off topic on HN is that they are repetitive and therefore predictable. There's no curiosity in that, and HN is a site for curiosity. Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Substantive conversation about the specifics of the OP is different; that's possible, and if people can do it, it's on topic here. But it takes discipline not to devolve into flame-throwing.
When a thread gets to the level of name-calling about concentration camps, there's no substantive discussion left to be had. Internet forums as a medium are quick to become vessels for venting rather than information sharing. That's what we want to avoid here. If your wish is to fight battles and smite enemies, please do so elsewhere. I'm sure there are many good reasons to smite them; we are certainly not saying that these issues are unimportant.
dang, it's not name-calling to call concentration camps what they are. ICE literally runs concentration camps. There's no exaggeration, trolling, or flame-warring involved in saying so.
It's simply the same way that it's not libelous to call someone who committed murder a "murderer"--because they earned the title when they committed the murder.
When I said name-calling I was referring to words like vile and cynic.
Words like concentration camp seem to me in a different category. They aren't necessarily name-calling, but they do have dual semantics: a factual aspect and a pejorative one. If all a comment does is repeat those words and add additional pejoratives, that's not a substantive comment by HN standards.
Repeating pejoratives very much feels like "saying what something is" or "naming things as they are". But it feels like exactly the opposite of that to others, who then feel justified in escalating. That is the dynamic of flamewar, not conversation. We can't have both, and HN threads are supposed to be conversations.
It's clear that you've thought about this, so what do you suggest is the appropriate way to have a constructive conversation with someone who openly endorses atrocities? The pro-atrocity side is welcome to describe the crimes they support in warm, fuzzy terms that do not offend those with delicate sensibilities, but the anti-atrocity side cannot even freely state their case because it naturally involves invoking the truth of horrific events. Are we bound to stay silent about such actions because those who support them may be offended by being associated with their plainly factual content?
I'm sorry I didn't get a chance to reply to this. I meant to, but got swept away by the waves of everything that gets posted here.
Our intention is to give every sincere question a sincere answer, so I'm sorry to have left the wrong impression in this case. It's just not always possible given resource constraints. I'm sure we can revisit this in the future.
You can disagree with somebody's set of morals all you like. You can draw analogies to Hitler, Stalin, Mao, whoever. But: why should a private business only be allowed to choose its clients, if their morality aligns with yours?
EDIT: And the down votes begin the moment I don't agree with somebody's comparison to Hitler. Godwin's Law never fails to deliver.
What bothers me the most is how myopic people are about this. Does anyone not see how dangerous it will be if we have the world's largest companies choosing to do business based on their internal moral grounds? Do we really want tech companies to have moral councils that vet customers?
If you want to fix ICE, then by all means, attack the problem at its source! Take that well paid Github salary of yours and fund the ACLU and other lobbyists fighting the good fight. Write your congressman. Call your congressman. VOTE! Campaign for the correct congressman. Code for your congressman. Push for policy that makes ICE employees (and all government employees) more accountable for human rights abuses. All of these actions will be more effective than campaigning for ICE, who will just migrate to a different cloud code review tool
if the contract is cancelled (gitlab, bitbucket, or whomever else).
I see you as the myopic here; by pretending you only have to the long term stuff (votes, campaing) and that the short term stuff doesn't matter or shouldn't be done (like the employees complaining in this case) like these kind of protests live in a vacuum; when artists in the 50s refused to play in segregated crowds you think they didn't ALSO advocate for the long term stuff like voting for congressmen in favor of less racism? Absolutely nothing lives in a vacuum, and creating noise against ICE like they are doing in this case can help even more than doing the politics part themselves, because the exposure they get influences other people reading such news.
I actually don't think this is a short term action. I think of this as a non-action. If Github pulls the ICE contract they will just use a competitor (Gitlab has already gone on record saying they will not restrict customers based on moral viewpoints). And regardless of which cloud code collaboration tool ICE uses, they will still be locking kids in detention camps and trampling human rights. No behavior change will happen at all at ICE if they have to change their git cloud provider.
This is a non action move in my opinion. I see it as slacktivism, if Github pulls the contract, people will pat themselves on the back, and count it as a win. You could argue the exposure might have some effect, but given that ICE human rights abuses have been very well documented by the leading publications, I'm unsure if additional exposure will bring change. I do strongly believe that funding lobbyists is the a great short term thing we can do. From an exposure viewpoint, I think the best thing we can do is raise exposure and support in the blue areas of the country. However, these protests are not doing that.
If I have learn anything about politics is that very well documented facts don't always have more importance in the public eyes than the noise made about a subject, the full political campaign of Trump had practically 0% of any truth whatsoever, just rambling insults and other easily-repeated slogans void of any truth but emotional appeals to a big chunk of the voting population; and he won with millions of votes. So no, I think stuff like this does a bit more than "some effect".
I agree that noise can impact change, but the problem here is we've already got this noise within the Blue states. In order to get a policy change you need to have majority of Congress which means the noise needs to be felt on the Red states. So yea, if this was happening in a corporation based in Texas, Florida, or Georgia, I'd believe this was an action. Right now this exposure is going into publications that target people who already share the same viewpoint as the protestors.
I understand what you are saying but I do not believe all morals and values are created equal.
For one, many disparate cultures have separately developed values that are very similar. In a lot of these cultures values intersect more than diverge.
Second, I do not believe discriminating on an entity based on the perceived harm it is causing others is the equivalent to discriminating on an individual or group based on intrinsic characteristics the individuals were born with.
Further, I believe it's potentially desirable to attempt to derive a set of values and morals based on reasoning; attempting to maximize for the constructive and empowering and minimize the destructive and oppressive.
That's the entire problem isn't it? Perceived by who? Do people actually know the truth or is it just what they assume? How is this kind of policy not immediately susceptible to all sorts of abuse?
This is the whole point of everything. If you believe strongly in a thing, then you should fight for it. And other people in society will judge you for it (rightly so!)
So yeah, you decide that you care enough about "sanctity of marriage" so you decide to not sell cakes. So everyone who disagrees with you boycotts your business. Others believe that sexual orientation is such an important thing that they make it illegal for you to do this! This is how stuff happens!
There isn't some sort of rules-based pre-judgement for this sort of stuff. It gets played out over time. And you're responsible for your decisions in this front.
It's a colossal problem because it is an authoritarian stance hidden behind incoherent arguments of morality. There is no morality or ethics. There is only pushy people trying to strong-arm everyone around to comply with their personal world view under the threat of being cut off from a product/service.
You envision society as a battleground for various moral perspectives. I think there's some truth to that. But are there any ground rules? If so, what are they? Are you giving me license to firebomb ICE facilities because I "believe strongly" that ICE is evil? Or is the law a red line that no one can cross? If so, what about "bad laws"? What about civil disobedience?
Another perspective on this is that, for a society to function, people need to be able to agree to disagree about most things. This means that we are all morally compromised and we all must be morally compromised in order to live together. A society in which everyone follows their own moral impulses is a society that will not function.
I find myself wavering between these two perspectives (the first being yours). I don't mind people protesting. But how about blocking roads? How about vandalizing your ideological opponent's office? How about smashing windows? How about preventing your ideological opponents from speaking? It seems to me that your perspective minimizes the danger here. There's no guarantee that things will just work out. We might reach a level of polarization after which we simply won't be able to cooperate.
right, it's impossible to establish a universal, objective framework for morality. instead, we can only make compromises between majorities and vocal minorities, codify them as laws and ethics, and enforce them.
however, that doesn't absolve you of sticking up for your moral code, depending on what it is. for example, I'm gay. I know that Chik-Fil-A is complying with the law, and that its owners are funding advocacy for conversion therapy and other anti-LGBT issues. I wouldn't want Chik-Fil-A to be dismantled, since it's lawful, but I refuse to eat there, since my personal morals prevent me from giving money to people who want to hurt people like me. I'd also support protests of Chik-Fil-A, since protest is a lawful action (at least, social media campaigns and picket lines.)
Don't be lazy. Stand up for what you believe in. The law is the lowest common denominator, and legality doesn't absolve you of your actions.
So what are you saying then? That there are no moral absolutes? Or just that because people disagree on what is moral business should be allowed to act in interest of profit only?
That's fine, that doesn't change anything. If GitHub and their employees disagree so strongly on right and wrong that one side believes doing X is immoral and the other believes not doing X is immoral, GitHub can either attempt to convince their employees that they are in fact right, or let them leave.
(If GitHub does not believe they have a moral obligation to sell to ICE, they can drop the contract and keep their employees. It's a very small contract, less than one engineer's salary, and they committed to donating that money anyway. So I'm assuming that GitHub feels a moral or equivalently strong obligation to keep the contract, possibly of the form of feeling an obligation not to let employees influence moral direction. If not, this is just a story of bad business sense.)
Even others (a plurality I think) don't have strong feelings on the laws, but know one of the following:
- the executive has selective enforcement rights
- (at the time) congress + the WH could change laws!
- the laws were written with an understanding of selective enforcement
and so rightly recognized that this was a bad thing that could be made right.
There is an n-sided die about how people see this problem, and people acted in accordance to it. And yeah, it means that some sides don't believe in the legitimacy of other sides. They're incompatible after all.
Besides, it's not the point. The point of the game isn't to make a set of meta-rules for defining what is morally right. It's for, on a case-by-case basis, to say "this thing is good/bad" and then act on that.
I don't need to be able to answer every moral hypothetical to be able to say that _this one specific thing is bad_. To bring it back to HN, it's a P=/=NP problem. I can say one thing is good/bad without providing the full strategy for determining every thing. And then we work from there.
I think your entire argument would make a lot more sense if you replaced “right” with “what I think is right”. Your position is just one side of the dice (as you say).
Please don't take HN threads on generic tangents. They lead to shallow, predictable discussions. A public internet forum is not, as a medium, capable of addressing such questions. If you really want to discuss something like that, write an essay (or a book) and then post it here, or maybe someone will.
That's nonsense. Philosophers will debate subtleties around morality until the end of time, but that shouldn't prevent us from taking a stand against evil when we see it.
> That's nonsense. Philosophers will debate subtleties around morality until the end of time, but that shouldn't prevent us from taking a stand against evil when we see it.
"evil" is exactly what religious people called homosexuality for centuries, which is ironic considering your statement. Morality is purely an opinion, just like religion.
Except that "evil" is just a loaded word that tries to pin an absolute take on morality on a personal opinion. There are people who take stances against evil by persecuting others based on religion, gender, race, and even political leanings, and they feel so strongly about the morality of their positions that they feel that even extreme violence is justified.
I do not think the dichotomy you outlined accurately describes how things work
I mean, this is why we have developed the idea of a "protected class."
Because you're correct that, at the end of the day, judgement is judgement and sentiment is sentiment and everyone is the hero of their own story.
But to place the limits of proper action at sentiment is solipsism.
So there is a set of protected classes which we, as a society, have decided are inappropriate reasons to discriminate against people. The quick reasons it is wrong to discriminate: sex, race, age, religion[1]. There are many reasons we allow people to discriminate: lack of money, being violent to employees, being unacceptably rude, setting off explosives, etc. These are all discriminatory practices that often involve moral judgement.
We are always in the process of trying to decide if we should have a new protected class and how that class should be defined. I also suspect we will, at some point, talk about removing protected classes.
Businesses should (and in fact always do) make moral judgements about their clients. The people at Github who chose to work with ICE decided it was morally right for them to do so. You can tell because they did it. They might say they were sad about it and had "moral qualms" but at some point it does seem like it comes down to yes or no.
So do you think we should have a government agency class? Or perhaps a law enforcement class? I personally do not.
[1] Some exceptions here, of course, a mosque does not have to hire a catholic priest who applies to be an imam.
I haven't read enough on the Harvard admission scandal to have an opinion.
That said, there are lots of services that consider protected class in ways that aren't currently considered discriminatory. Ladies nights, for instance, are not illegal. Giving discounts to senior citizens is not considered discriminating against others.
All that said - those corner cases are always being considered and questioned. There are instances where I think the official decision is right and ones where I think it's wrong, but I'm no more perfect than anyone else.
>> She rejected the argument that “tips,” or admissions advantages, received by some black and Hispanic students were unfair. While some racial groups did receive tips...
They get them, and Asian/Asian-Americans are excluded from this, placing them in the "advantaged group" as I stated above (usually reserved for white people).
That they ruled this was "not unfair" doesn't make it "not discrimination." They admit as such that it happens to the detriment to Asian/Asian-Americans.
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.
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 function of your vote, not a function of protesting against Gitlab.
I very strongly argue that there should never be a single perspective on morality, in the way that these posts suggest there should.
Lots of people support ICE, maybe, but that doesn’t prevent a lot of people from thinking it’s inherently wrong.
The more clear cute example is weapons research. Loads of researchers and institutions outright rule out weapons research, because they find it wrong.
Besides, “inherently wrong” is a subjective thing anyways, if only by the fact some people agree to your statement and some people don’t, despite everyone having the same set of facts
> 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.
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.
Capitalism is nothing but an economic system where you own the means to production. There is no inherent morality.
Nobody has an issue with you making choices and voting with your dollars. The issue is forcing those choices on everyone else (as in a business, especially as a non-owner) through your own interpretation of morality.
It refers to "you" vs the state. You create a factory or a business or a new patent and you're responsible. You gain the profits or suffer the losses and nobody else can take it from you.
Workers are obviously not business owners, but they do own their own labor and are free to take whatever job they want, not be assigned to it from some central authority.
> While what you say is true, does pushing the start time of class back 30 minutes or 1 hour make any difference? I'm skeptical.
Did you read the article? They have done several studies to show a significance difference in academic performance with a slight shift. That's the whole reason for this change.
"One three-year study (pdf, p.1) of 9,000 high-school students across three states, for example, found that academic performance, “including grades earned in core subject areas of math, English, science and social studies, plus performance on state and national achievement tests, attendance rates and reduced tardiness show significantly positive improvement with the later start times of 8:35 AM or later.”
Like I said - why not push it to a start time of noon or later then? Was that studied too? Or are we just basing policy off a half-baked idea, here in Calunicornia?
I can be skeptical this will have any real impact, despite the findings of one survey-study.
The cited study was a survey students voluntarily completed... which opens the door for response bias. The study was only conducted over a single school year, and no two schools had the same modified schedule. Nor did they repeat the study for a second school year to ensure they didn't observe anomalies, nor go back to the old schedule to see if a simple schedule change - not the late start time - is what prompted the changes. Nor did they follow students through their student career, maintaining the altered schedule to see if performance results were consistent.
The 9,000 students might sound impressive - but this is not actually a good long term study... far from it.
Chronicle blocked me for using an adblocker so this is from the SF Examiner [1]:
>Better Market Street will be implemented in three phases: Market from Fifth to Eighth streets is phase 1, Market from Fifth to Second streets is phase 2, and Market from Van Ness to Octavia Boulevard will comprise phase 3.
This leaves 9th-11th streets, and streets past Octavia open to traffic. Also, certain types of transport are still allowed. I believe taxis (excluding rideshare apps like Lyft/Uber) were mentioned in another comment, and the streetcars will be allowed as well. I’m sure there’ll be other exceptions.
Do you think top down strategy and control is important for large organizations? Most people idealize organizations that are grassroots drive so it's interesting to see how it didn't work in this case.
Different substances are regulated differently because they have different risks for the population. Nicotine is significantly more addictive and harmful than marijuana which is why it is regulated differently than marijuana: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Drug_danger_and_dependenc...
Need a citation here. I've read the literature and the current consensus (as far as I'm aware) is "we don't know what the harms are". There is a study which suggest that nicotine may increase cancer risk in mice, though it is not a direct cause and even then the study was inconclusive.
Your link is a chart which shows relative lethal doses of substances. Nicotine requires a "very high" dose, not one you would ever get in practice. Not sure what point you were trying to make with that.
While that's the marketing view of most of the e-cig companies, we don't actually know if either of these claims are true.
#1 e-cigs are not as harmful as normal cigarettes
It will take several decades to prove or disprove this point. However, early research points to this not being the case.
#2 e-cigs make it much easier to quit tobacco
Again, early research doesn't indicate that e-cigs don't outperform other smoking cessation techniques.
The main concerns I've heard are from a public health perspective. Most tobacco researchers and public health officials are concerned that e-cigs are essentially a "better" product. "Better" meaning perceived as being less offensive, cooler, convenient, and less harmful. The concern is that since the youth perceive e-cigs as cool and safe, while cigarettes as uncool and harmful, it's seeing significant adoption in younger people which is undoing the gains from the anti-tobacco campaigns in the 90s. Essentially, the hypothesis is that e-cigs are a slightly less (but really the distinction is minute and trivial) harmful product that is significantly more compelling to people. The net effect is the threat of e-cigarettes is that it can do significantly more harm to humans that cigarettes (since more people perceive it as safe).
I'm going to have to disagree that you are "a paid a little less" at startups. In my experience working for a startup is a 20-30% drop in compensation.
When startups say they are near market, they mean base salaries. They neglect bonuses, stock grants, signing bonuses, stock refreshes, 401K matching. These things add up real quickly. Even worse, I've found that startup salaries usually don't grow as large companies (very few startups do equity refresh, raises, COL increases, etc.)
Compound this 30% difference over a 4 year stint and things start to look bad, esp. when you think of $1m+ home prices left in startup havens like San Francisco & New York. If the majority of startups were in affordable cities, I'd agree that the compensation difference isn't that much, but the bulk of startups are located in places where that 30% drop means a significant change in quality of life.
My career has involved working at an e-healthcare startup (like 25 people), then NetSuite pre and post IPO (probably no longer a startup), then a tiny startup that folded after 6 months, then a 20 person startup, then a 60 person startup.
So 4 definitely honest-to-god startups, and one post-startup. The only one I didn't get raises and equity refreshes at was the tiny startup that folded after six months -- because it didn't exist long enough to have a compensation cycle.
I don't think this was exceptional. I very much take exception to "very few" startups doing equity refreshes, raises, etc. Some may not. Most do.
There's no definite answer. For example, if you want a site that functions without javascript (i.e. degrades gracefully) you need cookies. Localstorage requires JS while cookies do not. It really depends what kind of web app you are developing.
The distinction you are making doesn't exist. localStorage and cookies both persist after the browser is closed so if you want that use case you won't get it from either.
Maybe they were thinking of the options most browsers have to clear selected private data on exit. In that case, though, it's still possible to clear both localStorage and cookies I am sure. Maybe parent commenter currently has the options set so that cookies are cleared but localStorage is not and that's why they thought that this is the way it always is.
