Federal immigration control almost exclusively focuses their attention on deporting and denying asylum to Latino refugees and asylum seekers.
Last week it was uncovered that mass hysterectomies had taken place at an ICE facility in Georgia without the informed consent of patients - this falls under the UN's definition of genocide.
This policy shift towards targeting exclusively Latinos came under the Trump administration calling Mexican immigrants "rapists" who bring crime and drugs. Melania Trump is a white immigrant who was granted the exclusive EB-1 green card for "extraordinary abilities".
I find it nearly impossible in these circumstances to come to the conclusion that the state is not explicitly catering to white supremacist ideology...and immigration policy is only the tip of the iceberg.
1. I agree with you in as far as politicking that has nothing to do with your workplace can be a distraction, but as it pertains to Facebook the politicking is not abstract, but relates directly to Facebook's actions. It might be unacceptable for an employee to use company resources to boost a political candidate: this is not the case here. Facebook is curbing internal criticism of company policy.
2. I think it's disingenuous to imply that Facebook workers - and bear in mind we're not talking about the janitorial staff here, but tech workers who command salaries at and above $100K p.a. - must work at Facebook lest they be destitute. The greatest advantage of being a tech worker is the range of high salary positions available to you. That aside, I return to my previous point about this not being an abstract, culture wars style debate, but specific critique of company actions. It's not politics, but internal politics. Every company has internal debates about the strategic and ethical direction of the company - why not this one?
3. I understand that politics can be exhausting, especially in the highly polarized environment we live in, but I don't think that's sufficient reason to forbid internal critique of any company. Moreover I think the stakes are higher than we are comfortable with - Facebook has already ADMITTED that they provoked the Burmese genocide 2 years ago [https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/06/technology/myanmar-facebo...].
To flip the question around: what makes YOU think that YOUR personal right to feeling relaxed at work is more important than an employee's right to ensure that they do not work on a product that can lead to mass murder? Moreover, is it really a political stance to demand that you are not complicit in unethical activity?
If you're being offered a $400K comp package I can say with a lot of certainty that you have not been dealt a hand and are, in fact, a highly skilled worker with a great many options for employment, so sincere congratulations on your success!
It's therefore hard to see how taking this offer would not be choosing to sell your ethics for money and success, given that you could likely land a well paid job anywhere.
Why are you convinced of that? Unionized protests frequently accomplish institutional change - why do you think Facebook or Twitter would be exempt? If anything a unionized tech force striking would have more bargaining power than other groups since they are educated, specialized, and difficult/expensive for either company to replace en masse.
Yes, but it's not a political end it's an ethical end. Facebook is being leveraged by political actors to cause harm in an unethical way - wanting to prevent this is not a political stance unless you believe that being apolitical is adopting some middle ground between America's Republican and Democrat parties, in which case considering ethics at all is a non-starter since both parties have shied away from imposing any kind of hard regulation on Facebook.
Institutional power doesn't have to be leveraged towards political ends, but if you profit directly from an institution choosing unethical behavior in pursuit of profits then you are also behaving unethically. It's completely reasonable to apply that standard to the best-paid of Facebook's employees, just as it is completely reasonable for those employees to petition against committing more unethical behavior.
My parents are very much of the "no politics at work" generation and I really question why that cultural strain has carried itself into 2020 since it only serves company board members/executives and categorizes rank and file employees as automaton code monkeys who should "shut up and type".
Armchair thought: in this odd period of history where, ostensibly, capitalism "won" as the political system of choice and "the end of history" was declared we have entered an alarming stage of hyper-capitalism mixed with growing discontent/civil unrest. More than ever there seems to be a breathless determination by upper-middle class professionals to not rock the boat in any way in the hopes that these mega-corporations will continue to prop up the stock market, pay out outrageous salaries, and keep the gravy train running. It's a kind of cognitive dissonance where we can see how much damage the big players in tech are wreaking on global society - there's ample evidence - but to recognize and face it would sully the deeply held ideal that tech is some kind of great, benevolent force in our society (more cynically: confronting it would also mean confronting that fact that we as tech workers have ethical responsibilities to society at large that we have at best ignored, at worst defied).
Practically, it's not. Yes, you can catch up on how your cousin's new baby is doing, but you can't disentangle that from the extremist propaganda, disinformation, and real harm that these platforms incur by leveraging human psychology against us. Taking the view that ethics and work are separate silos is hopelessly naive. Almost every profession requires constant awareness and ethics in order to be a benevolent force: doctors, lawyers, builders, scuba gear manufacturers, car designers all have a responsibility to their end user and I can't see how tech is any different. I doubt people would react the same way if this were GM instead of Facebook and their employees were up in arms after learning the car they had been designing and building had a track record of blowing up and killing people.
Yes, and this is why nobody is going after, for example, Facebook HQ's janitorial staff for the moral responsibility of Facebook's actions. Their income remains static in spite of Facebook's quarterly profit so it would be unfair to accuse them of trading their ethics for an income.
There is a fundamental difference when you're talking about a stock-owning, educated, in-demand software engineer, even if they are "just" working on scaling Facebook's image service. They have the institutional power at the company that they could leverage to change the product's outcomes, if they so desired.
Generally I try and shy away from being too alarmist, but I am so disillusioned with the kind of tech worker HN's userbase seems to represent. I think it's a feckless attitude to think that working in one of the best-paid, global, most influential professions in the world right now means that your only obligation is to clock in on time, code whatever you're told to code, take no ownership of the effect your work may have on the general public and collect your fat paycheck at the end of the month.
Why does it sound good to anyone that Facebook employees should be prevented from discussing the ethical implications of the product they sell their labor to create? Facebook complete lack of accountability - internal or governmental - has to date:
and that's really just the tip of the iceberg. If you buy into the notion that Mark Zuckerberg is a nice man in a hoodie trying to run a business that his employees are tearing down with some radical agenda then I'm sorry, but how naive are you? Facebook has a track record of ignoring the consequences of what happens on their platform in order to continue profiting. It's not a mistake, it's the point.
We should be cheering on tech workers challenging the ethics of the work they produce, not talking about how inconvenient it is for Facebook workers to start realizing how questionable the product they're building really is.
This is untrue - different states have different standards by which mail in ballots will be counted. A postmark on or before Election Day is no guarantee your vote will be tallied, depending on where you live.
Direct election interference. Please call your elected representatives and demand action. There is no safe alternative to voting by mail in the middle of a pandemic that the Trump administration has completely bungled a response to.
We are watching the creation of a banana republic in realtime.
Thanks for the link - the 6x in pricing is to enforce the monopoly on delivery of letters rather than all mail items. It only applies to (i) items weighing less than 12.5oz (ii) to the first 1.0oz of a single piece of mail.
Certainly an enforcement of USPS' monopoly on letter delivery, but not a blanket price fixing across all mail items and types.
The USPS would be profitable if it didn't have to pre-fund its pension obligations by an 75 years - an obligation no other government regulated entity must abide by.
I can find no evidence that private competitors must legally charge a higher rate than USPS. Do you have a source for that? My understanding was that USPS had to compete directly with private mail carriers.
Spare me the puerile libertarian arguments for a privatized postal service. There is no good reason for it to be privatized and many Americans lives will be negatively affected by such a change.
1) There are already private mail carriers (FedEx, UPS, et al.). They do not have an obligation to deliver mail in a timely manner anywhere in the continental US and overseas territories. This is fine if you are a city dweller, but private mail carriers notoriously do not guarantee "last mile" delivery. This will cut off many isolated rural communities for whom the USPS is a lifeline to the outside world.
2) USPS receives no tax dollars for their services. They are completely self-sustaining. A Republican congress forced an insane burden for the USPS to pre-fund 75 years worth of pension obligations: there are future postal workers who have not been born yet that the post office must plan pensions for. No other government entity has such an obligation - this is the only reason the USPS is in a financial problem and it is a manufactured crisis. There is no "small government" argument here since your tax dollars don't fund them.
3) The USO pledge states that the USPS must offer affordable rates to customers. Privatized companies have a market incentive to keep prices low, yes, but in practice there is no way that there won't be price collusion/fixing if a handful of private carriers become market dominant. Antitrust is laughably weak in the US right now.
4) DeJoy is using the manufactured crisis from pension obligations as a canard for slashing worker benefits and overpay to the bone. He is intentionally gutting the USPS so the Republicans can point at it and whine about how socialized enterprises don't work as well as private ones. This is why all mail is so delayed right now: postal workers rely on overtime to ensure that all mail is delivered in a timely manner.
Eye-opening how many HN comments are framing this guy as a demented political extremist. He’s a whistleblower exposing one of the most frightening threats to modern democracy that exists.
We are beyond the speculation point here. Facebook has demonstrated that it has the capability to spread misinformation and sway political opinion very effectively and never for the right reasons. The pandemic is the most recent example of Facebook’s fuckery: post something that tells people that Covid is caused by 5G and that Bill Gates wants to implants microchips in you? You might get a small disclaimer on your FB post saying that “parts of it” “may be” inaccurate. You are constantly fed anything to keep you engaged with the platform and increasing Facebook’s bottom line.
Zuckerburg has just spun to Congress that Facebook is going to extreme lengths to moderate their platform - this employee’s testimony is proof that Facebook doesn’t care in the least or worse, they may be actively trying to help along candidates who will be politically lenient towards their behavior. We just discovered a “bug” caused Republican ads to show at a more frequent rate than Democratic ads - I don’t know what’s more worrying: that a bug on Facebook could swing the election or that it wasn’t a bug at all.
People need to stop with the “I know good people at Facebook” B.S. It’s beside the point. Facebook is a rogue actor that has enormous social and political power to completely mislead the general public into practically any belief. They have continued to demonstrate that they cannot be trusted with this power. This man should be praised as a whistleblower for exposing the charade that is an unregulated Facebook. We need more like him in tech to show people how serious the problem is. Give me a break with the analyses on whether he should have been fired or not and recognize the scope of the problem he is trying to warn is about. The quality of our democracy is absolutely at stake.
Old adage about incompetence and maliciousness being indistinguishable applies, but having whistleblowers land in jail MULTIPLE times should raise eyebrows for such a young news organization.
Wondering if The Intercept belongs in the nether world of "news" organizations (read: thinly veiled propaganda outlets) along with InfoWars, RT, etc.
I often read about the divides between Zuckerberg and other decision-makers in the company, but I’m always unsure what the divides revolve around. Could anyone in the know clarify what the stakes are here? What is Zuck’s vision? What are dissenters unhappy with?
Last week it was uncovered that mass hysterectomies had taken place at an ICE facility in Georgia without the informed consent of patients - this falls under the UN's definition of genocide.
This policy shift towards targeting exclusively Latinos came under the Trump administration calling Mexican immigrants "rapists" who bring crime and drugs. Melania Trump is a white immigrant who was granted the exclusive EB-1 green card for "extraordinary abilities".
I find it nearly impossible in these circumstances to come to the conclusion that the state is not explicitly catering to white supremacist ideology...and immigration policy is only the tip of the iceberg.