Most of those "450 signatures" never saw the letter prior to distribution. There were some pragmatic debates without consensus, many bringing up your concerns, then silence, then this gets sent out of nowhere. If the signatories had been consulted prior to distribution, I wouldn't be surprised if the number fell to... maybe 10?
This really reflects our political sphere. Partisans ignoring even the input of allies, blindly charging forward with irrational demands, and alienating rather than convincing the moderate majority. They operate as if this is a movie, where the hero makes a grand statement and instantly win support...
We already have a mechanism for choosing the leader of these various institutions. And whatever powers we give to these institutions, we have to recognize that they will change leadership as quickly as a single election.
Ultimately, it should be a political issue... first and foremost. We may not have the best political system possible, but its the best that we all can agree to. As such, we should rely upon the culture of this country to provide us the leaders who we would be proud to give these powers to.
Naw, dawg, when things get ugly, you have to resist where you can. I'm guessing you can't agree, but there's a fair number of people who think we're in a Germany 1937 situation. We have a president who in all likelihood enlisted Russian interference in the election, who shares plenty of rhetorical similarity to actual fascists. We have a Congress that is moving as fast as it can to stack the judiciary, which in turn will hear future election cases. Things are getting grim. I've lived and worked in places where these processes have played out - like Hungary - and anyone who says it can't happen here is kidding themselves.
Speeding tickets are also people who were caught committing a crime.
Regardless, it is a new policy to put Adults who cross with children (even though many of these Adults are the parents of those children) into jail.
I for one, believe that there are more humane ways to treat boarder-crossers who are crossing with their family. Sure, maybe put the lone crossers into jail, but if they're coming over with kids, then I'd hope that the judges / immigration agents / etc. etc. have power to show compassion in those cases.
So yeah, put some of them in jail, and put others into other forms of detention that don't necessarily involve separating kids from their parents. And yes, I recognize that Coyotes exist (professional illegal boarder crossers who specialize in trafficking children into America), so I recognize that ICE has a hard job here. But a repeat-offender like a Coyote could be caught on the 2nd or 3rd attempt. I recognize that ICE needs a plan to deal with Coyotes appropriately, and that not every adult-with-children is necessarily the parent.
There's a lot of ways to deal with the problem, and its sad that the current administration thinks that separating families is the best way forward.
If separations are to happen, I want it to happen only to Coyotes and the children they're smuggling. We need to be careful to keep the real parents together with their real children.
Most unlawful residents did not enter unlawfully, they overstayed on visas or in some other way went from a legal stay to an unlawful one. These people would not be committing a crime.
Engage accordingly.
This happens any time anyone is sent to prison for any reason, no?
You're also allowed to be here if you're seeking asylum.
But, at the end of the day, if your basis for the family border separation policy is to defend it with "well, criminals also have their families broken up," then I'm not sure how to convince you it's right to care about and have empathy for families and other human beings.
Not at all. I just find it curious that this one particular application of what is actually a common policy has suddenly become protest-worthy. By all means protest it in its entirety (if you think it’s appropriate for children to serve sentences alongside their parents in the same cells) but anything else just looks politically motivated.
What would be humane treatment? Hold kids together with parents? Same people will be outraged by putting kids behind (hypotethical) bars.
b) The effects are actually even worse than they are in the jail/prison situation. The kids themselves are incarcerated, as they don't have family that they can be placed with. We know that there are many migrants who have been deported after being separated from their children, who are now still in custody.
"At the moment, the government’s rolls include hundreds of children in shelters and temporary foster care programs who were taken from an adult at the border, whether a parent, grandparent or some other companion. About 13,000 children who came to the United States on their own were being held in federally contracted shelters this month, more than five times the number in May 2017." https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/08/us/migrant-children-famil...
I also disagree that we should limit this discussion to political. Companies (esp the size of Amazon) are hardly affected by politics, they are often judged more harshly by the court of public opinion.
Folks who want to prevent what they see as disaster should use all the legal mechanisms possible to enable discourse and change the course of events.
God forbid workers have say in how their work is used, instead of just being robots. Smart enough to build the technology, but apparently not qualified enough to have input on limiting its nefarious and anti-social uses at the hand of an executive branch the employees probably don't favor.
Can you explain how discriminating against minority members of society is somehow logically relatable to selling a technological product that immediately expands the governments surface area of an easily abusable power? Because I don't know where bakeries not selling doughnuts to gay people, purely based on personal perspectives, really comes into play with not selling a technological platform that enables governments and its officials to more easily abuse and greatly expand the power they currently have.
From the article:
>On stage, he acknowledged that big tech’s products might be misused, even exploited, by autocrats. But rather than meaningfully explain how Amazon will act to prevent the bad uses of its own technology, Bezos suggested we wait for society’s “immune response.”
>Law enforcement has already started using facial recognition with virtually no public oversight or debate or restrictions on use from Amazon.
But where do we draw a bright line? Sure, maybe we want religious people baking cakes for gay weddings. But should Muslim bakers be forced to draw likenesses of the Prophet Muhammad if a customer requests it? Should a bikini wax establishment that only works on women be forced to wax the intimate areas of a pre-op transwoman?
It's an evolving conversation. There is no line to be drawn. We learn, we codify, we move on.
Let's stick to applicable conversations, shall we?
Unless you a have a principle that everyone agrees on over what is 'applicable' and what isn't, that veers pretty close to begging the question - conversations that support your point are declared 'applicable', while ones that bring up difficult questions to your point of view get dismissed as off-topic.
Getting back to the original topic, if you're saying that "employees' political views should be taken into account in company decisions", the difficult question is "what about employees whose political views are repugnant to you?" The example of the cake bakery is easy to dismiss because it seems covered by existing law, but what about other cases?
E.g. if a medical device company's employees are religious, should they force it to not sell to abortion providers? Should Trump supporters agitate to only manufacture in the US?
But that's not what's happening.
>the difficult question is "what about employees whose political views are repugnant to you?
Why is this a question? What part of any statement that I made lead to the implication that only a certain subset of employee's should be heard from?
>The example of the cake bakery is easy to dismiss because it seems covered by existing law
It's not only easily dismissable if the conversation called for it, it's actually just irrelevant to the current situation. They touch on two completely different subjects and contexts. A company targeting specific individuals on an ad-hoc basis has no bearing on a company empowering a government with its product. You have to strip both situations down to "employee has opinion, will business listen?" for the current conversation to make any sense. I'd say that'd be absurd to do but I guess that's what we're actually doing.
>if a medical device company's employees are religious, should they force it to not sell to abortion providers?
There is an appreciable difference between a company taking its employee's views and wishes into consideration and obeying laws. There is no law stating that Amazon has to sell this technology. It'd be hard to make such a law, for a whole host of reasons. I'd be happy to expand on such reasons since we're going to start having a civics conversation at any point now.
These kind of analogies, again, are fundamentally mistaken. Because they confuse different issues, different subjects, and different contexts. It's a bad abstraction.
That is a line.
> want their country to fill with illegal immigrants
and selling facial recognition software to local police departments in main. It's disingenuous to conflate unlike positions. That's not to say I agree with one or or the other, but lets at least pretend to be honest about the comparisons.
Pretty good if you want some perspective.
Automation and outsourcing are the primary things that have lowered the wages of American workers as it reduced demand for low skill and other manual labor work, not immigrants seeking a better life.
There are plenty of legal things that I think it’s fine with being non-neutral on. A private company SHOULD be non-neutral based on the whims of the employees! Who else steers their ship?
If AWS is non-neutral, will that hurt their ability to attract clients? Absolutely. I'm the first one in line to abolish ICE, but if AWS starts kicking people they don't like off of AWS I'll also be the first one to stop using it. Sure, we agree on ICE, what about companies that make violent video games? Companies that make firearm accessories?
They serve a legitimate law enforcement function in our country, which by last check doesn’t have open borders and prosecutes those that cross illegally?
Note that I'm not saying we should be getting rid of Customs and Border Patrol, nor am I saying anything crazy like we shouldn't have borders. The problem with ICE is that they're a weird pet agency under DHS that has a lot of power, minimal oversight, and a history of abusing their power.
They also do some exceptionally terrible things like snatching immigrants from courtrooms instead of you know, using local police forces like they should.
I don't think people realize it was only formed in 2003...
What exactly is being advocated in abolishing ICE when you bring up that another agency was doing its duties? Are you saying that other agency can take over those duties again?
Most of the abolish ICE crowd just wants to get rid of ICE and ICE's duties. I don't think they want the CBP doing roughly the same thing ICE is doing. They'll just demand we abolish CBP.
Ok, nod, nod...
> The letter also contained demands to kick Palantir, the software firm that powers much of ICE's deportation and tracking program, off Amazon Web Services and to institute employee oversight for ethical decisions.
Nope, lost me. These should not be lumped together for a myriad of reasons. First, you are diluting your original goal. Second, you risk AWS being seen as non-neutral based on the whims of employees' feelings about a company (as opposed to something illegal). Third, you cannot be consistent with this approach (e.g. all the gov cloud stuff). Fourth, there is a clear delineation between computing services like AWS and targeted software efforts like facial recognition systems, like the difference between a phone company and a weapons manufacturer. Fifth, AWS is not value added enough nor can it see enough of what's going on with its customers for this to be any more than virtue signalling.
If you want to ban companies you disagree with from AWS, I disagree with it, but at least separate the requests. The Google employees you are following in the footsteps of are not demanding that Android calling be disabled for certain companies or Google search be restricted from use by them. Maybe Amazon should also not ship any products to that company too?