Re:Facebook is embedding tracking data inside the photos you...
by manyxcxi on Saturday July 13, 2019 @01:40PM
(#20429176)
I can vote for the people (at every level) that I think will spend the taxes I am legally obligated to pay in a way I agree with and I can follow up with successively vociferous concerns (letters < community organization < protest, etc), but at a certain point my freedom (or life) can be threatened.
Employers can’t (yet) do the same. I’m under no obligation to them to do what I morally disagree with because I can always quit playing their game.
All I can do to quit my country is uproot from everything I’ve ever known, including my family, to another country that I agree with more that will also let me in.
They’re completely different situations and I’m pretty sure we all recognize that, but I’ll add my own personal anecdotes:
Employer
I don’t like the idea of software patents or generic business patents that can be summed up with “... do it on a computer”. I created some really awesome things for an employer many moons ago that were essentially revolutionizing how people in this very particular niche could more efficiently do their jobs. What did I really do though? I put together some open source tools completely foreign to this niche, glued them together with some nifty ideas and code that I wrote, put a decent unified UI on it, and packaged it up as a virtual machine appliance for our people in the field. My company wanted me to sign the invention away so they could patent it, and were going to put in 5 different applications. It was sign on the dotted line or walk, I walked at significant financial penalty.
Government
My dad’s from Libya. I lived there for a while growing up, and all my dad’s family is still in Tripoli. They all hated Gadaffi, and with the Arab spring uprising- things were getting bad. I joined in some protests across the US asking for intervention. Welp, we got what we asked for but not what we wanted. Turns out governments and geopolitics are tricky.
Employers can’t (yet) do the same. I’m under no obligation to them to do what I morally disagree with because I can always quit playing their game.
All I can do to quit my country is uproot from everything I’ve ever known, including my family, to another country that I agree with more that will also let me in.
They’re completely different situations and I’m pretty sure we all recognize that, but I’ll add my own personal anecdotes:
Employer
I don’t like the idea of software patents or generic business patents that can be summed up with “... do it on a computer”. I created some really awesome things for an employer many moons ago that were essentially revolutionizing how people in this very particular niche could more efficiently do their jobs. What did I really do though? I put together some open source tools completely foreign to this niche, glued them together with some nifty ideas and code that I wrote, put a decent unified UI on it, and packaged it up as a virtual machine appliance for our people in the field. My company wanted me to sign the invention away so they could patent it, and were going to put in 5 different applications. It was sign on the dotted line or walk, I walked at significant financial penalty.
Government
My dad’s from Libya. I lived there for a while growing up, and all my dad’s family is still in Tripoli. They all hated Gadaffi, and with the Arab spring uprising- things were getting bad. I joined in some protests across the US asking for intervention. Welp, we got what we asked for but not what we wanted. Turns out governments and geopolitics are tricky.