Re:GitHub tries to quell employee anger over its ICE contract
by mc32 on Thursday October 31, 2019 @04:07PM
(#21413139)
So ultimately we’re societies built on laws. Sometimes we have embargoes. We don’t allow sales to Iran or Cuba, but we allow sales to China and Russia and a bunch of others. Most companies stay neutral and don’t take a stance. Walmart and Amazon don’t check you or me for our good citizen creds before selling goods to us. We could be ex felons for all they care. Unless the gov says don’t sell something to X, then we can. It’s a bit of circular reasoning but that’s all we have. We build human institutions to support our human activities.
Re:GitHub tries to quell employee anger over its ICE contract
by shadowgovt on Thursday October 31, 2019 @04:16PM
(#21413251)
Sure, no disagreement there. But I'll note that those institutions all have the liberty (with the exception of specific legal constraints like Title VII) to refrain from providing service to any of the categories you described. In fact, quite a few companies won't hire ex-felons; there's no law requiring them to do so at the federal level. And a recent Supreme Court case indicated that nothing in the law stops a bakery from refusing to make a wedding cake for a gay couple.
These are sliding scales of "how much do I care about the metadata on my customers," and most companies find it optimal to set the scales nearly to zero to maximize revenue. That's not a universal truism.
Re:GitHub tries to quell employee anger over its ICE contract
by ThrowawayR2 on Thursday October 31, 2019 @04:41PM
(#21413504)
> "If a company declares selling computers to the legitimate government of a country is "Just doing business," then, well, that's IBM during the reign of the Nazi party, and history has held them accountable regardless."
Seems more like a historical footnote than any real accountability. IBM is still around and the era where "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" and had a immense workforce occurred well after the WWII era.
Re:GitHub tries to quell employee anger over its ICE contract
by shadowgovt on Thursday October 31, 2019 @04:56PM
(#21413642)
The fact they're noted in the history books as aiding the Holocaust carries a weight to it different than the dollars-and-cents accounting, but if you're interested more in practical effect: they still have to push harder than peer companies to hire because they have a mixed reputation (that younger companies don't have, even if that's merely because they haven't had time to grow one yet).
To short-circuit it, let's establish as ground-truth that some people think "neutral" is the same has having no position, and some people think "neutral" is a position one can try to take that will have consequences, same as any other position, and at the end of the day, the effects are the same whether it's not a position or a position so the question of "position-ness" of neutrality is moot in a discussion of outcomes.
If a company declares selling computers to the legitimate government of a country is "Just doing business," then, well, that's IBM during the reign of the Nazi party, and history has held them accountable regardless.