It’s really not so black and white. By paying taxes you’re technically facilitating their efforts, so approximately everyone is complicit.

This is a political problem that can only be solved politically (by voting) not by some tech companies doing small scale boycott

> This is a political problem that can only be solved politically (by voting) not by some tech companies doing small scale boycott

Yet, big companies have had boycotts internally and that lead to the company changing its course. https://www.cnbc.com/2018/06/01/google-will-not-renew-a-cont... And, yeah, sometimes the efforts only work for a short period but they still had an effect.

Voting is nice but - most often - you don't get a real choice with voting. You choose one corrupt politician for another because more money == more speech. The uninformed masses who are more concerned with their own daily lives (divorce, family deaths, their children, etc.) are what are making large decisions for the rest of the informed. The cycle perpetuates.

The question isn't if you can actually cause Google or another big tech company to refuse to provide services, the question is if you can actually change the results with it.

Project Maven continues, now run by Palantir. Google's refusal to continue the project did nothing but slow down the project by a few months.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-12-14/palantir-...

In fact, considering the goals of Project Maven (roughly making sure you're blowing up what and who you intend and avoiding collateral damage), if you consider Google a leader in AI, you could make the perverse argument that you're actually killing people by reducing the effectiveness and delaying the timeline of the program. I'm not saying I've researched this enough to say that this is a correct or even plausible argument, merely that it is possible.

From my reading of available publications by the airforce on maven, the calculus was actually that they had a fixed threshold for risk, and being able to analyze more data would allow them to act in more cases with that same risk level. To probably oversimplify, if they were ok with 25% innocent causalities, increasing efficiency 100x would just let them kill 100x more often at the same ratio. Disclosure: ex-google

> By paying taxes you’re technically facilitating their efforts, so approximately everyone is complicit

You're only complicit if you pay taxes.

Refuse to pay or reduce your income below the taxable threshold and you will no longer be complicit.

Still complicit because income tax is not the only federal tax.

You have to pay taxes. You don't have to provide tech to the ICE.

Politics is a lot more than just voting, especially when you have a two-party system that is vulnerable to ratcheting and deception.

>You have to pay taxes.

Not really, no. You don't have to make money. You're able to live a life free of income and taxes, live like a vagabond.

You choose to earn enough income that you have to pay taxes on it. If you decide to get a job that pays you enough that you have to pay taxes, you're complicit.

And if a suffice t amount of people were to decide to live as vagabonds, society would collapse, and you'd be complicit in the millions of deaths that would cause.

No such conclusion if everyone stops selling software to ICE until they stop their grossly inhumane actions.

You can live an agrarian sustenance lifestyle and society wouldn't collapse... That's what society was for thousands of years.

Again, you choose to make a taxable income; you choose to pay taxes.

Remember that next time you use any form of transportation powered by fossil fuel.

Remember that any time you support the marijuana market (legal or illegal) as a purchaser and indirectly add demand to the curve that feeds the cartels in Mexico.

> Remember that any time you support the marijuana market (legal or illegal) as a purchaser and indirectly add demand to the curve that feeds the cartels in Mexico.

I hope you support drug legalization, otherwise this attitude is massively hypocritical.

And please explain why buying legal marijuana supports the cartels? Are people buying Mexican brick weed from dispensaries now?

Buying legal marijuana is the same as participating in any combined market. There are significant groups of people who buy both illegal and legal just because of previous connections or the inconvenience (driving across state lines to get the legal hookup). So if you buy legally, you are causing competition for the legal supply which can cause just enough shortage to push demand onto the illegal market.

Until people refuse to smoke illegal marijuana en mass, the markets are effectively the same.

> hope you support drug legalization, otherwise this attitude is massively hypocritical.

This is completely orthogonal to legalization. As long as the cartels still get it into the country at a competitive price to local growers (legal or illegal), the cartels are being supported.

> Until people refuse to smoke illegal marijuana en mass, the markets are effectively the same.

Which will only happen when it's legalized, which is exactly my point.

Even when it’s legalized, that won’t be enough unless it’s so cheap that the cartel literally can’t compete. With how heavily legal weed is taxed, a ton of people will be tempted to continue buying from their dealers.

Do you want the obvious answer? Clearly I don't advocate high taxes that would leave room for the black market to undercut the price. I've had this exact argument so many times...

BTW, I'm not misleading you in the other thread. I know no one wants to believe that their own government could do that, but unfortunately they did. It's an "open secret", something like NSA spying was circa 2005.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bandar_bin_Sultan_Al_Saud

Bandar helped negotiate the 1985 Al Yamamah deal, a series of massive arms sales by the United Kingdom to Saudi Arabia worth GB£40 billion, including the sale of more than 100 warplanes. After the deal was signed, British arms manufacturer British Aerospace (now BAE Systems) allegedly funnelled secret payments of at least GB£1 billion into two Saudi embassy accounts in Washington, in yearly instalments of up to GB£120 million over at least 10 years. He allegedly took money for personal use out of the accounts, as the purpose of one of the accounts was to pay the operating expenses of his private Airbus A340. According to investigators, there was "no distinction between the accounts of the embassy, or official government accounts [...], and the accounts of the royal family." The payments were discovered during a Serious Fraud Office investigation, which was stopped in December 2006 by attorney general Lord Goldsmith.[68][69] In 2009, he hired Louis Freeh as his legal representative for the Al-Yamamah arms scandal.[70]

A court affidavit filed on 3 February 2015 claims that Zacarias Moussaoui was a courier between Osama bin Laden and Turki bin Faisal Al Saud in the late 1990s, and that Turki introduced Moussaoui to Bandar.[72] Zacarias Moussaoui stated on oath and wrote to Judge George B. Daniels that Saudi royal family members, including Prince Bandar, donated to Al-Qaeda and helped finance the 11 September attacks. The Saudi government continues to deny any involvement in the 9/11 plot, and claims there is no evidence to support Moussaoui's allegations in spite of numerous previous intense investigations, noting that Moussaoui's own lawyers presented evidence of his mental incompetence during his trial. Leaked information from the redacted portion of the 9/11 Commission Report states that two of the 9/11 hijackers received $US130,000 in payment from Bandar's bank account.

> It's not about your feelings. If you facilitate their efforts, no matter how much you wish to disclaim responsibility, you have still facilitated their efforts.

Obeying the law is like that.