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A comment on Google fires 28 employees involved in sit-in protest over $1.2B Israel contract. Parent comment

Re:Google fires 28 employees involved in sit-in protest over... by ryandrake on Thursday April 18, 2024 @05:08PM (#40080737)
I'd like to push back on "raising awareness." At this point is anyone in the country not "aware" that there's a war going on? Did anyone wake up today, read the news, and say, "Gosh, I had no idea this was an important issue! Incredible!" More importantly, did this action have even the slightest effect of changing any country's policy or affect the war in any way? It doesn't seem like anything positive, or even material was accomplished here--besides those employees getting fired.

EDIT: Huh--I guess I'm wrong then. I thought this was more well-known than it was.

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Re:Google fires 28 employees involved in sit-in protest over... by arcastroe on Thursday April 18, 2024 @05:25PM (#40080887)
Of course, but what I wasn't aware of (until today's news) was that Google had signed a 1.2 Billion contract to provide cloud-computing and artificial intelligence services for the Israeli government and military.

Not saying I agree or disagree. Just saying that the protest succeeded in raising awareness.

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Re:Google fires 28 employees involved in sit-in protest over... by DiogenesKynikos on Thursday April 18, 2024 @05:12PM (#40080783)
People may not be aware that Google is helping the Israeli military.
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Re:Google fires 28 employees involved in sit-in protest over... by pas on Thursday April 18, 2024 @10:25PM (#40082886)
sure, but does it matter in any material way?

Israel or the IDF can buy this anywhere, or even just build it in-house (and there's a huge cost to spending a long time on procurement if someone can get Google to cancel this, but unfortunately it doesn't matter for anyone in Gaza right now)

and while there are a lot of objections to this (why not spend it on something a lot more useful, feeding Google is bad, etc), awareness of this, or even cancelling this does nothing to move the needle on the actual very high-prio issue :/

so all this has a huge cost to them (they lost their jobs, emotional distress) and in the end ends up as performative as Twitter/Mastodon threads :(

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