Blind, which I realize is a bit of the wild west, is full of racist anti-immigration/pro ICE hatred. Obviously, you can see where users work/worked, and it’s every company you could imagine.
The sad reality is that a lot of people will do what they can to support racist agendas, possibly even motivate them to work at certain companies as it feels moralizing to their hateful beliefs.
I don’t know that things are that black and white.
Do you feel the same about the billions of consumers who buy and use the products these companies make?
Consumer pays $1.10 for a can of coke, $0.10 of that goes to ad-tech, the consumer watches some coke ads, ad-tech pays $0.05 to the publisher and the consumer receives $0.05 in benefits in the form of "free ad-supported content" (which they already paid $0.10 for).
The only way for consumers to avoid this is to just stop spending money with any brand that advertises online, which is completely unrealistic and a much taller ask than asking employees to give up their deal with the devil (and work for just about anyone else except big tech).
Does your argument still hold up?
>”employees are making the actual thing that inflicts harm while consumers' actions are completely diffused and many steps removed from the harm they cause.”
“employees are making the actual thing that inflicts harm while consumers' actions directly cause deadly harm.”
I’m not arguing that we shouldn’t be voting with our wallets and supporting these people but your initial argument is flawed. They produce goods precisely because consumers buy them…
Can you explain why you think it wouldn't?
Tons of principled engineers choose not to pursue opportunities at military contractors, for instance, and this is not widely seen as unreasonable.
Or they could stop drinking coke? But I guess that is too much to ask.
Stores still fund the advertising industry but to nowhere near the extent that name brand goods do.
You can't buy a car or any smartphones you've ever heard of, you won't find an ISP that doesn't advertise online, and good luck finding a decent job without supporting ad-tech.
A big chain like kroger, for example, is spending around 10 to 100M. Coke is spending around $5B.
Avoiding national branded products goes a long way in avoiding contributing to the problem.
Things don't need to be all or nothing.
If the goal is to decrease money going into advertisement budgets, then the best thing you can do is buy store brand when possible. Even if both products are ultimately made from Nestle corp, the cheaper store brand will send less money into Nestle's pockets which means less money for advertising.
That's what I mean by "avoiding nationally branded products". A package of "signature frozen peas" will taste just as good as the "birds eye green peas" without sending money to a major company (Looks like all the major companies have spun off their frozen food departments, but at one time this was a Nestle brand. I spent too much time looking into major frozen food brands :D).
The advertisement budgets for the grocers are simply a lot smaller than that of the national brands across the board. It also doesn't seem (to me at least) to have been really spent on invasive advertisements.
They are the victims, not the source.
If you want to put the blame on consumers, at least show them on your adverts, product packaging, etc. all the morally abject methods used in the production of the product.
If you hide it from them, all the blame is on you.
You really think adtech is the way to avoid starving on the street? There are a hell of a lot of jobs between entry level and adtech dev that could give you the same basic peace of mind.
Also, you can retain your morals and choose a career, it is optional to select where you work as it’s hopefully voluntary.
Thankfully I don't live in the US and I don't work for anything even remotely related to this. I don't know if I would have the fortitude in the current US job market (based on what I read here) to threat the well being of the wife and daughter by taking principled stances.
You can call it an "easy buck", and it is just coping. An easy way to make some poor schlemiel creating a miserable report with user location data during his sprint into a greedy bastard that is just enriching his bank account out of the suffering of plenty.
If many were to sacrifice their morals out of financial pressure easily (the control over which is in increasingly few hands) the path the US is treading becomes pretty deterministic... We've seen it in the movies and read it in the books.
You guys seem to need collective action and civil disobedience.
Then again.. maybe the will for collective action comes only after the repossessions...
One of the reasons I chose to move to Europe is because I value the mininal safety nets and labor protections on this side of the pond. Yes, I make less money and pay more taxes but I believe this is how society should work, I reject the hyper individualism that ignores any sort of collective.
But I am also not naive. Expecting individuals to take the burden for decisions way beyond their control is silly. It takes immense fortitude to threaten the well being of those dear to you based on principle, when the only outcome is your own suffering (the company will likely find another employee right away anyway).
No charity from church or family needed. Just the State- and it does not care about your religion or sexual preferences.
You do realize this is what most criminals of the world just so happen to say as well, right?
Where is the line?
It's an extremely unfair system based on coercion - you are beaten down into submission by the implicit threat that without work you won't be able to make ends meet.
Maybe you have a family that can support you financially. Maybe you already own the place where you live and could save up money over an extended period that you can weather a storm. If you are in these situations, that's great, but it is also an extremely privileged position to be in.
Thankfully, that isn't most of them. Despite the job market not being as good as it used to be, the vast majority of software engineers in the US could still find another job to pay the bills before becoming homeless and starving.
At the time I was still paying rent and needed employment to keep my visa. I also had little savings, and an ill parent that depended on me. I certainly couldn't take the principled stance of "fuck this, I'm out".
My point is that if you are in the position to take a principled stance, good for you. Maybe you already own your home, maybe you had time to accumulate savings, maybe you can do a few interviews and land a less evil job even in the current market (and perhaps a pay cut won't be a massive blow in you life). All that is awesome, but also a position of relative privilege.
Prescribing principled stance as universal without recognizing this is just cruelty though.
None of the individual acts seem evil. Conducting a census isn't evil. Collating the data isn't evil. Arresting people with the wrong papers isn't necessarily evil. Driving a train isn't evil. Operating a switch isn't evil. Processing paperwork isn't evil.
Look what's proposed now: Adtech has the data, this would feed into ICE systems leading to arrests, flights are conducted, and people get put into prison camps like CECOT where they have no recourse and where people are already talking about forced labor.
So no, I'm not saying to these folks "you're literally causing Auschwitz". That's a famous Vernichtungslager, and that's not true yet.
But people getting locked up in Concentrationslager or Arbeitslager (like historically : Mittelbau-Dora, Flossenbürg, Mauthausen, and Monowitz). I think we're getting there.
I guess the question is: at which point do you decide maybe to wear extra layers or skip a meal instead? We're not there yet. The chain has many links. Eternal vigilance is needed to make sure they don't actually link up.
(ps. Imagine if I was posting this in 2024! Can I exchange this timeline for another please? )
But it may well become true soon.
From the angle of your 2015 post, I can at least see where you're coming from. Modern adtech is much more granular and up to date than a census ever was.
And hopefully the worst case can be prevented.
I reject that societal and systemic issues can be fixed by individual action, unless as an individual you are extremely powerful (and the ones that are typically are the ones causing the societal and systemic harm).
As an common man you can do small things. Do a lousy job when processing the paperwork of evil. Malicious cooperation to the powers that be. Small acts of charity. That sort of thing.
Systemic change can only be achieved through collective action. Easier said than done.
The world is cursed. Life is tough even at the best of times. The system as it is ensures compliance through coercion and threats.
I honestly believe we would agree more than disagree on the current state of things. I just reject the approach that individual action is a way out of this sort of mess.
But I ask him, "But would you work for Lex Luthor?"
He doesn't have a good comeback to that.
Anyway, I (mostly, hopefully) try to make my small corner of the world a happy place. And I hope everyone else does for theirs.
Also, layers are resining from positions in doj they find unethical. It is not like the jobs for them were easier to find.
Everything else is an excuse
Sure, I don't earn half a million a year total comp to kiss some billionaire's ass, but I still have a very comfortable lifestyle that is well above the median.
Some of those folks were cultural leaders in the orgs I belonged to. Some even passed for nice people.
No, my conscience is clean.
You're basically saying "There isnt anything inherently wrong about working for the 4th Reich"
Not all LEOs are brown shirts, In my experience, few are, but they give the lot a bad rap.
Treating LEOs uniformly as evil is just counterproductive
No one becomes a cop because they want to be nice and help vulnerable people. Some might say they did but that is some coping technique. Being a cop involves exerting violence towards people who are vulnerable and desperate, and to become one you have to be fine with this. Some would say that this alone is enough to deem a person ethically dubious.
Even if one would accept the premise that society requires some degree of organised violence towards its members, one would also have to handle the question of accountability. Reasonably this violence should be accountable in relation to the victims of it, and police institutions inherently are not.
I think that we should also not that the other person above used "childishly" to denote something negative, apparently they don't think of kids as the light of the world and childish as something fun and inspiring. This is something that makes me quite suspicious of their morals.
Your other note is also well taken, it does however not imply that anything a kid or teen does is OK or automatically positive.
Finally, it's OK to be suspicious. I am too. What I am saying is that one cannot just make the decision "all cops are evil or must be treated as such" and then hope for a good outcome in all cases. I argue it's a better policy to keep an open mind and decide on a case by case basis.
However, many others have come to this conclusion and made a rather long tradition out of their arguments.
I strongly agree. There's even the argument to be made that if no legislation exists, even if you're anti X, you might get incentivized to build a company for X just so it's not a fan of X at the helm of the top company for X.
Blaming it on the employees is pointless. It's the law that should dictate what's allowed and what isn't and if the lawmaking or enforcement isn't working you probably want some "good" people in those companies.
Perhaps the conflict is that you just want to make people who work in ad tech feel bad, and don't care whether or not they enable ICE? That's fine, I suppose, there's industries I feel the same way about. But then we don't have much to talk about and I'm not sure what you hope to gain from being here. To me opposing ICE is very important - I think tobacco companies are pretty bad too, but if ICE sent out a request for cartons of cigarettes I'd shovel praise on them for declining.
Yes—and one of the tools we have for that is shunning.
If enough of us who are appalled and disgusted by the state of things, and the people who willingly lend themselves to creating said state, make our disgust with those people known, it can lead to some of them choosing to act differently, because they care about being thought well of by their fellow techies.
Now let me say the same: But those tools buy Teslas and $8 donuts and cardboard apartments in trendy neighborhoods for people too young to understand how money works.
There, now there's no longer a high horse concern.
Hey, thanks for doing the right thing.
It takes real courage and it costs to have principles. And just like I detest those that fall for the money I have insane respect for those that stand up.
In the words of the XO from the Alfa class submarine to his CO in The Hunt for Red October: "You've killed us, you ass."
I would argue that whatever is happening now is part of the revenge of the nerds once the nerds remain unsatisfied despite the material possessions they acquired as software ate the world.
People deeply disconnected from the real world, seeing numbers and thinking with numbers without understanding the underlying realities of those numbers is a trait of any low touch system that developers and other IT professionals operate within.
Just yesterday apparently when asked Trump said "it's just two people" that were executed by ICE and steered the conversation when he was pushed to elaborate.
Probably from tech perspective ICE is incredibly well working, in tech world you can take away the livelihood of thousands of people by a single line of a code that changes an algorithm that bans someone or re-sorts the search results. Someone loses their Youtube account they built for years due to algorithm misfiring, someone loses their developer account on an App Store and can't even get a reason for it.
The tech world is very used to operate in a fascist high efficiency environment that enshittifies everything that touches but keeps improving on some selected KPI. Maybe they wish it doesn't happen but they are not going to sacrifice higher numbers for the lives of a few people. Welcome to the highly efficient(according to selected KPI) new world order.
Major political groups:
Liberals/centrists - maintain order/decorum at all costs
Fascists - gain power at all costs, in groups of decreasing size
Libertarians - reduce taxes at all costs
Leftists - argue for an equal society but never get there
Conservatives - return to monke
Gaining power is at all cost as a fascist trait is a good point, Tech companies do that all the time too so techies are often accustomed with that.
Its main mode of operation is fish-net-style catching brown people on the streets and making them sign voluntary deportation. That allows to bypass any court orders and any requirements of the law (like hearing, lawyer, etc).
Edit: to the commenter below:
>I care because my children are approaching the workforce and I want their opportunities to open up to them
do you really want your children to work in strawberry fields in CA in 100+ degrees weather? That is the opportunities which mostly get open when you remove the migrants, legal or illegal, that ICE is targeting.
I love how the accounts defending ICE are always brand new.
"Wow this looks just like the rise of the nazis!"
Which was covered extensively during my history classes.
Why did you even have all the school schootings if you don't use that stupid second ammendmend thing you have? This is the tyranical government you've all been waiting for.
Just because we currently have our own right wing populist faschists rearing their heads again, doesn't mean that the parallels of the current events in the US and the rise of the Nazis aren't real and glaring to someone who has had this as part of their basic education curriculum.
https://web.archive.org/web/20250503162240/https://www.verfa...
If you want to know: In my personal opinion that conflict is fucked beyond repair because a small group of powerful people on both sides benefit from it, while a huge number of deep interpersonal conflicts and histories fuel it, with any moderates getting squashed by their own side. So I wouldn't send weapons, but I'd send humanitarian aid or the blue helmets. That whole region is thoroughly fucked beyond my pay grade.
Use your words, direwolf. Even if your moral outrage is valid, calling everyone you dislike a "Nazi" is unhinged.
This dualist thinking seems to be a particular US thing, based on your two party system.
I see the erosion of the rule of law and decency in the US, the persecution of minorities, the populism, the defamation of journalism as "lügenpresse" and alignment of media to the party line, the personal police force (what the fuck is ICE doing in Italy), the person cult around a single madman, the violence without consequence, the fancy SS/SA style cosplay uniform by the head of ICE, and I think "that looks a lot like the stuff we learned about in school".
Another way of phrasing this is that it's a call to stop assuming good faith discussion on the part of the boosters, stop being derailed by pondering nuance, and focus on putting the brakes on the new Nazi movement. History doesn't repeat but we're teetering on the edge of a large-scale horrific rhyme.
The recent tragedies are indeed thoroughly depressing for all of us, but we shouldn’t let our emotional reactions destroy our ability to reason and think objectively about history and statistics. We can feel and think. Some of us believe enforcement of laws is the villain in this. Some feel the laws themselves or the idea of borders and sovereignty are to blame. Others that a surge of violent criminals such as those who killed Jocylan Nungary or Laken Riley is the cause of the recent tragedies. None of these views are inherently evil. All of these views have some merit. Truth is manifold. Don’t be narrow minded, we need broad thinking not simplistic pathos driven dogmas and references to nazis. Grow up.
Learn about the tolerance paradoxon, there is no negotiating, nuance and reasoning with fashists.
Your enlightened centrism is nothing but smoke and mirrors. Get educated.
I make a new account at least every week to get around this. This is my only account. Don't like it? Encourage your comrades to engage in good faith and tolerate perspectives that they personally disagree with.
Downvoting my comment, flagging my comment, getting my account shadow banned (it might be already and you'll never see this comment...), while dismissing my comment because it's from a new account.
People can't have it both ways. Stop censoring civil comments that you disagree with, or stop complaining that people make new accounts to circumvent the censorship. Or, I guess, be honest enough to explicitly ban anyone from disagreeing with the hivemind and enjoy your echo chamber in peace.
I'm glad, to have spend most of my career in the government to stop these people coming in and terrorists. Which is why I can report, the US has a very low terror rate, especially when you look at foreign extremists, unlike other parts of the world.
I'm not threatening anybody, I'm just pointing out that in the aggregate anonymity does not exist as told by TFA whereas the GP seems to believe it holds some weight. The only reason you are able to write your comment is simply because I'm not hiding.
You on the other hand are.
> I personally, am glad we have this, so I don't experience what I do when I go to Europe, and get a bunch of illegal Africans terrorizing people in front of police. Or let alone the no go zones.
Funny, that hasn't happened to me yet. What also hasn't happened to me yet is that I got shot in the face at a protest.
But: you are part of the problem, you believe you are part of the solution. The fact that you believe that you are part of the solution but you're not proud enough of it to do so under your own name tells the whole story. It's the equivalent of the mask of those ICE goons.
https://jacquesmattheij.com/if-you-have-nothing-to-hide/
https://jacquesmattheij.com/trackers/
> I'm glad, to have spend most of my career in the government to stop these people coming in and terrorists. Which is why I can report, the US has a very low terror rate, especially when you look at foreign extremists, unlike other parts of the world.
That has something to do with two oceans and nothing at all with your efforts.
The women shot in the face by an ICE agent was not "violating her visa", nor was she violating American laws by being halted for a short time across a single lane with traffic passing her by.
She was given conflicting instructions by two agents, and was within her rights to leave as she did, slowly, carefully, when she was shot through the front and then through a side window by the same agent.
> I proudly stop terrorists, I proudly help law enforcement
These particular agents were a clown show textbook example of how not to behave .. you should be not be proud to associate with them.
As for American law - it's falling apart from the top: https://talkingpointsmemo.com/morning-memo/the-trump-doj-has...
The people shooting US citizens in the face and in the back are repeatedly in violation of judges orders.
Also, please keep in mind, the majority of Americans, do believe that, hence the president, who campaigned on this. Getting the popular vote, and winning one of the most successful campaigns and the most votes in the history of our country.
> And I gotta ask, you think it's just two oceans, and what your experience is in the intelligence community field? Are you just assuming without knowing the inner workings?
This depicts the distribution of refugees caused by iraq and afghan wars. Which, to remind you, were proudly based on lies.
> https://www.unhcr.org/news/press-releases/iraqis-afghans-and...
> As a region, Europe received 75 percent of all asylum applications although the United States remained the single largest recipient country with an estimated 13 percent of all applications
Are you still proud making the world a better place? Maybe you are too busy fighting terrorists to reply.
Also, they arnt killing Americans anymore are they? We gave them everything we could. But the afghan army chose to just do drugs and do nothing and now their women can’t go to school and don’t have rights again.
There are still terror orgs seeking to destabilize the region, like israel or ISIS. Besides the destruction, thats at least one reason why you wouldnt want to go back.
But why can they stay? Maybe a familiy -- a life -- is a reason to stay too. Why is "why dont they go back" your initial reaction? Why do i have to remind you about that human element of migration? Are you implying all refugees are terrorists? Or are you a racist?
Id really would like to see your mind rn. How it tries to spin the convo to "but they are illegal aliens". Such a pitty that even you cant see it.
Not the state government, and the federal government is in the midst of not a investigation under the pretence of having one.
> But if you try to run over the police.
She did not. It's very clear that she did not.
Also .. ICE agents .. not "the police" - these were immigration agents overstepping their bounds.
See stories about breaking multiple judges orders.
So, the state government, has zero purview over the federal government. And immigration and interstate issues are under the domain of the federal government. They can't do an investigation, because there's probably LES(Law Enforcement Sensitive), or other sensitive government information. We have courts, and we have multiple branches of government. There's been zero charges, the executive defended and backed up the officer. The judicial hasn't done anything, because we can assume there's nothing to do. And there's a few members in the legislature pushing for it, but nothings coming, because he did nothing wrong.
Not only that, but if he did, the state government, could also try to prosecute the ICE officer. But, they arn't. The governor, and everyone else with power to prosecute and make a trial, under multiple jurisdictions, either are defending the officer, or not doing anything about what they think is a murderer, when they have the power. The governer can go and order the arrest of the ICE officer. So, either everyone, both sides, are all in on it. Or, he didn't do anything wrong.
> > But if you try to run over the police. > She did not. It's very clear that she did not.
I think she did, the government thinks she did. And so does alot of other people. And they have alot more information than we do.
And ICE is still law enforcement, they have law enforcement powers. They are doing their job, and arresting people, who are here illegally. You don't magically wind up in America somehow without papers. You choose to come here, choose to break the laws. If I chose to go over the another country, and break their laws, I would be kicked out. You can look at Mexico, and they deport old Americans all the time. So does Thailand, kicking out a ton of British and American expats who abuse the system, and break the laws.
And you're proudly delusional.
But that's fine, stick your head in the sand and continue, you are so invested in this that the thought that you might be on the wrong side seems to scare you into flinging abuse and digging in deeper.
The USA is not 'the best in the world', not by a long shot. Witness the turd sitting in the half demolished White House that you serve.
> Anyways, I will be submitting a tip personally
Haha, so you are now threatening to take revenge on someone you've never met because they're calling you out for exactly that sort of thing. I don't think I could have asked for harder proof.
WTF dude, have you entirely lost it?
Lately I'm not sure that's the case.
see:
No, it won't be. Except perhaps to too few to make a difference. The money is too good.