jgacook

Federal immigration control almost exclusively focuses their attention on deporting and denying asylum to Latino refugees and asylum seekers.

Last week it was uncovered that mass hysterectomies had taken place at an ICE facility in Georgia without the informed consent of patients - this falls under the UN's definition of genocide.

This policy shift towards targeting exclusively Latinos came under the Trump administration calling Mexican immigrants "rapists" who bring crime and drugs. Melania Trump is a white immigrant who was granted the exclusive EB-1 green card for "extraordinary abilities".

I find it nearly impossible in these circumstances to come to the conclusion that the state is not explicitly catering to white supremacist ideology...and immigration policy is only the tip of the iceberg.

1. I agree with you in as far as politicking that has nothing to do with your workplace can be a distraction, but as it pertains to Facebook the politicking is not abstract, but relates directly to Facebook's actions. It might be unacceptable for an employee to use company resources to boost a political candidate: this is not the case here. Facebook is curbing internal criticism of company policy.

2. I think it's disingenuous to imply that Facebook workers - and bear in mind we're not talking about the janitorial staff here, but tech workers who command salaries at and above $100K p.a. - must work at Facebook lest they be destitute. The greatest advantage of being a tech worker is the range of high salary positions available to you. That aside, I return to my previous point about this not being an abstract, culture wars style debate, but specific critique of company actions. It's not politics, but internal politics. Every company has internal debates about the strategic and ethical direction of the company - why not this one?

3. I understand that politics can be exhausting, especially in the highly polarized environment we live in, but I don't think that's sufficient reason to forbid internal critique of any company. Moreover I think the stakes are higher than we are comfortable with - Facebook has already ADMITTED that they provoked the Burmese genocide 2 years ago [https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/06/technology/myanmar-facebo...].

To flip the question around: what makes YOU think that YOUR personal right to feeling relaxed at work is more important than an employee's right to ensure that they do not work on a product that can lead to mass murder? Moreover, is it really a political stance to demand that you are not complicit in unethical activity?

If you're being offered a $400K comp package I can say with a lot of certainty that you have not been dealt a hand and are, in fact, a highly skilled worker with a great many options for employment, so sincere congratulations on your success!

It's therefore hard to see how taking this offer would not be choosing to sell your ethics for money and success, given that you could likely land a well paid job anywhere.

Why are you convinced of that? Unionized protests frequently accomplish institutional change - why do you think Facebook or Twitter would be exempt? If anything a unionized tech force striking would have more bargaining power than other groups since they are educated, specialized, and difficult/expensive for either company to replace en masse.

Yes, but it's not a political end it's an ethical end. Facebook is being leveraged by political actors to cause harm in an unethical way - wanting to prevent this is not a political stance unless you believe that being apolitical is adopting some middle ground between America's Republican and Democrat parties, in which case considering ethics at all is a non-starter since both parties have shied away from imposing any kind of hard regulation on Facebook.

Institutional power doesn't have to be leveraged towards political ends, but if you profit directly from an institution choosing unethical behavior in pursuit of profits then you are also behaving unethically. It's completely reasonable to apply that standard to the best-paid of Facebook's employees, just as it is completely reasonable for those employees to petition against committing more unethical behavior.

Well put!

My parents are very much of the "no politics at work" generation and I really question why that cultural strain has carried itself into 2020 since it only serves company board members/executives and categorizes rank and file employees as automaton code monkeys who should "shut up and type".

Armchair thought: in this odd period of history where, ostensibly, capitalism "won" as the political system of choice and "the end of history" was declared we have entered an alarming stage of hyper-capitalism mixed with growing discontent/civil unrest. More than ever there seems to be a breathless determination by upper-middle class professionals to not rock the boat in any way in the hopes that these mega-corporations will continue to prop up the stock market, pay out outrageous salaries, and keep the gravy train running. It's a kind of cognitive dissonance where we can see how much damage the big players in tech are wreaking on global society - there's ample evidence - but to recognize and face it would sully the deeply held ideal that tech is some kind of great, benevolent force in our society (more cynically: confronting it would also mean confronting that fact that we as tech workers have ethical responsibilities to society at large that we have at best ignored, at worst defied).

Practically, it's not. Yes, you can catch up on how your cousin's new baby is doing, but you can't disentangle that from the extremist propaganda, disinformation, and real harm that these platforms incur by leveraging human psychology against us. Taking the view that ethics and work are separate silos is hopelessly naive. Almost every profession requires constant awareness and ethics in order to be a benevolent force: doctors, lawyers, builders, scuba gear manufacturers, car designers all have a responsibility to their end user and I can't see how tech is any different. I doubt people would react the same way if this were GM instead of Facebook and their employees were up in arms after learning the car they had been designing and building had a track record of blowing up and killing people.

Yes, and this is why nobody is going after, for example, Facebook HQ's janitorial staff for the moral responsibility of Facebook's actions. Their income remains static in spite of Facebook's quarterly profit so it would be unfair to accuse them of trading their ethics for an income.

There is a fundamental difference when you're talking about a stock-owning, educated, in-demand software engineer, even if they are "just" working on scaling Facebook's image service. They have the institutional power at the company that they could leverage to change the product's outcomes, if they so desired.

Generally I try and shy away from being too alarmist, but I am so disillusioned with the kind of tech worker HN's userbase seems to represent. I think it's a feckless attitude to think that working in one of the best-paid, global, most influential professions in the world right now means that your only obligation is to clock in on time, code whatever you're told to code, take no ownership of the effect your work may have on the general public and collect your fat paycheck at the end of the month.

Why does it sound good to anyone that Facebook employees should be prevented from discussing the ethical implications of the product they sell their labor to create? Facebook complete lack of accountability - internal or governmental - has to date:

- incited a genocide [https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebo...]

- provided a bias for right wing content in a American election year (and fired the employee who blew the whistle on it) [https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/ne...]

- exacerbated a global pandemic, indirectly causing 1000s of deaths, by not policing Covid misinformation [https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/aug/19/facebook-...]

- is arguably a contributor to the global rise in authoritarianism [https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/feb/24/facebo...]

and that's really just the tip of the iceberg. If you buy into the notion that Mark Zuckerberg is a nice man in a hoodie trying to run a business that his employees are tearing down with some radical agenda then I'm sorry, but how naive are you? Facebook has a track record of ignoring the consequences of what happens on their platform in order to continue profiting. It's not a mistake, it's the point.

We should be cheering on tech workers challenging the ethics of the work they produce, not talking about how inconvenient it is for Facebook workers to start realizing how questionable the product they're building really is.

This is untrue - different states have different standards by which mail in ballots will be counted. A postmark on or before Election Day is no guarantee your vote will be tallied, depending on where you live.

Direct election interference. Please call your elected representatives and demand action. There is no safe alternative to voting by mail in the middle of a pandemic that the Trump administration has completely bungled a response to.

We are watching the creation of a banana republic in realtime.

Thanks for the link - the 6x in pricing is to enforce the monopoly on delivery of letters rather than all mail items. It only applies to (i) items weighing less than 12.5oz (ii) to the first 1.0oz of a single piece of mail.

Certainly an enforcement of USPS' monopoly on letter delivery, but not a blanket price fixing across all mail items and types.

The USPS would be profitable if it didn't have to pre-fund its pension obligations by an 75 years - an obligation no other government regulated entity must abide by.

https://www.nonprofitmailers.org/four-usps-myths/

> The USPS loses a lot of money. Even ignoring the pension pre-funding issue, it's still cashflow negative.

This is untrue - without its pension pre-funding requirement it turns a modest profit each year[1].

[1] https://www.nonprofitmailers.org/four-usps-myths/

I can find no evidence that private competitors must legally charge a higher rate than USPS. Do you have a source for that? My understanding was that USPS had to compete directly with private mail carriers.

Spare me the puerile libertarian arguments for a privatized postal service. There is no good reason for it to be privatized and many Americans lives will be negatively affected by such a change.

1) There are already private mail carriers (FedEx, UPS, et al.). They do not have an obligation to deliver mail in a timely manner anywhere in the continental US and overseas territories. This is fine if you are a city dweller, but private mail carriers notoriously do not guarantee "last mile" delivery. This will cut off many isolated rural communities for whom the USPS is a lifeline to the outside world.

2) USPS receives no tax dollars for their services. They are completely self-sustaining. A Republican congress forced an insane burden for the USPS to pre-fund 75 years worth of pension obligations: there are future postal workers who have not been born yet that the post office must plan pensions for. No other government entity has such an obligation - this is the only reason the USPS is in a financial problem and it is a manufactured crisis. There is no "small government" argument here since your tax dollars don't fund them.

3) The USO pledge states that the USPS must offer affordable rates to customers. Privatized companies have a market incentive to keep prices low, yes, but in practice there is no way that there won't be price collusion/fixing if a handful of private carriers become market dominant. Antitrust is laughably weak in the US right now.

4) DeJoy is using the manufactured crisis from pension obligations as a canard for slashing worker benefits and overpay to the bone. He is intentionally gutting the USPS so the Republicans can point at it and whine about how socialized enterprises don't work as well as private ones. This is why all mail is so delayed right now: postal workers rely on overtime to ensure that all mail is delivered in a timely manner.

Eye-opening how many HN comments are framing this guy as a demented political extremist. He’s a whistleblower exposing one of the most frightening threats to modern democracy that exists.

We are beyond the speculation point here. Facebook has demonstrated that it has the capability to spread misinformation and sway political opinion very effectively and never for the right reasons. The pandemic is the most recent example of Facebook’s fuckery: post something that tells people that Covid is caused by 5G and that Bill Gates wants to implants microchips in you? You might get a small disclaimer on your FB post saying that “parts of it” “may be” inaccurate. You are constantly fed anything to keep you engaged with the platform and increasing Facebook’s bottom line.

Zuckerburg has just spun to Congress that Facebook is going to extreme lengths to moderate their platform - this employee’s testimony is proof that Facebook doesn’t care in the least or worse, they may be actively trying to help along candidates who will be politically lenient towards their behavior. We just discovered a “bug” caused Republican ads to show at a more frequent rate than Democratic ads - I don’t know what’s more worrying: that a bug on Facebook could swing the election or that it wasn’t a bug at all.

People need to stop with the “I know good people at Facebook” B.S. It’s beside the point. Facebook is a rogue actor that has enormous social and political power to completely mislead the general public into practically any belief. They have continued to demonstrate that they cannot be trusted with this power. This man should be praised as a whistleblower for exposing the charade that is an unregulated Facebook. We need more like him in tech to show people how serious the problem is. Give me a break with the analyses on whether he should have been fired or not and recognize the scope of the problem he is trying to warn is about. The quality of our democracy is absolutely at stake.

Quadratic voting!

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

Interesting - thanks for the info! It's a good personal reminder to always vet my sources and keep reporting outlets accountable.

Not the first sketchy thing spotted at The Intercept. Read also this excerpt on Glenn Greenwald's spurious reporting of Michael Flynn's prosecution: https://www.emptywheel.net/2020/05/19/glenn-greenwalds-inven...

Old adage about incompetence and maliciousness being indistinguishable applies, but having whistleblowers land in jail MULTIPLE times should raise eyebrows for such a young news organization.

Wondering if The Intercept belongs in the nether world of "news" organizations (read: thinly veiled propaganda outlets) along with InfoWars, RT, etc.

I often read about the divides between Zuckerberg and other decision-makers in the company, but I’m always unsure what the divides revolve around. Could anyone in the know clarify what the stakes are here? What is Zuck’s vision? What are dissenters unhappy with?

Because the US regulatory framework and enforcement has been chipped away at by corporate interests over the past 3 decades to the point of non-existence.

America went from filing >50 antitrust lawsuits in the 1970s to ~5 in the past 2 decades.

In the parent comment I'm referring to the commenter states that if you talk negatively about your employers employment practices (perform action X) you should expect to be fired (receive outcome Y).

I get irritated by this kind of comment because by being a description of a chain of events with no verdict as to whether outcome Y is fair or proportional to action X, it is an absolution of responsibility for the observer and to some extent implies that those affected by outcome Y are responsible for their fate simply because they weren't canny enough to realize the chain of events they had set in motion, regardless of whether the chain of events is immoral.

An alternate example: "The subversives held a protest and were reported to the secret police who sentenced them to death by firing squad. Perhaps if the subversives didn't want to be shot they shouldn't have staged the protest in the first place, since protesting carries the death sentence."

I know that example is taken to the extreme, but I think it makes some points more salient: (i) by reciting a series of outcomes without value judgments about the outcomes, the observer is not engaging with whether the subversives should be shot and thereby implicitly supports the status quo, regardless of whether the status quo is fair or just (ii) the observer misses the point by implying that the protesters are responsible for their fate and blames them for the unjust outcome. The protesters likely knew that they would be executed for protesting. Surely we should be asking why the sentence for protesting is death, not whether the protesters were too stupid to see what they were getting themselves into.

RE the criminal justice system...I know it's a cop out to say "I read a lot", but I am interested in its shortcomings and consume a lot on the subject matter. I recently read "Usual Cruelty: The Complicity of Lawyers in the Criminal Injustice System" which I think is a good primer on the bureaucracy of the justice system. It's a complex thing to dissect in a post, but from a very high up/more abstract POV the American justice system considers "justice" the rendering of sentences based on breaking of laws, not necessarily whether an outcome is compatible with what we consider "justice".

Example: a man is sentenced to 10 years for possession of marijuana. The justice system considers this to be justice because the man was aware that action X (possessing marijuana) leads to outcome Y (prison time) without really considering whether jail time is a reasonable or fair outcome for possessing a plant that is quite harmless by most scientific standards.

This turned into an essay...hope I clarified my point of view though!

It's a form of ethical handwashing of the kind the American justice system is built on. It's much easier to point out that taking a certain set of actions will lead to a certain set of outcomes than it is to judge whether the outcomes are fair or just, since those are abstract concepts that require critical thinking and making value judgments.

"If you do X then you can expect Y" is a tautology built on observation that divorces the observer from any responsibility for the outcome Y.

What on earth incentivizes them to not repeat this pattern of behaviour if they can rely on a no-strings-attached cash infusion?

Middle class Americans are expected to have enough cash reserves to survive 2-3 months in case of an emergency. Why is this expectation not in effect for an airline that makes vastly more profit per capita than the average household?

Airlines spent well over 96% of their free cash flow on stock buybacks, enriching their boards of directors, executives, and shareholders. Do you think it's fair that they can make those decisions and still be entitled to favourable loan agreements when their mismanagement comes back to bite them?

Why do we not let the airlines have an asset selloff of their "super expensive machines" in an attempt to bridge the coronavirus gap before giving them public funding? Could they not declare bankruptcy and restructure themselves to survive until shelter in place is over and business returns to normal?

Why does the government bailout not have the cash infusions come in the form of an equity buyout, thus bringing actual consequences to the mismanaged airlines and bringing a more stable guarantee of investment return to the taxpayers who have funded this bailout? Shouldn't having access to socialized coffers come with the caveat that your company must become, in part, socialized?

The system only works if companies feel the pain of their mismanagement. Any whisper of bailing out the airlines without considering the above is disgusting and un-American. You don't get to privatize profits and socialize losses. History has shown that companies do not learn lessons unless they are allowed to fail.

Ah we begin the long journey of having a system so politically broken that the central bank must command its balance sheet to stop the rotten structure from collapsing, a la Weimar Republic or Zimbabwe.

This liquidity isn't a life boat. It's propping up corporations and people who have been dangerously over leveraged for years and who are beginning to become habituated to the notion of getting a government bailout when times get hard.

To the enlightened HN participants proclaiming that this is a necessary step to save an ailing economy facing an unprecedented crisis, consider the following:

1) this crisis was not that unprecedented and many companies had large enough balance sheets that they were able to weather it. Why are we rewarding corporate mismanagement? Have any of the corporations eligible for asset filed for bankruptcy or attempted an asset selloff to recover some liquidity?

2) the Main St. loan pool is much smaller than the Wall St one. Why do we expect smaller businesses to be better able to weather this crisis?

3) what is this cash infusion actually doing to tackle the exponential rise in unemployment? How does it help the taxpayer? It's not going to stimulate consumption in people who have lost their jobs and kickstart a recovery - the unemployed will likely be unemployed for months to come and the loan recipients will likely be so saddled with debt at the end of this that they won't experience growth again for years. There's no mandate that companies receiving emergency loans have to maintain their current workforce. The taxpayer receives no equity in the companies they have gone into debt to save.

4) given the size of these loans we may well be in another recession in 10-20 years and still have the majority of these loans outstanding. Do we then forgive these loans when the usual suspects need another round of cash infusions?

5) the Fed has set interest rates close to rock bottom for the better part of a decade (and backed down from raising them last year when Trump threatened bloody war) leading to a massive asset bubble and a business climate addicted to cheap liquidity. The message this bailout sends is that corporate over-leveraging is rewarded with a cash infusion, but god help the individual who took out a mortgage, car loan, etc. and lost their ability to keep up payments from coronavirus unemployment. Why is one type of entity granted access to public money in order to be spared from their bad decisions?

The scale of this debt is almost unfathomable and adds to an already overloaded Federal Reserve balance sheet. Other commenters have rightly pointed out how precarious this situation is in the longer term. I'm more worried about the callousness of the average person on this issue. American economics are so polluted with worship of great titans of business that nobody really seems that concerned that millions of Americans are facing perhaps permanent homelessness and long-term unemployment in the next few months.

Pumping failing businesses full of cash when millions of our citizens are struggling to buy food should not be normal. It is not a stepping stone of necessity to preserve our way of life. It is a choice to use capital to violate perhaps the most central tenet of capitalism: businesses must face the consequences when the punch bowl runs dry. This is socialism for corporations and we're all footing the bill.

Nice to hear! Background check is a little more understandable - thanks for letting me know

Is the drug testing portion of the application still in effect?

I find the concept an invasion of basic privacy and while I'd love to work at USDS someday I can't see myself submitting to such a process.

I have been mulling cancelling my Facebook account for a while now. Today as I was browsing I saw several Scientology ads. I know Facebook doesn't have an agenda per se - you have the money, they have the adspace - but I was still struck by the brazenness of advertising something whose ethical dubiousness has been so thoroughly publicized.

Facebook will never change unless they are forced to. We have signed away perhaps one of the most important experiments ever in digital social networking to a behemoth that chips away at your humanity the longer you stay on it. People who think I'm being dramatic almost always underestimate exactly how much data Facebook, Google, et al. collect on you and the extent to which they use it to manipulate you emotionally or with your wallet. Every facet of Facebook is designed to coerce you into an addiction that results in you spending more and more time on the site while you consume ever more advertising content.

These enormous tech companies are kind of like the fast food of the Internet. They have erased individuality and served us an experience that is mass produced and shrink wrapped for our convenience. It's delicious and addictive, but we keep being told lies about the quality and safety of what we are consuming. We've become so reliant on it we've forgotten how to cook, if you'll extend the metaphor.

I increasingly hate a lot of the what the Internet is. I always feel watched and directed to the point where I have trouble trusting what I'm reading, like watching manufactured drama in a reality TV show. I'm planning on setting up my own website as an expressive space where I can go to be creative and try to consume thoughtful content and (hopefully) make thoughtful content for people in return. I'm hoping there's a world of expressiveness and fun to be had in interacting with people on the Internet on one's own terms.

Hope it turns out well!