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.
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.
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.
Counterargument: a workplace is, at best, a poor environment in which to advocate for one's political causes. Most people engaged in labor for a company do so because they are not financially independent--that is, they have to in order to simply live. The larger the organization the more likely the employee base will span incompatible political views. Also, very vocal proponents (regardless of what political view they're advocating) will tend to dominate and effectively marginalized the more soft-spoken: a poor outcome in other contexts; why not this one?
On a more personal side: I honestly cannot stand when most people discuss politics in the Slack at work. The vast majority of comments are snarky, are unsupported (by data) opinions, or are caustically dismissive of opposing views. It's bad enough when people holding political views I disagree with engage in that behavior, but it's much worse when people I do otherwise agree with do. And it happens in just about equal measure, as far as I've experienced.
Work is already stressful enough without adding to it with political fights.
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?
Nobody said anything about “personal rights”. Also, yes, it is a political stance. And one in this context your own comment indicates you have a solution for: don’t work there (at FB). A lot of people don’t have the luxury to pick and choose employers for their political activities: arguably they’re not a position to agitate on the inside, either.
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:
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.
I'm convinced that discussing ethics or politics inside Facebook or Twitter will have literally zero effect. Employees should either quit or get back to work.
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.
I agree that unions could be effective, but I also doubt that Facebook/Twitter employees could ever unionize. And for anything less than a full strike, leadership will just ride it out.
We should indeed. I unfortunately don't know enough at Facebook well enough to have those conversations in person often, so internet will have to suffice.
It's unfortunately very much in the interest of Facebook's leadership team to discourage it, however, as a clock in clock out, see and hear no evil labor culture is good for the leaders' personal wealth, so ethics be damned, number go up.
I think it's reasonable for someone working on, say, scaling the photo storage service to say that their work is apolitical and these debates aren't relevant to them. The performance characteristics of Facebook photos aren't going to incite a genocide or contribute to the global rise of authoritarianism.
I don’t want to go all Godwin’s law, but the “I was just scaling capacity for processing census punch cards” argument doesn’t pan out very well, historically.
I don't think this comparison works at all except through Godwin's law. Nobody argues that, say, Walmart store clerks bear personal moral responsibility for their company's decisions.
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.
There's a difference, but it still strikes me as unreasonable to say that all institutional power must be leveraged towards political ends. I do business with a lot of companies whose owners don't agree with my politics, and I'd be unhappy to see them dedicate more of their institutional power towards fighting for things I don't want.
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.
Last time I checked, Walmart doesn’t sell conspiracy theories, stoke political violence, or demonstrably false, targeted advertising. You can muddy things with as many analogies as you like, but it’s quite obvious that Facebook’s engineering staff is closer to my example than yours.
Sorry, I don't mean this to be dismissive, but I don't think I can productively engage with the idea that Facebook is more closely analogous to the Nazi Party than to Walmart. I just wouldn't know where to begin.
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.
And in places like California which take a long time to count ballots they usually announce results and the election is effectvely over before everything is counted.
Most places will make the announcement once the outstanding ballots are extremely unlikely to change the result of the election.
So if Candidate A is winning 500,000 to 400,000 but 150,000 ballots are still outstanding then they'll make the call for Candidate A because there is no reason to think that the outstanding ballots will be that much different in distribution than the already counted ballots. This can be adjusted based on historical precedent as well, if you know that late counting precincts tend to vote in a certain way then you can make educated guesses as to when the results of that precinct will no longer make a difference. Even after adding in some extra margin for safety you can call the race.
The tricky part is when a race is really close and you have to count every ballot. This is when waiting 3-5 days for the mail to finish trickling in is going to cause cable news anchors to lose sleep.
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.
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.
Even if this were not true, it seems to me that a mail system is a societal good that is significant enough that I would be happy to see it funded from taxes.
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.
From Wikipedia: "Regarding the monopoly on delivery of letters, the report notes that the monopoly is not complete, as there is an exception for letters where either the amount paid for private carriage of the letter equals at least six times the current rate for the first ounce of a single-piece First-Class Mail letter (also known as the "base rate" or "base tariff") or the letter weighs at least 12.5 ounces."
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.
This subthread is in response to a comment that said:
>" What is the direct competitor for bulk letter delivery? Historically that's not profitable so no private company does it and instead they all focus on the profitable package business, or edge case super-fast high cost delivery. "
So I responded with reasons why there was no competitor for letter delivery:
>" Well, the law currently requires that any competitor charge many times (7x if I recall correctly) more than the USPS for mail, and they are not permitted to use letter-boxes, so it is rather unsurprising that UPS and FedEx charge more for first class mail."
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.
> 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.
This is the same obligation that private company pensions need to adhere to, because that is the responsible thing to do, with the difference being that the post office has to also fund retirement medical plans since, unlike a private company, those are mandated by congress and can only be changed with congressional approval.
I don't understand why this keeping getting called out, like it is an unusual burden to be responsible. In my humble opinion I think that all government pensions should be funded, because it is not fair for us to artificially lower costs now and expect everyone's children and grandchildren in the future to somehow pay for this generation's unfunded promises.
> I don't understand why this keeping getting called out, like it is an unusual burden to be responsible.
They are being forced to plan for the next 75 years now. in 2006 They were given 10 years to have the money needed for all pensions up to 75 years in the future. That is an unreasonable burden because no company does that. No company is planning 75 years from now on anything.
> In my humble opinion I think that all government pensions should be funded
No one is saying Pensions should stop being funded or paid out.
> because it is not fair for us to artificially lower costs now and expect everyone's children and grandchildren in the future to somehow pay for this generation's unfunded promises.
They are not artificially lowering costs, they were making a decent profit without this burden at the current price point. They were more then capable of meeting their obligations including pensions due now, and still making a decent profit. Nothing was being pushed off to future generations.
>They are being forced to plan for the next 75 years now.
I'm reading that ALL pensions offered by private companies in the U.S. must be funded out for 75 years. I presume this is for good reason. Why should this not apply to the USPS or other local/state/federal/church employees?
I might not follow your reply, but you seem to be under the impression that the USPS is having to do something different than every private company, but that does not appear to be the case. https://www.forbes.com/sites/ebauer/2020/04/14/post-office-p...
EDIT: with the exception of medical coverage, which is handled differently than private companies as per congress.
>in 2006 They were given 10 years to have the money needed for all pensions up to 75 years in the future.
That would seem to have been a heavy burden. I don't know all the particulars, but they seem to be past that now, right? Is this ten year catchup period still relevant to the conversation?
>Nothing was being pushed off to future generations.
Then why does the government mandate this same pension funding for all private company pensions? I assume it is because there were problems with bankrupt pensions in the past.
The USPS isn't given the "private company" treatment in other matters though. They can't set their own rates, or appoint their own chief executive or sell stock. It's hard to believe the intention behind the pre-funding requirement was anything so benign as "fiscal responsibility".
I'd file that under "two wrongs don't make a right".
I think all government pensions should be responsibly funded. To do otherwise is basically tell our kids and unborn future generations that they can pay for our our lack of ability to make hard decisions. I just can't see where that's right.
I wonder why is it that only government workers have pension plans that everyone else knows are unaffordable?
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.