This is, in all honesty, a terrifying point of view.
Forcing people to take part in a society that has already rejected them and conform to someone else’s view of normal, healthy, stable, etc., that, to me, would be literal torture. I don’t consider it humane to torture people.
How do you feel about all the busywork jobs that enable so so much more squandering of human potential? Should all those folks be forced to live your version of their best life?
I think we should do everything we can to give/push them into treatment, but at the very least they don't get to make streets unsafe and unclean for others, they have to go elsewhere
I hope you never are homeless, drug addicted, or mentally ill. I have been all of these things. I can tell you first-hand forcing people to comply makes things worse.
That you don't care about someone's wishes is deeply indicative of your own moral character -- or lack thereof. That we can't even agree to disagree turns my stomach a bit. I'm deeply disappointed, and you've made it very clear to me that I need to walk away from this "community".
So, my final thought will simply be this:
Silicon Valley and their enablers, through their arrogance, short sightedness, and dare I say.. general lack of humanity are creating a dystopian nightmare. In many places, that nightmare already exists in full force. That you don't or can't see it doesn't matter. It's well underway and it won't leave any of us untouched.
The dystopian nightmare is the thousands of people living in filth on the streets of SF, living and dying short and brutal lives.
If I'm ever drug addicted and homeless, I want you to institutionalize me until I am clean and able to resume a normal life. I'm very confused by anyone who would want anything else for themselves.
Voting for the lesser of two evils is still voting for evil. We only get to choose between candidates who are corrupt in different ways. That isn't the fault of the people, it's the fault of the incumbent politicians who game the system to be most favorable to themselves.
If you want to blame us for something, blame us for enjoying the empty comforts of modern life over choosing civil war.
That's horrifying. I was not aware. The horror is hundreds of IBM employees were directly involved in extermination activities; literally maintaining tabulation machines on prem, as it were, in the camps.
I hope every HN reader has the awareness and moral strength to resist, where the corporations are unable, the next time such à job comes.
> I wouldn't get my hopes up. The number of times I've seen people, even here, equate legality and morality is frightening.
I have literally never seen anyone here argue that "murder and genocide isn't morally wrong if it is legally right".
Are you sure you aren't equivocating "I don't support $FOO political position" with "I support murder and genocide"?
Because I have seen a number of people argue that some aspect of their personal moral code, which isn't currently written into law, should be written into law and enforced on the rest of the people who don't have that moral code.
No, I wasn't even thinking of political positions. I'm not trying to dog-whistle around red-tribe/blue-tribe signaling, I actually mean what I said. I was in a comment thread some time ago about the ethics of self-driving cars. Another user believed that they should base the decisions of who to save on the cultural mores, history, and laws of the region where they are sold. On the one hand, it's hard to see a business doing otherwise. On the other, that's exactly how we get Zyklon B and legal slavery in the third world.
I was discussing the trolley problem with a lawyer a few years ago, and her conclusion to the dilemma, no joke, was literally "It depends if I would be legally culpable in the country I'm in." Which is a very legalistic, and utterly amoral answer.
My apologies, I read your comment more uncharitably than you intended.
> Another user believed that they should base the decisions of who to save on the cultural mores, history, and laws of the region where they are sold.
This brings up a different issue: the product will then be considered amoral in the particular region that it is deployed in. That's the problem with using "morals" as a yardstick - it's too subjective because every culture has their own set of morals, and these morals change over time anyway.
For a product sold in multiple regions, it makes sense to follow the cultural mores of that region. If you don't like their morals, don't do business with them.
Americans will fuell all sides of the conflict to reap the financial and political profits, disregarding human lives including unaware civilians. With their official army, intelligence agencies, corporations, and many other entities we have no clue about.
The fascinating part of the deal of IBM with Nazi Germany is that it boils down to _tracking_of_individuals_. Their personal profile, location, capabilities, health status.
It sounds like German employees in Germany and it’s territories working for the german subsidiary did work for the German government yes, and after the war was declared they did some very shady stuff. Similarly American citizens working for German companies in America did work for the US government during the war.
I don’t really see what’s surprising about any of this. The implication seems to be that the US directors of IBM were supposed to do something about it, but I’m not sure what.
Of course if some of these contracts for the concentration camps and such were tendered during peacetime, and this was known and it was possible for the US operation to exercise oversight, that would be incredibly damning.
Are you just guessing though? There certainly was coordination between IBM in the US and IBM in Nazi Germany even during the war. Look at IBM and the Holocaust by Edwin Black for example.
We can argue about the scale of involvement and its meaning, but if you're not just speculating you should mention a source.
The Just World Fallacy is incredibly strong in this one.
Sure, the US imprisoned its citizens of Japanese ethnicity during WWII, a practice approved by its highest court, but they would never imprison Jewish people just for their ethnicity, right?
If I'm committing a fallacy, it's probably just assuming that individual American IBM executives probably wouldn't have actively and knowing facilitated genocidal policies. Also that if German IBM employees did do so, that's on them, not necessarily US execs who may have had no knowledge or awareness of it.
That turns out to be false though, it's seems apparent that US execs had a pretty good idea what their machines were being used to do at last up to 1942. Not in detail, they probably weren't aware of the specific activities happening at say Treblinka, I don't think anyone in the US did, but they were aware that German government policy was the registration and oppression of Jews and other minorities and that IBM machines were facilitating it.
You pretty much just hoped something wasn't true, even though references were easily available, so you started making excuses, caveats and assumptions instead of following up on those references. Really what was your comment going to achieve?
Your fallacy is to repeatedly make assumptions in favour of the US without any evidentiary basis. When history is as well studied as it is, there's no need to propagate your assumptions.
Now you're at it again - I just Googled "when was us aware of the holocaust" and found an interesting Time article. There were already rumours of mass killing. And the existence of concentration camps, ie not merely "registration and oppression" but active imprisonment, was very well known. The number of victims was underestimated in the common mind - but IBMs contribution of record keeping systems was to help increase that number.
Nah, this is just the ultimate conclusion of the Friedman doctrine: there is no morality, only legality. Unless you can conclusively prove that IBM US C-level executives knew about the Holocaust while it was happening, it was just business as usual which makes it okay by definition.
Ah yes, the legendary honesty, integrity, and forthrightness of Silicon Valley, and Corporate America in general.
My father, an ex-Navy man, pointedly asked me once: “why do you want your own country to lose?” I don’t! I want us to be honest in our success, not smug while saying “if it isn’t illegal it must be OK!”.
The solution to this could be teaching ethics at all levels of education.
Back in 2004, I had a phone screen with the folks at Time, Inc., for a systems admin position. Now, I'd been out of school for about 10 years at that point. The interviewer's first question was "what was your GPA in college?", and I was forced to confess I honestly didn't remember.
He stammered a bit, apologizing, and then hung up on me. I've always considered that dodging a bullet. It's a weird thing to ask someone with many years of professional experience. The only thing I could infer was that all of their staff were very young, and this was still relevant to them.
I remember an interview with a French company (in the UK) a few years ago - when they realized I had arrived in tech via a vocational route it got very frosty.
For what it’s worth, I made the same decision several years ago. I am 110% happier! I can look at myself in the mirror and feel good again.
For me it wasn’t just tech though; its all of corporate America. I just can’t take the lack of humanity, empathy, kindness. Nor can I take the useless work, endless, pointless posturing, forced “fun” activities, and the general dishonesty.
I weep for what we’ve done and the awful future that awaits. All this is probably histrionic too. But like you, I’d rather be able to look myself in the mirror, and get a good nights sleep.
This reason is why I personally would like separate app stores. I'd _really_ like to see an iOS app store, curated by the FOSS community, focused on privacy and productivity -- actual productivity, not mind-numbing dopamine fix loops!
Running a local "pihole" equivalent might be possible then; really the sky is the limit if we regain control of our devices.
Forcing people to take part in a society that has already rejected them and conform to someone else’s view of normal, healthy, stable, etc., that, to me, would be literal torture. I don’t consider it humane to torture people.
How do you feel about all the busywork jobs that enable so so much more squandering of human potential? Should all those folks be forced to live your version of their best life?