The Tech Revolt
story.californiasunday.com
story.californiasunday.com
I guarantee those people would be as well if they were effected by it personally. If you're not personally doing the kind of jobs an illegal immigrant can do for less, then you can only benefit - it lowers the cost to you for many things in your life. As a bonus, you get to pretend that makes you a good person.
An episode of South Park addresses this brilliantly, though people conveniently only remember the first part. Time travellers from the future come into South Park and take all the menial jobs. The blue collar americans yell "they took our jerbs!" Randy - a geologist - admonishes them as racists, until he finds out his own white collar positionhas been given to an alien, and then he too is complaining about how they took his job.
The day the wealthy Californian tech companies start hiring illegal immigrant developers at a lower cost is the day the echo chamber changes its tune.
I mean it is already happening, perhaps you just missed it.
That argument goes both ways. If your family was impacted by violence, corruption, and poverty wouldn't you pack up and look for a better life?
Don't forget we caused many of these problems.
Absolutely, and I would never deny it.
> Though the photos are nearly identical to those from 2014, there is one key difference between them: the 2014 photos showed only children who arrived at the border unaccompanied. The 2018 photos also show families that have been separated from one another.
We need ICE (maybe not in it's current form) but we need someone to protect our borders. How we protect our borders is up to legislators to determine. This doesn't mean that individuals doing this aren't responsible as well but it's also a systemic problem at this point.
I don't know where you got that from, but it's not in the article I linked. The article specifically states:
> The Obama administration established family detention centers that kept families together while their cases were processed.
Other sources tell me that the Obama administration did separate some families in extreme cases such as a parent carrying drugs.
But all that is besides the point. I've made no claims about Obama. The point here is that ICE has done things that were worth protesting against: systematically and needlessly separating children from their families.
I don't know where you got that from, but it's not in the article I linked. The article specifically states:
> The Obama administration established family detention centers that kept families together while their cases were processed.
Whoa. You just repeated what I said while pretending I didn't say it. (A bit of partisan bias?) If they established family detention centers, that means there was a need for such new facilities. Unless the establishment happened at the oath of office, this would corroborate what I said.
https://www.factcheck.org/2018/06/did-the-obama-administrati...
Jeh Johnson, DHS secretary under the Obama administration, told NPR earlier this month that he couldn’t say that family separations “never happened” during his tenure. “There may have been some exigent situation, some emergency. There may have been some doubt about whether the adult accompanying the child was in fact the parent of the child. I can’t say it never happened but not as a matter of policy or practice.
Brown told us that while the Obama administration “did separate some families,” it also tried to detain families together. In 2016, a court ruling limited how long children with their parents could be in family detention centers. That ruling confirmed that a 1997 settlement applied to both unaccompanied and accompanied minors, as we’ve explained before.
“At that point,” Brown said, “family detention dwindled and most families were released into the US, either on their own with a notice to appear or under Alternatives to Detention, which could be an ankle bracelet or a supervised monitoring provision where they had to check in with ICE regularly until their immigration court hearing.”
From the original NPR article cited:
Child immigrant shelters. Within three days, children are supposed to be transferred from immigration detention to the Office of Refugee Resettlement, which is part of the Department of Health and Human Services.
For 15 years, ORR has handled the "care and placement" of unaccompanied migrant children. Until recently, that usually meant minors who crossed into the U.S. alone. Now it also includes children who have been separated from their families by authorities, including much younger children.
On a call with reporters on Tuesday, a Border Patrol official said that it's a matter of "discretion" how young is too young for a child to be separated from their parents. In general, he said, the age of 5 has been used as a benchmark, with children younger than that called "tender-aged."
The CEO of Southwest Key, which operates 26 ORR shelters, tells NPR the children at his facilities range from ages "zero to 17."
I never said that under the Obama administration that there was mass separation. Evidently, practices of separation existed in some situations under previous administrations, evidently going back at least 15 years, and there were policy changes to have less separation. This is what I stated.
You might want to take stock of recent news coverage of what the ICE has been up to recently. And not just recently - over several decades actually.
It's really quite horrible in fact.
Actually that's not what it means.
And there's no evidence that decentralized agencies of force (where these can be stable for any length of time) are any likely to devolve into abuse.
It's not, but if you prefer to believe that it is, hey, that's your right.
I don't see how protesting in the tech sector is a fair and reasonable way of of resolving these issues - too many people involved are not part of the tech sector. Resolving such issues fairly is one of the reasons the West has a complicated systems of public voting and it seems a bit naive of the political system to try and force change at the corporate level. It also hopefully won't work as corporations are stripped of power by Ye Invisible Hand of the Market finding companies that will just do what is asked of them. Corporate political activism annoys me, I don't want to be told what is moral by a corporate entity or its non-representative employees.
For reference the simplistic average rate for the American household of $10500 spread over an average household size of 2.5 comes out to around at $4200 per head, which yields $50.4B in potential taxes over an equivalent sized population.
But is it a net positive at the margin? Protests by the tech community won't get rid of ICE. They might make it less efficient, forcing it to spend some of its budget on, say, migrating to new tech platforms. Seizing drugs is (hopefully) a higher priority for ICE than locking up children, so a reduction in available budget should lead to a reduction in the latter, not the former.
Of course, it might also just lead to ICE having an easier time getting a bigger budget next year so that they don't have to let any services slip. Or maybe they just cut back on cultural sensitivity training. Perhaps something else entirely! There's really no way for us to meaningfully predict outcomes from where we are. We may as well be generating random numbers.
Your hypothesis is intriguing. I would love to see data.
I know a lady who was working for a startup that folded. She got told, then walked down the hallway in the same building, got hired by another startup. Boot camp grad.
There's even a person mentioned in the article who refused to work at Amazon, which I guess pays over $200k. Some people would do it out of principle regardless, but many more would find it easier to protest if they had high confidence they could find another job in that bracket.
I've seen sexual harassment suits happen in finance, and it hasn't led to any form of mass movement. People just get paid off and let out the back door.
In addition you have to ask about the effect of that hiring cartel being broken.
I've worked with programmers who live in 3rd world countries like the Philippines, and notice a huge difference in the way they treat their job. When I give them a boring task, they don't ask what is this for, or why am I doing this? They just do it - on the flip side, they don't care about the product, or the company mission. I'm not saying this because it's good or bad, but this is just what I've noticed.
Perhaps I’m delusional because I’ve been comfortable in my low stress, check out and go home, type of job for some period of time. I just don’t feel any desire to chase some kind of meaning in my work. Most of my coworkers seem to have the same outlook.
I will admit I also an outlier for my age group. Have been married over a decade had kids in my early 20s without any debt (GI Bill helped here). Probably could have a bigger nest egg saved but traveled quite a bit before and after kids. This has resulted in different goals, and career trajectory than my peers. Both of our children will be out of the house when we are 46.
I 100% agree with you that social media has warped people's views of life. My social media presence is LinkedIn (and I guess here), just a page with one post. None of my hobbies I post about or share online, only through in-person interactions. Nor do I have smart phone, so I don't take pictures to share, thus we discuss what visiting a Nepalese village was like, instead of scanning a bunch of photos. In my opinion this creates a better relationship dynamic. I am sure there are things Im missing out on due to the extra step people need to take to invite me (a phone call) but I gladly trade it for the reduced information overload from a smart phone.
I don't think that job exists any more. Or if it does, there are fewer and fewer of them out there.
I have a reasonably well-paid, low-stress developer job working on a product I believe adds value. But I don't get to go home and just switch off: I get emails at all hours of the day and night, and if the service goes down at 4 am (which has never happened yet) then I need to deal with it.
I'm not sure there are many jobs that pay middle class wages but only require 9-5/M-F levels of responsibility.
I live in the first world, in a city of about 100,000. According to numbeo it's a bit cheaper to live here than Seattle, but much more expensive than Dallas. I earn just under $60,000 USD as a developer, which is considered a good salary here.
I think you drastically over estimate the first world as a whole.
> We refuse to participate in the creation of databases of identifying information for the United States government to target individuals based on race, religion, or national origin.
But then you have people signing it who work for companies like Google and Facebook that obviously already have built huge databases to target individuals based on race, religion and national origin to show them ads.
If the US government really wanted to go full fascist, these companies have conveniently collated all the data for them.
It's like saying "I'm happy to work on building nuclear bombs, as long as you pinky-swear you'll only ever use them for digging harbours."[0]
If you're looking for an alternative: https://www.laarc.io/
You may find the site a welcome change of pace. We just had our first Show post today.
There is a good chance that this account will be quickly banned, this post killed, and this account marked as "uncommentable", meaning this is the last comment I am likely able to post under this handle. But you may also know me as sillysaurus.
I've missed you guys.
So is this basically a revolt by the more political oriented people? I mean, the people who want to discuss the political type controversial stuff and not so much tech and science?
Just wondering why I never heard of it until I read that comment?
Because it gets flagged off the site immediately.
I mean, again, if we're being fair, those guys should get as much of a say as you do.
> those guys should get as much of a say as you do.
Absolutely agree. But the flagging mechanism means that a small number of users make the choice for the rest, who never see the story in question.
I'm not suggesting I have an easy fix, community moderation is one of the biggest problems out there. But I'm not sure the current approach is the best one, that's all.
EDIT: and you might notice it happening now. This story has slipped down to 23rd on the front page, despite having far more upvotes in a shorter space of time than the stories that surround it. Soon it won't be on the front page any more.
That's the thing though, "a small number of users" made the choice to put the post on the front page in the first place. It only really takes a tiny fraction of the daily user count to promote a submission to the front page, and, to my mind, YCombinator is just kind of saying, "well, since there's no way to downvote a submission, we'll have this flagging mechanism." I think that's a reasonable compromise.
I think it may just be that beyond a certain size, online communities break, and you get crap. And laarc is effectively a splinter off HN of users who got fed up with the content here.
Techies aren’t as politically mono cultural as this (and most other pieces) would have you believe. Many would happily build something for ICE as another example.
Sure the number is nonzero, but I'd look beyond you're own bubble if you think that's a population worth mentioning in a discussion about larger trends.