I agree that noise can impact change, but the problem here is we've already got this noise within the Blue states. In order to get a policy change you need to have majority of Congress which means the noise needs to be felt on the Red states. So yea, if this was happening in a corporation based in Texas, Florida, or Georgia, I'd believe this was an action. Right now this exposure is going into publications that target people who already share the same viewpoint as the protestors.
I actually don't think this is a short term action. I think of this as a non-action. If Github pulls the ICE contract they will just use a competitor (Gitlab has already gone on record saying they will not restrict customers based on moral viewpoints). And regardless of which cloud code collaboration tool ICE uses, they will still be locking kids in detention camps and trampling human rights. No behavior change will happen at all at ICE if they have to change their git cloud provider.
This is a non action move in my opinion. I see it as slacktivism, if Github pulls the contract, people will pat themselves on the back, and count it as a win. You could argue the exposure might have some effect, but given that ICE human rights abuses have been very well documented by the leading publications, I'm unsure if additional exposure will bring change. I do strongly believe that funding lobbyists is the a great short term thing we can do. From an exposure viewpoint, I think the best thing we can do is raise exposure and support in the blue areas of the country. However, these protests are not doing that.
What bothers me the most is how myopic people are about this. Does anyone not see how dangerous it will be if we have the world's largest companies choosing to do business based on their internal moral grounds? Do we really want tech companies to have moral councils that vet customers?
If you want to fix ICE, then by all means, attack the problem at its source! Take that well paid Github salary of yours and fund the ACLU and other lobbyists fighting the good fight. Write your congressman. Call your congressman. VOTE! Campaign for the correct congressman. Code for your congressman. Push for policy that makes ICE employees (and all government employees) more accountable for human rights abuses. All of these actions will be more effective than campaigning for ICE, who will just migrate to a different cloud code review tool
if the contract is cancelled (gitlab, bitbucket, or whomever else).
I just wanted to see if dunstad would support such a ban. And they did, as you can see by their agreement. This shows how real that slippery slope is for many people...
You are right - I always forget that political affiliation is not a protected class within our legal system. However, I think it should be, because we've seen the whole ugly side of persecution and discrimination that came about during the McCarthy era and beyond where people like MLK, Chaplin, WEB Du Bois, and Linus Pauling were targeted for their political beliefs.
But how is Github's product enabling human rights violations? I can understand if Github employees were protesting a product that created human rights violations (for example if Github offered a security service for ICE detention centers that was abusing prisoners). Would you be ok if Github was a restaurant and it had a policy of not serving anyone who is an ICE employee?
I find it ironic that the same people protesting the contract would also protest a bakery that refuses to sell a product for say a same sex couple (or if you were in the 60s, restaurants that refused to serve blacks).
You either have a viewpoint that:
1) a business shouldn't make a moral judgement on its customers and be accessible to all
2) A business can make moral judgements on its customers and choose not to do business with customers considered immoral
If you are ok with #2 you are running into a slippery slope in my view. And if you are ok with #2 and you are one of the largest companies in the world, it is a very huge slippery slope.
> While what you say is true, does pushing the start time of class back 30 minutes or 1 hour make any difference? I'm skeptical.
Did you read the article? They have done several studies to show a significance difference in academic performance with a slight shift. That's the whole reason for this change.
"One three-year study (pdf, p.1) of 9,000 high-school students across three states, for example, found that academic performance, “including grades earned in core subject areas of math, English, science and social studies, plus performance on state and national achievement tests, attendance rates and reduced tardiness show significantly positive improvement with the later start times of 8:35 AM or later.”
Do you think top down strategy and control is important for large organizations? Most people idealize organizations that are grassroots drive so it's interesting to see how it didn't work in this case.
Different substances are regulated differently because they have different risks for the population. Nicotine is significantly more addictive and harmful than marijuana which is why it is regulated differently than marijuana: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Drug_danger_and_dependenc...
While that's the marketing view of most of the e-cig companies, we don't actually know if either of these claims are true.
#1 e-cigs are not as harmful as normal cigarettes
It will take several decades to prove or disprove this point. However, early research points to this not being the case.
#2 e-cigs make it much easier to quit tobacco
Again, early research doesn't indicate that e-cigs don't outperform other smoking cessation techniques.
The main concerns I've heard are from a public health perspective. Most tobacco researchers and public health officials are concerned that e-cigs are essentially a "better" product. "Better" meaning perceived as being less offensive, cooler, convenient, and less harmful. The concern is that since the youth perceive e-cigs as cool and safe, while cigarettes as uncool and harmful, it's seeing significant adoption in younger people which is undoing the gains from the anti-tobacco campaigns in the 90s. Essentially, the hypothesis is that e-cigs are a slightly less (but really the distinction is minute and trivial) harmful product that is significantly more compelling to people. The net effect is the threat of e-cigarettes is that it can do significantly more harm to humans that cigarettes (since more people perceive it as safe).
I'm going to have to disagree that you are "a paid a little less" at startups. In my experience working for a startup is a 20-30% drop in compensation.
When startups say they are near market, they mean base salaries. They neglect bonuses, stock grants, signing bonuses, stock refreshes, 401K matching. These things add up real quickly. Even worse, I've found that startup salaries usually don't grow as large companies (very few startups do equity refresh, raises, COL increases, etc.)
Compound this 30% difference over a 4 year stint and things start to look bad, esp. when you think of $1m+ home prices left in startup havens like San Francisco & New York. If the majority of startups were in affordable cities, I'd agree that the compensation difference isn't that much, but the bulk of startups are located in places where that 30% drop means a significant change in quality of life.
There's no definite answer. For example, if you want a site that functions without javascript (i.e. degrades gracefully) you need cookies. Localstorage requires JS while cookies do not. It really depends what kind of web app you are developing.
The distinction you are making doesn't exist. localStorage and cookies both persist after the browser is closed so if you want that use case you won't get it from either.
A coding bootcamp is basically a vocational program. Grads are looking to get placed in web developer roles so that's what their metric of success - can graduates get junior web roles?
I think you are buying into the marketing/PR hype. The majority of headcount actually works on core products like advertising & search. The headcount in fringe areas like things like X is a very small % of total engineers. This basically is a huge boost for recruiting because every engineer hopes to work on these moonshot teams.
