Besides, there's something better to learn here: the surveillance state will always find willing people to work on technologies that can potentially be used to oppress populations. Luckey is enormously wealthy by world (and HN) standards -- he has "fuck you money" that so many on this board are searching for -- so you can't say he's out building this stuff to pay the bills, to feed his family, et cetera. He's out building this stuff because he is a paladin for this cause, regardless of whether or not you find it detestable.
This. I have never understood why people think that if someone has something means they don't need more of it.
Though I can't speak for Palmer Luckey's intention behind doing this.
Yes, the technology could be repurposed for nefarious uses, but so can just about every other technology. Machine learning, for example, probably has some excellent military applications.
Trump's America and Putins Russia are the same. In Russia, it costs big$$ to get favourable regulations from the government and access to government spending. Once u pay, ur returns are garenteed. As we can see with Trumps budget, its obvious he is paying back the US's own oligarchy in order to gain a life-long membership.
Nah, the big 4 Australian banks all make profits in the billions:
http://www.smh.com.au/business/banking-and-finance/big-four-...
With regards to Luckey's exit from Facebook, and the controversy of his politically-oriented actions:
Persecuting someone for choosing a political candidate or supporting a political group is the exact opposite of a democracy - no matter how "abominable" that group might seem. I am not a Trump supporter, but the way people have treated his supporters sickens me. Can we agree to disagree, rather than launch a witch hunt on anyone who does not share similar views? This has manifested itself everywhere, its not even choosing sides anymore (see: Kathy Griffin).
We are so afraid of free speech it is ridiculous. I say let people speak. If people want to speak and say potentially idiotic things, let them expose their views. They are free to speak, we are free to listen or ignore. We have a huge empathy problem where anyone that holds an opposing view is inhuman.
We are afraid that free speech will incite violence, but ironically a lot more violence has come from trying to suppress free speech.
We can chose to work in these fields, we can choose not to. There will be engineers who have to do things to get a pay check, to feed their families. I don't begrudge that.
However it is up to each of us who understand the technology to ensure that we vote and support the best political representatives who understand when it is morally correct to best implement such advances.
1) Working on US border security is bad.
2) US Soldiers are good. Even though their job is ultimately for border security and border security in other countries.
Is it that they see the idea of a defensive military as good and tolerate it doing any amount of bad as long as it might also do good too? Are they following the Nuremberg defense of soldiers not being accountable for their actions as long as they're following orders?
Does 1) extend to other countries? Is border security for, say, Nigeria a bad thing? Or is it a good thing if it's enforced by Nigerian soldiers and bad if it's enforced by more efficient technology?
However, the linked article doesn't say that. It says he gave $100,000 to Trump's inauguration. The linked article also references figures like "Microsoft, which donated $500,00", "Qualcomm, which donated $1,000,000". In fact, the article's title makes this clear: "...donated $100,000 to Trump’s inauguration"
How could a "reporter" and his editor be so confused that they completely misinterpret another article hosted on their own site? More importantly, why is this trash on Hacker News?
I can see this being on Hacker News due to the technology connection. It would have been better to find a more neutral / factual article, perhaps. Maybe the BBC version? (http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-40158899)
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/04/business/oculus-palmer-lu...
(itself already sensibly flagged to oblivion).
Surely the problem with funding a group like that is that they are actively employing measures to reduce free speech or a balanced political discussion? In that context it's not someone who is using their free speech, but employing others to suppress it. That's the problem I have with Luckey's actions (and yes, a whole lot of other people's too).
According to Luckey, they made some memes that he liked. Maybe they were not racist memes, but I do not know. Maybe Luckey did not know about some of their worse memes. Anyhow, he threw them a chunk of money. We can infer without greater evidence that Luckey is racist simply because he donated to something.
All of that said, the one and only attack on free speech is censorship. Censorship comes in many forms, including the form of shaming people. I think what the alt-right does is dumb, but at the same time, they hide in their own dark corner of the internet and I never have to interact with them so I am fine carrying about my business. Luckey donating to Nimble America had a similar lack of effect on me.
Attempt to maximize some measure of "total freedom" at the expense of some individual freedom, or just let everybody do what they want even if it harms the community?
The fact that a lot of messages aren't is maybe worth some reflection.
Speaking out against atrocities and harmful political views is exactly what democracy is about.
Some people find themselves "persecuted" any time someone disagrees or they can't get media on their side. That is diluting the term and in no way reason to stop speaking out against them. (And perhaps ironically, the ones who want to silence others often see themselves as silenced.)
What you call "persecution" I call a difference of opinion. No one is saying this guy should be locked up for his views, and he clearly has the means and opportunity to continue pursuing his political and career goals.
He aligned himself with groups his employer found unsavory (shitlords, trolls, meme magicians, etc.) and lost his job. that's not persecution, that's playing with fire and getting burned.
Playing devil's advocate may be intellectually satisfying for you but I believe it damages the discourse by presuming a fundamental equality between the two sides, as if this is all just a game and there is no right and wrong. Your perspective here is, essentially, nihilistic. You steadfastly refuse to make a value judgement on the people you are defending.
This perspective was satirized by @dril on Twitter[0]:
> the wise man bowed his head solemnly and spoke: "theres actually zero difference between good & bad things. you imbecile. you fucking moron"
From this everything-is-neutral, there-is-no-right-and-wrong vantage point, I can see how the Trump backlash could look like anti-free-speech partisanship. But everything is not neutral. There are such things as right and wrong.
[0]: https://twitter.com/dril/status/473265809079693312?lang=en
And I can choose not to listen to them, or to disagree with them, or to speak out against them, or to refuse to associate with them, or to refuse to support their causes, or all of the above.
The problem you seem to have is confusing "I disagree with, and thus refuse to associate with or support, and will speak out against, this person's views" for "This person is oppressed".
In a marketplace of ideas, some people are not going to be winners.
There is a clear difference between debating political views and witch hunting though.
People are having to write public apologies for having their own views or engaging in free speech. This is NOT ok in my opinion. People are getting fired or threatened for being Trump supporters. Also not ok IMO.
The clear difference is when it turns from political debate ("free speech") into real-world consequence.
And some things should have consequence. If a person engaged in racial discrimination in the workplace, I would totally fire them. However, if someone supported political candidate of dubious values, its a different ballgame - maybe they support that candidate for their economic policy, who knows. The crazy thing is Luckey is not even a Trump supporter, at least according to his public apology.
This word, I do not think it means what you think it means.
Nope, sorry. This isn't a witch hunt on people who do not share my views. It is a witch hunt on a man unfit to hold the office, with detestable views, not just ones I don't share.
I don't know why people can't see that Trump is an entirely different situation than the usual "damn my party lost".
I will die, never knowing. Oh well.
Nobody expects the president to be a genius military strategist, a certified priest, a renowned scientist, a master economist or whatever else. What people do expect is that he seeks out those he trusts most to offer opinions, data and interpretations of data to allow him to make informed decisions he deems best for the country.
To some extent, I think many of his whimsical views are irrelevant and are simply highlighted by media for profitability while others are perhaps overinflated relative to their original form. His actions are all that really matter and the media is covering him so studiously that if he does something truly horrid then it's unlikely to squeak by.
Having said that, there is a very serious danger that the media may have cried wolf too many times and the public may not pay as much attention if they have to cry wolf for real. They've overinflated and misrepresented many issues in every attempt to depopularize or delegitimize Trump, that they may have destroyed some of their potential as an alarm bell service.
A couple years ago if you were to put out a truly fair unbiased survey across the country which asked about the border wall or immigration from that list of countries without trying to force racial or religious interpretations, the results might be surprising in retrospect. After these things became super-topics thrust into the light of the campaign, the media machine went into full swing to convince people that everything about them was horrible.
Many people didn't even know they should have strong opinions about these and if Obama had done them (perhaps more smoothly), it might have just been another day. The trend out there is not to properly inform people on topics, but to instill anger. To some degree, Trump won on that emotional vote by using the same tactics.
What people have felt is that the government was not representing them and a candidate appeared that showed every indication of fighting an uphill battle where both parties and the media were against him. Saying a few unpopular things was not considered enough to be damning, especially when the media had thrown a lot of its credibility out by passing a certain threshold for bias which may have hurt their influence on shaping public opinion.
Now, part of what is keeping all of the controversy alive is that many people feel that Trump is being judged as guilty until proven innocent while at the same time there is parallel information (both fake news and legitimate) that offers reasonable doubt.
There was a time when news and scientific papers were trusted by default, but trust has been sacrificed for agendas and personal or corporate gain. It was never a good thing that they were trusted by default, but it was good that they were less opinion oriented. Now the burden has been placed back on the individual to do their own research, but many do not have the time or are not equipped to do research and the internet offers many counter-productive shortcuts.
I'm not a particularly politically invested person and I completely opt-out of the process. No voting, no donating, no activism, etc. It is however good to see that more people have gained interest in that process, despite how juvenile it may seem on both sides.
I don't know if any of that satisfies your curiosity, but I apologize for it being lengthy. It's easy to give in to the doomsaying that's popular right now, but I don't think Trump even measures on the chart of things to worry about over the next 100-200 years. Technically I guess that's also considered doomsaying. :) Doomed if we do, doomed if we don't.
I don't know Trump much but the parallels are amazing. I know our media is bought and paid for by vested interests but such a thing in the US would be unimaginable for me. And then again, your media all saw proofs of WMD in Iraq.
I'm an American and maybe completely out of the loop but I never saw any news report that WMD was discovered in Iraq. I'm guessing it may have been circulated online but the news I watched never reported it from my memory.
CNN has a bunch of people they pay to come say how great Trump is. That sounds sarcastic, but they really do have several paid commentators that will work backwards and find anything to justify anything.
This isn't families getting deported. This is cameras, on the border.
Or do you believe that border crossings are inherently immoral?
Today's border cameras are liable to be deployed all over in the future. Watch what you build because it's very hard to un-build things.
He's developing a technological alternative to "full-scale border walls." He also explicitly positions it as a "defense" technology to protect citizens from threats. A substantial amount of the money to be made here is made possible by anti-immigrant hysteria.
I wouldn't want any of my technology preventing people from improving their situation. So yes, in this instance, I would not work on this project.
I do. It's not OK to do immoral things just because someone is paying you to do them.
That's like refusing to build security cameras because you oppose the death penalty.
The implication of your argument is that cameras make borders more secure and therefore it's a good idea to have them. Cameras obviously don't stop people crossing a border physically like a wall would, so the only possible way they'll improve security is by providing evidence of who crossed. Your assertion that "No one's getting deported" is obviously wrong - if that were the case there'd be no need to have the cameras in the first place.
I can deeply respect anyone who would refuse to aid the current government's immigration policies in any way, and I would refuse to do so myself.
When the institutional reaction to a reporter fleeing death threats from agents of his government, by voluntarily surrendering at your border and asking for asylum, is to lock him up, then I can see reasons to criticize those working to empower said institutions (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/04/07...).
When President Trump issued an Executive Order banning immigrants from seven countries, over 100 tech companies showed up at the courts opposing the move. But support for skilled immigration - i.e. immigrants working at these tech companies - is scant. For instance, so far only Microsoft [2] has come forward to support legislation fixing systemic discrimination against skilled immigrants from the most populous countries.
Sure, the firms are free to choose the causes they support. But it sounds hollow when they are blind to plight of their own employees who they come across every day, but are able to manufacture anguish for others they often have very little contact.
[1]: https://www.recode.net/2017/4/19/15363806/trump-amazon-googl...
[2]: https://www.facebook.com/CongressmanJasonChaffetz/posts/1222...
That's not what the executive order did.
At the other end, border patrol is seen as an extension of the surveillance state.
Current members, because I grew up in a part of the country ideal for military recruiting: poor overall education, weak economy, and for many people enlisting is the only way they can see to escape from it. It's not direct conscription, but in terms of the genuine choices available it's often pretty close. And for "choices" that are partly or heavily coerced I'm much less judgmental.
Former members, because many of them signed up for the reasons outlined above, and now are treated horribly.
2) is fighting brutal dictators
However there are times when:
1. is good
2. is evil (about half the time in the US case)
1) The desire for a "free and open" world, especially without much first-hand experience of the immediate downsides of that.
2) That technologies in this space also directly enable police-state situations, and there are reasons to believe that this is a risk in the future.
3) A privacy-driven dislike for surveillance -- sure, you know who I am when I go through passport control, but I don't want to be tracked in more detail than that.
4) Our existing border security is reasonably functional, and there are better ways to spend the time & money. (Especially as pertains the arguably excessive "border wall".)
Sadly that's not true. If there are millions of stupid messages then it's very hard to see the good ones. To use HN as an analogy, some brilliant stories never make it to the front page on a busy day because /newest is just moving too fast. In that sense shitposting does deprive people of speech by making it impossible for anyone to listen.
Some are prevented from entering very near to the time and place of entry. Most people can see a difference.
It's not OK that the left has started doing it to the right, but the people I see going on about "liberal witch hunts" and "Literally Hitler" and "This is why Trump won" I didn't see having a problem back when Jonah Goldberg wrote a bestselling book about how Hillary was "Literally Hitler", or a problem when Limbaugh/Hannity/OReilly were saying that anti-war protesters were terrorist lovers.
These people didn't have a problem when entertainers who spoke out against George W Bush were blackballed. Or when people who opposed the DOMA were accused of being anti-Christian. Or all the bullshit about Vietnam vets getting spit on (it never happened, but it's still accepted as conventional wisdom that it did.) People have gotten threatened and fired from their jobs for supporting gun control - why no outrage about that? People who are pro-choice still get accused of being baby-killers. Where's the outrage about that from the frozen peach lover community?
Being accused of being a traitor to America or to Christianity for holding leftist political beliefs has been the social norm since the 1950's in this country. I wish people would quit acting like some 13 year old liberals on Tumblr started this shit.
Suggested Reading: Liberal Fascism, by Jonah Goldberg Deliver Us from Evil: Defeating Terrorism, Despotism, and Liberalism, by Sean Hannity The Crucible, by Arthur Miller Literally any post on Breitbart, ever.
People are having to write public apologies for having their own views or engaging in free speech
So would you see a boycott as a "witch hunt"? After all, the point is to force an organization, or its leaders, to disavow opinions or positions. Do people not have the right to collectively speak in that fashion?
Because ultimately that's what these "witch hunts" people wring their hands about boil down to: organized action by people who disagree.
What's worse is that while trying to cloak yourself in "free speech", you're really making an argument that is virulently hateful to it. The only way not to have the "witch hunts" you're so terrified of is to stifle speech. The only way not to have people pressured into public apologies is to stifle speech. You cannot have "free speech" and not have the potential for consequences in the form of large numbers of people disagreeing with or disassociating from you. What you really seem to want is a freedom of first speech -- in other words, someone who speaks first gets a special privilege of never having to deal with people disagreeing, or consequences of the general public's views of their speech. And if that is what you want, you should stop calling it "free speech" and start calling it "privileged special protection for certain speakers", since that's what it would actually be.
Not paying taxes would help.
When I think censorship I think people being fined, thrown in cages, or even killed for saying or writing the wrong kind of thing.
That is a very different thing than, "Shame on you! What would your mother think?"
Of course, you are totally free to develop opinions about people - but at the same time laws for slander, libel, and defamation exist for a good reason. Many people made Luckey out to be Hitler, but if you met him in real life you'd probably find it hard to insist on this comparison.
The difference, of course, is that it isn't the government doing it. It's the general population.
I'm of 2 minds about it because I don't want to support anyone that supports racism.
But I also feel that people deserve second chances. People do learn from their mistakes, and they have to be allowed to continue on afterwards or there's no point in changing.
I haven't heard of Luckey apologizing, but that isn't surprising because the media doesn't think that's good enough news to broadcast. They only publish the worst stuff, not the best. He might have done so and I'd have no idea.
Mmm, surely you think there's a line somewhere, right? Hypothetically, if a business owner used their profits to fund people committing genocide in Africa, you would find that objectionable, boycott that business, and demand an apology, yes? If so, then you draw the line at least at supporting genocide.
Others draw the line elsewhere. Supporting the Republican party in 2017 means supporting minority disenfranchisement, supporting open racism against and profiling of people of Hispanic and Middle Eastern descent, supporting poor health outcomes for people who aren't wealthy, supporting the undermining of our democracy through a blatant disregard for reality, and a list of other atrocities of varying magnitudes depending on who you ask. The same cannot be said for Democrats.
I think it's reasonable for many people to draw their lines at that point, and demand an apology from business leaders who support Republicans. I also think it's reasonable for you to draw your line elsewhere, and to debate in favor of your line. But I think it's crazy to claim that there is no line that a person may cross that should expel them from our modern society.
I just deleted a lengthy post rebutting you, because I realized that quoting this is all I need. You profess to support free speech, but you do not. That's all there is.
That's society saying that one's behavior is unacceptable and that it won't do business with them. I find that perfectly acceptable. Its not being forced by a single entity, but rather a general consensus is reached among everyone.
> I haven't heard of Luckey apologizing
Because he hasn't.
Do you honestly think this socio-political pressure is new? It's now visible due to how well-connected the world is now and it resonates a bit because the victims are people HN potentially identify with.
This has been going on for ages and is not limited to the left or right, labels have been flying for ages: n!@@&^-lover, RINO, fascist, cuckservertive, racist, and on and on.
No we can't. And this is the kind of lazy reasoning that has already diluted the word "racist" significantly.
Snark punctuating a hazy, misinformed comment is ironically one of the calling cards of the alt-right: incoherency of speech to provoke incoherency of thought.
http://www.ibtimes.com/how-berlin-wall-fell-two-reporters-re...
The guards with guns were the real impediment.
At any rate, we are discussing surveillance technology, not a wall. And it has nothing to do with Americans legally leaving the US.
For many years they were campaigning to make Germany great again, as other countries were taking advantage of them and some elements in their country were intentionally making bad deals. Plus obviously the people who weren't real Germans were a problem that needed to be dealt with. They wanted to build up the army and built strong links between large corporations and the government.
So maybe it's okay to call people who do things like that Nazis?
Because almost everything in life works this way. Once I have a place to live, I don't need to find a second one. Once I've eaten enough food to be full, I don't need to keep eating. Maybe by buying enough clothes you can avoid doing laundry, though…
Except that's not how it works, at all.
Overweight people are overweight because they eat when they don't need to.
People with money pursue ever greater amounts of it.
People are overweight for reasons other than "eating too much," just as drug addicts relapse for reasons other than "trying meth once." I'm actually comfortable thinking about greed as a symptom of a disconnected world view as well. Just one that none of the afflicted are inclined to treat.
That's a massive over-simplification, but by the same token, okay? We've now established that over-accumulation of wealth is comparable to an eating / mental disorder? Has anyone looked into treating this disorder?
Innovative!
What I meant is money is one commodity where even the super rich wants more, not less. Just because they have a lot of money doesn't mean they stop caring about it.
If you think that Lidar technology for border security can only be used at national boundaries, I have a bridge in NY to sell you.
From [1]:
Executive Order 13769 lowered the number of refugees to be admitted
into the United States in 2017 to 50,000, suspended the U.S. Refugee
Admissions Program (USRAP) for 120 days, suspended the entry of Syrian
refugees indefinitely, directed some cabinet secretaries to suspend entry
of those whose countries do not meet adjudication standards under U.S.
immigration law for 90 days, and included exceptions on a case-by-case
basis. Homeland Security lists these countries as Iran, Iraq, Libya,
Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen.
I don't think that the distinction is as narrow as you think that it is.
I'm not sure if the 100 mile thing is a new convention or not (https://www.aclu.org/other/constitution-100-mile-border-zone) but it's 100 miles from the border as the crow flies, not via highways. That means the entire state of Vermont is somehow inside that zone.
I think the 200 mile figure that was reported, though I can't find the citation, involved the driving distance. Vermont, for example, is 159 miles end to end, and somehow the southern tip is in the border zone.
What if they decide this entire zone is worth putting up cameras in? What if that software that recognizes "illegals" is so bad that it simply tags anyone who looks vaguely Mexican? These systems are only as good as their data, and the data is astonishingly thin in areas where it counts.
A recent story covered three people that were treated as "identical" in the police database because they had the same first/middle/last names and birthdates. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/apr/03/identity-the...
Or someone without a ~~personal tracking device~~ cellphone
The overwhelming majority of the country lives within 200 miles of a border (since ocean borders count as borders). 66% of the country lives within only 100 miles of the border.
So even if you're talking about something that "only" applies to the 200 mile region, you're still talking about something that applies to the vast majority of people actually living here.
Note that I was talking about relief for current employees of these tech companies. Please direct me to evidence supporting massive support for this cause from tech companies.
1) Lobby to increase H1B caps 2) Once they are here they "don't do anything" to help them get permanent residency
I think you are conflating two very different things: Valley companies were very vocal about refugees not being allowed into the country, which has little (arguably nothing) to do with H1B immigration. Most people coming on H1Bs aren't fleeing a war zone or at risk of death.
While waiting times for extremely populous countries (i.e. China and India) can be very long, that's because of the way immigration quotas for citizenship/permanent residency are setup, and has nothing to do with the employer/employee relationship that is in the company's interest.
What, exactly, do you expect companies to do besides providing a job? What would be your proposal?
My proposal would be for companies to use their lobbying muscle to try pass legislation that would put a stop to the systemic racial discrimination embodied in the current legal immigration laws. It is no longer called "XYZ Exclusion Act of NNN" but that is what it boils down to, in practice. See Microsoft's stance I linked to in the comment you replied to originally. More of the same is what I expect from Valley companies who benefit immensely from the labor of immigrants.
Instead these companies choose to use their influence to speak for allowing more refugees into the country, protecting illegal immigrants etc. This comes out as hollow to me. If these companies really cared for immigration issues, there are issues much closer to home.
It needn't be this or that. But, the fact that organizations like FWD.us etc are completely silent about legal immigration issues makes one wonder about their true intentions.
Trump's travel ban or lidar-based border control wouldn't even have prevented 9/11 as most came from a country that is of economic importance.
Maybe Luckey can sell its technology to Saudia Arabia and Trump can then boast of the big money deals he made. In the mean time SA can fund European mosque's that calls not to integrate, to resist western society/ideals or democracy. That is big part of the problem.
I don't believe for one bit that this has to do with "security" or "keeping troops save". There are easier things you can do that would improve that.
There has to be a solution
Laying WMDs in Iraq at the feet of the media, as if they could influence our military's action, is ridiculous.
There was a study published in 2005 showing that a huge majority of americans (and australians/germans) did not believe WMDs were found in Iraq[2]. I do wonder how the numbers changed after the 2014 article by the NYT.
[1]https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/10/14/world/middlee...
[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_and_weapons_of_mass_destr...
This isn't a good norm.
Empowering groups with money is a behavior.
> Often witch-hunt style - i.e. the victim didn't even hold the opinion attributed to them by the mob.
What opinion was attributed to Luckey that he didn't seem to hold or support?
I've seen a lot of social media that's based on a misinterpretation of a Twitter comment, and people screaming for them to be fired for some kind of prejudice that never actually existed. It quickly got to the point that I no longer trust the general public to be right about anything that involves social media. Even cursory sanity checks fail.
What did "the media" have to gain from the US going to war in Iraq? Any media campaign to convince the public would have been led by the government. All the actionable intel came from government, not the media. "The media" isn't some mass entity working together. They're one step above the general public in the knowledge chain, beneath government. Government can influence the media as much as it can influence the public.