> But to expect that a _federal agency_ will be denied service from a private entity, especially for essentially political reasons, is lunacy.
Um, think you've got this backwards. Private entities shouldn't have to take on anyone they don't want as customers (for whatever reason - do you have to justify who you do or don't want in your livingroom?), but publicly-funded institutions shouldn't be able to deny service on political grounds.
That is true – businesses are legally allowed to refuse service to anyone (apart from protected classes like race or political affiliation, but that probably does not apply here). It's an important right, and probably many businesses would be more profitable and happy if they exercised that right more often.
It's still politically dangerous, and would earn a company a lot of enemies and mistrust (as well as some allies, though they may be the type to just ask for more, as others on this post have mentioned).
> It's still politically dangerous, and would earn a company a lot of enemies and mistrust
Yes, doing the right thing often is dangerous and earns you hatred from other people doing bad things who love the freedom of hiding amongst a herd of other equally guilty people.
The reason we have so much respect for people who take stand and do what they believe is right is because doing so is so hard. That doesn't mean you shouldn't do it.
If you're going to risk your business's livelihood to bravely take a stand, it should be in a situation where you can win. Where your bold action will be the turning point towards victory of righteousness. And where the magnitude of that victory is commensurate with the risk of your business's failure.
Denying the use of racially biased facial recognition software is a much clearer example where the risks are lower and the impact much, much greater.
It's much less clear that a source code repository is the fulcrum that enables 40 children to be jammed into a room without hygiene. Maybe if you worked for a critical supplier for ICE you could have an impact (which I would much encourage).
> If you're going to risk your business's livelihood to bravely take a stand, it should be in a situation where you can win.
I fundamentally disagree with this. Your argument is akin to stating that there should never be any casualties in a war. There is no way to effectively win a war without sometimes sending some troops into situations where you know they will die.
Compared to soldiers who knowingly lay down their lives in losing battles to help win the war, choosing a moral course of action that merely ends a company seems like a pretty cheap sacrifice.
I think a better way to look at it is that workers should be able to protest working on a machine they find morally wrong. The world might be a better place if people directing resources were required to stop and think "Are the workers going to willingly do this?" before making decisions.
What if developers find it morally wrong to automate away jobs? Do they get a say?
Is it within their moral rights for backhoe operators demand manual ditch digging too because that will benefit their friends who lost jobs to powered equipment?
In that case they probably should quit and join a different company. I mean, if they don't agree with the core function of their job, why are they working there?
Regardless, if enough people think it is wrong that the company goes out of business, so be it. I don't think that is likely, but ok. Automation is going to continue to happen no matter what.
To some extent, yes. The economy exists for the benefit of humanity and not the other way around.
The question is: does the automation help us build things that were impossible before, or does it exist for the sole purpose of cutting jobs and funneling more money to the executives?
That kills the whole purpose of automation. Automation is preferable because it is supposed to be cheaper while providing equal benefits as traditional production of goods and services.
My personal choice here would be a tax for practices that are provably automatable but not yet automated. The result is the same, we are funding a UBI but now businesses are also incentivized for innovation to escape from the tax. I'm probably missing hundreds of reasonable concerns with my simplistic view point though.
> That kills the whole purpose of automation. Automation is preferable because it is supposed to be cheaper while providing equal benefits as traditional production of goods and services.
That's the capitalist enrich-the-owners purpose. In my mind, the real purpose of automation is to relieve humans the need to do work so they can live lives of leisure and personal enrichment. Unfortunately, I don't expect us to get there within my lifetime, if ever at all.
Well, some companies seem to end up with weird incentives where it makes sense to be less productive. For example, a dev might create some script that eliminates some data processing roles. The CEO might decide to not implement it solely to save a few jobs. If there’s a tax for not automating then the organization will immediately respond in a more economically rational way.
In this case, the existence of a proof means that its application is universal. You may believe that the automation of one process could be easily generalized to another process, but you haven't proved it until you've automated the second process.
How exactly are you going to measure what is automation? Even something as basic as making a function rather than copy-pasting code is automation.Where do you draw the line? Who is going to measure this?
> Is it within their moral rights for backhoe operators demand manual ditch digging too because that will benefit their friends who lost jobs to powered equipment?
This seems like an unfruitful digression.
OP already agreed that the actions of ICE are immoral and that this action is within the moral rights of the workers.
The main question is about efficacy. That isn't elucidated by introducing a thought experiment where you believe the moral rights of developers are not as clear cut.
For most Americans and, I’d guess most citizens of most countries, enforcing immigration laws isn’t a big debate and enforcement is routine and companies don’t question enforcement by their government.
So the question is can employees who have diverging moralities have direct input on what a company considers moral and immoral outside the common take of the population at large?
> For most Americans and, I’d guess most citizens of most countries, enforcing immigration laws isn’t a big debate and enforcement is routine and companies don’t question enforcement by their government.
At least for Americans you are wrong on all three counts, and that may be where the confusion is coming.
The workers (and as I already stated, the OP) all agree that there are actions done by ICE that are not only unethical but morally reprehensible. One of the (only) two major parties officially agrees as do a large portion of their constituents.
So your question about views "outside the common take" is interesting but not relevant to this discussion.
Should they? Well, one hardly can force someone to work for one's self nowadays.
Companies aren't democracies. Why should "the population at large"'s opinion matter in anyway? Most people don't even know Github exists, let alone what it's for.
This just seems like a weird, ineffective way to put pressure on ICE to stop detaining people excessively, inhumanely, or lethally.
It might very well be, and it's worth debating how much giving business support to an organization whose policies you (possibly vehemently) disagree with is a kind of implicit support of those policies. But, it's also worth asking: if protest by workers to put pressure on their employees to stop giving business support to organizations whose policies they vehemently disagree with is "disappointing," what kind of protest isn't?
It seems to me that when we're talking about corporations, who you do and don't sign contracts with -- who you buy from, who you sell to, and what charities you support -- is far and away the strongest signal you can send. If you're sending a signal of support to Black Lives Matter protests, it's nice if you send out a few tweets and update your home page, but it's better if you donate money, services, and/or employee time. And the group you donate those things to is going to send a signal: donating to Colin Kaepernick's "Know Your Rights Camp" is in some sense a more specific, stronger message than donating to the ACLU.
So it certainly seems reasonable that asking the corporations you work for (and perhaps work with) to put their money where their PR is in terms of who they do business with also sends a message. No, it's probably not in and of itself going to put much pressure on ICE, but it is a statement of values.
Yes exactly! There are lots of more effective ways to take action (and changing your twitter pic likely isn't a big one). Donating to BLM causes, employee time, lobbying, etc, as you have mentioned.
Personally I think $500k is a bit small, and if I were Nat Friedman in this situation, maybe I would have announced a few extra paid leave days for employees engaging in protest, strikes, visiting elected officials to lobby for change, etc.
Nat Friedman's quote on this particular request from employees is "Picking and choosing customers is not the approach that we take to these types of questions when it comes to influencing government policy."
> Anger and outrage are valuable, and it's important that we channel them in the right directions.
It's important to channel them in all directions that could have impact. You never know for sure which 'direction' matters to the group you are trying to impart change on.
Even if there is no direct impact (such as another supplier stepping in) an individual choosing to avoid directly, supporting an organization they cannot morally abide has personal moral value. Probably not in a utilitarian sense, but that isn't the only basis for moral action in humans - see the trolly-problem for the canonical example.
> I think ICE needs reforms, but I don't believe a pressure should be put on them to impose changes
I'm in one of those weird moods where I want to see if I can argue something that sounds weird at first. If that's not your thing just ignore this post.
Putting pressure on ICE isn't going to change anything. Institutions cannot be trusted to reform themselves. In fact, it's going to be worse than doing nothing. The people involved will feel like they have "done their part" and will do fewer useful things in the future than they would have otherwise, mostly because they wasted their time on this thing.
Pressure has to be put on congress to reform ICE. Anything that distracts from that, or makes people feel a sense of accomplishment without furthering that goal is worse than useless.
ICE doesn't make the law. Yes, there have been actions worthy of investigation. But blaming ICE for doing its job? Is it's ICE's fault there are 12 million undocumented immigrants? That was no accident.
How would businesses be more profitable if they exercised the right to refuse service more? You also realize the people who exercise this right the most do it for reasons you likely don't agree with.
Simple: some customers are more expensive to serve than others.
Maybe they use a lot of a free service you provide that costs you money. Maybe they require too much customer support. Maybe they return most of the products they buy from you. I've looked at a few datasets where profitability by customer varied pretty widely, including many that were clearly in the red. Most companies just don't break out their costs by customer enough to see it.
Spot on. I’ve worked for companies that have “fired” customers for being more trouble than they’re worth. Generally, it was because of unreasonable support or product demands (e.g. “we need this boutique feature added now,” filing countless tickets for outstanding issues we were working on and had communicated as much to them, etc).
If more companies were forced to pause and consider whether taking on certain customers would cause their workers to revolt, we’d all be better off.
I am strongly against a private business being able to refuse service to a person/organization on political grounds, even when the "victim" may seem to be performing evil actions, as long as it is not breaking any laws. One should not discriminate on the basis of race, political orientation, gender, origin or religion. Refusing service is clearly a form of discrimination. When you aim that towards your own Government, it may look like a heroic action to your supporters, but to those who are not, you're performing discrimination on the grounds of political affiliation against an organization that is following, as it is obliged to, the law of the Land. If you think the ICE is doing terrible things, you should lob the Government to take action and bring them to justice, but given the Government is, as I understand it, actually mandating such terrible things, you're aiming your fury at the wrong place. You should be protesting against the Government who is mandating these terrible things.
Imagine for a moment that things change completely, and the ICE starts refusing to follow the orders of the Government - but now the Government is leaning towards the far-left, and wants the ICE to open borders to all. The ICE would no doubt have a lot of supporters, but disobeying the Government in such case would ALSO be wrong because in a democracy, the Government represents the people - by not following the orders of the Government, you're basically advancing anarchy. In both cases, the correct attitude is to fight for a Government change. It's not democratic for a Government organization to take its own stance on a topic despite the Government's policies.
ICE is not a person. ICE does not have a "race, political orientation, gender, origin or religion." It is a social construct and a very recent one at that.
Denying service to ICE the organization isn't even remotely comparable to denying service to actual human beings.
“Creed” [0] is a protected class and it will be interesting to see a legal determination if this is discrimination based on the creed of the organization. Namely, carrying out its congressional mandate.
I think that social constructs could be discriminated against based on race, religion, sex, etc if it was discriminated against because its members were part of a protected class.
Religion isn't a person either. That's a social construct. And I keep reading people claiming gender is a social construct too, so I guess discriminating against people on those grounds is fine then.
Denying service to ICE the organization isn't even remotely comparable to denying service to actual human beings.
Is ICE staffed entirely by robots? How is it not denying service to actual human beings?
A government agency cannot be a victim of discrimination, at least not in any way that matters. It is not a person, and does not have rights.
A government agency refusing to follow its orders is in no way parallel or analogous to a private company refusing to serve a particular customer. In the first case it's an illegal act, where the result will be the firing/jailing of the offenders (with the removal of their access that enables them to disobey), while in the second case it's just a normal, legal, expected outcome of business sometimes.
> the correct attitude is to fight for a Government change
Private entities refusing to do business with certain parts of the government is an aspect of fighting for government change. GitHub refusing to do business with ICE is a collective way for GH's employees and executives to lobby the government for change.
This is not an absolute truth, and many countries would disagree with your interpretation of discrimination.
For instance in France regarding B2B sales:
"Constitue également une discrimination toute distinction opérée entre les personnes morales sur le fondement de l'origine, du sexe, de la situation de famille, de la grossesse, de l'apparence physique, de la particulière vulnérabilité résultant de la situation économique, apparente ou connue de son auteur, du patronyme, du lieu de résidence, de l'état de santé, de la perte d'autonomie, du handicap, des caractéristiques génétiques, des mœurs, de l'orientation sexuelle, de l'identité de genre, de l'âge, des opinions politiques, des activités syndicales, de la capacité à s'exprimer dans une langue autre que le français, de l'appartenance ou de la non-appartenance, vraie ou supposée, à une ethnie, une Nation, une prétendue race ou une religion déterminée des membres ou de certains membres de ces personnes morales."
This clearly states that you cannot refuse to sell a product or to a company on political grounds, just like you can't refuse to sell to a Jewish association because they are Jewish, or to a Italian company because you don't trust Italians.
>One should not discriminate on the basis of race, political orientation, gender, origin or religion. Refusing service is clearly a form of discrimination
It looks like you're trying to imply that discriminating based on political orientation is as bad as as discriminating based on race, gender, origin or religion, but that's wrong. At least when it comes to the law, political orientation isn't a protected class. Race, gender, origin or religion are.
When it comes to US law, under the qualification of "most states", then political orientation is not protected. Some states however do protect it in some circumstances just like any other discrimination. Discrimination laws in the US is a mix between federal and state law.
In the EU under human rights, discriminating based on political orientation is just as bad as discriminating based on race, gender, origin or religion. Religion and political beliefs are equivalent under the rule of law.
The UN also recognize discriminating based on political orientation under their human right declaration: "Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status"
I think that there is a good midway solution to this.
For example in many countries you need to "register" political advertising[1]. One could say that it is perfectly reasonable not to help political opponents, but then it would be reasonable to declare your business as politically oriented.
Similarly to how even private universities in the US must uphold free-speech rights is they declare free-speech friendly.
This is not a complete solution, but it does not need to be all or nothing.
[1] in the Uk there was some conversation about Ryanair's showing pro-stay slogan on a plane behind a press conference during the Brexit campaing
You're correct regarding the law, but I wouldn't be so quick to claim it's not as bad. Suppose a business refused to serve union activists? Environmentalists? Feminists? Suppose many large businesses did so?
I also think discrimination based on political grounds is a bad idea. In NZ political opinion is protected. Human Rights Act 1993, 21 Prohibited grounds of discrimination (1)(j) "political opinion, which includes the lack of a particular political opinion or any political opinion" [An exception is made for employment of a political nature, see section 31]
I think that's a better situation than the U.S. model which essentially foments society-dividing political warfare by cancelling people from different political viewpoints. It just serves to divide your country even further.
If you disagree, answer me this: Are you okay with the fact that a racist employer can fire you for not being racist enough? Are you okay with the fact that a Christian employer can fire you for supporting LGBT rights.. (they cannot fire you for being gay, but they can fire you for supporing gays)? Are you okay with the fact that an employer can fire you for supporing BLM? If political opinion is not protected, you'd better hope your employer has the same political opinions that you do... or else you'd better stay very quiet (chilling effect).
Discrimination against an arm of the government itself (ICE) seems to me to be an advanced stage symptom of a systemic societal sickness. I have no idea how it will resolve, but I wish you all the best. Hang in there.
This goes way too far in limiting freedom IMO. It makes sense to not let people discriminate on things that are immutable (like skin color), but it's crazy to not let discrimination happen on things that are a choice.
Just like I can decide not to let people not wearing shoes or shirts into my business, why shouldn't I be able to deny entry to a neo-Nazi? What if I'm losing black customers because I have racists regularly visiting my store?
Religion is a protected class, so the question is moot under US law.
In any case, I confess I'm always a little suspicious of this method of argument. Bob says, "I will ban neo-Nazis from my forum," and people chime in with, "Well, what about banning Catholics? Vegetarians? People who admit to liking Nickelback?". Is the principle really that if we find one single case where Bob would admit "I don't think banning that group makes any sense," then Bob needs to just give up and let neo-Nazis on his forum? Personally, I don't think that's a very good principle. An argument about where we (and Bob) should draw the line is reasonable, but I'm not convinced an argument about whether lines are intrinsically evil is.
I was directly addressing the notion that "It makes sense to not let people discriminate on things that are immutable (like skin color), but it's crazy to not let discrimination happen on things that are a choice." Religion is not an immutable characteristic. It's not a slippery slope argument, but rather a direct counterexample of the principle given.
Not drawing a line is a simple solution to the problem of where to draw the line.
Catholicism is an organization that as one of its main tenets is homophobic. How is that better (or is it worse) than being an Confederate flag-waver or a neo-Nazi or a Black racial separatist or ? I'm sure the answer is obvious to you, but only because of your personal idiosyncratic preferences.
Evil is not an objective spectrum. It's a subjective high dimensional manifold.
I find this form of argument extremely exhausting as well.
I don't think many people would argue that we need a forum where people can advocate for pedophilia and child porn. We've clearly decided that sort of thing is bad. But saying we're going to ban child porn is not the same thing as saying we're going to ban vegetarians.
Certainly reasonable people can disagree on what types ideas deserve platforms. I imagine some (misguided but well-intentioned) people might think that providing neo-Nazis a platform to advocate for their position is a good and fair thing to do, even if they disagree with the neo-Nazi message. But it doesn't mean that people who don't think that's ok are somehow anti-free-speech fascist dictators who want to have control over every kind of speech.
I also get exhausted when people trot out the slippery-slope argument at every opportunity in order to shut down discussion. Not everything has to be a slippery slope! People are actually capable of making decisions in a nuanced, fine-grained way!
And why not? If you say you are very religious and pray to your god before you push your branches I would look at you very weird, I am sorry... Maybe I am a bad person but...
And more over, everyone can register a religion these days, look at Our Lady of Perpetual Exemption... So if someone wakes up one morning and starts a religion out of a joke I should be forced not to discriminate against him?
But replace John Oliver with Jewish religion and now this argument sounds different.
But that is the problem with context... I don't like blanket laws making me do things.
You've gotten downvoted for some reason, but I think you're right. The religious people I know could no more choose not to believe than I can choose to believe. Religious belief or non-belief comes as a response to life's experiences, heavily influenced by the level of indoctrination inflicted by parents when we're young.
When I was 11 or 12, I realized I didn't believe in god (I didn't know the term "atheist" at the time). My parents were Catholic, and I was forced to attend CCD weekly during the school year (the Catholic version of "Sunday School") in addition to weekly Mass. I tried so hard to believe in a god because I didn't want to disappoint or anger my parents, and I wanted to fit in with my peer group. I was trying to make a choice to believe, but that's just not a choice you can make. You either believe, or you don't.
In hindsight I'm glad I failed to choose to believe, but at the time I agonized over my non-belief daily, thinking there was something wrong with me.
By that same logic corporations should be forced to do business with parts of the government doing things completely in contrition to their mission right? A peace advocacy group would be expected to allow contracts with the military or a right wing think tank would have to sell its services to the Peace Corp?
>I am strongly against a private business being able to refuse service to a person/organization on political grounds, even when the "victim" may seem to be performing evil actions, as long as it is not breaking any laws
If a government was committing acts of genocide, do you believe private enterprise should be compelled to be complicit in these acts?
If a government is committing genocide private enterprise would be coerced into cooperation. The government would have gone rogue.
Besides, GitHub probably does offer services to the Chinese government bodies and it will be no surprise to anyone if it turns out they are committing acts of genocide against the Uyghurs. They are probably hosting code related to research and commercialisation of the facial recognition programs that various governments will be implementing.
To draw the line at Ice but not withdraw services from the Chinese mainland showcases the level of myopic politicisation that is being lobbied for here. They are a platform, they should act like one.
GP didn't say they should be required to work with certain entities, only that it could jeopardize their stance with other, less controversial, entities.
> could jeopardize their stance with other, less controversial, entities
That would, of course, be a terrible and illegal abuse of power and essentially be the government policing political speech by private individuals. What an indictment of our government (and I don't mean a single person, but of the system itself) that this seems to be an uncontroversial statement. Because I agree, it's true, and it's the mark of terrible corruption.
I’m not sure it needs to even be as nefarious as that. If I’m in charge of deciding what technology to use for another, less controversial, arm of the government and I see that one of the companies I’m considering has decided to stop doing business with another I might feel less confident in deciding whether or not to use them. What if they decide they don’t want to do business with me at some point in the future?
That might be overly naive and I agree that there’s great potential for corruption here as well.
Or not even an arm of the government. The same reasoning would be applied by other companies buying services. Vendors with a reputation for stopping service to clients because of bad news coverage are a risker bet.
Explain all the businesses built on YouTube, then. YT is "free" to most consumers (paid for by ads), but there are literally people who make their livings as YouTube personalities.
No, read it again. According to me, many people are unwilling to build a life on sand, it weighs negatively in their choices. The fact that some are observed to take the gamble proves nothing. (And the fact that some of those got nasty surprises of being de-monetized proves that they should have been concerned.)
OP wasn't specific, but I interpreted it as government threatening action against the company -- such as the IRS opening an investigation of their taxes.
But let's take your example, since you aren't the only one who interpreted it that way. That would be covered by the scope of the government contract being awarded during the normal bidding and contract process. The contract would stipulate the terms by which one party could pull out of the deal. What would be illegal would be for political influence to discourage the awarding of that contract.
Why would that be an abuse of power? The company has demonstrated that they are an unreliable government partner.
It's wholly different to not accept a contract in the first place, but to unilaterally end it for any reason, political or otherwise, is grounds to consider that service provider unreliable.
The contract was brought to an end - but did the company prove they were an unreliable partner or did the government? These calls to end government association aren't coming from no where - these government acts don't have majority support and it's gotten to the point where individuals are feeling the need to take on personal risk to ensure that the government is actually aligned with the citizenry.
> but did the company prove they were an unreliable partner or did the government?
The company.
You can support the employees without needing to twist reality. There is no question that ending service on non service related grounds makes a company unpredictability unreliable.
The likelihood of a potential vendor to actually be able to supply what they say they will has long been a consideration for government agencies. The novel thing here is that "political winds may change" is not normally considered a good reason to have that doubt for a US based company.
Source code is a company’s Crown Jewels. Who can take the risk that their business will be shut down because an employee tweeted something 8 years ago that is now out of favour? At least Git by it’s very nature protects you but you would still have your issue tracker and CICD pipeline held to ransom.
Well, I don't know. Freedom of speech is also a principle. Public accommodation and non-discrimination are also principled. We don't need laws to see these as a public good. We shouldn't parse these ideas into orthogonal pretzels just because wokeness.
> We don't need laws to see [freedom of speech] as a public good.
I think it's very easy to refute this statement by looking at any country where freedom of speech isn't guaranteed by law. The most populous country in the world is a glaring example.
I'm not sure what the argument is, then? Either we need or don't need laws in place to ensure freedom of speech (clearly we do). If that's not what we're talking about, what is a law "recognizing free speech as a public good"? That... isn't a thing?
In societies that have full respect for private property, I should be able to refuse to do business with you for any reason, including the color of your shoes, the kind of music you listen to, or your marital preferences. Whether it is wise or rationally self-interested to do so is a different question.
Nope - in free societies you should be able to refuse service on any grounds, including those things. Otherwise you're permitting the government to forcibly compel you to allocate your time and resources to ends they define.
In free societies, governments should only be able to forcibly compel people not to do things (murder, threaten, steal, etc.) - see the concept of "negative rights."
In a your version of a free society, what happens when everyone refuses you EVERY single service because random-reason? They sure as heck aren't murdering, stealing, nor threatening you. They're just refusing to sell you anything because of random-reason, forever. Those services include sales of any food, water, shelter.
Taking it further, what if a majority of businesses gradually decide to be racist and refuse all services just because they can? Not serving minorities wouldn't really impact their bottom line all that much. The minorities would literally die off.
It's easy to talk about "rights" as if they exist in a vacuum i.e. my rights are mine and they do not affect anyone else, ergo my rights should be absolute. They are not, and should not.
Reality is usually a tenuous balance of rights (usually tilted towards the majority) that people participating in civil society share.
> what happens when everyone refuses you EVERY single service
If I'll ever find my self in a situation like this - I'll pack my things and run. I'm not going to be happy in a place like this even if government will force those people to tolerate me.
> if a majority of businesses gradually decide to be racist and refuse all services just because they can
That means anyone entrepreneurial enough will have access to an underserved niche market.
Unfortunately, packing your things and running is basically impossible for most people anywhere close to that situation because borders are enforced and countries will find any excuse possible to avoid granting refugee status. The "you could've slept in a forest, never interacted with anyone, and foraged for plants for survival" kind of excuse that LGBT folks fleeing from countries where they're likely to get murdered get.
An underserved niche market of people who have significantly less money because they can't find work - and your company won't hire them because your other customers who actually have money will boycott you - isn't worth much.
I think your parent comment is neither here nor there on actually leaving, but rather just using hyperbole to demonstrate that this isn't a problem easily fixed with laws.
A food establishment forced to serve you might serve you food that's gone bad, a mechanic might not fully tighten the nuts on your brake pads, or any other variety of horrible things that people could do to harm you while leaving room for plausible deniability.
At least if they can legally deny service to you, you know that the ones serving you aren't a risk to your wellbeing. And to that end, I think it's a bit unfair to suggest that less money means there would be no businesses to serve that group of people. If every restaurant is discriminating, the singular restuarant that serves the less wealthy group would have plenty of business, simply due to the lack of competition.
The "pro-regulation" argument is valid with regard to a less commoditized market though, which is interesting. For example, I wouldn't want the only company that makes a life-saving drug to be able to legally discrimate who they sell it to.
It's a challenging problem and I certainly see both sides. My gut goes to regulations affecting large businesses but not smaller ones. It feels like there are probably some difficult edge-cases within there though.
> At least if they can legally deny service to you, you know that the ones serving you aren't a risk to your wellbeing.
Assuming that refusal-of-service is a sort of relief valve is wildly optimistic.
Overt but relatively passive forms of racism effectively give pervasive comfort and encouragement to those who would engage in more active acts. Indirectly, this is also why "dog whistle" speech is so dangerous.
Per your example, in an environment where simply refusing service to you was common and widespread, you might find that someone who does agree to serve you is doing so just for the opportunity to spit in your food (at best).
> If every restaurant is discriminating, the singular restuarant that serves the less wealthy group would have plenty of business, simply due to the lack of competition.
Depends on how spread out the population is - black folk, maybe (but I don't have a simulation on me to work it out for sure and in what situations that theory might collapse), the subset of trans folk who're still working out how to blend in and not be seen as such in a rural area, not so much.
There's entire countries where some products are just not available commercially due to the lower income meaning nobody wants to put in the effort to work out how to provide them cost-effectively.
> running is basically impossible for most people anywhere close to that situation
AFAIK there is no strict control on US state borders, citizens are allowed to move freely. In many cases running away is as easy as purchasing Greyhound bus ticket. It's great that you deeply care about prosecution of LGBT people in places like Middle East, but it's not really relevant to a discussion of anti discrimination laws in US.
> isn't worth much
You don't have to be big to be successful. This scenario means that you have very low barrier to enter this market and will have to spend close to nothing on advertising. But what's more important - this scenario is unrealistic. If you live in a country where it's possible to pass anti-discrimination laws - you don't need those laws, since majority of your country already finds discrimination unacceptable.
US states share significant amounts of culture, including attitudes towards minority groups, and moving between them doesn't make as much difference as you'd expect if they did not.
The majority of a country finding discrimination unacceptable isn't necessary to pass anti-discrimination laws - just that most people don't care whether someone gets discriminated against or not. If you don't care (or need the job to survive yourself), you'll do whatever your boss tells you to do, and you're hardly going to boycott a store for discriminating against someone else, which means a subset of the population has disproportionate impact.
> I'm not going to be happy in a place like this even if government will force those people to tolerate me.
This is an important point that those in disagreement with these kind of arguments often under-emphasize or ignore entirely. When a government makes it illegal to behave in a racist way, the racists don't go away, and they might even be amplified within those communities in a similar way to the Streisand effect.
If everyone in a community is racist, you can't simply make it illegal to be racist to fix the problem. They have to make that decision on their own - anything else is fundamentally authoritarianism, which doesn't have a great history of long-term success.
In this fictional scenario every single community member has become a racist but the government legislative and enforcement bodies are immune from this trend?
Making something illegal may feel good, but if 100% of the population (by the terms of your scenario) are against it, legislation is hardly going to move the needle.
I would actually suspect that in this kind of society -- the state isn't there to enforce discrimination, but it's also not there to redress it -- there would still be civil rights movements, and protests would probably be pretty vigorous. Businesses that discriminate would find themselves, their customers, and their suppliers put under a great deal of pressure. Sit-ins. Blockades. Rallies painting them, specifically, as villains.
As an aside, the relative absence of that kind of movement in libertarian thought experiments has always bemused me; I think there's a somewhat utopian "everything gets better when you take the state out of the equation" notion at play. Everything doesn't automatically get worse, but it doesn't automatically get better, either. If the society still has discrimination, prejudice, and unequal justice, it's still going to face pressures to reform; most of us would rather see where we live be made "better" in our understanding of the term than be forced to move somewhere else to find that "better," even assuming we have the resources to make such a move.
I mean this in the nicest possible way; have you ever faced discrimination based on the colour of your skin, gender, sexual orientation, disabilities or anything else which is protected by law in most civilised countries?
If, like a significant portion of the HN audience, you are straight, white, middle class and male it's probably easier for you to dismiss the right to fair treatment than it might be for individuals in those categories.
I have. And you know what, civil rights laws did jack all to protect me. I'm much happier knowing that the people that operate that business were racist jerks (instead of, say, them being forced to serve me and spit in my food, which would be a health concern), and I have dissuaded probably on the order of a hundred people from going to that place, and that was in the era before social media.
> I have. And you know what, civil rights laws did jack all to protect me.
I'm not you, and I can't imagine what your situation is, but I'll bet whatever precious little civil rights laws that are enforced wherever you are has probably has helped you more than you know.
Some people thought pandemic response teams are a waste of money, until a pandemic happened, then they realized perhaps there wasn't a pandemic previously because that team was doing their job.
In the mid 80s, My parents took me to a diner, specifically BOB AND EDITH's on columbia pike, in Arlington VA. During the 80s, Asian Americans were very rare in the Washington DC area, and moreover, there was a trade war going on between the US and Japan. It was fashionable at the time for short fiction to feature dystopian US futures where the active currency was the Yen. We arrived at the diner, and sat at the diner for three hours before leaving without having been served. I'm not sure that I would have preferred being served and had my food spat in, which I know happened, because friends in high school told me stories of that kind of stuff happening in the food services industry.
What else do you want to know? Do you want to know that while working for the federal government, my Father was basically ignored and had zero work friends except for the only Jewish coworker, and so I grew up in the DC area observing Jewish holidays and attending Bar and Bat Mitvahs?
Do you want to know that I was rejected for admission to MIT, despite having gotten AP CS and Calculus scores of 5 in the 9th grade, and placing at the International Science Fair, though someone else at my school (a friend, btw) got lower grades than I did and did get admission to MIT [0]? Do you want to know that my father pressured me to ask a family acquaintance (who happened to be the chair of the House Science and Technology Committee, I carpooled with his kid to elementary school) but I told him not to (and thus don't owe anything to the author of the PATRIOT act?)
Do you want to know that my father was passed over from promotion "no leadership potential" within that same government unit (the Veterans Administration) despite, in his part-time job with the US Navy, he rose to the rank of captain (O6) and in his last stint was in charge of a group of programmers (despite not being one himself) who implemented the US Navy's first fully-digitized inventory database, ahead of schedule and underbudget?
Do you want to know that while working for the VA, he identified that asian american veterans in hawaii, some of whom were medal of honor recipients, disproportionately did not seek the benefits they were entitled to and initiated outreach to them (via his personal desk) make sure they got the care they were entitled to, then was slammed for being racist, despite the fact that his personal outreach also helped black, white, and latino veterans in Hawaii? Is it also ironic that this was brought down by Democrat appointees and he found redress and correction of the situation by a Republican appointee?
Do you want to know that my father identified elder neglect and a dangerous health situation (black mold) at a veterans facility (long before the very public scandals at Walter Reed, btw), and instead of having the issue dealt with he was rubber-roomed into a windowless room in the same veteran's facility, exiled across the campus from the main office where decisions were being made?
Honestly for all of the secondary effects that systemic racism had on my dad, and indirectly, on the stress it put on our relationship, I at least got some solace when a (white, not that it matters) marine corps colonel that I'd never met before got up at his funeral and gave a fire and brimstone speech about how my dad was a victim of low grade corruption and racism in the federal bureaucracy and in was ultimately a hero in the American spirit, in his military job and more importantly in his activism in his civilian job as a bureaucrat.
Look, the primary issue of racism that Asian Americans have to deal with is not the same as the racism that African Americans have to deal with, which is that to get what we want we have to work twice as hard. That's not in the same league as worrying about not coming home because of an asshole cop. But we do face similar situations in the "not being served" at private establishments. And having to work twice as hard, or, for African Americans, "having to code switch", or for both our classes, being taken seriously in leadership roles, is not something any legislation is going to correct.
And forgive me for having low trust that this is a problem that government can solve, since quite literally government can't get its own shit straight.
[0] there's a good chance thinking "oh there weren't any extracurriculars, this guy just looked like every other Asian American candidate" but also I performed on stage with the Washington Shakespeare company and directed/produced a full-length play.
Imagine if in addition to all you also couldn't even live in the place you do, because until recently it was legal to write on a deed of property that said an Asian-American couldn't own that property or live there.
The fact that racism exists doesn't mean that civil rights protections are useless to you.
You've listed an impressive set of adversities associated with being Asian American, some of which I can also relate to as an Asian American, but then the motivation behind your posts becomes clear with:
> Look, the primary issue of racism that Asian Americans have to deal with is not the same as the racism that African Americans have to deal with
and then making the following wholly unsubstantiated statement:
> which is that to get what we want we have to work twice as hard
How do you know how hard an African American has to work to get the the same place as you? How do you know how hard it is to work against the type of racism that is so much greater than that faced by Asian Americans, that it is in your own words "not in the same league".
I'm not saying you've had it easy by any stretch, but your attempt to blur the lines between the experiences of Asian and African Americans in an attempt to cast aspersion on efforts to provide protection under the law for African Americans' human rights - which is what Black Lives Matter is advocating - seems to show that you value "freedom from legislation" more than you value their human rights.
I'm saying we have to work twice as hard as white people, not African Americans.
You're missing my point. I'm saying that I don't trust government to make "black lives matter". There might be a chance that government can self intervene and stem the bloody police abuse against African Americans (I'm also not terribly optimistic about this since cops are abusive to plenty of non African American citizens, too, e.g. Kelly Thomas, albeit at much lower relative rates). In general, if we want black lives to matter, we have to do the hard work in communities and among individuals, and, separately IMO, asymptotically with racial admixing to make the whole thing pointless, not paper it over with legislative interventionism, though at least in the realms where government tries to regulates itself I'm not opposed to giving it the old college try, as they say.
Look what I'm saying is scary right? I'm saying there is no easy "just make racism illegal" solution to racism. Well so let's get to work on it.
> I'm saying we have to work twice as hard as white people, not African Americans.
The point still stands. How do you know you have to work twice as hard as white people? Which white people? Wealthy who got admitted to elite Private universities on legacy? How about working class white people with non college educated parents?
This question does not deny it all that there is workplace discrimination against Asian Americans, and that depending on educational institution, admission may have a higher bar, but your use of blanket hyperbole doesn't help advance a critical discussion of whether or why that should be the case.
> Look what I'm saying is scary right? I'm saying there is no easy "just make racism illegal" solution to racism.
That's a straw man. Nobody is suggesting "making racism illegal", because it is impossible for legislation to achieve. Racism itself is a cultural issue.
What people are suggesting is removing legal protections that allow law enforcement to disproportionately violate the human rights of African Americans. That is very possible. That is exactly how you get started on tackling the problem of racial injustice in policing.
I think if you read what I wrote carefully and with a clear mind, you will see that I very much support efforts by the government to self regulate and reduce violence against African Americans, even if I'm pessimistic that it will work in the case of police violence. Indeed, I've been following the subject for over a decade now and have also put my money where my mouth is on this subject.
It's government regulating private citizen's racism that I abjectly disagree with because I think there will be very bad unintended consequences for a strategy that will not work.
So summarizing, a waiter was terrible 30+ years ago, and your dad ran into tons of politics in the VA, and you didn't get into the school you think you should have in your otherwise extremely privileged upper middle class life that had you interacting with high level government officials as a child, so protected classes were a mistake?
I have had the same experience (although it was not race-based discrimination). Theoretically there were laws to protect me, but, practically, asserting my rights under those laws would have been too costly and time consuming to be worth it.
My claim is it didn't. You don't think black people were discriminated against in private locations well past the 1960s? What absolutely worked in the 1960s, was the banning of government REQUIRING segregation in private entities by law (which by the way, many companies absolutely chafed at, because quite frankly segregating your business is a cost-sinking pain in the ass to arrange and enforce). Nobody is disputing that CRA I and CRA II were much needed reforms.
If that were the case, then de facto segregation wouldn't be increasing even to this day. Without the government enforcing segregation, people started separating themselves physically. Schools for instance are more segregated than they were in 1975.
Segregation wasn't a case of the government pushing these ideas on to unwilling populace.
This could actually be because of forced busing of whites to black schools.
Many parents want to send their kid to the best school and were willing to move to avoid their kids going to worse schools.
White parents were more likely to be able to afford to move which resulted in them leaving. Minorities tended to be poorer and could not leave and stayed in the areas with the worse schools. Kids who go to worse schools are less likely to get out of poverty so they stayed in the same poor areas and had kids in the same area repeating the cycle.
Since schools are typically given money based on property tax it meant that the schools in poor areas tended to receive less funding. There are also issues with teachers getting lower pay if they were in a poorer school. I think these issues are fixed in some states but there are still issues related to this in various states.
I don't agree with discrimination, and would never seek to engage in that myself.
With that being said, in the private sector, there really is no "right to fair treatment" with exceptions for anything required by law for affirmative action. By forcing fairness (where a business must provide service to someone it doesn't want to), you are simultaneously removing the freedom of association [0].
[0] While not explicitly stated in the US constitution is argued to be a fundamental human right.
>Nope - in free societies you should be able to refuse service on any grounds, including those things.
You know, in free societies, there is society. That is very different from "wild reign of every impulse going through the head of an individual", which of course would be impossible anyway as an individual is itself permanently full of conflicting impulses.
Not to do things and do things is only a matter of wording. Forbidding to kill people is equivalent with compelling to do something: people are compelled to repress their possible will to kill other people. Accepting to follow an interdiction is doing something. Only something that doesn't exist won't act in any way or an other.
> In free societies, governments should only be able to forcibly compel people not to do things
Well, how about "don't discriminate"?
I am not saying it is the perfect solution, but if you want to refuse a service you can always terminate your commercial venture. I do not necessarily see this a clear cut case of positive/negative right.
Similarly to how the state can compel you to get a driving license to drive. You can just give up on driving.
HOw do you reconcile not forcing someone to do something with depriving another of life & liberty? The entire reason for protected classes is to prevent the majority from harming the minority.
>> forcibly compel you to allocate your time and resources to ends they define.
...as has been SOP in even the most permissive of societies throughout history. I'm all for classical liberal ideals influencing the world, but these extreme libertarian rules and values have never existed outside the minds of their most zealous believers and you don't have to get too far into the details to see their contradictions.
You are completely right. In a free society you should have the liberty to do business with whomever you want (no matter how politically in-correct your reasoning is).
The great thing about this, is that someone else will realize there is now an under-served market, and create a business to fulfill that need.
> is that someone else will realize there is now an under-served market, and create a business to fulfill that need.
That is a childishly simplistic understanding of how free markets work. There is no way a retail business would be established to service the needs of 2% of the population who are wheelchair users for example, when they could easily make their stores considerably more efficient by making the aisles a little narrower.
> There is no way a retail business would be established to service the needs of 2% of the population
Slow down there, you're going to need more evidence than that to claim that an underserved segment of the population isn't an attractive commercial target.
I agree that wheelchair users might be comparatively expensive customers, but if that 2% stat is correct they would be profitable to someone. A business with 2% of the market as a captive audience is going to be profitable.
Based loosely on 1.2 million wheelchair users in the UK for a population of 50 million it's in the right ballpark.
Honestly, I think the claim that the free market would solve this is so outlandish that the burden of proof is on those who believe it.
Maybe, just maybe, in a dense population centre like London their needs would be met by a few specialist 'accessable' stores. But what about some rural town of a few thousand people?
In the global pandemic recently, I spent a week not leaving my apartment even once. I had no trouble getting goods and services because everything was delivered to my door.
It isn't that outlandish that the market will sort it all out. I doubt anyone is going to be unhappy if business get a bit of a prod to remind them that wheelchairs exist, but the idea a free market would ignore 2% of their potential customers is just not true. Greedy capitalists have incentives to be thorough; 2% of the market changing hands is enough to get the attention of any CEO.
Most businesses would notice 2% of their customers disappearing, let alone 2% of the broader market.
Your argument from first-principles makes sense, but I just don't think a lot of us are comfortable living in a world where disabled people have to pay twice as much (or whatever the additional cost would be) for groceries. The fact that there's no movement to repeal the ADA would suggest most people feel that way.
Honestly, the alternative is just absurd. In this version of reality do employment protections still exist for disabled people or do they all magically earn there living in multilevel marketing from the comfort of their living rooms in their bespoke built homes (because most homes aren't build with accessibility in mind because the free market will fix that...).
Disability protection law uses the idea of "reasonable accomodation", which mediates between the tensions in this issue.
So disabled people don't get an automatic job, say. But an employer can't just decide not interview someone because "it's inconvenient to interview you due to your disability".
Another: It's not acceptable to say "sorry we can't interview you if you can't climb stairs, because there is a staircase between our interview room and the downstairs offices", because there is a reasonable accomodation possible, namely interviewing in a different room.
A shop is required to make reasonable accomodations, such as provide an entry ramp if that makes sense, and a wheelchair compatible toilet if that makes sense (i.e. it has other toilets).
That prevents shops from saying "we don't care about the 2% so we can't be bothered with a ramp even though the cost is negligable to us".
On the other hand, reasonable is relative. An organisation with no funds would not be required to do the same things as an organisation with plenty of funds. A club open to the public is expected to do more than a private gathering of people where nobody in the group has particular needs. And accomodation doesn't always have to be pre-emptive. For a public facility, anticipating needs of a broad spectrum people is expectecd, but for a small, private workplace it may suffice to react to the particular needs of individual people as needed.
(Note, disability is complicated because there are so many kinds, many of them invisible but cause much difficulty for the persons affected, and people without experience do not recognise the signs. I've used wheelchair here because everyone recognises that, but even with those, a lot of people seem to not understand that if a person can stand up and walk a bit, it doesn't mean they don't need a wheelchair.)
> I agree that wheelchair users might be comparatively expensive customers, but if that 2% stat is correct they would be profitable to someone. A business with 2% of the market as a captive audience is going to be profitable.
That is true, but it most likely leaves wheelchair users paying a premium on goods and services for the privilege of even being able to enter the establishment, and probably having a smaller selection of lower quality to choose from to boot.
That is what generally happens with captive markets, you know.
Whether it's the kind of discrimination the store is obliged to deal with is going to come down to principles of reasonable accomodation.
So, say you had an extremely boutique store up some rickety stairs, where the way it's used is you go up the stairs and meet the chef who will take your order for a wedding cake and you can collect the cake next week.
I would expect, in that case, if the chef is willing to meet you at your home or another place with a menu of options and discuss your order, and then have it delivered next week, that would meet the bar of reasonable accomodation for someone who couldn't use the rickety stairs.
On the other hand, a large grocery store, where browsing the goods is part of the experience and is also significant to product discovery, and maybe pricing and access to better fresh ingredients and different bargains, and where the only obstacle is that the store does not replace one door type with another that a wheelchair user can enter, and the store can reasonably afford the cost, that is clearly inadequate of the store; they have no good excuse and could reasonably accomodate by changing that door.
On another hand, the same large grocery store may find it difficult to accomodate people who cannot tolerate bright illumination (that other people need, to see clearly), and large numbers of people moving around them. In that case, it is not at all obvious that the store can do much to accomodate. I would expect that if the store also provides online ordering with delivery, that it has performed reasonable accomodation for that situation.
> where the only obstacle is that the store does not replace one door type with another that a wheelchair user can enter, and the store can reasonably afford the cost,
It wouldn't be the only obstacle. Let's take wheelchair-accessible parking spots for example. We have to convince the store that sacrificing regular-sized parking spots (and the ones closest to the store, at that) in order to make room for a smaller number of larger parking spots that are reserved for 2% of their customers (and not exactly the most profitable 2%, either) is a reasonable accommodation.
Bear in mind that some of those spots we're asking them to convert might already be reserved for the store manager, some senior employees, and the employee-of-the-month as perks, rather than for customers. You will have a lot of convincing to do, and should expect significant pushback from the local chamber of commerce.
I don't think it's fair. But I also believe that people should run their businesses how they see fit, and that freedom of association is a human right.
I bet most businesses would make their stores accessible (within reason) since you need room in isles for carts, etc.
> The great thing about this, is that someone else will realize there is now an under-served market, and create a business to fulfill that need.
Except that every other business can now refuse to serve that business services, because that business serves people nobody else likes.
Given even time and systematic discrimination, that business owner and everyone they serve will be driven to destitution and cease to be a meaningful market segment. They, along with the people they serve can't afford to buy anything anyways.
Should society should just let them die because of the magic of capitalism and (???) rights?
If this type of situation happens, I think these would be symptoms of a much larger issue.
I think there will always be places that exist that help everyone. First in mind are churches, who often will help people even if the people they help have differing views.
Unless, say, they're trans, in which case plenty of those will turn them away.
At some point you will run down all these dead-end alleyways and you will realize that the perfect spheroid does not exist. For your moral sake I'd hope it's sooner than later.
If public property (streets, society built around cars, tax incentives) is being used to provide access to your business, for the mutual aid of both your business and the public, then you should not be allowed to deny access to the public for anything other than a business reason.
That is completely true, indeed the purpose of the law ought to be not to compel respect, but to allow vulnerable individuals access to society.
The intended outcome is not that people that want to discriminate stop existing (well, long term also...) but that non-discriminatory interactions can be allowed to flourish.
Sexuality is getting closer and closer to being a fully-protected class, so they are going to have to suck it up, just like the bakers who didn't want to serve black people decades ago.
They can deny service to anyone, so long as it does not run afoul of discrimination laws. ICE is not a protected class.
I think this comment is reasonable if they're simply saying that it's plausibly true that not everyone who is gay is born gay - some choose to live their life that way, others are born that way.
I think this is a fair read on sexuality especially given the "spectrum" understanding of sexual preferences. If you're born 50% interested in men and 50% interested in women, you can very well choose to live your life (and identify) as a straight person or a gay person (or a bisexual person!).
That doesn't mean that others aren't born with a 0/100 ratio (one way or the other), though.
I vouched for this comment for a very specific reason:
Civil rights of for the LGBT should not predicated on "being born that way", they should be predicated on the fact that it is an acceptable and dignified way to be human.
Simple: anti-discrimination laws only apply if you're being discriminated on the basis of being in a protected class. being gay is a protected class. Being ICE isn't.
In some jurisdictions being gay is a protected class, in others it is not. Even the USSC ruling today doesn’t create a new protected class; it simply (and correctly) determines that discrimination based on gender nonconformity (whether sexual orientation, gender identity, or other) is discrimination based on sex, which is already a protected class.
Of course you can. One rule for me another for you because I think these two things are different is easily understood by two year olds. Lawyers are perfectly capable of coming up with justifications for anything they like and if the judges feel sympathetic the power of the state will enforce it.
> Private entities shouldn't have to take on anyone they don't want as customers (for whatever reason - do you have to justify who you do or don't want in your livingroom?)
Actually that one is illegal in many jurisdictions, e.g. when it's a store refusing service to gays and lesbians.
> (for whatever reason - do you have to justify who you do or don't want in your livingroom?)
In most casts that results in discriminatory civil suits. Imagine a restaurant, who has even greater leverage to test the for whatever reason mentality, asking a black family to leave without stating a reason. In most places in the US restaurants have the legal right to refuse service to anyone for any reason.
This is a wholly invalid comparison. Ethnicity is a protected class of citizen and is illegal to refuse service based on it.
Federal agencies are not protected classes of citizens. In fact it is quite literally illegal to force a company to do business with the government if it doesn't want to.
The reason is only lawful if you can prove that discrimination is not solely due to that protected class. In the case where a group can refuse service for any reason and is not required to provide that reason this is impossible to prove even if clearly obvious.
not exactly comparable, but business denial of service was the cause of action in masterpiece cakeshop, a colorado civil rights case that appealed up to scotus
conscientious objection is a different case where you can fulfill your legal obligations in a way that's compatible with your religious or moral obligations -- if we created legislation requiring businesses to serve government agencies, there might be an implied right moral objection where use of force is concerned
Isn't that what the status quo in the US is? AFAIK outside of discrimination in a few specific industries (e.g. insurance rates), there is very little discrimination protection for customers.
I recently wrote this (https://github.com/jamesob/clii) because I can't stand click and got sick of having to check the argparse docs every time I wanted to write a CLI. I guarantee you'll spend a tenth of the time trying to figure out how to use this thing, it has no dependencies, and is implemented in a single vendor-friendly file.
Absolutely, there is no good reason for private entities who take over an open source project and limit it for private interests when a major chunk of people reject it.
The allegation of "take over" is both dishonest misinformation and a really abusive attack. The people you're accusing of taking Bitcoin over have been there essentially all along, -- long before you ever heard of it. The concerns about the trade-offs with block size have also been with Bitcoin all along: as a look into the history shows, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21977347
Sorry, the real attack was by the group led by Adam Back who himself dismissed Bitcoin initially before having a VC fund him to cater to his plan http://cashbleed.com/
Following which scare tactics ensued which broke the block size increase agreements of 8MB Hong Kong Agreement when Adam himself flew to the meeting overnight(as an individual) to attack the agreement, then when a 2MB NYA agreement was finalized and signed by the groups of miners, again the small blockers attacked it in favor of SegWit, that Bitcoin wouldn't survive a hardfork upgrade even though it had upgraded several times in the past.
The really abusive attack was when those same people removed Gavin Andresen's commit access when he had been leading Bitcoin development alongside Satoshi and testing large block clients on the side.
On-going abusive attacks when discussing about pros/cons of small blocks in r/Bitcoin and DDoS on large block nodes since Bitcoin XT, Bitcoin Classic, Bitcoin ABC..
The concerns about the trade-offs with block size have been there for a long time indeed, and we've come a long way with optimizing transactions and still keeping fees low while accessing the ledger via Bitcoin Cash VS forcing transactions to layer 2 side-chains via Bitcoin Core.
> when those same people removed Gavin Andresen's commit access
It's important to tell the whole story here. Gavin stepped back as lead maintainer and appointed Wladimir. No one else.
Maintainership is the sole reason to have commit acccess. All changes to the software are made as pull requests. And commit access is only needed to merge these pull requests. Nobody commits directly on master without going through a pull request, not even maintainers.
Being the maintainer of an open source project is hard work and can be quite thankless at times. The role is one of a glorified janitor while still requiring the highest both technical and people skills.
It is not surprising people only do this for a few years, and as far as I can tell Gavin did a great job. I don't think that is in dispute. But he should not have commit access when he is no longer maintaining the software.
(It may also be of interest that Gavin stepped back from maintaining the software in order to focus on his role as "chief scientist" for something called the "Bitcoin Foundation". This foundation was comprised of a number of noteworthy people whose names keeps appearing and re-appearing in MLM schemes, "hacked" exchanges, and/or premined coins. Gavin may be the sole exception.)
Gavin being silenced is just a tip of the iceberg out of the continual banning and censorship of people discussing ideas around scaling Bitcoin Core chain since 2016. Most of the folks have left for other projects since then and all BTC is left is as a tether propped exchange pair while merchants give up on accepting BTC (thanks RBF too).
Bitcoin Cash on the other hand has been gaining merchant acceptance and I've enjoyed using BCH same like I did enjoy using BTC since 2012. The honeybadger of P2P electronic cash is truly unstoppable.
That's stretching the truth far too thin. Gavin was never being "silenced" by anyone. Ask himself yourself, he replies to email. It was very much his decision, and while he may have held some controversial opinions in the community, he never let this interfere with maintaining the software which he did in the best professional manner.
He makes no secret about his disappointment with some of the decisions (or, rather, non-decisions) around the project as of late, but this was several years after he stepped down maintaining the software in favor of his chief scientist role for the foundation.
Adam, the only person who's name is mentioned in the body of the bitcoin whitepaper, was happily using Bitcoin long before creating a company to support it. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=225463.msg2371674#ms... though Adam has never been actively involved with the bitcoin software project itself-- beyond some mailing list discussions and such.
Aside, the numbers on the website you linked are randomly generated nonsense. Embarrassingly for its author, their made up numbers which are trying to claim to be astronomical fail to make their point because they're not that high when compared to other highly paying tech companies ( https://drive.google.com/file/d/19ne7ccUdOWewD4rFDQjjnQEJDgs... ).
That whole allegation is odd. Blockstream has (had?) a program where a significant part of employee pay was in the form of pre-purchased Bitcoin which vested over time. This was intended to create a significant incentive for employees to see bitcoin's value grow-- specifically to address concerns that somehow Blockstream could create incentives against that when it employed a couple long time contributors. ... it turns out that buying Bitcoin at $450/each was a really good deal, and it panned out well for employees. It worked exactly as advertised, and some anonymous troll is spinning it as some kind of fraud?! Weird.
> 8MB Hong Kong Agreement when Adam himself flew to the meeting overnight(as an individual) to attack the agreement, then when a 2MB NYA agreement was finalized and signed by the groups of miners, again the small blockers attacked it in favor of SegWit,
Not going along with a proposal you think is bad is not an "attack"-- it's the actualization of your own personal freedom.
> The really abusive attack was when those same people removed Gavin Andresen's commit access
Gavin's commit access was removed by Wladimir, -- not one of the people associated with Adam or our company. When it was removed it had been completely unused for a year and barely used for several years. Its ultimate removal was triggered by Gavin loudly endorsing an obvious scammer as being Satoshi which was especially concerning given his comments about "handing the repository over" to 'Satoshi'.
Good security practices should have had the access dropped long before then, and he'd been asked by Wladimir to resign them but kept responding that he'd sleep on it. Wladimir had wanted to avoid the drama of revoking them, but once Gavin was loudly endorsing a scammer the threat of poorly maintained access seemed a lot more serious.
> he had been leading Bitcoin development alongside Satoshi
Wladimir (and the other people you are insulting) were also there back when Satoshi was still active. Even back in 2011 Wladimir was the most active contributor, with two commits for every one by Gavin (348:152). In 2010, Satoshi made 215 commits and Gavin made 35.
Leading in a open source collaboration is a complicated question. Gavin was an extremely valued contributor, including valued for his public speaking at a time when many of us were keeping a low profile because we were really concerned that our involvement in Bitcoin might result in legal prosecution. That, however, doesn't mean he was leading in strong sense like you'd apply to the leader of a business. If you look at actual decision making in the project it, once Satoshi was gone it was always an extensive collaboration.
This fact is why e.g. some people have falsely accused me of controlling it when I didn't have any particular authority at all, just a history of reasonable insight and persuasive arguments.
> and DDoS
Bitcoin nodes got DOS attacked with some regularity in the past by people trying to interfere with block propagation to cause competing blocks to get orphaned (and still do, though less often now-- because we implemented countermeasures to make those attacks much less effective). There is no evidence that anyone saw any DOS attacks other than those. None of the people I know would have bothered not expected a DOS attack to do anything: the system is designed to be designed to resist DOS attacks.
The falsity of those "nodes" was also demonstrated by their near overnight disappearance once the pumping of competing altcoins stopped...
> we've come a long way with optimizing transactions
I don't believe that bitcoin abc has deployed any scalablity improvement not previously existing in Bitcoin. The primary one in it over the original p2p protocol, compact blocks, was designed by myself...
> was happily using Bitcoin long before creating a company to support it.
His public comments would say otherwise and many doubt that his company is supporting Bitcoin vs handicapping it for private interests.
> Gavin loudly endorsing an obvious scammer
Classic nullc way of putting it.. Gavin simply said that CSW was able to sign a message from one of the keys he had interacted with Satoshi's account. The signing itself has be debunked many a times, Gavin did not endorse CSW as Satoshi himself, like giving bitcoin repo access to CSW..
The entire drama created a path for new folks like Adam who showed up in 2013(from your bitcointalk article) to see opportunity to gain control of the core client.
Bitcoin Cash handles this by making sure to have multiple implementations.
Overall, only time will tell how the Bitcoin story will play out. For a fact though, we have 2 chains developed centrally planned (BTC & BSV) while BCH keeps the checks & balances of power with distributed teams.
> CompatBlocks is just one of the developments that BCH has completed and released
wtf. man, stop taking credit for other people's work. Compact blocks were completed and released by Matt Corallo, myself, and the other Bitcoin developers at the time long before BCH existed. It had absolutely no involvement from any BCH developer.
> many doubt that his company is supporting Bitcoin vs handicapping it
When your link in the earlier post is an article ranting about how much money blockstream employees are making because it pays its employees partially denominated in Bitcoin and Bitcoin has increased a lot in value.
> Gavin did not endorse CSW as Satoshi himself
In fact Gavin stated that he was convinced Wright was Satoshi long before he ever met him or witnessed any signing.
> folks like Adam [...] to gain control of the core client.
Adam doesn't have any control over Bitcoin Core and never has. I don't think anything he's ever proposed has ended up in in it, in fact.
> Cash handles this by making sure to have multiple implementations
Actually, BCH's constant hardforks have killed many of those multiple implementations. "Bitcoin XT", "Bitcoin Classic", "Bcoin" to name some of those. Ironically the old BitcoinXT from back when it was Bitcoin software ... happily still works on Bitcoin. So you have it backwards: it's bitcoin that preserves people's freedom to use different implementations.
The fact that in Bitcoin we took the time to fully think through, write a clear and complete specification https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0152.mediawi... , and thoroughly test and review the implementation before deploying it while BU has been occasionally abused by the BU organization and their supporters to dishonestly claim that compact blocks came later (or were somehow derived) from their work.
Users on the sidelines were easily deceived by this marketing because BU rushed their implementation into production while Bitcoin took a more deliberative process.
BU's "thinblocks" implementation was, in fact, severely flawed both due to an implementation vulnerability that resulted in almost every BU node on the network being crashed near simultaniously, and due to a design error introduced because BU's "chief scientist" strongly believed that it was computationally intractable to produce a collision in the first 64-bit of transaction IDs (a sha2 hash), even though one can be computed on a fast desktop computer in seconds.
So the history is that: Bitcoin developers proposed and tested an idea for faster block propagation using filters and found it lacking. Later, it came up again as a possible way to mitigate segwit's bandwidth increase, so I wrote a design to address the known issues and we started working on implementing it. A few weeks later BU developers picked up the old work and started improving it. Within a couple months they had it deployed it in public and announced 'mission accomplished', but their deployment was unspecified and ultimately faulty. As a result of those issues and the superior relay latency of compact blocks thinblocks was replaced in the Bitcoin Cash network with the protocol from Bitcoin.
There is no common protocol feature in BU's xthinblocks that wasn't also in Bitcoin's original work that inspired both efforts. There could have been no influence on compact blocks' design by xthinblocks because it would have been physically impossible for there to be due to causality. That hasn't seemed to stop BU developers and people like you from repeating this lie.
> wtf. man, stop taking credit for other people's work. Compact blocks were completed and released by Matt Corallo, myself, and the other Bitcoin developers at the time. It had absolutely no involvement from any BCH developer.
Sorry, I did not say or mean to take any credit, all I'm pointing out is that BCH was able to get that tech out in prod.
> BCH's constant hardforks have killed many of those multiple implementations. "Bitcoin XT", "Bitcoin Classic", "Bcoin" to name some of those. Ironically the old BitcoinXT from back when it was Bitcoin software ... happily still works on Bitcoin. So you have it backwards: it's bitcoin that preserves people's freedom to use different implementations.
This is flat out wrong, the BCH developers meet monthly to review roadmap and sync up on development in a decentralized fashion. The clients that were not maintained were deprecated as expected, nothing out of the ordinary here. The Bitcoin XT client was compatible with BCH chain when Core activated the SegWit.
The bi-annual BCH client upgrade actually helps keeping users empowered as to which ruleset they accept, a choice which is not available for Bitcoin Core users as they are held hostage to the code that governs their money.
You obviously didn't read the whole article because he explicitly covers refinancing during favorable rate changes - he has a whole section on 30yrs basically being implicit long vol trades on rates.
Chaincode Labs will be subsidizing flights to and lodging in NYC, so this is a great opportunity to get some experience building on top of Bitcoin using the Lightning Network.
Something from a few months back that's a bit closer to Bitcoin's actual implementation but at a similar level of readability: https://github.com/jamesob/tinychain
A block's timestamp is frozen in its hash, which is validated by any node receiving a block (whether during initial block download or otherwise). Bitcoin and tinychain don't accept blocks with a timestamp in the future beyond some threshold (in both cases 2 hours).
