He claimed in 2002, after the book was published, to have found additional evidence that IBM established a Polish subsidiary after Germany invaded Poland to sell machines to the Nazi government.
Highly recommend listening to this HBR podcast about the same topic. [1]
TJ Watson (of IBM) is quoted as saying: “I’m an internationalist. I cooperate with all forms of government, regardless of whether I can subscribe to all of their principles or not.”
I hear a lot of similar echos within tech companies right now. People using “we’re a business” to shut down discussion about the role of supplying AI technology to Israel, who has been using AI to choose bombing targets [2].
This is where government sanctions come in. While some companies may behave morally, we can't expect that they all will when there is money to be made.
If we the people as represented by our government decide that a particular foreign regime is off-limits, then companies are compelled to not do business with them. We don't leave it to choice.
So if you want companies to have any form of morality, you need to enforce it. Because otherwise all the ones that do care are just going to be outcompeted and die out, and you'll be left with specifically the worst of the bunch. Organizations and individuals act to their incentives, and if they don't, then they stop existing.
If ethics were self-enforcing, then we wouldn't need to be talking about it. We have laws against killing and stealing because without those laws, killing and stealing are a shockingly effective way to get ahead.
I think the moral obligation is slightly different when you have capabilities that no other firm has. I believe IBM falls into that category then, a company like ASML would now. Google Cloud would not: Israel can get cloud services anywhere.
(note this is true regardless of your feelings on the morality of Israel's government's choices)
If anything, "Israel can get cloud services anywhere" is an argument that Google should be even less inclined to take their money. If they have alternatives, it's not even as much money as it would be if they don't.
> I think the moral obligation is slightly different when you have capabilities that no other firm has.
hmmm... I don't know if that argument holds water.
for example, the corollary would be that your obligation is less if other firms have the capability?
although AI and choosing bombing targets is pretty horrible, I think surveillance tech ("advertising") is something more fundamental that everyone should think more about.
There is a line between saying "I am a business person and therefore I don't judge people with different values" and saying "I am a business person and therefore I expect not to be judged for my lack of ethical behavior".
As a complication, it's important to state that concentration camps were not against international laws at the time! Pursing racist and eugenic policies was in vogue, and many of Germany's concentration camps were toured and audited by the Red Cross before the war!
It's because of the holocaust that we thankfully have changed our collective attitude about such things. But in 1939, people's knowledge of the racial atrocities happening was very restricted, so I don't think we can underrate just how naïve some people where at the time.
I don't think eugenics by means of killing people was ever widely considered moral or even a gray area.
What happened a lot at the beginning of WWII was that people didn't know what was happening at the concentration camps. And yes, there were some twisted moral templates at the time based on racism and dehumanization.
> I don't think eugenics by means of killing people was ever widely considered moral or even a gray area.
Oof, how I wish that were true. You may be interested in Pernick, Martin (1999): The Black Stork: Eugenics and the Death of "Defective" Babies in American Medicine and Motion Pictures since 1915.
Several nations (the US included) were well on their way to "Great Society" ideas of shaping the next generation by controlling genetics (be that in who reproduced or who was allowed to live). A lot of experiments ended abruptly when the Allies reached the camps, and a lot of politically-powerful institutions have kicked dirt over their own pasts to try and help people forget that's where we were headed.
(Quite a few experiments did not; forced sterilization wasn't outlawed in the US until, IIRC, the eighties).
Indeed, the US had their own camps that they filled with Japanese, Germans, Italians and a few others. Of course they were relatively nicer to the people placed in the camps.
I think McDonald's would condemn and distance itself from a high-profile customer or partner that was responsible for highly illegal activity like that. Like it did with Russia.
ISIS propaganda isn't a crime, and anyone can be smeared as an ISIS propagandist for questioning any military decision or explanation (it's almost exclusively how Anglo-American politics is done these days.) Using unwritten and unconstitutional speech crimes as the benchmark for criminality is scary. Call me when some military contractor is helping jihadists find targets in Syria.
For the past 1000 years, Jews have fled antisemitic Europe for the relative safety of Muslim countries. The British turning Palestine over to Europe's Jewish refugees and its subsequent transformation into an ethnostate eventually changed this, but ideological antisemitism in the Muslim world is almost entirely imported from Europe and translated European/American writings.
Europe may not have a deeper shared value than its antisemitism, extended from late Rome. Even with the Reformation, one of the main things Protestants were protesting (other than indulgences) was the Catholic church allowing Jews who refused to convert to remain alive. Whereas Islamic countries just imposed a tax on Jews and Christians alike.
Even during the run-up to WWII, America and Britain minimized and ridiculed the complaints of European Jews, and refused people running for their lives entry into their countries. It's psychologically obvious why Europeans and Americans collectively want to locate the source of antisemitism in the Middle East, rather than the continent Jews were forced to flee from.
The Romans weren't particularly antisemitic, unless you define antisemitic as "opposing Jewish interests." There was a lot of bad blood between them and the Jews in that sense.
In one of the Jewish-Roman wars, Kitos War[1], here's what happened:
> 32 Meanwhile the Jews in the region of Cyrene had put one Andreas at their head and were destroying both the Romans and the Greeks. They would cook their flesh, make belts for themselves of their entrails, anoint themselves with their blood, and wear their skins for clothing. Many they sawed in two, from the head downwards. Others they would give to wild beasts and force still others to fight as gladiators. In all, consequently, two hundred and twenty thousand perished. In Egypt, also, they performed many similar deeds, and in Cyprus under the leadership of Artemio. There, likewise, two hundred and forty thousand perished. For this reason no Jew may set foot in that land, but even if one of them is driven upon the island by force of the wind, he is put to death. Various persons took part in subduing these Jews, one being Lusius, who was sent by Trajan. [2]
It's not intellectually honest to mention Roman "antisemitism" and not mention that the Jews were very deliberately genocidal. They were absolutely not just innocent victims.
Wait, so in another words, if a bunch of people from come on over from Europe, set themselves up in an aggressive manner, proceed to kick out Palestinians, and then also say that hey all Jews that still live outside of Israel are welcome to come, you are surprised that local Arab populations don't feel super happy about that?
What exactly did you expect would happen? You know that 12 Million Germans got kicked out post-WW2 out of the entirety of Eastern Europe for an analogous reason?
I say this as a Red Town Juhuri, some of the arguments used by Ashkenazis/Sephardics are beyond insane. Your original comment(to the GP) that you since edited literally suggests that the Holocaust(done by Europeans) gives Israel the right to do whatever the fuck it wants to protect "the last stand of Judaism".
I don’t think Israel has carte blanche to do whatever it wants. I think the point of GP’s comment is that the situation is substantially more complicated than the settler-colonial framing (although it does include settlers and political Zionists who have repeatedly ignored international law).
Concretely, Israel is the product of (1) both political and religious Zionist movements, (2) a massive refuge movement by Jews who could no longer live in Europe, (3) a similarly sized refugee movement of Sephardim and Mizrahim from the Middle East, and (4) people (both Muslim and Jewish) already living in the borders of Israel. These divisions deserve consideration for the same reason that the Palestinian people do not deserve collective punishment or blanket association with terror by Israel and its military.
(This is my viewpoint as a non-Zionist American Jew.)
>I think the point of GP’s comment is that the situation is substantially more complicated than the settler-colonial framing
Did you read his original comment? He was talking about how the Jews got chased out of their homeland by a "pedophile warlord" and how Jews have to make a last stand for Judaism. If they weren't both dead, it might as well have come from Baruch Goldstein or Meir Kahane themselves.
I don't disagree with anything you say, but if you look at his own numbers of Jews that had to flee Muslim countries after the establishment of Israel they are in the ballpark of what Palestinians went through with the Nakba. There were a lot of massive ethnic cleansings and deportation events post-WW2 based on the "ethnostates are good" / "minorities are the fifth column" ideas that were all fucked up and Sephardi/Mizrahi don't have a privilege in saying theirs was uniquely evil.
(If it was edited away from what you’ve said, then I’m not going to defend the original comment. And I agree that what happened to middle eastern Jews is not uniquely evil; only that it ought to color our understanding of the overall situation.)
>(2) a massive refuge movement by Jews who could no longer live in Europe
This one is a head-scratcher.
Europe, European crimes, European antisemitism, European pogroms, Europe Europe Europe. Also European double-dealing of the mandate of Palestine after Lawrence of Arabia, Sykes-Picot, all of that stuff.
A lot of the Middle East’s problems can be identified with European meddling (and domestic atrocities), yes. But that meddling is not a necessary or sufficient condition (there’s plenty of ancient religious and ethnic hate, irredentism, etc. to go around).
Well, equating IBM selling to Nazis with Google (or whoever) selling to Israel could be considered antisemitic. For some reason, people love to bring up Nazi comparisons with Israel, but not with other nations. I wonder why that is. Even people who hate the idea of Google doing business with the US government haven't(as far as I've read) used the comparison of IBM selling to Nazi Germany.
What do you imagine the outcome of the conversation would be?
If someone never explicitly said anything bad about black people, but always lamented the crime rate in America when black people came up, I would guess that the person is racist.
And I claimed that hyperbolic Nazi comparisons are far more common when dealing with Israel than with any other nation. That is not saying that people don't protest other nations.
You are giving too much credit to the "people". The "people" are stupid and parrot the garbage they consume. The organizations/nations that push that agenda are more interesting to look at and investigate.
I mean, FWIW, yes: internally and externally, people compared Project Maven to IBM doing business with Nazi Germany. There was significant concern among engineers that Google was going down a path of repeating the mistakes of a prior generation.
No one is quelling the conversation. You are omitting details in your comment to get readers to agree with a false premise. Workers faced consequences for illegally occupying their boss’s office and spending 10 hours screaming and refusing the leave after being trespassed.
Edit: the irony of ironies is you taking this stance, because this submission is now flagged, whereas the AI targeting submission was discussed on hn.
I find the use of "this is a business" logic to dissuade political discussion about a company's own business practices to be extremely troubling. Yes, there can be a discussion about the proper way to have these conversations, but dismissing discussion of ethics with an attitude of "this is a business" has lead to some horrific outcomes throughout history.
TJ Watson (of IBM) had a similar "this is a business" outlook: “I’m an internationalist. I cooperate with all forms of government, regardless of whether I can subscribe to all of their principles or not.” IBM's machines were extremely important part of Nazi Germany's Holocaust efforts, and there is evidence that IBM was actively working with Nazi Germany after the invasion of Poland [1].
Anyone notice the last few days tons of people bringing up the IBM/Holocaust connection? I've seen maybe half a dozen people in different threads bring it up. It almost feels coordinated, like those are the marching orders that were given out somewhere: "If this topic comes up, compare it to IBM and the holocaust, make these points, etc."
Google is being accused of writing software that facilitates the intentional killing of civilians. Whether you agree or disagree, that's what the accusation is. In that context, for people who accept the accusations, IBM seems like an obvious choice for an analogous company. Do you have a better comparison?
Limit it to 3 stories, at most 1/3 or 1/4. You can build really good looking midrises that integrate pretty well with the environment (and you do not need elevator for 3 to 4 stories midrises, it keeps the cost low. Also maybe the US should chill out on the staircase requirement too).
One parking spot for every apartment max too, to keep the footprint light. I think my residence has one spot per two apartment and it seems enough, its never full, but here people bike more than they drive, so that helps.
3 companies owning 11% of the single family homes available for rent in a metro area doesn't seem like a massive concentration of ownership. Some people prefer to rent rather than buy. Some people don't have savings for a down payment. Someone needs to own the houses that these people rent.
There are probably economies of scale to managing rental properties (e.g. larger companies can hire full time maintenance staff). Some people prefer to rent from small-time landlords, but those can have there problems too.
Is it the maze of LLCs? That does seem problematic.
If they have so much pricing power, why are their returns less than SP500? Who would want to lose money compared to a risk-less investment where you don’t have to do any work?
If so then antitrust laws kick in from three different companies colluding on this.
However, I'm skeptical of much pricing control. Few other markets have such widely distributed market share. There is some stickiness in that people don't want to move often, but unless there's a major shortage (which would be the true cause of high prices), it's hard for a 5% owner to exert much on the market.
Theses companies are part of a larger trend of the Atlanta rental market coming to be dominated by investors.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution did a whole report on this last year:
I think there's concern that if you manage to buy 11% then you can keep expanding. We've all seen what happens when a company captures enough market that there are no alternatives left:
Netflix, Prime: commercials and limiting devices per household
Gmail: no longer unlimited storage as promised
OpenAI: still competing so remains to be seen
If these companies are being subsidized by investors to capture market those investors will want a return and things will get nasty.
Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, Paramount, Disney??? There's a crapton of players trying to make streaming happen, and no evidence that they're making massive margins.
Many people complain about streaming fragmentation not the other way around. And it's an extremely optional product.
And did Google ever actually promise unlimited storage for all time? (And there's still a lot of free storage. I finally broke down and added some more but just so I could avoind managing how much I was using.)
Yes, a moment's thought should reveal that this is the case.
Buying and selling a house costs about 10% (or more) (realtors, expenses, etc). So if you buy a house today for $200k, and sell it tomorrow for $200k you will lose about $20k. (Yes, there are flipping tricks and stuff you can do to reduce that, but there are costs for normal transactions.)
So the rule of thumb is "about seven years" - if you buy today, and sell in seven years, appreciation and such will "break even". Certainly if appreciation was insanely high, that will be a shorter period, if it is bad or a crash happens, it may be longer or even underwater.
But whatever the time period is, if you will not live in the house for that number of years, you're better off renting, unless rental prices are so high as to invert it.
Another example of this is where businesses often prefer to lease (even so far as to triple-net) for tax purposes and to free up capital.
>88% of Americans would rather own a home than rent. Specifically, 76% of renters would rather own a home, but only 2% of homeowners would rather rent.
I suppose most homeowners that want to rent sell and become renters, so we can deduce that 20-24% of renters actually want to rent, and some percentage of the remainder might go back to renting if they had a bad ownership experience.
Though some percentage of those renters are in highly favorable situations, like rent-controlled units that would be insanely more expensive on the open market.
>I suppose most homeowners that want to rent sell and become renters
I see, so maybe selling isn't that big of a hassle then? People keep bringing it up as evidence that people would rather rent, but that really doesn't seem to be the case.
> Why would someone prefer to give away money instead of invest it into their net worth ?
You mean… how. Cash? Mortgage? Buying is easy, running the thing not necessarily. What are you going to do if you lose the job? Health? What’s your plan for when you get old? Do you see the work around the house?
Do you remember Lehman Brothers and why it happened? Because so many thought they could afford it! Have they increased their net worth?
Is that a new build? Second hand? How old? When is the roof to be replaced? Hows the isolation? What’s the quality of windows and doors? Is the electrical installation ready for solar panels? And so on…
> Are there really people that prefer renting, and wouldn’t buy even if they could afford to?
I'm glad I own a house but it can be a massive headache, expense, and time sink. It also places a big constraint on moving as you say. I absolutely wouldn't have wanted one the first 15 years or so out of school and I've been lucky enough that jobs have never forced me to move.
Ease of movement is such a meme.
Every time I've sold houses in 2nd or 3rd tier markets they've sold and gone into escrow in less than 2 months.
Maybe back when housing wasn't so tight this was the case. That isn't it anymore. Sure you have to queue up a bunch of things like a realtor and a mortgage broker but the benefits of getting equity outweigh the supposed convenience of renting .
It's also often house vs. apartment. There's absolutely friction associated with moving from a house with its contents to another house than there is to moving from, say, a 1000 sq. ft. apartment to another. It's still a move but it's much less of an undertaking and, as a renter, you also tend to have a mindset that you will be moving.
Probably the majority at what they think the house should cost. Probably very few at what the monthly payment for a market rate mortgage + downpayment actually costs, based on the recent run-up in home values and interest rates over the past 3-4 years.
E.g. would you prefer to rent the same house at $2000 month, or own at $4000/mo? It might not be this bad in Atlanta but in many areas the rent/buy ratio is that bad now.
Yeah. I live in an old house on a little bit of property. It's paid-off but it's still probably something close to $2K/month between property taxes, insurance, utilities/oil, and more or less steady state maintenance--some of which could probably be deferred but...
It's totally worth the exercise (it's not terribly hard) to "rent to yourself" on paper, just to get a feel for everything involved.
And like you see, it is much more than you'd expect at first, because so many things only "pop up" every 10/20/30 years. A $20k roof replacement done every 30 years is $60 a month or so, and how many of those kind of things are hiding in a house? Hint: the depreciation tables from the IRS are not a gift ...
I used to (half-)joke that had I known how much work and money my house was going to be, I'd probably just have gone with a newer condo.
I agree with the points upthread that a lot of people like the idea of home ownership but don't appreciate all the ongoing costs--including the amortized costs of unexpected things. (I just paid $1K to get a big tree that came down dealt with which fortunately didn't cause any actual damage.
>In ideal situations, I think almost everyone would prefer owning over renting.
I don't think that's true at all especially for people earlier in life/career. Even had I had more money in a brokerage account, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have made a home purchase (whether single family house or condo) before I did. And I don't think that's all that unusual for people 10 years out of school or so.
Yes, I was at a point when I could afford it but I was also mentally ready to put down some more roots.
>88% of Americans would rather own a home than rent. Specifically, 76% of renters would rather own a home, but only 2% of homeowners would rather rent.
That’s a completely dumb statistic since it doesn’t talk about the cost. Of course someone would rather have something rather than nothing, if the something cost nothing. In reality, if the “something” cost $1 Million and only saved you $2500/mo, is it actually preferred?
For awhile, I was friendly with a person who had a lot of material success and was recently retired.
He explained why he preferred renting to me: In the end, it was less hassle for him. All of the "upkeep" was someone else's responsibility. He just wrote a check every month.
It’s a massive amount. But what is more sickening is that we are treating a place to live like a market to corner and profitize. Three companies own 19,000 houses! 19,000 houses that aren’t available for people to buy, 19,000 houses that raised the price of all other houses, and 19,000 houses to milk renters for every cent they have like people in the pods in the Matrix.
This isn’t an isolated event either. There are lots and lots of other companies.
Many people are reading this stat to say that NYC is dying because of post-covid crime or some other stat. I really think this is a misreading of the situation.
I think it is far likely composition effects from:
- High-income people who work remote or hybrid started demanding more space for work and living. Given NYC housing is basically fixed (there is almost no building), this trend has decreased the average number of people per housing unit.
- As the article notes, "the city’s populace is overall older and wealthier": wealthier people use more housing per person and tend to have fewer children.
I'm not sure what the answer is but I'm also not sure why the downvotes.
There are absolutely tradeoffs involved in living in a big city, maybe especially NYC. You might still choose to do so absent any specific work-related reason but no one can seriously suggest that taking a daily commute off the table couldn't seriously change the decision someone makes about where they live.
I don’t have a strong opinion on the events of the past several days. But a lot of the behavior I’ve seen on twitter from Open AI employees, some led by Sam, feels very cult like: posting in all lower case, the heart emojis, rumors of employees calling each other in the middle of the night to pressure people to sign letters supporting Sam.
There isn’t necessarily anything wrong of this behavior. It is good to like your coworkers, but something about the manipulative nature of it triggers an “ick” feeling that I can’t really put into words.
I’ve also spent very little time in the Bay Area, but from afar, there does seem to be something in the DNA that makes people there more susceptible to cult like behavior.
I found those posts extremely weird, the emojis and lowercase tweets and screenshots of Notes. I would imagine people who were/are in charge of a company on the fast track to being worth hundreds of billions / trillion USD would be a bit more serious, but here they are, quoting each other tweets with heart emojis.
I've talked to OpenAI recruiters. I personally don't like Sama from what I've heard/read, but I would still consider working there due to Ilya and Karpathy.
However, I absolutely would have been livid at the board and wanted Sama to come back if I was an employee, simply because I would have joined being aligned with the 'commercialize and make money' side, and not the other.
So I think a lot of OpenAI employees probably don't care if Sama is CEO vs someone else, as long as they get to ship and get paid. The board firing sam wasn't just a 'let's get a new CEO' it was a pivot from 'ship and make $$$'.
All lowercase signals casual aloofness; it says the situation doesn't meet your bar for formality. It's like Zuckerberg wearing a hoodie when meeting with Wall Street types.
People are reading way too much into this, some people just prefer the look of all-lowercase. It's not like this is some super-unique choice to Sam / OAI, it's all over the internet.
The absolute uniformity was a bit disconcerting to be honest, but I can also see it being just a great display of comradery. I'm still unsure about how to feel about the thing with it mostly resolved.
Many aides in the new administration assigned to the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, adjacent to the White House, discovered Monday that their computer keyboards were missing the "W" key — a critical problem given their boss' name is George W. Bush, and he is often referred to simply as "W," to distinguish him from his presidential dad.
https://museum.stanford.edu/exhibitions/day-jobs