> Edwin Black, whose book IBM and the Holocaust was published in hardback last year, says new evidence set out in the paperback version shows that executives at the firm's New York headquarters directly controlled a Polish subsidiary which leased punch-card machines used to "calculate exactly how many Jews should be emptied out of the ghettos each day" and to transport them efficiently on railways leading to the camps.
> When the Nazis invaded Poland, Black wrote in the Jerusalem Post, "IBM New York established a special new subsidiary called Watson Business Machines," after its then- president, Thomas Watson. "IBM's new Polish company's sole purpose was to service the Nazi occupation during the rape of Poland." Watson Business Machines even operated a punch-card printing shop over the street from the Warsaw Ghetto, the paperback claims.
Private businesses should not have any insight on what's on people's phones, let alone the ability to ban images. Whilst we, as a society, may have an issue on our hands in that sense (I believe that we totally don't), it is for us to decide how to tackle that, not for governments to actively allow and enforce such rules via private enterprises.
I get the pointthat some might consider this spamming marketing bs, but in the same time I'd like to underline some aspects:
- a lot of us are currently speaking about EU alternatives and OSS
- a lot of the discussions are very general and not talking about the actual existing tools
- we expect open source to be free to access and use but maintained and developed at the same standards as proprietary tools with (unlimited, by comparison) budgets
- if someone talks about alternatives, promoting a webinar or a resource, they are flagged for it (as in my case)
For full disclosure: Yes, I do work at XWiki and we do create webinars on a regular basis to educate people and promote our latest developments, updates, and improvements.
If someone finds the information useful, they can join the free webinar, ask questions, find out more about our work.
If someone wants to support us, they can share the link to a friend or a colleague which might use the information.
If someone finds this irrelevant, they can just pass by and keep scrolling to something that appeals their interest.
Nah, I'm not unhappy that SO burned. Either the platform became a community-owned, not-for-profit, volunteer-driven project whose sole purpose was to be useful, or it was going to become yet another enshittified platform - which is exactly what happened. In that sense, it deserved to disappear. We're worse off without it, I agree, but we were heading in that direction anyway.
In 2 out of 3 cases, the responses I received to my questions were poor, wrong, snarky, or generally unhelpful.
I still believe a platform like that would be useful: something closer to MDN Web Docs, but with a Q&A mechanism. It should exist as public-interest technical infrastructure funded by govs, not as another asset to be squeezed until the community that made it useful has nothing left to give and everyone was worse off apart from the owners.
> In 1940, the federal tax rate on income over $200,000 started at 66 percent. By 1944, the top tax rate on all income over $200,000 — about $3.4 million in today’s dollars — had jumped to 94 percent.
Meritocracy is still a slur word by the left, that never changed, the left doesn't like meritocracy and the right likes it. So a left winger writing about the horrors of meritocracy doesn't mean that meritocracy is bad.
I find the left/right approach altogether ridiculous for this, it's but a spurious oversimplification which usually shows lack of understanding for the topic discussed. In this particular case, it also shows that you didn't bother to read what meritocracy actually is, since you claim, against the very inventor of the word, that it's a good thing without producing any evidence or reasoning.
> When the Nazis invaded Poland, Black wrote in the Jerusalem Post, "IBM New York established a special new subsidiary called Watson Business Machines," after its then- president, Thomas Watson. "IBM's new Polish company's sole purpose was to service the Nazi occupation during the rape of Poland." Watson Business Machines even operated a punch-card printing shop over the street from the Warsaw Ghetto, the paperback claims.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/mar/29/humanities.hig...
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