IBM CEO Ginni Rometty's Letter to the U.S. President-Elect (opens in new tab)

What is it that you theorize immunizes modern workers from the forces that led IBM's employees to participate in the Holocaust? Do you think IBM's 1930s employees didn't realize that genocide and mass relocation was wrong?

Further: tech giants have for the last several decades been arming the world's most repressive regimes with information technology. What do you think the Great Firewall of China was originally made up of? Whose databases do you think track activists in Iran and Egypt? What evidence do we have that modern tech companies will do anything different than IBM did, faced with the same "opportunities"?

I don't mean to suggest that IBM is more prone to such things than other companies; I'm using them as an example of what has happened in the past. Currently many companies, and I don't know if IBM is included, help dicatorships oppress their own citizens by building the systems and assisting in surveillance.

Rometty doesn't address issues of liberty or diversity in her letter. Offering to work with a man who has openly promoted prejudice and who has given an ally of white nationalists a high-level position in the White House, but not mentioning these issues, I believe is a failure of hers and IBM's obligations as leaders in society. The message they send is: It's ok to overlook these things and continue business as usual.

Imagine if Rometty had said: 'IBM remains committed to diversity and to the freedom of all Americans in our great country.'

Virtually no discussions I've seen on the Internet about executive orders seem to involve people who really understand executive orders. Executive orders do not in fact give the President the power to override Congress. All they do is define the manner in which the administration will execute the authority granted to it by Congress and the Constitution.

So it is indeed true that Obama altered immigration policy through executive order by changing enforcement priority to avoid deporting children, and it is indeed true that Trump will change that back. But in neither case is a President making new law by doing so: US immigration law doesn't require the administration to have or not have those priorities.

I'm not sure this qualifies as that. IBM's role in politics has been historically fraught. Is everyone here really aware of IBM's role in the Holocaust? That really happened.

The whole thread is problematic. I dug into some of the claims --- for instance, I'd like to see IBM's "15 ideas" for saving 900 billion in healthcare costs (I was unable to find anything other than anti-Obamacare spam sites suggesting IBM had offered to foot the bill for the whole system in exchange for running it on IBM hardware).

I'm not sure there's much to this story, and so I don't think there will be much to the thread.

It wasn't intended to provoke a flamewar, and it wasn't unrelated to the subject. IBM, who provided technology to the Nazis to track the Jews for the holocaust is now cozying up to a President-elect who promised to create a database to track Muslims.