Even Disney is going to transport workers to abortion-legal states as needed as "health benefit".
It's certainly a perk and good on Google for this one, but we're headed to a dark place if your best shot at human rights is to retain employment by a big tech company.
The jaded side of me wonders if some amount of companies figured it'd be cheaper to pay for an abortion than maternity leave and health insurance.
Duo you mean that women who undergo abortion wild not do that if they had access to healthcare and maternity leave?
We have access to both and still have abortions. About 220k per year, which is about 30% of all pregnancies.
Either we have a dumb population that did not know what contraception is (we have sex ed all the time), or there are deeper reasons for this action which is never fun for a woman.
US also has laws requiring up to 3 months of leave for having children.
So, if you have a child, the company must accept or pay for your leave, depending on policy, and their health insurance costs for you go up.
Specifically, Ford realizing it was cheaper to pay for crash lawsuits than making everyone's car safer in the days of rear end gas tanks.
You also have to keep in mind that the cost of onboarding a new developer is orders of magnitude more expensive than allowing a developer to relocate out of state or pay for a temporary trip there.
Im glad I have dual citizenship because It does feel like the next 4 years is going to be a very sharp downturn (socially) in the US.
The cynical view is it might be better for them to keep up the supply of low skilled labor...
But we're already here. We are in that dark place now. It's reality that if you work for big tech you get a perk this perk, and if not, you don't.
Edit: point being that we aren't heading to a bad place. Maybe we are heading to a worse place, but this has put a ton of people in a very bad place already.
https://appleinsider.com/articles/21/09/17/apple-is-monitori...
If they're truly against these policies, gutting those states of thousands of high earning jobs and refusing to build any new offices is the most effective way to do it.
The Russian sanctions actually surprised me in that a lot of corporations actually pulled out and fast. I'll be even more surprised if they stay out for years to come.
> The Russian sanctions actually surprised me in that a lot of corporations actually pulled out and fast.
Companies either pulled out because they were legally obligated (That's what sanctions are) or they wanted to avoid reputational damage to their brands. Again, rational self interest.
Corporations do not and I'd argue should not take political positions in the way people do.
The first week there we met a family that had also just moved from a northern state and ended up hanging out with them all summer. The kids were super nice, they played with our 1 year old, who had no one else to play with, being new to the area, for hours on end without any fighting whatsoever. Their son, maybe 7, had long red hair "like Shawn White" who he idolized. A few months later, school started. The first week the family showed up at the pool in our complex and he had cut his hair short. We mentioned it and he ran off, clearly holding back tears. His mom said he doesn't want to talk about it, the kids at school had bullied him so bad he wanted to get it cut.
Never made it to CA but left TX to go back home within just a few months. That story wasn't the only reason but there are plenty of others that made it clear to us TX wasn't a good place to raise a kid.
That’s an ironic way of saying you’re pro abortion.
From Scott Aaronson's blog today: https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=6518
"Most obviously for me, the continued viability of Texas as a place for science, for research, for technology companies, is now in severe doubt. Already this year, our 50-member CS department at UT Austin has had faculty members leave, and faculty candidates turn us down, with abortion being the stated reason, and I expect that to accelerate."
I work in D politics and don't think TX will be Dem anytime within the next few cycles. But the trend is there; especially if young people move in.
GA is closer IMHO.
FL is slipping away and illustrates this compounding effect that the GOP has engineered.
Florida's GOP SCO-FL (?) just allowed a really gerrymandered CD map put out by DeSantis, a break with norms.
The map is clearly undemocratic IMHO. 20 of 28 are now pretty safe R. That's very lopsided for the perennial swing state. Even trending +3% R, it should be a toss up.
State and local level is the same story, often worse.
More than people moving away, stopping immigration of young people has a big affect. That's big reason my state of Colorado has turned from purple to fairly solid blue.
Attacking women, queer people, non-religious people, POC, makes the state unwelcoming and even dangerous.
Being a bully gives them more power, which allows them to create more levers and enshrine more advantages to this power.
They have set themselves up to rule a divided states of America where they maintain extreme authoritarian power against the absolute majority.
You're also right in that global warming doesn't give a damn.
Sadly again their blocking of even sensible actions is just another example of what should be a minority party by #s literally killing people who have little power over this situation.
They can't exactly be one to take principled stances can they...
Guess which ones brings more revenue?
Do you see companies moving their offices to places where people have better rights, which usually translates into better salaries, better benefits, better working conditions? No. But they spent lots of money moving their operations to places where people have less or no rights at all.
So it's clearly virtue signaling.
Note that most contraceptives prevent implantation and IVF creates more embryos than needed. Both are no-no’s under the new regime. And miscarriages and stillbirths are going to be a legal minefield there.
This is part of the stated plan: “Josh Hawley says abortion ruling will push people to move states, strengthening the GOP” https://www.kansascity.com/news/politics-government/article2...
The sad thing is this comes right as remote work has the potential to do the opposite: bring Americans closer together by allowing more opportunity in states people have been leaving for decades in order to seek opportunity in tech and other industries.
Not saying I agree with either perspective, but I think it's very naive to assume WFH could unite the increasingly polarized american peoples.
I was born in a “conservative state”. For me, it wouldn’t be cultural colonialism but, rather, moving home. For my cousins and friends who are just starting their careers, it’s an opportunity (I didn’t have) to continue to live and work locally.
My assumption is that there are more people in my situation than people motivated to migrate away from their home town with the intent of colonizing other places. Certainly possible my assumption is wrong.
Sounds a lot like “if she floats she’s a witch”
Do you have any examples of specific laws of in any states that would make contraception or IVF illegal?
Most pro-life people are very supportive of IVF as they are all about people having more babies. Many states with anti-abortion laws also have laws explicitly making surrogacy legal (which requires IVF).
These rights and others are directly questioned in the text of the SCOTUS concurrence today: "For that reason, in future cases, we should reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell.”
Neal Katyal: “That's right to privacy, contraception, marriage equality,etc”
So like you said, the pro-life folks would force every single one to be kept.
I suspect most states will end up having pretty level headed laws once this all shakes out in 5 years or so with a few outliers on both sides.
Of course that doesn't matter when legislators are not required to not lie in legislation.
"The Industry" is an embarrassment. It is lazy, incompetent, and would be drowning if not for its oligopoly status. Companies who produce useful software will win out over the lackadaisical tech culture that exists today.
What the people bemoaning this decision should worry about is the regulatory backlash against technology--coming from the right--which they totally ignored and pretended was not possible. This decision is a precursor to that inevitability.
There is a very big elephant in the room for where people are moving. And those people are young. And those people do not have the belief monoculture that has existed prior.
Smaller elephant in the room #2 is that cost pressures and globalism don't care about the opinions of the traditional PMC that has reigned supreme when tech was on the upswing.
Interesting business decision.
The question I have, some states are going to call abortion murder and charge it as such. Is Google aiding and abetting a homicide?
But, you realize it's largely a question of axioms, right? Two sides are talking past each other because they take their axioms for granted as self-evident.
It's simply a question of a woman's reproductive rights if you take it as axiomatic that a fetus isn't a person.
I don't take it as axiomatic that personhood begins at conception, but if I did, it would all of a sudden be a question of balancing the rights of two people instead of just the woman's reproductive rights. We don't have a clean scientific definition of personhood. The fetus is genetically distinct and is essentially a parasitic larval human. Scientifically, it's just tissue, but so am I. The real question is if it's a person, and that's a legal and moral question that is largely axiomatic.
The reality is that very few of us have a problem with aborting an unviable fetus or early abortion in cases of rape, very few of us support aborting a perfectly healthy fetus minutes before birth, and hard science doesn't provide us many clear lines somewhere in the middle.
What is interesting is that I guess the average google employee is in a good enough position in life to either afford birth control, get an abortion if they need one, or simply figure out how to make an unwanted pregnancy a good situation for their family. So I’m not really sure how this helps their employees other than making them look like they care about the most recent dramatic thing.
> Second, as I see it, some of the other abortion-related legal questions raised by today’s decision are not especially difficult as a constitutional matter. For example, may a State bar a resident of that State from traveling to another State to obtain an abortion? In my view, the answer is no based on the constitutional right to interstate travel. May a State retroactively impose liability or punishment for an abortion that occurred before today’s decision takes effect? In my view, the answer is no based on the Due Process Clause or the Ex Post Facto Clause.
that would have an indirect effect on interstate commerce, but I could imagine the Court upholding Mississippi's ban, since it only concerns businesses that operate there.
of course, this would run straight into the Heart of Atlanta Motel decision that ended racial discrimination in hotels.
Obama in 2009 (the same year he had a supermajority in the legislature): eh, that’s not so important
I have zero faith in Democrats in Congress to actually do this and all of the Republicans in Congress are vocally (or tacitly) opposed to it.
Clinton’s VP pick was an anti-choice Democrat.
I doubt there will be a federal law allowing for first trimester abortions on demand for at least a decade.
(Note: i'm for abortion rules based on sentience level - i think that sentience level of cats/dogs/pigs is where we shouldn't be able to end the life at will while say fish level is ok, chicken is still ok though feels a bit uneasy, and that means as far as i understand about 3, may be 4 months cut-off for abortion in my view (incest and serious genetic defects a bit more complicated, and i think it warrants somewhat later cut-off))
do you have an actual reason for thinking this will happen? this is detached from reality, both of these procedures are meant to create babies which are carried to term, which is the fundamental goal of pro-life policies
At the deep biological level - the fundamental goal of pro-life policies is to enforce r-selection, ie. more random based, whereis pro-choice is K-selection, ie. more managed (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/K_selection_theory), and like the abortion the IVF, egg freezing, contraception, etc. are all enemies of r-selection while they are tools of K-selection.
1. Going to your super cool tech job in California when you get out of college.
2. After that, you get older and want to buy a house and settle down, and not pay state income tax, and so you move out to a red state to work remote and turn it blue with all the love of diversity picked up in California.
Strict abortion laws might serve as somewhat of a barrier to this sort of cultural re-diffusion.
I joked about how woke CA and hate high taxes, but I don't want my life managed by head elected by religious believers/idealogues.
The answer is NO
No thanks. Stay in California, please.
I like Texas as it is. Texas will likely, eventually, end up passing some sort of abortion laws similar to what European nations have - no abortions after 12 weeks, abortions in case of incest / rape, etc.
Frankly, I'd prefer to see Congress get off their ass and do their job and work together on federal abortion laws, since that's... you know... their goddamn fucking job... to pass laws... but we all know it'll never happen because Nancy Pelosi can cry to her ultra-liberal base that, "We TRIED sooooo hard, but the mean ol' Republicans won't let us abort babies 7 seconds before they're born!" and Mitch McConnell can cry to his ultra-conservative base that, "We wanted to meet those baby killers halfway, but they want to abort babies when they're still 16-cell zygotes! Godless heathens!"
And then we end up right back to where we are now, with states deciding... all because we have Congressional leadership and members who are so cowardly they don't understand that their job isn't to get re-elected, it's to pass laws beneficial to the entire nation, with which, the entire nation can live.
Do NOT fund states that suppress our rights.
This is all about status and which states we view as beneath our own. Trying to do economic sanctions as a whole has not been effective in recent state-wide rights deprivation legislation, and I don't think it will do much here either.
We need to expand the court, have a civil war, or something like that. (I'm not sure if I'm kidding anymore, talking to relatives in red states shows a seething hatred of people with my beliefs that makes me think that at any moment all these people may take up arms like on Jan 6. It certainly seems like many have very violent thoughts and view the world as based on gun violence, and think that their blue state "enemies" will come for them wi try guns just as they fantasize about whipping out there own. It's truly sick)
I think something is already inconsolable in this country.
I'm empathetic to the sentiment, but I think we have to be a bit proportional about this kind of stuff, because 'our rights' is a really, really broad thing, and every issue is different.
For example, if this were more of a perfunctory argument about state vs. federal rights, and SCOTUS was really consistent about it, and this was a social issue that got caught up in a legal issue ... and otherwise 'pretty much most states had good rights' on this issue, well, then the whole thing would look different.
So it's hard to make blanket statements about 'rights' and even specific issues are just full of nuance.
It's probably a good decision by Google and they likely should apply some pragmatic pressure to help a resolution on this one.
After Trump/Jan 6/Ongoing investigations, BLM protests, COVID, and literally Russian invasion of a major country, I thought 'Black Swan' season was over! My god man, this is just too much. Yet another 'big fight'. Hey Zeus. It'd be nice to have some centrist consensus on a lot of this because ironically people are not remotely as divided as it seems from the headlines.
I think it's likely best of Bit Tech navigates these issues separately, with careful deliberation, 'doing the right thing' while not getting to populist about it ... because bigger question for Google, is 'what to do next'?.
It'd be nice to be able to vote with my feet on some of these things. If course, most large employers are also overtly against this new decision and doing things like directly funding abortions, so now I have that whole aspect to consider.
Maybe we can work on making it easier for small and medium sized business to offer interstate remote work arrangements? Seems like megacorps have an unfair advantage in dealing with the red tape hiring employees who reside in N different states.
[1] Yes, reasonable people can disagree about when personhood is viable. And yes, I support bodily autonomy when other people aren't involved, including most drug legalization, etc.
Are you worried you'll accidentally have an abortion if you live where it's legal? Or do you just prefer to be physically farther away when other people do it?
At the same time easy abortion makes hookup culture more prevalent which can lead to other problems with societies.
What specifically makes you say this? It seems like one of those "common sense" conclusions that begs to be supported by data. The trend might surprise you. Abortion rates have fallen drastically since Roe v Wade (obviously Roe v Wade didn't itself reduce abortion rates, but improved education and access to birth control has been very effective). Has "hookup culture" also fallen drastically? How are abortions fueling hookup culture if they aren't happening as much?
Abortion rights might be good for business.
This is a serious issue and these articles are important. If anything they put pressure on more companies.
i never agreed to be brought into this world, i’ll have you know.
man holding a butterfly: is this <flaming>?
Abortion is an important issue but hardly the only one.
