Its noteworthy to me that it took till 1943 for the reality of the threat to be taken seriously for this outcome
People making parallels I feel have been inaccurate, as the parallels right now are much closer to Europe's 1933 happenings, and people act like 1945's happenings is what will happen the very next day
Not sure what to make of that, just noticing that these particular "resistances" didn't have a prior allegory to watch, and made these choices eventually, and still how late into the story we know that these things occurred
What can I say, it's hard to give up data. So I guess the situation must escalate until the bad outcome was undeniable.
And I don't want to make a point here about current political affairs. My point is that data collection has serious dangers, independent how good you think the current collectors are, how good the intentions of the data collection are, and how good the benefits of the data collection are. We should not pretend that at least some data collection has benefits. But we should also not pretend that any given data collection doesn't have the risk of misuse.
It's up to politics (in the end, us), to make sure that these risks are valued correctly, for example by making sure that data collectors take over some of the risk in a serious way. "The data was protected according to industry standards" is not enough.
A lot of that is because of the advent of computer systems built by IBM to maintain records.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust
IBM also built a calculator for the IRS in the late 1800s. They have been working with the government before nearly anyone still alive.
Edit: it was for the 1890 US census, not the IRS. I apologize for my prior error.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tabulating_machine
Friend, are you really conflating a calculator with a system of records knowingly used to enact the Holocaust? I recognize your point, but the valley between the two things is so large that I'm going to assume you're trolling.
Not at all. I’m saying that IBM has been getting government contracts for a while, and they worked with Nazis in Germany to tabulate undesirables.
Okay, but what's your point? The OP question was about what shifted.
If you believe that IBM carries water for fascists, the history seems to support that.
What’s your point?
Alternate take, since social consequences only arise after your client gets invaded by 2 superpowers at once, and you don't really know what a party or government is going to do, the downside is very improbable and its rational to continue contracting with them all
I’m not making a legal or moral argument, merely an observation. I think it’s silly to assume that corporations have values beyond line go up.
People have values. Deciding who you work with is a legitimate concern. No one alive today at IBM is likely to be a Nazi collaborator, but the company benefitted from Nazi money. I’m not sure if IBM ever paid any reparations or was ever asked to.
I think any company as old and as involved with government contracts as IBM is going to have some conflicts of interest, which says more about the world than it does about IBM.
My original point was that I believe the reason the math was so complicated for the Census and indirectly for the IRS regarding taxation in that period, was due to the Census Bureau also being responsible for tracking the frontier line. The release of the 1890 census marked the official closure of the frontier in the American West.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1890_United_States_census
I think the whole timeline of WWII is broadly misunderstood in the US. I imagine it’s related to the fact the US entered quite late, and that much of what’s taught in school is fairly US centric.
It’d be very interesting to survey people and see how people’s mental models reflect reality. I imagine very few Americans would identify what was going on in 1933 at all, never mind that Hitler’s first attempt at a coup took place nearly 20 years before the US entered the war.
To be fair, I never heard about the Canadian-US war before I moved to the States. But we went over the Nazi regime multiple times in school [I am German].
fwiw we do make a lot of jokes about getting rejected from art school