Google says US employees can relocate to states with abortion rights
theverge.comThis is the n'th tech company today that's made an announcement similar to this.
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.
One side of me applauds companies who truly do things they believe are right.
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.
I do not understand this comment (I am French, this may be a cultural/political thing)
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.
In the US, typically employers pay for most or all of your family's health insurance. Yes, it's absurd. Losing your job means losing your insurance.
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.
I don't think non-Americans appreciate the complexity here.
To anyone unfamiliar with our health care system for typical employees:
Once a year, most companies have a "benefits training" session that explains this year's crazy health care situation. They're boring and I only go to the first one when I join a company.
But it's 2022 and we have youtube, so I found Ohio State's training in public: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VjAWj0f6DAc
Anyone employed with benefits needs to have at least a vague understanding of everything in there or they're at financial risk.
So when you hear about contractors fighting to become employees so they have access to benefits, they're fighting for the opportunity to make these benefits elections.
I know plenty of people who design systems for a living that find getting their elections right to be confusing.
You'll notice that a big part of our health care cost mitigation is projecting expenses. It's like a prediction market where you can only lose less, but if you get it wrong you can lose a lot.
Fun!
Our system is not that simple either.
- you have mandatory health insurance which is a percentage of your income
- you have an extra insurance (called mutuelle) which you may not have if you are not salaried (but that you get anyway), or it may be compulsory if you are salaried.
Doctors can be in one of the two groups: 1 or 2. 1 means that your costs are fixed and regulated by law. This is for instance 25€ for a general/family doctor visit. n% of this is reimbursed by the compulsory insurance, and the other one reimburses the rest. n depends on the medical act - for instance for the visit to the MD n=70.
The group 2 fixes their prices as they wish. This is usually for specialists (but not always, there are plenty of specialists that are in the group 1)
The extra insurance covers up to M times the regular cost. M depends on the act and on the insurance.
Generally speaking - the more serious the act, the more you are reimbursed. A heart operation will be free no matter what, but something simple may cost a lot (more that the extra coverage). It is very rare, though, to go over that extra coverage.
Dental is not covered very well - it is OK for small things but implants fo instance are notoriously expensibve (you may pay, say, 1000€ out of 6000€). So is optical (you can always get glasses for free but they will not be the best ones).
That might be overly jaded. I think an unplanned and unwanted pregnancy is a loss for everyone involved, so it's a bit of a no-brainer for companies to offer this relocation.
I want to agree with you, and hope you're correct...but remember the job of actuaries and how they've worked in the past which is honestly rather depressing.
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.
I think that's a little too jaded. Much more likely they do this now for brownie points and quietly kill the program as soon as nobody's looking.
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.
It's certainly a good time for the company to step in, and look good, while not sacrificing much.
We're headed to a dark place.
It’s happening. I think it’s going to get way worse than most people believe.
Yep. They have already started talking about reversing marriage rights and contraception as well. It’s funny that an unelected body is now going to destroy the US and revert things that are clearly the majority opinion of the population.
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.
Probably kiss the Affordable Care Act goodbye and head back to the dark ages of losing your insurance and having a preexisting condition means that you get denied treatment.
People keep focusing on what this all means to minorities, but if you're just an old white male and sick they'll let you die, too.
Cue the old Niemoller poem.
If it's the majority opinion it should have no problem being passed in federal or state legislature
It would need to go through the house of reps, senate and president. The senate in particular is not representative of the majority.
Hmmm, if it wouldn't pass the Senate then I guess a lot of states' constituents don't want this. Sounds like it's better left to a state by state basis.
Congress should reflect the majority opinion of the population.
The maddening thing about this is these issues are all correctable by law, but most people (rightly, I think) don't believe the body with an 18% approval rating will successfully pass those laws.
I guess this could be one way Amazon could help solve its staffing woes. A perk of working at their warehouses is a free abortion.
Given the recent news about them running out of people to hire... I wouldn't be so sure.
The cynical view is it might be better for them to keep up the supply of low skilled labor...
> we're headed to a dark place if your best shot at human rights is to retain employment by a big tech company
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.
When TX first passed its law that allowed anyone to sue individuals that had or aided an abortion, Apple offered to pay for transport and the procedure for anyone at its new Austin campus.
https://appleinsider.com/articles/21/09/17/apple-is-monitori...
Honestly, Apple should be dialing down investment in Texas.
It's odd how many corporations have policies to help their employees escape the laws of places like Texas and Florida, but they're more than happy to relocate their offices to those states for small tax reductions.
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.
Relocating to low tax jurisdictions and boosting employee morale both contribute towards creating long term shareholder value.
> 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.
This is completely made up. Corporations take political positions all the time; it's why they hire lobbyists. Taking political positions is part of business.
Your statement really could not be further from the truth.
Again, corporations act in their rational self interest. Sure, industry specific regulation and abortion access are both political. But conflating them is not particularly useful.
I suppose industry specific regulation may be more direct, but if a company has a majority of employees who strongly believe in a specific social issue, such as abortion access, then couldn't it also be in the company's interest to lobby for that specific issue?
How did that work out for Disney?
I'm confused at how that follows what you were saying. I thought you were saying businesses try to act in their rational self-interest and I was trying to highlight how political issues could be in their rational self-interest.
I don't think the effects of one's actions, such as those of Disney's, would negate whether the company intended to do something to help their own company.
My comment was flippant, I apologise.
What I meant was taking sides on divisive hot button issues is fraught with peril. The probability of blowback is high.
Even if a large proportion of employees held a particular political position, I'd imagine only a small number of activist employees would be disgruntled by the company choosing to stay out of it.
It's ok, I appreciate the apology and as with any internet interaction, realize it's hard for me to know what's going on in your life beyond the screen so I hope all is well.
Oh, I strongly agree that it could be riskier and most companies would probably prefer to appear apolitical, especially with those charged topics. I was a part of a global organization that seemed to take much pride in saying it was apolitical, but had many many many views on how society should be organized, so I think yes, the corporate culture can strongly discourage the appearance of being involved in politics or religion or sex or some taboo topics and to also discourage not just appearance but action as well.
I also act in rational self interest, so I guess that makes all of my positions apolitical.
With that being said, abortion should be legal at the federal level. By your logic, this isn't a political statement.
Most people also support political positions that are orthogonal to or even against their self interest. That is what makes them different from corporations.
Literally nobody will benefit from a ban on abortions. That doesn't stop people from taking such a position.
You're using your own personal definition of "political", in which positions taken in rational self interest are not political, but this isn't how it works. It's difficult to have a discussion if you're using your own definitions of words.
It seems what you're really trying to say is that corporations should only act in rational self interest. As has been pointed out, there are circumstances in which a corporation can be acting in rational self interest by supporting abortion, or by taking other politically-charged positions.
The whole rational-vs.-political dichotomy you're trying to put forth is a false one; being political is not synonymous with being irrational or whatever you're suggesting.
> Literally nobody will benefit from a ban on abortions
The political class benefits from constituencies terrorized by leaders who criminalize health care
They often don't take political positions, they make them.
> Companies either pulled out because they were legally obligated (That's what sanctions are)
AFAIK, there were no sanctions regarding multinational corporations. McDonalds etc. were not legally obligated to pull out.
Yes, that's for publicity.
Renault has signed a deal where they sell the AvtoVAZ factory to Russian state but can buy back in the next 6 years and are in the meantime giving AvtoVAZ designs of new Renault models and assistance with getting parts for clones from more Russian-friendly countries.
McDonalds definitely feels like they're doing something similar but in a more covert way. Ate there in Moscow yesterday. They have a new logo, Big Mac is missing from menu (trademark negotiations probably?), but other than that I assure you they're re-open.
> pulled out (...) to avoid reputational damage to their brands.
French retailer Auchan did not move out of Russia and I have some friends who stopped shopping there and are quite vocal about how noone should shop there.
Because the company decided that the risk of reputational damage was smaller than the value of their Russian operations? The fact that they decided to stay put doesn't mean they support the invasion.
Don't anthropomorphize corporations.
Calling out anthropomorphization of corporations when related to morality or politics while attributing rationality or self-interest is a contradiction.
Corporations have no self-interest or do not think. Corporations are human artifacts composed of human beings that have specific rules applied to them in the great game in our societies, and tend to behave accordingly. This behavior have patterns that we as humans recognize unsurprisingly as human, because they are composed by humans. A corporation is a as rational as a group of humans can be.
Corporations do not always "act" in their self interest, and we can (and in my opinion should) expect moral obligations from them as we do with humans.
Even if you don't want to anthropomorphize the company, it's still the smart decision to take action as if they were in this case. Social and reputation repercussions were evidently not weighed heavily enough so if we want them to take a different action in the future then we as a society needs to respond to change that weighting in the future. If you just pass it off as a company being a company seeking profit as if it were a force of nature and don't do anything about it, then you remove one of the incentives for a company to align with the morals of greater society.
Corporations are owned by and run by people. Actual humans make those decisions.
Don't have to give them human emotions or qualities to make an ethical decision and advocate with the power of ones $
> The fact that they decided to stay put doesn't mean they support the invasion.
How about with taxes paid there?
German chancelor Olaf Scholz halted $10b Nord Stream 2 project and plans to stop fossils import from Russia to cut cash flow to Putin's regime. Other repercussions' goal is similar: to stop indirectly funding Putin's invasion.
Everyone paying Russia could just "stay put" but this wouldn't be inaction.
> How about with taxes paid there?
How about taxes paid in countries with more civilian kills in unjustified wars?
Are people from Iraq, Afghanistan, Sub-sahran africa less horrible to kill than from Ukraine?
I'm not whatabouting, I'm just clarifying what this idea implies
The actual reason why it's "okay" to pay taxes in U.S. is that the media don't demonize U.S. as equally as for Russia, Iran, Taliban, etc.. Therefore, public opinion isn't really going to affect their $$
Texas didn't look quite as insane a decade or so ago when Apple began ramping up their Austin offices. I wonder how Apple feels now though.
Google also just built a brand new building in downtown Austin that will house a few thousand people.
And Oracle.
Ugh.
I believe Meta as well.
IBM, AMD, TI, and a few other big names have been here for decades.
Texas Instruments was always there..
The significant part here is the new-to-texas SV tech darlings migrating, or attempting to migrate.
Odd? I think it just makes business sense.
I recently declined an Apple role that required Austin relocation. I like Austin and considered the move, but ultimately my family is my priority. We can't risk moving to a tech hub in a blistering red state with growing regulation on personhood. I told the recruiter Apple needs to reconsider where it plans to do long-term business.
I moved to Fort Worth a long time ago for work, we had a 1 year old. I didn't really like the idea of him going to school with kids... lets say, of the "Texas mentality", but was really just using the job as a stepping stone to get out of my home state and hoped to be in CA before he'd reach school age.
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.
I can empathize. As an early teen, my family moved from a major US city to the rural midwest which is filled with "blue collar born and bred Americans." I was immediately bombarded with a strict Christian and puritan-like culture in high school. I grew up in a Catholic household but I had never experienced the intensity of a group of kids following their parents upbringing to a tee. They hated anyone who had longer hair and didn't play football and didn't go to church on Sunday. It may sound like a caricature but I immediately asked my parents to change schools. It never happened. I experienced a tough four years of high school because I liked alternative music and dance music like techno. I never made long lasting friendships during that era. Over 20 years later and I can't shake the uneasy feeling that seemingly well-intentioned people seek to eradicate uniqueness in humanity. I've been to plenty of those homes with parents who would greet me with polite words, but I could sense the dichotomy of distaste and good Christianity sensibility.
I never considered myself politically active during that era. I chalked it up to the country mindset. But, since then I've witnessed the rise of their hatred powered by the systems many of us built – social networks and similar technologies. I don't believe either of the two major political parties represent my ideologies and ethics. Instead, I find them both to be trapped in a game of showmanship while wrestling for control of a great nation. Seemingly non-1% citizens loose rights, freedoms, and opportunities to grow as persons. The majority of my high school peers never left their birth town and simply perpetuated the farce taught them in early in youth. The farce being that they own something of America to greater degree than anyone else and that their government owes them everything, but they want to exist without regulation or taxation...and any non-white non-christian non-rural humans. I still can't wrap my head around their logic and I spent a lot of time experiencing a similar existence.
Back to the topic of Texas life. I believe that people born in rural communities like I experienced, would have different belief systems had they been raised in more open and mentally adventurous environments. In other words, their culture is not genetic instead it is more like a meme. Why risk putting our nation's future in stifling cultural states?
As a side note, I witnessed many of my peers turn to drugs like meth and fake cannabis like Spice by the end of high school. Maybe that is the American and I did it wrong.
> Over 20 years later and I can't shake the uneasy feeling that seemingly well-intentioned people seek to eradicate uniqueness in humanity.
It's because there's a self-perpetuating safety in it. This is one of the functions of religion: it benefits its in-group by giving them rules about the "right" way to behave, and those rules coincidentally favor conservative behaviors that have the side effect of stamping out individuality and making everything more "the same." And the self-perpetuating part is that groups of people engaging in more conservative, safer behavior thrive (at the expense of individualism). It's compounded by the fact that there's a moral judgment attached to your behaviors, which means it behooves people to be outwardly conforming in order to signal their inclusion in the morally superior group. Long hair on a boy? Well that sure is different, and as everyone knows, different is bad.
> Long hair on a boy? Well that sure is different, and as everyone knows, different is bad.
This feels really weird when you think about the general western perception of jesus. In damn near any picture he's got a flow going.
My understanding is that Austin is actually politically moderate, though the strong authoritarianism is much more troubling to me than the heavy political slant.
The main issue is that Austin, like all other municipalities in Texas, is governed by the Legislature of the State of Texas. Home rule cities in Texas have legislatively-granted broad authority but the Texas constitution doesn't protect the actions of home rule cities very much. The legislature of Texas has routinely been very fast to pass laws pre-empting city ordinances they don't like. This is in comparison to the constitutions (and constitutional traditions) of some other states where the legislature is largely expected to let local government do its thing while the legislature concerns itself with the state as a whole.
Or, put another way, Austin might be the deepest blue on the entire continent but that means little when the state government is in direct opposition, and has been for decades.
That is my understanding as well. Austin itself feels like a city plucked out of blue state, but I didn't want to risk being caught in the growing Texan zeal with nowhere to go.
But just think about all of those sweet, sweet electoral votes if you help flip it.
Sincerely,
A Georgia Resident
Bad latitude for climate change too
Latitude doesn't help so much, you need altitude, or oceanfront and hope the currents dont shift and you are above the new high water mark. And when the refugees arrive your deed won't count for much, but at least you won't be a refugee.
I think they mean the weather more than the sea level rise - Austin's elevation is 500 feet.
Ssh... I'm still hoping it's affordable to have a vacation house in Minnesota when I retire.
I just moved back to the US after roughly 10 years in Hong Kong. If they pay you enough to move in and move out, don't worry about it (unless your kids are in school).
Nice, what team was that? I'd happily take that Apple role and support a red state as well.
> but ultimately my family is my priority.
That’s an ironic way of saying you’re pro abortion.
Can you explain?
I can see that being smart, but even after the influx of tech Austin is still a way lower cost of living than CA and their campus is close to a few good stem universities. Plus, if everyone educated leaves the place it will just perpetuate. Then again, climate change will probably make it unlivable anyway.
> their campus is close to a few good stem universities
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."
This strikes me as wildly implausible. The US broadly has very permissive abortion laws compared to most of Europe, but I have never once heard of anyone migrating to the US over greater abortion access. It's always economic/opportunity concerns. Going further back, during the Soviet era when abortion was widespread (i.e. 2-3 abortions per live birth in the 60s-70s), did anyone want to migrate to the Eastern bloc for it? My understanding is that it was overwhelmingly the other way around, again for economic reasons.
I think if people turn down jobs in states because of restrictive abortion laws, it's because they have so much choice in desirable employers that they can select on issues that almost everyone else would live with, whether they personally approve or not.
And lastly, if anything is going to undermine Austin universities in terms of science research and education, it's the rampant devaluation of academic standards, excessive bureaucratization, grade inflation, and churning out of degrees in exchange for tuition money. Abortion will have little if anything to do with it.
> The US broadly has very permissive abortion laws compared to most of Europe
a) I assume you're talking about the past, and not the future.
b) The issue is less that our laws are restrictive, and more that they're written in a capricious, illogical, incomplete, and ignorant way. What do you think is going to happen to people with emergency reproductive conditions (e.g. late stage ectopic pregnancies) when doctors have a prison sentence hanging over their heads if they accidentally terminate a viable pregnancy?
If I was a woman trying to get pregnant, I'd be getting the fuck out of these redstate shitholes because I don't want to die.
EDIT: You seem to have written a reply to this comment and then deleted it. I composed a counter-reply in my head on my walk home from the bar, before seeing that your reply had vanished. That counter-reply was: "Your flippant disregard for human life is as astonishing as it is disgusting."
This decision is going to kill real people with hopes and dreams and loved ones and people who depend on them. If you support it, or publish apologia for it, you are some combination of a moron and/or a monster.
Some states are explicitly banning procedures to save women's lives in emergencies such as ectopic pregnancies.
It really is that bad.
The right have been emboldened.
Thomas is no longer afraid to say their goals out loud: they are coming for more rights.
I'm terrified. As a queer person I already feel targeted.
Dehumanization & equating all queer people to pedophiles is a Nazi tactic which allows people to delude & rationalize to themselves that they are actually doing the right thing whilst perpetrating their hate and violence.
Not even going to go on tangent about Thomas' wife. It's the same undeniable b.s. that they espouse at their confirmations: I don't bring my personal (wife's) opinions into rulings (marriage).
I removed my original reply upon realization the poster to whom I responded was likely too angry for debate given the tone of the parent post, which I re-read after sending mine. Perhaps the news is too recent and more time is needed for conversation, I thought. It seems that I was entirely correct...
Below is my reply, which I am re-writing for context, and I will have to encroach on everyone's trust that what I write below completely represents the original. Whether I am a "moron and/or a monster" I will leave for you all to decide.
I will say, though, that for Americans, the abortion issue is out of the courts and in the purview of federal and state legislatures. We need to have these conversations sooner than later, if not now. There is a real concern about maternal health and freedom, just as there is one about rights to life and protection in utero.
___
I am speaking about the past and present. One should be skeptical of predictions about the future.
The motivation for the decision process you describe is fear. Fear or harm, fear of death. Fear itself is irrational (I do not mean this in a pejorative sense) but powerful emotion, but it is not one that I believe motivates people when they are trying to have children. Pregnancy can have many complications that can be debilitating or even fatal (depression, internal bleeding, sepsis, hormonal dysfunction, and so on), and lack of access to abortion in the case of ectopic pregnancy, for example, is only of many factors that would weight against a potential pregnancy. If lack of access over abortion is an overriding fear for women looking to have children, I suspect that fear could just as easily be replaced by other non-abortion-related dangers. Becoming a parent can be scary, and perhaps now isn't the right time. Maybe later.
Also, I want to stress the earlier point I made about living under laws, good or bad. Women bear children because they want them. I believe this to broadly be true, but the case is especially strong in societies where abortion and more importantly contraception are available. Women bear children because they want to raise them, watch them grow, and start families of their own. Should any complications arise from pregnancy, one adapts and lives with them. Despite the risks, which historically had been far graver until very recently, over 7 billion of us exist. I believe that red state or blue state, abortion or no, people will continue to have children, and they will do so in whatever state they are able to raise them. While it is certainly understandable for women, especially if sexually active, who don't yet want to have children to avoid moving to states with outright abortion bans rather than restrictions to the 1st trimester, I doubt it will be an important consideration for those who want to have them.
To your specific point, if laws are so poorly written that they endanger women's lives, such as in ectopic pregnancies, then I expect the laws will change in response to outrage over deaths. Laws that affect people's lives are unavoidable but can unfortunately cause that to happen (e.g. raising speed limits, drug testing requirements, etc.). However, I am not so pessimistic that to believe that no law can be written as a reasonable compromise. And I never would be so pessimistic so as to give up entirely on elected legislatures and instead choose to live under the fiat of judges in hope that their decisions are optimal. There is certainly precedent for courts to make (very recently, in many eyes) stupidly written, poorly reasoned decisions.
> I removed my original reply upon realization the poster to whom I responded was likely too angry for debate
Strong arguments don't lead with transparent emotional projection. If it's important to you to imagine that I am "likely too angry for debate", you are likely already rationalizing an indefensible position you are attached to for whatever reason. Better to abandon it.
Sifting through the largely irrelevant (in the sense of the immediate context of this thread) mountain of words you've dumped here, it seems that the best you can do wrt. the actual substance of my original comment is that women will first have to die to generate "outrage" that will then somehow cause laws to change, to which I think my originally drafted reply suits just fine. Apologia for policy that will kill people is astonishing; it is disgusting; and it is what precisely you are engaging in here.
> The US broadly has very permissive abortion laws compared to most of Europe
According to Wikipedia: "Most countries in the European Union allow abortion on demand during the first trimester, with Sweden and the Netherlands having more extended time limits." That's the same as what was once guaranteed in the US under Roe.
It's still like that in most of the US. And until today, abortion into the 2nd trimester was legal in the entire US, minus some delta in one state as this case reached the Supreme Court. Also, some consideration is needed for lack of abortion access in some states though abortions themselves were technically legal.
Still, 2nd trimester abortions are very uncommon to be legal in Europe. Is there any evidence to suggest that the liberal abortion laws in the US up until today attracted people from Europe to take jobs in the US instead of their home countries with more restrictive abortion laws?
Second trimester abortions, except where medically required (in which case they are legal in most European countries) are also very, very rare.
And this decision is arguably the canary in the coal mine; note Thomas’s concurrence. Things could get very, very dark in the more right-wing US states.
Incorrect. Roe guaranteed till viability (e.g. the day of birth). Very different and most people completely disagree with it.
Viability as defined by Roe was 28 weeks at the time of the opinion and (due to technological improvements) 24 weeks in recent years. Not "the day of birth".
That perpetual motion machine is one of my top fears as well - and sadly perhaps part of their calculus.
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.
No. Texas has way lower property prices than California. Do not take that choice away.
I mean, Apple is investing hundreds of billions in China where they literally have ethnic cleansing going on....
They can't exactly be one to take principled stances can they...
Will they dial down investment in nations with far worse human rights or is this just virtue signaling?
It's far harder to move citizens between countries and would basically be impossible on a large scales like this. Currently people are free to travel between states but who knows in 5-10 years? They may make women take pregnancy tests at the borders of states.
Somewhat. They're free to travel, now, as you say, but Missouri now has the crime of "conspiracy to commit abortion" to cover you getting in your car to drive out of state, or booking a flight out of state...
It's just good business. There are lots of women at Google who are valued contributors and will leave if they are forced to live in a state hostile to them. Google can't afford for them to leave. Ergo, Google creates an environment where they can avoid hostile states and continue working for the corporation.
Do you also think guys with flags and shit on their big trucks are virtue signalling?
There's a famous virtue-signaller in my area who drives to work every day (construction) with trump flags on his truck, and he pickets an intersection near my house with a "trump won" sign most weekends.
The far-right has themselves a major virtue-signalling epidemic they aren't admitting.
I don’t know many people with shit on their trucks, unless it’s from the birds before going through the car wash.
Cute.
Texas is clearly bad, but China isn’t.
Guess which ones brings more revenue?
That's an odd take. Wouldn't you want American companies to care more about people of America than people of other countries?
Do you see companies investing their money to give workers a better salary or better working conditions? No. But they invest a lot of money in lobby to take away worker's rights.
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.
The still-unfinished Austin campus will be the largest outside of Apple Park, so....
Ignoring abortion, I suspect that states without contraception, IVF or gay rights will be of less interest to a significant portion of the tech workforce. Companies would have to provide alternatives unless they want to limit their hiring to red state natives. Good argument for wfh to get talent that just won’t go there.
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.
> suspect that states will be of less interest to a significant portion of the tech workforce.
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.
I don't think remote work would result in bringing us together at all, quite the opposite actually. Frankly, the existing populations in the states people have been leaving for decades are very culturally different than your average remote worker. The local population will see this as cultural colonialism by coastal elites, and the remote workers will wonder why they aren't welcomed, all while driving up local house prices/rents, overtaxing the already crumbling infrastructure, and causing those places to lose their "local charm".
Not saying I agree with either perspective, but I think it's very naive to assume WFH could unite the increasingly polarized american peoples.
Valid point. There are certainly negative scenarios and those need to be considered seriously.
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.
No way. A ton of people, myself included, sees wfh as a ticket out of regressive hellholes.
“Prove you had a miscarriage“ Shudders
Sounds a lot like “if she floats she’s a witch”
Essentially a summary of the world at large.
> Note that most contraceptives prevent implantation and IVF creates more embryos than needed. Both are no-no’s under the new regime.
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).
> Do you have any examples
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”
I mean examples of laws. Like is there any state that has passed or even proposed a law saying "contraception is illegal". To my knowledge, there's not.
Here you go: https://www.findlaw.com/family/reproductive-rights/griswold-...
> At the time, a Connecticut law prohibited the use of "any drug, medicinal article or instrument for the purpose of preventing conception" and punished anyone who "assists, abets, counsels, causes, hires or commands another" to do so (in other words, it wasn't a crime to sell birth control devices, but it was a crime to use birth control or any drug or medical instrument for the purposes of preventing conception).
> Griswold and Buxton sued the State of Connecticut claiming the law violated their constitutional rights. The issue at stake was whether a married couple had a constitutional "right of privacy" to be counseled in the use of contraceptives.
Three other major cases are cited in that FindLaw article, the most recent in 2014 which took away rights to healthcare coverage.
The "at the time" was 1965. Contraception was new and controversial 50 years ago. It's not anymore and is widely supported. Is there any current law or proposal to outlaw contraception? Such a law would be wildly unpopular, even among most pro-life people.
> It's not anymore and is widely supported.
So is abortion, and yet, it's 2022, and the leopards are eating our faces.
I dunno, the comstock act?
The way SCOTUS works is they render it impossible to enforce a law. It doesn't actually remove the law from the books.
It's a legal hack - the government can't enforce it when its made unconstitutional, but it still exists unless they explicitly remove it. Hence Texas' legal hack of allowing citizens to enforce a law.
Which is completely fucking bonkers and should be squashed ASAP, lest these states go completely rogue.
Every state that defines life begins at conception rather than heartbeat or viability. The supremes already mentioned contraception and ivf willingly discards embryos that are not needed.
The supreme court doesn't write laws, they only interpret them. Laws are very specifically written and often include enumerated exceptions and specific scenarios. They don't just say "Life begins at conception and that's that".
Oklahoma has proposed. Supremes removed all limits on laws. “Not mentioned in constitution” applies to all sorts of things.
> Though the bill considers a pregnancy to begin at fertilization, and not implantation, the bill does not restrict the use of forms of contraception that prevent a fertilized egg from implanting in a uterus. According to the bill, abortion "does not include the use, prescription, administration, procuring, or selling of Plan B, morning-after pills, or any other type of contraception or emergency contraception."
It doesn't mention anything about IVF, but as that doesn't involve an abortion procedure it would probably not be affected either. The bill does not propose what you're saying it does.
https://edition.cnn.com/2022/05/19/politics/oklahoma-abortio...
> The supreme court doesn't write laws, they only interpret them.
That is a technical fiction. The Supreme Court rewrites laws all the time. They are the line-item veto a President is not allowed to have.
You don't have to like it. This is literally the system we suffer.
It's not about making it illegal, it's that IVF typically results in more fertilized embryos than are kept.
So like you said, the pro-life folks would force every single one to be kept.
Do you have an example of any pro-life lawmaker, pundit, anyone demanding that all embryos from IVF be kept?
This person is in no way interested in facts, they'll move the goalposts again after it becomes widespread practice.
I seem to be the only one interested in facts rather than hysterical speculation. The facts are nobody can produce a law or proposed law banning contraception or IVF or requiring every embryo to be used.
What's been produced so far is an article from 2005 (above) about a handful of extreme conservative groups, which has clearly gone nowhere in the past 17 years and a video of Ben Shapiro, whose only job is to say provocative bullshit.
Okay, I will make a note to reply to you again when these things come to pass.
At some point, you have to admit that the "hysterical speculation" is really just foresight given current events.
Will you admit it then? I honestly am happy waiting to reply till then.
It seems like you want these things to happen so you can gloat and say "I told you so"
If instead you were interested in the opposite result - making women's reproductive rights explicitly legal - what you would need to do in a democracy is convince enough people to vote for the laws you want.
To do that you need to understand what the people you disagree with are actually saying and what the actual words are in the laws that you don't like. Not speculation about what you imagine the logical conclusion of their reasoning is, not what you read in a headline or a tweet about what the law says (those are often misleading and sometimes outright lies), but the real words that are in the law.
From that point you can attempt to address the real arguments that the people you disagree with are really making. Addressing fake arguments that you imagined they made does not convince anyone.
Yes, Ben Shapiro. IVF is slippy slope. Don't make any more embryos than you will implant and carry. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cETGY6U9wfQ
This is a natural result of placing the cutoff at conception.
No, it's not the natural result of anything. Like I said above, laws are very specifically worded in what they allow and prohibit. They are written by and for human beings. They are not computer programs which mindlessly execute every possible logical consequence.
Technically you can donate the unused embryos, though I don’t know how that would work legally.
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.
Question is: how many women die preventable deaths in the meantime? Will she be your mom? Your girlfriend? Your sister? You?
Of course not, but that is the natural progression of forcing evangelical/Catholic morals on all Americans as current Republican leadership is pushing for. I hope it blows up in their face and Americans wake up to the coming Republican attempt to install Trump as dictator for life.
Contraceptives prevent fertilization, not implantation.
Of course that doesn't matter when legislators are not required to not lie in legislation.
I suspect, having had a long career in tech, no one of import will care.
"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.
Err, having had a long career in tech, I’ve found that companies like to hire younger people. Those who might be sexually active, considering starting families and trying to balance career requirement vs pregnancies. Such as young professors, rising developers, pretty much every aspect of stem. While the regulatory backlash is a concern, I would think that attracting or keeping staff is a larger concern.
And I, having seen Austin, TX grow from a laughingstock to an industry powerhouse, find your points humorous.
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.
Sure we believe in the ‘monoculture.’
Every tech worker I know who moved to Austin is here in spite the fact it’s in a conservative state, not because of it.
What it comes down to is the south has nice weather and is relatively underpopulated for historical reasons. Nothing else.
And frankly, having moved from Seattle, ‘powerhouse’ is an overstatement. Austin is a nice place, but has a long way to go in terms of engineering talent.
> Every tech worker I know who moved to Austin is here in spite the fact it’s in a conservative state, not because of it.
Then you missed the party. I hate to break it to you. Welcome to being a consumer of tech culture, not a producer of it.
Austin is a long way from being a "tech powerhouse"
Well, perhaps. But at least when they had homeless people dying on the streets and shit all over the place, they finally cleaned it up in a little over a year.
One may ask how many decades it takes for that to happen in the places all the imports are from.
Take a look at the voting numbers for Austin, TX. It's overwhelmingly democrat. 71% of Travis County votes were for Joe Biden[1]. The people moving to Austin are no different from the people that moved to San Francisco or Seattle in the first place.
[1] https://countyclerk.traviscountytx.gov/wp-content/uploads/el...
Dude, you do not understand Texas Democrats. And Texas Democrats do not understand you.
If they did, frankly, they would not vote the way they do. There is a type of cultural elitism, and a freeness that Austin voters have that is not indicative of the SF or Seattle voters. People who have been there any appreciable amount of time understand how much Austin leftists actually dislike the imports.
I live in Austin.
That is factually inaccurate.
PMC?
I think it stands for Professional Managerial Class.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional%E2%80%93manager...
I wonder if this is a business decision that has shown it could be profitable. I can imagine people without kids work more hours. Then again, they have a lot less to lose.
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?
I assumed it was a decision relating to a woman's reproductive rights. To suggest it is a business decision is sort of debasing?
> I assumed it was a decision relating to a woman's reproductive rights.
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.
It's not "largely a question of axioms" and no amount of confidently assert-while-questioning will make it so
Personhood simply isn't a scientific question. There's no objective scientific criteria for personhood.
Maybe it's purely a legal question, but that's a problem given the current makeup of the Supreme Court.
If it's not scientific, not legal, and not axiomatic, then what is it?
I'd argue mostly emotional, us projecting our different emotional experiences on each other and wanting them to feel how we feel regarding the same things.
I also believe it has scientific and legal and axiomatic components, just feel quite confident it has to do more with the fear, anger, guilt, shame, and other emotions we feel and attach to things.
I'd agree with that, but unfortunately, that makes it even harder for maximalists on either side to communicate.
Lol I agree. I think people who take maximalist positions often speak the most distantly about how they feel, using a lot of second or third person pronouns and focusing on how people certainly are and not how they might feel.
Part of that may be that feelings are a very difficult basis for constructive conversation if you disagree strongly. Even if you feel strongly, presenting your position as not emotionally based at least helps move the conversation forward.
I've seen that often when I say how I'm feeling, like actually feeling, and the other person does as well, it can help me feel more connected to them and as a result maybe less connected to the belief/idea/preference I held before the conversation. Not always, sometimes I still feel very adamant about a position and yet I tend to open a bit to their humanity.
How else would you describe the different views of each side regarding the moral worth of a fetus?
For-profit companies don’t care about anyone’s rights. To believe otherwise is naive.
Google cares about attracting and retaining smart people. Smart people generally respect reproductive rights. So I guess in some ways you are correct, but not in the way your response to the person you are responding to would imply.
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.
The split of pro/against is really close to 50/50. If you think that the smart people are only on one side or that only one side has "good" arguments, then you are living in a bubble. The argument over abortion was going on before Roe v Wade. Roe v Wade only prevented legislation from finding a solution.
Sorry, the one who is living in a bubble is you. I wouldn't be surprised if over 80% of Google employees support abortion rights. There are many ways to show that Google employees (or generally in the tech industry) are much more liberal than the average US citizen.
Here’s a citation: https://application.marketsight.com/app/ItemView.aspx?Shared...
Depends what you mean really, as much as 60% are against abortion after a fetus can feel pain (debated: 7-28 weeks), with another 20% undecided and only 20% support abortion.
Most people just don’t know how to have an informed discussion.
What overturning Roe really does is allow states to set the threshold. Roe prescribed a method of determining whether an abortion was legal — “viability”.
Now you can have Colorado having after birth abortions (seriously legislated) and Texas banning abortions after heart beat and Alabama banning all abortions.
Support for overturning Roe is actually around 30%
This is the thing that our "two sides to every argument" political discourse distorts. Many issues don't poll at 50/50, but perception is often that they are 50/50.
Pro-choice vs pro-life is pretty evenly split.
Even on the pro-choice side there is a lot of variance on when abortion should be restricted (similar to how Europe restricts abortions the closer to full gestation). Same on the pro-life side, views aren’t binary.
Considering most people don’t understand why Roe v Wade was overturned, I’m not sure opinions on whether it should have been mean much, since belief of what that means is all over the place.
Personal views of pro-life/pro-choice though can be separated from the question of "Does a woman have the fundamental right to terminate a pregnancy?", which seems to have much more support. Would a significant majority choose to do that themselves? Maybe not. But it seems the majority feel women DO have that right, and should be able to make that choice themselves.
That’s my point. When asked “should abortion be legal?” It’s about 60/40 split.
If you asked “would you get an abortion?” The numbers are likely more skewed.
It's 70/30 and you know it. Americans support abortion in some form or another at 70%. The MAGA base do not, and they want other things like gay marriage, gay sex, and birth control also declared illegal.
I've never met a person who thinks birth control should be illegal. I am sure they're out there, but this "they're coming for your morning after pill next" is scaremongering. Gay sex is probably the same. Gay marriage I think you're probably right.
How many devout evangelicals and catholics have you met? BC condemnation are in the majority of those religions.
> this "they're coming for your morning after pill next" is scaremongering. Gay sex is probably the same.
Justice Thomas's concurring opinion literally calls for reconsidering (ie, overturning) Griswold (contraception), Lawrence (same sex relationships), and Obergefell (same sex marriage).
It's perfectly clear that this is exactly what a not insignificant number of conservatives want to do. How is this scaremongering ?
His opinion talks about considering whether the court overstepped it's bounds on those rulings, not whether those behaviors should or shouldn't be illegal.
That feels like a distinction without a difference. If he and 4 others rule that the court overstepped its bounds, states will determine those behaviors to be illegal.
So if you admit he's willing to overthrow the precedent, and you agree that some states would then make those behaviors illegal, then how can you square that circle in your brain to claim it's scaremongering?
Well if we look at everything we do in this way there's no way to make a decision on principle, we must always consider outcomes only.
I don't think there's a state that would outlaw regular birth control. Maybe 40 years ago, but today, probably not.
And really, why is it that we can vote at the federal government based on the policies we want, but saying that you should do that for certain issues in your state is undemocratic all of a sudden? What's wrong with states, constituted by their citizens, deciding how to govern themselves?
If a state voted to enslave a certain subset of the population, when would you say that shouldn't be allowed? So at some point you probably think the federal government needs to prevent the erosion of us citizens rights in favor of states autonomy. Get it?
If you do not have bodily autonomy due to the enforcement of religious stupidity by the state, you are not considered a full human being by the state.
Acting like women, and men who care about women should just accept this shit because it's "the will of the people" is not logical, and I might add is not going to happen.
The states that banned this medical procedure are gerrymandered and at least in Texas I have witnessed first hand the extreme measures they are taking to prevent people from voting out the unpopular and corrupt leaders who are endorsing these measures no one wants, except the religious minority. So please tell me more about how this democratic process is what's happening. They rigged the game and now women are going to die and suffer because of it, and nothing is going to change. They will still pay for their mistresses abortions in "free" states and the poors get ground into the dirt even further. Same song different day.
Yes, Justice Thomas mentions some of the most major 14th amendment rulings and says they were ruled wrongly. One conspicuously missing ruling was Loving v Virginia. The one that prevented states from banning interracial marriage. Does this sound like someone standing on principle? Or perhaps more like someone who doesn’t care about others’ rights but don’t touch his own?
Several states have already had debates in their state houses about outlawing some forms of birth control (Louisiana and Missouri off the top of my head). This was prior to the decision, now they will be more emboldened.
The Texas governor when asked if he could go further and outlaw birth control simply responded “I don’t know.” You wildly underestimate how extreme these people are and how little they care about what the majority want.
To answer your final paragraph, there is a very long history of _certain_ particular states in a _certain_ region in America with a _certain_ evangelical Christian makeup who has been trampling rights for centuries. These people argued states should decide slavery and Jim Crow laws as well. Being blunt, history has proven over and over you’re on the wrong side of this.
And, for what it’s worth, until gerrymandering is fixed there is a tremendous problem with letting the minority political party in the state govern.
For instance, in Wisconsin over the last 3 elections, Democrats have been +4%, +8%, -3%. One would expect their state house to slightly favor Democrats. Republicans have held a +29%, +27%, and +23% edge.
Almost every red state is like this. This is how you have relatively purple states like North Carolina, Texas, and Florida take absurdly hard right positions that in no way represents their populations.
The Texas GOP just days ago released their platform calling for a state-level electoral college for all state-wide positions so they can maintain control of governor, secretary of state, attorney general, etc. without coming remotely close to winning the popular vote.
Hope that helps explain how it is very much the DEFINITION of undemocratic and what’s wrong with it.
Thomas mentioned all the cases that made those protected rights. The way those cases would be overturned is if a state passed a law to prohibit them. He is sending a very clear message to legislatures that he would be receptive to hearing those cases. This is not hysteria and you are making the same arguments made about Roe. We have the roadmap, and it is very clear.
After privacy rights, Affordable Care Act, Social Security, and Medicare are all next.
> The split of pro/against is really close to 50/50.
I’ve searched and I cannot find data that say half of America wants abortion made completely illegal (as it is in several states right now and will be in more shortly due to trigger laws).
Can you please share where you get your 50/50 split from?
> Roe v Wade only prevented legislation from finding a solution.
Roe only? Roe made safe abortions available to millions — it reshaped society.
If the argument against Roe is that fertilized embryos are killed, then we need to make sure in-vitro fertilization is stopped where abortion is as well.
As one anti-abortion politician said “The egg in the lab doesn’t apply. It’s not in a woman.”
The argument around roe is quite simply that it was an overreach of constitutional authority by the federal government. Now individual states, the people of them, can decide how they want to govern themselves. That's all that's changed.
> The split of pro/against is really close to 50/50.
I don’t believe you and I think you’re the one in the bubble.
Your turn.
Also; did you even read my comment before replying to it? Come on, brother. It is obvious that I am talking about Google employees.
> The split of pro/against is really close to 50/50.
It’s not 50/50 at Google or any of the big tech companies.
Yes, it's important for people to realize the split is closer to 50/50 nation wide, some people forget that, but in tech, it's definitely not 50/50 and that's relevant as well.
"As of March 2022, a broad majority of Americans oppose overturning Roe v. Wade (61%) and just over one-third (36%) support it. Opposition is highest among Democrats (74%), including a majority (56%) who strongly oppose overturning Roe. Most independents (61%) also oppose a Roe overturn."
https://www.prri.org/spotlight/most-oppose-overturning-roe-v...
That's making my point though.
Those numbers are far closer to 50/50 than one would imagine in the bubble, but that's also reference to specifically overturning Roe v. Wade, not whether or not abortion should be legal, which is closer to 50/50.
Have a look at the second chart[1]
It's been 'mostly, roughly, steadily ~50/50 'ish' for about 20 years.
I think most self described progressives would be surprised by those numbers, and even the 64/36, as you brought up.
This is a 'big win' for 35% of the country, and another 15% are maybe ok with it, and a few others ambivalent.
That sentiment I think is at odds with the moral outrage felt by ~55% of the country, and it's hard to ingest.
Which makes this a big more difficult to navigate than I think we might normally assume.
I think Google's response is rational, but it's not as 'Black and White' an issue as our 'tech culture instincts' might have us believe.
The "bubble" tends to claim the numbers are 60-70% (and higher in tech companies). Polling shows the numbers between 60-70%.
No, most self described progressives would not be surprised that the numbers are where they say they are.
Literally all throughout this thread people are using these same numbers. I'm curious how far off your perception of progressives is from reality. What numbers do you think we believe are accurate?
Further, _you_ should reference the first chart you linked. It should clearly indicate to you that many who identify as pro-life do indeed support at least partial abortion rights.
85% believe abortions should be allowed in all or some circumstances. 13% believe illegal in all circumstances. Many states under conservative control will go to illegal in all circumstances, so that's the opinion of 13% controlling the freedoms of the other 85%. Not so close to 50/50, huh?
It's not quite that simple, and it's also not 50/50 (right now).
https://news.gallup.com/poll/1576/abortion.aspx
There are a lot of numbers here. In short, while it has been 50/50-ish for a while, it wasn't in the 90s, and it's not right now. More people, when asked for an opinion, think abortion should be legal than not. And by about a 5-3 or 2-1 margin, more people think and have thought that Roe should be left alone, not overturned.
So I see this as a broadly unpopular decision.
It’s about 70/30 nation wide, and in tech probably about 95/5.
50% of the country are of below average intelligence so yes.
For-profit companies are ruled by people, not robots, so it depends.
Sure, but having stressed employees doesn't make a profitable company.
I disagree.
Everything a publicly held corporation does is a business decision, it's naive to pretend otherwise.
That is the next move on their part to make it premeditated murder. If you know evangelicals like I do, you know that I'm not joking.
Possibly. Now the fun will begin if when the Feds stake a claim via the Commerce Clause to make inter-state abortion travel a right. This could end run Roe's overturn because the Feds could say that a State not allowing abortions will affect the price of abortions much like the Feds said you can't hold back corn grown on your farm to feed your livestock because that would prevent the corn from going to market at a market set rate.
Kavanaugh's concurring opinion said this:
> 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.
Didn't Kavanaugh also state that Roe was settled precedent? And anyway even if he actually means what he says this time, do you think the right will be satisfied with this outcome? Or when the time comes will they replace him with a judge who will find that the constitution does in fact find that a state can bar a resident from traveling to another state for an abortion?
True but Thomas opened up, in his opinion explicitly, the line to legally challenge same sex marriage and legal contraception. Same sex marriage only recognized in one state but not another opens all sorts of issues when it comes to interstate travel as far as communal assets, marital rights during hospital visits and death rights, and insurance claims.
I think there are (at least) two things on this topic. The majority opinion didn't agree with Thomas (no one signed on to it). Second, event under Thomas' opinion, the question becomes one of shaky Constitutional footing. If these "rights" are not really Constitutional, the issue needs to move to Congress. There is nothing that prevents Congress from crafting a law to explicitly allow anything you listed.
Also, it could be that better argumentation is needed to seat something as a right. Take gay marriage as an example. If we solely describe it as a contract (not a religious rite), then you can probably lay access to gay marriage within the Commerce clause. Married couples move around. We can't have their marriages suddenly annulled by moving within the US. We don't allow that to happen to other contracts. Yes it might require a destination wedding, but the couple will comeback with all the rights an privileges thereof.
While I support marriage equality, it seems like fundamentally the wrong issue. Government shouldn't be involved in marriage in the first place. A better solution would be to eliminate civil marriage from the legal code entirely. If people want to go through some sort of ceremony and declare themselves married then that's fine, but that process shouldn't grant them any more legal rights or privileges than single people.
Currently civil marriage is bundled up with other legal issues like immigration, child custody, income taxes, and medical care decisions. But there's no fundamental reason other than tradition why those things need to be coupled. They could all be handled through separate contracts or elective registries.
> Government shouldn't be involved in marriage in the first place. A better solution would be to eliminate civil marriage from the legal code entirely. If people want to go through some sort of ceremony and declare themselves married then that's fine, but that process shouldn't grant them any more legal rights or privileges than single people
That doesn't make much sense. So in order to get basic rights that come out of marriage/civil union like hospital visits, power of attorney, inheritance, child support, alimony, splitting assets and children in case of divorce etc. one would need to involve lawyers and sign one-off contracts that cover everything? Sounds like a collosal waste of time and money.
I think that's fine, and by that logic religious institutions can avoid taxes by following charitable institution policies and tax regulations. That would keep a lot of the religious scam artists out of the water and money that says it's going to go somewhere good, going somewhere good. But I think we all know at least 1/2 of America's heads would explode.
What American government should do and what American government does are fundamentally different things and that ship has sailed. No different than what priests, teachers and actors should do.
People can do what they want through voluntary contracts with each other. If marriage is a right, then we don't need government license to practice the right.
I'm not so sure. say that Planned Parenthood operates shuttles to abortion clinics out of state. then Mississippi makes it a crime to operate any business within the state that facilitates abortion.
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.
Setting aside the topic of abortion, that would be one precedent I would absolutely love to see the court overthrow. It was a terrible decision in the first place (wheat, not corn, IIRC) and the commerce clause is far too abused as a result.
I hope to see that happen particularly because I'd love to see the supreme court overturn that commerce clause ruling (I forget the case but I'm familiar with it) because it is clearly nonsense. But any state law restricting travel to another state for abortion would be unconstitutional, yes, no state can pass a law criminalizing behavior in another state, thankfully.
What about 'aid and abet' the person to get there? Or allowing crazy civil lawsuits that evidently are a constitutional 'gotcha'?
Assisting someone in crossing state lines would be pretty well covered by the constitution, the federal government is the only authority capable of regulating cross state movement and interstate commerce, period.
Do you have any examples or possibilities for a constitutional gotcha under these circumstances?
Some texas-style rigmarole.
I'm genuinely asking as I'm not an attorney.
My guess would be something like give each citizens in __ state the power to sue __ for assisting someone to commit a "murder" or "crime of life," whatever insane definition they put into law.
Making "civil suits by private citizens the exclusive avenue of enforcement."
And grants a bounty to encourage this.
Further placing 100% of the burden on the person being sued to prove their innocence (and pay legal fees); doesn't matter the uber driver was just dropping someone off at the airport. Whereas the state would have to prove the crime.
it's the threat, the time, the money, and the inconvenience which creates the deterrence & fear that they want.
No matter how baseless it might be, this whole 'gotcha' is that the Supreme Court won't intervene because - and this is where legal understanding could have nuances - each victim is unique (person being sued civily), and that the relief would be from unique individuals and not the state. SCOTUS "ruling that the providers could not bring suit against the classes of state judges and clerks or the state Attorney General"
Or Congress could just pass a law.
Obama in 2007: first thing I’d do as president is sign the Freedom of Choice Act, essentially codifying Roe
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.
Calling what Obama had a "supermajority" is revisionist history. At best, it was like 20 working days of exactly 60 votes (e.g. due to the Al Frank stuff). If even one Dem didn't go along with it (which for a somewhat nuanced issue like abortion back in 2009 - definitely a possibility) even then it wasn't possible.
So acting like there was some all-powerful supermajority is ignorant at best, misinformation at worst.
Won't happen unless we somehow get 10 new Dems probably with 2 to spare (or primary centrist Dems)
The Feds don't need to rely on Wickard or any Commerce Clause jurisprudence in regards to freedom of movement. Freedom of movement is guaranteed by the Privileges and Immunities clause.
A company the size of google constantly makes decisions that aren't immediately profitable, or will possibly never be profitable in the first place if they believe it will improve PR.
wrt. business decision. I think that in-vitro fertilization would soon become not an option in the "life at conception" states. Probably eggs freezing too. Even may be some forms of contraception. That will have more and more negative impact on that group of employees who would need such services. Also family planning becomes very dented at the "planning" part as getting pregnant one would have to accept the much higher risk of having to carry to terms even if say early genetic testing would show some serious defects, and that may result in delaying of the decision to get pregnant, less pregnancies overall, etc. especially for people who favors planning and consequences estimation based approach to live. That all would result in more stressed employees and lesser number of happy families, and that would negatively affect productivity.
(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))
> I think that in-vitro fertilization would soon become not an option in the "life at conception" states. Probably eggs freezing too.
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 everyday level - dismissing extra fertilized eggs is killing new life according to the "life-at-conception". And IVF, contraception, eggs freezing, etc. gives more power/freedom to women which is abomination to the conservative forces. And it isn't some utility level power/freedom like guns or speech, it is the most fundamental power domain for any biological life - the power to determine the genetic makeup of the next generation of the species.
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.
you should try talking to somebody who believes these things instead of projecting darwinian strategy fantasies onto them
it would be pointless. Most people don't recognize their deep internal biological drivers, and by its nature the
>darwinian strategy fantasies
are effects emerging at biological species [sub]population levels, not at an individual level.
For example, you may have noticed that statistically speaking prochoice people and their children are more educated while having less children than the prolifers. That is a typical manifestation of K- vs r-selection differences. The opening of "Idiocracy" is a nice funny commentary on that.
Also one can notice that the slight birth rate increase in the developed countries in the recent 2-3 decades came with the slight decrease in IQ while one the child policy in China resulted in the IQ increase - classic K/r.
k-selection doesn't vote, and this entire event is the outcome of judicial review. this is like talking to an animist about the forest, you are mistaking the result for the agent. the direct corollary of your argument is that free will doesn't exist, so i don't know why you even bother with presenting an argument.
>k-selection doesn't vote, and this entire event is the outcome of judicial review.
that event is just a wrinkle in the history of our and other species. The natural selection laws didn't start with humans and hopefully wouldn't end with us.
>you are mistaking the result for the agent
in evolution there is no difference between the result and the agent - every agent is a result of previous evolution, and every result of evolution, ie. an individual with specific traits, strategies, preferences, is an agent of shaping of the further evolution. For example the tendency of elephants to have one baby at a time is a result of their evolution and it shapes their future evolution.
>the direct corollary of your argument is that free will doesn't exist
classic anti-Darwinian argument. It is a fallacious argument in its nature as free will is a trait of an individual while Darwinian laws are of large group level.
You wouldn't euthanize your dog or cat if it had some end of life condition and in pain everyday?
i would. That why i said that incest, serious genetic defects and the likes would warrant a later cut-off, definitely into cats/dogs/pigs level of sentience and may be in very serious cases even into monkey like level of sentience, though that is pushing as it starts to become closer to human euthanasia which is really tough and much more complex subject, and personally and as society we are definitely not able to handle it right.
The migration pattern in the nation seems to be:
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.
On the other hand, a lot of these "red states" are really hostile to Californians moving in, too. We're low-key looking to move now that remote work is a thing, and I have direct knowledge of communities that overtly don't want political progressives moving in. One home seller's agent brought up that the seller is demanding what they called a "California Tax." The asking price is what it is, but if the buyer is from California, they want 20% more. And it's not because they think we are all rich and can afford it. These places just don't want us around.
You don’t have to move to a red state to avoid state income tax. You can move to Washington.
Clearly some of the red states residents have fundamentally different idea on many things from mine. And the divide is huge.
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
> and turn it blue with all the love of diversity picked up in California.
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.
What would be the legal basis for a Federal abortion law? I can’t think of any that seems likely to not be struck down by the current Supreme Court.
This is not good news at all. Access to basic healthcare should be a constitutional right. This only increases the power of mega corps.
This makes sense. I fully agree with Google on sticking to this one.
Do NOT fund states that suppress our rights.
When NYC PD was doing stop and frisk, pretty much nobody suggested that we boycott NUC based companies.
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)
Could be
I think something is already inconsolable in this country.
Does that include gun rights?
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'?.
There are no state vs. federal rights. No government entity grants American citizens their rights.
Rights extend to people who aren't citizens and living beings who aren't human as well, but nice reply.
The left fears guns and tries to ban them, the right fears ideas and bans books from schools. The book V for vendetta has the line "ideas are bulletproof" so maybe the right is on to something? V is one of the books TX banned interestingly. But if you put a bullet through every NN that has the offending weights you will find ideas are not in fact bulletproof. Sadly our species has done this a few times to confirm.
This is a good PR move to get out ahead of the investigative journalists who will absolutely start digging into public campaign contribution data and pointing out how much they’ve donated to the politicians who drove this decision.
But will Google - or any of the others - pledge not to support record keeping or data mining aimed at the prosecution of those who seek abortions? Any changes to their privacy rules or app store policies? While it's nice that they offer travel/relocation benefits, the cost to them is down in the noise relative to their total budgets. Turning away or alienating government (and shadow-government) customers by refusing to aid them in their march toward Gilead would show more real commitment.
Such a scary thing this is even a concern.
It sucks to be poor in the US a bit more than yesterday
Sorry, does Google normally bar their employees from relocating at will anyway?
Usually it's a long process to relocate. They may be stating that they are willing to approve it for anyone who wants to relocate while at the same time making the process easy for them.
I'm getting the popcorn ready for when a person who was born male asks Google for permission to relocate to a State where this service for females is allowed. The more that companies get involved in politics, the more this turns in to clown world.
Well this is available upon request, before you'd obviously have to go through channels for transfer. This is a 100% get out of jail free card due to women's rights violations currently legalized in Texas (and other backward states). I don't really like google, but this is a commendable move on their part to get women and families out of an oppressive zone.
Google should let their employees work wherever they want. Why constrain people. Just go remote.
Unpopular opinion here, but I'm pro-life and am considering moving to full remote to get out of states that allow unrestricted late term abortions. In my view, systemic killing of unborn people [1] is up there with slavery and Jim Crow in the worst parts of American history and culture. I have Quaker culture in my family going way back.
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.
> I'm pro-life and am considering moving to full remote to get out of states that allow unrestricted late term abortions.
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?
In principle I would feel the same as you, but if one looks at the science of the development of human fetus versus what we, the humanity do with animals with completely developed nervous systems, I believe that what we're doing to animals for meat production is uncomparably worse.
At the same time easy abortion makes hookup culture more prevalent which can lead to other problems with societies.
> easy abortion makes hookup culture more prevalent
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?
I just looked at the data, it seems that both of us are somewhat right, but at this point birth control and education outweights abortion law:
In 1973, the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision legalized abortion in all 50 states. From 1973 to 1980, the abortion rate rose almost 80%, peaking at 29.3 abortions per 1,000 women of childbearing age ...From 1981 through 2017, the abortion rate fell by approximately one-half.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion_statistics_in_the_Uni...
This isn't a question of who's right or wrong. I'm specifically asking about your claim that abortions are driving "hookup culture." This implies that people are having more sex because of availability of abortions. Why do you think this? For that matter, what makes you think people are having more sex, period?
It's hard to find hard data on it, but in my personal life 10 years ago I experienced women having sex with me only after they felt that they know enough about me and trust me in having a long term relationship, and after the first sex I didn't feel that I still have to prove myself and court, but rather I can focus on having a great time and great relationship with the woman I am with.
Nowdays women have sex with me much earlier in the courtship (generally second date), but they still play hard to get and give a masculine vibe, like they were just brushing their teeth. I can't really blame women doing it, as the high budget movies are portraying the same masculine characters in beutiful female bodies.
Another example that I can provide that I see nowdays is that I was trying to date women in my age range (40), and they are feminine, great to talk to, mature, want to have kids, and talk about being so desparate that they are thinking about just asking a friend to make baby with them to raise up solo, which they know is really really hard. I have a great time talking to them, I just more see them as friends than people I would like to have relationship with.
What does any of this nonsense have to do with abortion and its relationship to hookup culture? Significant parts of this are downright incoherent.
Right, I thought they had a 3 day per week in-office policy. How does that work with people relocating ?
What if, after reviewing their internal HR data they found woman employees who have had children have longer retention and higher productivity and work longer hours.
Abortion rights might be good for business.
Does this policy apply only to women?
>To support Googlers and their dependents, our US benefits plan and health insurance covers out-of-state medical procedures that are not available where an employee lives and works. Googlers can also apply for relocation without justification, and those overseeing this process will be aware of the situation. If you need additional support, please connect 1:1 with a People Consultant via [link to internal tool redacted].
Isnt this contraproductive? This means less voters who may in a furure overturn this
I don't think most people want to live in a place where they don't like the laws in a moonshot bid to take over the world for ideological reasons.
A small reversal of the outflow from California to Texas, maybe?
I can't stand Google, but hats off to them for this.
Why only US states? I don't remember this for Google's offices in Mexico, Ireland, et al.
Both Mexico and Ireland allow abortion.
Within past year or two, Google has been there much longer.
If I had to guess, it's because in neither of those locations did people lose rights that they had previously been granted. This is a substantive shift in peoples' bodily autonomy. If you don't want theocratic fascists inspecting your body, all of a sudden you have to uproot.
Probably because you can move between U.S. states without a visa, which is required to permanently work in another country. I feel like Google could do something similar between it's different offices in the Schengen area, but moving from Ireland to Mexico or from USA to Italy is going to require a lot more work and paperwork than most people are willing to put in, especially if there's a simpler option already available.
This is exactly how things should work. If you don't like the politics of one state, you should move to another state. States should retain authority over their laws not enumerated in the constitution. The diversity of states, some with weed, some with no income tax, some with abortion, some with an oil stipend, is a great thing. Hopefully most companies end up supporting this
Is it possible to avoid a flame war at this point? I believe this arricle is way too inflammatory, political and uninteresting for this forum.
If we only posted articles lacking in controversy that would be uninteresting.
Nope. There are plenty of challenging problems that are not controversial, and disagreements can be dealt with amicably. You can have friendly opponents/competitors.
You could for example, avoid the article and go comment on the ones you find more interesting.
This is a serious issue and these articles are important. If anything they put pressure on more companies.
Apparently supporting basic human rights is too political now
Yes, the right to life is apparently quite controversial.
as is the right to consent.
i never agreed to be brought into this world, i’ll have you know.
man holding a butterfly: is this <flaming>?
Aren't you free to not read the comments?
Frankly, this is a good stance but doesn't go far enough. Google should have a policy encouraging every employee to relocate to the area they feel most appeals to their values, lifestyle and beliefs.
Abortion is an important issue but hardly the only one.