1478
IBM pulls X ads as Elon Musk endorses white pride
(www.theverge.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 16 Nov 2023
1478 points (100.0% liked)
News
23353 readers
2718 users here now
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
I find an odd sort of satisfying humour that we know exactly where IBM draws the line, and it's right there.
It hasn't always been exactly there though....
All the more reason to have a hard line there now, I suppose.
Yep, now look up the dark past of basically any large corporation that existed at that time... wild stuff.
it makes me wonder why, when we see WWII movies or documentaries, why they are doing everything analog? Typewriters, handwritten letters, when we know they had IBM computers, which were sold to the Nazis including during the war, in direct contravention of sanctions. Could it be they want to hide that unsavory bit of history
Early computers were weighty, unreliable, and insecure. We've come a long way with network management, parity checking, digital encryption, smaller machines, and input devices that don't require punch cards. Even if we thought they could have adopted widespread use of computers in the 1940s, it would be a long time until people adapted to the sudden change.
You couldn't even purchase a modem until 1958. ARPANET was the first wide area network actually put to use in 1970 connecting computers on opposite coasts of the United States after four years of development, and it largely wasn't improved upon until ARCNET in 1986.
The Nazis literally used custom made IBM punch cards to keep records of their undesirables. I know society at large was mostly unaware of computers, but did they did play a role in WWII. We see cipher devices like Enigma in historical documentaries and fiction, but we don't see the computers that calculated bomb and rocket trajectories, and least of all the Nazi's database which seems quite well buried in footnotes, though it was critical in the holocaust.
I still stand by the answer to your likely rhetorical question is that it wasn't really hidden that much it simply was utilized so little that the exact sites and personnel that used computers of the time are incredibly few in number, so while easy to document and possibly quite impactful: it also wasn't a very big part of the era as a whole.
I find some dark amusement in knowing there is a wiki page called "IBM and the holocaust" haha. Not gonna read it though
Tldr the arm tattoo #s were the ID in the IBM asset tracking database for the efficiently run coal mines.
Doesn't have to be a line, might just be the last straw