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>The employees are also asking for zero contracts with fossil fuel companies that use Amazon’s AI technology to help them accelerate oil and gas extraction, Th

>The employees are also asking for zero contracts with fossil fuel companies that use Amazon’s AI technology to help them accelerate oil and gas extraction, This type of stuff will be the bane of large companies migrating to cloud. A lot of large companies are involved in defense initiatives, law enforcement, fossil fuel extraction, mineral extraction etc. If they have to worry about what latest moral crusade will try to get you kicked off the cloud platform, they will be a lot more reticent about migrating to cloud. In addition, if you were a fossil fuel or car company that makes gas burning vehicles, how confident are you that one of those people that is walking out to try to get you kicked off the platform, won't try to be a "hero" and use their insider access to try to sabotage your operations or leak confidential data? I mean if the cause is worthy enough, all sorts of activities that would be illegal are considered justified. I mean if a person thinks they are literally saving the planet from destruction, sabotaging an oil company's cloud infrastructure seems like something that they would at least seriously consider doing. I think Amazon and the other cloud companies need to come down hard and state unequivocally that cloud services are not fodder for political crusades, and they will allow all companies that are conducting legal business activities, to be able to use their cloud.

thepaperone 7y ago
get woke go broke
esotericn 7y ago
I think that's precisely the point. You've conflated a few different ideas there under the banner of 'moral crusades'. Law enforcement and climate change issues have very little in common. Your initial quote calls out "oil and gas extraction" - we're not talking about like, making more efficient cars, we're talking about literally pulling more carbon out of the ground so that someone can chuck it into the air. The distinction is between "something that someone probably should care about" and "something that everyone must care about".
whatshisface 7y ago
>I think Amazon and the other cloud companies need to come down hard and state unequivocally that cloud services are not fodder for political crusades, and they will allow all companies that are conducting legal business activities, to be able to use their cloud. HN, please don't turn the following in to a flame war. That said... How does this fit in with companies that de-platform organizations that they see as promoting extremism? There have been some high-profile cases where services like Patreon, CloudFlare and YouTube have banned people who weren't breaking the law, but were doing something management found politically unacceptable. This is interesting because YouTube is run by Google, who also offers cloud services.
- User23 7y ago
  I’m not a lawyer, but a lot of these crusades smell like tortious interference[1]. A lot of people just don’t know their rights, but if a third party, which I imagine includes an employee acting in a personal capacity, interferes and causes your AWS contract to be dropped you have a solid cause of action against them. And unlike a lot of activists, Amazon employees may well be worth suing. And this is a good thing, because reliable contracting is foundational to a developed economy. If you can’t rely on your contracts being honored over arbitrary non stipulated issues then your operation becomes massively less efficient. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tortious_interference https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tortious_interference
  - tehjoker 7y ago
    We wouldn't want anyone's efficiency to be harmed while the world burns. :/
davmar 7y ago
if you think that people fighting to preserve organized society on earth from the reality of climate apocalypse is "the latest moral crusade" or a "political crusade"... you're wrong.
giantsloth 7y ago
It's interesting how the refrain is usually "the power of the free market", "let the free market decide" yada yada. However, as soon as workers decide to express their power by using their free market labor to push companies to do the right thing. All of a sudden people come out with the authoritarian dribble written above, and the "take politics out of the workplace" (which is literally a political position). Worry less about the profits of a monopoly and more about the will of the people to do the right thing in lieu of some ostensible catastrophic profit loss that's more than likely not going to happen. Also, this whole "programmers are going to turn into illegal rogue agents and sabotage amazon customers" is beyond absurd reactionary hysterics.
n_time 7y ago
> If they have to worry about what latest moral crusade will try to get you kicked off the cloud platform, they will be a lot more reticent about migrating to cloud. Equating climate change activism with all other forms of social justice is a common trend I see. They seem so different to me–the difference between empirical reality and ideology. While the outcomes of climate change will be ideological–save climate refugees or preserve competitive advantage and wealth–the immediate concern of attempting to mitigate the impacts of climate change are relatively rational. > if you were a fossil fuel or car company that makes gas burning vehicles Have you tried putting on your role-playing hats and empathising with some of the points being made on the environmentalist side?
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- Consultant32452 7y ago
  Climate change is a similar kind of moral crusade. I don't know if you are old enough to remember, but when AIDS came out we were all told it would be jumping to the general straight population at any moment. The scientists knew at the time this was largely a lie but they told us the story because they didn't believe we would invest in treatment for mostly gays and junkies. They might have been right. Climate change is similar. It will be really bad for the poorest humans. Relatively rich westerners will have some adaptive behaviors and technology, but it will come in slowly and the population mostly won't notice it happening. But the rich people, the people who surely have better information than you, are still doing things like buying beach front property. Barack Obama did this recently, he clearly doesn't expect it to be under water in the next few years. Climate change is a moral crusade to help poor people in other countries. We're given a polite fiction because they don't believe we would help in the same way they didn't believe we'd help the gays and the junkies. Maybe they're right.
  - ianmobbs 7y ago
    Most folks pushing climate activism fully understand that for the most part, only the poor will be effected. That doesn't lessen the argument at all, and to imply "Well, since it won't affect rich people, it doesn't matter" is borderline maniacal.
apacheCamel 7y ago
Why can't employees voice their concerns to their companies? I imagine such a large company like Amazon, it would be near impossible to get a direct response without something bigger like this. Companies are groups of people working towards a goal/service/whatever and those people all have ideas on how to make the world a better place. If the company wants to shut them down, sure, but companies have ideologies too and don't always have to play the "neutral" card. Which, IMO, climate change shouldn't even be a political issue.
- cameronbrown 7y ago
  Selling an idea, even one we can prove beyond a reasonable doubt is always going to be a political issue. There's no getting around the fact that nobody is born with an innate sense of statistics.
  - apacheCamel 7y ago
    It seems like that reasoning would put everything into the bucket of "political issue". I feel like it is more intertwined with forcing people to change (gas cars to EV) OR removing a flow of money (oil industry).
    - aaronbrethorst 7y ago
      That’s because everything is political—including choosing to be apolitical.
  - PavlovsCat 7y ago
    > Selling an idea, even one we can prove beyond a reasonable doubt is always going to be a political issue. So is allowing corporations in the first place, that is also not a result of some innate sense of perfect knowledge of everything surrounding the issue. Too many companies, too many people in them want the cake and eat it, they want societies to uphold their responsibilities towards them, but not the other way around.
crooked-v 7y ago
Climate change mitigation should itself be a 'defense initiative', given the impacts that sea level rise and increased weather variability will have on national defense over the next decades, as well as the increased level of conflict in hotspots around the globe [1]. [1]: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2015/3/150302-syria-war-climate-change-drought/ https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2015/3/150302-syria-...
Angostura 7y ago
You see to be confusing "political crusade" with "effort to respond to the scientific data showing that current carbon usage is unsustainable and a significant threat to civilisation".
avip 7y ago
It's deeply depressing to see climate-related activities portrayed as political crusades, moreover on this forum! CC is not some subjective moral agenda we could disagree on. It's a scientifically proven disaster that had already happened, and have been known and ongoing for almost half a century now.
- umvi 7y ago
  > It's a scientifically proven disaster that has already happened Ok, then where are the thousands of people dying? Where's the "disaster" part? Proclaiming something to be a disaster when the average person can't even tell something is wrong without being told something is wrong is the problem. "It's a disaster because our computers and scientific instruments have predicted it to be so!" doesn't carry much weight. People need tangible evidence that impacts their bottom line. If you are in the Bahamas right now and you told someone "Hurricane Dorian is a scientifically proven disaster that has already happened," they would believe you, because they can see the carnage with their own eyes. They can see that their house is missing. They can see trees torn out of the ground. Say the same thing about climate change and they'll think "huh, this summer didn't seem any hotter than when I was a kid. And last winter we still got tons of snow like we always do." and they'll write it off as hyperbole.
  - avip 7y ago
    >where are the thousands of people dying? Currently, mostly in India, Africa and Middle-East. >People need tangible evidence And we'll have plenty of that, if even the most conservative/optimist projections will materialize. Patience.
    - umvi 7y ago
      > And we'll have plenty of that, if even the most conservative/optimist projections will materialize. Patience. Right, and when we do, that will be the fire under humanity's collective butt to mobilize and act. It might be too late, it might not. I have faith that we will pull through.
  - 7y ago
cortesoft 7y ago
Nah, fossil fuel companies will just create subsidiaries that will be in charge of all their IT infrastructure... or just contract it out. Are Amazon employees going to demand that Amazon not do business with companies that do business with fossil fuel companies? How many layers down are they going to demand?
ben509 7y ago
(Disclaimer: I used to work at AWS.) > won't try to be a "hero" and use their insider access to try to sabotage your operations or leak confidential data? We do have examples of that. Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden. SPC Manning, in particular, was particularly vulnerable to exploitation due to her dysphoria and her chain of command's inability to recognize this problem and mitigate it. And Wikileaks recruited and turned that asset. Snowden was certainly regarded as a HUMINT asset by someone, but he's more the self-motivated ideological case that you're talking about. In both cases, the penalties are much more severe than a private company can bring against an employee, so it's realistic. At the same time, I'm honestly surprised that there weren't more. There are a shitload of government contractors since the usual requirement is a clearance and a pulse. > I mean if a person thinks they are literally saving the planet from destruction, sabotaging an oil company's cloud infrastructure seems like something that they would at least seriously consider doing. It's the classic insider threat scenario. And so Amazon does have strategies to limit what rogue employees can do, as selling corporate clients on cloud services would be a nonstarter without it. I didn't have broad enough knowledge to speak to how effectively they're able to mitigate the threat. > I think Amazon and the other cloud companies need to come down hard and state unequivocally that cloud services are not fodder for political crusades, and they will allow all companies that are conducting legal business activities, to be able to use their cloud. I don't think you can crack down on people like that. They'll just go dark. And my read of the senior guys is they're genuinely sympathetic to these causes. Maybe one response is, "you say you want urgent action, but you're engineers. You know that it's the slow grind that delivers solutions, not the sturm and drang." It's interesting to speculate what would happen if an employee did leak customer data... many companies have gone through crises you'd think would wreck their reputation forever and the market turned out to be shockingly forgiving. Or maybe we'd find out that private clouds are actually quite economical, you just get some standardized racks and run various management services. Hell, you can even resell excess capacity just like how Amazon got started.
- AdamM12 7y ago
  If they got caught seems like a CFAA (Computer Fraud and Abuse Act) charge would be brought.
body12 7y ago
"There's no cloud: it's just someone else's computer (and it's run by people who hate your guts)"
tehjoker 7y ago
I think the people need to come down hard on these companies. Nothing else works. Collective action gets the goods. Business disruption is necessary to get the rulers to change their ways.
NeedMoreTea 7y ago
Thankfully for the world, only in the US does climate science seem to have been quite so politicised. I've never quite understood how that was achieved so successfully, as whenever a significant UK denier has cropped up in our media, they just sound like an ignorant idiot. It leaves little doubt they've not even tried to understand the scientific advice, and most will dismiss them accordingly. The right in the UK and the rest of Europe may not be doing enough to mitigate the problem, but very, very few of them are denying there is a problem. Or trying to associate those agitating for more action with political or moral crusades. A majority of voters, of all political hues, seem to agree with the need for more dramatic action. To the greater point, all companies will have to adjust to a low or zero carbon world. If they don't they can expect greater action from activists, regulators and governments, and changes to what constitutes legal activity. Even the London stock market recently adjusted the categories companies were in - to make it easier to identify those firms people might increasingly want to divest from for being fossil related.
- bjourne 7y ago
  Continental US hasn't warmed as much as the rest of the world. In Europe we have seen and experienced extreme heatwaves and droughts in the last decade. https://www.nesdis.noaa.gov/content/record-summer-heat-bakes-europe https://www.nesdis.noaa.gov/content/record-summer-heat-bakes... The US on the other hand hasn't had temperatures increase that much and has even had many unusually cold winters.
caconym_ 7y ago
Defining efforts to slow/prevent/reverse anthropogenic climate change as "political crusades" has been one of the great propaganda victories of the oligarchs who are raping and pillaging the planet to line their pockets now and will be long dead by the time industrialized human society has come under undeniable threat as a consequence of their actions. Fuck that. Entities willfully contributing to climate change should be censured and marginalized with extreme prejudice. Unless them not migrating to cloud (or choosing a less scrupulous provider) is actually harmful in the long run (and I'm sure there are convincing arguments in this vein), IDGAF if they don't migrate to cloud. On the face of it, them migrating to cloud has no value to me or the human species at large.
bjourne 7y ago
I think your unfounded suspicions amount to FUD - Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt. You have no evidence that people concerned about climate change would be more underhanded or less loyal to their employer than other employees. A company has no reason to fear working with another company because its employees exercise the right to free speech.(+) Claiming such a fear is rational... Well, I think you can see how that would cause people to shut up because they are afraid of being seen as a liability and fired. That would be bad, wouldn't it? A similar situation existed in many Western countries during the Cold war. Communists were afraid to speak their mind because they would be labelled Russian spies and they would be blacklisted. There were of course lots of people that spied for the Soviet union though. But crucially, only one (that I know of) were a devout Communist. All the others were spying for monetary reasons. + - Last I heard an American senator recently proposed that the US should stop selling crowd-control equipment to China. If a politician can propose that, why can't an employee propose that Amazon should not host oil exploration companies?

thepaperone 7y ago

get woke go broke

esotericn 7y ago

I think that's precisely the point. You've conflated a few different ideas there under the banner of 'moral crusades'. Law enforcement and climate change issues have very little in common. Your initial quote calls out "oil and gas extraction" - we're not talking about like, making more efficient cars, we're talking about literally pulling more carbon out of the ground so that someone can chuck it into the air. The distinction is between "something that someone probably should care about" and "something that everyone must care about".

whatshisface 7y ago

>I think Amazon and the other cloud companies need to come down hard and state unequivocally that cloud services are not fodder for political crusades, and they will allow all companies that are conducting legal business activities, to be able to use their cloud. HN, please don't turn the following in to a flame war. That said... How does this fit in with companies that de-platform organizations that they see as promoting extremism? There have been some high-profile cases where services like Patreon, CloudFlare and YouTube have banned people who weren't breaking the law, but were doing something management found politically unacceptable. This is interesting because YouTube is run by Google, who also offers cloud services.

User23 7y ago
I’m not a lawyer, but a lot of these crusades smell like tortious interference[1]. A lot of people just don’t know their rights, but if a third party, which I imagine includes an employee acting in a personal capacity, interferes and causes your AWS contract to be dropped you have a solid cause of action against them. And unlike a lot of activists, Amazon employees may well be worth suing. And this is a good thing, because reliable contracting is foundational to a developed economy. If you can’t rely on your contracts being honored over arbitrary non stipulated issues then your operation becomes massively less efficient. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tortious_interference https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tortious_interference
- tehjoker 7y ago
  We wouldn't want anyone's efficiency to be harmed while the world burns. :/

davmar 7y ago

if you think that people fighting to preserve organized society on earth from the reality of climate apocalypse is "the latest moral crusade" or a "political crusade"... you're wrong.

giantsloth 7y ago

It's interesting how the refrain is usually "the power of the free market", "let the free market decide" yada yada. However, as soon as workers decide to express their power by using their free market labor to push companies to do the right thing. All of a sudden people come out with the authoritarian dribble written above, and the "take politics out of the workplace" (which is literally a political position). Worry less about the profits of a monopoly and more about the will of the people to do the right thing in lieu of some ostensible catastrophic profit loss that's more than likely not going to happen. Also, this whole "programmers are going to turn into illegal rogue agents and sabotage amazon customers" is beyond absurd reactionary hysterics.

n_time 7y ago

> If they have to worry about what latest moral crusade will try to get you kicked off the cloud platform, they will be a lot more reticent about migrating to cloud. Equating climate change activism with all other forms of social justice is a common trend I see. They seem so different to me–the difference between empirical reality and ideology. While the outcomes of climate change will be ideological–save climate refugees or preserve competitive advantage and wealth–the immediate concern of attempting to mitigate the impacts of climate change are relatively rational. > if you were a fossil fuel or car company that makes gas burning vehicles Have you tried putting on your role-playing hats and empathising with some of the points being made on the environmentalist side?

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
Consultant32452 7y ago
Climate change is a similar kind of moral crusade. I don't know if you are old enough to remember, but when AIDS came out we were all told it would be jumping to the general straight population at any moment. The scientists knew at the time this was largely a lie but they told us the story because they didn't believe we would invest in treatment for mostly gays and junkies. They might have been right. Climate change is similar. It will be really bad for the poorest humans. Relatively rich westerners will have some adaptive behaviors and technology, but it will come in slowly and the population mostly won't notice it happening. But the rich people, the people who surely have better information than you, are still doing things like buying beach front property. Barack Obama did this recently, he clearly doesn't expect it to be under water in the next few years. Climate change is a moral crusade to help poor people in other countries. We're given a polite fiction because they don't believe we would help in the same way they didn't believe we'd help the gays and the junkies. Maybe they're right.
- ianmobbs 7y ago
  Most folks pushing climate activism fully understand that for the most part, only the poor will be effected. That doesn't lessen the argument at all, and to imply "Well, since it won't affect rich people, it doesn't matter" is borderline maniacal.

apacheCamel 7y ago

Why can't employees voice their concerns to their companies? I imagine such a large company like Amazon, it would be near impossible to get a direct response without something bigger like this. Companies are groups of people working towards a goal/service/whatever and those people all have ideas on how to make the world a better place. If the company wants to shut them down, sure, but companies have ideologies too and don't always have to play the "neutral" card. Which, IMO, climate change shouldn't even be a political issue.

cameronbrown 7y ago
Selling an idea, even one we can prove beyond a reasonable doubt is always going to be a political issue. There's no getting around the fact that nobody is born with an innate sense of statistics.
- apacheCamel 7y ago
  It seems like that reasoning would put everything into the bucket of "political issue". I feel like it is more intertwined with forcing people to change (gas cars to EV) OR removing a flow of money (oil industry).
  - aaronbrethorst 7y ago
    That’s because everything is political—including choosing to be apolitical.
- PavlovsCat 7y ago
  > Selling an idea, even one we can prove beyond a reasonable doubt is always going to be a political issue. So is allowing corporations in the first place, that is also not a result of some innate sense of perfect knowledge of everything surrounding the issue. Too many companies, too many people in them want the cake and eat it, they want societies to uphold their responsibilities towards them, but not the other way around.

crooked-v 7y ago

Climate change mitigation should itself be a 'defense initiative', given the impacts that sea level rise and increased weather variability will have on national defense over the next decades, as well as the increased level of conflict in hotspots around the globe [1]. [1]: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2015/3/150302-syria-war-climate-change-drought/ https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2015/3/150302-syria-...

Angostura 7y ago

You see to be confusing "political crusade" with "effort to respond to the scientific data showing that current carbon usage is unsustainable and a significant threat to civilisation".

avip 7y ago

It's deeply depressing to see climate-related activities portrayed as political crusades, moreover on this forum! CC is not some subjective moral agenda we could disagree on. It's a scientifically proven disaster that had already happened, and have been known and ongoing for almost half a century now.

umvi 7y ago
> It's a scientifically proven disaster that has already happened Ok, then where are the thousands of people dying? Where's the "disaster" part? Proclaiming something to be a disaster when the average person can't even tell something is wrong without being told something is wrong is the problem. "It's a disaster because our computers and scientific instruments have predicted it to be so!" doesn't carry much weight. People need tangible evidence that impacts their bottom line. If you are in the Bahamas right now and you told someone "Hurricane Dorian is a scientifically proven disaster that has already happened," they would believe you, because they can see the carnage with their own eyes. They can see that their house is missing. They can see trees torn out of the ground. Say the same thing about climate change and they'll think "huh, this summer didn't seem any hotter than when I was a kid. And last winter we still got tons of snow like we always do." and they'll write it off as hyperbole.
- avip 7y ago
  >where are the thousands of people dying? Currently, mostly in India, Africa and Middle-East. >People need tangible evidence And we'll have plenty of that, if even the most conservative/optimist projections will materialize. Patience.
  - umvi 7y ago
    > And we'll have plenty of that, if even the most conservative/optimist projections will materialize. Patience. Right, and when we do, that will be the fire under humanity's collective butt to mobilize and act. It might be too late, it might not. I have faith that we will pull through.
- 7y ago

cortesoft 7y ago

Nah, fossil fuel companies will just create subsidiaries that will be in charge of all their IT infrastructure... or just contract it out. Are Amazon employees going to demand that Amazon not do business with companies that do business with fossil fuel companies? How many layers down are they going to demand?

ben509 7y ago

(Disclaimer: I used to work at AWS.) > won't try to be a "hero" and use their insider access to try to sabotage your operations or leak confidential data? We do have examples of that. Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden. SPC Manning, in particular, was particularly vulnerable to exploitation due to her dysphoria and her chain of command's inability to recognize this problem and mitigate it. And Wikileaks recruited and turned that asset. Snowden was certainly regarded as a HUMINT asset by someone, but he's more the self-motivated ideological case that you're talking about. In both cases, the penalties are much more severe than a private company can bring against an employee, so it's realistic. At the same time, I'm honestly surprised that there weren't more. There are a shitload of government contractors since the usual requirement is a clearance and a pulse. > I mean if a person thinks they are literally saving the planet from destruction, sabotaging an oil company's cloud infrastructure seems like something that they would at least seriously consider doing. It's the classic insider threat scenario. And so Amazon does have strategies to limit what rogue employees can do, as selling corporate clients on cloud services would be a nonstarter without it. I didn't have broad enough knowledge to speak to how effectively they're able to mitigate the threat. > I think Amazon and the other cloud companies need to come down hard and state unequivocally that cloud services are not fodder for political crusades, and they will allow all companies that are conducting legal business activities, to be able to use their cloud. I don't think you can crack down on people like that. They'll just go dark. And my read of the senior guys is they're genuinely sympathetic to these causes. Maybe one response is, "you say you want urgent action, but you're engineers. You know that it's the slow grind that delivers solutions, not the sturm and drang." It's interesting to speculate what would happen if an employee did leak customer data... many companies have gone through crises you'd think would wreck their reputation forever and the market turned out to be shockingly forgiving. Or maybe we'd find out that private clouds are actually quite economical, you just get some standardized racks and run various management services. Hell, you can even resell excess capacity just like how Amazon got started.

AdamM12 7y ago
If they got caught seems like a CFAA (Computer Fraud and Abuse Act) charge would be brought.

body12 7y ago

"There's no cloud: it's just someone else's computer (and it's run by people who hate your guts)"

tehjoker 7y ago

I think the people need to come down hard on these companies. Nothing else works. Collective action gets the goods. Business disruption is necessary to get the rulers to change their ways.

NeedMoreTea 7y ago

Thankfully for the world, only in the US does climate science seem to have been quite so politicised. I've never quite understood how that was achieved so successfully, as whenever a significant UK denier has cropped up in our media, they just sound like an ignorant idiot. It leaves little doubt they've not even tried to understand the scientific advice, and most will dismiss them accordingly. The right in the UK and the rest of Europe may not be doing enough to mitigate the problem, but very, very few of them are denying there is a problem. Or trying to associate those agitating for more action with political or moral crusades. A majority of voters, of all political hues, seem to agree with the need for more dramatic action. To the greater point, all companies will have to adjust to a low or zero carbon world. If they don't they can expect greater action from activists, regulators and governments, and changes to what constitutes legal activity. Even the London stock market recently adjusted the categories companies were in - to make it easier to identify those firms people might increasingly want to divest from for being fossil related.

bjourne 7y ago
Continental US hasn't warmed as much as the rest of the world. In Europe we have seen and experienced extreme heatwaves and droughts in the last decade. https://www.nesdis.noaa.gov/content/record-summer-heat-bakes-europe https://www.nesdis.noaa.gov/content/record-summer-heat-bakes... The US on the other hand hasn't had temperatures increase that much and has even had many unusually cold winters.

caconym_ 7y ago

Defining efforts to slow/prevent/reverse anthropogenic climate change as "political crusades" has been one of the great propaganda victories of the oligarchs who are raping and pillaging the planet to line their pockets now and will be long dead by the time industrialized human society has come under undeniable threat as a consequence of their actions. Fuck that. Entities willfully contributing to climate change should be censured and marginalized with extreme prejudice. Unless them not migrating to cloud (or choosing a less scrupulous provider) is actually harmful in the long run (and I'm sure there are convincing arguments in this vein), IDGAF if they don't migrate to cloud. On the face of it, them migrating to cloud has no value to me or the human species at large.

bjourne 7y ago

I think your unfounded suspicions amount to FUD - Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt. You have no evidence that people concerned about climate change would be more underhanded or less loyal to their employer than other employees. A company has no reason to fear working with another company because its employees exercise the right to free speech.(+) Claiming such a fear is rational... Well, I think you can see how that would cause people to shut up because they are afraid of being seen as a liability and fired. That would be bad, wouldn't it? A similar situation existed in many Western countries during the Cold war. Communists were afraid to speak their mind because they would be labelled Russian spies and they would be blacklisted. There were of course lots of people that spied for the Soviet union though. But crucially, only one (that I know of) were a devout Communist. All the others were spying for monetary reasons. + - Last I heard an American senator recently proposed that the US should stop selling crowd-control equipment to China. If a politician can propose that, why can't an employee propose that Amazon should not host oil exploration companies?