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?
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.
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.
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.
> 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 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 $$
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.
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.
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 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).
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.