CIRCLE WITH A DOT

@aral Related: I use Anki for studying with flashcards and they just now migrated their CI from Buildkite to Github Actions for their CI. Although:

• Microsoft abandoned some parts of Github Actions because they want to put their resources elsewhere
• Github now charges you money for CI minutes even if you host the runners on your own hardware
• Microsoft is migrating GitHub from AWS to Azure, and Azure isn't ready yet for such workloads, but the two teams didn't communicate, and now they have a <90% uptime.
• It's Microsoft

Some decisions I really don't understand. You want to move away from GitHub, not move to GitHub.

@liaizon You're confusing mastodon online with mastodon social.

@tansy @aral I see why the top politicians all are complicit in genocide. They receive the big bucks or have other reasons to be complicit.

I don't get though why the ordinary people (for example, the officers in the Metropolitan Police who don't receive the big bucks, only a measly salary) choose to be complicit and continue to follow their orders. I don't get why a police officer doesn't just pretend they didn't see that person wearing a sweater with the banned words on it or that peaceful protestor carrying a Palestine flag. What's in it for an ordinary police officer to arrest such people and follow such orders? They don't even get rewarded for their deeds like the politicians are, they're just not ostracized for not carrying out their orders.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer and others who analyzed how ordinary people can commit atrocities, came to the conclusion that stupidity is not an intellectual or psychological problem but a social problem. Police officers have this feeling of belonging to a group, and to not lose that feeling of still belonging to their group, they rather voluntarily give up their capability of critical thinking, of asking questions, and of refusing orders. Just look at the US soldiers who only a few months ago proclaimed they swore an oath to the constitution, not to Trump, and are committing war crimes in Iran and Venezuela regardless.

I know a few police officers in Germany who I believe are decent people, not some sadists who became officers for the power that comes with a uniform, and they keep telling me they would refuse illegal orders and report it up their chain of command, but I don't believe they would. They would be bullied and cannot change employer like other professions can.

Hannah Arendt taught us about the banality of evil, and the probable thinking of a police officer: "Well, I'm a police officer, it is my job to arrest people who display banned slogans. So I better do the best job I can do," instead of turning a blind eye and opting not to arrest literally an 80-year old protesting genocide.

@evcricket It's fine if you set all ethics aside, you mean?