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As an engineer I have serious moral qualms about furthering the goals of any military. Contributing means being complicit. The fact that the military funds res

As an engineer I have serious moral qualms about furthering the goals of any military. Contributing means being complicit. The fact that the military funds research doesn't change that.

criley2 9y ago
As an engineer I have serious moral qualms about not furthering the goals of our military. After all, I would not be here, and my job would not exist, and the freedom I have to do this work would not exist, if soldiers like my grandfather hadn't stepped up to Hitler and Stalin and Mao and say "No, you're wrong, and we're willing to use violence to protect our way of life". Just my 2c but I definitely respect the ultimate sacrifice that my grandparents generation gave to create this quite nifty Liberty bubble that these few generations get to play in.
- tclancy 9y ago
  That's a fair point but it also treats life as a zero sum game that's played in a steady-state arena where the threat of Tartars over the next hill is ever present. That's a good way to prevent progress and to defend yourself perfectly against the Last War but one would think the last 30 years of terrorism would have shown us the flaw in that. Put another way: who benefits from $Giant_New_Military_Platform like new fighter planes? They don't really keep me safe as a citizen of the US: they don't prevent terrorists and they don't threaten other thermonuclear states. Yet we spend trillions on stuff like this any justify it with bellicose rhetoric and it seems like the only people benefiting from it are people selling it.
  - chiefalchemist 9y ago
    Agree. And to that I'll add, it was an ex general and ex POTUS who coined the term (or at least etched it into history): Military Industrial Complex Yet most act like that "friendly reminder" never happened. The collective memory is in fact short.
    - Fej 9y ago
      Originally it was the "military-industrial-Congressional complex".
  - thwarted 9y ago
    Yet we spend trillions on stuff like this any justify it with bellicose rhetoric and it seems like the only people benefiting from it are people selling it. And the people who work at those military/government contractors. In some sense, military spending is a job-work program that transfers funds from the public coffers to citizens. That it's for useless tech means it has attributes of an entitlement. That it's called military spending and has bellicose rhetoric is part of making that entitlement palpable to citizens it wouldn't be otherwise.
  - politician 9y ago
    Please realize that all state militaries are coevolving together and competing in an on-going global tournament for dominance at all times whether there is an official war or not, that a weakness in one area will be weaponized by a competitor (e.g. our military weakness in preventing Russian disinformation leading to a political upset), that we must continually improve, enhance, and expand our capabilities just to maintain our status quo, and that it is essential to perform well in this competitive environment just to be able to buy items from Walmart, get 15% off your car insurance, drink your Starbucks latte, and carry a placard at the local activist rally. There are indeed warlords just over the hill, and they have names like Entropy and Resource Availability.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - olleromam91 9y ago
      People immediately want to paint these truths as only products of fear. Yes, fear is a large part of it. But it takes courage to fight against that fear and be responsible for the future of your people (whomever they are). Pretending that there is no evil in the world is cowardice.
  - criley2 9y ago
    The Tartars are over the hills. Democracy is in decline. Authoritarianism is on the mega-rise. The state of democracy is bad and looking worse, and if the Brexit/Trump trend of destroying the EU and breaking up the Atlantic Alliance bear just a bit more fruit, you may find that these "Tartars" are a lot closer to you than you once believed. You call me blind to the future by looking at the past, but quite frankly, you appear to be repeating the mistakes of the past by not learning from them. Democracy was not "won". Liberty for all does not exist. These are fights that every generation must wage. Or we will (and are currently) losing.
    - ForRealsies 9y ago
      You assume the EU was created for Democracy purposes?
    - vixen99 9y ago
      The EU under its unelected President and unaccountable unelected lawmakers (the EU parliament can't propose laws) with a constitution that would be thrown out anywhere else (and never put to the electorate as a whole) is doing a pretty good job of destroying itself never mind the rats deserting the sinking ship.
    - tc7 9y ago
      It's not obvious to me that democracy is in decline, or authoritarianism on the rise. Over what time-frame? Do you have supporting data you can point me to ("In the past 10 years, more countries have switched from democratic to non-democratic government than vice versa")? Thanks!
      - travmatt 9y ago
        You’d probably be interested in the book “How democracies die” by two Harvard political scientists. They walk through the warning signs of a failing democracy and how many others have collapsed - and the answer is actually yes, there are plenty of warning signs that American democracy in particular is in trouble. Some of the evidence they walk through: the collapse of political norms, political restraint and the rise of win at all costs brinksmanship, the delegitimization and dehumanization of political rivals, attacks against independent institutions and neutral arbiters, and much more.
- sdhgaiojfsa 9y ago
  For many, the current actions of our military weigh much more heavily than good things it did half a century or more ago. Of course, each person's morality is their own, so you may feel that working in favor of the military is justified by its past actions. For others, they see working for the military as enabling bad present and future actions, and therefore see it as immoral to offer support.
- scarmig 9y ago
  ...the US military never clashed with Stalin's military AFAIK. Even in the Korean war, the USSR only provided supplies. That standing up to Hitler also involved a peer partnership with the USSR's military.
  - geofft 9y ago
    The US military in fact defended Stalin's military in resettling Germans who were pushed by Nazi Germany to settle Eastern Europe - of course the initial settlement wasn't legitimate either, but somewhere between half a million and two million Germans died in the resettlement. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_and_expulsion_of_Germans_(1944%E2%80%9350) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_and_expulsion_of_German... Also, as part of war reparations, millions of Germans were placed in forced labor by agreement of Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forced_labor_of_Germans_after_World_War_II https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forced_labor_of_Germans_after_...
  - adventured 9y ago
    Before Stalin died, he believed that a conflict with the US was imminent. There was blatantly a hot war brewing between the US and the USSR along the borders of the West/East divide in Europe. The comment's grandparent could have just as well been defending Western Europe from Stalin's USSR territorial lust. They didn't stop moving west just to be polite. That vast military stand-off, which became the cold war, was a military conflict. The US deployed over three million soldiers to Europe in the 1950s almost entirely to stop the USSR from advancing any further.
    - panzagl 9y ago
      Our industry was literally born from the Cold War, yet now everyone wants to pretend it didn't exist. The Cold War was not just rhetoric and flag-waving. Even outside of Korea/Vietnam/Afghanistan there was continual military activity and those engaged in it took it as seriously as if the world could end.
    - scarmig 9y ago
      The USSR's "territorial lust" was aided and abetted by FDR and Churchill and guaranteed by their militaries. They divvied up Europe into spheres of influence at Yalta, and the US and UK were perfectly happy to gift Stalin Eastern Europe to further their own geopolitical objectives. I'm by no means equating the three, but it's ahistorical to present the American military as an idealistic organization that exists to battle evil. Hell, Mao killed more Soviet soldiers than the USA ever did.
- lotsofpulp 9y ago
  I don't think it's useful to refer to a military without also including its leaders. The military that fought against Hitler and Stalin and Mao isn't the same military that invades countries and topples governments under false pretenses.
  - icebraining 9y ago
    How so? Eisenhower finished the WW2, and then went on to topple the government of Iran and restore the Shah. Plus he gave bombers and napalm to help the French keep their colonies in Indochina.
    - lotsofpulp 9y ago
      True, I did not think of that. I we'd have to go even more granular and refer to specific engagements.
- oculusthrift 9y ago
  yes your freedom wouldn’t be here if we weren’t drone bombing weddings of goat farmers in yemen (the poorest people in the world). Or maybe if we weren’t setting civilians on fire in laos or cambodia or bombing pharmaceutical factories in Sudan. Where would our freedom be without that? you already lost this game when you had to go back to ww2 for a just war.
  - geofft 9y ago
    World War II wasn't just, either. It's simply that the Allies were less evil than the Axis. The Allies literally included Stalin. The US placed an ethnic minority of its own people in concentration camps despite zero evidence that these people were going to help an enemy country. And so forth.
- geofft 9y ago
  Without defending the morality of the Hitler/Stalin/Mao governments (or of the US government), it's very much worth noting that scientific researched flourished in the USSR and technological research continues to flourish in China. A lot of discoveries in computer science had roughly simultaneous Soviet / US discovery (the Cook-Levin theorem is a good example). There are a huge number of technology companies in China, and all your chips come from there anyway. So if your goal is "I should further the goals of a military because it provides room for the sort of work I enjoy" and not "I should further the goals of a military because the military does good things," it is not at all clear that backing the US military over those of the USSR and China is the right option. It is also worth remembering that plenty of people the US killed could have had grandchildren who wanted to work in these same fields.
  - friedman23 9y ago
    haha, USSR research flourished? Do you mean how the USSR crushed any research into computing because it contradicted their ideology? And "Chinese chips" are all foreign designs.
    - mantas 9y ago
      I'm sure Soviet times joke that "our microschemes are biggest!" came out of nowhere.. I wonder why all the consumer tech in USSR was so backwards if research was so flourishing :)
    - jbros 9y ago
      It seems like their we're ideological reasons at first. But you are leaving out crucial details afterwards. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_computing_in_the_Soviet_Union?wprov=sfla1 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_computing_in_the_...
  - archgoon 9y ago
    >> create this quite nifty Liberty bubble > worth noting that scientific researched flourished in the USSR You seem to be talking about two totally different things. The grandparent did not talk about scientific advancement. He also wasn't talking about the USSR's military, he was specifically talking about the US's. The US, you may be surprised to discover, pursued, and continues to pursue, a political agenda quite different than that of the USSR. > "I should further the goals of a military because it provides room for the sort of work I enjoy" He didn't say that at all. He said specifically 'create this quite nifty Liberty bubble', which is not the same thing.
- robert_foss 9y ago
  I guess that is a standpoint that would be easy to take if all governments were flawless and co-existed in peace. But history paints a different picture, with events like Iraq, the Kontras, NSA Dragnetting just to name a very select few. Governments are willfully violent towards its own citizens and others for what is often not much of a reason at all.
- PeterStuer 9y ago
  You would be here. Your job would be the same. In fact, it would be hard to tell the difference. With all due respect, the 'ultimate sacrifices' might have been given, but many believe, including those that survived the horrors of war, that it was never to safeguard you, but rather a feast for those that prey on volatility.
  - jahewson 9y ago
    That’s not a safe assumption. The US was awfully busy fighting the Japanese. Had they stayed out of Europe, Hitler would certainly have defeated Britain (leaving Africa unprotected) and likely had the resources spare to defeat the USSR too. From there Hitler could support the Japanese against the US and would have massive resources to do so. Hitler’s plan really was world domination. He had plans for a rocket-powered trans-Atlantic plane to bomb New York. Not to mention that the Nazis had the V2 and even a jet fighter by the end of the war (but too few resources to build/deploy them). With more resources the Nazis may well have developed their nuclear bomb.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - wilsonnb 9y ago
      It's not at all certain that Hitler would have defeated Britain if the US had stayed out of Europe. As far as I know, most historians agree that the US hastened the Allies victory over Germany but the Allies would have (eventually, probably) won anyways.
- batmansmk 9y ago
  I was born and raised in Normandy, and saw the dire sacrifice a generation had to make. On my way to school, I could see the bullet holes in the walls, the tombstones of nameless soldiers, the bombs and mines we had to defuse in the fields. What our grandfathers did was noble. What we do now is the business of war. I find it diminishing to compare what they did to what Google does now.
  - GordonS 9y ago
    I completely agree with this. Trying to compare WWII to the actions of the modern military is absurd. How can you possibly compare it with overthrowing governments in South America and the Middle East, Vietnam, Guantanamo, Abu Gharib, drone strikes on hospitals, up to 200k civilians dead in Iraq, and much more - and of coursr the deeply, deeply questionable motives of all of these. The actions of our ancestors in WWII were borne out of necessity - those of the modern military are driven by money, greed, propaganda and political point-scoring.
    - Maybestring 9y ago
      >drone strikes on hospitals, up to 200k civilians dead in Iraq You are looking at allied actions in WWII through rose colored glasses if you think that's worse. Dresden, Tokyo, Nagasaki, Hiroshima, Berlin, Saint-Nazair... the allies engaged in total war. Civillians are part of the war making capability of a nation, and in WWII all sides considered them to be valid targets. In Saint-Nazair's case it wasn't even enemy civillians. The German U-boat port was too heavily fortified, so the British wiped out the occupied French town that fed it.
      - dredmorbius 9y ago
        I'd add Nanking, London, Warsaw, Auschwitz, Amsterdam, and Bataan to your list, and that's off the top of my head. The British, U.S., USSR, Germans, Japanese, and Italians all practiced atrocities and mass warfare and/or genocide against civilian populations. I'm not challenging the credibility of your list, only the one-sidedness.
      - 9y ago
- goatlover 9y ago
  They didn't step up to Stalin and Mao. Hitler was because of alliance with Britain and the Japanese attack, not because of how awful the Nazis regime was. The US for the most part didn't want to get dragged back into another European conflict. Hitler was bad, yes. But what happened in Germany was rooted in the outcome of WW1, which was rooted in all the alliances and what not proceeding it, which was rooting in yet prior conflicts. A lot of which had to do with the colonial powers fighting over how to divide up the world, or because of religious differences. A pacifist might say Hitler, Stalin and Mao are just symptoms of the deeper problem, which is the willingness of human beings to engage in violent conflicts just because somebody tells them to.
  - ixtli 9y ago
    It's amazing the degree to which people are ignorant of what you've said here and imagine the US was motivated by ideology.
    - fastball 9y ago
      The US was motivated by ideology. Why was the US an ally of GB/France/etc and not Germany/Italy? Contrary to your belief, greed can be ideological -- striving for global free trade is an example of this.
      - mijamo 9y ago
        Then why wasn't the US in the war from the beginning? Did it take 2 years to discover that Hitler was bad?
        fastball 9y ago
        It took 2 years for a country that values personal freedoms and international free trade/security to decide that the Axis powers winning the war would be bad for both. Also, the US formally joined the war in 1941, but were providing material support to the Allies and otherwise prepping before then.
        9y ago
- jahewson 9y ago
  Nobody stood up to Stalin and Mao. Cherry picking the good stuff doesn’t make the bad stuff acceptable. Carpet bombing of civilians in German cities for example - an act of zero military value. The takeaway from WWII is not that the military is a wonderful thing but that the UN is a wonderful thing.
  - refurb 9y ago
    The only thing the UN has shown is how utterly weak it is. It's ability to force compliance is limited to those members willingness to do so. It's just another puppet of the superpowers.
  - walshemj 9y ago
    Well depends those cities had large military plants Hamburg was building the scary fast U boats for example. Btw I am lucky as my fathers house was bombed (when he wasn't in it) oh but he did live near the larges spitfire plant - which was a military target.
  - drak0n1c 9y ago
    The Korean war was a case of the US and UN standing up to Mao's influence. The North Koreans lost ground until PRC forces started pouring in.
  - djrogers 9y ago
    > The takeaway from WWII is not that the military is a wonderful thing but that the UN is a wonderful thing. The same UN that causes Cholera outbreaks, protects rapists (as long as they wear blue helmets), and steps aside to allow massive genocides to occur on a not-irregular basis ( Rwanda, Bosnia, Sri Lanka, South Sudan for starters). Or are you talking about the UN that funded the Oil for Food program so a bunch of super-elite rich people could get kickbacks from an evil dicatator? Maybe it's the UN that has stood by for decades while more and more dictators and legitimately horrible people acquire and use WMDs (Libya, Syria, North Korea, and on and on)... Seriously, how much good has the UN actually done that wasn't backedstopped by a US Super Carrier or two?
- GordonS 9y ago
  Sorry, but there is an enormous difference between WWII and the terrible actions of the US military since then.
- mr_spothawk 9y ago
  your grandfather was probably considered by leadership to be just as disposable as every other low-income male in the population at that time... he's lucky that he didn't die in the trenches. you are, too. war is power and money. glowing historical illusions of "responsibility" and "valor" don't protect us from nuclear holocaust.
- jankeymeulen 9y ago
  One of the bigger issues I have with this that Google is only doing this kind of work for the US military, which for me as a non-US Googler makes me a bit uncomfortable. Because some relatives have been fighting the US military not even that long ago.
- johnny313 9y ago
  I understand this perspective, but I think it oversimplifies the reality of why we (the US) go to war. I am a veteran of the war in Iraq, a conflict that could be reduced to a one-line "defend our way of life" sound bite if you are willing to ignore everything else that happened. I do not want my children to use my involvement in that conflict to remove their responsibility to make hard ethical choices.
mieseratte 9y ago
That these Google engineers support a global surveillance network that stalks and spies on everyone while taking a moral stances against military projects is truly laughable. Keeping "free" nations safe and prosperous is as fine a goal as any.
- monfrere 9y ago
  Not everyone thinks that the U.S. drone program has much to do with keeping free nations safe and prosperous.
AndrewKemendo 9y ago
You should understand that building basically anything will further the goal of some military over another. Technology is neutral - who it's used by and how is not. I don't care what you build, if it has the goal of improving a workflow or automating a process then it will de-facto support one organization over another.
mkirklions 9y ago
I have refused to work for defense companies, I try to encourage my friends and sibling to avoid these companies. Boy they pay great though...
- walshemj 9y ago
  Compared to FANG companies not realy
  - vesrah 9y ago
    CoL and benefits need to be figured into your assertion
    - walshemj 9y ago
      Yes right trouble is this is often used by hr to try and explain why they don't pay market rate. Doesn't really explain why google pays less in London UK for that google does in low col states in the states. And I don't think Lockheed and BAE pay their engineers as much as FANG companies do and they certainly don't out compete on benefits.
      - geodel 9y ago
        Exactly right. Somehow people keep explaining high salaries of FANG in terms of cities/area in US. Truth is more likely that these companies have immense market cap and profitability and being helmed by first generation liberal entrepreneurs they are happy with sharing benefits. IBM, Cisco or any other typical IT company pays 120-150K salaries in bay area and not much of profit sharing/ equity.
  - pascalxus 9y ago
    FANGs defeat themselves by putting themselves in COL areas that are really high thus reducing their relative compensation to 1/3 or less, even with all that stock. That's pretty easy for govt to beat.
ataturk 9y ago
It barely matters. If you won't do it, someone else will happily step in to earn that paycheck. I have fought against the MIC my whole life and have been extremely careful about what kind of work I take on. It hasn't made a bit of difference. Ethics are dead. The total state is likely our future whether we like it or not.
sremani 9y ago
Complicit of what? These smug generalizations, if you did not vote for X, you are racist! If you are not for A, you are for Genocide! are not going to win you over people that are not already in your camp.
walshemj 9y ago
That's fair enough but you have to decide if your cool with that and resign if you have moral beliefs that run counter to your employers You come across as wanting that sweet sv $ and benefits without having to make any moral choices - if you got to work for CNI company's you know what the deal is. And before you ask yes I did face that at my first job when I analysed some high speed film from one experiment and though oh I know what that "objct" is and my office mates said yes that's probably REDACTED.
- AndyNemmity 9y ago
  I disagree strongly. Employees are a stakeholder in the company, and if they can band together to enact change on the companies goals for a moral purpose, then that is an option as well. If their efforts fails, they can choose to resign, or take other actions as employees in history have. It's not the only option, it may be the only option ultimately that succeeds in removing yourself from complicity.
  - walshemj 9y ago
    Well id agree on the stakeholder side but try that in the USA and they will treat it in the same way that they would union organizing :-) You will find that in general that a lot more googlers probably wouldn't take that view.
emanresu101 9y ago
> Contributing means being complicit. I don't agree with this. Many open source projects have been used for sinister means (not just by governments). But does that make those contributors complicit? Should those contributors be safe-guarding against all possible unintended use cases? It seems like you're painting all military efforts and funding in evil terms. But these efforts are directed by many different people, each with their own goals and agendas. Some of those efforts are intended for the betterment of humanity, while other efforts are at the detriment of humanity (at least in my opinion). I worked for several years at a large defense contractor. The majority of our funding came from military contracts. I worked on a project intended to help detect and disarm explosive devices. And I worked next to a team that was trying to rapidly detect infectious diseases. We all thought we were doing work that would benefit society. But virtually any technology can be used for malicious purposes. Does that make us complicit if those technologies are ever used in malicious ways? Do the evil actions of some people in an organization make the entire organization evil? Does that mean that all military efforts are unjust?
- calcifer 9y ago
  > Does that make us complicit if those technologies are ever used in malicious ways? Yes. If you choose to work for an entity you help further their work. Militaries are made for war and by contributing to a military, you directly help them commit atrocities. Working for a military is simply war profiteering [1]. > Do the evil actions of some people in an organization make the entire organization evil? Yes, if you voluntarily join an organization knowing they have evil people doing evil things. > Does that mean that all military efforts are unjust? Yes, with probably the only exception being a defensive war. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_profiteering https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_profiteering
  - olleromam91 9y ago
    By using this "logic" you draw a very blurry line, that wont lead to any decision making, just arguing over who is most evil. I can now assume that miners and forgery workers are complicit in murder because they harvest and refine the metals that build weapons. And that farmers are complicit because they produce the food that is used in military rations, the wool or cotton that is used to make their uniforms.

As an engineer I have serious moral qualms about furthering the goals of any military. Contributing means being complicit. The fact that the military funds research doesn't change that.

criley2 9y ago

As an engineer I have serious moral qualms about not furthering the goals of our military. After all, I would not be here, and my job would not exist, and the freedom I have to do this work would not exist, if soldiers like my grandfather hadn't stepped up to Hitler and Stalin and Mao and say "No, you're wrong, and we're willing to use violence to protect our way of life". Just my 2c but I definitely respect the ultimate sacrifice that my grandparents generation gave to create this quite nifty Liberty bubble that these few generations get to play in.

tclancy 9y ago
That's a fair point but it also treats life as a zero sum game that's played in a steady-state arena where the threat of Tartars over the next hill is ever present. That's a good way to prevent progress and to defend yourself perfectly against the Last War but one would think the last 30 years of terrorism would have shown us the flaw in that. Put another way: who benefits from $Giant_New_Military_Platform like new fighter planes? They don't really keep me safe as a citizen of the US: they don't prevent terrorists and they don't threaten other thermonuclear states. Yet we spend trillions on stuff like this any justify it with bellicose rhetoric and it seems like the only people benefiting from it are people selling it.
- chiefalchemist 9y ago
  Agree. And to that I'll add, it was an ex general and ex POTUS who coined the term (or at least etched it into history): Military Industrial Complex Yet most act like that "friendly reminder" never happened. The collective memory is in fact short.
  - Fej 9y ago
    Originally it was the "military-industrial-Congressional complex".
- thwarted 9y ago
  Yet we spend trillions on stuff like this any justify it with bellicose rhetoric and it seems like the only people benefiting from it are people selling it. And the people who work at those military/government contractors. In some sense, military spending is a job-work program that transfers funds from the public coffers to citizens. That it's for useless tech means it has attributes of an entitlement. That it's called military spending and has bellicose rhetoric is part of making that entitlement palpable to citizens it wouldn't be otherwise.
- politician 9y ago
  Please realize that all state militaries are coevolving together and competing in an on-going global tournament for dominance at all times whether there is an official war or not, that a weakness in one area will be weaponized by a competitor (e.g. our military weakness in preventing Russian disinformation leading to a political upset), that we must continually improve, enhance, and expand our capabilities just to maintain our status quo, and that it is essential to perform well in this competitive environment just to be able to buy items from Walmart, get 15% off your car insurance, drink your Starbucks latte, and carry a placard at the local activist rally. There are indeed warlords just over the hill, and they have names like Entropy and Resource Availability.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - olleromam91 9y ago
    People immediately want to paint these truths as only products of fear. Yes, fear is a large part of it. But it takes courage to fight against that fear and be responsible for the future of your people (whomever they are). Pretending that there is no evil in the world is cowardice.
- criley2 9y ago
  The Tartars are over the hills. Democracy is in decline. Authoritarianism is on the mega-rise. The state of democracy is bad and looking worse, and if the Brexit/Trump trend of destroying the EU and breaking up the Atlantic Alliance bear just a bit more fruit, you may find that these "Tartars" are a lot closer to you than you once believed. You call me blind to the future by looking at the past, but quite frankly, you appear to be repeating the mistakes of the past by not learning from them. Democracy was not "won". Liberty for all does not exist. These are fights that every generation must wage. Or we will (and are currently) losing.
  - ForRealsies 9y ago
    You assume the EU was created for Democracy purposes?
  - vixen99 9y ago
    The EU under its unelected President and unaccountable unelected lawmakers (the EU parliament can't propose laws) with a constitution that would be thrown out anywhere else (and never put to the electorate as a whole) is doing a pretty good job of destroying itself never mind the rats deserting the sinking ship.
  - tc7 9y ago
    It's not obvious to me that democracy is in decline, or authoritarianism on the rise. Over what time-frame? Do you have supporting data you can point me to ("In the past 10 years, more countries have switched from democratic to non-democratic government than vice versa")? Thanks!
    - travmatt 9y ago
      You’d probably be interested in the book “How democracies die” by two Harvard political scientists. They walk through the warning signs of a failing democracy and how many others have collapsed - and the answer is actually yes, there are plenty of warning signs that American democracy in particular is in trouble. Some of the evidence they walk through: the collapse of political norms, political restraint and the rise of win at all costs brinksmanship, the delegitimization and dehumanization of political rivals, attacks against independent institutions and neutral arbiters, and much more.
sdhgaiojfsa 9y ago
For many, the current actions of our military weigh much more heavily than good things it did half a century or more ago. Of course, each person's morality is their own, so you may feel that working in favor of the military is justified by its past actions. For others, they see working for the military as enabling bad present and future actions, and therefore see it as immoral to offer support.
scarmig 9y ago
...the US military never clashed with Stalin's military AFAIK. Even in the Korean war, the USSR only provided supplies. That standing up to Hitler also involved a peer partnership with the USSR's military.
- geofft 9y ago
  The US military in fact defended Stalin's military in resettling Germans who were pushed by Nazi Germany to settle Eastern Europe - of course the initial settlement wasn't legitimate either, but somewhere between half a million and two million Germans died in the resettlement. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_and_expulsion_of_Germans_(1944%E2%80%9350) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_and_expulsion_of_German... Also, as part of war reparations, millions of Germans were placed in forced labor by agreement of Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forced_labor_of_Germans_after_World_War_II https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forced_labor_of_Germans_after_...
- adventured 9y ago
  Before Stalin died, he believed that a conflict with the US was imminent. There was blatantly a hot war brewing between the US and the USSR along the borders of the West/East divide in Europe. The comment's grandparent could have just as well been defending Western Europe from Stalin's USSR territorial lust. They didn't stop moving west just to be polite. That vast military stand-off, which became the cold war, was a military conflict. The US deployed over three million soldiers to Europe in the 1950s almost entirely to stop the USSR from advancing any further.
  - panzagl 9y ago
    Our industry was literally born from the Cold War, yet now everyone wants to pretend it didn't exist. The Cold War was not just rhetoric and flag-waving. Even outside of Korea/Vietnam/Afghanistan there was continual military activity and those engaged in it took it as seriously as if the world could end.
  - scarmig 9y ago
    The USSR's "territorial lust" was aided and abetted by FDR and Churchill and guaranteed by their militaries. They divvied up Europe into spheres of influence at Yalta, and the US and UK were perfectly happy to gift Stalin Eastern Europe to further their own geopolitical objectives. I'm by no means equating the three, but it's ahistorical to present the American military as an idealistic organization that exists to battle evil. Hell, Mao killed more Soviet soldiers than the USA ever did.
lotsofpulp 9y ago
I don't think it's useful to refer to a military without also including its leaders. The military that fought against Hitler and Stalin and Mao isn't the same military that invades countries and topples governments under false pretenses.
- icebraining 9y ago
  How so? Eisenhower finished the WW2, and then went on to topple the government of Iran and restore the Shah. Plus he gave bombers and napalm to help the French keep their colonies in Indochina.
  - lotsofpulp 9y ago
    True, I did not think of that. I we'd have to go even more granular and refer to specific engagements.
oculusthrift 9y ago
yes your freedom wouldn’t be here if we weren’t drone bombing weddings of goat farmers in yemen (the poorest people in the world). Or maybe if we weren’t setting civilians on fire in laos or cambodia or bombing pharmaceutical factories in Sudan. Where would our freedom be without that? you already lost this game when you had to go back to ww2 for a just war.
- geofft 9y ago
  World War II wasn't just, either. It's simply that the Allies were less evil than the Axis. The Allies literally included Stalin. The US placed an ethnic minority of its own people in concentration camps despite zero evidence that these people were going to help an enemy country. And so forth.
geofft 9y ago
Without defending the morality of the Hitler/Stalin/Mao governments (or of the US government), it's very much worth noting that scientific researched flourished in the USSR and technological research continues to flourish in China. A lot of discoveries in computer science had roughly simultaneous Soviet / US discovery (the Cook-Levin theorem is a good example). There are a huge number of technology companies in China, and all your chips come from there anyway. So if your goal is "I should further the goals of a military because it provides room for the sort of work I enjoy" and not "I should further the goals of a military because the military does good things," it is not at all clear that backing the US military over those of the USSR and China is the right option. It is also worth remembering that plenty of people the US killed could have had grandchildren who wanted to work in these same fields.
- friedman23 9y ago
  haha, USSR research flourished? Do you mean how the USSR crushed any research into computing because it contradicted their ideology? And "Chinese chips" are all foreign designs.
  - mantas 9y ago
    I'm sure Soviet times joke that "our microschemes are biggest!" came out of nowhere.. I wonder why all the consumer tech in USSR was so backwards if research was so flourishing :)
  - jbros 9y ago
    It seems like their we're ideological reasons at first. But you are leaving out crucial details afterwards. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_computing_in_the_Soviet_Union?wprov=sfla1 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_computing_in_the_...
- archgoon 9y ago
  >> create this quite nifty Liberty bubble > worth noting that scientific researched flourished in the USSR You seem to be talking about two totally different things. The grandparent did not talk about scientific advancement. He also wasn't talking about the USSR's military, he was specifically talking about the US's. The US, you may be surprised to discover, pursued, and continues to pursue, a political agenda quite different than that of the USSR. > "I should further the goals of a military because it provides room for the sort of work I enjoy" He didn't say that at all. He said specifically 'create this quite nifty Liberty bubble', which is not the same thing.
robert_foss 9y ago
I guess that is a standpoint that would be easy to take if all governments were flawless and co-existed in peace. But history paints a different picture, with events like Iraq, the Kontras, NSA Dragnetting just to name a very select few. Governments are willfully violent towards its own citizens and others for what is often not much of a reason at all.
PeterStuer 9y ago
You would be here. Your job would be the same. In fact, it would be hard to tell the difference. With all due respect, the 'ultimate sacrifices' might have been given, but many believe, including those that survived the horrors of war, that it was never to safeguard you, but rather a feast for those that prey on volatility.
- jahewson 9y ago
  That’s not a safe assumption. The US was awfully busy fighting the Japanese. Had they stayed out of Europe, Hitler would certainly have defeated Britain (leaving Africa unprotected) and likely had the resources spare to defeat the USSR too. From there Hitler could support the Japanese against the US and would have massive resources to do so. Hitler’s plan really was world domination. He had plans for a rocket-powered trans-Atlantic plane to bomb New York. Not to mention that the Nazis had the V2 and even a jet fighter by the end of the war (but too few resources to build/deploy them). With more resources the Nazis may well have developed their nuclear bomb.
  - deleted 9y ago
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  - wilsonnb 9y ago
    It's not at all certain that Hitler would have defeated Britain if the US had stayed out of Europe. As far as I know, most historians agree that the US hastened the Allies victory over Germany but the Allies would have (eventually, probably) won anyways.
batmansmk 9y ago
I was born and raised in Normandy, and saw the dire sacrifice a generation had to make. On my way to school, I could see the bullet holes in the walls, the tombstones of nameless soldiers, the bombs and mines we had to defuse in the fields. What our grandfathers did was noble. What we do now is the business of war. I find it diminishing to compare what they did to what Google does now.
- GordonS 9y ago
  I completely agree with this. Trying to compare WWII to the actions of the modern military is absurd. How can you possibly compare it with overthrowing governments in South America and the Middle East, Vietnam, Guantanamo, Abu Gharib, drone strikes on hospitals, up to 200k civilians dead in Iraq, and much more - and of coursr the deeply, deeply questionable motives of all of these. The actions of our ancestors in WWII were borne out of necessity - those of the modern military are driven by money, greed, propaganda and political point-scoring.
  - Maybestring 9y ago
    >drone strikes on hospitals, up to 200k civilians dead in Iraq You are looking at allied actions in WWII through rose colored glasses if you think that's worse. Dresden, Tokyo, Nagasaki, Hiroshima, Berlin, Saint-Nazair... the allies engaged in total war. Civillians are part of the war making capability of a nation, and in WWII all sides considered them to be valid targets. In Saint-Nazair's case it wasn't even enemy civillians. The German U-boat port was too heavily fortified, so the British wiped out the occupied French town that fed it.
    - dredmorbius 9y ago
      I'd add Nanking, London, Warsaw, Auschwitz, Amsterdam, and Bataan to your list, and that's off the top of my head. The British, U.S., USSR, Germans, Japanese, and Italians all practiced atrocities and mass warfare and/or genocide against civilian populations. I'm not challenging the credibility of your list, only the one-sidedness.
    - 9y ago
goatlover 9y ago
They didn't step up to Stalin and Mao. Hitler was because of alliance with Britain and the Japanese attack, not because of how awful the Nazis regime was. The US for the most part didn't want to get dragged back into another European conflict. Hitler was bad, yes. But what happened in Germany was rooted in the outcome of WW1, which was rooted in all the alliances and what not proceeding it, which was rooting in yet prior conflicts. A lot of which had to do with the colonial powers fighting over how to divide up the world, or because of religious differences. A pacifist might say Hitler, Stalin and Mao are just symptoms of the deeper problem, which is the willingness of human beings to engage in violent conflicts just because somebody tells them to.
- ixtli 9y ago
  It's amazing the degree to which people are ignorant of what you've said here and imagine the US was motivated by ideology.
  - fastball 9y ago
    The US was motivated by ideology. Why was the US an ally of GB/France/etc and not Germany/Italy? Contrary to your belief, greed can be ideological -- striving for global free trade is an example of this.
    - mijamo 9y ago
      Then why wasn't the US in the war from the beginning? Did it take 2 years to discover that Hitler was bad?
      - fastball 9y ago
        It took 2 years for a country that values personal freedoms and international free trade/security to decide that the Axis powers winning the war would be bad for both. Also, the US formally joined the war in 1941, but were providing material support to the Allies and otherwise prepping before then.
      - 9y ago
jahewson 9y ago
Nobody stood up to Stalin and Mao. Cherry picking the good stuff doesn’t make the bad stuff acceptable. Carpet bombing of civilians in German cities for example - an act of zero military value. The takeaway from WWII is not that the military is a wonderful thing but that the UN is a wonderful thing.
- refurb 9y ago
  The only thing the UN has shown is how utterly weak it is. It's ability to force compliance is limited to those members willingness to do so. It's just another puppet of the superpowers.
- walshemj 9y ago
  Well depends those cities had large military plants Hamburg was building the scary fast U boats for example. Btw I am lucky as my fathers house was bombed (when he wasn't in it) oh but he did live near the larges spitfire plant - which was a military target.
- drak0n1c 9y ago
  The Korean war was a case of the US and UN standing up to Mao's influence. The North Koreans lost ground until PRC forces started pouring in.
- djrogers 9y ago
  > The takeaway from WWII is not that the military is a wonderful thing but that the UN is a wonderful thing. The same UN that causes Cholera outbreaks, protects rapists (as long as they wear blue helmets), and steps aside to allow massive genocides to occur on a not-irregular basis ( Rwanda, Bosnia, Sri Lanka, South Sudan for starters). Or are you talking about the UN that funded the Oil for Food program so a bunch of super-elite rich people could get kickbacks from an evil dicatator? Maybe it's the UN that has stood by for decades while more and more dictators and legitimately horrible people acquire and use WMDs (Libya, Syria, North Korea, and on and on)... Seriously, how much good has the UN actually done that wasn't backedstopped by a US Super Carrier or two?
GordonS 9y ago
Sorry, but there is an enormous difference between WWII and the terrible actions of the US military since then.
mr_spothawk 9y ago
your grandfather was probably considered by leadership to be just as disposable as every other low-income male in the population at that time... he's lucky that he didn't die in the trenches. you are, too. war is power and money. glowing historical illusions of "responsibility" and "valor" don't protect us from nuclear holocaust.
jankeymeulen 9y ago
One of the bigger issues I have with this that Google is only doing this kind of work for the US military, which for me as a non-US Googler makes me a bit uncomfortable. Because some relatives have been fighting the US military not even that long ago.
johnny313 9y ago
I understand this perspective, but I think it oversimplifies the reality of why we (the US) go to war. I am a veteran of the war in Iraq, a conflict that could be reduced to a one-line "defend our way of life" sound bite if you are willing to ignore everything else that happened. I do not want my children to use my involvement in that conflict to remove their responsibility to make hard ethical choices.

mieseratte 9y ago

That these Google engineers support a global surveillance network that stalks and spies on everyone while taking a moral stances against military projects is truly laughable. Keeping "free" nations safe and prosperous is as fine a goal as any.

monfrere 9y ago
Not everyone thinks that the U.S. drone program has much to do with keeping free nations safe and prosperous.

AndrewKemendo 9y ago

You should understand that building basically anything will further the goal of some military over another. Technology is neutral - who it's used by and how is not. I don't care what you build, if it has the goal of improving a workflow or automating a process then it will de-facto support one organization over another.

mkirklions 9y ago

I have refused to work for defense companies, I try to encourage my friends and sibling to avoid these companies. Boy they pay great though...

walshemj 9y ago
Compared to FANG companies not realy
- vesrah 9y ago
  CoL and benefits need to be figured into your assertion
  - walshemj 9y ago
    Yes right trouble is this is often used by hr to try and explain why they don't pay market rate. Doesn't really explain why google pays less in London UK for that google does in low col states in the states. And I don't think Lockheed and BAE pay their engineers as much as FANG companies do and they certainly don't out compete on benefits.
    - geodel 9y ago
      Exactly right. Somehow people keep explaining high salaries of FANG in terms of cities/area in US. Truth is more likely that these companies have immense market cap and profitability and being helmed by first generation liberal entrepreneurs they are happy with sharing benefits. IBM, Cisco or any other typical IT company pays 120-150K salaries in bay area and not much of profit sharing/ equity.
- pascalxus 9y ago
  FANGs defeat themselves by putting themselves in COL areas that are really high thus reducing their relative compensation to 1/3 or less, even with all that stock. That's pretty easy for govt to beat.

ataturk 9y ago

It barely matters. If you won't do it, someone else will happily step in to earn that paycheck. I have fought against the MIC my whole life and have been extremely careful about what kind of work I take on. It hasn't made a bit of difference. Ethics are dead. The total state is likely our future whether we like it or not.

sremani 9y ago

Complicit of what? These smug generalizations, if you did not vote for X, you are racist! If you are not for A, you are for Genocide! are not going to win you over people that are not already in your camp.

walshemj 9y ago

That's fair enough but you have to decide if your cool with that and resign if you have moral beliefs that run counter to your employers You come across as wanting that sweet sv $ and benefits without having to make any moral choices - if you got to work for CNI company's you know what the deal is. And before you ask yes I did face that at my first job when I analysed some high speed film from one experiment and though oh I know what that "objct" is and my office mates said yes that's probably REDACTED.

AndyNemmity 9y ago
I disagree strongly. Employees are a stakeholder in the company, and if they can band together to enact change on the companies goals for a moral purpose, then that is an option as well. If their efforts fails, they can choose to resign, or take other actions as employees in history have. It's not the only option, it may be the only option ultimately that succeeds in removing yourself from complicity.
- walshemj 9y ago
  Well id agree on the stakeholder side but try that in the USA and they will treat it in the same way that they would union organizing :-) You will find that in general that a lot more googlers probably wouldn't take that view.

emanresu101 9y ago

> Contributing means being complicit. I don't agree with this. Many open source projects have been used for sinister means (not just by governments). But does that make those contributors complicit? Should those contributors be safe-guarding against all possible unintended use cases? It seems like you're painting all military efforts and funding in evil terms. But these efforts are directed by many different people, each with their own goals and agendas. Some of those efforts are intended for the betterment of humanity, while other efforts are at the detriment of humanity (at least in my opinion). I worked for several years at a large defense contractor. The majority of our funding came from military contracts. I worked on a project intended to help detect and disarm explosive devices. And I worked next to a team that was trying to rapidly detect infectious diseases. We all thought we were doing work that would benefit society. But virtually any technology can be used for malicious purposes. Does that make us complicit if those technologies are ever used in malicious ways? Do the evil actions of some people in an organization make the entire organization evil? Does that mean that all military efforts are unjust?

calcifer 9y ago
> Does that make us complicit if those technologies are ever used in malicious ways? Yes. If you choose to work for an entity you help further their work. Militaries are made for war and by contributing to a military, you directly help them commit atrocities. Working for a military is simply war profiteering [1]. > Do the evil actions of some people in an organization make the entire organization evil? Yes, if you voluntarily join an organization knowing they have evil people doing evil things. > Does that mean that all military efforts are unjust? Yes, with probably the only exception being a defensive war. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_profiteering https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_profiteering
- olleromam91 9y ago
  By using this "logic" you draw a very blurry line, that wont lead to any decision making, just arguing over who is most evil. I can now assume that miners and forgery workers are complicit in murder because they harvest and refine the metals that build weapons. And that farmers are complicit because they produce the food that is used in military rations, the wool or cotton that is used to make their uniforms.