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Isn't it ironic whilst Google's engineers are mass protesting against military contracts, Uber already signed a whole bunch without any moral dilemma whatsover.
by Bobbleoxs 8y ago
Isn't it ironic whilst Google's engineers are mass protesting against military contracts, Uber already signed a whole bunch without any moral dilemma whatsover. Tells a lot about the company ethics there.
On a separate note, could someone enlighten how stacked co-rotoring (moving towards the same direction) may make the aircraft silent and not noisier?
- ryanlol 8y agoHas Google not signed a whole bunch of military contracts?
- em3rgent0rdr 8y ago> "Google's engineers are mass protesting" ~12 Google employees resigned. Out of ~4,000 signers to the petition. Out of ~74,000 total employees. A drop in the bucket. Clearly the vast majority of google employees don't care, rationalize away, or excuse the fact that they work for the military industrial complex.
- epanchin 8y ago5.6% of staff signed a petition and 1.6% resigned. In comparison, the largest petition in the US was 4.6 million signatures, a mere 1.8% of the working age population.
- tossaway1 8y ago0.016%, not 1.6%
- doktrin 8y ago>> ~12 Google employees resigned. Out of ~4,000 signers to the petition. Out of ~74,000 total employees. > 5.6% of staff signed a petition and 1.6% resigned. 1.6% would be almost 12,000, not 12. I'm not familiar with this case but a quick search corroborated that it was a dozen employees that walked out.
- nightcracker 8y ago1.6% of 74000 is approx 1200, not 12000.
- kvartz 8y agoGoogle's AI research team is 3490 people according to (https://ai.google/research/people https://ai.google/research/people) While I couldn't find any info on who left. Assuming it was high paid AI researchers/engineers, it puts number of employees resigned in a perspective.
- rdtsc 8y ago> 1.6% resigned. So more than 1 in 100 of Google's employees resigned because of the contract? That doesn't seem right, do you have a source for that. That would be huge news. Was it 1% of one particular department only?
- RealityVoid 8y agoI think your comment is a little bit unfair seeing as only a very very small subset of those ~74.000 employees work for the "military industrial complex" and even that on a subset of the problem that is not directly aimed at killing people.
- dao- 8y agoI don't understand how you're trying to spin this. If you only want to look at the people working directly on military projects (a restriction that I'm not sure makes sense in the first place), the number of people who signed the petition and resigned from Google will also go down. How exactly does this back Bobbleoxs' comment?
- RealityVoid 8y agoI think saying I want to "spin" something implies I have some sort of ulterior motive for doing so and only care about projecting am image, not about the truth. I can assure you, that is not so, I simply think Google, overall, has managed to be a good influence on the world. I might be wrong, but my opinion comes from honest belief. Assuming otherwise poisons the conversation. What I was trying to highlight is that the rapport between the involvement in military research and the amount of revolt stemming from it is quite small, ergo the reaction is not quite a drop in the bucket but quite strong, looking at what prompted it.
- adventured 8y agoPeople like to say that because of the military industry complex having a small role in the funding of research that Sergey Brin was part of while he was at Stanford. Back in reality, the government has had its hands all over funding programs like that since the 1940s and it amounts to nothing more than routine government sponsorship of science & research, which all nations do.
- giancarlostoro 8y agoHow big is that team doing that contract though? Did half of the team resign? That'd be the numbers I'd be more interested in knowing about, or are these random employees?
- kerng 8y agoSome employees raising concerns is something, compared to noone raising concerns I'd say. It shows difference in openess and culture between the two organizations.
- notheguyouthink 8y agoHard to say what that culture is exactly, though. It could simply be a culture where the employees feel safe enough to express concern with the company. Ie, both employee groups have the same numbers of people who care about ethics, but one group feels more able to express those concerns.
- glogla 8y agoI mean, if they were people with strong ethics who don't want to do harm, they probably wouldn't be working for Google in the first place.
- Steltek 8y agoThat's quite a leap to equate "okay with killing people" to "working at Google".
- soperj 8y agoYou also work for the Military Industrial Complex if you live in the U.S and contribute taxes.
- d0lph 8y agoMore like coerced, there is no option.
- soperj 8y agoVote for someone else? If people actually care, and it seems a great number do, it is possible to actually do something.
- d0lph 8y agoNot in a two party system. Voting for anyone that deviates from the status quo is throwing away your vote.
- SahAssar 8y agoIt's throwing away your vote until it isn't. As recent as 1992 a third candidate got above 18%, and led in the polls just a few months before the election. Either way, voting for reformist candidates (for either way you support) in senate, house and local elections goes a long way.
- d0lph 8y agoThe US's last third party president was George Washington.
- marnett 8y agoThe MIC and Intelligence apparatus are here to stay. They are overwhelmingly bipartisan. It would be "Anti-American" to not avow complete support.
- assblaster 8y ago
- akhatri_aus 8y agoMore like Google was ready to deal with the PR and spun the story of just a few engineers resigning..
- ekianjo 8y agomass protests? did you see Google engineers blocking the company gates or something?
- PeterStuer 8y agoI'd think people with a 'moral dilemma' wouldn't be working for Uber in the first place.
- baddox 8y agoI have no clue about the stacked corotating rotors. How do they compensate for the yaw caused by the net torque? Stacked counter rotating rotor systems do exist. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coaxial_rotors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coaxial_rotors
- imglorp 8y agoI think it's about loosing a rotor, not net torque. You need to keep the roll and pitch stable in an outage. Like that hexapod in the above link, if you lose one prop/motor/controller, you can increase power to other unit in the stack and decrease power to all the others, maintaining your stability while you descend and look for an emergency landing spot.
- matthewaveryusa 8y agoI find it ironic that western countries and their citizens are all kumbaya about the ethics of being a bully nation (militarily and socially) while our empires were built at the expense of those we exploited (colonialism for europeans, post WWII resource-grabs for US.) Everyone in the US forgets that the pollution and poor labor practices in China is the foundation that our buying power and consumption is based off of.
- marnett 8y agoMost US citizens are woefully ignorant of this perspective. Their ignorance precludes the irony from ever showing itself.
- lcfcjs 8y agoEngineers would much prefer to work for Google than Uber.
- dokem 8y agoAh yes, how amoral it is to work with, arguably, the greatest force for good the world has ever known, the US military..