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I agree it's sad to see things disrupted/destroyed, but it certainly lit a fire under a ton of people who have the power to make dramatic shifts. I think this w

I agree it's sad to see things disrupted/destroyed, but it certainly lit a fire under a ton of people who have the power to make dramatic shifts. I think this will mark the beginning of a new era in semiconductor abundance and innovation.

Kliment 5y ago
My dramatic shift - never work on a project that helps the car industry. They're now on the same shitlist as weapons, coal, and surveillance capitalism.
- WanderPanda 5y ago
  Just a handful more shifts and you end up with just „never work“ :p
  - syntheticnature 5y ago
    The key is to time this to align with retirement.
  - rhn_mk1 5y ago
    It would be a really sad world if there was no way to survive except by doing harm. Something tells me it's an overly pessimistic outlook.
    - lazide 5y ago
      It seems overly naive to assume any company's actions don't have pros and cons, or aren't part of the larger society/ecosystem you're enabling by existing? You can't take an action (or exist and take no action) without a side effect, and at the scale of any significant company, it is impossible to do what someone somewhere considers to be harm to someone or something. Picking and choosing the scope, scale, and amount of the type of harm you're comfortable with certainly seems worthwhile, but pretending there is any option that is harm free seems like self deception. Even refusing to play (not living?) has side effects most would consider harmful - at least to those around you.
      - rhn_mk1 5y ago
        That is a good point. Perhaps a different statement makes more sense: it's hard to believe that there are no options where the benefits outweigh the harm.
        lazide 5y ago
        In my experience, the benefits do outweigh the harm in pretty much all cases where it lives awhile - if you pick the right group of people to care about, and the right things or people to be ok harming. We all do it, directly or indirectly. It’s necessary to survive. It’s common for instance to not worry too much about the earthworms dying on the sidewalk after the sprinklers run. Most people would consider someone pretty weird if they didn’t drive because of the body count of insects on their windshield. For example - everyone who drives is implicitly or explicitly saying the benefit to them outweighs the harm to those insects. Everything has a trade off. Most life survives by eating other life (yes even Vegans), and even pure photosynthetic algae has to kill or crowd out (and starve) competitors and things that would kill and eat it, or they would no longer be alive. It’s easy to be isolated from this reality, especially with modern life meaning we don’t need to gather, raise and/or kill our own food. Nature is not (just) a national park with carefully curated trails and animals to snap pictures of when they grace us with their presence. It’s wild fight for survival and dominance - full of growth, birth, gore, beauty, and death. Recognizing that someone’s trade off to make another country less strong (a ‘other’) in exchange for making themselves richer or their country more capable of doing the same in the future is important (one example) - say a defense contractor making a new weapon. It is a specific mindset and trade off that we might not agree with it even find repugnant, but it is keyed off important survival needs and a fundamental part of the world and nature we are foolish to ignore. What do you consider ok to harm, to get the benefits for the people or things you care about? At some point it might be worth making it concrete, it can be illuminating.
        rhn_mk1 5y ago
        My point was not about nature though, rather it was about being sustainable. Looking at the classic prisoner's dilemma, there are activities which bring localized benefit, but an overall loss in a non-zero-sum game. Presuming that human activity is not zero-sum regarding whatever system of values we take, it's clear cut that some activities are bad, period. This makes the grandparent's examples clearer: coal production benefits some people now but hurts future generations disproportionately. Wars hurt all sides, and allow some of them partially recover, and never as far as if they joined forces. Car companies throw the whole semiconductor industry under the bus in exchange for not having to keep inventory. In a huge simplification, it's self-destruction I'm talking about, not sacrificing little things to gain greater ones, like exchanging the lives of insects to feed a human cvilization (presuming you value humans more). Of course, it's possible to construct an arbitrary system of values to justify your own arbitrary deeds as "survival" or "natural", but I don't find such systems convincing.

Kliment 5y ago

My dramatic shift - never work on a project that helps the car industry. They're now on the same shitlist as weapons, coal, and surveillance capitalism.

WanderPanda 5y ago
Just a handful more shifts and you end up with just „never work“ :p
- syntheticnature 5y ago
  The key is to time this to align with retirement.
- rhn_mk1 5y ago
  It would be a really sad world if there was no way to survive except by doing harm. Something tells me it's an overly pessimistic outlook.
  - lazide 5y ago
    It seems overly naive to assume any company's actions don't have pros and cons, or aren't part of the larger society/ecosystem you're enabling by existing? You can't take an action (or exist and take no action) without a side effect, and at the scale of any significant company, it is impossible to do what someone somewhere considers to be harm to someone or something. Picking and choosing the scope, scale, and amount of the type of harm you're comfortable with certainly seems worthwhile, but pretending there is any option that is harm free seems like self deception. Even refusing to play (not living?) has side effects most would consider harmful - at least to those around you.
    - rhn_mk1 5y ago
      That is a good point. Perhaps a different statement makes more sense: it's hard to believe that there are no options where the benefits outweigh the harm.
      - lazide 5y ago
        In my experience, the benefits do outweigh the harm in pretty much all cases where it lives awhile - if you pick the right group of people to care about, and the right things or people to be ok harming. We all do it, directly or indirectly. It’s necessary to survive. It’s common for instance to not worry too much about the earthworms dying on the sidewalk after the sprinklers run. Most people would consider someone pretty weird if they didn’t drive because of the body count of insects on their windshield. For example - everyone who drives is implicitly or explicitly saying the benefit to them outweighs the harm to those insects. Everything has a trade off. Most life survives by eating other life (yes even Vegans), and even pure photosynthetic algae has to kill or crowd out (and starve) competitors and things that would kill and eat it, or they would no longer be alive. It’s easy to be isolated from this reality, especially with modern life meaning we don’t need to gather, raise and/or kill our own food. Nature is not (just) a national park with carefully curated trails and animals to snap pictures of when they grace us with their presence. It’s wild fight for survival and dominance - full of growth, birth, gore, beauty, and death. Recognizing that someone’s trade off to make another country less strong (a ‘other’) in exchange for making themselves richer or their country more capable of doing the same in the future is important (one example) - say a defense contractor making a new weapon. It is a specific mindset and trade off that we might not agree with it even find repugnant, but it is keyed off important survival needs and a fundamental part of the world and nature we are foolish to ignore. What do you consider ok to harm, to get the benefits for the people or things you care about? At some point it might be worth making it concrete, it can be illuminating.
        rhn_mk1 5y ago
        My point was not about nature though, rather it was about being sustainable. Looking at the classic prisoner's dilemma, there are activities which bring localized benefit, but an overall loss in a non-zero-sum game. Presuming that human activity is not zero-sum regarding whatever system of values we take, it's clear cut that some activities are bad, period. This makes the grandparent's examples clearer: coal production benefits some people now but hurts future generations disproportionately. Wars hurt all sides, and allow some of them partially recover, and never as far as if they joined forces. Car companies throw the whole semiconductor industry under the bus in exchange for not having to keep inventory. In a huge simplification, it's self-destruction I'm talking about, not sacrificing little things to gain greater ones, like exchanging the lives of insects to feed a human cvilization (presuming you value humans more). Of course, it's possible to construct an arbitrary system of values to justify your own arbitrary deeds as "survival" or "natural", but I don't find such systems convincing.