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So does AT&T and Verizon which would fall in the morally neutral category. Even big tech - Google/meta are probably classified as morally neutral but in reality

So does AT&T and Verizon which would fall in the morally neutral category. Even big tech - Google/meta are probably classified as morally neutral but in reality gray areas. The US government probably has access to all that data - with our without warrants. I also agree with his premise. There is really no gray area working for defense tech in the US. In my opinion people have a rather lopsided view of that. You would rarely find any other nation that where defense tech companies are turned away from job fairs. Kinda ridiculous.

stackskipton 2y ago
>You would rarely find any other nation that where defense tech companies are turned away from job fairs. Kinda ridiculous. Probably because US MIC is weird political place. On one hand, it's turns out really cool tech and US needs defense. On other hand, who are we defending from and why are spending all this money on world police when we have a ton of internal problems? Throw in some pork barrel in there to add to political stuff. When people post memes about "You are about to find out why US doesn't have free healthcare." with some overwhelming American firepower equipment in the image, it's not hard to see why a lot of people find it a grey area.
- psunavy03 2y ago
  > On other hand, who are we defending from and why are spending all this money on world police when we have a ton of internal problems? Because someone has to be this if you want the continuation of the post-WWII rules-based international order that underpins the entire global economy. The Department of Defense and US hegemony are essentially overhead that is the Least Bad Option to stop WWIII from kicking off or the world from fragmenting into spheres of influence (which is starting to happen already). Who else would do this and not screw over everyone else even worse? Russia? China?
  - mistermann 2y ago
    Force is only one of many methods to achieve certain outcomes, not all methods that could achieve the same general outcome are known, very little cognitive effort is put into searching for alternatives, leaving few options other than speculation if one is obligated to form a conclusion on the matter.
    - scottyah 2y ago
      All deliberate actions to achieve certain outcomes are "force", it is a scale not a binary option.
      - mistermann 2y ago
        I am skeptical, let's run an experiment and see what the response is: Is feeding the homeless so they are not hungry "force"? Is lending a compassionate ear to someone suffering so they may feel a bit better "force"? Is making myself a nice sandwich and watching a movie because I find it pleasant "force"?
        shiroiushi 2y ago
        >Is making myself a nice sandwich and watching a movie because I find it pleasant "force"? To the chicken, turkey, pig, or cow that died to make the meat in your sandwich, definitely yes.
        wonnage 2y ago
        the mental gymnastics it took to write this hot take must be "force" too
        mistermann 2y ago
        At least there is a logical path in that claim (if we ignore that I didn't specify that there was meat in the sandwich...I do eat a lot of plain tomato sandwiches, but not exclusively, so I do to some degree drive demand for animal slaughter)! I think it's kind of neat that we got from Palantir to sandwiches... I wonder if Palantir's software supports mapping metaphysical causality like this, because bizarre metaphysical causality is the root cause of war in the first place!
  - ngcazz 2y ago
    We should stop defending an imperialist establishment which relies on the rampant exploitation of the global south and is committing genocide and calling it rules-based order. More like America rules. The containment rhetoric/logic is long past its use-by date - the US's pretense as guardians of a common moral high ground was shattered at the very latest with the Vietnam War, and in 2024 it is an absolute tragedy of a joke in poor taste. You gotta think this rules-based order is designed to drive anyone decent crazy. What else can happen when you hear pieces of shit like Blinken wax lyrical about the human rights of Palestinians while supercharging weapons deliveries to Israel, or the very existence of the UNSC veto which will guarantee outcomes that reinforce unforgivable and unforgettable mass crimes, beckoning awful consequences for the whole world.
    - itsoktocry 2y ago
      >You gotta think this rules-based order is designed to drive anyone decent crazy. All complaints, no solutions. Typical. So who does have the moral high-ground around the globe? It's unbelievable to me how many people think it'd be all peace and harmony if the US disappeared. I can imagine much worse, just by reading a history book.
      - saturn8601 2y ago
        I'd like to think that Pakistan would be on a better road if their democratically elected leader wasn't ousted by the US. Thats one example, there are many others. In terms of solutions, well looking at history of the US, the only time the people at the top ever gave any semblance of crumbs to everyone else was when they knew they were in deep trouble and were forced to part with whatever little they could give to calm the masses. Think of Medicare, Social Security etc. We saw it again with Obamacare. The country was in a rage so out came the bare minimum. Elimination of barbaric things like pre-existing conditions in exchange for guaranteed income for the insurance companies. Absolute breadcrumbs but it was something. We just need something like that on a worldwide level. Maybe China rising will finally put pressure on the US given that the EU never amounted to much more than being a US vassal state.
      - bigstrat2003 2y ago
  - saturn8601 2y ago
    Great. So Americans get to be the suckers propping up the decent lifestyles of the rest of the western world and much of Asia and the ME. This country has a collapsing middle class, horrendously bad health outcomes, ever increasing amount of corruption and little chance to turn things around because of entrenched interests. I can just picture the thought process going in your head(and many others) right now. If you hate it so much why dont you leave.
    - yks 2y ago
      > Americans get to be the suckers propping up the decent lifestyles of the rest of the western world and much of Asia and the ME America benefited greatly from this position though, it's just the gains have not been equally distributed, and one can make an argument that Americans simply vote for that outcome. It is very unclear to me how the situation of the middle class in the US becomes any better if the US gives up its leverage for Chinese to dictate the terms. FWIW pre-WW1 the US had even worse inequality while not propping up anyone's lifestyle abroad.
      - nxobject 2y ago
        I think there's some clarification that needs to happen, though: what would it mean for "China to dictate the terms", and does that necessarily happen if the US "steps back" (and what does that mean?) In a charitable interpretation, the US remains an important trading, industrial, technological, and educational world power. Perhaps it might even keep the spending on worldwide surveillance (e.g. spy satellites). Geopolitical influence allows for many strategies.
        yks 2y ago
        Stepping back from enforcing post-WW2 world order means letting China, Russia, Iran to freely install their satellite and unfriendly-to-the-US regimes around the world, by force if needed. Which means access to the foreign markets will be curtailed for the US or otherwise "dictated" by other powers. It's hard to see how that leads to more prosperity for Americans, especially since the political forces trying to bring that about are also not very pro-"trading, industry, technology and education". The GP says that they don't want to prop up foreign lifestyles because the middle class in the US is struggling but isolationism in the 21st century will not make things better for the US middle class. Nor for middle class of any other country really, although the GP doesn't care about those.
  - walleeee 2y ago
    You may be correct on at least one point: the DOD may have stepped us all down from WW3 recently, to the chagrin of other elements of the establishment who have gotten used to whispering foreign policy into the relevant ears with no pushback
  - butlike 2y ago
    I think based on your last sentence: > Who else would do this and not screw over everyone else even worse? Russia? China? It's important to say which country you're residing in now.
- mega_dean 2y ago
  > On other hand, who are we defending from and why are spending all this money on world police when we have a ton of internal problems? Reminds me of this scene in Wag the Dog: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wwgPnYVg74Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wwgPnYVg74Y "The war of the future is nuclear terrorism. It is, and it will be against a small group of dissidents who, unbeknownst to perhaps their own governments, have blah blah blah blah blah. And to go to that war, you have to be prepared."
nxobject 2y ago
I'm sure there are plenty of people who say no to working on improving Facebook engagement, DoubleClick etc. for that reason! As opposed, to, say, something like the calming algorithm YouTube uses with its comments. (Also, there are plenty of reasons why the American defense industry is both quanitatively and qualitatively different from those of other nations, e.g. France, Sweden – i.e. its disproportionate involvement with arms sales, its involvement with defense boondoggles and the opportunity cost, etc. Regardless of the grays, when the system is black, entire countries are painted black.)
NegatioN 2y ago
"Right now there's this thing where ethics aren't what they used to be. This idea that people are trying to replace the ideas of good and bad, with better or worse." -Dave Chappelle What you're writing should naturally lead to the conclusion that working for Google, Meta, Verizon, AT&T etc are all in the category of companies one shouldn't strive to use their hard earned talents for. For some reason I cannot fathom, you seem to land on the idea that Palantir is okay, because all these others somehow have snuck under the radar of many people?
- orochimaaru 2y ago
  I’m saying Palantir and defense tech is better because they are upfront about their association. In contrast you have what the author calls as morally neutral companies that are in fact gray areas.
julianeon 2y ago
Factually untrue. I'm going to quote ChatGPT here, just because finding links outside of that is hard (it's an obscure topic) and this summary is good enough. > The phenomenon of compensating wage differentials for working in "sin" industries is observed not just in the U.S., but internationally as well. About "sin" industries: > "Sin industries" (alcohol, tobacco, gambling, pornography, miltech) can be seen as morally contentious by some workers. As a result, individuals may seek higher wages to compensate for any discomfort or societal stigma attached to their work in those sectors.
- tolerance 2y ago
  Julian, I know that on the Internet the demand for sources can be a preemptive concern when structuring an argument. However—please—there is no need to resort to large language model applications in order to support your subjective claims. You can do this on your own, son. If the machine can find it, so can you! Take your time, think things through. What you're saying would sound more reasonable in your own words.
  - julianeon 2y ago
    Since you asked, I think I'll explain myself. I did look for sources. I estimate it would've taken about 15 minutes to collect the sources and link them. Basically if you do the search yourself, you'll see the first page or so of links is very academic ones. So I would need to scroll past all those, and read the abstract to find one that corroborated my argument. This is not, as they say, a paid position: it's fair to say "that takes to long" and choose not to do this. Which is what I did here. Now I'm not sure what the correct thing to do here was, in retrospect. I can see that an LLM is not a popular choice, though I thought it was a defensible compromise between "no source" and "spending too long finding actual sources." I could've handwaved and said "academics say" without sourcing (probably the best choice). I won't cite an LLM next time. I'll probably just frankly say "you can look it up, I won't do that because it takes too long, but..." I believe that's a fair compromise between "saying nothing" and "spending 15-20 minutes on a thankless research task." The one thing I'm unwilling to do here is to just spend 15-20 minutes on this, however. I'd rather be downvoted, or simply say nothing.
Shog9 2y ago
You're being pretty generous toward the "phone companies" here - their reputations have decades of bad press and shady behavior to shoulder as well. The big difference being, in addition to their roles as data brokers and fig-leaves for the spooks, they also provide phone service. So... Y'know. You could just let people assume that you're a lineman or something.
moolcool 2y ago
> Google/meta are probably classified as morally neutral but in reality gray areas I don't think so. I see tons of people with moral objections to Meta specifically.
int_19h 2y ago
> You would rarely find any other nation that where defense tech companies are turned away from job fairs. To be fair, most countries don't routinely bomb some random folk halfway across the world. So if you work on defense tech there, there is a less immediate connection between what you do and people dying.
subjectsigma 2y ago
I work for a government contractor that does quite a number of things for a diverse set of agencies. You would be amazed at the mental gymnastics people go through to convince themselves you are some sort of child-eating monster. 80% of the time they have absolutely no idea what my company does nor what working for the military is actually like. “Where do you work?” “Oh at $COMPANY.” “I hear they work in missile defense technology, you should be ashamed. Gaza Israel blah blah blah” “Oh, well sorry you feel that way.” “So how many innocent children you bombed this week?” “Actually zero, I spent the week writing Ansible and bash scripts. Then I went to a presentation about a team trying to stop $COUNTRY from hacking into the electric grid and shutting down power to hospitals. Then I read a report about improving 911 tech backends and other emergency services. Then I had lunch with my friend, who works in forensics catching sex traffickers, and he told me some crazy stories.” “Wow I didn’t know you guys did all that stuff at $COMPANY…” “Sounds about right…”
- aguaviva 2y ago
  And yet, if $COMPANY is also providing munitions for "Gaza Israel blah blah", then by continuing to work for $COMPANY, you are also very much a part of that. It doesn't matter what department you are in, or the neat little Ansible scripts you get to write.
  - subjectsigma 2y ago
    I suppose you’re also complicit in the deforestation of the Amazon, since humans did that and (I’m assuming) you’re human The point is that we should constantly demand better of our governments and leaders, but that doesn’t require throwing out the baby with the bathwater. I don’t think anyone should want to completely defund the people working on maintaining radios for EMS and 911 if they happen to work in a building next to people that spend 10% of their time making missile guidance systems
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - 2y ago

stackskipton 2y ago

>You would rarely find any other nation that where defense tech companies are turned away from job fairs. Kinda ridiculous. Probably because US MIC is weird political place. On one hand, it's turns out really cool tech and US needs defense. On other hand, who are we defending from and why are spending all this money on world police when we have a ton of internal problems? Throw in some pork barrel in there to add to political stuff. When people post memes about "You are about to find out why US doesn't have free healthcare." with some overwhelming American firepower equipment in the image, it's not hard to see why a lot of people find it a grey area.

psunavy03 2y ago
> On other hand, who are we defending from and why are spending all this money on world police when we have a ton of internal problems? Because someone has to be this if you want the continuation of the post-WWII rules-based international order that underpins the entire global economy. The Department of Defense and US hegemony are essentially overhead that is the Least Bad Option to stop WWIII from kicking off or the world from fragmenting into spheres of influence (which is starting to happen already). Who else would do this and not screw over everyone else even worse? Russia? China?
- mistermann 2y ago
  Force is only one of many methods to achieve certain outcomes, not all methods that could achieve the same general outcome are known, very little cognitive effort is put into searching for alternatives, leaving few options other than speculation if one is obligated to form a conclusion on the matter.
  - scottyah 2y ago
    All deliberate actions to achieve certain outcomes are "force", it is a scale not a binary option.
    - mistermann 2y ago
      I am skeptical, let's run an experiment and see what the response is: Is feeding the homeless so they are not hungry "force"? Is lending a compassionate ear to someone suffering so they may feel a bit better "force"? Is making myself a nice sandwich and watching a movie because I find it pleasant "force"?
      - shiroiushi 2y ago
        >Is making myself a nice sandwich and watching a movie because I find it pleasant "force"? To the chicken, turkey, pig, or cow that died to make the meat in your sandwich, definitely yes.
        wonnage 2y ago
        the mental gymnastics it took to write this hot take must be "force" too
        mistermann 2y ago
        At least there is a logical path in that claim (if we ignore that I didn't specify that there was meat in the sandwich...I do eat a lot of plain tomato sandwiches, but not exclusively, so I do to some degree drive demand for animal slaughter)! I think it's kind of neat that we got from Palantir to sandwiches... I wonder if Palantir's software supports mapping metaphysical causality like this, because bizarre metaphysical causality is the root cause of war in the first place!
- ngcazz 2y ago
  We should stop defending an imperialist establishment which relies on the rampant exploitation of the global south and is committing genocide and calling it rules-based order. More like America rules. The containment rhetoric/logic is long past its use-by date - the US's pretense as guardians of a common moral high ground was shattered at the very latest with the Vietnam War, and in 2024 it is an absolute tragedy of a joke in poor taste. You gotta think this rules-based order is designed to drive anyone decent crazy. What else can happen when you hear pieces of shit like Blinken wax lyrical about the human rights of Palestinians while supercharging weapons deliveries to Israel, or the very existence of the UNSC veto which will guarantee outcomes that reinforce unforgivable and unforgettable mass crimes, beckoning awful consequences for the whole world.
  - itsoktocry 2y ago
    >You gotta think this rules-based order is designed to drive anyone decent crazy. All complaints, no solutions. Typical. So who does have the moral high-ground around the globe? It's unbelievable to me how many people think it'd be all peace and harmony if the US disappeared. I can imagine much worse, just by reading a history book.
    - saturn8601 2y ago
      I'd like to think that Pakistan would be on a better road if their democratically elected leader wasn't ousted by the US. Thats one example, there are many others. In terms of solutions, well looking at history of the US, the only time the people at the top ever gave any semblance of crumbs to everyone else was when they knew they were in deep trouble and were forced to part with whatever little they could give to calm the masses. Think of Medicare, Social Security etc. We saw it again with Obamacare. The country was in a rage so out came the bare minimum. Elimination of barbaric things like pre-existing conditions in exchange for guaranteed income for the insurance companies. Absolute breadcrumbs but it was something. We just need something like that on a worldwide level. Maybe China rising will finally put pressure on the US given that the EU never amounted to much more than being a US vassal state.
    - bigstrat2003 2y ago
- saturn8601 2y ago
  Great. So Americans get to be the suckers propping up the decent lifestyles of the rest of the western world and much of Asia and the ME. This country has a collapsing middle class, horrendously bad health outcomes, ever increasing amount of corruption and little chance to turn things around because of entrenched interests. I can just picture the thought process going in your head(and many others) right now. If you hate it so much why dont you leave.
  - yks 2y ago
    > Americans get to be the suckers propping up the decent lifestyles of the rest of the western world and much of Asia and the ME America benefited greatly from this position though, it's just the gains have not been equally distributed, and one can make an argument that Americans simply vote for that outcome. It is very unclear to me how the situation of the middle class in the US becomes any better if the US gives up its leverage for Chinese to dictate the terms. FWIW pre-WW1 the US had even worse inequality while not propping up anyone's lifestyle abroad.
    - nxobject 2y ago
      I think there's some clarification that needs to happen, though: what would it mean for "China to dictate the terms", and does that necessarily happen if the US "steps back" (and what does that mean?) In a charitable interpretation, the US remains an important trading, industrial, technological, and educational world power. Perhaps it might even keep the spending on worldwide surveillance (e.g. spy satellites). Geopolitical influence allows for many strategies.
      - yks 2y ago
        Stepping back from enforcing post-WW2 world order means letting China, Russia, Iran to freely install their satellite and unfriendly-to-the-US regimes around the world, by force if needed. Which means access to the foreign markets will be curtailed for the US or otherwise "dictated" by other powers. It's hard to see how that leads to more prosperity for Americans, especially since the political forces trying to bring that about are also not very pro-"trading, industry, technology and education". The GP says that they don't want to prop up foreign lifestyles because the middle class in the US is struggling but isolationism in the 21st century will not make things better for the US middle class. Nor for middle class of any other country really, although the GP doesn't care about those.
- walleeee 2y ago
  You may be correct on at least one point: the DOD may have stepped us all down from WW3 recently, to the chagrin of other elements of the establishment who have gotten used to whispering foreign policy into the relevant ears with no pushback
- butlike 2y ago
  I think based on your last sentence: > Who else would do this and not screw over everyone else even worse? Russia? China? It's important to say which country you're residing in now.
mega_dean 2y ago
> On other hand, who are we defending from and why are spending all this money on world police when we have a ton of internal problems? Reminds me of this scene in Wag the Dog: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wwgPnYVg74Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wwgPnYVg74Y "The war of the future is nuclear terrorism. It is, and it will be against a small group of dissidents who, unbeknownst to perhaps their own governments, have blah blah blah blah blah. And to go to that war, you have to be prepared."

nxobject 2y ago

I'm sure there are plenty of people who say no to working on improving Facebook engagement, DoubleClick etc. for that reason! As opposed, to, say, something like the calming algorithm YouTube uses with its comments. (Also, there are plenty of reasons why the American defense industry is both quanitatively and qualitatively different from those of other nations, e.g. France, Sweden – i.e. its disproportionate involvement with arms sales, its involvement with defense boondoggles and the opportunity cost, etc. Regardless of the grays, when the system is black, entire countries are painted black.)

NegatioN 2y ago

"Right now there's this thing where ethics aren't what they used to be. This idea that people are trying to replace the ideas of good and bad, with better or worse." -Dave Chappelle What you're writing should naturally lead to the conclusion that working for Google, Meta, Verizon, AT&T etc are all in the category of companies one shouldn't strive to use their hard earned talents for. For some reason I cannot fathom, you seem to land on the idea that Palantir is okay, because all these others somehow have snuck under the radar of many people?

orochimaaru 2y ago
I’m saying Palantir and defense tech is better because they are upfront about their association. In contrast you have what the author calls as morally neutral companies that are in fact gray areas.

julianeon 2y ago

Factually untrue. I'm going to quote ChatGPT here, just because finding links outside of that is hard (it's an obscure topic) and this summary is good enough. > The phenomenon of compensating wage differentials for working in "sin" industries is observed not just in the U.S., but internationally as well. About "sin" industries: > "Sin industries" (alcohol, tobacco, gambling, pornography, miltech) can be seen as morally contentious by some workers. As a result, individuals may seek higher wages to compensate for any discomfort or societal stigma attached to their work in those sectors.

tolerance 2y ago
Julian, I know that on the Internet the demand for sources can be a preemptive concern when structuring an argument. However—please—there is no need to resort to large language model applications in order to support your subjective claims. You can do this on your own, son. If the machine can find it, so can you! Take your time, think things through. What you're saying would sound more reasonable in your own words.
- julianeon 2y ago
  Since you asked, I think I'll explain myself. I did look for sources. I estimate it would've taken about 15 minutes to collect the sources and link them. Basically if you do the search yourself, you'll see the first page or so of links is very academic ones. So I would need to scroll past all those, and read the abstract to find one that corroborated my argument. This is not, as they say, a paid position: it's fair to say "that takes to long" and choose not to do this. Which is what I did here. Now I'm not sure what the correct thing to do here was, in retrospect. I can see that an LLM is not a popular choice, though I thought it was a defensible compromise between "no source" and "spending too long finding actual sources." I could've handwaved and said "academics say" without sourcing (probably the best choice). I won't cite an LLM next time. I'll probably just frankly say "you can look it up, I won't do that because it takes too long, but..." I believe that's a fair compromise between "saying nothing" and "spending 15-20 minutes on a thankless research task." The one thing I'm unwilling to do here is to just spend 15-20 minutes on this, however. I'd rather be downvoted, or simply say nothing.

Shog9 2y ago

You're being pretty generous toward the "phone companies" here - their reputations have decades of bad press and shady behavior to shoulder as well. The big difference being, in addition to their roles as data brokers and fig-leaves for the spooks, they also provide phone service. So... Y'know. You could just let people assume that you're a lineman or something.

moolcool 2y ago

> Google/meta are probably classified as morally neutral but in reality gray areas I don't think so. I see tons of people with moral objections to Meta specifically.

int_19h 2y ago

> You would rarely find any other nation that where defense tech companies are turned away from job fairs. To be fair, most countries don't routinely bomb some random folk halfway across the world. So if you work on defense tech there, there is a less immediate connection between what you do and people dying.

subjectsigma 2y ago

I work for a government contractor that does quite a number of things for a diverse set of agencies. You would be amazed at the mental gymnastics people go through to convince themselves you are some sort of child-eating monster. 80% of the time they have absolutely no idea what my company does nor what working for the military is actually like. “Where do you work?” “Oh at $COMPANY.” “I hear they work in missile defense technology, you should be ashamed. Gaza Israel blah blah blah” “Oh, well sorry you feel that way.” “So how many innocent children you bombed this week?” “Actually zero, I spent the week writing Ansible and bash scripts. Then I went to a presentation about a team trying to stop $COUNTRY from hacking into the electric grid and shutting down power to hospitals. Then I read a report about improving 911 tech backends and other emergency services. Then I had lunch with my friend, who works in forensics catching sex traffickers, and he told me some crazy stories.” “Wow I didn’t know you guys did all that stuff at $COMPANY…” “Sounds about right…”

aguaviva 2y ago
And yet, if $COMPANY is also providing munitions for "Gaza Israel blah blah", then by continuing to work for $COMPANY, you are also very much a part of that. It doesn't matter what department you are in, or the neat little Ansible scripts you get to write.
- subjectsigma 2y ago
  I suppose you’re also complicit in the deforestation of the Amazon, since humans did that and (I’m assuming) you’re human The point is that we should constantly demand better of our governments and leaders, but that doesn’t require throwing out the baby with the bathwater. I don’t think anyone should want to completely defund the people working on maintaining radios for EMS and 911 if they happen to work in a building next to people that spend 10% of their time making missile guidance systems
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - 2y ago