Remember, you are just a cog in a machine, it just happens to be a death machine.
The four horsemen of selling out:
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Big Pharma
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Big Oil
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The military-industrial complex
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Surveillance tech companies
Don’t forget quants
Was just having a conversation about the phrase “selling out”. Seems you don’t hear it used much anymore. I reckon that’s because the concept is seen as more of a life skill now than some despicable practice. But I feel sure it would be argued I’m just jealous of those sweet living wages.
What about open source jobs and funding? Since it seems like most of them come from either FAANG or government unless my research is wrong.
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Tankie
How? How is that person a tankie by posting this meme?
Tankie is when you’re to the left of Adolf Hitler and it’s barely even an exaggeration anymore
If you are the left hand of Hitler you’re not a tankie, you’re much worse.
That’s not what the term ‘to the left’ means
Judging from your profile page, you’re doing some real hard projection right now
mabye shared username with .ml account
in ghat case probably. yes
*that
Tankie (lmao I’m kidding but you know)
Dan the company man felt loyalty to the corp After 16 years of service and a family to support He actually started to believe the weaponry and chemicals were for national defence 'Cause Danny had a mortgage and a boss to answer to The guilty don’t feel guilty, they learn not to.
(The Irrationality of Rationality by NOFX).
brah. You will merely break many peoples bodies with explosives in the name of capitalism, corruption and colonization.
At my job I corrupt entire countries full of children, starting at an early age. I run user bucket targetting experiments on them to get them to spend more and steer them to befriend “friends” I select for them to optimize some pennies for our network edge performance. The measurements and manipulation of their vulnerabilities never stops. I take high resolution scans of their faces that we can use for the rest of their life to identify them anywhere–all so they can change their face to be an animated fox face, or stuff like that. I hope authoritarians never get ahold of this info because that could be bad for these consumers/kids, but hopes and prayers are not exactly my job. We never delete their info because parents click through the terms of service to shut their kids up. We say we educate kids to learn to program but inside the company that concept is spoken of mockingly.
I measure and steer their temperament and engagement with new games that are open to their worst impulses, and keep them on the treadmill. I transcribe and save literally every single word they utter. I analyze those spoken words for sentiment, and to build an ongoing model of which bucket they belong in to maximize their spending. The loaner? the helper? the team player? authority truster? authority abuser? rule driven, rule antidriven? I have loot, friends, new games, and contrived self serving “bugs” for all of them to find and think they are exploiting the games without my knowing.
I teach them to get addicted to loot boxes and I arbitrage endorphin hits between their peers and from the game. I give them their entire range of their lifes highs and lows. The best and worst times of their short lives are things I hand out. The later at night it is, or the longer their session, the more loot I give them to keep them playing. Like an IV drip of drug where sometimes you need to squeeze the bag to push more through to feel that hit strongly even when exhausted, and get them to defy their parents’ calls for them to sleep.
You think darkness is your issue. But you merely adopted the dark for a paycheck; I was born into it right out of school, moulded by it. I didn’t see socially useful internet services till I was an old man, by then it was nothing to me but a different way to drive engagement and raise the value on my rsus. My legacy will be a path of human wreckage and misery, same as yours only much bigger.
You terrible terrible person. Do you still do this?
No, I moved on. The money was amazing though.
Damn, that’s a long ass wall pf text for a two letter company
“EA”
so quit ur job lmao??? incredible that you are able to be so eloquent with how you are abusing people in your work and display no remorse? (hope this is a joke if it is no hate)
Every corp you work at has a dark side. Maybe not Lockheed Martin level of destruction.
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My current job, we build systems to get people to spend more for things they don’t need.
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My last job, we provided technology to “free speech” folks and looked the other way unless legally obligated to take it down
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The nonprofit i worked for spent 80% of their time and energy just for funding. Like $2mil a year, and 1.6mil went to paying staff.
Sometimes jobs frame it to look like it’s a positive.
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I worked at one company that “gave opportunities” to offshore engineers because they were a fraction the cost of Americans.
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Another company outsourced our graphic design to people on Fiverr to help fund “freelancers”, and then repurpose the work for million dollar ad campaigns.
And for me, I just constantly think of what the line is and how much of it I can cross to feed my kids.
I work in healthcare IT, we develop medical systems which help physicians to help people. It sounds like a good field to work in, but it’s still about money in the end, looking for ways to maximise profits, because we live in a capitalist system. As long as profits play the main role, there always is a dark side.
Yup. “Capitalism values only what it can count, and it can only count dollars. Every capitalist wants to invest as little and profit as much as possible.”
Absolutely. There’s a line between “willfully sold out to Evil Corp because money good and I like money lol”, and “I need a job because eating is nice and they were hiring.”
The original post about Lockheed makes sense, but someone’s gotta be on an extremely privileged self-righteous high horse to shout “Baby killer!” at like, the dude working the lobby desk. Lol
Very rational take. You learn entering the world that every company has a dark side, and every person has a line, but that line shifts.
Personally I’d avoid Lockheed, but when it comes to paying the mortgage, the bank is surprisingly not very amenable to me not having a job. I’d love to avoid working at any bad company, but I’d probably have to sell my house and live out of a studio, and my family would suffer for it.
So I give some graces. For example, people shame folks who work at amazon, but Amazon pays the bills. What I personally have changed to is judging people for being gung ho about a company, happy with what the company is doing, or are they just there as a job. If you’re in accounting and you just loooove working for Amazon and think they do no wrong, then yes I judge a lot
Thank you for this incredibly rational take.
What I personally have changed to is judging people for being gung ho about a company, happy with what the company is doing, or are they just there as a job. If you’re in accounting and you just loooove working for Amazon and think they do no wrong, then yes I judge a lot
This. I’ll usually get along fine with my fellow working class folks in the trenches wherever I end up, and I’ll make friends with the cool managers even if they’re managers.
Few people are excited to be forced into a corrupt and awful system to justify their existence.
But more often than not, they’re the True Believers™ that are so utterly brain-warped into thinking some job actually cares about them, and make it part of their identity to “represent the brand”. I give these simps a wiiiide berth.
When it’s a grunt employee with that mindset, it’s even more pathetic.
Worst thing my company does is supply ESD devices to the MIC. Not exactly sending them armaments but it does kind of help out the MIC.
Sometimes you find maybe a startup that is for-purpose. So, not necessarily nonprofit, but exists to do something with a predominantly positive impact.
We have so few years here on earth that it feels good to do something that at least is not making any problems worse.
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Who has the least ethical job at Lockheed?
My money is on the salesman, “this bad boy can kill so many children”
By shifting what you sell to “this bad boy can disperse your targeted package across an area x by y in z time frame” instead of “we can turn the entire school to rubble” you help them sleep at night.
Consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, ‘I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so’. Probably, therefore, he will say something like this:
‘While freely conceding that the Soviet regime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigors which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement.’
- George Orwell
Boy Boy has a video where they sneak into a military weapons convention.
One guy was selling crowd control armor and advertised the dissociation from your actions that armor like that creates, divorcing you from guilt.
Found the vid + timecode
CEO because he likely gets paid mostly in shares, and it’s really shareholders (not employees) who have the most choice in the matter.
Does their workforce in D.C count?
Fuck the military complex of this species. I’m gonna build my own aerospace company, mine the asteroid belt, and build my own human habitat. With black jack… And hookers… And universal healthcare…
In fact… forget the healthcare!
SPACE healthcare instead !
If you can get a job for LM, you can get a job somewhere else. If a bit more money persuades you to help build child pulverizing machines, you never had any ethics to begin with.
Currently have a contractor offer from NASA I’m probably going to turn down for a mom and pop electrical repair company lmao
Doesn’t take much to be principled.
Wait what was the ethical dilemma working with NASA?
More or less the same you’d have working for Grumen or Lockheed. NASA wind tunnels were often critical tools in developing more efficient drone designs, for example. The product is the data, and you get no say in how that data is used.
I had a job offer from Cambridge Analytica, they were up front about the work they were doing as well as the pay. Though it was tempting to sell my soul for the pay, even I have my limits.
I had an interview with a “mass email” provider. By the time I left it was clear to both of us that no way in hell.
Is it bad that I consider this much worse than a defense company? Lockheed has some cool tech and help protect my country, at the huge cost of killing so many. Cambridge Analytica indiscriminately attacks people’s privacy, all people, and for profit with no hint at a good purpose
I’m sure I still don’t appreciate that historically speaking the world has been quite a dangerous place.
I’m not a fan of dead kids or rich men sending the young to die for them, but I cannot deny my lifestyle significantly benefits from the fact top military spenders align with my ideology. (e.g. I’m better off with a powerful USA than North Korea)
Would be interesting if a new generation of principled Americans were responsible for a change where defense contractors knew to attract modern talent they had to provide assurances against outputs being used for evil. I’m naïve enough to think that might be possible.
If your country is the USA I am not sure it’s worthy of protecting.
Hot take but a world without the USA would probably have a lot more war in it.
The EU wouldn’t be able to get away with the low defense spending. Even with the war in Ukraine, they seemed to realize they’re spending too little. Granted, the US does overspend.
What? You mean the nation that funded several coups and made a mess of the middle east?
The US is not a uniquely bad country TBH. Just another shitty one in a long line.
Fuck off
Not twisting your arm, but I always wonder what my limit is, and if they added more to it.
It was freaking tempting. It was a 70% raise.
deleted by creator
Raytheon too. Job offer was $$$weet, but it was related to making missiles even more efficient.
No, I don’t think we need to turn brown kids into skeletons yet more efficiently, thanks.
I got a Raytheon for missile targeting systems. Didn’t want it on my conscience and got another offer for slightly less money but way more ethical of a company a week later.
Sweet, glad that worked out for you. I’ve learned for certain types of work I gotta ask whether it’s on the attack vs defense side of military work; at least a couple of interviewers have been taken aback by such an apparently blunt question, that it “isn’t such a relevant question”.
In my mind, both times I was wondering why they thought I’d be happy with coming to work every day if it was for something even possibly negative. Engineers get paid to pay attention to details, the fuck wouldn’t I be able to piece this shit together from within?
Compartmentalization is a cute concept on paper. 🙄
This reads like you are buying missiles
What if you’re making the missiles more accurate?
Someone else can solve that. None of us has infinite energy, so imma use what I got on what I want.
It ain’t weapons, bub.
Basically every person with a job, usually and specially in this market.
It’s not like China is going to stop making weapons if I refuse to make weapons.
My parents said the same thing about air pollution and carbon emissions
I suppose the difference is that a country doesn’t just get conquered by force if it stops polluting.
Even if the US suddenly lost all its fighter jets, naval force, missiles and bombs. How likely would an invasion be in the next 10 to 50 years?
It is quite a big country with a big population, with a practically uninhabited and difficult to cross country in the north, and a poor drug war ridden country with significant amount of jungle in the south. To the west and east are oceans with some thousands of kilometres until the next sizable and properly inhabitated landmass.
So purely in geographics terms, invading and conquering the US is a huge pain.
Now add to it all the issues of the US dominance in global trade and the ramifications such an invasion would have.
The US doesnt need that army or MIC for defense. It is offense focused and it needs to keep murdering people all over the world to keep its wheels turning.
I don’t disagree with you, especially in the short term, but Noah Smith (economist at https://www.noahpinion.blog/) does have some eye-opening opinions on the industrial might of China, and what that could mean for USA influence if China wanted to push things. (All this assumes no one uses nukes, of course.)
I’m going from memory, so errors are probably mine, not Mr. Smith’s. But, basically, wrt manufacturing, China is already where the USA was during / near the end of WWII. Even if we had the tech and raw materials, the USA would not be able to up with China’s factories if it came to war. They could basically just keep throwing drones and bombs at the USA until we literally ran out of anything to defend ourselves with, much less fight back with. Even if much of the rest of the world’s factories were on our side.
CHIPS act is one way the Biden admin was trying to restart strategic manufacturing in the USA. We’ll see how that goes.
Almost all pollution is by industries and not your parents, so…
If anything you could criticize them if they voted to keep the pollution going.
Buying a big SUV, shopping at h&m, eating red meat multiple times a week, and flying to the other side of the world during summer, are all worse than voting for climate change. Companies don’t pollute for the sake of it.
Check out the EPA’s stats on ghg emissions at this LINK. 28% of emissions total are from non-agriculture/shipping transportation, and if you break that down then 57% of the 28% are light duty vehicles, all larger road vehicles are 23%, and aircraft are 9%.
Since 2005 emissions carbon-equivalent total of the USA has fallen about a billion metric tons thanks to awareness and federal programs to reduce and eliminate emissions, almost exclusively in the Electrical Power sector.
So even if you cut out all consumer non-business transport you’re left with 72% of emissions. A person who votes to curttail polution does more good than a person who drives a hybrid.
Hybrids don’t reduce CO2 emissions that much anyway. Better to go all electric and vote for climate protection.
yeah this is a really stupid argument
“It’s not like Israël is gonna stop killing Palestinians if I refuse to kill Palestinians”
I mean
That’s true tho, pretty much nobody else murders Palestiniains but Israel still does.
Change on all of these scales has to come from societies around the world, not from individuals.
pretty much nobody else murders Palestiniains but Israel still does.
https://afsc.org/gaza-genocide-companies
Shortly after Oct. 7, the U.S. government started transferring massive amounts of weapons to Israel. By Dec. 25, Israel received more than 10,000 tons of weapons in 244 cargo planes and 20 ships from the U.S. These transfers included more than 15,000 bombs and 50,000 artillery shells within just the first month and a half. These transfers have been deliberately shrouded in secrecy to avoid public scrutiny and prevent Congress from exercising any meaningful oversight. Between October and the beginning of March, the U.S. approved more than 100 military sales to Israel, but publicly disclosed only two sales. A list of known U.S. arms transfers is maintained by the Forum on the Arms Trade.
Much of these weapons were purchased using U.S. taxpayers’ money through the Foreign Military Sales program, while some were direct commercial sales purchased through Israel’s own budget. An undisclosed amount of weapons was also transferred from U.S. military stockpiles already stored in Israel, known as War Reserves Stock Allies-Israel (WRSA-I). The use of WRSA-I to provide Israel with weapons serves to further obfuscate the full picture of U.S. arms transfers, as there is no public record of these stockpiles’ inventory.
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This is a form of corporate welfare not only for the largest weapons manufacturers, like Lockheed Martin, RTX, Boeing, and General Dynamics, which have seen their stock prices skyrocket, but also for companies that are not typically seen as part of the weapons industry, such as Caterpillar, Ford, and Toyota (see below).
I’m not saying the US government and US citizens aren’t contributing, but almost nobody, and I did specify that earlier, is going to get out of their chair, fly to Israel, and pull the trigger. At the end of the day, Israelis are the ones killing people no matter where the weapons come from. Whether or not each individual american decides to fly to palestine to commit a war crime doesn’t have any impact on the war crimes being committed: votes do.
almost nobody, and I did specify that earlier, is going to get out of their chair, fly to Israel, and pull the trigger
Why would you need to fly to Israel when you can pilot a drone bomber from Langley?
The USA has admitted to using their own surveillance drones over Gaza, do you have a source on the USA troops or remotely operated equipment firing into Gaza?
yes but I’m saying that doesn’t mean you should just start killing Palestinians as well
Doesn’t make you any less responsible when the fruits of your labor are used to murder civilians.
What if I have only ever worked constructively on anti-missile defense systems?
A THAAD still could potentially be used for offense even though they don’t use any warheads.
A better argument could be early warning systems, or even their space division where they may have NASA or ESA contracts. Products closer to scientific research, like the Osiris, crew capsules, or the lunar rover they are supposedly teamed up with GM to design.
That’s a harder question to answer and depends more on your own moral compass. Do you believe that having better defensive capabilities empowers the users of your creation to feel safe enough to do evil things? I certainly don’t think you could absolve the makers of anti-missile systems who supply militaries that are committing genocide.
How far down that chain do you want to go? A toolmaker who’s wears are used to build tanks? The US interstate system was originally a military project, are those construction workers complacent?
I try to stay practical about it. A screwdriver manufacturer is not an arms dealer. But if your work only has value in the violent world of war, then I think it’s worth asking yourself if you’re comfortable with that. I don’t always disparage people that are, even though I certainly couldn’t stomach it.
My rule of thumb is to ask whether the defense industry is the only customer for the product. The company I work for does sell some to defense, but the products were not designed with defense as the primary purpose. It still doesn’t feel great to me, but I’m finding it increasingly difficult to avoid defense funding nowadays.
Such as if Trump would start to send anti-missile systems to Russia.
“I can’t force the world to behave as I would like it, so I may as well not have morals”
You know, every country has an army. Either their own, or another country’s…
Yes? I don’t know what you’re getting at
Which boils down to: you need to have an army. You can’t live without one.
But the only reason that’s true is because people like you insist on tribalism. Well our enemies who are 99.999% genetic identicals to us, just over that hill, have militaries and so we need one. And they have one because there is some asshole who is saying the same thing. As long as your first step is tribalism humanity will never get out of it’s current cesspool.
“iTs YoUr FaULT” no it isn’t my fault psycopaths with delusions of grandeur wants to invade any country weak enough in their eyes.
I actually don’t like it either but I’m still correct.
Ask the dead about honour
Why? They are dead. That makes them irrelevant.
If we don’t build the bombs dropped on Gaza, China will.
Israel builds weapons so they could do it themselves
https://afsc.org/gaza-genocide-companies
Between October and the beginning of March, the U.S. approved more than 100 military sales to Israel, but publicly disclosed only two sales. A list of known U.S. arms transfers is maintained by the Forum on the Arms Trade.
Much of these weapons were purchased using U.S. taxpayers’ money through the Foreign Military Sales program, while some were direct commercial sales purchased through Israel’s own budget. An undisclosed amount of weapons was also transferred from U.S. military stockpiles already stored in Israel, known as War Reserves Stock Allies-Israel (WRSA-I). The use of WRSA-I to provide Israel with weapons serves to further obfuscate the full picture of U.S. arms transfers, as there is no public record of these stockpiles’ inventory.
…
This is a form of corporate welfare not only for the largest weapons manufacturers, like Lockheed Martin, RTX, Boeing, and General Dynamics, which have seen their stock prices skyrocket, but also for companies that are not typically seen as part of the weapons industry, such as Caterpillar, Ford, and Toyota (see below).
I wonder how many arms companies aren’t involved with Israel.
Potentially the prosthetic arm companies
When you realize they actually have an adverse incentive to support indiscriminate bombardment…
“It’s not like drug addicts will stop taking drugs if I quit heroin.”
False equivalency, nice
My sib has a friend that constantly criticizes others b/c they marginally contribute to injustices in the world (one example is how a family friend votes that specifically puts others at a disadvantage for affordable housing, making them commute for hours on end). That friend also worked with Purdue Pharmaceuticals defense team during their lawsuit lol
It’s crazy to me how so many ppl can be so oblivious to their own hypocrisies.
I think this is a big stumbling block with Lefties we need to get over, especially young and eager ones.
People want so badly to belong, but there’s so much of a culture of purity-testing and pre-judgement that they’re terrified of being eaten by their own for doing any wrong whatsoever.
I appreciate trying to minimize harmful impact and maximize helpful impact, but people get so hostile because someone like, buys anything, or has a job. Get over yourselves, kids.
Well someone has be on the defense
