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abeppu 11 hours ago [-]
I do think that for those of us who got into tech in the last couple of decades, the history can be rather obscured, but from the Fairchild semiconductor days, the military was a main customer, right?
I think there's a real question: would the world be a better place had Fairchild and peers e.g. refused to build ICs for missile systems (including the minuteman), for example? Would the same tech have been developed with purely civilian funding? Would missiles built with other tech have caused some awful disaster?
To the extent that the internet descended from ARPANET, and the internet is now both how we access a range of information and also hospitals get shut down by remote attackers, would the world have been better if researchers refused to build it b/c it was from military funding and motivations?
In retrospect it does seem like in the 1950s-70s the military was willing to fund some stuff that was actually not especially close to applications of killing people. I don't know that the kinds of things listed in this research are likely to lead to broad other applications in the future like microchips and networks did. But neither do I think it's straight forward to just condemn this stuff as purely evil and say we shouldn't do it.
justin66 6 hours ago [-]
> In retrospect it does seem like in the 1950s-70s the military was willing to fund some stuff that was actually not especially close to applications of killing people.
There's no "seem" about it, what you're saying is true, and it was because of changes in federal law. [0]
Thanks for pointing that out; I was not aware of it.
At the same time, when I helped with research in a cognitive psychology lab in school (much closer to the present than to that law), our PI said our funding came partly from a grant from the US Navy. We worked on Bayesian models of human learning and reasoning -- so "direct or apparent relationship to specific military function" has perhaps at times been interpreted somewhat loosely?
justin66 4 hours ago [-]
As a practical matter, I'm not sure the Mansfield amendment affected all agencies equally. My impression is that it affected ARPA (later DARPA) most profoundly. (pretty much everything I've read about this was in the context of ARPA and XEROX Parc so my perception might be a little skewed)
I'd speculate the Navy had perhaps more discretion over how it spent its research funding. For example, they funded polywell fusion research for years.
nradov 8 hours ago [-]
Even before Fairchild Semiconductor was founded, much of the original SF Bay Area tech industry started during and after WWII to develop radar and electronic warfare systems for the military.
thenthenthen 3 hours ago [-]
Is there a place I can read about this? I am doing research on tech-histories (mainly in Asia) and i would say 100% of all tech coming from there has its origins in radio and radar tech, yes including fridges (you might have in your home right now)
I think this is true, and also a lot of tech, which often isn't as PR as the web/internet tech, gets funded by DOD/DARPA
That being said, I feel like a lot of the web-based tech, device tech etc came out of the liberal/leftist university environments, i.e. BSD unix, CERN, linux ish type projects. Berkeley/Stanford/MIT etc. So the culture of a lot of people who were rank and file and enthusiastic about this stuff from had this mindset.
bluegatty 8 hours ago [-]
Good point, but there's a very big difference between dual use tech that gets it's start in the military, vs building weapons systems.
Silicon, GPS, the Internet, nuclear power, most of rocketry and space etc., I think most would believe was worthwhile.
Building cruise missiles, or 'Civilian Monitoring Tech' - that's a different question.
I don't think that DARPA, the internet, or NASA etc. count as 'Military Industrial Complex', but Anduril of course does, and Palantir pretty much does as well.
That's 'new' for the Silicon Valley at least, it has mostly not been building 'defence tech' but rather general tech that has key defence use.
abeppu 7 hours ago [-]
Ok you say rockets and space were "worthwhile" and missiles are "a different question".
But of course the space race proceeded from work on missiles. ICMBs are rockets that go high and fast and then happen to complete less than one full orbit.
And my understanding is that early ICs were for missiles because it was acceptable for the ICs to be very expensive in exchange for them being very light and small. Only a context that was optimizing for a tiny package (b/c extra weight also required more fuel) and was relatively cost insensitive would justify them at first. The point is building weapons sometimes _does_ turn into tech that can be used more generally. Does that justify the risk?
bluegatty 3 hours ago [-]
I mean there's a very clear difference between 'strategic tech' that's supported by defence (GPS) - and weapons systems (Spitfire).
And yes, some weapons systems are just ... 'weapons related' ... and the dual-use comes later, so it's more nuanced. Some of it more obvious (radar), than others (cruise missiles).
But I think it's important to characterize these things.
nradov 3 hours ago [-]
Why is it important? Do those arbitrary labels allow us to feel morally superior to those who make different choices?
bluegatty 2 hours ago [-]
Because building 'GPS', 'LLMs', 'food preservation', 'vaccines' and 'off-road vehicles' is not 'arbitrarily different' from building 'cruise missiles' or 'F22 fighters'.
They are completely different things.
'Tech' that can be used by the military', and 'weapons' are not 'arbitrary labels'.
HN is the only place in the world where someone would try to conflate the two to make a point, I don't think it's reasonable.
nradov 1 hours ago [-]
That's just your meaningless opinion.
bluegatty 2 minutes ago [-]
No, it's a substantially objective, and fully uncontroversial perspective.
Given that, consider consulting with another actual human being, or even your favourite AI to help ground yourself a bit in those ideas.
bigyabai 6 hours ago [-]
The lines blurred, IMO. Boycotting the 8086 wouldn't hamstring ICBM development. Boycotting the microwave oven wasn't going to prevent radar complexes from being constructed.
Much of the modern pushback seems to come from the new blood companies. Microsoft, Apple, Google, businesses that deliberately blurred the line to obscure which side they stand on. These companies all collude with the US government to some extent, but their desire to hide that cooperation creates a rift in what they say and do. You could have boycott Google and Apple technology to protect Americans[0] from warrantless surveillance. You could have boycott Starlink to thwart Starshield[1] and future bids on the Golden Dome. Information on all of this behavior is classified because it is obviously upsetting and creates the potential for dissent. But hiding the behavior also creates a dam-burst effect once you tell people the truth, including employees. The Snowden files were a legitimate surprise to most people working in FAANG at the time.
It's upsetting to think that American NOBUS abilities[2] hang like a Sword of Damocles over the so-called Free World. When you import American technology, you also import the surveillance and opinions of the American government. It has developed in a new and insidious way that doesn't fully resemble what we saw in WWII or the Cold War, unique to the information age.
Microsoft Apple and Google have not blurred any lines, they are not defence contractors in any way.
They are very large tech companies which will invariably have some relationship with every industry.
Apple had some early contracts in defence, Google's early research grands were National Science Foundation, but that's not defence companies.
'Boeing' blurs the lines definitely - they are 35% defence contractor mostly civilian airline agency and didn't really start as military.
It's important to understand that every company of a certain scale exists a bit differently than others, and in some industries, like aviation, will be considered 'strategic' and they're going to work with 'national interests' in a lot of ways, that may involved some kind of defence contracting.
abeppu 5 hours ago [-]
You should read the actual post?
For Microsoft, the first and largest contract mentioned in the table just below the fold on that page is for an IVAS system. Microsoft had been basing this off their HoloLens system but was a distinct product (they weren't just sending over the normal HoloLens and expecting that they were gonna work in the field). This contract was then transitioned to Anduril. But just saying of Microsoft that "they are not defence contractors in any way" is hard to reconcile with the facts of having a large contract to _develop a new product_ for the military ... even if it turned out to never have been used.
I see what you're trying to say - but MS is not a defence contractor. The amount of business they do selling 'Windows' and 'Azure' to DoD is 100x whatever little tiny bit of co-research they are doing otherwise. It's not relevant to their business, that's just 'a tiny project that happens to cross into some field'.
I understand that technically, it's a project that can be used for defence, but if you say that MS is a 'defence contractor' - then you also have to say:
MS is an 'Investment Bank' - almost 50% of MSFT's Operations are financial. Their financial opts are bigger that most investment banks.
MS is a 'Healthcare Company'
MS is a 'Gaming Company'
MS is an 'Entertainment Company'
MS is XXX, YYY and ZZZ etc.
better: "MS is a Tech Conglomerate that sells Windows (OS), Office, Outlook, Sales and Ops SaaS, and has Bing some other services, with XBox as major subdivision. They have a major financial footprint, and also have research activities in other sectors."
Palantir is partially Defence contractor even if a minority of their business is defence, it's a strategic business line for them, and it's material to their existence.
abeppu 4 hours ago [-]
> I understand that technically, it's a project that can be used for defence
No, it's a project commissioned by and built for defense needs. It's not that someone at the DoD saw how to creatively re-use an existing civilian project.
bluegatty 3 hours ago [-]
You're right, I misstated - I meant to say 'dual use contract'; but my point is the same.
alexashka 7 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
chanakya 13 hours ago [-]
Serious question: should companies not participate in contracts from their country's defense department? Or is the argument that it's only US companies which shouldn't, because the US is uniquely evil?
beloch 11 hours ago [-]
There is an undeniable conflict between "Don't be evil." and "Evil pays.". A lot of what militaries do can be best described as the lesser of two evils. Murdering people is bad, but sometimes a little murder can prevent a lot of murder. However ethically or unethically a state uses force, there's usually a lot of money to be had in supplying that state with the means of force.
Is there room for ethics in military research and procurement? Absolutely. An AI company might say, "We will help you choose the best targets when under time pressure, but we won't provide an oracle that lets you justify indiscriminate killing of civilians." An explosives factory might say, "We'll build precision missile warheads for you, but not white phosphorous or cluster munitions, because these kill civilians indiscriminately.". People working for companies that do defence work have a moral obligation to observe how their labour is used and refuse to give it if the results are unethical. It's no different from soldiers having a moral duty to refuse illegal orders.
To answer your question, I'd say that participating in the defence industry can be justifiable if you remain guided by ethics, and unjustifiable if you abandon them for money. e.g. If you're currently doing anything to help develop the IDF's Lavender or "Where's Daddy" programs, it's pretty hard to argue that you have a functioning moral compass.
It's also completely fine to say, "I don't want to deal with moral grey zones" and refuse to work for companies that do military work. You might make less money, but you'll almost certainly sleep easier.
JumpCrisscross 9 hours ago [-]
> You might make less money, but you'll almost certainly sleep easier
Idk, there's something unethical in outsourcing ethical grey areas to other people while reaping the benefits of the peace (or war far from your home) it brings.
Predatory monsters exist. A wealthy society that demilitarizes learns the lesson Europe is now. (If Ukraine didn't have a domestic defence industry, it wouldn't have been able to fight the fight it has been able to.) Put another way, you'll sleep easier, but it's a false security, even if it's one that may last for the rest of your own life.
I'd also note that you can absolutely contribute to parts of the military where you actions are highly unlikely to directly result in anyone dying. Air-defence radars and munitions, for example, particulalry those designed to take out missiles and ballistics.
megous 7 hours ago [-]
Dunno where the idea that defence or defensive weapons are somehow morally better comes from.
It really depends on who's using them and what they're used to defend.
JumpCrisscross 7 hours ago [-]
> where the idea that defence or defensive weapons are somehow morally better comes from
As a category, I think it's safe to say that defensive weapons tend to be more morally defensible than purely-offensive ones. Of course the circumstances matter. But that doesn't mean we can't make generalisations.
4 hours ago [-]
sophacles 9 hours ago [-]
You're not responding to their actual comment, you're arguing something else.
As for "someone else will do it if i don't".... (aka your argument). That's true of a lot of things, and I sleep great at night choosing not to steal from people even though I know others will choose to steal. It turns out I don't have the ability to choose their actions for them, only my own.
Ajedi32 8 hours ago [-]
> "someone else will do it if i don't".... (aka your argument)
That's not the argument. It's more like "if I don't do it then I better hope somebody else will, otherwise my whole country will inevitably become subservient to a despotic regime". Basically, the question is whether strict pacifism is a tenable national policy in the real world. All of modern and ancient history up to this point seems to suggest it is not.
s1artibartfast 5 hours ago [-]
I think the better argument is that Europe has a credible nuclear defense, therefore they don't need conventional military. If Russia starts rolling tanks towards Berlin, drop a nuke outside their international waters and announce the next one will be on Moscow
nradov 2 hours ago [-]
How about if Russia starts sending troops to "protect" the ethnic Russian population in Latvia? Would the USA, UK, and/or France really threaten to nuke Moscow and start WW3 in that scenario? It's better to have a credible conventional deterrent and a range of possible responses instead of betting everything on an all-or-nothing nuclear response.
s1artibartfast 2 hours ago [-]
I dont think they would, but think it would work if they did
LargoLasskhyfv 2 hours ago [-]
What about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupied instead? I've found that to be rather entertaining, when the 1st season began. Though only the pilot and 1st few episodes. What came later was just so-so.
Enjoy.
slg 8 hours ago [-]
Would you define Russia not nuking Ukraine as "strict pacifism"? Because every modern country and army seems to have some basic standard of ethics and morals that restrict them from waging total war even if you want to argue that's purely for diplomatic or PR reasons.
There are a whole lot of decisions that need to be made to get from "strict pacifism" to total war, so I don't know why we need to flatten this into a binary.
JumpCrisscross 7 hours ago [-]
> Would you define Russia not nuking Ukraine as "strict pacifism"?
Nobody reasonable would. Russia started a war of choice. That's the opposite of pacifism.
Strict pacifism would be Ukraine refusing to fight after being invaded. Someone saying all war in all circumtances is evil and should not be contributed to, directly or indirectly, is sort of endorsing that view. The folks calling for nuclear disarmament, or no first use policy, are pretty far away from that.
slg 5 hours ago [-]
>Nobody reasonable would. Russia started a war of choice. That's the opposite of pacifism.
Yes, that was my point. The person I replied to stated a nation taking actions off the table "will inevitably become subservient to a despotic regime". As a response, I pointed to a country that many would call "a despotic regime" who seems to operate with at least some consideration towards the ethics of war even if that is due to external pressure.
s1artibartfast 5 hours ago [-]
Maybe I'm slow , but how is that relevant to the point? Can you expand? Am I understand is that defense is important because sooner or later someone else may choose aggression.
You might put your life savings on the street in front of your house for a day or two without someone stealing it, but sooner or later someone unscrupulous is likely to come along based on the evidence we have
slg 3 hours ago [-]
The person I replied to stated that a country refusing to develop military tech for moral reasons was destined to fall to a country that ignores morals and develops that tech. I pointed to an example of an aggressor nation that is refusing to use all the military tech at its disposal. Modern society has decided that ethics don't go completely out the window in war and by and large nation states at least pretend they agree.
s1artibartfast 2 hours ago [-]
I got that far. Does the 2nd point contradict the first (setting aside the question of if other deterrents are at play in Russia?)
slg 1 hours ago [-]
I'll be as straightforward as possible. Ukraine does not have a nuclear deterrent and yet Russia is deterred from using nuclear weapons ergo Ukraine didn't need its own nuclear weapons as a deterrent to prevent Russia from using nuclear weapons. And when even the "despotic regimes" like Russia are refusing to use a weapon, it no longer becomes a credible threat for the ostensibly good guys to threaten to use.
Weapons can only act as a deterrent if your opponent believes you're willing to use them and there are some weapons that no one is willing to use. And if no one is willing to use them, it's probably a waste to develop them in the first place.
s1artibartfast 1 hours ago [-]
How is that an argument that demilitarized pacifism is a tenable national policy. This was the point you started arguing against. Russia hasent nuked Ukraine so nobody needs defenses or arms?
slg 4 minutes ago [-]
>How is that an argument that demilitarized pacifism is a tenable national policy.
I never made that argument. My original comment was refuting the idea that taking a singular option off the table is equivalent to pacifism. Ukraine didn't feel the need to develop a nuclear program, that doesn't make them pacifists.
nradov 7 hours ago [-]
Russia not nuking Ukraine had nothing to do with ethics or morals. It's more pragmatic than that. Putin wants to take Ukraine largely intact to control its population and resources, not turn it into an irradiated wasteland. And he knows that use of WMDs would invite economic sanctions from key neutral trading partners such as India.
Also, it's questionable whether Russia's nuclear arsenal would even work reliably. The USA and other nuclear powers spend enormous amounts every year just on nuclear weapons maintenance and testing. Those munitions can't just be stored in a warehouse indefinitely like rifle cartridges and pulled out when needed; they require periodic remanufacturing in order to remain operational at all. Russia is a relatively poor and highly corrupt country so I suspect many of their nukes wouldn't deliver the rated yield if used today. From their perspective an attempted strike resulting in a fizzle would be even worse: all of the diplomatic disadvantages for no military gain.
JumpCrisscross 6 hours ago [-]
> Putin wants to take Ukraine largely intact to control its population and resources, not turn it into an irradiated wasteland
Nuking Kyiv, Odessa and Lviv would probably force Ukraine to surrender.
> use of WMDs would invite economic sanctions from key neutral trading partners such as India
This is the real constraint. There is still the credible threat of being economically isolated by America, Europe, China and India. (Neither China nor India wants the normalisation of nuclear bombardment normalised. They both have border disputes with nuclear-armed neighbours.)
slg 5 hours ago [-]
>Nuking Kyiv and Lviv would probably force Ukraine to surrender.
Or if we want to take nuclear options off the table because Russia values infrastructure, they aren't attacking population centers with bioweapons.
>This is the real constraint. There is still the credible threat of being economically isolated by America, Europe, China and India. (Neither China nor India wants the normalisation of nuclear bombardment normalised. They both have border disputes with nuclear-armed neighbours.)
Ethics enforced by external pressure are still ethics in action. The comment I replied to was basically arguing that we have to do this unethical thing because if we don't our enemies will. Well here is an example of our ostensibly unethical enemy not doing something because of ethical pressure. So why would this pressure work for nuclear weapons and not this new military tech?
JumpCrisscross 4 hours ago [-]
> if we want to take nuclear options off the table because Russia values infrastructure
Putin doesn't care about infrastructure in Kyiv. He wants the natural gas and resources in the east. A nuked rump Ukraine isn't a threat to his power.
> why would this pressure work for nuclear weapons and not this new military tech?
Because the normalisation of nuclear weapons has global consequences in a way conventional warfare does not. The most problematic aspects of Trump's Iran war for India and China are that it raises oil prices.
slg 3 hours ago [-]
>Because the normalisation of nuclear weapons has global consequences in a way conventional warfare does not.
And you don't think that has any chance of applying to some hypothetical yet to be developed future military tech?
master_crab 4 hours ago [-]
Economic embargoes are the least of Putin’s worries if he nukes a country.
More than likely Russia is ostracized to the point that other countries will treat it with active hostility.
And the most likely possibility is Putin is assassinated and the government overthrown due to internal opposition.
The same thing that would happen to America if Trump acts on his musings about tactically nuking Iran.
nradov 8 hours ago [-]
Heavy use of cluster munitions (and land mines) was critical in allowing Ukraine to stop the second Russian invasion in 2022-2023 and stabilize the front lines. The notion that they kill civilians indiscriminately, or that it's unethical for defense contractors to build them for the US and allied militaries, is ludicrous and disconnected from objective reality.
JumpCrisscross 8 hours ago [-]
> cluster munitions was critical in allowing Ukraine to stop the second Russian invasion in 2022
Genuinely want to read more about this. Do you have a good source?
I'd always assumed cluster munitions had no legitimate use.
jandrewrogers 6 hours ago [-]
Cluster munitions are highly effective at destroying massed formations of men and equipment. This forces the attacker to heavily armor up, which doesn’t work well against modern cluster munitions, and/or disperse forces across a very large area so that few targets will be within the kill zone of a cluster munition to limit their effectiveness.
They limit the ability of an attacker to mass vast forces in an area for a brute-force assault. Soviet doctrine was notorious for this kind of attack, so cluster munitions were developed as a solution. Russia still uses this kind of assault, so cluster munitions still work against their forces. Other militaries (e.g. the US) use doctrines that render cluster munitions ineffective.
Just about every weapon invented was developed to address a specific scenario where it is highly effective at shaping the battlefield. Some have become obsolete because those scenarios don’t occur in modern warfare, but there is still a lot of diversity in the practice of warfare.
dredmorbius 5 hours ago [-]
Today that role (strongly discouraging grouped formations) has been occupied by drones.
The current UA/RU front is a 30km deep kill zone crossed by FPV craft (and discarded optic fibre cables) in which the largest effective group size might be four or so soldiers. Tanks are all but useless as sitting ducks.
Reuters made a surprisingly good infographic / interactive feature on this this past July:
Some aspects of modern warfare seem to be taking the classic idea of light infantry and dialing it up to 11. They have little armor or heavy weaponry but are such a fluid sparse target and have such a small logistical footprint that they are expensive and difficult to root out.
The modern version of this allows the same soldiers to command heavier, better weaponry via remote control that is asymmetric to their logistical footprint, enabling them to shape a battle space that would not have been possible historically.
Of course these things ebb and flow. I imagine the solution to this problem is something like autonomous drone swarms with advanced sensors that can systematically sterilize an area of any hidden soft targets. Sparsity would not be much of a defense in this case.
nradov 1 hours ago [-]
That's already beginning to happen. Both sides are increasingly taking humans out of the loop.
scheme271 4 hours ago [-]
The following wiki article has a section on it. Cluster munitions allow you to saturate areas and prevent infantry from advancing. The issue is that some of the submunitions malfunction and sit around on the ground and injury civilians (particularly children since they look like toys at times) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual-purpose_improved_conventi...
nradov 7 hours ago [-]
Here you go. Note that DPICM is a type of cluster munition. As for which uses are "legitimate", I guess everyone has their own opinion.
The least ethical people I know seem to sleep the soundest. We need to study if there is a correlation there.
antii 9 hours ago [-]
[dead]
asdff 9 hours ago [-]
No need to get serious. Only a sith deals in absolutes. There's plenty of work within the us military that is definitely not evil. Even within the field of weapons development. You could say develop a target selection approach that is less likely to blow up a school halfway across the world than existing approaches. You are literally saving lives working on that project, despite what the people who only see in black and white and make grandstand positions online might think.
protocolture 7 hours ago [-]
>You could say develop a target selection approach that is less likely to blow up a school halfway across the world than existing approaches.
Then your new target selection approach is used specifically to target a school, and you just made the weapon more accurate.
You dont get to build shit for the military AND determine what its used for.
tastyface 9 hours ago [-]
"You could say develop a target selection approach that is less likely to blow up a school halfway across the world than existing approaches."
Sure, you save some lives. Then the military realizes they can apply violence far more liberally than they ever could before. Subsequent conflicts result in a whole lot more death for the losing side. Maybe a lot more "militar-aged men" end up as cannon fodder for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Or... do those lives not count? Depends on your definition of "evil," I guess: I'm using the Christian one.
irishcoffee 8 hours ago [-]
There’s a story in the Christian Bible about David, Old Testament. He was told to fire arrows into the ground. He shot 3. The response he got was something like “you should have shot more, now you’ll only sack 3 cities.”
Tell me more about lives, Christianity, and war.
tastyface 5 hours ago [-]
Anyone who knows anything about Christianity knows that the New Testament supersedes the Old Testament.
marcosdumay 6 hours ago [-]
The US is almost uniquely evil, though.
People should ask the same question in the likes of Russia, Israel, North Korea, Iran. But in most countries, defense actually means that.
0cf8612b2e1e 13 hours ago [-]
Other countries probably focus quite a bit more on the defense aspect. How many times has the US military countered a hostile attacking force? Instead, I can think of significantly more instances where the US was instigating the situation.
Manuel_D 10 hours ago [-]
The US stopped countless wars from starting in the first place due to deterrence. Look at Ukraine to see what happens to a country that isn't part of an alliance like NATO.
0cf8612b2e1e 9 hours ago [-]
Ukraine seems to be what happens when a country willingly gave up their nukes (with US encouragement).
I have no problem if the US navy wants to tool around shipping lanes for the good of global trade. I take issue with everything else.
In the past couple of years, the US has implicitly used the strength of its military to threaten the sovereignty of Greenland, Panama, Canada, Mexico, and Cuba. Abducted a foreign head of state. Started a war. Bombed drug runners and fishermen.
The death toll for the Iraq war is heavily contested, but the numbers are somewhere in the region of 200k to one million dead. All under the guise of WMDs.
Like any large organization, there is a mixture of good and bad outcomes.
chasd00 8 hours ago [-]
Ukraine was storing nukes but did not have the keys to use them. They were useless to ukraine and presented no deterrent.
karp773 5 hours ago [-]
That's false. Please stop spreading Russian propaganda. Not only Ukraine was able to control and maintaining them, in fact, Ukrainian companies manufactured nuke ICBMs, and then serviced them in Russia long after the collapse of the USSR. See, for example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KB_Pivdenne
AngryData 7 hours ago [-]
Ukraine was home to many nuclear and rocket scientists so presumably they could have reverse engineered them if they wanted and got a big head start in it.
But yeah thats only if they wanted to try and spend the money to support a nuclear program. As they sat they were unreliable at best case.
goatlover 9 hours ago [-]
Then look at the Middle East.
stickfigure 12 hours ago [-]
US military power does most of its heavy lifting without throwing bombs. We're seeing the end of Pax Americana and it isn't pretty.
pphysch 11 hours ago [-]
The two major ongoing wars are due to US foreign policy and could be over tomorrow if US government fully stopped supporting their respective belligerents.
A good chunk of the human population has never known a "Pax Americana" and regions such as East Asia are clearly better off due to declining American hegemony.
lovich 11 hours ago [-]
If you’re referring to Ukraine as one of the two, we already heavily reduced our support under Trump and there is no chance in hell that removing the leftover support causes Ukraine to capitulate by tomorrows, especially after recent territory gains and destruction of Russian logistical supply lines with Wildberries and their refinery infrastructure.
Also if the other is Iran, lol at “stopped supporting respective belligerents” as if the US itself was not one of the major belligerents.
paimapi 11 hours ago [-]
I think the other example is Israel which seems like the much more obviously belligerent, actively colonial nation state that the US is largely propping up (and wouldn't exist otherwise)
also, arguably, the half-century of creating, establishing, funding, and build-up of NATO largely supersedes the point that Trump cut spending there temporarily. that all came from American coffers and the current conflict there is a long hangover from that
JumpCrisscross 9 hours ago [-]
> colonial nation state that the US is largely propping up (and wouldn't exist otherwise)
This is a baseless, American-centric notion I've heard frequently in New York and San Francisco.
If America pulled support from Israel, it would find partners in other countries. India and China are at the top of the list–they want Israeli weapons technology and intelligence. Russia would probably play too. And depending on the kind of mess we leave Iran in, some Gulf countries may also find a way to come to a nuclear technology transfer deal with Tel Aviv.
paimapi 9 hours ago [-]
oh? I didn't know China and Russia had such solid relationships with Israel. my understanding was that Israel has been repeatedly condemned by both and last I heard, the free-trade agreement with them has been stalled for years. but what do I know?
JumpCrisscross 9 hours ago [-]
> my understanding was that Israel has been repeatedly condemned by both and last I heard, the free-trade agreement with them has been stalled for years. but what do I know?
India-Israel trade has been growing since diplomatic relations between the nations were established in 1992 (including since the war in Gaza) [1]. In 2025 they signed a bilateral investment agreement. And Israel is a growing defence provider to India.
I know less about the China relationship, but it remains a major trading partner with Isrel [2]. (I do not believe there are significant military relations. China has recently been calling what Israel is doing in Gaza a genocide, and I'll note they started doing this a year ago, before Trump bungled into Iran, though for obvious reasons Beijing isn't dwelling on the question.)
Russia is currently embedded with Iran, but nothing about that is geostrategic. Israel and the USSR once had close relations. Putin needs weapons for Ukraine. An Israel searching desperately for partners would be useful to Moscow.
Note, too, that both China and India have governments in power that explicitly reject the rights of their domestic Muslim populations.
Israel sanctioned BYD and China sanctioned Israeli cybersec firms back recently to my knowledge. The average Chinese citizen also is much more willing to call it a genocide and if there's one thing the Politburo knows to do, it's not to unnecessarily foment unrest by collusion
I don't personally think it's likely relations would improve on this and I consider myself much better read on the goings-on of the PRC than most
For the other nation states you discussed, I'm far from an expert on them so you very well might be right. But I doubt it'll be straightforward if the US were to cease aid. I also seriously doubt Israel would be so aggressively expansionist without the 300 billion or so they've received from the US. An un-invaded Iraq in combination with Iran would have put its existence at major jeopardy
JumpCrisscross 8 hours ago [-]
> Israel sanctioned BYD and China sanctioned Israeli cybersec firms back recently to my knowledge
Yup. China is also shipping arms precursors (and very likely intelligence) to Iran. China and Israel aren't friends. But Israel pivoting from the U.S. absolutely brings it back to the table. China isn't, like, sanctioning Israeli firms in general, or even Israeli firms in the West Bank.
> doubt it'll be straightforward or that Israel would be so aggressively expansionist without the 300 billion or so they've received from the US
My personal hypothesis is the aid turned Israel into a monster. Removing the aid, however, won't change that. It just means more broad-based munitions.
Israel and Gaza have natural gas. The world has shown it will tolerate a lot of nonsense from an energy supplier, particularly a nuclear-armed one.
lovich 9 hours ago [-]
I don’t know why so many people take it as a given that Israel only exists because of America.
They used to be aligned with the USSR and we did a lot of work to peel them off into our own domain. They also have their own military industrial complex and are perfectly capable of manufacturing the weapons they need domestically.
And they can redirect resources to the war if we removed it.
If anything, removal of our support probably leads to the use of dumber less targeted weapons like carpet bombing or good ole white phosphorus that they’ve already demonstrated use of in past conflicts.
If we were giving them 30+% of their gdp then yea, dropping that probably stops the conflict. 2% is just a budget reshuffle.
paimapi 9 hours ago [-]
you should look up how much the 2008 financial crisis shrank the US GDP. 2% of an entire nation state's GDP especially with aid concentrated in gov\mil sectors of which a huge part of Israel's private sector is dependent on for grants is not a 'budget reshuffle'
funker337 7 hours ago [-]
You are conflating things. US aid represents around 2% of Israel’s government budget, not its GDP - which itself is growing by 3% annually.
lovich 8 hours ago [-]
It is when there’s an existential threat which, agree with Israel’s government or not, they believe the neighboring Islamic factions are.
I’m not claiming it would be easy but it’s definitely not an amount that losing would end the war overnight, which was the original claim I responded to
megous 7 hours ago [-]
Israelis can't carpet bomb. They don't have the tech.
Are you saying 10's of thousands of bombs US supplied to level the entire cities and countryside to the ground is preferable to IL having to get this elsewhere, because why exactly? What does precision have to do with it?
You can scroll around here to see what US did by providing all those mostly free bombs:
(south is the only thing google is not misrepresenting on the aerial imagery)
This is preferable to carpet bombing, yeah? How?
lovich 6 hours ago [-]
> Israelis can't carpet bomb. They don't have the tech.
What? I’m not even responding to the rest if this is how you open up.
Carpet bombing is so low tech I can’t imagine a country in the modern age that couldn’t create the technology even if they couldn’t afford actually deploying it. It’s a matter of logistics and having enough bombs.
It’s literally just dropping a fuck ton of dumb bombs on an area to “carpet” it, unless we’re talking past each other and you were referring to something else.
JumpCrisscross 6 hours ago [-]
> Carpet bombing is so low tech I can’t imagine a country in the modern age that couldn’t create the technology
Yeah, it's artillery bombardment by more-modern means. The "modern" bit being planes.
lovich 4 hours ago [-]
Give me enough guano, charcoal, sulphur, steel, and flint and I can cobble together carpet bombing from my kitchen without ever having to go up the tech tree past a few hundred years ago.
Hell Hamas themselves under heavy sanctions have shown they have the technology, they merely lack the surfeit of resources to implement it.
This isn’t me arguing with you, I’m just flabbergasted that someone could say with a straight face that Israel doesn’t have the technology to carpet bomb.
I want us to decrease or end our alliance with Israel for political reasons related to how their government has interacted with ours(the US) but I am constantly surprised by these people who honestly think that Israel wouldn’t collapse the moment US support ended, like they didn’t fight several existential wars and win previous to our support.
lovich 9 hours ago [-]
Israel vs Palestine is not a major conflict, especially given the one sided nature of the fight.
Israel + US vs Iran is a majorish conflict but the US is directly a belligerent in that one.
> also, arguably, the half-century of creating, establishing, funding, and build-up of NATO largely supersedes the point that Trump cut spending there temporarily. that all came from American coffers and the current conflict there is a long hangover from that
Glossing over the Russian propaganda points accusing a defensive pact as a reason for starting a war, that still means that the conflict “ could be over tomorrow” is incorrect even if the US ended all support today.
pphysch 10 hours ago [-]
The USA is heavily supporting Ukraine with intelligence sharing, private financial support, StarLink, and """indirectly""" providing arms through European middlemen.
The latter was Trump's innovation so that he can pretend he is upholding some foreign policy campaign promise without materially changing anything.
lovich 6 hours ago [-]
Private financial support doesn’t count, that’s private actors.
I’ll accept Starlink as US support despite their back and forth on supporting Russia, because they are a large corporation requiring on government assent the same way Wildberries is for Russia.
The indirect one you’ll have to sell me on as support. We’re selling shit, and like to make money. Someone buying our shit to give to Ukraine doesn’t count as support or antagonistic to me but as a neutral position.
chanakya 13 hours ago [-]
That may be partly true, but in recent times, most western countries participated in wars like Afganistan and Iraq, and provided logistical or other support during the current Iran war.
buellerbueller 12 hours ago [-]
In even more recent times, the US made war on Iran for no apparent reason at all.
jopsen 10 hours ago [-]
There are plenty of reasons, some might even be good.
But prospects for a positive outcome where probably always slim.
IMO, it is particularly dumb when there is a full scale conventional war happening in Ukraine.
tsunamifury 11 hours ago [-]
You dont really understand globalism and pax americana do you?
But specifically yes america has been directly attacked 20 times in the last 40 some odd years... so averaging once every other year.
afavour 12 hours ago [-]
I think it’s difficult to come up with hard and fast rules. But the fact that the US government (falsely) renamed their Department of Defense to Department of War is perhaps a useful signal.
SllX 11 hours ago [-]
Defense was always just a euphemism for War. That’s not the signal you think it is.
throw0101d 10 hours ago [-]
> Defense was always just a euphemism for War. That’s not the signal you think it is.
No, it was not. Tom Nichols, professor emiritus of national-security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College:
> It is almost impossible to overstate the inanity of this move. The United States has a Department of Defense for a reason. It was called the “War” Department until 1947, when the dictates of a new and more dangerous world required the creation of a much larger military organization than any in American history. Harry Truman and the American leaders who destroyed the Axis, and who now were facing the Soviet empire, realized that national security had become a larger undertaking than the previous American tradition of moving, as needed, between discrete conditions of “war” and “peace.”
> These leaders understood that America could no longer afford the isolationist luxury of militarizing itself during times of threat and then making soldiers train with wooden sticks[1] when the storm clouds passed. Now, they knew, the security of the country would be a daily undertaking, a matter of ongoing national defense, in which the actual exercise of military force would be only part of preserving the freedom and independence of the United States and its allies.
> In 1949, after two years that included a massive reorganization of the U.S. military (and the establishment of an air force), Truman christened the new United States Department of Defense, which consolidated elements of the previous War and Navy Departments. […]
The Department of War had a different function for a different geopolitical outlook that no longer matched reality in the post-WW2 world.
SllX 9 hours ago [-]
I answered in response to a different comment about the level of patience I have with men that think changing one word in the title of the bureaucracy in charge of war somehow meaningfully changes the reality or meaning of war (spoiler: none).
I wanted to address this though:
> The Department of War had a different function for a different geopolitical outlook that no longer matched reality in the post-WW2 world.
The reality of the post-WW2 world is that those who were most responsible for bringing big messy & complex wars to the world were no longer able to litter their own little subcontinent hanging off the western edge of Asia with as much ordinance as they could manufacture. It was too expensive & they were either too occupied or too preoccupied with the rather expensive operation of trying to maintain their hold on their colonial enterprises. We could afford to pretend that all of our wars were “defensive” because our goal was to make sure they couldn’t pull that shit again & there was only one or two relevant powers at a time we were in direct competition with that was otherwise keeping us busy. Telling the UK & France to fuck off during the Suez Crisis was approximately a phone call.
But whether a war was actually offensive or defensive still came down to what story we wanted to tell ourselves at the end of the day.
tolerance 9 hours ago [-]
I don't think that quote helps your case or detracts from the parent.
Tangentially—and perhaps counterintuitively—it can be taken as an argument in favor of the name change.
The statement also does little to address the ethical concerns at the root of the relationship between industries and the military.
AngryData 7 hours ago [-]
They noted it but I think the important part was before then the Department of War only really existed when congress declared war. Once the war was over 95% of those people went home and back into civilian life. So even if a President wanted to start a war they had limited resources to do so unless Congress declared war and re-expanded or formed a Department of War.
tolerance 7 hours ago [-]
Right. But somewhere in between then and now the powers of the President expanded so that "the actual exercise of military force" in the name of defense ("preserving the freedom and independence of the United States and its allies") involved fighting in wars.
edgyquant 9 hours ago [-]
Defense was an Orwellian spin on the greatest warfighting organization in the history of the world. This quote does nothing to change anything but is some weird appeal to authority when no authority is needed
charlesabarnes 11 hours ago [-]
Why isn't it? The change was clearly made to indicate the posture of the department. Either to US citizens or to powers abroad. Even though its "just" words it indicates intent.
SllX 10 hours ago [-]
It was originally entitled “Department of War” and was changed after World War II for better PR. Whether it is called “Department of War” or “Department of Defense”, it’s still the same organization maintaining the same mission operating under the same budget.
Personally, I view “Department of War” as more honest, because War has always been its business.
openasocket 8 hours ago [-]
This is actually not true! This is a pedantic point but I think is important.
The department of defense is not equivalent to the pre-1947 War Department. The War Department was in charge of just the army. There was a separate Department of the Navy. There was no over-arching department for all of the US military.
Post WW2 the US military was restructured to organize all of the branches (including the newly-formed Department of the Air Force) under a united civilian leadership. This was done in the National Security Act of 1947. The new structure was initially called the National Military Establishment and then renamed to the Department of Defense.
So the department of war name going away wasn’t a PR thing. It was because of military parochialism. If they had called this unified structure the Department of War it would have seemed like the Army was now taking over the other branches! And I promise you today’s Admirals understand that history, even if the secretary of defense doesn’t.
throw0101d 10 hours ago [-]
> Whether it is called “Department of War” or “Department of Defense”, it’s still the same organization maintaining the same mission operating under the same budget.
The mission of the Department of War, which was its name pre-WW2, and the mission of the Department of Defence (post-WW2) is completely different: this is evidenced by the number of military personnel in the two time periods (and the draw-down in personal post-1990, after the Cold War ended):
> it’s still the same organization maintaining the same mission operating under the same budget
WWII demonstrated wars of conquest don't work in the industrial age. When America and its Department of War and Navy were founded, invasion and conquest could still be done profitably. WWII showed that was no longer true–industrial machinery and skilled workers are destroyed by invasion and even base resources quickly become useless when surrounded by people who hate you. (Nuclear weapons sealed the equation.)
The Americans who fought in WWII saw that lesson firsthand and seem to have genuinely pivoted away from wars of conquest and annexation towards something closer to status quo preservation. We, of course, still went to war. But it was generally to help the current leader repel something or the other. The case in point for this is the truly devilish stuff having been shifted to the CIA's clandestine portfolio.
Renaming the DoD the DoW basically says all that clandestine stuff wasn't shameful, it's good. It's a real message being written by idiots who don't know history or war and are mastered by their own insecurities.
SllX 9 hours ago [-]
Whether a war is fought defensively or offensively, war is still war. I don’t have a lot of patience for the romantic notions of men, that changing one word in a bureaucratic ensemble of Departments is going to change meaning of what it means to go to war or the reality of war itself. Only how we actually prosecute our wars & handle the subsequent consequences of war will give them any meaning.
JumpCrisscross 9 hours ago [-]
> Whether a war is fought defensively or offensively, war is still war
Someone being invaded should lay down arms because invasion and fighting an invader are morally equal?
> that changing one word in a bureaucratic ensemble of Departments is going to change meaning of what it means to go to war or the reality of war itself
Department of War celebrates an era when wars of conquest were profitably fought. It explicitly embraces the notion that war is good and accretive to America. Renaming something the Department of War means we're going to have more wars. America being America, they're mostly going to be offensive.
SllX 9 hours ago [-]
> Someone being invaded should lay down arms because invasion and fighting an invader are morally equal?
The morality of a war is not easily encompassed in small words like “war” or “defense”.
> America being America, they're mostly going to be offensive.
America being America, any war fought by us not in direct defense of American people & territory is by definition an offensive war. Doesn’t stop us from calling wars fought elsewhere “defense”.
JumpCrisscross 8 hours ago [-]
> morality of a war is not easily encompassed in small words like “war” or “defense”
It's not. But you're avoiding the question. If you claim all war is morally equal, then a defender is equally at fault as an invader, and we're going to fundamentally disagree. If you don't believe that, I'm still curious about your position.
> America being America, any war fought by us not in direct defense of American people & territory is by definition an offensive war
Agree.
> Doesn’t stop us from calling wars fought elsewhere “defense”
We still call them wars. Nobody calls what we did in Iraq or Vietnam or Korea the defense or whatever. We call them wars.
I think we agree that renaming the DoW the DoD didn't reduce American military adventurism. What I'm saying is returning the DoD to the DoW absolutely presages a difference in attitude that is more dangerous and more violent.
SllX 8 hours ago [-]
> If you claim all war is morally equal
I didn’t make this claim. War is war, but the morality of our actions is found not in the act of war, but in the why & how of war.
> We still call them wars. Nobody calls what we did in Iraq or Vietnam or Korea the defense or whatever. We call them wars.
Of course we still call them wars. That was not mutually exclusive with politicians justifying it as “defense”. The mantra is defense abroad rather than defense at home, which is a fine enough mantra if you’re selling a war, but I’m not going to nod along & pretend that it’s not actually offense.
> What I'm saying is returning the DoD to the DoW absolutely presages a difference in attitude that is more dangerous and more violent.
The election of more dangerous & more violent politicians presaged that. Turns out America is more dangerous. As to whether we’re more violent? TBD. The President’s unwillingness to actually put boots on the ground abroad despite trying to talk a dangerous game makes this part less objectively clear to me.
shagmin 7 hours ago [-]
Part of the point in the US having a huge military is to avoid war in the first place, it's a form of defensive posturing.
edgyquant 9 hours ago [-]
World War 2 did not demonstrate that, the USSR (and arguably the US) proved the exact opposite by conquering entire continents. What kind of narrative even is this?
JumpCrisscross 9 hours ago [-]
> the USSR (and arguably the US) proved the exact opposite by conquering entire continents
WWII demonstrated it. America learned the lesson sort of, for a while. The USSR, arguably, did not. At the end of the day, the security infrastructure the USSR had to deploy to subdue its conquered poopulations (and its nonsense with China, to say nothing of its own idiocy in Afghanistan) pretty directly lead to the economic uncompetitiveness vis-à-vis its adversaries.
And no, America wasn't running around annexing foreign territory. Where we were trying to do so indirectly, through puppets, one, that's categorically different from annexation-aimed conquest, and two, we did it clandestinely and–I'd argue–in a way that in the long term was almost never accretive to American power and interests.
Before WWII, the Mexican-American war, the German unification, the Prussian unification, Japan's conquest of Manchuria, Japan's invasion of Taiwan and the Russo-Japanese wars were each pretty definitively winning moves for the instigators.
Since WWII, the only wars of conquest that may have yielded the victor more than it cost was arguably Israel's six-day war and, for a short time, Russia's conquest of Crimea. Both subsequently undid those gains by trying to double down. (I'm not counting India's invsasion of Bangladesh as a war of conquest since nothing was annexed. Same for America and the USSR intervening everywhere without annexing.)
People keep attempting wars of conquest, or to work clandestinely and find a loophole. Nobody has. It doesn't work. It absolutely used to. Acknowledging that might help prevent empire-ending mistakes like Iraq and Iraq 2 Trump in Iran Boogaloo.
goatlover 9 hours ago [-]
Big difference between defense of a country and starting wars. Canada and Switzerland don't start wars but they still have a military in case they ever need it to protect from an aggressor. Like Russia or the Canadian neighbor to the south who has a president making social media posts with the US flag over all of North America. Which suits the name, "Department of War".
antonymoose 8 hours ago [-]
Both Bush and Obama used the Department of “Defense” to launch regime change “operations” across the MENA. If anything, Trump is guilty of saying the quiet part out loud, AKA “Truth in Advertising.” If anything, he got this one right. We’re a militant state.
tastyface 9 hours ago [-]
Well, except the administration changed the name and then immediately engaged in wars of blatant aggression with Venezuela and Iran.
What we choose to call things *is* important.
SllX 8 hours ago [-]
You’re right, what we choose to call things is important, but our calls should better reflect reality.
Like Venezuela: we definitely did things that a neutral observer could fairly & reasonably call Acts of War by conducting an aggressive military operation that ended in the result of us arresting Maduro. Yet the net result is that we did not actually fight a war in Venezuela, and we are still not fighting a war in Venezuela. So if a tinpot socialist dictator gets arrested in a forest & none of the invaders/law enforcement are left to shoot at when the smoke clears, was it really a war? Apparently not.
As to Iran, the only moral differences I see between our operations in Iran conducted by the US Department of War & our operations in Iraq conducted by the US Department of Defense 23 years earlier, is that 23 years earlier, the politicians actually bothered to try & make a convincing case to the American public first & the the invasion of Iraq was executed more competently. I definitely wouldn’t call either operation “defense”.
shimman 10 hours ago [-]
Because the US has mostly been an imperial force of evil among the world, not a net benefit outsides of the elites that benefit from the deliberate colonialism + death.
War Is a Racket is almost a 100 years old and it's about one man's feelings towards his manipulation in the banana wars [1] + middle east interventions. You can go back every century and see what damage colonialism has done both abroad and at home.
I just don’t want to copy & paste the same answer in multiple places.
10 hours ago [-]
Centigonal 8 hours ago [-]
I think this is secondary to a widespread loss of confidence in our nation's political and foreign policy apparatus to do what's right for the average American. "Working for the military is evil" descends from a post-Vietnam, post-Iraq, post-Snowden worldview that presupposes that the military will leverage technology it has access to in unexpected, undesirable, and broadly harmful ways.
XorNot 8 hours ago [-]
Well that and it's indicative of the broader American social dysfunction that they are chronically incapable of holding themselves or their (still surprisingly democratic) government accountable and so everything is always about "the corporations".
Every problem is meant to be solved by what corporations do or do not do.
pixl97 8 hours ago [-]
I mean, when you start believing greed is good it's all downhill from there.
throw0101d 10 hours ago [-]
> * Or is the argument that it's only US companies which shouldn't, because the* US is uniquely evil?
What are the (current?) foreign policy goals of the country in question? If it leans more defensive, like Japan, that's different than a country that may have a more interventionist bent.
Also what product(s) is the company developing or offering (field hospital equipment or are we talking about Palantir)?
sebzim4500 9 hours ago [-]
What if it's interventionist but those interventions are clearly good? Think US in the 90s.
protocolture 7 hours ago [-]
>Serious question: should companies not participate in contracts from their country's defense department? Or is the argument that it's only US companies which shouldn't, because the US is uniquely evil?
Depends if they do evil shit or not. The USA does a lot of evil shit. If you wanted to not be evil, you wouldn't help people to do evil shit.
istjohn 11 hours ago [-]
If your country's defense department is conducting itself ethically, and the contracts are for equipment or technology that is not inherently ethically fraught (like autonymous weapon systems), then one might consider that acceptable if you aren't a pacifist. An enormous amount of US military technology and weapons have been recently used to perpetuate a genocide, so the US is certainly an outlier in the global landscape.
chanakya 6 hours ago [-]
Among the list of countries which supply arms to Israel are UK, Canada, Germany, Australia, Netherlands, India, Italy, Taiwan, Romania and a few others. The US is not unique in this by any means.
2OEH8eoCRo0 11 hours ago [-]
Work for defense but elect better leaders. Your leaders decide where and when the military is used.
esalman 11 hours ago [-]
Hard to elect better leaders when you do not have multiple billions of dollars to spend.
XorNot 9 hours ago [-]
Oh, do they have some mechanism by which they just took people's votes away entirely?
Avicebron 9 hours ago [-]
Pretty much, corporate lobbying, corporate donations, superpacs, the list is pretty much endless. Little timmy's vote in rural nebraska isn't moving the needle. Maybe he can complain at his local town meeting about the datacenter they're building in his back yard. Or put a sign in his yard to show he's on the blue team or the red team but practically it doesn't matter.
As an aside, I emailed my congressman (blue) about one of the proposals (bipartisan) to essentially force device age verification and his office emailed me back well after it passed with a few reguritared sentences about protecting the children. I bet if I called a lobbyist in Maryland and had him meet the congressman for coffee to express my view he might be more willing to listen.
chanakya 6 hours ago [-]
There was more corporate and billionaire backing and donations to the Democrats than the Republicans. Also, studies have shown that the power of money in elections is overestimated. Money tends to go for the viable candidate, it's not the money which makes them viable.
7 hours ago [-]
7 hours ago [-]
umeshunni 11 hours ago [-]
There's a class of people in the West who have forgotten that wars happen and that defense is necessary. American especially benefit from two oceans separating them from the rest of the world and having never seen a war except on CNN.
Some of them, esp in central/eastern Europe, were rudely woken up in 2022 when Russian tanks rolle into a neighboring country. Others still have their heads buried in the sand and will not wake up even when Chinese robots march in Taipei in a few years.
chanakya 6 hours ago [-]
Exactly. Decades of pax americana has lulled people into a view that the rest of the world are pacifists who will get along just fine but for the US.
hkchad 13 hours ago [-]
Transforming? You guys do know where google got it's start right? SV has been DOD funded from the start.
mandevil 9 hours ago [-]
This long pre-dates Google.
Microprocessors as a whole were a result of the US military industrial complex. The first large scale use of integrated circuits was the Minuteman II ballistic missile guidance system. The lineage that leads to the modern smartphone starts with Texas Instruments winning the contract for that military guidance system (first as a subcontractor to North American, then fully on their own).
Similarly, the first production use of a charge-coupled device for digital camera technology was the KH-11 spy satellite.
jazzyjackson 8 hours ago [-]
The ENIAC press demo, essentially the first public demo of an “electromechanical brain”, just ran parabolas to estimate artillery trajectory. (It also involved the genius addition of ping pong balls secured to each lamp on the machine, so as to be more legible to the reporters and photographers)
jeffbee 12 hours ago [-]
Tech workers on the way to work: I wonder why this tram stop is called "Lockheed-Martin". I guess we'll never know!
bluegatty 8 hours ago [-]
Because there are defence contractors in every major city.
jeffbee 8 hours ago [-]
Oh really you are out here telling us that working on defense is not a unique sin of the software industry?
bluegatty 7 hours ago [-]
Yes, and very obviously so. I'm here to debunk such ridiculous and obviously untrue conspiratorial things.
There isn't a shred of reality to support the notion that software is materially different than any other industry, and 'The Silicon Valley' starts with 'Silicon' - and then went through 'Hardware' - it wasn't software dominated until the 1990s.
I would go so far to say as Software is less involved than hardware.
Defence has almost always been a 'physical' industry and most defence contracts are for gadgets, not software.
Obviously - there's a ton of 'intelligence' going on that is software oriented, but they're generally not massive contracts, but bespoke stuff.
The NSA is not spending $100B on single procurement. They're relatively small.
(FYI - one middle sized defence program is bigger than CIA/FBI/NSA budgets)
kgen 8 hours ago [-]
Real sv tech workers don't ride the VTA :P
seizethecheese 9 hours ago [-]
Huh, I learned something new but also your post is misleading. According to what I read after reading your comment:
- google founders’ research was funded from federal grants.
- federal grant was administered by National Science Foundation (not DoD) with funding from DARPA (yes DoD) and NASA (not DoD?).
Google itself was fully funded by private investors, only the research was *partially DoD funded.
trescenzi 12 hours ago [-]
Yea how is this comment so low. There was a brief period of time where the military industry complex wasn’t deeply entwined but that period is very much over.
strangattractor 12 hours ago [-]
Post WWII built SV - it has always been the case.
alterom 12 hours ago [-]
Wait till they find out where the Internet came from.
Or what drove the demand for silicon in the first place.
As for "transforming", that happened some time during the Vietnam war when the laser-guided bomb was introduced. Been a smooth sailing ever since.
js8 11 hours ago [-]
I originally read the headline as "Silicon Valley Is Transforming Military-Industrial Complex".
bluegatty 8 hours ago [-]
It's fair to bring up the issue, but that is a deeply misrepresentative framing.
Funding some key technologies is not the same as 'funding the valley'.
Military related funding is probably less than a few % of the financing behind startups.
There are a few strategic foundations, but it's not a defence industry.
bobbane 11 hours ago [-]
As a person whose graduate work in GOFAI in the early 1980's was funded by DARPA, I am somewhat conflicted by choices like this.
In 2015, I told my son I would disown him if he went to work for Facebook. Several years later, he told me he was doing a contracting gig for Meta, on a project that would "definitely never see the light of day". Given the amount of engineering time that was squandered in the early 2020's, I chose to believe him.
slowin 13 hours ago [-]
It's up to us, as tech workers to push back against this. I quit my job at Microsoft due to their complicity with Israeli war crimes and oppression (and certainly the US government was involved too). It's tough to leave a high paying job, but I feel good about it every single day. We don't have to be cogs in the MIC machine and we don't have to build systems that terrorize people.
leonidasrup 12 hours ago [-]
Microsoft has been participating in PRISM program (SIGAD US-984XN) since 2007.
There are allegation that Microsoft changed Skype architecture (after buying Skype for $8.5 billion) to make wiretapping easier.
"
In July last year, nine months after Microsoft bought Skype, the NSA boasted that a new capability had tripled the amount of Skype video calls being collected through Prism;
"
We should celebrate when people make ethical choices.
Not berate them because they didn't make it sooner.
EA-3167 11 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
JoshTriplett 11 hours ago [-]
If you shame people for acting now rather than earlier, you discourage them from acting at all.
Sometimes people aren't in a position to be secure enough to act. Sometimes different issues are more effective at resonating enough to break through previously cached unconsidered patterns of thought. Sometimes people don't know all the things that are going on, and act once they've learned about them. Whatever the reason, if your reaction is "took you long enough" rather than "welcome", you discourage people from acting.
Don't punish the behavior you want to see more of.
I’m not interested in shaming people or crediting them for superficial performances. The entire premise is ridiculous, as if the companies people are working for are somehow ethical.
You’re making money from venture capitalists and tech firms, MS, Meta, X, Google, etc… which of them is any better than MS? They’re all awful in different ways.
JoshTriplett 11 hours ago [-]
You are dismissing people as superficial or performative when they are taking action according to their ethics. Have you considered the possibility that people are not, in fact, performing, and are just trying to be ethical?
I can't tell if your actual goal here is to be dismissive of the entire concept of people caring about ethics, or if you don't think that quitting is an effective means of acting in concert with those ethics. If it's the latter, then I'd suggest that it's a start, not everyone is in the position to do even that much, and some people who do so will be able to go further. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good, particularly if someone is taking a step in the right direction.
alpha_squared 11 hours ago [-]
A lesson I've had to learn is that, for some people, ethics is a paycheck. It can be incomprehensible to imagine someone acting against their own paycheck as a result.
mitxela 10 hours ago [-]
Capitalistic evolution selects for that people, so their numbers only increase.
EA-3167 11 hours ago [-]
You don’t have to repeat yourself, I understood your point originally, I simply disagree with both your premise and conclusions. I don’t have the same respect for people who preach “anti-Zionism” at every turn online, I’m not that gullible.
5upplied_demand 10 hours ago [-]
If quitting a job is "performative" what would you consider a "non-performative" act?
Ironically, you are doing your own preaching in your comments. It could even be described as "performative."
EA-3167 10 hours ago [-]
Oh God I realized the issue here, I didn't make myself clear:
Talking about doing something on a 4 month old account is not the same as doing it. I give credit to people for doing things, not claiming to do them in an anonymous forum they just joined. Cynical? Perhaps, but maybe if people were just a bit more cynical about believing any text on the internet just because it feels better to believe it, we'd be better off.
slowin 9 hours ago [-]
You don't have to believe me, but I made my account after I quit. I wanted to be able to talk about what happened without doxxing myself and my old account was tied to my actual work.
JoshTriplett 6 hours ago [-]
That's fair; when all is said and done, more is said than done. That is much, much better than the more common thing that leads to comments like yours; I think some comments and downvotes come from the assumption that your comments come from a place of "I don't like it when people make decisions based on their ethics, because I don't like their ethics". That is, unfortunately, very common.
sebzim4500 10 hours ago [-]
It's clearly not a superficial performance if you actually quit a high paying job.
ricksunny 11 hours ago [-]
Good on you. I left my post-university defense job after a year and a half. Of all career decisions, that's one I don't regret, and rather the regret I harbor was for joining in the first place (albeit did so under a combination of limited information & naivete).
Well it's good you just left on your own accord, basically you fired yourself rather than wasting their time having to do it. There's an interesting dynamic with this in that the Chinese and Indian (and other foreign born/first gen immigrant) workers at big tech companies don't care about these things at all. There are some very intense ideological dynamics within big tech companies among the employee base but I always found it interesting that the foreign born employees did not care at all, they were just there to work.
trhway 11 hours ago [-]
whatever the motherland's ideology/propaganda had been telling, the first gen gets to firsthand witness/experience that it were lies. After that you become were critical/unbelieving to whatever propaganda and ideology, even if it is the right ideology and propaganda this time, is being fed to you.
bromourd 9 hours ago [-]
> even if it is the right ideology and propaganda this time,
this is legit hilarious.
As a first-gen immigrant I can say that what I witness is that yes, a lot of what I've been told about America were lies. But a quite few things actually weren't. I made a choice where to live so I accept the whole package, and on the balance it's a much better deal than pretty much anywhere else.
antonvs 12 hours ago [-]
> the foreign born employees did not care at all, they were just there to work.
There's survivor bias in that observation. There are plenty of "foreign born employees" who choose not to work for companies that explicitly violate their values by choice. (I phrase it that way because of the whole "no ethical consumption under capitalism" issue.) I know because I'm one, and I have friends with the same mindset.
monideas 11 hours ago [-]
I mean non-Europeans/non-Anglosphere
buellerbueller 10 hours ago [-]
So your argument is a racialist one?
monideas 8 hours ago [-]
Europeans have a pretty different culture than East and Southeast Asians. Generally in my experience Russians and Eastern Europeans are very apolitical, focused just on work and similar to East/Southeast Asians in that regard in terms of professional conduct.
If you want to get into parsing out who is “white” or not you can do that but it’s really something better done on 4chan and also not even sensible as a concept or relevant to this discussion.
PorciiVorbesc 12 hours ago [-]
>There's an interesting dynamic with this in that the Chinese and Indian (and other foreign born/first gen immigrant) workers at big tech companies don't care about these things at all.
Why do you think the elite business owning class wants to replace you with desperate and malleable foreign workers from countries where morals and human rights are suggestions at best?
The other thing is, you built your nest egg taking Microsoft's "blood money" for a few years giving you the luxury to quit on a dime, but there's a lot of people on the planet or even in your country, wishing to do as you did.
You can't just pull the ladder after you and expect everyone make the same sacrifice as you except without their own nest egg. If you want to start a moral and egalitarian society then what about a higher tax on the wealth of tech bros, to finance the lives of the non-tech bros to accept humane jobs?
monideas 12 hours ago [-]
Because they're intelligent, work hard and have strong family ties. They put their energy into their families instead of trying to derive meaning from political activism. But these things dissipate within a few generations of living in the US, hence the need for more and more foreign workers.
antonvs 12 hours ago [-]
> They put their energy into their families instead of trying to derive meaning from political activism.
It's useful that psychopaths always tell on themselves like this.
monideas 12 hours ago [-]
Putting energy into your family is generally the opposite of psychopathy, it's actually a good thing to do. On the other hand you can actually find a lot of psychopaths who find their outlet in political activism
"The Dark Triad traits predict authoritarian political correctness and alt-right attitudes"
The psychopathic tell is dismissing political activism as "trying to derive meaning." It's right up there with the idea that moral or ethical claims are "performative".
These kinds of claims generally come from people who don't feel any moral or ethical impulses. These people are most commonly malignant narcissists and psychopaths. A great example is Elon Musk who described empathy as a "bug".
Morality is a fundamental feature for most humans. The people who make the kinds of claims above constitute a small, single digit percentage of the population. They tend to have an outsize influence though, because they exploit the trust of others to rise to positions of power, where their lack of compunction can be an advantage.
People like Trump, Musk, and Thiel are canonical examples of this. Eventually, when their actions make things bad enough for everyone else, people tend to take action. We may be approaching a time like that. You acknowledged this yourself in earlier comments.
matheusmoreira 10 hours ago [-]
There are many things I consider to be deeply immoral that I nevertheless cannot change. My political activism is merely performative.
Power and wealth are already so entrenched I think we have little chance of effecting any lasting change without violence. So either I become a literal terrorist, or I enable Daniel Plainview mode. It seems to me like the rational move is to try to get rich by any means necessary so I can fuck off to somewhere isolated and never have to deal with the rotten society I hate ever again.
monideas 11 hours ago [-]
Most of what people call morality is just their own feelings or interest or some attempt to protect their ego, it's basically just an expression of narcissism.
The cultivation of a sense of actual morality requires a lot of study and humility and quieting your own feelings and ego. This is very difficult and most people can't do it, ideally in a healthy society the elites you have are people who can and do do this.
Ironically Thiel in particular is precisely one of these people. He's very thoughtful and well read and displays a lot of humility in his speech and conduct.
singleshot_ 10 hours ago [-]
People with morals are narcissists and Peter Thiel is humble.
Well, that’s a point of view, I guess.
monideas 10 hours ago [-]
People with morals are moral. People often confuse morality with just their own feelings, interests, ego. If you don't understand this then likely you are not actually moral.
10 hours ago [-]
shimman 11 hours ago [-]
This is a very childlike understanding of how people engage with politics across the US. Fitting that immigrant tech workers wouldn't understand the culture then cry foul when rightfully called out on it.
Maybe DHH was right.
monideas 10 hours ago [-]
This is exactly how most people engage with politics across the US (and all over the world) and I am not an immigrant tech worker. Both of my grandfathers served in WW2 in the US military.
shimman 10 hours ago [-]
Don't really believe you, looking at past comments you don't really come across as someone raised in America while also being completely unaware of what local politics looks like or how US citizens engage with politics.
Not too mention the completely sociopathic comments made above.
Are you trying to fool me or Stephen Miller here?
monideas 9 hours ago [-]
I was born and raised and lived in America up until my mid 30s. I am just very clearpilled or perhaps blackpilled on the nature of things in the US. I am completely aware of how people engage in politics and I’ve lived all around the US, things just get worse and worse. Fortunately I am no longer subject to the insanity and I don’t really care anymore.
antonvs 11 hours ago [-]
> Most of what people call morality is just their own feelings or interest or some attempt to protect their ego, it's basically just an expression of narcissism.
Oh good grief. Hot take of the month right there. All you're doing is demonstrating how uninformed you are on the subject. Can you name anything you've ever read about this?
> [Thiel] displays a lot of humility in his speech and conduct.
You can't be serious. Where in this does the talk of the "Antichrist" fit?
What kind of humility are you talking about? Because if it means intellectual modesty, willingness to acknowledge one's own fallibility, or reluctance to cast one's own political/intellectual beliefs as uniquely farsighted, Thiel's public record is not consist with "displaying a lot of humility."
monideas 11 hours ago [-]
The reason you call Thiel immoral or psychopathic is because he's wealthy and this evokes jealousy in you, it's a threat to your ego and your own sense of self worth.
It's really that simple and this is a good illustration of what I'm talking about.
buellerbueller 10 hours ago [-]
No, Thiel is immoral because he is funding a panopticon and wants to get rid of democracy in favor of authoritarianism. It's really that simple, and your blindness to his cartoonish level of villainy is a good illustration of what everyone who is pushing back against you is talking about.
monideas 8 hours ago [-]
People who say they are against panopticons and for democracy are universally fine with subjecting their political enemies to panopticons and only for democracy when their side wins.
esalman 10 hours ago [-]
Quotes from the man himself:
On Democracy and Freedom: "I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible"
On Competition: "Competition is for losers"
On Technology and Control: "One of the things I like about technology is that when technology is unregulated, you can change the world without getting approval from other people. At its best, it's not subject to democratic control and not subject to the majority, which I think is often hostile to change"
On Reputation: "I'd rather be seen as evil than incompetent"
monideas 9 hours ago [-]
Just because these ideas are heterodox relative to prevailing norms which makes you uncomfortable, it doesn’t make them immoral ideas.
I wouldn’t say these statements even have moral judgments in them either way. For example, this doesn’t even ascribe moral weight to “freedom” or “democracy” just that they are at odds.
This is why these types of things are better left to elite minded people who are capable of these types of discussions. You’re just responding essentially to the valence of these terms.
“Democracy = good feeling, freedom = good feeling, how can good feeling != good feeling?” This is the level at which you’re engaging.
esalman 4 hours ago [-]
If these were mere ideas we wouldn't have a problem. On a given day anyone can come up with worse ideas.
What makes us separate from animals and thrive as a civilization is that majority of us do not act on our intrusive ideas without consequences.
Thiel is an exception because he is acting on thsea ideas, causing harm to real innocent people, without any regard for consequences.
anonymars 8 hours ago [-]
> these types of things are better left to elite minded people who are capable of these types of discussions
In a world of eye-poppingly hot takes, I commend your ability to somehow raise the bar
Bonus points for dismissing things like "you can change the world without getting approval from other people" (you could hardly ask for a more substantive topic to debate in moral philosophy than one's freedom to affect other people) as mere valence-level "how can good feeling != good feeling" sophistry
jubalfh 10 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
PorciiVorbesc 12 hours ago [-]
>Because they're intelligent, work hard and have strong family ties.
So when imported workers are having strong conservative values prioritizing their family over progressive values = good, but when western locals are having strong conservative values prioritizing their family over progressive values = bad?
>But these things dissipate within a few generations of living in the US
Have you heard of the amish? Or the ultra orthodox jews? Or other such groups with strong conservative values. You underestimate the stubbornness of certain cultures to adopt american/western progressive liberal values. They can stay conservative longer than you can stay alive.
And also, given their significantly higher birth rates of their culture and religion, they'll also be able to outvote liberals who have catastrophically low birth rates, within a few generations. What do you think happens then with liberals and their values in a democracy?
>hence the need for more and more foreign workers.
Even when the locals are struggling to find jobs?
monideas 12 hours ago [-]
The elites in the West don't actually have an understanding of what they're doing. If your point is that it would be better if they promoted traditional values and invested in the native population, yes it would be, but that requires a whole metaphysical framework which elites in the West don't have.
> Have you heard of the amish? Or the ultra orthodox jews?
Yes and Western elites do not think like the Amish or like Orthodox Jews, they do not spend their time studying the Bible or care about that at all (they don't even study the Western classics).
> Even when the locals are struggling to find jobs?
They don't care about this, again this requires a whole metaphysical framework, at most they care about their own families and you'd probably be surprised at how dysfunctional these people are in their own private lives
__MatrixMan__ 7 hours ago [-]
Which is why leaving is not enough. If we want to be safe we need to actively interfere.
dgellow 13 hours ago [-]
Thank you, both for following your values and for sharing it publicly
1234letshaveatw 12 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
slowin 12 hours ago [-]
I just want to say that I don't think I was brave at all. I actually feel a lot of shame because I knew that Microsoft wasn't compatible with my values when I joined. I didn't know the exact details that came out later, but I took a very high paying job for a company that I thought at best didn't align with my values. I had to live with a growing cognitive dissonance about the choices I made. I also didn't exit tech fully, I still work for a company that seems ethical and nice, but has VCs that are probably involved in the MIC post we're discussing.
I've debated exiting tech fully but I do have people to support. I think that's kind of an excuse though. I also tell myself that anywhere I go, if you follow the money far enough up the chain, it will be unethical. That's also kind of an excuse.
I'm not brave, but I do feel trapped. I think we need some sort of reckoning as an industry, a country and possibly a planet. I don't know what will happen but I'm trying to balance living in 2026 with making choices that I can live with in the future.
SoftTalker 10 hours ago [-]
So, did you stay long enough to accumulate FU money and then quit?
Because that's a bit easier than quitting or turning down a job when you need the income.
Since you say you're still working and have people to support I am guessing it was more the latter, but maybe the "very high paying job" gave you the runway needed to make that choice? I quit a high paying software job under different circumstances. The company wasn't doing anything unethical (that I know of) but I was just sick of how they managed people and projects. It had reached the point where I sat in my car for 15 minutes (or longer) every morning just trying to summon the willpower to get out and walk into the office. So I finally just quit. But it was easier as I had stashed away enough money to give me time to find a new job without having to jump on the first offer. I ended up freelancing a bit to extend the runway even longer.
slowin 10 hours ago [-]
I don't have FU money but I'm financially in a good spot, so definitely privileged compared to someone who would be out on the street with a few missed paychecks.
Congrats on getting out of a toxic situation btw, that's hard to do too if you're getting paid well. In a way I was similar, every morning started to be a real struggle for me.
monideas 12 hours ago [-]
Well there's definitely a global reckoning happening, people are not having children in developed countries due to very serious social ills (every developed country except for Israel of course).
dgellow 10 hours ago [-]
Diminishing birth rates doesn’t actually correlate with what you call socials ills. The strongest correlation I’m aware of is with the education level. It’s a worldwide phenomenon, not something that only impacts developed countries
monideas 9 hours ago [-]
If people are not having children then the society is dying. That indicates there are social ills, by definition.
“Education level” is probably also an indication of social ills and a social ill itself given that most people are not suited for higher education. Most “higher education” in the US is abject slop and partying for 4 years. College used to be restricted to the aristocracy and particularly promising students.
If you take a young person who is already not of an elite quality and subject them to slop and partying, campus meal plans, basically unproductive day care for 4 years that also fills their heads with nonsense that is obviously going to do a lot of damage to them, especially young women who are especially impressionable.
It’s also worth noting that while Israel does have universities, as a societal intuition they function very differently. Young people serve in the army first for 2-3 years or they do university with a deferral and then serve in specialized roles in the army based on their degree. It’s not slop and partying for 4 years starting at 18. And it’s normal to not go to university at all.
Fraterkes 11 hours ago [-]
Social ills whose minds are pure machinery! Social ills whose blood is running money! Social ills whose fingers are ten armies!
buellerbueller 12 hours ago [-]
Did you realize that sharing personal attacks is, in fact, optional?
georgeburdell 12 hours ago [-]
Do you support the status quo of millions of H1Bs? Those people I doubt can or will take such a principled stance, making collective action by tech workers impossible.
__MatrixMan__ 7 hours ago [-]
This is why H1B needs to be a relatively fast path to citizenship. Without that, the bosses will continue to behave badly.
klausa 1 hours ago [-]
Why do people always assume that people on H1Bs _want_ a citizenship?
There's tons of things you can do to make people on visas more empowered to push back at work without them become citizens; and in many cases cutting ties to their original countries.
tombert 12 hours ago [-]
Wouldn't this be an argument for people who can take principled stances to do so?
cyanydeez 11 hours ago [-]
that they'll be replaced by H1Bs?
wartywhoa23 12 hours ago [-]
That's exactly why they are imported in such huge numbers.
dietr1ch 11 hours ago [-]
You can comfortably go back to your home country. It might feel that you wasted your time in the US, but it was hard to foresee Trump ruining the US so fast and there's little to do about it as an immigrant.
Dig1t 10 hours ago [-]
Absolutely, there’s a reason as well why the VC’s funding these defense tech startups are so pro H1B. It guarantees them a compliant workforce who can’t easily quit, ask for higher wages, or complain about things like genocide.
nater5000 12 hours ago [-]
You know, if enough tech workers at Microsoft felt strongly about these ethical issues, they could influence Microsoft's decisions internally which is probably the most effective position to be in to do so.
But all well, glad you can feel good about yourself by leaving so that someone with less concern about these ethical issues can fill the void and assert their own influence on the company instead.
JohnMakin 12 hours ago [-]
Have you ever worked at a large company? This is simply not how things are done. Speaking up about something like this is almost a guaranteed fast track to getting laid off in the next round of reduction in force, and if you do somehow have the pull individually or collectively to make a meaningful difference here, coordinating all those levers in a way that satisfies the board/shareholders and effects meaningful change is pretty much an impossibility. And we're dealing with nation states who are going to have their own levers to push (and internally too). For an individual contributor or hell, someone who's not on the board/C suite, quitting and letting management know they're losing talent because of their stance on certain issues is probably the most effective thing someone can do in that spot.
Following your line of thinking, why don't you join microsoft and effect such change? I guess it's easier to leave a moralizing snarky comment and feel good about yourself.
reverius42 11 hours ago [-]
There's a solution to this problem, and that solution is workers unionizing.
JumpCrisscross 9 hours ago [-]
> if enough tech workers at Microsoft felt strongly about these ethical issues, they could influence Microsoft's decisions internally
This isn't how companies work or are structured. If you have the CEO's ear, potentially. If you don't, the only ethical thing to do is to quit. (I don't personally have an issue with the military per se. I have other issues with several tech companies which would make taking a job there something I couldn't do.)
asdff 9 hours ago [-]
If something bad is going on and you don't agree and you quit, that is just absolving you of your guilt. I mean think two steps ahead. Is M$ going to go "gee, Jimbo quit, maybe the project is just no good and we ought to stop." Hell no. They will fill your position with someone who will be thankful for the opportunity. And I think ultimately you know it, but a bit of cognitive dissonance makes you think you did something.
Why are so many people supposedly principled but not militant about it? A principled militant would use their role in m$ as an opportunity to be an anchor to the efficiency of the operation that they do not agree with. They will fight to keep their position such that a more effective less moral person might not take it over and get the project moving.
One has to wonder how many projects in the world are in such a holding pattern, protected by people who had the foresight to think two steps ahead, attempting to keep their body holding that door shut as they possibly can.
JumpCrisscross 9 hours ago [-]
> They will fill your position with someone who will be thankful for the opportunity
But you won't be doing it. Companies are run top-down. If you're within the organisation you're advancing the goals of those at the top. You aren't going to change that by complaining internally (unless you have a direct line to the CEO).
It's fine to disagree with something and just not contribute to it. If you want to be principled and militant, staying is hypocritical. In that case, you should whistleblow.
> attempting to keep their body holding that door shut as they possibly can
Unless you're conducting sabotage, which within this context seems like a gross overreaction, you aren't holding any door shut. (Again, assuming you don't have a line to the CEO.)
asdff 1 hours ago [-]
>Unless you're conducting sabotage
I am saying you should conduct sabotage if you feel the work is immoral and against your principles to such an extent. It would be immoral not to in a lot of ways, saying you'd rather wash your hands of it and pretend it weren't happening than to try and think of what you might do about it.
slowin 8 hours ago [-]
I think you do have a point but, at least for me, I found it wasn't so cut and dry. Nothing I was working on related to the ethical issues I had. I did find other like-minded people in Microsoft and that felt like we were at least creating a pocket of people who cared, yet none of us had direct power to change anything. There were people who protested directly and got fired for it. I had to balance my IRL responsibilities outside of work with my ability to change things and my need for employment in the future. I made compromises across the board and like I mention up thread, I don't think I was brave at all. In fact I think I did the bare minimum I could, but at least I'm no longer complicit.
There are people far braver than me, but they were indeed fired. There are probably people covertly fighting the system from within but I didn't work close enough to any of these projects to know them.
So ideally people would do what you say and/or just be very open about their objections, but it's also worth recognizing the risk of industry blacklisting and how things like employer provided health insurance raise the stakes.
vjvjvjvjghv 4 hours ago [-]
"You know, if enough tech workers at Microsoft felt strongly about these ethical issues, they could influence Microsoft's decisions internally which is probably the most effective position to be in to do so."
The workers can't even influence things like office setup and floor plans. They certainly can't influence business decision to any meaningful degree.
11 hours ago [-]
xyzelement 5 hours ago [-]
A few days ago I recall you taking the position that Israel should not exist and that anyone who disagree is a Zionist (correct definition) that you would not associate with.
The implication of your idea is what? The desire for a destruction of a state of 10 million people and another exhile of the Jews? That's the stance you deem moral - or am inferring unfairly (I hope I am actually)
If I am following correctly - you left Microsoft because it doesn't share this genocidal desire? I guess that's consistent and I admire that part, but the underlying perspective is horrifying when you just casually drop it in like that
georgemcbay 10 hours ago [-]
> It's up to us, as tech workers to push back against this.
Sadly in my experience a lot of tech workers just don't even care about the issue, let alone have the courage to push back against it.
I certainly care about it and I have immense respect for your decision, but I've worked with numerous "typical tech/dev" types in the past who later went on to work at places like Shield AI and Anduril with seemingly no compunction about the imperialistic baby-killing aspects of working directly within the military-industrial complex as long as the pay is good.
sadnvkse 12 hours ago [-]
At the risk of being downvoted to oblivion. Threads like this always have lots of people agreeing to people quitting the jobs, not even ones that are directly working on that but even ones just associated with the company at hand.
This is an honest question, how do you decide what is Ok? A job with a company that was involved in this is not Ok, fair enough. What about working with a company that does business with Microsoft or uses Microsoft products? What about owning Microsoft stock and benefiting off it? what about owning Microsoft stock via index funds? Don't mean to be pedantic, but can I use Microsoft products, can I use outlook? can I use an xbox? What are my other realistic options, considering it feels like every industry (not just tech) has big 2-3 realistic options and they all likely have something bad headlines, even if I don't know about it. How much time can I realistically invest digging and fact checking this? I want to be good, but these threads generally leave me feeling judged.
I understand everyone has their moral compass, and they act accordingly. But, I find it hard to not ask myself, if this is not OK, why is this other related thing Ok? how do I decide what's Ok and seems when you ask the question you get downvotes and lots of judgement instead of answers.
NDlurker 12 hours ago [-]
I sold my Microsoft stock when they started talking about military AR headsets. Except the index funds. I'm not sure what to do about that.
t-writescode 12 hours ago [-]
I think you answered it. Everyone has their own moral compass and act accordingly.
The concept of “No Ethical Consumption Under Capitalism” and the moral framing of later seasons of The Good Place give good representations of how.
Ultimately each person makes a mark of what they can and cannot care about, and caring about literally everything is a fast-track to total impotence.
Some situations are (relatively) easy:
* Harry Potter is a relatively isolated (though formative for many)
franchise.
Some situations are way harder.
* Nestle creates a HUGE amount of the food we eat.
* Amazon powers half the internet
* Microsoft is the backbone of a huge number of corporate sites.
Excel makes the world go round.
Unfortunately, this is all up to you, and there are individual scales of “harm to the world by participating” vs “harm to you by abstaining” you have to personally weigh. There is no global answer.
Terr_ 10 hours ago [-]
I think a way-out exists if we accept that "shopping isn't politics" [0]. In a nutshell:
* Bad news: "Voting with your wallet" is actually pretty ineffective. Big companies know it, diversify around it, and they're happy when consumers are neutralized and busy infighting with one-another over consumptive purity, instead of...
* Good news: Organizing politically does work, and is so much more-effective that you can arguably redeem any evil taint on your shopping list by engaging in it.
I agree that these are good questions to be asking and I asked myself many of them. It's a slippery slope imho, and it's easy to convince yourself that what you're doing is ok. At the end of the day, I was getting physically sick and I felt terrible about myself. I mentioned it up thread, I don't think I was brave, I was just forced to confront reality through increasingly difficult to dismiss cognitive dissonance.
FLeXMurphy 13 hours ago [-]
What was your job at Microsoft?
slowin 13 hours ago [-]
I was a 68 working on consumer products, but it was still too much for me. Especially the revelation that Satya worked with the IDF to capture all Palestinian phone conversations and host them on Azure. Every day I woke up to go to work after I found that out, I was sick to my stomach. I eventually couldn't take it any more. I took a pay cut and I'm still in the tech industry working for a startup, and still facing ethical dilemmas (with our investors) but at least I'm not on the front-lines of human rights abuse.
> Especially the revelation that Satya worked with the IDF to capture all Palestinian phone conversations and host them on Azure.
man imagine when you learn about what MS did to all Americans phone conversations, emails, meta data, and basically all digital communications flowing in and out of the US for the NSA.
1234letshaveatw 12 hours ago [-]
TIL an intelligence agency spying on a foreign adversary is human rights abuse. I would be super upset if my country of residence did the same to a neighbor sending rockets my way, would make me sick to my stomach
Fraterkes 12 hours ago [-]
Little slip of the mask here where we seamlessly transition from the perspective of an American working for an American tech company to someone living in a country neighbouring Palestine.
1234letshaveatw 12 hours ago [-]
I would go so far as to call it a privileged perspective
laimewhisps 9 hours ago [-]
I don't think the tens of thousands of innocent people, including a huge number of children, were "privileged". Same with the hundreds of thousands removed from their home during the Nakba ethnic cleansing.
swozey 12 hours ago [-]
He didn't work for Israel, unless he failed to mention that this was not a USA job.
laimewhisps 9 hours ago [-]
Israel is not the US and Palestinian civilians are not a "foreign adversary".
> a neighbor sending rockets my way, would make me sick to my stomach
Israel has been murdering Palestinians since Nakba. They literally eliminated whole cities in Gaza. I think that makes most people in the world sick to their stomach.
antonvs 12 hours ago [-]
> TIL an intelligence agency spying on a foreign adversary is human rights abuse.
It is when it's an intelligence agency for a country that's actively committing genocide.
Answer a question for me: is the lesson you took from the Holocaust something like "if there are going to be holocausts anyway, I want to be the one committing them"?
klipt 9 hours ago [-]
What is the obsession with equating the Holocaust with a war whose death toll is roughly 1/100th of the Holocaust (and that only if you include combatant deaths, which the Holocaust numbers do not?)
tessierashpool 10 hours ago [-]
Judaism != Israel
this conflation is extremely unhelpful
laimewhisps 9 hours ago [-]
I don't see them conflating Zionism and Judaism. 100% of Zionists will reference the Holocaust as one of the justifications for committing genocide against the Palestinians. I think the parent is pointing that out.
tessierashpool 9 hours ago [-]
I disagree, but you could be right. however, if so, then they should have pointed out this distinction themselves.
also, there was conflict between Jewish Palestinians and Muslim Palestinians long before the Holocaust. Zionists were trying to take over in the late days of the Ottoman Empire.
antonvs 5 hours ago [-]
You want me to preemptively fix your basic reading comprehension and logical inference issues?
tessierashpool 12 hours ago [-]
take these theatrics somewhere else, please. you're changing the topic and you're not arguing in good faith.
1234letshaveatw 12 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
FLeXMurphy 13 hours ago [-]
War is a massive racket.
swozey 12 hours ago [-]
I've always figured big tech workers were so compartmentalized that they wouldn't know their new analytic feature was also going to the defense skunks initiative, but that could be conspiratorial thinking.
Guess it doesn't matter now when they have full on defense orgs.
tamimio 10 hours ago [-]
Yeah, relying on someone’s conscious won’t really cut it, greed and current economy will always win. The best solution imo is crowdsourcing, there should be a site or platform that aggregates all the people who works in these companies, categorize the company as grey or black list based on how they are engaged in shady practices. If someone chose to do something morally questionable, it’s up to them, but it’s also transparent that other people get to know that, could be colleagues, employers, or investors. I think it’s fair that whoever is building surveillance systems and tracking to be surveilled, whoever is making weapons to be known, they can be a public danger given that they sell their morals to highest bidder.
davidw 13 hours ago [-]
I feel like tech has lost its way recently. It's a huge, huge field, so there have always been people working on 'bad' things, but IDK, I just don't have the same feeling of optimism about things that I used to and I wish there was some kind of movement bringing that back.
Benjammer 13 hours ago [-]
Recently? Blind (teamblind.com) culture has been taking over tech for like a decade at this point.
lbrito 12 hours ago [-]
I think the parent commenter is referring to a much darker side of tech than just TC-chasing Blind culture, which is pretty harmless in comparison
davidw 10 hours ago [-]
Yeah, people trying to get rich quick are maybe not great, but that's a side of humanity that has always been with us and always will be and you can kind of discount it. I'm talking about the people who run things lurching towards some pretty ugly stuff.
foobiekr 11 hours ago [-]
Blind culture is really just asian cultural values in aggregate form.
lbrito 13 hours ago [-]
I think many people share this feeling. I sure do.
I don't see how it could have gone any other way. The internet became too pervasive, too embedded into too many people's lives, for it to not be weaponized by governments and large companies.
edgyquant 10 hours ago [-]
I don’t know I think it’s really rich to see people who’ve spent a generation hooking the world on dopamine machines and making society full of hate suddenly act like those who work in the MIC are “going to far.”
People working at big tech are complicit in the destruction of communities and the mass depression and suicide of our youth, compared to that wanting your country to have the best military tech is altruistic. Military tech isn’t the problem foreign policy is, you can’t say the same about slop factory builders.
righthand 12 hours ago [-]
You’re doing the right thing! Glad to see this kind of action.
cynicalsecurity 11 hours ago [-]
You spoke to my heart, comrade! Already sending Microsoft my resignation letter so I can join you on skid row fighting against the evil capitalist empire!
shimman 12 hours ago [-]
It should be noted that MSFT is the only tech company that explicitly asked the FBI to surveil about workers that were protesting the Gaza genocide:
Also thank you for your bravery, it is not easy leaving well paid jobs. If you haven't already, I'd start donating some time with your local mutual aid groups. It's very therapeutic to spend time with people that believe similar things while helping others.
username_my1 12 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
MisterTea 12 hours ago [-]
> I really hope the Chinese keep killing everything that gets too big to fail.
Be careful what you wish for. What happens when China gets too big to fail?
lbrito 9 hours ago [-]
Perhaps the world gets a new hegemon that isn't going to spend the next century bombing other countries, installing dictatorships and destroying democracies? Doesn't sound too bad!
MisterTea 7 hours ago [-]
> destroying democracies?
Taiwan would like a word.
lbrito 7 hours ago [-]
I'm not saying China is perfect, but its not unreasonable to entertain the possibility that it might be better than what we've suffered for the last century.
Okay, Taiwan. They are the losing side from the Chinese civil war from over half a century ago and proclaim themselves as the true Chinese government. I'm not saying China has the right to crush them, but the tension is at least understandable.
A comparison with the democracies and lives destroyed by US FP is ridiculous. If Taiwan would like a word with China, well, half the world would like a word with the US.
username_my1 10 hours ago [-]
they don't have to answer for the next quarter, and that's good enough for me.
sippingabonedry 11 hours ago [-]
On the contrary, you will do exactly as you're told if you expect to cash those sweet MSFT paychecks, which I assume you did prior to this epiphany, otherwise you would have returned all the money.
Has this level of obtuseness infected the software industry because this is not the first time I've heard this; usually someone will take a job at a missile factory then later realize "Wait, we build war machines AND sell them to countries I don't like? I had no idea!"
This isn't an employee-owned grocery store where your opinions matter.
You're at the point in Goodfellas where he tells the babysitter "do you understand what we're involved in here?"
cyanydeez 11 hours ago [-]
I bet your opinion of effective altruism is essentially the same as mine: the idea that you can do the worst things in the world to make enough money to solve all the worlds problems is a delusions on par with "prosperity gospel". Humans are just excellent as crafting a philosophy that suits what they've already chosen to do.
pfdietz 12 hours ago [-]
> It's up to us, as tech workers to push back against this.
This appears to me to be unrealistic or performative, except if you mean pushing back in the sense that anyone could, as a voter for example. Boycott of defense work won't work; attempting to claim some special authority in debate won't work either.
datsci_est_2015 12 hours ago [-]
The opposite of performative action is even worse: nihilism or even active support of atrocities.
Too many nihilists in the tech industry with the attitude “if I don’t do it someone else will”, and here we are as a professional class actively making the world an objectively shittier place. The VCs can’t do it without us.
ForHackernews 11 hours ago [-]
This is exactly the problem: Software developers are not a professional class, we are hired goons with no professional organization nor a code of professional ethics.
This is one of my personal bugbears. I keep making this point on HN but devs want to LARP as professionals so they usually don't want to hear that they have more in common with retail workers than they do with carpenters, engineers, or accountants.
It was once a respected technology, and being a mechanic or factory worker was a high-paying job.
Now you have Jiffy Lube and some pimply kid in a polo!
Polofication
Has come for many industries...
And if retail was done the same way as it was 20 years ago, some kid in a polo shirt at Office Depot would be making small business websites using ChatGPT with a 1-hour turn-around time. Pay at the register, with your printer paper.
But Idk, I don't actually agree with you...
I think "software engineering" is such a spectrum now, a wide field of its own, that you can have deep research roles, high art, fashion, accounting, and executive-level work that involve it (which may have nothing to do with "consumer web design") that it's hard to make that blanket statement.
For example, the software engineer working on the computer in a Tesla, or the software on the displays in the BART train, or the banking infrastructure for Bank of America, is a lot more like a "real engineer" than the developer putting a marketing site on Vercel, or an iOS game on the App Store (each of which is vastly different work in their own right).
Everything is software now, every engineer is a software engineer now to some degree.
datsci_est_2015 11 hours ago [-]
Maybe AI will provide an impetus for change. One can only hope.
I’d be willing to pay a few hundred dollars a year to be a part of a professional organization that maintains ethics requirements at this point.
mikestew 10 hours ago [-]
Yeah, and read the responses to your comments: "but, but, 'professional' is a state of mind, not just a piece of paper" and some crap, completely missing the point. Professionals push back with "I'll lose my license/certification/disbarred". Software developers push back with "yes, sir, how high, sir?" or "I quit".
votingisntreal 6 hours ago [-]
If voting was so powerful, couldn't we just vote these problems away? While we're at it, vote away excessively high rent, or vote to prevent companies from hiring immigrant labor instead of locals.
And yet - I never see these items on the ballot! Huh. Why is that?
It seems like rent strikes do work though. And mass denial of anything on your ships after you spent the gas seems to make things pretty annoying for you guys :)
> special authority in debate
All normally functioning humans want to preserve life, liberty, and prosperity worldwide. You guys are the outliers. You're the weird ones with your "chosen" special authority that nobody believes or respects at all.
pfdietz 3 hours ago [-]
I didn't say voting would work, only not ruling that out; I said those other approaches would not work. It's possible nothing works.
Voting does work if enough voters feel strongly about something. Look at the policians scurrying about now that they're seeing the deeply negative polling on data centers.
paimapi 14 hours ago [-]
some interesting tidbits from the longer report:
>Keyhole, a small San Francisco-based company that developed software for creating three-dimensional models of the earth’s surface [was] provided seed funding in 2003 [by a CIA-backed VC firm, In-Q-Tel], and
within two weeks, military and intelligence agencies were reportedly using Keyhole’s software to support the U.S. war in Iraq. The following year, Google acquired Keyhole for an undisclosed sum. It was renamed Google Earth.
[...]
>A distinctive aspect of the shifting military-industrial complex is the crucial role played by venture capital (VC). Some observers have noted that the rapid rise in VC funding for defense tech firms has been spurred by recent global conflicts, particularly the war in Ukraine, and more recently, escalating conflicts in Gaza and other parts of the Middle East. According to this line of reasoning, the widely publicized use of drones, satellite imagery, Starlink, and other technologies are generating interest among investors, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has led to a shifting “ethical red line” that is prompting VC to back defense tech startups.
lbrito 12 hours ago [-]
Keyhole founder John Hanke also went on to found Niantic and develop Pokémon Go.
If there's one thing that should be obvious from the war in Ukraine it is that relying on private companies is a bad idea for certain types of weapons. Specifically, for low margin weapons that you need in volume.
The standout example of this from the Ukraine war is artillery shells.
We should maybe have a state owned corporation for making artillery shells in America, because there does not seem to be enough profit to incentivize private corporations.
krisoft 8 hours ago [-]
> If there's one thing that should be obvious from the war in Ukraine it is that relying on private companies is a bad idea for certain types of weapons.
I’m not following how that is a lesson from Ukraine. Their drones and missiles are made by private companies.
The true lesson i think is that in times of peace (or in times of wars of choice) procurement is dominated by excercises, lab tests, and design reviews. When you are doing that it is hard to tell apart the “good enough” from the “over engineered”. To every choice you can dream up a “counter”. Some real or imagined response or tactic by your enemy which would negate your system. And then your engineers have to design some counter-counter, or harden the system somehow. This leads to complexity which leads to high cost per individual weapon.
In contrast Ukraine is fighting for their existence. If they want to know if a new weapon is good enough, they send it to the front and try it. If it hurts the enemy more than it costs great. Order more. If it stops being effective, try something else. They are not picking the weapon system which will serve them for the next decade. They are picking what is available and effective today.
Different incentives, different opportunities which lead to different choices and different outcimes. But the difference is not if they are using private companies or not.
Cheap money gone, investor money being burnet in bubble, only thing long term is government money, but gov money still not enough to get US defense primes to make stuff at scale and not SaaS the shit out of hardware (see lockmart f35). I doubt SV will be any different. My feeling is any $$$ US spends on soft MIC stuff, PRC going to acquire anyway and have their industrial base utilize more efficiently. If US tech end up build AGIing, and when US gov as it how to beat China expecting 5d chess answer, AGI going to conclude crippled US industrial base simply can't - it and defect.
sizzzzlerz 8 hours ago [-]
Hardly transforming. SV has been involved with military contracts since post-war in 1946 due solely to the efforts of Professor Fredrick Terman. Starting first with Stanford, where he taught, he started associating the engineering labs with defense programs. This soon followed by establishing Stanford Research Park and bringing on companies who soon started getting them. The man is a legend and is often referred to as the Father of Silicon Valley.
There were also established companies like Lockheed, Hughes, and Gruman and smaller start-up companies founded in the 50s, 60s, and 70s. I started working for one of these, ESL, in 1978 and worked at several others, ArgoSystems and Applied Signal Technologies, up until I retired in 2023. All were mostly involved in working with the Intel community on SIGINT and ELINT systems with other work building SIGINT into aircraft for the Services. During its heyday, late 60s to the 90s, it was nothing to change to a new company every year if you liked as long as you held a golden ticket, a special access clearance. The executive staffs of these companies were closely tied into the Government up to the White House. In fact, the founder of my first company, Dr. William Perry, served as deputy directory of defense under Carter as well as secretary of defense under Clinton.
All this mostly ended when the Cold War collapsed the Soviets. Lockheed is a shell of what it once was as it moved most of its manufacturing elsewhere, keeping only its missiles in Sunnyvale. A lot of the small companies either closed or were bought by the big boys. TRW bought ESL and was, itself bought by Grumann who then partnered with Northrup, Boeing bought ArgoSystems, and Raytheon bought my last company, Applied Signal Technologies.
So, basically, SV has been deeply invested in defense for 81 years.
scorxn 3 hours ago [-]
Why was the headline altered?
dredmorbius 5 hours ago [-]
All that's old is new again.
Steve Blanks' "Secret History of Silicon Valley" details the emergence of that tech hub beginning with WWII and the "radiation lab", which helped develop radar.
Those of us who can remember the 1980s / early 1990s, prior to the defence build-down following the end of the Cold War might recall quite a few defence-related establishments in and around Silicon Valley, in its original scope centred on Santa Clara County and the Santa Clara - Palo Alto region.
HPsquared 13 hours ago [-]
Silicon Valley was practically built by the military industrial complex.
13 hours ago [-]
pjmorris 13 hours ago [-]
True. 'The Secret History of Silicon Valley', Steve Blank, is essential viewing, IMO.
0xWTF 12 hours ago [-]
Which was written as a call to action. The Valley should remember how trade is kept free, especially all those electronics moving Eastward across the Pacific. Worth reading Mahan if you're confused.
liveoneggs 13 hours ago [-]
hoisted by its own petard!
aghilmort 13 hours ago [-]
heh upvoted, came here to note same; the continuous net gain of defense R&D
yawnxyz 13 hours ago [-]
I've been reading Chip War and it seems like original funding for chip design was for the Space Race and for guided missiles - so basically most of Silicon Valley was started / funded by military all along
asdff 9 hours ago [-]
All sorts of research. Clinical trial efficacy testing has its statistical origins in military radar target verification.
hangonhn 13 hours ago [-]
Before chips it was radio and radars. The Klystron was invented at Stanford. Lockheed Martin Space and Raytheon have locations in Silicon Valley.
laimewhisps 13 hours ago [-]
And ENIAC and ARPANET... what's interesting is how much of this is not capitalism but instead state funded and directed. I fear we're also seeing SOTA AI captured by the state. I am grateful for Chinese open models and a multi-polar world, especially given the egregious ethical violations the US has perpetrated very consistently since its formation.
simonwsimonw 13 hours ago [-]
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vjvjvjvjghv 11 hours ago [-]
I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, maybe they will be more efficient than the usual defense contractors whose main goal is to charge as many hours as possible. Similar to SpaceX who have accelerated innovation while also lowering prices for launches.
On the other hand, it looks like Silicon Valley has run out of ideas for consumer stuff and are now looking to merge with the government to extract tax dollars while building the perfect surveillance state.
The way it looks right now, we are probably more going in the direction of Silicon Valley becoming a part the military industrial complex while also providing plenty of money making opportunities for people who are connected to Washington DC.
JumpCrisscross 9 hours ago [-]
> it looks like Silicon Valley has run out of ideas for consumer stuff
The U.S. military spends about $800bn a year [1]. That's up about $300bn from ten years ago.
American consumers spend about $21 trillion a month [2].
If you look at VC, most of it still goes to B2C and B2B. DefenseTech is a headline because it's novel.
the ideal shape may be a null pointer stored in an 8-bit processor which is then placed in the sewer
9 hours ago [-]
gsky 5 hours ago [-]
Killing is big business after all
dayofthedaleks 8 hours ago [-]
[0] “Palo Alto” - Malcolm Harris, 2023
georgeecollins 13 hours ago [-]
Silicon Valley started with companies doing defense contracting. Like many here, I disagree with a lot of current policies of the US. But I don't want the US to be weak or vulnerable. Tech is our strength. Silicon Valley should be transforming the way we do a lot of things, hopefully for the better.
2847aH 13 hours ago [-]
The game is always the same. Josh Kushner leads a funding round, then someone in the Trump environment boosts the company:
It happened with Cursor, where Musk completely overpaid (what will he get in return? a new kind of circular deal?)
It happened with Anduril (topic of this submission). Kushner led a round and days after Anduril got a huge Pentagon contract:
> Kushner leads a funding round, then someone in the Trump environment boosts the company
It's been an open secret for over a year that a cheque from Thrive buys tariff exemptions.
qrashg 11 hours ago [-]
There are now multiple reputation laundering agencies on this site who flag wrongthink or sink submissions.
jongjong 6 hours ago [-]
The most unethical aspect IMO isn't what they're building but the taxpayer money which those big companies are getting. These are essentially handouts.
Taxes are not paid voluntarily but coerced out of citizens under the threat of force. So when they hand out such large contracts, the government is taking from all taxpayers by force and giving it selectively to a few chosen people who happen to own shares of those companies.
Many of those shareholders aren't even US citizens!
They will transform the world. Why? They don't know shit about security nor prioritize it. Hardware will be captured, hardware will be reversed engineered, hacked and duplicated faster than anytime in history. They will essentially innovate and do the hard R&D for the rest of the world. Yup, transformation indeed. That is of course unless they make security top priority and they won't!
ranger207 5 hours ago [-]
As others noted, Silicon Valley was formed by the MIC. But there was a period there for a while where defense contracting was uncool so no VCs funded it. Then in the wake of Trump winning in 2016 all of the politically conservative VCs (who generally hadn't been advertising their political views) got to reveal that they loved the military and funded anyone with the vaguest idea of a military-focused product. Meanwhile from the other side, US military procurement has always been obsessed with corporate America, and had long tried to court startups in vain. When finally there were startups for them to throw money at, those startups quickly became massive regardless of if their products were actually worth anything (cf Anduril)
tsunamifury 10 hours ago [-]
SV was literally founded as a part of national defense and the military industrial complex.
tamimio 11 hours ago [-]
>published April 17, 2024
Now that spending is definitely x10 more than 2023, at least.
bpodgursky 13 hours ago [-]
I mean... the market was handed to the prime defense contractors on a silver platter for decades, and they utterly failed to deliver cost-effective or even working solutions.
It's not some 4d chess play by VCs, they just finally realized the market was dominated by the most disruptable enterprises on earth. Good riddance.
generuso 12 hours ago [-]
It was not just the VCs. There were also influential people in Pentagon who saw the inefficiency of the prime defense contractors, especially after having seen what SpaceX was able to do.
One of the consequences of this was the meteoric rise of the young Will Roper [1], who in a span of a few years went from a theoretical physicist to being in charge of the Air Force procurement program, and then tried to facilitate the access of startups to defense contracts, through AFWERX and "Defense Pitch Days".
Whether this worked or not is debatable, but the itch to change things was there. One example of a startup which was an early beneficiary of this top-down attention is Ursa Major [2], a rocket engine company. Unless one looks at them in the context of these military programs, their existence would seem quite puzzling.
We'll still have plenty of utter failures. I was shocked hearing about the IVAS program when it was announced, it was such an obvious loser. I guess it's better to have burned 2billion rather than the full amount but whoever green lit that nonsense should spend the rest of their career peeling potatoes.
vjvjvjvjghv 11 hours ago [-]
The question is whether SV will do better than the prime contractors or just become another one.
tessierashpool 12 hours ago [-]
I hate to say it, but this is mostly true.
reason I hate to say it is because companies like Palantir and Anduril are clearly pursuing political objectives, including subverting governance by creating tools which set the frame and context that governance happens in.
if Palantir and Anduril were observing the same strict separation between political and military matters, and the same strict separation between domestic and foreign activity, that the military itself observes, then the only thing happening here would be the Valley disrupting a poorly-run industry. I have no issue with that. that is what the Valley's supposed to do.
but that's not what's happening.
It's not some 4d chess play by VCs -- this part is just provably false. they're using military contracting as a Trojan horse for some truly crazy shit.
chasd00 10 hours ago [-]
> Palantir and Anduril are clearly pursuing political objectives
How so? I honestly haven't heard this before. I like Anduril's tech and have some friends who work there. I would be excited to work at Anduril but my skills have diverged away from what they do and so I wouldn't make a very good hire.
tessierashpool 9 hours ago [-]
you might wonder, reading this, how a person could say "I honestly haven't heard this before" about such a widely-discussed topic, in a thread about that topic, when the OP is a paper about a very closely related topic. it is, under the circumstances, a surprising assertion.
the purpose of propaganda is not to convince the ignorant or skeptical, but to exhaust and/or discredit opponents.
chasd00 8 hours ago [-]
What political objectives? The only objective I see with those two companies is making money.
tessierashpool 7 hours ago [-]
are you being serious? honest question. I assumed you were BSing.
they literally published a manifesto. did you not know about that?
I guess google them, dude. read the paper you're posting on a thread about. good luck
edit: on reflection, I still think he's BSing
Manuel_D 10 hours ago [-]
> companies like Palantir and Anduril are clearly pursuing political objectives, including subverting governance by creating tools which set the frame and context that governance happens in.
Can you elaborate on what you mean by this? How are these companies subverting governance?
mentalgear 13 hours ago [-]
also the new war-profiteers are profiting from a war a certain family member started.
> NEW YORK (AP) — Among dozens of companies competing for Pentagon contracts to supply attack drones, one stands out.
> Powerus is flush with cash and ballooning in size as it buys up rivals and has one other advantage: It is partly owned by President Donald Trump’s two oldest sons.
> The latest Trump venture is hoping to win some of the $1.1 billion set aside by the Pentagon to build up a U.S. manufacturing base for armed drones now that the Trump administration put a ban on importing them from China.
Evidently they want to deplete the military's reserves in order to sell them the refills.
ElProlactin 12 hours ago [-]
[dead]
qrashg 11 hours ago [-]
There are now multiple reputation laundering agencies on this site who flag wrongthink or sink submissions.
tessierashpool 12 hours ago [-]
also the new war-profiteers are profiting from a war a certain family member started
this is true but it's also kind of falling into a trap.
first, the weird endless hunger that man has for any and all spotlights draws attention away from the policy issues and rampant criminality, which are a lot more important than his personality problems.
second, he was causing chaos overseas with military in his first administration too. Silicon Valley wasn't all-in on that.
third, Anduril, Palantir, et al represent a consistent philosophy of how the Valley takes over the military-industrial complex. they come from the same financial backer, Thiel, who also put a lot of money behind Trump. so we got a paper here about the real issue, and if we're shifting our attention from that to this clown who kind of just works for Thiel (among other, even more dubious possible bosses), the risk is that the conversation transitions from substance to gossip.
swozey 12 hours ago [-]
I was around FEDRAMP stuff awhile back and there was a huge push to get "warroom" verbiage out of the tech field everywhere but there, like when visiting your normal silicon valley office we had to be careful about speech but you drive on base and let rip, since you had to interact daily with mil.
Wild seeing it come back completely unabated out of Luckeys mouth of all people. Missiles are kewl, bro!
mmooss 6 hours ago [-]
(2024)
And the actual title doesn't make it a question at all; they assume it's happening and ask how:
"How Big Tech and Silicon Valley are Transforming the Military-Industrial Complex"
I understand that HN auto-removes the leading 'How', but adding the question mark changes the meaning significantly.
contingencies 7 hours ago [-]
Inter-national wars are fought with technology, so this makes sense. However, I believe from an optimist perspective that ideas of global citizenship and environmental awareness / macro humanism are already in the post-formative, snowballing stages of disrupting nationalism, and without an anachronistic national affinity amongst the citizenry, countries are objectively becoming obsolete.
Wireless broadcast media, PSTN, air travel, international post, international financial networks, global supply chains, the internet have all contributed to this, but AI will drive it home: AI governance in particular. Once one nation adopts it, the benefits will be obvious and expand rapidly. Few yet realize how transformative the changes will be.
bossyTeacher 10 hours ago [-]
"Making the world a better place." the Silicon Valley mantra that every dev out there and in here drank like a drug. People like Graham arguably have played a part in the transformation mentioned in the article. And many of us here have been directly or indirectly participants too.
8 hours ago [-]
pstuart 12 hours ago [-]
The irony here is that the origins of Silicon Valley have deep ties to the military as well, and it was the successful commercialization of those technologies that turned it more into a consumer / b2b space.
But yeah, the tech bro elite are now tech fascists.
I think there's a real question: would the world be a better place had Fairchild and peers e.g. refused to build ICs for missile systems (including the minuteman), for example? Would the same tech have been developed with purely civilian funding? Would missiles built with other tech have caused some awful disaster?
To the extent that the internet descended from ARPANET, and the internet is now both how we access a range of information and also hospitals get shut down by remote attackers, would the world have been better if researchers refused to build it b/c it was from military funding and motivations?
In retrospect it does seem like in the 1950s-70s the military was willing to fund some stuff that was actually not especially close to applications of killing people. I don't know that the kinds of things listed in this research are likely to lead to broad other applications in the future like microchips and networks did. But neither do I think it's straight forward to just condemn this stuff as purely evil and say we shouldn't do it.
There's no "seem" about it, what you're saying is true, and it was because of changes in federal law. [0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Mansfield#Mansfield_Amend...
At the same time, when I helped with research in a cognitive psychology lab in school (much closer to the present than to that law), our PI said our funding came partly from a grant from the US Navy. We worked on Bayesian models of human learning and reasoning -- so "direct or apparent relationship to specific military function" has perhaps at times been interpreted somewhat loosely?
I'd speculate the Navy had perhaps more discretion over how it spent its research funding. For example, they funded polywell fusion research for years.
That being said, I feel like a lot of the web-based tech, device tech etc came out of the liberal/leftist university environments, i.e. BSD unix, CERN, linux ish type projects. Berkeley/Stanford/MIT etc. So the culture of a lot of people who were rank and file and enthusiastic about this stuff from had this mindset.
Silicon, GPS, the Internet, nuclear power, most of rocketry and space etc., I think most would believe was worthwhile.
Building cruise missiles, or 'Civilian Monitoring Tech' - that's a different question.
I don't think that DARPA, the internet, or NASA etc. count as 'Military Industrial Complex', but Anduril of course does, and Palantir pretty much does as well.
That's 'new' for the Silicon Valley at least, it has mostly not been building 'defence tech' but rather general tech that has key defence use.
But of course the space race proceeded from work on missiles. ICMBs are rockets that go high and fast and then happen to complete less than one full orbit.
And my understanding is that early ICs were for missiles because it was acceptable for the ICs to be very expensive in exchange for them being very light and small. Only a context that was optimizing for a tiny package (b/c extra weight also required more fuel) and was relatively cost insensitive would justify them at first. The point is building weapons sometimes _does_ turn into tech that can be used more generally. Does that justify the risk?
And yes, some weapons systems are just ... 'weapons related' ... and the dual-use comes later, so it's more nuanced. Some of it more obvious (radar), than others (cruise missiles).
But I think it's important to characterize these things.
They are completely different things.
'Tech' that can be used by the military', and 'weapons' are not 'arbitrary labels'.
HN is the only place in the world where someone would try to conflate the two to make a point, I don't think it's reasonable.
Given that, consider consulting with another actual human being, or even your favourite AI to help ground yourself a bit in those ideas.
Much of the modern pushback seems to come from the new blood companies. Microsoft, Apple, Google, businesses that deliberately blurred the line to obscure which side they stand on. These companies all collude with the US government to some extent, but their desire to hide that cooperation creates a rift in what they say and do. You could have boycott Google and Apple technology to protect Americans[0] from warrantless surveillance. You could have boycott Starlink to thwart Starshield[1] and future bids on the Golden Dome. Information on all of this behavior is classified because it is obviously upsetting and creates the potential for dissent. But hiding the behavior also creates a dam-burst effect once you tell people the truth, including employees. The Snowden files were a legitimate surprise to most people working in FAANG at the time.
It's upsetting to think that American NOBUS abilities[2] hang like a Sword of Damocles over the so-called Free World. When you import American technology, you also import the surveillance and opinions of the American government. It has developed in a new and insidious way that doesn't fully resemble what we saw in WWII or the Cold War, unique to the information age.
[0] https://www.wyden.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/wyden_smartphone_...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starshield
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NOBUS
They are very large tech companies which will invariably have some relationship with every industry.
Apple had some early contracts in defence, Google's early research grands were National Science Foundation, but that's not defence companies.
'Boeing' blurs the lines definitely - they are 35% defence contractor mostly civilian airline agency and didn't really start as military.
It's important to understand that every company of a certain scale exists a bit differently than others, and in some industries, like aviation, will be considered 'strategic' and they're going to work with 'national interests' in a lot of ways, that may involved some kind of defence contracting.
For Microsoft, the first and largest contract mentioned in the table just below the fold on that page is for an IVAS system. Microsoft had been basing this off their HoloLens system but was a distinct product (they weren't just sending over the normal HoloLens and expecting that they were gonna work in the field). This contract was then transitioned to Anduril. But just saying of Microsoft that "they are not defence contractors in any way" is hard to reconcile with the facts of having a large contract to _develop a new product_ for the military ... even if it turned out to never have been used.
https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-military/2026/07/08/...
https://www.army.mil/article/290020/ivas_a_solution_to_a_tri...
I understand that technically, it's a project that can be used for defence, but if you say that MS is a 'defence contractor' - then you also have to say:
MS is an 'Investment Bank' - almost 50% of MSFT's Operations are financial. Their financial opts are bigger that most investment banks.
MS is a 'Healthcare Company'
MS is a 'Gaming Company'
MS is an 'Entertainment Company'
MS is XXX, YYY and ZZZ etc.
better: "MS is a Tech Conglomerate that sells Windows (OS), Office, Outlook, Sales and Ops SaaS, and has Bing some other services, with XBox as major subdivision. They have a major financial footprint, and also have research activities in other sectors."
Palantir is partially Defence contractor even if a minority of their business is defence, it's a strategic business line for them, and it's material to their existence.
No, it's a project commissioned by and built for defense needs. It's not that someone at the DoD saw how to creatively re-use an existing civilian project.
Is there room for ethics in military research and procurement? Absolutely. An AI company might say, "We will help you choose the best targets when under time pressure, but we won't provide an oracle that lets you justify indiscriminate killing of civilians." An explosives factory might say, "We'll build precision missile warheads for you, but not white phosphorous or cluster munitions, because these kill civilians indiscriminately.". People working for companies that do defence work have a moral obligation to observe how their labour is used and refuse to give it if the results are unethical. It's no different from soldiers having a moral duty to refuse illegal orders.
To answer your question, I'd say that participating in the defence industry can be justifiable if you remain guided by ethics, and unjustifiable if you abandon them for money. e.g. If you're currently doing anything to help develop the IDF's Lavender or "Where's Daddy" programs, it's pretty hard to argue that you have a functioning moral compass.
It's also completely fine to say, "I don't want to deal with moral grey zones" and refuse to work for companies that do military work. You might make less money, but you'll almost certainly sleep easier.
Idk, there's something unethical in outsourcing ethical grey areas to other people while reaping the benefits of the peace (or war far from your home) it brings.
Predatory monsters exist. A wealthy society that demilitarizes learns the lesson Europe is now. (If Ukraine didn't have a domestic defence industry, it wouldn't have been able to fight the fight it has been able to.) Put another way, you'll sleep easier, but it's a false security, even if it's one that may last for the rest of your own life.
I'd also note that you can absolutely contribute to parts of the military where you actions are highly unlikely to directly result in anyone dying. Air-defence radars and munitions, for example, particulalry those designed to take out missiles and ballistics.
It really depends on who's using them and what they're used to defend.
As a category, I think it's safe to say that defensive weapons tend to be more morally defensible than purely-offensive ones. Of course the circumstances matter. But that doesn't mean we can't make generalisations.
As for "someone else will do it if i don't".... (aka your argument). That's true of a lot of things, and I sleep great at night choosing not to steal from people even though I know others will choose to steal. It turns out I don't have the ability to choose their actions for them, only my own.
That's not the argument. It's more like "if I don't do it then I better hope somebody else will, otherwise my whole country will inevitably become subservient to a despotic regime". Basically, the question is whether strict pacifism is a tenable national policy in the real world. All of modern and ancient history up to this point seems to suggest it is not.
Enjoy.
There are a whole lot of decisions that need to be made to get from "strict pacifism" to total war, so I don't know why we need to flatten this into a binary.
Nobody reasonable would. Russia started a war of choice. That's the opposite of pacifism.
Strict pacifism would be Ukraine refusing to fight after being invaded. Someone saying all war in all circumtances is evil and should not be contributed to, directly or indirectly, is sort of endorsing that view. The folks calling for nuclear disarmament, or no first use policy, are pretty far away from that.
Yes, that was my point. The person I replied to stated a nation taking actions off the table "will inevitably become subservient to a despotic regime". As a response, I pointed to a country that many would call "a despotic regime" who seems to operate with at least some consideration towards the ethics of war even if that is due to external pressure.
You might put your life savings on the street in front of your house for a day or two without someone stealing it, but sooner or later someone unscrupulous is likely to come along based on the evidence we have
Weapons can only act as a deterrent if your opponent believes you're willing to use them and there are some weapons that no one is willing to use. And if no one is willing to use them, it's probably a waste to develop them in the first place.
I never made that argument. My original comment was refuting the idea that taking a singular option off the table is equivalent to pacifism. Ukraine didn't feel the need to develop a nuclear program, that doesn't make them pacifists.
Also, it's questionable whether Russia's nuclear arsenal would even work reliably. The USA and other nuclear powers spend enormous amounts every year just on nuclear weapons maintenance and testing. Those munitions can't just be stored in a warehouse indefinitely like rifle cartridges and pulled out when needed; they require periodic remanufacturing in order to remain operational at all. Russia is a relatively poor and highly corrupt country so I suspect many of their nukes wouldn't deliver the rated yield if used today. From their perspective an attempted strike resulting in a fizzle would be even worse: all of the diplomatic disadvantages for no military gain.
Nuking Kyiv, Odessa and Lviv would probably force Ukraine to surrender.
> use of WMDs would invite economic sanctions from key neutral trading partners such as India
This is the real constraint. There is still the credible threat of being economically isolated by America, Europe, China and India. (Neither China nor India wants the normalisation of nuclear bombardment normalised. They both have border disputes with nuclear-armed neighbours.)
Or if we want to take nuclear options off the table because Russia values infrastructure, they aren't attacking population centers with bioweapons.
>This is the real constraint. There is still the credible threat of being economically isolated by America, Europe, China and India. (Neither China nor India wants the normalisation of nuclear bombardment normalised. They both have border disputes with nuclear-armed neighbours.)
Ethics enforced by external pressure are still ethics in action. The comment I replied to was basically arguing that we have to do this unethical thing because if we don't our enemies will. Well here is an example of our ostensibly unethical enemy not doing something because of ethical pressure. So why would this pressure work for nuclear weapons and not this new military tech?
Putin doesn't care about infrastructure in Kyiv. He wants the natural gas and resources in the east. A nuked rump Ukraine isn't a threat to his power.
> why would this pressure work for nuclear weapons and not this new military tech?
Because the normalisation of nuclear weapons has global consequences in a way conventional warfare does not. The most problematic aspects of Trump's Iran war for India and China are that it raises oil prices.
And you don't think that has any chance of applying to some hypothetical yet to be developed future military tech?
More than likely Russia is ostracized to the point that other countries will treat it with active hostility.
And the most likely possibility is Putin is assassinated and the government overthrown due to internal opposition.
The same thing that would happen to America if Trump acts on his musings about tactically nuking Iran.
Genuinely want to read more about this. Do you have a good source?
I'd always assumed cluster munitions had no legitimate use.
They limit the ability of an attacker to mass vast forces in an area for a brute-force assault. Soviet doctrine was notorious for this kind of attack, so cluster munitions were developed as a solution. Russia still uses this kind of assault, so cluster munitions still work against their forces. Other militaries (e.g. the US) use doctrines that render cluster munitions ineffective.
Just about every weapon invented was developed to address a specific scenario where it is highly effective at shaping the battlefield. Some have become obsolete because those scenarios don’t occur in modern warfare, but there is still a lot of diversity in the practice of warfare.
The current UA/RU front is a 30km deep kill zone crossed by FPV craft (and discarded optic fibre cables) in which the largest effective group size might be four or so soldiers. Tanks are all but useless as sitting ducks.
Reuters made a surprisingly good infographic / interactive feature on this this past July:
<https://www.reuters.com/graphics/UKRAINE-CRISIS/KILL-ZONE/zn...>
The modern version of this allows the same soldiers to command heavier, better weaponry via remote control that is asymmetric to their logistical footprint, enabling them to shape a battle space that would not have been possible historically.
Of course these things ebb and flow. I imagine the solution to this problem is something like autonomous drone swarms with advanced sensors that can systematically sterilize an area of any hidden soft targets. Sparsity would not be much of a defense in this case.
https://static.rusi.org/lessons-learned-ukraine-offensive-20...
https://www.csis.org/analysis/seizing-initiative-ukraine-wag...
The least ethical people I know seem to sleep the soundest. We need to study if there is a correlation there.
Then your new target selection approach is used specifically to target a school, and you just made the weapon more accurate.
You dont get to build shit for the military AND determine what its used for.
Sure, you save some lives. Then the military realizes they can apply violence far more liberally than they ever could before. Subsequent conflicts result in a whole lot more death for the losing side. Maybe a lot more "militar-aged men" end up as cannon fodder for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Or... do those lives not count? Depends on your definition of "evil," I guess: I'm using the Christian one.
Tell me more about lives, Christianity, and war.
People should ask the same question in the likes of Russia, Israel, North Korea, Iran. But in most countries, defense actually means that.
I have no problem if the US navy wants to tool around shipping lanes for the good of global trade. I take issue with everything else.
In the past couple of years, the US has implicitly used the strength of its military to threaten the sovereignty of Greenland, Panama, Canada, Mexico, and Cuba. Abducted a foreign head of state. Started a war. Bombed drug runners and fishermen.
The death toll for the Iraq war is heavily contested, but the numbers are somewhere in the region of 200k to one million dead. All under the guise of WMDs.
Like any large organization, there is a mixture of good and bad outcomes.
But yeah thats only if they wanted to try and spend the money to support a nuclear program. As they sat they were unreliable at best case.
A good chunk of the human population has never known a "Pax Americana" and regions such as East Asia are clearly better off due to declining American hegemony.
Also if the other is Iran, lol at “stopped supporting respective belligerents” as if the US itself was not one of the major belligerents.
also, arguably, the half-century of creating, establishing, funding, and build-up of NATO largely supersedes the point that Trump cut spending there temporarily. that all came from American coffers and the current conflict there is a long hangover from that
This is a baseless, American-centric notion I've heard frequently in New York and San Francisco.
If America pulled support from Israel, it would find partners in other countries. India and China are at the top of the list–they want Israeli weapons technology and intelligence. Russia would probably play too. And depending on the kind of mess we leave Iran in, some Gulf countries may also find a way to come to a nuclear technology transfer deal with Tel Aviv.
India-Israel trade has been growing since diplomatic relations between the nations were established in 1992 (including since the war in Gaza) [1]. In 2025 they signed a bilateral investment agreement. And Israel is a growing defence provider to India.
I know less about the China relationship, but it remains a major trading partner with Isrel [2]. (I do not believe there are significant military relations. China has recently been calling what Israel is doing in Gaza a genocide, and I'll note they started doing this a year ago, before Trump bungled into Iran, though for obvious reasons Beijing isn't dwelling on the question.)
Russia is currently embedded with Iran, but nothing about that is geostrategic. Israel and the USSR once had close relations. Putin needs weapons for Ukraine. An Israel searching desperately for partners would be useful to Moscow.
Note, too, that both China and India have governments in power that explicitly reject the rights of their domestic Muslim populations.
[1] https://www.indembassyisrael.gov.in/pages?id=nel5a&subid=7ax...
[2] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/5/22/which-countries-tra...
I don't personally think it's likely relations would improve on this and I consider myself much better read on the goings-on of the PRC than most
For the other nation states you discussed, I'm far from an expert on them so you very well might be right. But I doubt it'll be straightforward if the US were to cease aid. I also seriously doubt Israel would be so aggressively expansionist without the 300 billion or so they've received from the US. An un-invaded Iraq in combination with Iran would have put its existence at major jeopardy
Yup. China is also shipping arms precursors (and very likely intelligence) to Iran. China and Israel aren't friends. But Israel pivoting from the U.S. absolutely brings it back to the table. China isn't, like, sanctioning Israeli firms in general, or even Israeli firms in the West Bank.
> doubt it'll be straightforward or that Israel would be so aggressively expansionist without the 300 billion or so they've received from the US
My personal hypothesis is the aid turned Israel into a monster. Removing the aid, however, won't change that. It just means more broad-based munitions.
Israel and Gaza have natural gas. The world has shown it will tolerate a lot of nonsense from an energy supplier, particularly a nuclear-armed one.
They used to be aligned with the USSR and we did a lot of work to peel them off into our own domain. They also have their own military industrial complex and are perfectly capable of manufacturing the weapons they need domestically.
They also have nukes.
If anything, removal of our support probably leads to the use of dumber less targeted weapons like carpet bombing or good ole white phosphorus that they’ve already demonstrated use of in past conflicts.
If we were giving them 30+% of their gdp then yea, dropping that probably stops the conflict. 2% is just a budget reshuffle.
I’m not claiming it would be easy but it’s definitely not an amount that losing would end the war overnight, which was the original claim I responded to
Are you saying 10's of thousands of bombs US supplied to level the entire cities and countryside to the ground is preferable to IL having to get this elsewhere, because why exactly? What does precision have to do with it?
You can scroll around here to see what US did by providing all those mostly free bombs:
https://earth.google.com/web/@31.31022959,34.24130746,30.076...
(south is the only thing google is not misrepresenting on the aerial imagery)
This is preferable to carpet bombing, yeah? How?
What? I’m not even responding to the rest if this is how you open up.
Carpet bombing is so low tech I can’t imagine a country in the modern age that couldn’t create the technology even if they couldn’t afford actually deploying it. It’s a matter of logistics and having enough bombs.
It’s literally just dropping a fuck ton of dumb bombs on an area to “carpet” it, unless we’re talking past each other and you were referring to something else.
Yeah, it's artillery bombardment by more-modern means. The "modern" bit being planes.
Hell Hamas themselves under heavy sanctions have shown they have the technology, they merely lack the surfeit of resources to implement it.
This isn’t me arguing with you, I’m just flabbergasted that someone could say with a straight face that Israel doesn’t have the technology to carpet bomb.
I want us to decrease or end our alliance with Israel for political reasons related to how their government has interacted with ours(the US) but I am constantly surprised by these people who honestly think that Israel wouldn’t collapse the moment US support ended, like they didn’t fight several existential wars and win previous to our support.
Israel + US vs Iran is a majorish conflict but the US is directly a belligerent in that one.
> also, arguably, the half-century of creating, establishing, funding, and build-up of NATO largely supersedes the point that Trump cut spending there temporarily. that all came from American coffers and the current conflict there is a long hangover from that
Glossing over the Russian propaganda points accusing a defensive pact as a reason for starting a war, that still means that the conflict “ could be over tomorrow” is incorrect even if the US ended all support today.
The latter was Trump's innovation so that he can pretend he is upholding some foreign policy campaign promise without materially changing anything.
I’ll accept Starlink as US support despite their back and forth on supporting Russia, because they are a large corporation requiring on government assent the same way Wildberries is for Russia.
The indirect one you’ll have to sell me on as support. We’re selling shit, and like to make money. Someone buying our shit to give to Ukraine doesn’t count as support or antagonistic to me but as a neutral position.
But prospects for a positive outcome where probably always slim.
IMO, it is particularly dumb when there is a full scale conventional war happening in Ukraine.
But specifically yes america has been directly attacked 20 times in the last 40 some odd years... so averaging once every other year.
No, it was not. Tom Nichols, professor emiritus of national-security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College:
> It is almost impossible to overstate the inanity of this move. The United States has a Department of Defense for a reason. It was called the “War” Department until 1947, when the dictates of a new and more dangerous world required the creation of a much larger military organization than any in American history. Harry Truman and the American leaders who destroyed the Axis, and who now were facing the Soviet empire, realized that national security had become a larger undertaking than the previous American tradition of moving, as needed, between discrete conditions of “war” and “peace.”
> These leaders understood that America could no longer afford the isolationist luxury of militarizing itself during times of threat and then making soldiers train with wooden sticks[1] when the storm clouds passed. Now, they knew, the security of the country would be a daily undertaking, a matter of ongoing national defense, in which the actual exercise of military force would be only part of preserving the freedom and independence of the United States and its allies.
> In 1949, after two years that included a massive reorganization of the U.S. military (and the establishment of an air force), Truman christened the new United States Department of Defense, which consolidated elements of the previous War and Navy Departments. […]
* https://archive.is/https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive...
The Department of War had a different function for a different geopolitical outlook that no longer matched reality in the post-WW2 world.
I wanted to address this though:
> The Department of War had a different function for a different geopolitical outlook that no longer matched reality in the post-WW2 world.
The reality of the post-WW2 world is that those who were most responsible for bringing big messy & complex wars to the world were no longer able to litter their own little subcontinent hanging off the western edge of Asia with as much ordinance as they could manufacture. It was too expensive & they were either too occupied or too preoccupied with the rather expensive operation of trying to maintain their hold on their colonial enterprises. We could afford to pretend that all of our wars were “defensive” because our goal was to make sure they couldn’t pull that shit again & there was only one or two relevant powers at a time we were in direct competition with that was otherwise keeping us busy. Telling the UK & France to fuck off during the Suez Crisis was approximately a phone call.
But whether a war was actually offensive or defensive still came down to what story we wanted to tell ourselves at the end of the day.
The statement also does little to address the ethical concerns at the root of the relationship between industries and the military.
Personally, I view “Department of War” as more honest, because War has always been its business.
The department of defense is not equivalent to the pre-1947 War Department. The War Department was in charge of just the army. There was a separate Department of the Navy. There was no over-arching department for all of the US military.
Post WW2 the US military was restructured to organize all of the branches (including the newly-formed Department of the Air Force) under a united civilian leadership. This was done in the National Security Act of 1947. The new structure was initially called the National Military Establishment and then renamed to the Department of Defense.
So the department of war name going away wasn’t a PR thing. It was because of military parochialism. If they had called this unified structure the Department of War it would have seemed like the Army was now taking over the other branches! And I promise you today’s Admirals understand that history, even if the secretary of defense doesn’t.
The mission of the Department of War, which was its name pre-WW2, and the mission of the Department of Defence (post-WW2) is completely different: this is evidenced by the number of military personnel in the two time periods (and the draw-down in personal post-1990, after the Cold War ended):
* https://www.statista.com/statistics/1066986/us-armed-forces-...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_military_personnel_and...
WWII demonstrated wars of conquest don't work in the industrial age. When America and its Department of War and Navy were founded, invasion and conquest could still be done profitably. WWII showed that was no longer true–industrial machinery and skilled workers are destroyed by invasion and even base resources quickly become useless when surrounded by people who hate you. (Nuclear weapons sealed the equation.)
The Americans who fought in WWII saw that lesson firsthand and seem to have genuinely pivoted away from wars of conquest and annexation towards something closer to status quo preservation. We, of course, still went to war. But it was generally to help the current leader repel something or the other. The case in point for this is the truly devilish stuff having been shifted to the CIA's clandestine portfolio.
Renaming the DoD the DoW basically says all that clandestine stuff wasn't shameful, it's good. It's a real message being written by idiots who don't know history or war and are mastered by their own insecurities.
Someone being invaded should lay down arms because invasion and fighting an invader are morally equal?
> that changing one word in a bureaucratic ensemble of Departments is going to change meaning of what it means to go to war or the reality of war itself
Department of War celebrates an era when wars of conquest were profitably fought. It explicitly embraces the notion that war is good and accretive to America. Renaming something the Department of War means we're going to have more wars. America being America, they're mostly going to be offensive.
The morality of a war is not easily encompassed in small words like “war” or “defense”.
> America being America, they're mostly going to be offensive.
America being America, any war fought by us not in direct defense of American people & territory is by definition an offensive war. Doesn’t stop us from calling wars fought elsewhere “defense”.
It's not. But you're avoiding the question. If you claim all war is morally equal, then a defender is equally at fault as an invader, and we're going to fundamentally disagree. If you don't believe that, I'm still curious about your position.
> America being America, any war fought by us not in direct defense of American people & territory is by definition an offensive war
Agree.
> Doesn’t stop us from calling wars fought elsewhere “defense”
We still call them wars. Nobody calls what we did in Iraq or Vietnam or Korea the defense or whatever. We call them wars.
I think we agree that renaming the DoW the DoD didn't reduce American military adventurism. What I'm saying is returning the DoD to the DoW absolutely presages a difference in attitude that is more dangerous and more violent.
I didn’t make this claim. War is war, but the morality of our actions is found not in the act of war, but in the why & how of war.
> We still call them wars. Nobody calls what we did in Iraq or Vietnam or Korea the defense or whatever. We call them wars.
Of course we still call them wars. That was not mutually exclusive with politicians justifying it as “defense”. The mantra is defense abroad rather than defense at home, which is a fine enough mantra if you’re selling a war, but I’m not going to nod along & pretend that it’s not actually offense.
> What I'm saying is returning the DoD to the DoW absolutely presages a difference in attitude that is more dangerous and more violent.
The election of more dangerous & more violent politicians presaged that. Turns out America is more dangerous. As to whether we’re more violent? TBD. The President’s unwillingness to actually put boots on the ground abroad despite trying to talk a dangerous game makes this part less objectively clear to me.
WWII demonstrated it. America learned the lesson sort of, for a while. The USSR, arguably, did not. At the end of the day, the security infrastructure the USSR had to deploy to subdue its conquered poopulations (and its nonsense with China, to say nothing of its own idiocy in Afghanistan) pretty directly lead to the economic uncompetitiveness vis-à-vis its adversaries.
And no, America wasn't running around annexing foreign territory. Where we were trying to do so indirectly, through puppets, one, that's categorically different from annexation-aimed conquest, and two, we did it clandestinely and–I'd argue–in a way that in the long term was almost never accretive to American power and interests.
Before WWII, the Mexican-American war, the German unification, the Prussian unification, Japan's conquest of Manchuria, Japan's invasion of Taiwan and the Russo-Japanese wars were each pretty definitively winning moves for the instigators.
Since WWII, the only wars of conquest that may have yielded the victor more than it cost was arguably Israel's six-day war and, for a short time, Russia's conquest of Crimea. Both subsequently undid those gains by trying to double down. (I'm not counting India's invsasion of Bangladesh as a war of conquest since nothing was annexed. Same for America and the USSR intervening everywhere without annexing.)
People keep attempting wars of conquest, or to work clandestinely and find a loophole. Nobody has. It doesn't work. It absolutely used to. Acknowledging that might help prevent empire-ending mistakes like Iraq and Iraq 2 Trump in Iran Boogaloo.
What we choose to call things *is* important.
Like Venezuela: we definitely did things that a neutral observer could fairly & reasonably call Acts of War by conducting an aggressive military operation that ended in the result of us arresting Maduro. Yet the net result is that we did not actually fight a war in Venezuela, and we are still not fighting a war in Venezuela. So if a tinpot socialist dictator gets arrested in a forest & none of the invaders/law enforcement are left to shoot at when the smoke clears, was it really a war? Apparently not.
As to Iran, the only moral differences I see between our operations in Iran conducted by the US Department of War & our operations in Iraq conducted by the US Department of Defense 23 years earlier, is that 23 years earlier, the politicians actually bothered to try & make a convincing case to the American public first & the the invasion of Iraq was executed more competently. I definitely wouldn’t call either operation “defense”.
War Is a Racket is almost a 100 years old and it's about one man's feelings towards his manipulation in the banana wars [1] + middle east interventions. You can go back every century and see what damage colonialism has done both abroad and at home.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_Wars
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49649394
I just don’t want to copy & paste the same answer in multiple places.
Every problem is meant to be solved by what corporations do or do not do.
What are the (current?) foreign policy goals of the country in question? If it leans more defensive, like Japan, that's different than a country that may have a more interventionist bent.
Also what product(s) is the company developing or offering (field hospital equipment or are we talking about Palantir)?
Depends if they do evil shit or not. The USA does a lot of evil shit. If you wanted to not be evil, you wouldn't help people to do evil shit.
As an aside, I emailed my congressman (blue) about one of the proposals (bipartisan) to essentially force device age verification and his office emailed me back well after it passed with a few reguritared sentences about protecting the children. I bet if I called a lobbyist in Maryland and had him meet the congressman for coffee to express my view he might be more willing to listen.
Some of them, esp in central/eastern Europe, were rudely woken up in 2022 when Russian tanks rolle into a neighboring country. Others still have their heads buried in the sand and will not wake up even when Chinese robots march in Taipei in a few years.
Microprocessors as a whole were a result of the US military industrial complex. The first large scale use of integrated circuits was the Minuteman II ballistic missile guidance system. The lineage that leads to the modern smartphone starts with Texas Instruments winning the contract for that military guidance system (first as a subcontractor to North American, then fully on their own).
Similarly, the first production use of a charge-coupled device for digital camera technology was the KH-11 spy satellite.
There isn't a shred of reality to support the notion that software is materially different than any other industry, and 'The Silicon Valley' starts with 'Silicon' - and then went through 'Hardware' - it wasn't software dominated until the 1990s.
I would go so far to say as Software is less involved than hardware.
Defence has almost always been a 'physical' industry and most defence contracts are for gadgets, not software.
Obviously - there's a ton of 'intelligence' going on that is software oriented, but they're generally not massive contracts, but bespoke stuff.
The NSA is not spending $100B on single procurement. They're relatively small.
(FYI - one middle sized defence program is bigger than CIA/FBI/NSA budgets)
- google founders’ research was funded from federal grants.
- federal grant was administered by National Science Foundation (not DoD) with funding from DARPA (yes DoD) and NASA (not DoD?).
Google itself was fully funded by private investors, only the research was *partially DoD funded.
Or what drove the demand for silicon in the first place.
As for "transforming", that happened some time during the Vietnam war when the laser-guided bomb was introduced. Been a smooth sailing ever since.
Funding some key technologies is not the same as 'funding the valley'.
Military related funding is probably less than a few % of the financing behind startups.
There are a few strategic foundations, but it's not a defence industry.
In 2015, I told my son I would disown him if he went to work for Facebook. Several years later, he told me he was doing a contracting gig for Meta, on a project that would "definitely never see the light of day". Given the amount of engineering time that was squandered in the early 2020's, I chose to believe him.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM
There are allegation that Microsoft changed Skype architecture (after buying Skype for $8.5 billion) to make wiretapping easier.
" In July last year, nine months after Microsoft bought Skype, the NSA boasted that a new capability had tripled the amount of Skype video calls being collected through Prism; "
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/11/microsoft-nsa-...
Not berate them because they didn't make it sooner.
Sometimes people aren't in a position to be secure enough to act. Sometimes different issues are more effective at resonating enough to break through previously cached unconsidered patterns of thought. Sometimes people don't know all the things that are going on, and act once they've learned about them. Whatever the reason, if your reaction is "took you long enough" rather than "welcome", you discourage people from acting.
Don't punish the behavior you want to see more of.
(Also, OP is not even an instance of what you're decrying; see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49647687 .)
You’re making money from venture capitalists and tech firms, MS, Meta, X, Google, etc… which of them is any better than MS? They’re all awful in different ways.
I can't tell if your actual goal here is to be dismissive of the entire concept of people caring about ethics, or if you don't think that quitting is an effective means of acting in concert with those ethics. If it's the latter, then I'd suggest that it's a start, not everyone is in the position to do even that much, and some people who do so will be able to go further. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good, particularly if someone is taking a step in the right direction.
Ironically, you are doing your own preaching in your comments. It could even be described as "performative."
Talking about doing something on a 4 month old account is not the same as doing it. I give credit to people for doing things, not claiming to do them in an anonymous forum they just joined. Cynical? Perhaps, but maybe if people were just a bit more cynical about believing any text on the internet just because it feels better to believe it, we'd be better off.
The 'will not' list in here I Just learned about today, https://www.solzhenitsyncenter.org/live-not-by-lies it easily maps to the employment situation question.
this is legit hilarious.
As a first-gen immigrant I can say that what I witness is that yes, a lot of what I've been told about America were lies. But a quite few things actually weren't. I made a choice where to live so I accept the whole package, and on the balance it's a much better deal than pretty much anywhere else.
There's survivor bias in that observation. There are plenty of "foreign born employees" who choose not to work for companies that explicitly violate their values by choice. (I phrase it that way because of the whole "no ethical consumption under capitalism" issue.) I know because I'm one, and I have friends with the same mindset.
If you want to get into parsing out who is “white” or not you can do that but it’s really something better done on 4chan and also not even sensible as a concept or relevant to this discussion.
Why do you think the elite business owning class wants to replace you with desperate and malleable foreign workers from countries where morals and human rights are suggestions at best?
The other thing is, you built your nest egg taking Microsoft's "blood money" for a few years giving you the luxury to quit on a dime, but there's a lot of people on the planet or even in your country, wishing to do as you did.
You can't just pull the ladder after you and expect everyone make the same sacrifice as you except without their own nest egg. If you want to start a moral and egalitarian society then what about a higher tax on the wealth of tech bros, to finance the lives of the non-tech bros to accept humane jobs?
It's useful that psychopaths always tell on themselves like this.
"The Dark Triad traits predict authoritarian political correctness and alt-right attitudes"
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7369609/
These kinds of claims generally come from people who don't feel any moral or ethical impulses. These people are most commonly malignant narcissists and psychopaths. A great example is Elon Musk who described empathy as a "bug".
Morality is a fundamental feature for most humans. The people who make the kinds of claims above constitute a small, single digit percentage of the population. They tend to have an outsize influence though, because they exploit the trust of others to rise to positions of power, where their lack of compunction can be an advantage.
People like Trump, Musk, and Thiel are canonical examples of this. Eventually, when their actions make things bad enough for everyone else, people tend to take action. We may be approaching a time like that. You acknowledged this yourself in earlier comments.
Power and wealth are already so entrenched I think we have little chance of effecting any lasting change without violence. So either I become a literal terrorist, or I enable Daniel Plainview mode. It seems to me like the rational move is to try to get rich by any means necessary so I can fuck off to somewhere isolated and never have to deal with the rotten society I hate ever again.
The cultivation of a sense of actual morality requires a lot of study and humility and quieting your own feelings and ego. This is very difficult and most people can't do it, ideally in a healthy society the elites you have are people who can and do do this.
Ironically Thiel in particular is precisely one of these people. He's very thoughtful and well read and displays a lot of humility in his speech and conduct.
Well, that’s a point of view, I guess.
Maybe DHH was right.
Not too mention the completely sociopathic comments made above.
Are you trying to fool me or Stephen Miller here?
Oh good grief. Hot take of the month right there. All you're doing is demonstrating how uninformed you are on the subject. Can you name anything you've ever read about this?
> [Thiel] displays a lot of humility in his speech and conduct.
You can't be serious. Where in this does the talk of the "Antichrist" fit?
What kind of humility are you talking about? Because if it means intellectual modesty, willingness to acknowledge one's own fallibility, or reluctance to cast one's own political/intellectual beliefs as uniquely farsighted, Thiel's public record is not consist with "displaying a lot of humility."
It's really that simple and this is a good illustration of what I'm talking about.
On Democracy and Freedom: "I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible"
On Competition: "Competition is for losers"
On Technology and Control: "One of the things I like about technology is that when technology is unregulated, you can change the world without getting approval from other people. At its best, it's not subject to democratic control and not subject to the majority, which I think is often hostile to change"
On Reputation: "I'd rather be seen as evil than incompetent"
I wouldn’t say these statements even have moral judgments in them either way. For example, this doesn’t even ascribe moral weight to “freedom” or “democracy” just that they are at odds.
This is why these types of things are better left to elite minded people who are capable of these types of discussions. You’re just responding essentially to the valence of these terms.
“Democracy = good feeling, freedom = good feeling, how can good feeling != good feeling?” This is the level at which you’re engaging.
What makes us separate from animals and thrive as a civilization is that majority of us do not act on our intrusive ideas without consequences.
Thiel is an exception because he is acting on thsea ideas, causing harm to real innocent people, without any regard for consequences.
In a world of eye-poppingly hot takes, I commend your ability to somehow raise the bar
Bonus points for dismissing things like "you can change the world without getting approval from other people" (you could hardly ask for a more substantive topic to debate in moral philosophy than one's freedom to affect other people) as mere valence-level "how can good feeling != good feeling" sophistry
So when imported workers are having strong conservative values prioritizing their family over progressive values = good, but when western locals are having strong conservative values prioritizing their family over progressive values = bad?
>But these things dissipate within a few generations of living in the US
Have you heard of the amish? Or the ultra orthodox jews? Or other such groups with strong conservative values. You underestimate the stubbornness of certain cultures to adopt american/western progressive liberal values. They can stay conservative longer than you can stay alive.
And also, given their significantly higher birth rates of their culture and religion, they'll also be able to outvote liberals who have catastrophically low birth rates, within a few generations. What do you think happens then with liberals and their values in a democracy?
>hence the need for more and more foreign workers.
Even when the locals are struggling to find jobs?
> Have you heard of the amish? Or the ultra orthodox jews?
Yes and Western elites do not think like the Amish or like Orthodox Jews, they do not spend their time studying the Bible or care about that at all (they don't even study the Western classics).
> Even when the locals are struggling to find jobs?
They don't care about this, again this requires a whole metaphysical framework, at most they care about their own families and you'd probably be surprised at how dysfunctional these people are in their own private lives
I've debated exiting tech fully but I do have people to support. I think that's kind of an excuse though. I also tell myself that anywhere I go, if you follow the money far enough up the chain, it will be unethical. That's also kind of an excuse.
I'm not brave, but I do feel trapped. I think we need some sort of reckoning as an industry, a country and possibly a planet. I don't know what will happen but I'm trying to balance living in 2026 with making choices that I can live with in the future.
Because that's a bit easier than quitting or turning down a job when you need the income.
Since you say you're still working and have people to support I am guessing it was more the latter, but maybe the "very high paying job" gave you the runway needed to make that choice? I quit a high paying software job under different circumstances. The company wasn't doing anything unethical (that I know of) but I was just sick of how they managed people and projects. It had reached the point where I sat in my car for 15 minutes (or longer) every morning just trying to summon the willpower to get out and walk into the office. So I finally just quit. But it was easier as I had stashed away enough money to give me time to find a new job without having to jump on the first offer. I ended up freelancing a bit to extend the runway even longer.
Congrats on getting out of a toxic situation btw, that's hard to do too if you're getting paid well. In a way I was similar, every morning started to be a real struggle for me.
“Education level” is probably also an indication of social ills and a social ill itself given that most people are not suited for higher education. Most “higher education” in the US is abject slop and partying for 4 years. College used to be restricted to the aristocracy and particularly promising students.
If you take a young person who is already not of an elite quality and subject them to slop and partying, campus meal plans, basically unproductive day care for 4 years that also fills their heads with nonsense that is obviously going to do a lot of damage to them, especially young women who are especially impressionable.
It’s also worth noting that while Israel does have universities, as a societal intuition they function very differently. Young people serve in the army first for 2-3 years or they do university with a deferral and then serve in specialized roles in the army based on their degree. It’s not slop and partying for 4 years starting at 18. And it’s normal to not go to university at all.
There's tons of things you can do to make people on visas more empowered to push back at work without them become citizens; and in many cases cutting ties to their original countries.
But all well, glad you can feel good about yourself by leaving so that someone with less concern about these ethical issues can fill the void and assert their own influence on the company instead.
Following your line of thinking, why don't you join microsoft and effect such change? I guess it's easier to leave a moralizing snarky comment and feel good about yourself.
This isn't how companies work or are structured. If you have the CEO's ear, potentially. If you don't, the only ethical thing to do is to quit. (I don't personally have an issue with the military per se. I have other issues with several tech companies which would make taking a job there something I couldn't do.)
Why are so many people supposedly principled but not militant about it? A principled militant would use their role in m$ as an opportunity to be an anchor to the efficiency of the operation that they do not agree with. They will fight to keep their position such that a more effective less moral person might not take it over and get the project moving.
One has to wonder how many projects in the world are in such a holding pattern, protected by people who had the foresight to think two steps ahead, attempting to keep their body holding that door shut as they possibly can.
But you won't be doing it. Companies are run top-down. If you're within the organisation you're advancing the goals of those at the top. You aren't going to change that by complaining internally (unless you have a direct line to the CEO).
It's fine to disagree with something and just not contribute to it. If you want to be principled and militant, staying is hypocritical. In that case, you should whistleblow.
> attempting to keep their body holding that door shut as they possibly can
Unless you're conducting sabotage, which within this context seems like a gross overreaction, you aren't holding any door shut. (Again, assuming you don't have a line to the CEO.)
I am saying you should conduct sabotage if you feel the work is immoral and against your principles to such an extent. It would be immoral not to in a lot of ways, saying you'd rather wash your hands of it and pretend it weren't happening than to try and think of what you might do about it.
There are people far braver than me, but they were indeed fired. There are probably people covertly fighting the system from within but I didn't work close enough to any of these projects to know them.
So ideally people would do what you say and/or just be very open about their objections, but it's also worth recognizing the risk of industry blacklisting and how things like employer provided health insurance raise the stakes.
The workers can't even influence things like office setup and floor plans. They certainly can't influence business decision to any meaningful degree.
The implication of your idea is what? The desire for a destruction of a state of 10 million people and another exhile of the Jews? That's the stance you deem moral - or am inferring unfairly (I hope I am actually)
If I am following correctly - you left Microsoft because it doesn't share this genocidal desire? I guess that's consistent and I admire that part, but the underlying perspective is horrifying when you just casually drop it in like that
Sadly in my experience a lot of tech workers just don't even care about the issue, let alone have the courage to push back against it.
I certainly care about it and I have immense respect for your decision, but I've worked with numerous "typical tech/dev" types in the past who later went on to work at places like Shield AI and Anduril with seemingly no compunction about the imperialistic baby-killing aspects of working directly within the military-industrial complex as long as the pay is good.
I understand everyone has their moral compass, and they act accordingly. But, I find it hard to not ask myself, if this is not OK, why is this other related thing Ok? how do I decide what's Ok and seems when you ask the question you get downvotes and lots of judgement instead of answers.
The concept of “No Ethical Consumption Under Capitalism” and the moral framing of later seasons of The Good Place give good representations of how.
Ultimately each person makes a mark of what they can and cannot care about, and caring about literally everything is a fast-track to total impotence.
Some situations are (relatively) easy:
Some situations are way harder. Unfortunately, this is all up to you, and there are individual scales of “harm to the world by participating” vs “harm to you by abstaining” you have to personally weigh. There is no global answer.* Bad news: "Voting with your wallet" is actually pretty ineffective. Big companies know it, diversify around it, and they're happy when consumers are neutralized and busy infighting with one-another over consumptive purity, instead of...
* Good news: Organizing politically does work, and is so much more-effective that you can arguably redeem any evil taint on your shopping list by engaging in it.
[0] https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2026-05-21...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/aug/06/microsoft-isra...
man imagine when you learn about what MS did to all Americans phone conversations, emails, meta data, and basically all digital communications flowing in and out of the US for the NSA.
> a neighbor sending rockets my way, would make me sick to my stomach
Israel has been murdering Palestinians since Nakba. They literally eliminated whole cities in Gaza. I think that makes most people in the world sick to their stomach.
It is when it's an intelligence agency for a country that's actively committing genocide.
Answer a question for me: is the lesson you took from the Holocaust something like "if there are going to be holocausts anyway, I want to be the one committing them"?
this conflation is extremely unhelpful
also, there was conflict between Jewish Palestinians and Muslim Palestinians long before the Holocaust. Zionists were trying to take over in the late days of the Ottoman Empire.
Guess it doesn't matter now when they have full on defense orgs.
I don't see how it could have gone any other way. The internet became too pervasive, too embedded into too many people's lives, for it to not be weaponized by governments and large companies.
People working at big tech are complicit in the destruction of communities and the mass depression and suicide of our youth, compared to that wanting your country to have the best military tech is altruistic. Military tech isn’t the problem foreign policy is, you can’t say the same about slop factory builders.
https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/latest-news/microsof...
---
Also thank you for your bravery, it is not easy leaving well paid jobs. If you haven't already, I'd start donating some time with your local mutual aid groups. It's very therapeutic to spend time with people that believe similar things while helping others.
Be careful what you wish for. What happens when China gets too big to fail?
Taiwan would like a word.
Okay, Taiwan. They are the losing side from the Chinese civil war from over half a century ago and proclaim themselves as the true Chinese government. I'm not saying China has the right to crush them, but the tension is at least understandable.
A comparison with the democracies and lives destroyed by US FP is ridiculous. If Taiwan would like a word with China, well, half the world would like a word with the US.
Has this level of obtuseness infected the software industry because this is not the first time I've heard this; usually someone will take a job at a missile factory then later realize "Wait, we build war machines AND sell them to countries I don't like? I had no idea!"
This isn't an employee-owned grocery store where your opinions matter.
You're at the point in Goodfellas where he tells the babysitter "do you understand what we're involved in here?"
This appears to me to be unrealistic or performative, except if you mean pushing back in the sense that anyone could, as a voter for example. Boycott of defense work won't work; attempting to claim some special authority in debate won't work either.
Too many nihilists in the tech industry with the attitude “if I don’t do it someone else will”, and here we are as a professional class actively making the world an objectively shittier place. The VCs can’t do it without us.
This is one of my personal bugbears. I keep making this point on HN but devs want to LARP as professionals so they usually don't want to hear that they have more in common with retail workers than they do with carpenters, engineers, or accountants.
Previously:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47625159
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48932441
They did this to automotive.
It was once a respected technology, and being a mechanic or factory worker was a high-paying job.
Now you have Jiffy Lube and some pimply kid in a polo!
Polofication
Has come for many industries...
And if retail was done the same way as it was 20 years ago, some kid in a polo shirt at Office Depot would be making small business websites using ChatGPT with a 1-hour turn-around time. Pay at the register, with your printer paper.
But Idk, I don't actually agree with you...
I think "software engineering" is such a spectrum now, a wide field of its own, that you can have deep research roles, high art, fashion, accounting, and executive-level work that involve it (which may have nothing to do with "consumer web design") that it's hard to make that blanket statement.
For example, the software engineer working on the computer in a Tesla, or the software on the displays in the BART train, or the banking infrastructure for Bank of America, is a lot more like a "real engineer" than the developer putting a marketing site on Vercel, or an iOS game on the App Store (each of which is vastly different work in their own right).
Everything is software now, every engineer is a software engineer now to some degree.
I’d be willing to pay a few hundred dollars a year to be a part of a professional organization that maintains ethics requirements at this point.
And yet - I never see these items on the ballot! Huh. Why is that?
It seems like rent strikes do work though. And mass denial of anything on your ships after you spent the gas seems to make things pretty annoying for you guys :)
> special authority in debate
All normally functioning humans want to preserve life, liberty, and prosperity worldwide. You guys are the outliers. You're the weird ones with your "chosen" special authority that nobody believes or respects at all.
Voting does work if enough voters feel strongly about something. Look at the policians scurrying about now that they're seeing the deeply negative polling on data centers.
>Keyhole, a small San Francisco-based company that developed software for creating three-dimensional models of the earth’s surface [was] provided seed funding in 2003 [by a CIA-backed VC firm, In-Q-Tel], and within two weeks, military and intelligence agencies were reportedly using Keyhole’s software to support the U.S. war in Iraq. The following year, Google acquired Keyhole for an undisclosed sum. It was renamed Google Earth.
[...]
>A distinctive aspect of the shifting military-industrial complex is the crucial role played by venture capital (VC). Some observers have noted that the rapid rise in VC funding for defense tech firms has been spurred by recent global conflicts, particularly the war in Ukraine, and more recently, escalating conflicts in Gaza and other parts of the Middle East. According to this line of reasoning, the widely publicized use of drones, satellite imagery, Starlink, and other technologies are generating interest among investors, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has led to a shifting “ethical red line” that is prompting VC to back defense tech startups.
There has to be a viable lawsuit in there somewhere. One of the last remaining tools of us plebs...
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/09/09/defense-tech-covenant-anthem...
The standout example of this from the Ukraine war is artillery shells.
We should maybe have a state owned corporation for making artillery shells in America, because there does not seem to be enough profit to incentivize private corporations.
I’m not following how that is a lesson from Ukraine. Their drones and missiles are made by private companies.
The true lesson i think is that in times of peace (or in times of wars of choice) procurement is dominated by excercises, lab tests, and design reviews. When you are doing that it is hard to tell apart the “good enough” from the “over engineered”. To every choice you can dream up a “counter”. Some real or imagined response or tactic by your enemy which would negate your system. And then your engineers have to design some counter-counter, or harden the system somehow. This leads to complexity which leads to high cost per individual weapon.
In contrast Ukraine is fighting for their existence. If they want to know if a new weapon is good enough, they send it to the front and try it. If it hurts the enemy more than it costs great. Order more. If it stops being effective, try something else. They are not picking the weapon system which will serve them for the next decade. They are picking what is available and effective today.
Different incentives, different opportunities which lead to different choices and different outcimes. But the difference is not if they are using private companies or not.
There were also established companies like Lockheed, Hughes, and Gruman and smaller start-up companies founded in the 50s, 60s, and 70s. I started working for one of these, ESL, in 1978 and worked at several others, ArgoSystems and Applied Signal Technologies, up until I retired in 2023. All were mostly involved in working with the Intel community on SIGINT and ELINT systems with other work building SIGINT into aircraft for the Services. During its heyday, late 60s to the 90s, it was nothing to change to a new company every year if you liked as long as you held a golden ticket, a special access clearance. The executive staffs of these companies were closely tied into the Government up to the White House. In fact, the founder of my first company, Dr. William Perry, served as deputy directory of defense under Carter as well as secretary of defense under Clinton.
All this mostly ended when the Cold War collapsed the Soviets. Lockheed is a shell of what it once was as it moved most of its manufacturing elsewhere, keeping only its missiles in Sunnyvale. A lot of the small companies either closed or were bought by the big boys. TRW bought ESL and was, itself bought by Grumann who then partnered with Northrup, Boeing bought ArgoSystems, and Raytheon bought my last company, Applied Signal Technologies.
So, basically, SV has been deeply invested in defense for 81 years.
Steve Blanks' "Secret History of Silicon Valley" details the emergence of that tech hub beginning with WWII and the "radiation lab", which helped develop radar.
<https://steveblank.com/2009/03/23/if-i-told-you-i%E2%80%99d-...>
Quite a few HN submissions over the years: <https://hn.algolia.com/?q=secret%20history%20of%20silicon%20...>.
Those of us who can remember the 1980s / early 1990s, prior to the defence build-down following the end of the Cold War might recall quite a few defence-related establishments in and around Silicon Valley, in its original scope centred on Santa Clara County and the Santa Clara - Palo Alto region.
On the other hand, it looks like Silicon Valley has run out of ideas for consumer stuff and are now looking to merge with the government to extract tax dollars while building the perfect surveillance state.
The way it looks right now, we are probably more going in the direction of Silicon Valley becoming a part the military industrial complex while also providing plenty of money making opportunities for people who are connected to Washington DC.
The U.S. military spends about $800bn a year [1]. That's up about $300bn from ten years ago.
American consumers spend about $21 trillion a month [2].
If you look at VC, most of it still goes to B2C and B2B. DefenseTech is a headline because it's novel.
[1] https://www.warcosts.org/us-military-budget-2026
[2] https://apps.bea.gov/iTable/?reqid=19&step=2&isuri=1&categor...
It happened with Cursor, where Musk completely overpaid (what will he get in return? a new kind of circular deal?)
It happened with Anduril (topic of this submission). Kushner led a round and days after Anduril got a huge Pentagon contract:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/trump-admin-hands-mega-d...
It's been an open secret for over a year that a cheque from Thrive buys tariff exemptions.
Taxes are not paid voluntarily but coerced out of citizens under the threat of force. So when they hand out such large contracts, the government is taking from all taxpayers by force and giving it selectively to a few chosen people who happen to own shares of those companies.
Many of those shareholders aren't even US citizens!
Secret History of Silicon Valley by Steve Blank https://youtu.be/ZTC_RxWN_xo
Now that spending is definitely x10 more than 2023, at least.
It's not some 4d chess play by VCs, they just finally realized the market was dominated by the most disruptable enterprises on earth. Good riddance.
One of the consequences of this was the meteoric rise of the young Will Roper [1], who in a span of a few years went from a theoretical physicist to being in charge of the Air Force procurement program, and then tried to facilitate the access of startups to defense contracts, through AFWERX and "Defense Pitch Days".
Whether this worked or not is debatable, but the itch to change things was there. One example of a startup which was an early beneficiary of this top-down attention is Ursa Major [2], a rocket engine company. Unless one looks at them in the context of these military programs, their existence would seem quite puzzling.
[1] https://www.af.mil/About-Us/Biographies/Display/article/1467...
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mE1HZAPPSrE
reason I hate to say it is because companies like Palantir and Anduril are clearly pursuing political objectives, including subverting governance by creating tools which set the frame and context that governance happens in.
if Palantir and Anduril were observing the same strict separation between political and military matters, and the same strict separation between domestic and foreign activity, that the military itself observes, then the only thing happening here would be the Valley disrupting a poorly-run industry. I have no issue with that. that is what the Valley's supposed to do.
but that's not what's happening.
It's not some 4d chess play by VCs -- this part is just provably false. they're using military contracting as a Trojan horse for some truly crazy shit.
How so? I honestly haven't heard this before. I like Anduril's tech and have some friends who work there. I would be excited to work at Anduril but my skills have diverged away from what they do and so I wouldn't make a very good hire.
the purpose of propaganda is not to convince the ignorant or skeptical, but to exhaust and/or discredit opponents.
they literally published a manifesto. did you not know about that?
I guess google them, dude. read the paper you're posting on a thread about. good luck
edit: on reflection, I still think he's BSing
Can you elaborate on what you mean by this? How are these companies subverting governance?
> NEW YORK (AP) — Among dozens of companies competing for Pentagon contracts to supply attack drones, one stands out.
> Powerus is flush with cash and ballooning in size as it buys up rivals and has one other advantage: It is partly owned by President Donald Trump’s two oldest sons.
> The latest Trump venture is hoping to win some of the $1.1 billion set aside by the Pentagon to build up a U.S. manufacturing base for armed drones now that the Trump administration put a ban on importing them from China.
https://apnews.com/article/drones-eric-donald-trump-powerus-...
this is true but it's also kind of falling into a trap.
first, the weird endless hunger that man has for any and all spotlights draws attention away from the policy issues and rampant criminality, which are a lot more important than his personality problems.
second, he was causing chaos overseas with military in his first administration too. Silicon Valley wasn't all-in on that.
third, Anduril, Palantir, et al represent a consistent philosophy of how the Valley takes over the military-industrial complex. they come from the same financial backer, Thiel, who also put a lot of money behind Trump. so we got a paper here about the real issue, and if we're shifting our attention from that to this clown who kind of just works for Thiel (among other, even more dubious possible bosses), the risk is that the conversation transitions from substance to gossip.
Wild seeing it come back completely unabated out of Luckeys mouth of all people. Missiles are kewl, bro!
And the actual title doesn't make it a question at all; they assume it's happening and ask how:
"How Big Tech and Silicon Valley are Transforming the Military-Industrial Complex"
I understand that HN auto-removes the leading 'How', but adding the question mark changes the meaning significantly.
Wireless broadcast media, PSTN, air travel, international post, international financial networks, global supply chains, the internet have all contributed to this, but AI will drive it home: AI governance in particular. Once one nation adopts it, the benefits will be obvious and expand rapidly. Few yet realize how transformative the changes will be.
But yeah, the tech bro elite are now tech fascists.