- cross-posted to:
- memes@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- memes@lemmy.ml
You must log in or register to comment.
This is one of the few reasons I dislike living in the area I do, defense contractors are basically the only ones nearby hiring for engineering roles. Luckily I work remotely, but if that ever changed and I couldn’t find another remote position, I’d probably have to move. I’m not about to sell my soul.
Same for me, except IT.
Its pretty much either work at The Base or Geek Squad. One of these options pays enough to leave the area.
Am getting a niche going for elderly centric IT help.
All we have is elderly here 🤷 take that over jarheads
Id take the jarheads tbh. They can usually follow instructions and admit it if they don’t know what they’re doing. Civil Engineers were always a fun tech support call, too.
Sounds like good honest work but i don’t think id have the patience for it long term
Fair.
I’m not the smartest tech person. Don’t really have a passion for it, but for whatever reason listening to an elderly prattle has never been draining. If I can turn airplane mode off for those fuckers and write them instructions on how to send an email I’ll take that over actually working lol
Nothing wrong with that; Social engineering is what i would consider an essential skill for customer support, and it can take people far in the field of IT.
Does it pay enough to ever be free one day?
I’ll let you know when I find out.
(Guessing no)
I know which one it isn’t!
Or, and hear me out, get a job and suck at it.
Found the Boeing recruiter!
Removed by mod
It almost sounds like you might be suggesting that there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism
Removed by mod
If less people worked to make weapons, there would be less weapons made.
How is this a hard concept to understand?
Removed by mod
Do you think that there is a dire shortage of tools for murder, and only the modern defense industry is sustaining the strained supply?
Israel, Russia, and Ukraine sure seem to think so. None are producing enough munitions domestically to satisfy themselves.
Less weapons made still means less weapon used.
Removed by mod
So do you work for a defense contractor or do you just have great respect for the act of killing in general
Removed by mod
It is pretty radical to argue that a small contingent of Zionist Israelis would be successfully eradicating the people of Palestine if both sides just had sticks, so the U.S. should just keep manufacturing and selling MK-84 bombs. Or we can talk about how absurd a claim it is that the arms industry is looking out for the little guy—you know, the group that can pay for less of their product? Thank god for arms manufacturers—that’s probably what Uyghurs think when they’re stopped at checkpoints by military police
But you are literally arguing in defense of America, which is funding genocide, so now you are just straight up lying
Defending defense contractors isnt as cool as you think it is, Jesus would be ashamed.
I mean yes there is a sort of “there is no ethical consumption under capitalism” dilemma when it comes to working. But just with that dilemma, you don’t just give up, you try to minimize your participation as much as you can healthily do. And I think not working for a corp who’s sole purpose is to develop weapons for killing people is one of those no brainers.
Removed by mod
I do think there is nuance to the situation and exceptions. Your example being one. But I would consider Lockheed (the example of the original post) would be the no brainer one. Those weapons aren’t going to defending my family from an imperialist power, they are going to death squads in South America and committing genocide in Palestine.
Removed by mod
With Lockheed you are forced to choose between being complacent with it because they supply Ukraine’s defense against occupation by an imperialist power or outright oppose it due to its supplying towards the Palestinian genocide. The genocide is a dealbreaker in any capacity for me. Even ignoring the genocide, the bad outweighs the good to me by a longshot. I oppose it just like how I oppose McDonald’s, Amazon, Starbucks, and more.
Removed by mod
The problem of manufacturing weapons would be significantly less controversial of LM (for ex) had even a few scruples.
Defending yourself is fine.
Making tools to defend yourself is fine
Making tools for people to defend themselves is fineMaking and selling those tools for use in attacking is not fine.
Profiteering from harm is not fine.\The reason why I put Palestine over Ukraine is because Palestine is a genocide right now, while Ukraine isn’t. Ukraine is two capitalist states fighting.
I do still also think working for a defense contractor like Lockheed is wrong as working for them is far more direct of a hand in death than most other jobs. And I wouldn’t say they are immoral, they are chasing money (which in of itself is immoral) and chose to do it through profitting off of war. They may do good sometimes but it is not out of the goodness of their hearts, its to profit off of killing each other. And just as I do with elections, if the game is pick a lesser evil I will not play.
And with the McDonald’s et al yeah I wouldn’t shame those working there, I lost track of my point. Was just trying to say I take action to oppose them, just like I would with Lockheed if I could (I don’t live near one and I cant buy their stuff to begin with lol).
I won’t deny its more complicated than I gave it credit for, but I think Lockheed is indefensible of a corporation. Working for them is a deal with the devil. There are reasons why I wouldn’t shame someone for working there, but they are exceptions and not the rule.
Removed by mod
Removed by mod
Removed by mod
Communists make weapons too tho. It’s kind of a whole cycle.
One, the issue isn’t the production of weapons in of itself. Weapons are used for defense, survival, and recreation which are (in my opinion) ethical. The issue is “defense” contractors like Lockheed are not producing weapons to defend against exploitation, oppression, etc. They are produced for imperialist powers to defend the interests of exploitors, oppressors, and war mongers.
Secondly, I am an anarchist. Statist “communists” are often no better than capitalists to me.
Removed by mod
Removed by mod
I agree: Everyone is terrible.
Removed by mod
Removed by mod
Removed by mod
Removed by mod
Removed by mod
Removed by mod
Removed by mod
Yeah, I think they’d argue for DU instead of against it. They’re not using that against people they’re using that against war machines.
Removed by mod
OK, I guess we should stop harvesting wheat and making flour because it could possibly be used to support a genocide, but don’t even bother thinking about stopping the manufacture of the bombs being dropped.
Removed by mod
Plus you have deterrance weapons like the F22. It hasn’t actually killed anyone, because no one has challenged it. That sort of weapon can keep wars from starting, since they’re less likely to win.
Removed by mod
Removed by mod
Would you rather they be used? Best case scenario is that they prevent the battle from happening.
I’ll go even farther. Have you voted in the last 50 years? Guess what you help elect the president and chief commanding death at the end of the bayonet and the from the top of the drones.
Removed by mod
Hmm if all the candidates will both be responsible for killing people, are the people who didn’t vote responsible? Technically the only innocent people would be the ones who stop the candidates from being elected. but I’ll drink to improving society as a whole.
Removed by mod
Kill the killers is the best option until we gaze to long and deep into the abyss…
First, props for backing a bonafide unpopular opinion so unflinchingly. (A) discusses your argument. (B) challenges it.
A. I liked your direct approach to this position, and think you raise some important points. In particular…
- It’s important to acknowledge that we all serve this machine in some capacity by our engagement with the free market. But why?
- Economists call these markets efficient (i.e., pareto efficient) because of how quickly they achieve equilibrium/zero-sum states in response to change.
- That efficiency is the curse no participant can outrun, because anything short of complete absence from the market necessarily furthers its result, which always includes violence. In other words, no one’s hands are clean.
- Appearing closer to acts of violence often has little to do with magnitude of influence or actual violence produced. How so?
- Suppose we define violence quotient (VQ) for the roles of market participants, some formula to rate the lockheed engineers and steel workers of small arms manufacture, etc.
- We could measure VQ in lots of ways — e.g., by the count of people hurt, the severity of suffering, the degrees of causal separation between the violent act and the role behind it, etc.
- For each case, it seems we can always find a role further from the violence with higher VQ — a much greater hand in the violence — to the extent that we have old tropes contrasting the direct-but-limited violence of the simple-minded goon and the detached yet far-reaching avarice of the ruthless kingpin.
- So it’s true that working on a small piece of an incremental improvement to some military technology isn’t technically going to be easily traced to much bloodshed, comparatively.
B. But each of these observations correspond to a problem with the idea that the roles we choose don’t matter…
- While the principle of efficiency makes all of us morally culpable — again, because we drive the market onward by merely living in it — by the same token this machine tells us what it wants most, and does so quite unambiguously: by naming a price.
- Concretely, for any two roles considered, you can bet that whichever offers greater personal benefit is the choice that further maximizes overall productivity, accumulation of capital, and ultimately violence.
- This heuristic is mostly useless to the individual (since a strategy of deliberately minimizing personal benefit is like trying to use your body to slow a speeding train… you’ll only slow it down about one human’s-worth).
- But when many individuals coordinate to decommission machines like ours by agreeing to make small survivable sacrifices, they achieve collective action, which has halted many a train.
- What delays collective action, however, is choosing instead to look out for number one, to defect against the social contract.
- And that is the social problem OP describes. So one might then ask why is it a breach of the social contract?
- Ultimately it’s the symbolic value of the choice that’s so disappointing.
- It’s obviously not the “VQ” of your military-industrial job, how close to the violence you work, or any such utilitarian metric.
- It’s not even the individual intent. Most Americans still at least pay lip service to the individual “pursuit of happiness” idea.
- In the end, it’s simply that a person chose the money in spite of everyone’s misgivings about what these contractors represent and purvey in our world, because each defection, however minor, makes the victory of collective action feel just a bit further away than they once hoped.
deleted by creator
- It’s important to acknowledge that we all serve this machine in some capacity by our engagement with the free market. But why?
Removed by mod
“Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That’s not my department”, says Wernher Von Braun.
Don’t say that he’s hypocritical
Say rather that he’s apoliticalcontext for those who need it:
Making rockets wasn’t his department either.
The US wouldn’t let Von Braun go testify at Dachau. To this day there’s a lot of whitewashing. But he knew how those rockets were made.
I had a friend in a difficult position, deciding between high pay at Buy N Large or the opportunity to work on insanely cool shit for Death Inc.
Ultimately he chose Death Inc, and the reasoning was along the lines of “This might kill a hundred people, but at least it’ll kill them specifically. I can’t even conceptualize the harm Amazon et al. do on a global scale to entire populations without even trying”.
Made me think. I didn’t have a very good answer to that.
those bombs will kill far more than just a hundred people, far more than he can ever conceptualize. the consequences of those deaths will shape the world more than the extra microsecond an engineer could shave off of an internal Amazon function
The argument the person was saying is that we already have big bombs that do catastrophic damage, the R&D is how do you make those bombs more targeted so they have less collateral damage.
Now whether that will actually lead to less deaths or will just cause the bombs to be used in places they otherwise wouldn’t be used with the same amount of collateral damage is unknown.
But it brings up a bit of a utilitarian dilemma of “is it ethical to work on weapons if it leads to an overall reduction of collateral damage to civilians”
It doesn’t have a necessarily correct answer
Have advancements in precision bombing technology ever led to an overall reduction in collateral damage to civilians? Is that even an argument defense contractors make, or are you just making it up?
Or has every study shown the exact opposite, that “precision” bombs actually cause more civilian deaths?
Yep, in world war 2 without precision bombing we fire bombed entire cities to the ground and one of them was so bad it caused a fire tornado that literally suck people into it! World war 2 had such a problem with imprecise bombing that they are still finding bombs today
yea but nestle
Also, “if I don’t make this thing that will kill a hundred people specifically, they’ll just use something that kills more people with less precision / more casualties.”
Ah good ole ego.
How is precision weaponry “insanely cool shit”???
I mean it’s impressive from an engineering standpoint
Technically if you think about it, he’d be saving innocent lives, since non precise weapons have more collateral damage. Might as well make bombs accurate and hit the right targets.
The “right targets” tend to be innocent lives as well. Besides, who said anything about precise weaponry? These days, it’s all about AI, where precision is actually not the goal
Shame that the right targets are often schools, hospitals, weddings, and apartment complexes
Removed by mod
Anduril has had many, many recruiters desperately trying to get me to work for them. On the surface, what they make does sound incredibly cool: embedded systems/operating systems for autonomous robotics.
The only problem is those robots happen to be death bots (and Palmer Luckey, who makes me want to stay far, far away).
It means you can take out the bride’s party, or the groom’s party.
Well, I can’t get into details, but the field is vast.
Military technology has got a near unlimited budget, that means you get tons of cool and technically impressive toys and things to work with
I enjoy watching the breakdowns of the most advanced weaponry and stuff like jet fighters (that we have access to information about), nuclear armaments, and other stuff like that, because they are very very impressive from an engineering perspective
But, of course, I really do strongly hate them for existing in terms of their actual purpose. It would be much cooler for similar engineering feats to be in use for civilian purposes. But I can’t deny that they are amazing from a purely technical perspective
Removed by mod
i mean… it sorta is. like take a look at this, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SUdHzKRiBX8 - thats impressive af
Removed by mod
Not quite, no. Not everyone works on the weapons.
That’s an interesting take. One on one side the death is a haphazard byproduct and on the other it is at least motivated by someone. Somebody has to have a vision for why these weapons need to be used. I’d argue though that in the case of Amazon, wether or not it’s of any priority to them, the suffering would be something worth ironing out over time whereas, for weapons companies, it’s the entire product they sell
I worked gps until i determined The Customer was not interested in reducing civilian casualties.
They wanted the induced fear, priming the next generation ready for revenge, the garuntee of future business.
The number of people defending Lockheed Martin here is staggering, but I guess I shouldn’t be surprised given the apparent makeup of Lemmy’s population
I’ll make this very, very simple: working for a well-known defense contractor who brags about making bombs is bad. Working for Lockheed Martin is unethical.
Working for a large corporation (Microsoft) that funds or supports wars (Israel) is also bad, but not as bad as Lockheed Martin, the company that actually builds the bombs that are bought with the dollars that Microsoft sends to Israel
Working for any company that could theoretically contribute economically to a war is bad, but not as bad as the previous two examples and is more or less unavoidable for working people
Paying any kind of tax (especially in the US) ultimately funds wars, and so isn’t good either, but it’s not as bad as any of the three above options, and no one can avoid it (except billionaires of course)
To add, “There’s no ethical consumption under capitalism” applies to your labor, as well. The phrase is meant to provide perspective, and shouldn’t be used as an excuse to do whatever.
I’m not particularly happy with everything the company I work for does. Especially the actions of the people at the top. But it’s not notably worse than any other Fortune 500.
Lockheed, though? It’s bad in a more fundamental way.
random subject is discussed
instantly thinks about Israel
You can really tell 4Chan is down currently.
Removed by mod
How is it more related to this than to any other geopolitical conflict?
Im not surprised honestly, and yes its seriously fucked up.
Removed by mod
Because wherever there is a possibility to make massive amounts of money, those with power will push and push and push to be in control of it.
theoretically it allows for more competition, but in practice its much more complex
Seems like if a theory doesn’t allow for obvious-to-everyone complexity, then it’s a pretty useless theory.
And which benevolent corporations IS acceptable to work for?
no ethical consumption under capitalism etc etc but… there are companies that don’t make a profit by murdering middle eastern people
That number is shrinking alarmingly fast
I think it’s picking nits, economic destruction can be just as complete as military. People starve all over the world every day. Some people live in slavery to make the shirts Walmart sells, etc.
Removed by mod
Of course it is, but I think it’s only marginally better than Walmart. I mean after all, Walmart IS a force for good in the world, right?
Removed by mod
Removed by mod
Removed by mod
Removed by mod
I’m offended on behalf of myself. You are the reason I cannot reasonably assume humanity will die off in a meteor strike that allows nature time to heal.
But then it was a long shot anyway…
ALL ROCK LIVES MATTER!!!
Removed by mod
AND MY STONE!
“planetary defense” usually means tracking and maybe deflecting asteroids that are likely to hit Earth.
Removed by mod
Jesus Christ, Finch.
With the amount of classified information that goes into weapons manufacturing, where your just making doo-dad#1, it’s understandable some people wouldn’t even know their doing something wrong.
Makes me think of the, “when does life begin” debate. When do random parts become a weapon of mass destruction?
I’m unable to get any info on what my grandpa did after leaving active duty and going to work for LM on government contracts. I have paperwork mentioning him, and it’s alllllllll still sharpied out almost 70 years later. Dude was a logistics engineer, he basically organized warehouses, yet apparently was so important to the nuclear sub program (Mare Island in the 50s & 60s tells me that much) apparently that I’m not allowed any further info
It’s entirely possible he didn’t know what he was working on, I only have guesses because of other shit we know from decades after his death
I volunteer in my free time so that more Russian occupiers will be eliminated. I’m very proud of myself.
Removed by mod
“I refuse to work in defense. I’d rather my work wasn’t used to blow anyone up” is a line I’ve used in multiple job interviews. I like to think the hell I end up going to at least has chilly weather and/or really good AC.
Ah, you’re going to visit Hell, Michigan.
Sounds nice, where do i sign? :)
I guess it would
Lockheed does more than just defense contracts
Yeah sometimes they crash spacecraft on Mars
Lockmart felt the pound-force from that burn a kilomile away.
I’ll have to insist in using BTUs for the measurement of burns
Compact fusion could literally save our civilization.
Got offered interviews at Raytheon and Lockheed once. Said no immediately. Can’t have a good conscience working for these companies.
Good job o7
