131–140 of 527 posts
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War will always be evil, it's usually just about whether it is a necessary evil.
I think that’s a very oversimplified opinion. Depending on the alternative, war can certainly be the moral decision. I don’t think you’d find many would who would describe The Unions war on slavery as Evil.
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Some people will see the evil as the country you are working for is known as the one of the primary aggressors and war initiators of the history that continues to kill directly and indirectly hundreds of thousands of people in other countries bringing them "democracy" where no one asked them for anything. Others will just see it as a necessity and that every company should work and help the government when they are a…
Well, what’s the alternate option? If the US hadn’t been the “police” of the world. It could have been Russia or China or India, would we rather have had them? And don’t say Europe unless you consider France and the U.K. and others and their things. We don’t live on a vacuum. If you create one, someone will fill it. I am loath to think of how much worse things could be despite the idiotic wars of Obama and W., I thin…
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Hell of a comparison. “Why can’t they?,” you ask? I’m not saying they can’t , but for a start, how about the fact that we are no longer fighting a world war?
And do you know what it is that really upholds the peace we all love?
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Because it is a conflict of interest. The public has put their trust into Google for 20 years. We supported them. We cheered them on. We have voluntarily given them all our personal data. Our emails. Our instant messages. Our voices. All of it feeds into their massive database for them to mine. We put our faith into them, in the hopes that they would honor their creed, that they would do no evil. But gradually, that…
> There is nothing that will stop this. The military will find a defense contractor to do their bidding. But Google can voluntarily elect to remove themselves from this sector. Let some other company do it. Let someone else figure it out. The blood of dead innocent civilians will be on their hands. You don't see Raytheon, Boeing, or Northrop crying about it. I work at Google but opinions are my own. This is actually…
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The US is directly and indirectly responsible for more civilian death than any other coutry since the cold war ended. Basic human decency should be the answer to why you shouldn't help kill even more.
I think you should read some stats on Syria and get back to us.
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I kind of agree actually. Humanity has always been at conflict with each other and will be for the foreseeable future. But for the first time in history we have the tools to conduct intense warfare yet limit collateral damages and minimize cost in both human and material resources. The engineers who worked on precision strike weapons/smart bombs should be applauded instead of ostracized, in the past we'd just carpet…
I have mixed feelings here. On the one hand, you're correct about reduction of collateral damage. On the other hand, weapons of old were used as part of actual wars. Precise weaponry seems to be making it too easy to kill off people without starting a war - like the US is doing with its drone strikes - which means it'll happen more. Also, I fear that the limit of precision strike weapons is being able to swiftly kill…
I guess everything is a double edged sword after all.
I think that the leaked emails show that one or two execs within Google expressed the optimistic case for the eventual revenue leading from the project. That's how projects happen in companies. Some employee gets excited about the potential of the project and writes emails talking about all the huge numbers that project will post. Most of those emails are wrong. Maven may be wrong at any price or size. But Google's c…
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No, your moral compass is off. The US has toppled a large number of sovereign states that were not acting violently toward other nations, and installed dictators and monarchs. The US supports Saudi Arabia, one of the most authoritarian nations on earth, who backed an actual attack on US soil, and yet they invade nations with false claims of WMD and kill hundreds of thousands. To claim that the US is the police and no…
Or maybe the US just had a problematic idea of what police should be doing, which explains a lot of our other problems.
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> Because it is a conflict of interest. No, it's not. That's entirely subjective. It's only a conflict of interest in the heads of people who believe the U.S. military is evil. The problem is that Google has a different interpretation of evil than yourself, and you're struggling to cope with that reality.
So the quote can basically mean anything you want it to mean? You just have to bend your definition of evil into whatever shape suits you.
> We believe strongly that in the long term, we will be better served—as shareholders and in all other ways—by a company that does good things for the world even if we forgo some short term gains
So it boils down to the simple interpretation: Is helping the U.S. military consistent with doing good things for the world? Public opinion polls conducted in 2016 indicated that 78% of Americans trusted the military to act in the interest of the public [2]. So, at least among Americans, I think it's a reasonable conclusion that a majority of people view the military as doing good.
[1] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1288776/000119312504... (page 32)
[2] http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/10/18/most-america...
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> There is nothing that will stop this. The military will find a defense contractor to do their bidding. But Google can voluntarily elect to remove themselves from this sector. Let some other company do it. Let someone else figure it out. The blood of dead innocent civilians will be on their hands. You don't see Raytheon, Boeing, or Northrop crying about it. I work at Google but opinions are my own. This is actually…
Because they oppose the drone warfare program, which is killing noncombatants in nominally allied countries. https://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_561fafe2e4b028dd7ea6c4ff https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/03/the-oba... It’s not the military that is evil, it’s this particular program in the eyes of many. http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-24557333 Disclaimer: I am also fortunate to work at Google an…
I don't understand this logic. Drones are a weapon. They are not any more evil than any other weapon that the military uses. They aren't killing people autonomously. There is a human pilot behind every death. The pilot just happens to be hundreds or thousands miles away from the aircraft. Would we be fine with the military killing the exact same people if the pilot was simply on the aircraft that launched the missiles or bombs?
The distinct advantage of drones is to safeguard the lives of military personnel by not putting them in harms way. You can make an argument that this fact makes using military force politically easier, but I think the blame for that is once again on the military/political leadership and not the drones themselves.
If your problem is with killing people, it should be with the people who ordered the killing and not the specific weapon that was used to carry out the killing.