Do you struggle to find ethical work?

Agreed on a some level. I just would think of not gimping the whole country by banning bad things when our enemies don't do this. For example, Germany and shutting down nuclear power.

But you don't necessarily need to sacrifice anything. There is most probably ethical work paying similar salary to the non-ethical one. So in that case you volunteered without pressure to make the world a more shitty place. (the "without" pressure part is probably hyperbole as finding an unethical well-paying job is probably easier)

Thanks for sharing. I understand your hesistancy to post this, however, I feel that a lot of people share your position, so it's very useful to add it to the discussion. I certainly won't downvote you.

The reason I don't personally agree with this is that it's unrealistic at this point to expect legislation to help with the glaring issues in the world. Legislators are bought and paid for by the industries that are causing harm.

I also disagree with your assumption that if you're not doing it then someone else will. There are a lot of great people in our industry but the number is not infinite. If enough people individually say no to something then there's less chance it will happen.

I worry that your view point seems rational to many people and allows them to dodge any responsibility that they may have.

Cons:

- regulation by legislation is super slow. For example, disposables vapes should have never entered the market in the first place. They are an environmental nightmare, don't have any half decent purpose. Yet it will take years if not decades to ban them.

- We already have too many laws. Legislations are like licences. The best ones are the simplest ones. Once you need lawyers and legal advisors and protection to do anything, it means we have already gone too far.

We are doomed as a specy anyway, unable to collectively learn from our past errors.

One of the things that I worked on of which I'm proudest, was a data science platform for some really admirable US aviation safety programs, working in an elite team.

That said, in my HCOLA city, today I'm competing for housing with people who spent the same decade working at FAANGs and biotechs (as well as competing with old-money and foreign investors). You generally won't get wealthy by working for the government or a federal contractor. And you could be simply priced out of your city -- if not immediately, then as climate change, geopolitical power shifts, "AI", and ongoing wealth concentration disrupt things.

A colleague (who's done a lot of real activist work, mostly behind the scenes, since before the recent wave of fashionable activism), and who was there with me as a skilled techie at the start of the dotcoms, later said something like, "we should've taken the money, and then had the money for do-gooding after". I haven't had the positive impact he has, and in hindsight he might've been right (though it was more complicated than that).

But I'm not necessarily encouraging "take the money", as blanket advice for everyone. That's already the default that people do. And another default is for the person who might've said something about "improving the system from within" to then get acclimated to behavior they previously questioned, and instead chase career status and wealth. Most of us don't need to be encouraged to follow the default, and instead probably need to be nudged more to understand and be inspired to do better for society.