Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Silicon Valley is transforming the military-industrial complex? (2024)

costsofwar.watson.brown.edu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

391–400 of 405 posts

Re: Silicon Valley is transforming the military-industrial complex? (2024)

#391

Post by jasomill »

blablabla123 wrote: post #374
bluegatty wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Industr…

Interestingly AOL, Compuserve and similar ones originally ran without Internet. In fact it took a while until the Internet catched up with the level of interactivity, mostly through Flash. It's absurd that nowadays many websites require a central CDN to stay available.

CompuServe was in many ways its own single-source proprietary internet.

And CDNs are by nature distributed, even if their ownership is not. Just as it's unreasonable to expect a site operator to maintain their own global network backbone, it's unreasonable for every site to deploy global infrastructure for efficient content delivery. Which is not to say that we wouldn't be better off with a more diverse and distributed-in-the-ownership-sense market of CDN providers.

Re: Silicon Valley is transforming the military-industrial complex? (2024)

#392

Post by slg »

Ajedi32 wrote: post #390
slg wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is from the comment you replied to: >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. This is from your response: >It's more like "if I don't do it then I better hope so…

The "I" a person. If a company has no employees, it ceases to exist in any meaningful sense, so if you refuse to work for such companies you better hope somebody else will do so in your place. Just to be clear, the conversation so far: > beloch: 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. > JumpCrisscross: Idk, there's somethin…

You and other people who replied removed nuance from beloch's comment. The "moral grey zones" were not merely a question of working for a military contractor or not. Just from a basic grammar perspective, the use of the plural "zones" should indicate this isn't a singular question. I read that as a reference to the moral and ethical issues described in the three previous paragraphs.

Yet by the time you replied, those three paragraphs of nuance were flattened. It was no longer a question of which military programs and actions can be morally and ethical justified, it is now simply a question of whether they are done or not. And once it is flattened into a binary yes or no, all that nuance of potentially unjustifiable uses of the military in beloch's comment fall into the "yes" category. Making it into a binary reduces the issue to pacifism versus total war.

Re: Silicon Valley is transforming the military-industrial complex? (2024)

#393

Post by slg »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #386
slg wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here is what I responded to: > 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. This person equates not "do[ing] it" with "strict pacifism".

"It" is having some level of military capability. I agree with Ajedi32 that not doing it is strict pacifism. beloch and jump- advocated for some level of national defense as a practical necessity sophacles- stupidly thought this was an "If I dont, someone will" argument Ajedi32- clarifies "the question is whether strict pacifism is a tenable national policy in the real world" The point is some level of defense is req…

>"It" is having some level of military capability. I agree with Ajedi32 that not doing it is strict pacifism.

>beloch and jump- advocated for some level of national defense as a practical necessity

I don't think this an accurate summary of the nuance contained in beloch's comment. I'll specifically highlight what I think was lost by the people who replied:

> 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.

Once the choice is either a yes or no, this nuance is lost. If you set up the choice as between pacifism and military capability, you're tacitly endorsing any form of military capability including nuclear weapons.

Re: Silicon Valley is transforming the military-industrial complex? (2024)

#394

Post by Ajedi32 »

slg wrote: post #392
Ajedi32 wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "I" a person. If a company has no employees, it ceases to exist in any meaningful sense, so if you refuse to work for such companies you better hope somebody else will do so in your place. Just to be clear, the conversation so far: > beloch: 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. > JumpCrisscross: Idk, there's somethin…

You and other people who replied removed nuance from beloch's comment. The "moral grey zones" were not merely a question of working for a military contractor or not. Just from a basic grammar perspective, the use of the plural "zones" should indicate this isn't a singular question. I read that as a reference to the moral and ethical issues described in the three previous paragraphs. Yet by the time you replied, those…

I think saying you "refuse to work for companies that do military work" because you "don't want to deal with moral grey zones" is a pretty binary choice with not a lot of nuance, but whatever. I think both our positions have been made pretty clear at this point and I'm not that interested in continuing to debate the semantics of previous comments.

Re: Silicon Valley is transforming the military-industrial complex? (2024)

#395

Post by stickfigure »

pphysch wrote: post #90
stickfigure wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

> regions such as East Asia are clearly better off due to declining American hegemony

Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam, Philippines would very much disagree.

Re: Silicon Valley is transforming the military-industrial complex? (2024)

#396

Post by esalman »

XorNot wrote: post #185
esalman wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hard to elect better leaders when you do not have multiple billions of dollars to spend.

Oh, do they have some mechanism by which they just took people's votes away entirely?

You don't need to take everyone's vote to influence an election. Look at the data. Most elections are decided by a small percentage of swing votes. With appropriate amount of data and resources (i.e. money) it is possible to swing elections.

Re: Silicon Valley is transforming the military-industrial complex? (2024)

#397

Post by thenthenthen »

floweronthehill wrote: post #366
thenthenthen wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Palo Alto by Malcom Harris goes even further back to the 1800s to explain the origin of Silicon Valley. https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/malcolm-harris/palo...

Haha thank you both! Its always the question, how far back do you go!

Re: Silicon Valley is transforming the military-industrial complex? (2024)

#398

Post by s1artibartfast »

slg wrote: post #393
s1artibartfast wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"It" is having some level of military capability. I agree with Ajedi32 that not doing it is strict pacifism. beloch and jump- advocated for some level of national defense as a practical necessity sophacles- stupidly thought this was an "If I dont, someone will" argument Ajedi32- clarifies "the question is whether strict pacifism is a tenable national policy in the real world" The point is some level of defense is req…

>"It" is having some level of military capability. I agree with Ajedi32 that not doing it is strict pacifism. >beloch and jump- advocated for some level of national defense as a practical necessity I don't think this an accurate summary of the nuance contained in beloch's comment. I'll specifically highlight what I think was lost by the people who replied: > People working for companies that do defence work have a mo…

Why do you reject the idea or possibility of yes to military capability, but with ethics or restrictions?

It seems obviously possible, and your arguments support it.

Where is this tacit endorsement you see coming from? It seems like nobody thinks that way with respect to their employment or support.

Anyways, this seems to be more about semantics than substance at this point, if you are arguing it is not binary, and I'm arguing that nobody said it was

Re: Silicon Valley is transforming the military-industrial complex? (2024)

#399

Post by MisterTea »

lbrito wrote: post #277
MisterTea wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> destroying democracies? Taiwan would like a word.

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…

Presently Xi is focused on growing China and doing a great job of it. But what happens when Xi is gone? Once China reaches its goal and is the worlds manufacturing source, how will it use its influence to obtain resources?

We already see China deploying debt traps and surveillance technology to developing nations. They are building surveillance states which feed back into China. With that, I feel that we have yet to see how China is going to exert its power.

Re: Silicon Valley is transforming the military-industrial complex? (2024)

#400

Post by irishcoffee »

tastyface wrote: post #317
irishcoffee wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Anyone who knows anything about Christianity knows that the New Testament supersedes the Old Testament.

Man this made me laugh, that’s too funny. Either you forgot a /s or you sincerely have no idea what you’re talking about.
Post reply on HN