211–220 of 308 posts
Lawful didn't stop Project MKUltra, or attacking countless countries, or overthrowing countless governments, or murdering countless people, or kidnapping people and torturing them, or...
The USA can do anything it wants, to anyone, any time.
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I mean it's basically an extremely high-stakes version of the (possibly apocryphal) Upton Sinclair quote: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." Most people (at least the people I've talked to, which admittedly is somewhat of a lefty bubble but I think even more generally) agree that companies getting to or close to "monopoly" status is a pretty…
> they suddenly remember who their campaign contributors are, and can then create reasons to avoid actually solving any of these problems. There are very real concerns when you break up a company though. Rockefeller's wealth shot up a lot when Standard Oil was broken up. That could easily make a politician that's "politician out to get the big companies" into "politician making billionaires richer."
I wasn't around during the breakup, but my parents told me that phone service got considerably better and cheaper after the AT&T breakup, which makes enough sense to me: if a consumer can drop you for someone else, you have a reason to try and compete on service and/or price.
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Why would you write a letter if you don't know what you're objecting to or even if you should be objecting?
That's kind of my point? I'm concerned by what has been made available but can't form a complete opinion and decide if I need to take action without knowing the full extent of the agreement.
This is why we elect competent (hopefully) leaders to worry about these things for us. Mob rule democracy about every national secret would mean they’re not secrets for very long!
What are the consequences of breach? Otherwise, Americans only use for this is to wipe their ass, and only if they can find a paper version.
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You’d need some shared ethical/moral framework to make that claim, which doesn’t really seem to exist anymore
You don't need a shared moral framework to come to a personal moral conclusion.
(I take "moral framework" to mean a principled stance that gives objective grounding for a moral judgement. I agree that we can come to a moral judgement without putting it through a systematic and discursive defense, and I reject the notion that there are many moralities or that they are arbitrary, but it is also true that diverging conceptions of the basis of morality will frustrate agreement. Stopping at personal moral judgement does not lend itself to fruitful dialogue and understanding, as it constraints the domain of what is intersubjectively knowable.)
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If speaking vigorously in defense of morality is wrong, I guess that's something I'll just have to live with.
You'll have to live with it somewhere else. Neither HN's administrators nor readership will tolerate that kind of behavior. If you intend to participate on Hacker News over the long term, please take up the suggestion by the other poster to review the guidelines and adhere to them.
And you haven't disagreed with what I said, only how I said it ;)
Who could have seen this one coming. From yesterday: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/google-ai-pentagon-classified-u... ("Hundreds of Google workers urge CEO to refuse classified AI work with Pentagon"). Any AI researcher who continues to work here is morally compromised.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/27/us/politics/sergey-brin-g...
Who could have seen this one coming. From yesterday: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/google-ai-pentagon-classified-u... ("Hundreds of Google workers urge CEO to refuse classified AI work with Pentagon"). Any AI researcher who continues to work here is morally compromised.
Is every American tax payer morally compromised?
I agree with the intent of your rhetorical question, so I'm jesting with you. I'm justifying my "yes" with the hopefully humorous distraction that every person, including American taxpayers, has at some point made a nonsustainable/selfish (my definition of immoral) decision.
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I look at this as a case of "pick your battles." In war, the civilians can't audit every move of the military. (It's impractical, both for reacting timely, and for keeping secrets from the enemy.) If the military doesn't work with Google, they will work with someone else who might not put the same amount of pressure on the military about the practical limits on AI. Or, even worse, our enemy might use a significantly…
As a private contractor, you can sign a contract to deliver pizza or bandages to US soldiers, but also put into the contract that you won't deliver lethal weapons, if that's your own ethical stance. You don't need to audit every move of the military, just the stuff you're doing at their request. And sure, maybe that just means the military decides to take their business elsewhere. But if you have confidence that your…