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

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

#291

Post by JumpCrisscross »

nradov wrote: post #289
slg wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you define Russia not nuking Ukraine as "strict pacifism"? Because every modern country and army seems to have some basic standard of ethics and morals that restrict them from waging total war even if you want to argue that's purely for diplomatic or PR reasons. There are a whole lot of decisions that need to be made to get from "strict pacifism" to total war, so I don't know why we need to flatten this into a…

Russia not nuking Ukraine had nothing to do with ethics or morals. It's more pragmatic than that. Putin wants to take Ukraine largely intact to control its population and resources, not turn it into an irradiated wasteland. And he knows that use of WMDs would invite economic sanctions from key neutral trading partners such as India. Also, it's questionable whether Russia's nuclear arsenal would even work reliably. Th…

> Putin wants to take Ukraine largely intact to control its population and resources, not turn it into an irradiated wasteland

Nuking Kyiv, Odessa and Lviv would probably force Ukraine to surrender.

> use of WMDs would invite economic sanctions from key neutral trading partners such as India

This is the real constraint. There is still the credible threat of being economically isolated by America, Europe, China and India. (Neither China nor India wants the normalisation of nuclear bombardment normalised. They both have border disputes with nuclear-armed neighbours.)

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

#292

Post by bigyabai »

abeppu wrote: post #278
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…

Ok you say rockets and space were "worthwhile" and missiles are "a different question". But of course the space race proceeded from work on missiles. ICMBs are rockets that go high and fast and then happen to complete less than one full orbit. And my understanding is that early ICs were for missiles because it was acceptable for the ICs to be very expensive in exchange for them being very light and small. Only a cont…

The lines blurred, IMO. Boycotting the 8086 wouldn't hamstring ICBM development. Boycotting the microwave oven wasn't going to prevent radar complexes from being constructed.

Much of the modern pushback seems to come from the new blood companies. Microsoft, Apple, Google, businesses that deliberately blurred the line to obscure which side they stand on. These companies all collude with the US government to some extent, but their desire to hide that cooperation creates a rift in what they say and do. You could have boycott Google and Apple technology to protect Americans[0] from warrantless surveillance. You could have boycott Starlink to thwart Starshield[1] and future bids on the Golden Dome. Information on all of this behavior is classified because it is obviously upsetting and creates the potential for dissent. But hiding the behavior also creates a dam-burst effect once you tell people the truth, including employees. The Snowden files were a legitimate surprise to most people working in FAANG at the time.

It's upsetting to think that American NOBUS abilities[2] hang like a Sword of Damocles over the so-called Free World. When you import American technology, you also import the surveillance and opinions of the American government. It has developed in a new and insidious way that doesn't fully resemble what we saw in WWII or the Cold War, unique to the information age.

[0] https://www.wyden.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/wyden_smartphone_...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starshield

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NOBUS

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

#293

Post by lovich »

megous wrote: post #284
lovich wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And they can redirect resources to the war if we removed it. If anything, removal of our support probably leads to the use of dumber less targeted weapons like carpet bombing or good ole white phosphorus that they’ve already demonstrated use of in past conflicts. If we were giving them 30+% of their gdp then yea, dropping that probably stops the conflict. 2% is just a budget reshuffle.

Israelis can't carpet bomb. They don't have the tech. Are you saying 10's of thousands of bombs US supplied to level the entire cities and countryside to the ground is preferable to IL having to get this elsewhere, because why exactly? What does precision have to do with it? You can scroll around here to see what US did by providing all those mostly free bombs: https://earth.google.com/web/@31.31022959,34.24130746,30…

> Israelis can't carpet bomb. They don't have the tech.

What? I’m not even responding to the rest if this is how you open up.

Carpet bombing is so low tech I can’t imagine a country in the modern age that couldn’t create the technology even if they couldn’t afford actually deploying it. It’s a matter of logistics and having enough bombs.

It’s literally just dropping a fuck ton of dumb bombs on an area to “carpet” it, unless we’re talking past each other and you were referring to something else.

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

#294

Post by mmooss »

(2024)

And the actual title doesn't make it a question at all; they assume it's happening and ask how:

"How Big Tech and Silicon Valley are Transforming the Military-Industrial Complex"

I understand that HN auto-removes the leading 'How', but adding the question mark changes the meaning significantly.

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

#295

Post by marcosdumay »

chanakya wrote: post #22

Serious question: should companies not participate in contracts from their country's defense department? Or is the argument that it's only US companies which shouldn't, because the US is uniquely evil?

The US is almost uniquely evil, though.

People should ask the same question in the likes of Russia, Israel, North Korea, Iran. But in most countries, defense actually means that.

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

#296

Post by jandrewrogers »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #254
nradov wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heavy use of cluster munitions (and land mines) was critical in allowing Ukraine to stop the second Russian invasion in 2022-2023 and stabilize the front lines. The notion that they kill civilians indiscriminately, or that it's unethical for defense contractors to build them for the US and allied militaries, is ludicrous and disconnected from objective reality.

> cluster munitions was critical in allowing Ukraine to stop the second Russian invasion in 2022 Genuinely want to read more about this. Do you have a good source? I'd always assumed cluster munitions had no legitimate use.

Cluster munitions are highly effective at destroying massed formations of men and equipment. This forces the attacker to heavily armor up, which doesn’t work well against modern cluster munitions, and/or disperse forces across a very large area so that few targets will be within the kill zone of a cluster munition to limit their effectiveness.

They limit the ability of an attacker to mass vast forces in an area for a brute-force assault. Soviet doctrine was notorious for this kind of attack, so cluster munitions were developed as a solution. Russia still uses this kind of assault, so cluster munitions still work against their forces. Other militaries (e.g. the US) use doctrines that render cluster munitions ineffective.

Just about every weapon invented was developed to address a specific scenario where it is highly effective at shaping the battlefield. Some have become obsolete because those scenarios don’t occur in modern warfare, but there is still a lot of diversity in the practice of warfare.

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

#297

Post by jongjong »

The most unethical aspect IMO isn't what they're building but the taxpayer money which those big companies are getting. These are essentially handouts.

Taxes are not paid voluntarily but coerced out of citizens under the threat of force. So when they hand out such large contracts, the government is taking from all taxpayers by force and giving it selectively to a few chosen people who happen to own shares of those companies.

Many of those shareholders aren't even US citizens!

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

#298

Post by maxglute »

Cheap money gone, investor money being burnet in bubble, only thing long term is government money, but gov money still not enough to get US defense primes to make stuff at scale and not SaaS the shit out of hardware (see lockmart f35). I doubt SV will be any different. My feeling is any $$$ US spends on soft MIC stuff, PRC going to acquire anyway and have their industrial base utilize more efficiently. If US tech end up build AGIing, and when US gov as it how to beat China expecting 5d chess answer, AGI going to conclude crippled US industrial base simply can't - it and defect.

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

#299

Post by chanakya »

Avicebron wrote: post #218
XorNot wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Pretty much, corporate lobbying, corporate donations, superpacs, the list is pretty much endless. Little timmy's vote in rural nebraska isn't moving the needle. Maybe he can complain at his local town meeting about the datacenter they're building in his back yard. Or put a sign in his yard to show he's on the blue team or the red team but practically it doesn't matter. As an aside, I emailed my congressman (blue) abo…

There was more corporate and billionaire backing and donations to the Democrats than the Republicans. Also, studies have shown that the power of money in elections is overestimated. Money tends to go for the viable candidate, it's not the money which makes them viable.

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

#300

Post by chanakya »

umeshunni wrote: post #92
chanakya wrote: post #22

Serious question: should companies not participate in contracts from their country's defense department? Or is the argument that it's only US companies which shouldn't, because the US is uniquely evil?

There's a class of people in the West who have forgotten that wars happen and that defense is necessary. American especially benefit from two oceans separating them from the rest of the world and having never seen a war except on CNN. Some of them, esp in central/eastern Europe, were rudely woken up in 2022 when Russian tanks rolle into a neighboring country. Others still have their heads buried in the sand and will…

Exactly. Decades of pax americana has lulled people into a view that the rest of the world are pacifists who will get along just fine but for the US.
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