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

301–310 of 405 posts

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

#301

Post by lovich »

pphysch wrote: post #168
lovich wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you’re referring to Ukraine as one of the two, we already heavily reduced our support under Trump and there is no chance in hell that removing the leftover support causes Ukraine to capitulate by tomorrows, especially after recent territory gains and destruction of Russian logistical supply lines with Wildberries and their refinery infrastructure. Also if the other is Iran, lol at “stopped supporting respective be…

The USA is heavily supporting Ukraine with intelligence sharing, private financial support, StarLink, and """indirectly""" providing arms through European middlemen. The latter was Trump's innovation so that he can pretend he is upholding some foreign policy campaign promise without materially changing anything.

Private financial support doesn’t count, that’s private actors.

I’ll accept Starlink as US support despite their back and forth on supporting Russia, because they are a large corporation requiring on government assent the same way Wildberries is for Russia.

The indirect one you’ll have to sell me on as support. We’re selling shit, and like to make money. Someone buying our shit to give to Ukraine doesn’t count as support or antagonistic to me but as a neutral position.

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

#302

Post by chanakya »

istjohn wrote: post #88
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?

If your country's defense department is conducting itself ethically, and the contracts are for equipment or technology that is not inherently ethically fraught (like autonymous weapon systems), then one might consider that acceptable if you aren't a pacifist. An enormous amount of US military technology and weapons have been recently used to perpetuate a genocide, so the US is certainly an outlier in the global lands…

Among the list of countries which supply arms to Israel are UK, Canada, Germany, Australia, Netherlands, India, Italy, Taiwan, Romania and a few others. The US is not unique in this by any means.

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

#303

Post by justin66 »

abeppu wrote: post #119

I do think that for those of us who got into tech in the last couple of decades, the history can be rather obscured, but from the Fairchild semiconductor days, the military was a main customer, right? I think there's a real question: would the world be a better place had Fairchild and peers e.g. refused to build ICs for missile systems (including the minuteman), for example? Would the same tech have been developed wi…

> In retrospect it does seem like in the 1950s-70s the military was willing to fund some stuff that was actually not especially close to applications of killing people.

There's no "seem" about it, what you're saying is true, and it was because of changes in federal law. [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Mansfield#Mansfield_Amend...

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

#304

Post by JumpCrisscross »

lovich wrote: post #293
megous wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

> Carpet bombing is so low tech I can’t imagine a country in the modern age that couldn’t create the technology

Yeah, it's artillery bombardment by more-modern means. The "modern" bit being planes.

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

#305

Post by JoshTriplett »

EA-3167 wrote: post #171
5upplied_demand wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If quitting a job is "performative" what would you consider a "non-performative" act? Ironically, you are doing your own preaching in your comments. It could even be described as "performative."

Oh God I realized the issue here, I didn't make myself clear: Talking about doing something on a 4 month old account is not the same as doing it. I give credit to people for doing things, not claiming to do them in an anonymous forum they just joined. Cynical? Perhaps, but maybe if people were just a bit more cynical about believing any text on the internet just because it feels better to believe it, we'd be better o…

That's fair; when all is said and done, more is said than done. That is much, much better than the more common thing that leads to comments like yours; I think some comments and downvotes come from the assumption that your comments come from a place of "I don't like it when people make decisions based on their ethics, because I don't like their ethics". That is, unfortunately, very common.

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

#306

Post by votingisntreal »

pfdietz wrote: post #45
slowin wrote: post #8

It's up to us, as tech workers to push back against this. I quit my job at Microsoft due to their complicity with Israeli war crimes and oppression (and certainly the US government was involved too). It's tough to leave a high paying job, but I feel good about it every single day. We don't have to be cogs in the MIC machine and we don't have to build systems that terrorize people.

> It's up to us, as tech workers to push back against this. This appears to me to be unrealistic or performative, except if you mean pushing back in the sense that anyone could, as a voter for example. Boycott of defense work won't work; attempting to claim some special authority in debate won't work either.

If voting was so powerful, couldn't we just vote these problems away? While we're at it, vote away excessively high rent, or vote to prevent companies from hiring immigrant labor instead of locals.

And yet - I never see these items on the ballot! Huh. Why is that?

It seems like rent strikes do work though. And mass denial of anything on your ships after you spent the gas seems to make things pretty annoying for you guys :)

> special authority in debate

All normally functioning humans want to preserve life, liberty, and prosperity worldwide. You guys are the outliers. You're the weird ones with your "chosen" special authority that nobody believes or respects at all.

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

#307

Post by karp773 »

chasd00 wrote: post #259
0cf8612b2e1e wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ukraine seems to be what happens when a country willingly gave up their nukes (with US encouragement). I have no problem if the US navy wants to tool around shipping lanes for the good of global trade. I take issue with everything else. In the past couple of years, the US has implicitly used the strength of its military to threaten the sovereignty of Greenland, Panama, Canada, Mexico, and Cuba. Abducted a foreign hea…

Ukraine was storing nukes but did not have the keys to use them. They were useless to ukraine and presented no deterrent.

That's false. Please stop spreading Russian propaganda. Not only Ukraine was able to control and maintaining them, in fact, Ukrainian companies manufactured nuke ICBMs, and then serviced them in Russia long after the collapse of the USSR. See, for example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KB_Pivdenne

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

#309

Post by dredmorbius »

jandrewrogers wrote: post #296
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Today that role (strongly discouraging grouped formations) has been occupied by drones.

The current UA/RU front is a 30km deep kill zone crossed by FPV craft (and discarded optic fibre cables) in which the largest effective group size might be four or so soldiers. Tanks are all but useless as sitting ducks.

Reuters made a surprisingly good infographic / interactive feature on this this past July:

https://www.reuters.com/graphics/UKRAINE-CRISIS/KILL-ZONE/zn...>

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

#310

Post by dredmorbius »

All that's old is new again.

Steve Blanks' "Secret History of Silicon Valley" details the emergence of that tech hub beginning with WWII and the "radiation lab", which helped develop radar.

https://steveblank.com/2009/03/23/if-i-told-you-i%E2%80%99d-...>

Quite a few HN submissions over the years: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=secret%20history%20of%20silicon%20...>.

Those of us who can remember the 1980s / early 1990s, prior to the defence build-down following the end of the Cold War might recall quite a few defence-related establishments in and around Silicon Valley, in its original scope centred on Santa Clara County and the Santa Clara - Palo Alto region.

Post reply on HN