Now would be the best time to push it, when Silicon Valley employers have a significant advantage over workers, and the amount of people willing to work on anything is the highest its been since the dot-com crash.
Pentagon woos Silicon Valley to join ranks of arms makers
41–50 of 57 posts
Re: Pentagon woos Silicon Valley to join ranks of arms makers
#42The latest estimates of the military budgets of the USA and China are 768 billion and 270 billion, respectively - yet China seems to be equalling if not outpacing the United States on speed of technological innovation as well as on international trade arrangements. Calling on private capital to make risky investments in new technologies that only have one likely customer - the US government (well, maybe some Third Wo…
>China seems to be equalling if not outpacing the United States on speed of technological innovation as well as on international trade arrangements. What is this based on?
they already have a larger Navy and will soon pass us in aircraft
while we were blowing up the Middle East, they were building shipyards
Re: Pentagon woos Silicon Valley to join ranks of arms makers
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
China pays personnel way less and a huge chunk of that budget is personnel costs
In addition to lower personnel costs, their manufacturing industry is generally more efficient. The result is they get a lot more "bang for their buck" and you can't compare military spending just by looking at capital expenditure and currency conversion rates. They also have different goals. America spends to maintain global hegemony, which means a huge fleet of aircraft carriers meant to operate around the world. C…
oh they are definitely thinking about carriers - specifically ways to kill them
China has invested rather deeply in the space of carrier-killer missiles, which are cheap enough to build that it will always be possible and economical to sink any carrier, including Ford class
Re: Pentagon woos Silicon Valley to join ranks of arms makers
#44Silicon Valley tends to have degrees of employee autonomy, encouragement to be curious and ask questions / make suggestions outside your "lane," flexible and high quality workstations and tools, most code and documentation open to most employees, tons of foreigners. From what I understand, defense is lily white, extremely locked down and compartmentalized, you spend months wrestling with a bureaucracy to for access t…
There are a ton of nonwhite people in the defense sector. Just as there are a ton of non-white US citizens.
To the types of people who use terms like “lily white” in a derogatory sense, the non-white US citizens who work in the defense sector don’t really count as non-white. I think the term is “multiracial whiteness”.
Re: Pentagon woos Silicon Valley to join ranks of arms makers
#45The latest estimates of the military budgets of the USA and China are 768 billion and 270 billion, respectively - yet China seems to be equalling if not outpacing the United States on speed of technological innovation as well as on international trade arrangements. Calling on private capital to make risky investments in new technologies that only have one likely customer - the US government (well, maybe some Third Wo…
> Calling on private capital to make risky investments in new technologies that only have one likely customer - the US government (well, maybe some Third World petrodollar recycling options, who knows) - seems to avoid discussing how the current gigantic military government budget is being spent.
Historically, there has been no shortage of entrepreneurs chasing defense dollars. Lots of iconic weapons, from the Thompson submachine gun to the Spitfire to the Colt revolver, were developed speculatively and later sold to militaries that hadn’t initially requested them.
> Fundamentally, military expenditures don't have much in the way of additional positive economic effects. Say you're producing construction cranes, for example - each crane facilitates further economic activity, in building projects. If you're producing tanks - well, unless your economic model is to raid other countries for raw resources, it's not going to have that same effect. There's also little likelihood for a large consumer market for your product.
Lots of military procurement expenditures have resulted in products with immediate civilian applications: rockets, radios, first aid equipment, antibiotics, encryption, highways, helicopters, jet engines, radar, sonar, Kevlar, canned food, computers.
Re: Pentagon woos Silicon Valley to join ranks of arms makers
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
Does the amount of foreign founders and funders make a difference here? I imagine it’s grown.
They let a South African keep his security clearance after breaking federal law so no big deal if there isn't Chinese entanglement.
Or maybe the reason he still has clearance is because the federal crimes are totally made up & in your head
Re: Pentagon woos Silicon Valley to join ranks of arms makers
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
I just watched this the other day, and it was very eye-opening. They came to the same conclusion. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEe_dJZtF1E
Wow - that's WSJ-branded content. Not the crowd that you'd expect to speak ill of corporate mergers and pricing power.
I thought the same thing
Re: Pentagon woos Silicon Valley to join ranks of arms makers
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
In addition to lower personnel costs, their manufacturing industry is generally more efficient. The result is they get a lot more "bang for their buck" and you can't compare military spending just by looking at capital expenditure and currency conversion rates. They also have different goals. America spends to maintain global hegemony, which means a huge fleet of aircraft carriers meant to operate around the world. C…
oh they are definitely thinking about carriers - specifically ways to kill them China has invested rather deeply in the space of carrier-killer missiles, which are cheap enough to build that it will always be possible and economical to sink any carrier, including Ford class
You're restating parent's point, which is that China invests in cheaper regional objectives.
Re: Pentagon woos Silicon Valley to join ranks of arms makers
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
They let a South African keep his security clearance after breaking federal law so no big deal if there isn't Chinese entanglement.
Said "South African" is a naturalized American citizen, which should be 'American enough' for anybody. His business dealings with the communist Chinese are a bit more concerning. Edit for response: > why did you put quotes around american enough Because in my view you're either an American citizen or you're not. I think it's offensive to speak of being American being a matter of degree. Insinuating that Elon Musk is…
Musk also has citizenship of Canada and South Africa. It does matter in security clearances, but I don’t know how firm that rule is.
Re: Pentagon woos Silicon Valley to join ranks of arms makers
#50Does anyone work (or worked in the past) for a defense contracting company? I'm curious what the environment is like (e.g. is it a pressure cooker using ancient coding standards where everything requires a bunch of people with shiny metal on their work uniform to approve?). I worked for a startup where DARPA had given a fairly generous grant when I started my career (they made a medical training device that the milit…
I work as a data engineer for a Defense company. It's not always stable but depends on the contract you can get on, some have a pretty broad scope and arent going anywhere, others are small projects with less stable funding.
Most of what I work with is Databricks, Python, Pyspark, etc. So most coding is done in notebooks. I haven't felt that there was a lot of restrictions coding wise, but getting access to different databases, clusters, and especially on boarding can be a pain.
Environment wise its been pretty good, you find even the clients are often contractors themselves, but if you dislike them you can always roll off and onto another project, it seems everyone needs more devs