681–690 of 862 posts
Nothing brings home the Orwellian nature of USA 2026 more for me than the word "warfighter".
I continue to be surprised how many people haven't heard term until now, it's been in common use in the US for 20+ years. To me the most Orwellian thing is everyone using the newspeak name for the DoD.
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There's an old German short film called Nicht löschbares Feuer (Inextinguishable Fire, 1969)[1] that I'm fond of. It was a protest film against Napalm and how some companies wouldn't really let their employees know what they were actually working on. "I am a worker and I work in a vacuum cleaner factory. My wife could use a vacuum cleaner. That's why everyday I pick up a piece. At home I try to assemble the vacuum cl…
This question has been boiling in my brain for quite a long time. Consider a hypothetical scenario where one spy chinese or russian programmer working in Google or Meta might have siphoned off (copied and uploaded) all the important code (Monorepo) to the Mothership and all of us are now sitting ducks. I am sure, this question might have crossed your minds. I have no idea. if blueprints for the TPU chip design could…
I'd also be surprised if this code isn't already available with the US forces too and sometimes the enemy can be from within too.
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So what happened to those 34.7% voters that had better things to do than cast a vote? https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2025/2024-pre...
The exercised their rights not to vote. The “losing” side always thinks that higher turnout would have led to them “winning” which of course is a cry of a sore loser. The fact remains, 2024 election had the highest voter turnout ever and people have spoken (till the next one when we might get a chance to elect some adults to fix this shit)
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You're right. And the military in movies used to be depicted as inflexible, stubborn, paranoid, incompetent, and usually either "the bad guys" or authorities that impeded the progress of the main characters. (With exceptions; I'm not forgetting about Top Gun). Then there was a sudden switch, with the military shown with cool gadgets, airplanes, tech, heroics, and generally being glorified. The transition must have ha…
No conspiracy necessary. The CIA bought the rights to the 1954 film Animal Farm, modified the ending to fit propagandist ends, and it went undiscovered for four decades. The original Top Gun was intended to recover the image of the US Navy after the Vietnam War. Etc etc etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military%E2%80%93entertainment...
yea, I remember reading the book and then watching the movie and it had differences iirc, its available on youtube for free and I remember some comments talking about the different ending.
IIRC, in the movie, the animals finally kick the pigs out and everything. It was a good ending.
but in the book, there was not a good ending, the humans and the pigs were celebrating together and then ended up fighting in between each other
> Twelve voices were shouting in anger, and they were all alike. No question, now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
This is the last paragraph I found from the book (had to download it via archive.org to find the last para)
So am I correct or is there more to the story?
It is incredible how far the overton window has moved on this issue. When I graduated in 2007, it was common for tech companies to refuse to let their systems be used for war, and it was an ordinary thing when some of my graduating classmates refused to work at companies that did let their systems be used for war. Those refusals were on moral grounds. Now Anthropic wants to have two narrow exceptions, on pragmatic an…
There's an old German short film called Nicht löschbares Feuer (Inextinguishable Fire, 1969)[1] that I'm fond of. It was a protest film against Napalm and how some companies wouldn't really let their employees know what they were actually working on. "I am a worker and I work in a vacuum cleaner factory. My wife could use a vacuum cleaner. That's why everyday I pick up a piece. At home I try to assemble the vacuum cl…
DOW Chemical was producing Agent Orange, but was getting a ton of public pushback - so bad it decided to stop production, forcing the Pentagon to look for an alternative supplier.
That supplier? A German privately owned pharmaco called Boehringer-Ingelheim. It's Chairman at the time? Richard von Weizsäcker, future President of Germany.
The production site was in Hamburg, is contaminated for the next thousand years. Boehringer is legally forced to operate pumps to prevent the dioxins in that site from reaching the water table. If those did, it would wipe out the full population.
Oh those righteous Germans.
Disclosure - Boehringer denies the above: https://www.boehringer-ingelheim.com/boehringer-ingelheim-di...
Judge for yourself.
NIH on Exposure, AO and BI: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK230789/
Deeper dive on that BI Hamburg site: https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/consumer-health/diox...
It is incredible how far the overton window has moved on this issue. When I graduated in 2007, it was common for tech companies to refuse to let their systems be used for war, and it was an ordinary thing when some of my graduating classmates refused to work at companies that did let their systems be used for war. Those refusals were on moral grounds. Now Anthropic wants to have two narrow exceptions, on pragmatic an…
It is incredible how far the overton window has moved on this issue. When I graduated in 2007, it was common for tech companies to refuse to let their systems be used for war, and it was an ordinary thing when some of my graduating classmates refused to work at companies that did let their systems be used for war. Those refusals were on moral grounds. Now Anthropic wants to have two narrow exceptions, on pragmatic an…
Ever since I was young I was fairly divided on the subject. I've dealt with some highschool students affected by the downed aircraft MH17 and that lead to lots of grief among students. It usually lead to strong anti-war sentiments but some also felt a need to "do" something with it. If no one works on defence systems then all the things we have could become jeopardized, perhaps not this week but in 5 years. Therefore…
The reality is that the US government has not historically been engaged in defense. They have been engaged in offense. If you live in the united states and work on "defense," you are working on offense. If even if you are designing something like missile interceptors, they have historically been used primarily to protect US assets in wars that the US started.
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All of our current leaders as using God to justify their terrible actions. So religion doesn’t seem to be very good at teaching morals either.
Erwin Schrödinger might have abused children because why not, "everything is a wave after all. does it really matter what one wave does to another?" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erwin_Schr%C3%B6dinger#Sexual_...
Justification of any evil action to consider oneself as a good guy might be a human quality.
That being said, Majority of wars/conflicts in the past have sadly been because of religions and that number doesn't seem to be stopping and is still continuing to this day sadly.
It is incredible how far the overton window has moved on this issue. When I graduated in 2007, it was common for tech companies to refuse to let their systems be used for war, and it was an ordinary thing when some of my graduating classmates refused to work at companies that did let their systems be used for war. Those refusals were on moral grounds. Now Anthropic wants to have two narrow exceptions, on pragmatic an…
Maybe companies are more open about it today, but it is hard to make such a wide assertion.
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"Half" is obviously an exaggeration but apart from time-sharing operating systems, the Internet, what is now CSAIL and (partially) GPS, they sponsored a ton of open source projects. They used to maintain a catalog[0]. The Web Archive version[1] contains a partial list (e.g. OpenBSD was sponsored only for a few years and is not included there). [0] https://www.darpa.mil/opencatalog [1] https://web.archive.org/web/2014…
The bigger issue with your perspective is that you do not realize that the underlying purpose of the things you do not attribute to the military or equate as bad, is still groundwork or “capacity building” deliberately for militaristic purposes and objectives, usually very intentionally so that you don’t realize it. You would likely not support things if you were overly told what the underlying objective was. Let me…
The core issue itself is terribly complex because in an ideal world we would never need military at all, and at least in Europe we had this hope that humanity is evolving in this direction, and that eventually even the wars in the Middle East and Africa will calm down. 2014 and 2022 were rude awakenings - there are crazy people out there, and they became nation leaders, and will start a war for one reason or another. That's why I don't have a unified opinion on that, especially that some military tech like interceptors are saving people's lives.