Very warm

I volunteer in my free time so that more Russian occupiers will be eliminated. I’m very proud of myself.

"I refuse to work in defense. I'd rather my work wasn't used to blow anyone up" is a line I've used in multiple job interviews. I like to think the hell I end up going to at least has chilly weather and/or really good AC.
- Ah, you’re going to visit Hell, Michigan.

The number of people defending Lockheed Martin here is staggering, but I guess I shouldn't be surprised given the apparent makeup of Lemmy's population
I'll make this very, very simple: working for a well-known defense contractor who brags about making bombs is bad. Working for Lockheed Martin is unethical.
Working for a large corporation (Microsoft) that funds or supports wars (Israel) is also bad, but not as bad as Lockheed Martin, the company that actually builds the bombs that are bought with the dollars that Microsoft sends to Israel
Working for any company that could theoretically contribute economically to a war is bad, but not as bad as the previous two examples and is more or less unavoidable for working people
Paying any kind of tax (especially in the US) ultimately funds wars, and so isn't good either, but it's not as bad as any of the three above options, and no one can avoid it (except billionaires of course)
- To add, "There's no ethical consumption under capitalism" applies to your labor, as well. The phrase is meant to provide perspective, and shouldn't be used as an excuse to do whatever.
  I'm not particularly happy with everything the company I work for does. Especially the actions of the people at the top. But it's not notably worse than any other Fortune 500.
  Lockheed, though? It's bad in a more fundamental way.

I had a friend in a difficult position, deciding between high pay at Buy N Large or the opportunity to work on insanely cool shit for Death Inc.
Ultimately he chose Death Inc, and the reasoning was along the lines of "This might kill a hundred people, but at least it'll kill them specifically. I can't even conceptualize the harm Amazon et al. do on a global scale to entire populations without even trying".
Made me think. I didn't have a very good answer to that.
- those bombs will kill far more than just a hundred people, far more than he can ever conceptualize. the consequences of those deaths will shape the world more than the extra microsecond an engineer could shave off of an internal Amazon function
- Also, "if I don't make this thing that will kill a hundred people specifically, they'll just use something that kills more people with less precision / more casualties."
  
  Ah good ole ego.
- How is precision weaponry "insanely cool shit"???
  
  Anduril has had many, many recruiters desperately trying to get me to work for them. On the surface, what they make does sound incredibly cool: embedded systems/operating systems for autonomous robotics.
  The only problem is those robots happen to be death bots (and Palmer Luckey, who makes me want to stay far, far away).
  
  Well, I can't get into details, but the field is vast.
  
  It means you can take out the bride's party, or the groom's party.
  
  I mean it's impressive from an engineering standpoint
  
  Technically if you think about it, he’d be saving innocent lives, since non precise weapons have more collateral damage. Might as well make bombs accurate and hit the right targets.

"Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That's not my department", says Wernher Von Braun.
- Making rockets wasn’t his department either.
  The US wouldn’t let Von Braun go testify at Dachau. To this day there’s a lot of whitewashing. But he knew how those rockets were made.
  Arthur Rudolph’s crimes were so egregious, that after letting him build the Saturn 5, we decided to ask him firmly to leave the country. In 1984.
- Don't say that he's hypocritical
  \ Say rather that he's apolitical
  
  context for those who need it:
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEJ9HrZq7Ro

And which benevolent corporations IS acceptable to work for?
- no ethical consumption under capitalism etc etc but… there are companies that don’t make a profit by murdering middle eastern people
  
  That number is shrinking alarmingly fast

With the amount of classified information that goes into weapons manufacturing, where your just making doo-dad#1, it's understandable some people wouldn't even know their doing something wrong.
Makes me think of the, "when does life begin" debate. When do random parts become a weapon of mass destruction?
- I'm unable to get any info on what my grandpa did after leaving active duty and going to work for LM on government contracts. I have paperwork mentioning him, and it's alllllllll still sharpied out almost 70 years later. Dude was a logistics engineer, he basically organized warehouses, yet apparently was so important to the nuclear sub program (Mare Island in the 50s & 60s tells me that much) apparently that I'm not allowed any further info
  It's entirely possible he didn't know what he was working on, I only have guesses because of other shit we know from decades after his death

This is one of the few reasons I dislike living in the area I do, defense contractors are basically the only ones nearby hiring for engineering roles. Luckily I work remotely, but if that ever changed and I couldn't find another remote position, I'd probably have to move. I'm not about to sell my soul.
- Same for me, except IT.
  Its pretty much either work at The Base or Geek Squad. One of these options pays enough to leave the area.
  
  Am getting a niche going for elderly centric IT help.
  All we have is elderly here 🤷 take that over jarheads
  
  I know which one it isn’t!
- Or, and hear me out, get a job and suck at it.
  
  Found the Boeing recruiter!

Catching General Dynamics strays
- Search for Veridian dynamics commercials from Better Off Ted

Why?
Of all the tools for oppression and murder, advanced weaponry is pretty low on the list for what actually makes the murdering happen. If you work for a company that does any kind of business with any repressive regime (ie most companies above a certain size), the simple fact that you're working for a cog in enabling the economy of the repressive regime to pay its cops, its soldiers, its secret police and informants and massive bureaucracy, is as much as a contribution as "I was .1% of designing a multirole jet that's 10% better than the previous multirole jet"
Hell, anyone making steel of the correct grade to go into small arms probably kills more innocent people, by that standard, than your average person working for Western defense contractors.
- First, props for backing a bonafide unpopular opinion so unflinchingly. (A) discusses your argument. (B) challenges it.
- It almost sounds like you might be suggesting that there's no ethical consumption under capitalism
  
  Something like that. And little ethical work.
- I mean yes there is a sort of "there is no ethical consumption under capitalism" dilemma when it comes to working. But just with that dilemma, you don't just give up, you try to minimize your participation as much as you can healthily do. And I think not working for a corp who's sole purpose is to develop weapons for killing people is one of those no brainers.
  
  It might be a no-brainer if it was all "We are making orphan crushers for the orphans", but the defense industry is much more complex than that. For example, would you say that a Ukrainian working for a Ukrainian defense firm, whose sole purpose is to develop weapons for killing people, is evil?
  
  Communists make weapons too tho. It's kind of a whole cycle.
- If less people worked to make weapons, there would be less weapons made.
  How is this a hard concept to understand?
  
  If less people worked to make weapons, there would be less weapons made.
  Okay?
  How is that relevant?
  Do you think that there is a dire shortage of tools for murder, and only the modern defense industry is sustaining the strained supply?
- Plus you have deterrance weapons like the F22. It hasn't actually killed anyone, because no one has challenged it. That sort of weapon can keep wars from starting, since they're less likely to win.
  
  Not so sure about the deterrence argument. My point is just that defense industry firms are not particularly core to the problem of people murdering each other, and certainly not the workers therein, any more than farmers are guilty of feeding murderers if their client sells to a genocidal state.
- I agree: Everyone is terrible.
- I'll go even farther. Have you voted in the last 50 years? Guess what you help elect the president and chief commanding death at the end of the bayonet and the from the top of the drones.
  
  And if you haven't voted (but been able to), you are likewise guilty for allowing the candidate who became president and CiC to commit their crimes (instead of the crimes the other candidate would have committed).
  The only way forward is to improve society as a whole.
- There’s a big difference between making steel vs knowingly making weapons that are themselves illegal or being used in genocide.
  
  knowingly making weapons that are themselves illegal
  Beg pardon
  or being used in genocide.
  Of course, making other materials to support genocide is much more moral.

At MIT in the 1980's it was called, "Get your fingerprints on the murder weapon."

I laughed and upvoted the meme but then I had to find it again and double check to see if it specified a country.

I guess it would
Lockheed does more than just defense contracts
- Yeah sometimes they crash spacecraft on Mars
  
  Lockmart felt the pound-force from that burn a kilomile away.

Got offered interviews at Raytheon and Lockheed once. Said no immediately. Can't have a good conscience working for these companies.
- Good job o7

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The Devil vs an A10, who would win?
- Brrrrrrrrt
- Depends, are we in Georgia and is there a golden ~~fiddle~~ gattling gun on the line? If so, I'd take that bet, the A10's the best there's ever been.
- That might be a good buddy comedy about the rapture where Hell rises to the surface but the US Military's actually got it under control somehow. Like a damn minotaur comes through the fences and swings a helicopter into the pavement by it's rudder, but a dude in a turret on a humvee shreds it like swiss cheese and all the goblins storming the gate stop cold and kneel with their hands on the back of their head very nervously.
  
  Someone was telling me about a series about a similar premise, which ended with the US military bombing Hell with all the civilians in it, out of essentially religious fanaticism.
  Feels more fitting.

God I wish I was smart enough to be a Galen Erso