Selling out
Selling out
178 comments
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Who has the least ethical job at Lockheed?
My money is on the salesman, "this bad boy can kill so many children"
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By shifting what you sell to “this bad boy can disperse your targeted package across an area x by y in z time frame” instead of “we can turn the entire school to rubble” you help them sleep at night.
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Consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, ‘I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so’. Probably, therefore, he will say something like this:
‘While freely conceding that the Soviet regime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigors which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement.’
- George Orwell
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Boy Boy has a video where they sneak into a military weapons convention.
One guy was selling crowd control armor and advertised the dissociation from your actions that armor like that creates, divorcing you from guilt.
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Found the vid + timecode
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CEO because he likely gets paid mostly in shares, and it's really shareholders (not employees) who have the most choice in the matter.
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Does their workforce in D.C count?
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Every corp you work at has a dark side. Maybe not Lockheed Martin level of destruction.
- My current job, we build systems to get people to spend more for things they don't need.
- My last job, we provided technology to "free speech" folks and looked the other way unless legally obligated to take it down
- The nonprofit i worked for spent 80% of their time and energy just for funding. Like $2mil a year, and 1.6mil went to paying staff.
Sometimes jobs frame it to look like it's a positive.
- I worked at one company that "gave opportunities" to offshore engineers because they were a fraction the cost of Americans.
- Another company outsourced our graphic design to people on Fiverr to help fund "freelancers", and then repurpose the work for million dollar ad campaigns.
And for me, I just constantly think of what the line is and how much of it I can cross to feed my kids.
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I work in healthcare IT, we develop medical systems which help physicians to help people. It sounds like a good field to work in, but it's still about money in the end, looking for ways to maximise profits, because we live in a capitalist system. As long as profits play the main role, there always is a dark side.
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Yup. "Capitalism values only what it can count, and it can only count dollars. Every capitalist wants to invest as little and profit as much as possible."
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Absolutely. There's a line between "willfully sold out to Evil Corp because money good and I like money lol", and "I need a job because eating is nice and they were hiring."
The original post about Lockheed makes sense, but someone's gotta be on an extremely privileged self-righteous high horse to shout "Baby killer!" at like, the dude working the lobby desk. Lol
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Very rational take. You learn entering the world that every company has a dark side, and every person has a line, but that line shifts.
Personally I'd avoid Lockheed, but when it comes to paying the mortgage, the bank is surprisingly not very amenable to me not having a job. I'd love to avoid working at any bad company, but I'd probably have to sell my house and live out of a studio, and my family would suffer for it.
So I give some graces. For example, people shame folks who work at amazon, but Amazon pays the bills. What I personally have changed to is judging people for being gung ho about a company, happy with what the company is doing, or are they just there as a job. If you're in accounting and you just loooove working for Amazon and think they do no wrong, then yes I judge a lot
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Thank you for this incredibly rational take.
What I personally have changed to is judging people for being gung ho about a company, happy with what the company is doing, or are they just there as a job. If you're in accounting and you just loooove working for Amazon and think they do no wrong, then yes I judge a lot
This. I'll usually get along fine with my fellow working class folks in the trenches wherever I end up, and I'll make friends with the cool managers even if they're managers.
Few people are excited to be forced into a corrupt and awful system to justify their existence.
But more often than not, they're the True Believers(TM) that are so utterly brain-warped into thinking some job actually cares about them, and make it part of their identity to "represent the brand". I give these simps a wiiiide berth.
When it's a grunt employee with that mindset, it's even more pathetic.
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Sometimes you find maybe a startup that is for-purpose. So, not necessarily nonprofit, but exists to do something with a predominantly positive impact.
We have so few years here on earth that it feels good to do something that at least is not making any problems worse.
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Worst thing my company does is supply ESD devices to the MIC. Not exactly sending them armaments but it does kind of help out the MIC.
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I had a job offer from Cambridge Analytica, they were up front about the work they were doing as well as the pay. Though it was tempting to sell my soul for the pay, even I have my limits.
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I had an interview with a “mass email” provider. By the time I left it was clear to both of us that no way in hell.
Is it bad that I consider this much worse than a defense company? Lockheed has some cool tech and help protect my country, at the huge cost of killing so many. Cambridge Analytica indiscriminately attacks people’s privacy, all people, and for profit with no hint at a good purpose
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I’m sure I still don’t appreciate that historically speaking the world has been quite a dangerous place.
I’m not a fan of dead kids or rich men sending the young to die for them, but I cannot deny my lifestyle significantly benefits from the fact top military spenders align with my ideology. (e.g. I’m better off with a powerful USA than North Korea)
Would be interesting if a new generation of principled Americans were responsible for a change where defense contractors knew to attract modern talent they had to provide assurances against outputs being used for evil. I’m naïve enough to think that might be possible.
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Raytheon too. Job offer was $$$weet, but it was related to making missiles even more efficient.
No, I don't think we need to turn brown kids into skeletons yet more efficiently, thanks.
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I got a Raytheon for missile targeting systems. Didn't want it on my conscience and got another offer for slightly less money but way more ethical of a company a week later.
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Sweet, glad that worked out for you. I've learned for certain types of work I gotta ask whether it's on the attack vs defense side of military work; at least a couple of interviewers have been taken aback by such an apparently blunt question, that it "isn't such a relevant question".
In my mind, both times I was wondering why they thought I'd be happy with coming to work every day if it was for something even possibly negative. Engineers get paid to pay attention to details, the fuck wouldn't I be able to piece this shit together from within?
Compartmentalization is a cute concept on paper. 🙄
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This reads like you are buying missiles
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What if you're making the missiles more accurate?
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Someone else can solve that. None of us has infinite energy, so imma use what I got on what I want.
It ain't weapons, bub.
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The four horsemen of selling out:
- Big Pharma
- Big Oil
- The military-industrial complex
- Surveillance tech companies
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Was just having a conversation about the phrase "selling out". Seems you don't hear it used much anymore. I reckon that's because the concept is seen as more of a life skill now than some despicable practice. But I feel sure it would be argued I'm just jealous of those sweet living wages.
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Don't forget quants
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What about open source jobs and funding? Since it seems like most of them come from either FAANG or government unless my research is wrong.
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It's not like China is going to stop making weapons if I refuse to make weapons.
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My parents said the same thing about air pollution and carbon emissions
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"It's not like drug addicts will stop taking drugs if I quit heroin."
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False equivalency, nice
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I think this is a big stumbling block with Lefties we need to get over, especially young and eager ones.
People want so badly to belong, but there's so much of a culture of purity-testing and pre-judgement that they're terrified of being eaten by their own for doing any wrong whatsoever.
I appreciate trying to minimize harmful impact and maximize helpful impact, but people get so hostile because someone like, buys anything, or has a job. Get over yourselves, kids.
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Well someone has be on the defense
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Dan the company man felt loyalty to the corp After 16 years of service and a family to support He actually started to believe the weaponry and chemicals were for national defence 'Cause Danny had a mortgage and a boss to answer to The guilty don't feel guilty, they learn not to.
(The Irrationality of Rationality by NOFX).
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Before I went independent, I made many thousands of parts for General Dynamics up to and including missile housings. It's a shitty feeling.
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Selling out being an option for people just means the system is working as intended. People are so poor they are willing to compromise their morals to keep food on the table
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Exactly. The desperation is a workforce supply assurance feature, not a failing of the system as designed.
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Fuck the military complex of this species. I'm gonna build my own aerospace company, mine the asteroid belt, and build my own human habitat. With black jack... And hookers... And universal healthcare...
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In fact.... forget the healthcare!
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SPACE healthcare instead !
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I never would. And never have.
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Everybody has their price.
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I'd make way more money in defense. I've actively avoided it in my career. I spent one summer at LM as an intern. Never went back.
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That's actually just something people who sell out their morals say to make themselves feel better. There are absolutely people who don't have a price. It's not particularly many and society and those in power are generally able to deal with them in other ways, but there are in fact people who stick to their lines in regards to money.
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Sure, my price is making enough money on my first day there to solve world hunger.
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If you can get a job for LM, you can get a job somewhere else. If a bit more money persuades you to help build child pulverizing machines, you never had any ethics to begin with.
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What do you do now?
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You gotta enter the building to reach the CEO taps forehead
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Literal career assassins? Could this dumb world get THAT cyberpunk?
Headline: “Another accounting assassin, another salaried slayer, another rich revolutionary, leaves employer headless while leaving $300K savings account to save babies with cancer”
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When in Rome…
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After a history of ethically questionable jobs, I thought I had escaped it into something almost benign where we were only wasting the money of other companies.
\ Recently we started going balls deep into making AI products, and I feel very uncomfortable with it
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brah. You will merely break many peoples bodies with explosives in the name of capitalism, corruption and colonization.
At my job I corrupt entire countries full of children, starting at an early age. I run user bucket targetting experiments on them to get them to spend more and steer them to befriend "friends" I select for them to optimize some pennies for our network edge performance. The measurements and manipulation of their vulnerabilities never stops. I take high resolution scans of their faces that we can use for the rest of their life to identify them anywhere--all so they can change their face to be an animated fox face, or stuff like that. I hope authoritarians never get ahold of this info because that could be bad for these consumers/kids, but hopes and prayers are not exactly my job. We never delete their info because parents click through the terms of service to shut their kids up. We say we educate kids to learn to program but inside the company that concept is spoken of mockingly.
I measure and steer their temperament and engagement with new games that are open to their worst impulses, and keep them on the treadmill. I transcribe and save literally every single word they utter. I analyze those spoken words for sentiment, and to build an ongoing model of which bucket they belong in to maximize their spending. The loaner? the helper? the team player? authority truster? authority abuser? rule driven, rule antidriven? I have loot, friends, new games, and contrived self serving "bugs" for all of them to find and think they are exploiting the games without my knowing.
I teach them to get addicted to loot boxes and I arbitrage endorphin hits between their peers and from the game. I give them their entire range of their lifes highs and lows. The best and worst times of their short lives are things I hand out. The later at night it is, or the longer their session, the more loot I give them to keep them playing. Like an IV drip of drug where sometimes you need to squeeze the bag to push more through to feel that hit strongly even when exhausted, and get them to defy their parents' calls for them to sleep.
You think darkness is your issue. But you merely adopted the dark for a paycheck; I was born into it right out of school, moulded by it. I didn't see socially useful internet services till I was an old man, by then it was nothing to me but a different way to drive engagement and raise the value on my rsus. My legacy will be a path of human wreckage and misery, same as yours only much bigger.
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You terrible terrible person. Do you still do this?
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No, I moved on. The money was amazing though.
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Damn, that’s a long ass wall pf text for a two letter company
“EA”
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so quit ur job lmao???? incredible that you are able to be so eloquent with how you are abusing people in your work and display no remorse? (hope this is a joke if it is no hate)
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Lots of refreshingly, considered takes on Lemmy today
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Before reading the text I was expecting a Saddam joke. After reading seems even more applicable.
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At least its not NSO group or Booz Allen.
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What did Booz Allen do?
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...everything
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To answer my own question, Snowden was an employee of Booz Allen when he leaked PRISM.
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It could be worse like the insurance industry. It's bad that we need tools of war, but it is not like raping you and your doctor for your health care while making the CEO and investors rich.
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"it could be worse" the majority of the world would disagree the healthcare system is bad for America but your military corporation are bad for the planet. Israels little dog will supply them with all they need to bomb the middle east and have killed hundreds of thousands already. I promise you every genocide and massacre nowadays America is often complicit in
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Even Lockheed Martin looks down on Boeing.
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Or looks up to Boeing
Although some companies like Boos Allen and NSO group blow both Lockheed Martin and Boeing out of the water.
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Wait, will it make my body look that fit?
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Currently have a contractor offer from NASA I'm probably going to turn down for a mom and pop electrical repair company lmao
Doesn't take much to be principled.
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Wait what was the ethical dilemma working with NASA?
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More or less the same you'd have working for Grumen or Lockheed. NASA wind tunnels were often critical tools in developing more efficient drone designs, for example. The product is the data, and you get no say in how that data is used.
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On the one hand I agree with you, it's not hard. On the other hand if everyone had principles, it might be hard to find a job.
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Excellent opportunity for sabotage.
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Be the change you wish to see in the world
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Someone has to learn the government secrets so they can spill it to the revolutionaries later when they become disillusioned so they can build their own weapons.
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Or you know, on that tank? Game, where a bunch of specs have been disclosed.
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You think they got TR3B's there? I bet they do
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Basically every person with a job, usually and specially in this market.
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Remember, you are just a cog in a machine, it just happens to be a death machine.
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What are you the next CEO of United healthcare? Get some fucking ethics bitch
178 comments