“And you, young engineer, you who dream of improving the lot of the workers by the application of science to industry - what a sad disappointment, what terrible disillusions await you! You devote the useful energy of your mind to working out the scheme of a railway which, running along the brink of precipices and burrowing into the very heart of mountains of granite, will bind together two countries which nature has separated. But once at work, you see whole regiments of workers decimated by privations and sickness in this dark tunnel - you see others of them returning home carrying with them, maybe, a few pence, and the undoubted seeds of consumption; you see human corpses - the results of a groveling greed - as landmarks along each yard of your road; and, when the railroad is finished, you see, lastly, that it becomes the highway for the artillery of an invading army…”

Peter Kroporkin, 1880

A hundred years later engineers are more jaded. They know what they are doing. At MIT in the 1980’s it was called “get your fingerprints on the murder weapon”.

defense contractors in the us should be called attack contractors instead. truer to form.

I have a BS in physics that I never used, I chose it because I had no idea what I was doing and discovered afterward that most jobs involving physics are less “figuring out how stars work, for the joy of discovery” and more, “figuring out new and exciting ways to kill brown people, for profit,” which I did not sign up for. So, I’ve wound up doing grunt work at warehouses instead. “Learn to wash your own vegetables and you won’t have to pay court to kings,” as the story goes.

A lot of people go into STEM because they just want to solve problems and the issue with that is that if you just solve any problem that’s put in front of you without regard for who’s problem it is and whether solving it will actually make the world a better place, then you belong in the same category as the guy who developed the Blitzkrieg doctrine, who claimed afterwards that he didn’t really care about “politics” and was just doing his job as best as he could. Just because you’re capable of solving a problem and someone’s asking you to doesn’t mean that you actually should.

join lockhead martin and leak documents to Abdul Malik Al Houthi

Wait till you go to hell for spelling defence as “defense”

That’s not a Mk. 15 Raytheon Knife Missile - THIS is an Mk 15 Raytheon Knife Missile!

I’m a physicist in Norway. Outside the few university jobs, you can either work for the oil industry, which kills the planet, or defense, which kill people. I like the planet.

Shaming people for their job is such a shitty thing to do. I heard the same thing in college for having a job lined up with a major defense contractor. My circumstances were such that living with parents or someone else wasn’t an option - it was very important for me to have a job. I am grateful for that opportunity - the people I worked with were all great people. You can be an ideological fool but not everyone has that luxury.