Defense industry, law enforcement, and surveillance are all instant dealbreakers for me whenever a recruiter reaches out to me. And sadly that seems like the vast majority of positions for which recruiters are looking for candidates.
That or AI shit.
I’m so tired of the tech industry.
Science grad with 10 years engineering experience. I had to turn down a lot of jobs before I found one that didn’t involve killing people. It took two years. I’m paid about half of what I could get if I sold my morals. Totally worth it.
Depending on engineering discipline, oil & gas is another common one.
There’s positive tech stuff out here too, bud. You’ll likely need to look for yourself though, the recruiter reaching out to you is better funded for some reason.
When you’re 60 and the choice is either a permanent contract for the army or 1 or 2 years elsewhere, you’re going to choose army.
Nope
Oh you will, you will. Trust me, young people.
PS I’m not talking about the US military, because I’d rather live under a bridge for the rest of my life.
Just because you sold your soul to the devil doesn’t mean others necessarily will.
If anything, doing it in your 60s is even more morally reprehensible because you should have enough world experience by then to understand what militaries truly are. Both the atrocities they commit regularly on behalf of politicians and vested interests, and the lies and manipulation they perform during recruitment to get young people enlisted.
Not everyone is morally bankrupt. Stop projecting
You’re not a researcher depending on funding that barely exists anymore, I assume.
That moment when you quit the arms company and joined the legs company:

I’m stealing this

Raytheon would be equally accepted here.
Yea I’m an LGBTQ+ ally:
The ally they’re talking about:
L ockheed Martin
G eneral Dynamics
B AE
T exas Instruments
Q inetiq
“our hiring system is even less discriminatory than our targeting system!” -their motto, probably
"our hiring system is even less discriminatory than our targeting system!" -their motto, probably
Bravo!
I know TI had a history of weapons manufacturing, but haven’t they stopped now?
How many children have they tortured with their graphing calculators?
I believe so. I guess a more appropriate one would be Textron since they still make helicopters?
I just use my skills to make gooner games. My soul is pure. To heaven I shall go. Unironically.
Thank you for your service.
I would like to goon to some of your games
I don’t think anyone with an engineering degree would believe there’s a hell. Neither should you.
Leave it to an engineer to think that this meme is literally claiming there’s a hell.
Leave it to whatever your condition is to think that my reply was literally claiming that the meme was literally claiming there’s a hell.
Although I can imagine what hell would look like: commuting for 1h to sit in an office that has more people than desks to have a zoom meeting over VPN with flaky wifi and AC that is set to overheat whoever sits under the vent and under heat everyone further.
Oh did I tell you that meeting could have been an email? And the coffee machine broke yesterday. And there’s a bathroom queue.
Well, tomorrow morning, commuting hell will be sitting next to me. I don’t know what those samosas had in them but I sound like a WWII machine gun nest and smell like aisle 3 at the spice store.
True, these people will not face justice through any natural force of the universe, only by people holding them accountable for the harm they cause.
there’s probably an infinite number of paths, and an even greater number of perspectives to be considered across each moment and position along each of them. or absolutely nothing at all. most other possibilities seem so unlikely, they probably aren’t worth considering
This is why I focused on graphics hardware for so long… Then some arsehole came up with running AI on GPUs.
series of increasingly large dominoes where the smallest is “NVIDIA releases CUDA” and the largest is “the entire global economy has become dependent on running a useless computer program that tricks stupid people into believing it can do anything worthwhile”
Yeah, I got started in silicon thinking cheaper, faster, more power efficient chips would be a net benefit to the world… Then we became a social media surveillance state and AI dogshit is just the icing on the cake.
Now I drink to forget we’re boiling the oceans to ruin society. One day this capitalist hellscape will end.
There’s still a few of us out here using ROPs and texture units
Gods, I’m considering Job hopping and I saw Lockheed was hiring for my role, less experience, less certs, full remote, and quadruple my pay.
I had to block them on indeed and LinkedIn. I hated that I was considering it.
yeah they’re an option in my area and I’ve made the decision several times to not look at any positions they have
I sometimes wonder if we all truly have a price for our souls. I felt similarly when seeing positions at health insurance companies, pay was high enough that I paused despite how much I despise them.
Instructions unclear, I work at a prosthetics company.
Im currently in school and trying to get into the prosthetic industry after I get my engineering degree. Any recommendations on projects that could help me flesh out my skills?
Hell would be an upgrade! Where do I get my blood monies plz?
Not an engineer, but I have I have Asian parents, if I were an engineer and worked for a genocidal dictator, they wouldn’t care, that’s success anyways.
So… yea…
people value success over ethics
welcome to life
society…
Wouldn’t they still be disappointed that you are an engineer and not a doctor?
what are engineers, if not machine doctors?
I told my doctor friend I’m basically a doctor for my power plant(mechanical engineer/power plant operator). He told me I’m a certified nursing assistant at best. Lmao
💀
Do you think your Taiwanese background plays into that kind of thinking?
Also if you have any disabilities, like if you have depression. Oh your parents are gonna be so cruel to you. You are a “useless eater”.
What the fuck is this life. Why?
I wasn’t even supposed to be born. Why the fuck am I here. This fucking suffering.
Is there any chance to move out from your parents, and surround yourself with people with different ideals?
No chance. My brain is fucked.
I literally felt so much anxiety when I tried to live on campus so I ended up withdrawing from college altogether.
I’m just feeling so ashamed of myself for being such a failure I kinda think about killing myself all the time. Depression is so hard, I don’t have the energy to do anything.
It was already bad enough before, now I feel so anxious going outside because of ICE.
I have trouble dealing with other people. I don’t think I can handle roomates… I mean I did had roommates in college, and I kinda… everyone hated me. Well they didn’t say it, but I feel like I was unwelcomed.
I have a lot of health issues. I snore when I sleep and it annoys everyone.
Rent is so expensive these days you can’t be by yourself, but roomates is also a… no no.
I’d probably just get stabbed to death since I have no social skills (well not like zero, but I never really made friends in school, so… there… I doubt I’d get along with randos as roomates in like the adult world no-less)
I mean, I even have trouble finding psychaitric help and feel anxious af trying to schedule an appointment.
I need my parents’ money to even afford health related stuff. Y’all know how it is in the US. They say “seek professional help” but nobody ever mentions the money aspect.
This is years of emotional abuse and neglect.
They destroyed my ability to be independent.
I mean even my older brother 5 years older than me probably has problems being independent. He’s still at home with us.
I know I sound pathetic af
Our family is just a bunch of failures
Shitty parenting destroyed us
Thanks a lot, Confucious and your “filial piety” tiger parenting bullshit.
even just your awareness and ability to articulate yourself,as well as the capacity for consequential reasoning and your willingness to empathize with your brother all seem like priceless artifacts of your humanity which will become more precious and respected as we all start continue recognizing and discussing the realities we have seen throughout our twisted and tumultuous lives, and we are able to gracefully “live (well enough) and let die (or let go without bitterness)” the mistakes of these past few generations and all the shit they have been cooking for themselves and others all around them, to justify how they have been making it by, through all the thick and thin that they had all been making up and giving to each other.
I’m from mainland China (currently residing in the US), profile pic is because I hate the 5-Star Red Flag and the politics it represents.
Probably something with Asian cultures’s obsession with the idea of “success”. Like… my parents literally wouldn’t care if I became some corrupt government official as long as I don’t get caught. Success is worshipped, failure is shamed. I talk shit about trump, and like my mom said “at least he became president, can you do that?”
I’m like: “naturalized citizens can’t be president”
omg immediately less than 1 second later, mom goes: “but Gary Locke became Governor” (Gary Locke is a Chinese American)
And like you know Mamdani won, immedialy after, she told me “an immigrant managed to become Mayor, you are an immigrant just like him, why can’t you do the same?” bruh… maybe I could if I didn’t get so much emotional damage, mom.
Like they worship success, regardless of if they are “good” or “bad” people.
If you try to be a good person and you “fail” in life, you are considered worse than the bad person in power making a lot of money.
I’m like just so close to killing myself, even though I really wanna live, this is too painful, depression is too painful.
My parents are slowly killing my ethics and empathy, like one day I might just not care.
Either you die young with your morals intact, or you seek success and survival, and you corrupt your soul…
This world is cruel. The world wants you to be cruel to be able to even live a comfortable life.
I’m not asian but that bsounds like a lot of what i’ve heard called Asian Guilt. I’ve heard American Asians get a lot of flak for not measuring up to the likes of Jonny Kim. --personally, i’m finding it easier to deal with familial disappointment while living an ethical life as oppose to living an unethical life while still dealing with familial disappointment because i’m not gonna measure up to someone elses standards. Anyways, be good to yourself, there’s no guarantee anyone else will. Have you gone for a walk lately?
Mate I hope you get hold of your depression and find a way to sort or ignore your problems in a healthy, guilt free way.
Look I’m from South America and I get what you’re saying. Many parallels although to a lesser degree. Probably because South America has had tough life but not as tough as South East Asia.
I may be an engineer, but I am still too fucking stupid to get a job at an arms company
It’s easier than you’d think. The applicant pool doesn’t tend to be the best and brightest.
One of the guys I went to college with is an amazing programmer and had such a great understanding of C that hes why i got as far into CS as i did, couldn’t get a job after grad because 1) Covid and more importantly 2) he’s insufferable.
He got a job making $100k a year for I wanna say Lockheed because he quote “Wrote good looking code”. That’s all they needed because Tue DoD already told them that the project he was hired for was not going to be adopted, but they were still contracted for minimum 2 more years of development and Lockheed would be in breach of contract if they weren’t making progress even though it was already Dead.
The Military industrial complex is JUST a grift to put tax dollars in private hands.
He got a job making $100k a year
$100k per year writing code at a defence contractor isn’t very much.
There’s a monumental amount of waste in there. I’ve seen a department order a truckload of equipment from compUSA, a reputable vendor, and it shows up with open brown cardboard boxes of used equipment. Staff SGT rubber-stamped it. Somebody made bank. Shit like that was ALWAYS going down.
That’s why I work at a legs company
Doing engineering is more like an any% run to do something that eventually, even just statistically, hurts people.
So. Stop enabling us, scientists :P
Lots of people are better off for science, it’s the capitalists that ask us to wield it against others
Communists and capitalists both made WMDs and murdered millions for their own gain
“Capitalists bombed Hiroshima”
“Communists bombed Nagasaki”
-this dipshit probably
I don’t know why .ml has usernames. No one can tell any of you apart.
I don’t know why you consider yourself an anarchist instance when I see you quoting Gobbles more than Kropotkin
Who else the fuck pulls Gobbles and Kropotkin out as an insult?
Only tankies.
If I used Spongebob characters do you think it would land better with this audience?
No. That evil has nothing to do with whichever socio-economic system is your particular choice of boogie man.
Socio-economic models have to do with pretty much everything that happens in a society. They define the preferred end goal of most actions. In feudalism it would be to better expand and defend the territory of your liege, for example.
What I meant is that wielding new science and technology against people is in no way unique to capitalism. Every system we’ve ever tried has done that at one point.
No one said it’s unique to that particular system. As I said feudalism would do the same for different reasons
But that doesn’t mean it’s impossible to have a system that disincentivises harming others and even if it’s implemented it doesn’t mean no one will be harmed.
Traceur201 said that.
He did not say it’s the only system where it happens
It seems he was just saying that in the current socio-economic model for most of the planet the elite of that system (the “capitalists”) push for that behaviour, not that it wouldn’t happen under any other
If I say I get wet when it’s raining outside, I’m not implying I can’t get wet during a sunny day (I might just have bad luck and someone dumps water out of a window)
This is part of the reason I moved to CA. As an engineer I’m always going to have some kind of environmental impact, and I think a direct initiative is necessary for the public to consent.
This comment is known to the state of California to cause birth defects.
Some of us turned down Lockheed and Raytheon.
You turned down lockheed, lockheed rejected me.

Yeah, their equity package wasn’t as good as Anduril.
I desperately wanted to get a degree in mechanical engineering so I could go to work for an arms company (like Heckler & Kock, FN Herstal, etc.). Never happened, got an art degree instead. Then I met a guy that owns a very small firearms company, and, well, yeesh. It’s a brutally hard business. He makes a good product, he has good morals and ethics, but the market is so saturated that anyone smaller than the largest arms companies are hemorrhaging money. Glad I didn’t try to live my dream now.
I may not like what governments do with arms, but good goddamn, the arms themselves are neat.
“He has good morals and ethics”
How could he possibly if he has devoted his life to creating weapons? What’s his response if and when his guns are used for violence, be it murder, suicide, armed robbery, etc? Even if he is “small time” for “enthusiasts” of the “sport” it is only a matter of time until this occurs. How does he reconcile this? That it’s not the guns fault? Just the glamorization of them, the obscene amount of them, the fact that they are readily available, pushing it onto “mental health”, or some other scapegoat that allows him to escape accountability for facilitating mortal violence.
I hope your friend goes out business and his entire industry collapses.
His response, as is mine, is that what people use his guns for simply isn’t his business. If people used Stanley hammers to beat people to death, would it mean that Stanley was an immoral company? Or would it mean that people used the product in an unlawful and immoral way?
I happen to very, very strongly believe in 2A, and I think that the US is in the shitstorm it is currently in in no small part because liberals–but not leftists–have been working their asses off to disarm themselves. And I will note that the person in question has consistently employed furries–he loves their work ethic–and strongly supports the rights of LGBTQ+ people to arm themselves.
Hammers are tools used to build things that someone can decide to use as a weapon. Firearms, specifically handguns and semi automatic AR-style long guns, are literally designed for the sole purpose of ending a human life. Not at all a valid comparison.
What it was designed for, and what it’s used for, are two different things, as you already agreed. Even if you truly, absolutely believe that the only purpose of a handgun or removable-magazine-fed semi-automatic rifle is to kill other people, then you would also have to admit that the overwhelming majority of them never are used to fulfill their purpose; the number that do are, compared to the number that exist, practically a rounding error. There are literally more guns in non-police/non-military hands in the US than there are people. There are far, far more defensive gun uses annually–regardless of who measures it and how–than there are gun homicides.
And bluntly, I absolutely DO NOT trust the gov’t to be the only ones with access to firearms. If you can look at Trump, ICE, Hegseth’s DoD, cops in general, and say, oh, yeah, I shouldn’t be armed, but those guys are cool, well, I don’t know what to tell you. And I don’t trust ANY gov’t to not harm the people, because there’s no way to prevent fascists from taking control without also becoming authoritarian.
For civilians I would assume guns are used more for hunting and target practice. But then again America could be different you guys are crazy with your guns.
Once the rockets go up, who cares where they come down? That’s not my department, says Wernher von Braun
Who is responsible for the death? The person that intentionally drives a van into a crowd of peaceful protestors, the rental company that didn’t do a full psychological screening and criminal background check before they rented a van to the person that committed the murders, or Ford for making the Econoline van with steel body panels instead of covered in 5’ of closed-cell foam?
I’m torn on the idea of arming leftists in the current climate. I don’t disagree with you there. I live in a somewhat rural area that is heavy Trump and the right wingers are heavily armed. I don’t blame a trans person for arming themselves to defend themselves in an area like this, and my post history reflects as much.
That said there is a difference between arming yourself and actively contributing to increasing the amount of arms in the world. And what made it interesting is you claimed this is an ethical and moral issue. If your friend worked to only arm leftists that would be an interesting take. I doubt this is the case though. I am assuming they are like any capitalist based on your first line - anyone’s money is good enough.
To answer your question as others have said the hammer has a utilitarian purpose, as do knives, as does dynamite. With the exception of something like skeet shooting guns sole purpose is to rob the consciousness of a living being. I do not believe that the sport outweighs the risk. There are far less dangerous ways to hunt, we’ve banned things like lawn darts for less when the danger outweighs the utility. America just has a raging hard on for guns because of military fetishism
TBH, many of the people that buy his products at this time are leftists. Or at least anti-authoritarian, and deeply suspicious of gov’t control over individual liberties. His position that civil rights are for EVERYONE has meant that many people on the political right have no interest in doing business with him. And he’s absolutely right; if rights aren’t for everyone, then they aren’t rights.
It shouldn’t be a radical position to say that all people in the US should have the rights that they are promised by the US Constitution, and yet we currently have a gov’t that is doing their best to wipe their ass with the constitution and flush it down the toilet.
Are you thinking mental health is just a scapegoat and the mental state of shooters has nothing to do with the reason they commited the crime?
No, I think systemic issues need to be addressed of course. But I think in America, as someone who has worked in mental health for decades, the use of “mental health” in the wake of large scale violence is exclusively a scapegoat because there has almost never been meaningful action behind it. Overwhelmingly in almost (if not) all states since 2008 mental health programs have seen massive budgetary cuts year after year after year.
And this begets the point that “mental health” is a weasel word for treating systemic issues. Frankly even if you increased the budgets of Medicaid and community mental health programs 10 fold I don’t believe mass shootings would be impacted much in terms of rate. The systemic issues that create these conditions - wealth inequality, racism, quality education access, quality healthcare access, etc would essentially all remain and take generations to resolve even if you forced fixes tonight. The rot goes deep. Almost any therapist who works in community mental health programs will tell you that most of their clientele suffer more from lack of resources than mental health disorders
You didn’t adress my question/statement at all.
I think whether mass shooters are mentally ill is debatable on a case by case basis, some obviously yes, some less obviously.
But what I’m saying is this point is moot because even if 100% of mass shooters are “mentally ill” and that is the driving force behind their culpability the individuals saying “we need better mental health care in this country” in the wake of gun violence are so full of shit and obviously using the topic for misdirection with no intention for meaningful change. This is clearly evidenced by the fact that mental health services have been systematically defunded year after year for decades, very often by the same individuals who clamor the same.
Mental health facilities and systems losing funding is an absolute travesty. I still don’t believe the mental health side of these horrific crimes is a moot point though. With more dedication to early intervention and treatment a decline would have to happen. Its not the tools fault its the individual using it. Remember that guy who drove through a crowd a few Christmas back? He had a slew of mental health issues that were never addressed properly. He perpetrated a mass casualty event without issue. Almost half of mass shooters tell SOMEONE some part of their plan before carrying it out. If we did as many “warning signs” trainings as we do “active shooter” trainings I’d be willing to bet we’d prevent many of these incidents. I say this because even though I work in an isolated power plant, we have an annual online training and in person drill for active shooter situations (run,hide,fight). At the same time, I’ve never seen an early warning sign type training.
So then we get ride of knives and bows and pointy sticks and then rocks. People are going to kill we have been doing it forever. Getting rid of guns does not solve the problem.
what a stupid mindset. Show me a time someone managed to kill 20-50 people in a span of 15-30 minutes with a bow, let alone a knife, let alone a laymen that didn’t have military training.
As an aside the goal does not have to be to solve the problem definitively. It can be to make the problem markedly better. If mass shootings with body counts in the above turned into mass stabbings, which are obviously traumatic and horrible but typically have fatalities in the single digits (often only 1-2), is that not a tremendous improvement? It is of course still very worthwhile to address systemic factors that lead to violence, but making violence less severe is worthwhile as well.
I find that there’s a lot of overlap between people who like engines, clocks, and guns. They’re all machines with a concrete goal, harnessing an incredible force in a very controlled way, through precise, complex mechanisms and allow near complete freedom on how exactly you achieve that goal. There’s a beauty to it that’s hard to find anywhere else.

















