The Young People Working for the Most Evil Companies | Hacker News Reader

The Young People Working for the Most Evil Companies

vice.com

18 pointsBerislavLopac39 comments

This is just childish. Written by a probably 20-something journalist who has never in their life been responsible for fulfilling a real human need.

Without fossil fuels, civilization would grind to a halt. Billions would die. Yes, we need to move to renewables, but it's not going to happen overnight. In the meantime, somebody has to extract, refine and distribute fossil fuels. Telling them that they're evil for keeping the lights on and your house warm is not helping anyone.

Tobacco, sure. Don't smoke. But people do smoke. I guess we could make it illegal. Look how well that worked for other drugs.

Nuclear weapons. Our enemies have them, so we need to have them as well, which means people need to work on them. It is suicidally pollyannaish to think we can just stop working on them and everyone will get along and sing kumbaya.

This is pure clickbait and nothing else.

If I had to rank an oil worker, a nuclear sub designer, a tobacco salesman, and a Vice journalist in terms of their benefit to society, I don't think the journalist would like the outcome. They would have a slight edge over the tobacco salesman, but oil and gas and military engineering are both essential for society to function, regardless of their poor optics.

Really now. I'll take a bit of non-essential labor over one that actively damages the planet and will kill us if continued.

An oil worker sources and find the oil necessary to create plastics.

A nuclear sub designer puts together a tool to ensure peace. If you want to see a world where big sticks are not around, look at any non polite society.

Tobacco is on par with weed For effects. It provides an effect. There is a reason salespeople smoke, because it calms the nerves.

Journalist of old was valuable, journalist of today is from a school of training that you need to be an activist to force change, which means they are no longer providing a good, but an active manipulation toward a belief that the journalist believes in. If you think a journalist has an iq above 80, take a look at an article in your field, then realize they are mentally deficient and are trying to promote a message. Then look at other articles and realize this same person is doing it.

We can't bootstrap a transition to renewables without fossil fuels and petroleum byproducts. In the short term, we might even have to accept missing emissions targets in order to build infrastructure and production facilities that will support green energy. So until we reach the point where we can rely on green energy to produce more green energy, and have viable substitutes for the thousands of ways petroleum products are used on industry, oil and gas workers will still be needed to keep our economy running.

See I was hoping this was a series of interviews of Vice "journalists" and other mainstream media types.

Silly me for not considering that serial propagandists, spreaders of lies, squelchers of truth, and arbiters of cancel culture are the good guys. It's the industries that make civilization possible that are evil!

Plenty of companies that provide essentials are or have been 'evil' in the sense of adopting practices that are unnecessarily extremely harmful to certain groups.

You are aware that oil companies knew about climate change decades ago, right? Their response was to find ways to confuse public and delay any response. What you consider evil is definitely subjective, but that goes pretty high in my books.

You are aware that oil as an industry probably lifted the most people out of poverty in all human history right? Think of all the plastic you see in hospitals and ask yourself what would replace that without oil. It is so useful and valuable that countries are willing to go to war to secure its access. Things are never as black and white as people are willing to believe.

>> "You are aware that oil as an industry probably lifted the most people out of poverty in all human history right?"

Great. How many of them will die or be set right back due to climate change? You can't pretend like externalities aren't screaming toward all that vaunted progress. We could have dealt with those externalities in time without your beloved oil industry's propaganda. It's too late for prevention. All that's left is mitigation and trying to prevent the worst outcomes by getting off oil ASAP. And it's the oil industry's fault.

> Their response was to find ways to confuse public…

Unlike journalism

In fact, they bought journalism. A lot of journalism that is decreed as evil is precisely the kind bought by aforementioned industries and politicians.

Principles don't matter when you have to ignore them to survive. And it would be so easy to not have to do that too.

Executives are culpable for it, most of the time.

Everybody buys journalism in 2022 and let’s not pretend that it’s only executives at the media companies that are bought. Executives might kill a story that’s unfavorable to a big advertiser, but journalists absolutely prostitute themselves.

Fossil fuels/tobacco industry companies are now almost unanimously seen as "evil". What about social media/online tracking companies? When will we realize that the Metaverse & co. are not "the next big thing", but the biggest threat to privacy and freedom?

We already did. It's just that some companies are more directly linked to human suffering as others.

Or to put it bluntly, whats the point of privacy and freedom if your country isn't livable anymore due to climate change or you're dying of cancer due to toxic waste?

But there should also be something be done about social media companies poisoning our minds, or companies like clearview putting our freedom at risk.

I don’t often hear people talk about so openly but I think a large number of people now look at say Facebook or Palantir on a CV especially after 2016 as morally comparable to working as a tobacco lobbyist.

Working for FAANG (as a software dev) is still also linked with prestige and high salary. And moral ambiguity, to some, but not to all.

> One of Ben’s [who works for a large oil/gas company] lowest points came when he was told to fire over 60 people in 2020, a year in which his company made record profits.

Um... I don't think you need to work for a "sin stock" company to work for an Evil Company.

When I read the title, I thought this was going to be about young people working for Google, Twitter and Facebook.

Yeah but they really seem to struggle with accountability, so since they use those services and identify with them, by definition they can't be bad because they themselves are good. The moral panic of Gen Z would be hilarious if it wasn't so self-destructive.

I really worry too because they legitimately don't realize how much mental damage they're causing themselves. They know they're miserable, but they haven't figured out that so much of it is self-inflicted. So then they condense all of that hate on to a handful of things that their peer group has deemed signal worthy.

The guy working for oil and gas can console himself that hundreds of millions of people would die or be plunged into misery were his evil bosses to shut down the business.

That is what's called a false dichotomy. It's a terribly basic and foolish way to analyze such a situation.

As pointed out elsewhere, fossil fuel companies had full knowledge of impending climate doom decades and decades ago. They chose to fuck us all for their profits, instead of making slightly less money while still enabling industry.

We've lost innumerable species forever, among other incalculable losses. Examine your glibly evil rationalizations a bit more closely.

And if they had gone screaming to Washington about how there was going to be a disaster more than 50 years in the future, you think anything would have been done about it? There's no serious action now, and everybody knows about it, and we have tech to actually do something about it, which we really didn't back then.

Why in the world would Washington be required for them to simply plan for their own children’s future? Legislation is not necessary for simple acts of decency and self preservation. Are you suggesting the oil companies had no capacity to alter course on their own? You are aware of the free market?

Ah, yeah, keeping grandma alive by keeping her warm. So evil.

Protecting your country from attack by evil dictators (or benevolent democracies - i.e. the difference between North Korea (nukes, exists) and Libya (no nukes, destroyed)). Truly evil.

Sorry, can't justify tobacco, TBH

I'm less concerned about some random "young person" than all the distinguished luminaries selling their prestige and intellect to work for the likes of Google and Facebook, despite their massive surveillance of the population.

I've yet to hear any of them even try to defend their choice to work for these privacy-trampling corporations.

Getting a job at such places is still seen as a great accomplishment. This has to stop if anything is going to change.

You've hit on an uncomfortable conclusion, which is that these highly-paid youths and those with similar salaries do not care about consequences that barely affect their social class.

Energy is fundamental to civilisations and something which we cannot do without. You can put forward a million arguments as to why we don't need oil, coal or gas it's just for profit and so on and that is true but when you are freezing your nads off this winter in europe or anywhere else for that matter you will be grateful for the pouch of tobacco and lighter in your pocket to get you through the hardship.

Add adtech/surveillance eg. Facebook, Google and Amazon to that

Software engineer is the new tobacco salesman.

Software engineer is the new yuppy. I reckon the majority of users here work for either 'evil' companies or frankly useless ones which is just as bad IMO. Meanwhile we have historical happenings between social, environmental, and health issues that they could contribute to but otherwise take fat paychecks and bury their heads in the sand.

I am not sure why your comment ended up killed. It is literally true that the highest paid tech workers are employed by very shady companies. I don't exclusively mean FAANGs but also outfits such as Palantir. A large plurality of other devs pursue the startup dream or hawk products of questionable utility.

People who pretend to care about environmental stuff only do so to the extent that it doesn't impact them. In the absence of oil, all those home comforts and health products would all be gone. If a treehugger is willing to give up those things then people might listen. Until then they're hypocrites.

I think it's a little more nuanced.

I'm currently sitting here freezing my nuts off in a sleeping bag in my house, because I don't want to give money to Russia's war. So that's something I can do, that whilst disadvantaging me in _comfort_, doesn't disadvantage me in any meaningful way.

There are meaningful disadvantages though, which actually make you less likely to succeed in the very goals you're sacrificing for. If I were to boycott all the big bad tech companies _completely_, I would be cutting myself out of the loop to such an extent that it becomes counterproductive to my cause. It would be a bit like if I were to stop going to town hall meetings, because they were corrupt. The corrupt there would love that, because they shut me up without even trying.

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