everything in germany's economy is going downhill, the troubles in their car industry is just one symptom (but not the cause)

Can you move to a city? This is what most people I know in this situation do. Though I had a great time getting a car and taking myself out for hikes, sauna / spa days, activities and parties in the east bay near SF. Great place for practicing being alone. I had to think about it like dating myself - where would I have taken a date for fun? Try a bunch of things and see what sticks and remember you can appreciate moments by yourself with this mindset and it's like 80% as good.

I don’t feel that old, but I guess being 45 is ancient in tech.

The Silicon Valley tech jobs we have now has a history rooted in World War 2 and funding of it by the US gov.

https://youtu.be/ZTC_RxWN_xo?si=gGza5eIv485xEKLS

I’m not saying war is good or anything, but also don't ride a high horse cause none of it would be here w/o WW2.

Would love to enumerate those commonalities. Run by a psychopath? Commitment to violent lethality? Burning billions of dollars for uncertain goals? (ok there's one)

See in your case with the military you can directly say, hey my code will be used to bomb other people possibly. But in today's times it isn't (I am sure even then) so cut and dry. I worked in AdTech industry (like 60% of the bay area techies). So the ad tech I write gets shown to millions/billions. What about ads influencing elections and then politicians waging wars? Anti-vax ads which influence people and then kill them. Scam ads. Insurance ads and then people not getting cancer meds from the same insurance. Am I responsible for those deaths? I would say Yes.

But what is the option? I feel each of us wants to draw a line based off of our morality but the circumstances don't allow us to stick to it (still gotta pay rent)

We are all on a Titanic the way I see it. It's just the DARPA guy is gonna sink first. Rest of us are just pretending to be Jack trying to be the last ones to go.

> In corporate America

A lot of corporate America contracts for the military in some capacity (it's a giant piggy bank and if you jump through a few hoops you get to siphon money out of it, so of course they do) and assuming this Tweet is accurate (Jesus, what a world) this will also affect them.

IDK maybe they have corporate structures that avoid letting this kind of thing mess too badly with the parts of their company that don't have contact with the government, or maybe it'll only apply to specifically the work they do for the government, but otherwise I expect it'll be devastating for Anthropic's B2B effort.

The problem is this:

> The Saudis invest in many public US companies, does that make those companies less trust worthy?

It does. If Anthropic takes money from the middle east that might be the reason, why they cannot work for the Pentagon. Simply because the Pentagon works together with the Israeli Forces and middle east investors might not like this. So Anthropic has to decide to either take a lot of money from the middle east, or work for the Pentagon.

Of course the problem goes much deeper than just Anthropic. I don't understand why taking money from dictatorships doesn't count as money laundering in our society. Because basically this is dirty money, generated by slavery and forceful suppression of people. We should forbid all companies to take this kind of dirty money. But because we don't do that at the moment companies who don't take this dirty money will have a disadvantage against companies that do. And because companies are all about money, in the end they are basically forced to act against their good intentions, just to survive.

We as society have to stop this. We must make sure, that companies who are not taking dirty money survive the competition. My idea would be to extend the rules for money laundering to all countries that are dictatorships. But there might be other ideas, to level the playing field between companies, so we as society can help them to make the right decision.