There's an old German short film called Nicht löschbares Feuer (Inextinguishable Fire, 1969)[1] that I'm fond of. It was a protest film against Napalm and how some companies wouldn't really let their employees know what they were actually working on.

"I am a worker and I work in a vacuum cleaner factory. My wife could use a vacuum cleaner. That's why everyday I pick up a piece. At home I try to assemble the vacuum cleaner. But however I try, it always becomes a sub-machine gun.

...

This vacuum cleaner can become a useful weapon. This sub-machine gun can become a useful household appliance.

What we produce it depends on the workers, students, and engineers."

That last line is still very relevant today.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EnpLS4ct2mM

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shadowtree 12 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Fun fact:

DOW Chemical was producing Agent Orange, but was getting a ton of public pushback - so bad it decided to stop production, forcing the Pentagon to look for an alternative supplier.

That supplier? A German privately owned pharmaco called Boehringer-Ingelheim. It's Chairman at the time? Richard von Weizsäcker, future President of Germany.

The production site was in Hamburg, is contaminated for the next thousand years. Boehringer is legally forced to operate pumps to prevent the dioxins in that site from reaching the water table. If those did, it would wipe out the full population.

Oh those righteous Germans.

Disclosure - Boehringer denies the above: https://www.boehringer-ingelheim.com/boehringer-ingelheim-di...

Judge for yourself.

NIH on Exposure, AO and BI: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK230789/

Deeper dive on that BI Hamburg site: https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/consumer-health/diox...

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KellyCriterion 11 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Nitpick here:

They didnt produce the final Agent Orange, they produced on of the materials needed for Agent Orange:

2,4,5-Trichlorophenoxyacetic

	▲	tartoran 11 hours ago \| parent [-]
		That's one of the herbicides used to defoliate trees in the agent orange.

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lencastre 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Bhopal disaster comes to mind.

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bobchadwick 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This sounds like the plot to the story Johnny Cash tells in One Piece at a Time, minus the machine gun, of course.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZuJivIwV8o

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ghywertelling 14 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

This question has been boiling in my brain for quite a long time.

Consider a hypothetical scenario where one spy chinese or russian programmer working in Google or Meta might have siphoned off (copied and uploaded) all the important code (Monorepo) to the Mothership and all of us are now sitting ducks.

I am sure, this question might have crossed your minds. I have no idea. if blueprints for the TPU chip design could get leaked, imagine what might have already happened?

	▲	ipython 13 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		That kinda happened already in 2009. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Aurora Industrial espionage also was publicly disclosed around the plans for the joint strike fighter. https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2017/july/chinas-... I’m sure in the classified arena there are a lot more examples.
	▲	sabatonfan 12 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Minor point but this doesn't only have to be russian/chinese spies but rather this can be anybody including say the UK/Israel or even countries which can be considered "allies" I'd also be surprised if this code isn't already available with the US forces too and sometimes the enemy can be from within too.