In the summer of '84, I did an internship at Kodak. My father had warned me when I was approved that I'd probably be driving a fork lift. But because I knew my way around a computer, they had me work in accounting doing Lotus 123 development - my first programming job! While there, my boss took me on a plant tour in the building where they were making disk cameras, which was the big thing in the early 80s. The tour and factory were amazing. Even with all the automation, there were still a lot of people. And the biggest machines I had ever seen - especially the presses.
This was shortly before the very steep decline in Kokak's business. That year there were over 14,000 employees working just at that one facility (Elmgrove). Our start and end times were staggered in 5 minute increments to manage traffic flow. Kodak now employs only about 5000 worldwide. Kodak famously invented the digital camera around 1975. But they failed to envision a future without film.
> But they failed to envision a future without film.
I'm not sure this is true. I think Kodak had no way of salvaging their business. They used to make a dime every time someone pressed the shutter on a camera. That type of revenue stream simply doesn't exist.
Of course, they could have become a completely different company, but there was no one company that dominated photography in the post-film world.
Both are true. A dime per click wasn't going to happen. But their collective denial about the impending demise of film as a multi-billion dollar business is a textbook case of bad management. They made an effort to be a major cloud SaaS for photography, but it was too little to late.
From what I have heard Kodak was mainly a chemicals company - and making and selling film obviously sold and used more chemicals.
They definitely screwed up not developing the digital camera more - does not make sense to me why they even invested the money developing one in the first place.
Kodak spun off Eastman Chemical Company in 1994. It continues to operate a successful chemicals business. It's now bigger (employees, revenue) than its former parent.
> Kodak famously invented the digital camera around 1975. But they failed to envision a future without film.
What would you have even put a photo onto to view it in 1975? A television I guess - at 320x240 NTSC resolution. Which is wildly inferior to an actual photograph in terms of quality at that time (35mm negatives are around 20 megapixels at 75 lp/mm).
How would you have distributed it? Photo CD? CDs weren't standardized for another 5 years. Laserdisc I guess? Not standard equipment for anyone at the time (even leaving aside that nobody had PCs either).
In 1975, the market for digital photography would have consisted of: satellite reconnaissance, military applications, and wire-service news photography. Military applications and wire-service being large fixed-installation cameras and not a SLR format.
Blasting Kodak for "not envisioning a future without film" in 1975 is like blasting IBM for not envisioning the personal computer in 1950. They were correct that the worldwide market for computers didn't exist at that time. And when the opportunity came to pivot - like the DCS-100 - they largely did. The military were early adopters of that for special operations teams for example.
What they didn't do was dive into consumer photography aggressively in the early 00s. And I'm sure that seemed like a reasonable business decision at the time: margins were much lower for consumer gear than professional, and kodak was not really a semiconductor firm.
Anyway, "kodak could have become kings of digital photography!" is one of those bits that has just sunk into the pop-culture psyche but isn't really true at all. Much like the IBM "there is only a worldwide market for five computers" line - they actually were right at the time they made that observation. The real problem was that when the time was right they were too blinded by their higher-margin businesses to pivot, but 1975 was not it.
The world was nowhere near ready for consumer digital photography in 1975 and it doesn't even pass the smell test that it might possibly have been. There's about another five technologies you really needed before digital photography could have become a thing commercially let alone viable for consumers.
Everything you say is true - and doesn't conflict with what I had said.
Look at the second link I had posted originally. It has a nice photo of that first digital camera. I was built by a 24 year old new hire:
"Soon after arriving at Kodak, Mr. Sasson was given a seemingly unimportant task — to see whether there was any practical use for a charged coupled device (C.C.D.), which had been invented a few years earlier."
I enjoyed your comment because it describes in detail what is really meant by the phrase "ahead of its time" and shows how that phrase may as well mean "useless" (for now).
It's interesting to watch someone trying to learn something that is out of his zone of education and knowledge. To me, who has worked in mechanical manufacturing processes for 30+ years, almost all of what the employees were showing is "intuitive". I might not understand the specifics of their application, but I understood the fundamentals immediately (e.g. what's a feed screw, and no it doesn't rotate quickly). Destin on the other hand has education and experience in different domains - and I am sure I would fail to understand what are basic concepts to him.
All that to say: Learning something new that is completely outside your current comfort zone is great, and watching it live was a wonderful experience.
It's probably useful to note as well that Destin is acting as an educator during these interviews, and so he's probably asking a lot of questions that he already knows the answer to... but he needs to bring the audience along.
tbh, it actually seems less likely with him. Maybe he's just a great actor, but he comes off more as a guy that doesn't deeply research things before he shows up so it is still all exciting and educational to him. And when he does ask questions they seem to easily be categorized as "for the viewers benefit" and "destin didn't know either"
On the other hand, I am pretty sure Destin researches the hell out of every single detail before he goes in.
There's a lot in the background before you see the actual video. Destin is one of those people who would prepare a ton before going in to shoot so that he doesn't waste time (both his and the people he's interviewing). It's how he is able to get access, for example, to the nuclear sub series.
You can tell by the prepared equations, etc that he has all ready. He won't know the information that the interviewees will tell him (since it's a learning journey) - but you better believe he does his homework before he goes.
For example, in the Coast Guard zig zag search pattern video, you can tell that he was doing his research in between visits to different coast guard stations. at the beginning he was like "what is search pattern" and by the end of the video, he was feeding the coast guard questions, etc - and that's all in 1 video, shot over a long length of time - it's not like he just goes in without learning more about the things that he's going to ask his interviewees. It's more like a knowledge search pattern, and with each interview he learns more. And that's all stitched together in 1 short 30 min video, when in reality that all took place over several months or even a whole year, etc.
Destin does his research and calculations. He just doesn't show it on the video itself.
Also in some videos you can see him trying to test his own knowledge in order to have the interviewee tell him that his understanding is wrong. You can only do that if you know the field/subject already (and you're anticipating what the correct answer is).
Kinda like an instructor in a unix class feeding a question to the class - well, why don't we just sudo everything? - and having the students reject you by saying what you really wanted to say, that using sudo is a security risk. Makes for better instructional video.
I can’t overstate how excited I am for the next video in the series. kodak and fujifilm are literally the only two film manufacturers left in the business, and signs from fuji have not been good lately.
film has also become really popular among gen Z recently, as evidenced by the meteoric rise of prices of used point-and-shoots, and i’m seeing a lot more film photos on instagram as well.
9 months ago when Destin released his first video on film, I got my dads old Olympus OM1 and started shooting with it. I have to say, I totally get it. The delayed gratification of not knowing how your shots will come out, the asthetic of film, I love it. Big thanks to Destin for this new hobby of mine and I can't wait to see more in this series
I love seeing the Kodak employees. I’ve worked remote for nearly a decade and do miss working with other people, but there is something about doing engineering on physical products in a massive plant like that which I really wish I had.
Then again the place is clearly ancient and their stock price has been sliding for years so I’m sure it’s not all roses.
Did they ever move on from the "we have two totally different perspectives" pitch? I listened to a couple of their early episodes, and they kept mentioning how different they were, which was very obviously not the case.
I'm a big SED fan, and love watching it with my kids especially, I just found the podcast to come off as lacking any kind of self-awareness.
I have collected film cameras since 1976. The golden era for buying old film cameras was about 2005-2015 -- great gear could be had for next to nothing. Since 2015, prices have been on the rise and the hobby is notably more expensive now. But it's only certain cameras whose prices have gone through the roof. The one the fellow in the video was holding was one of those cameras.
Any tips for buying used gear? I purchased three consecutive Nikon FEs off of eBay, and each one arrived with a different mechanical issue. I was lucky enough to be covered by return policies in those cases, but I'm hesitant to purchase again.
I've had a few Nikon FE bodies. I think they're excellent cameras. But I did need to have them serviced / repaired from time to time.
Depending on where you are, buying from a second-hand camera shop is a good avenue because you'll get some sort of warranty, and you can also ensure the camera is working before you buy it.
Checkout KEH.com - they will rate the gear and test and often CLA things. Often times the stuff labeled "bargain" will be functionaly fine but just scratched up physically.
I highly recommend the Nikon FM2 instead of the FE or the Pentax MX
KEH used to be a lot better before they got acquired. Their ratings have taken a tumble over the last decade.
I don't have a better answer though - I still buy from them from time to time. eBay is the big alternative if you're looking for something specific. Note that Japanese sellers list a lot of stuff on ebay but they tend to do it at fairly high BIN prices that don't necessarily move instantly - so don't look at those prices and think that's normal, they're just waiting for someone with a nice thick wallet to get impatient. The prices stuff actually sells at will be much lower.
Pentax MX is a good camera though, very similar to the FM2 (although lacking the 1/2000th shutter of the FM2n). Maybe you're thinking of the Pentax ME, which (like the Nikon FE/FG) are another early-electronics camera and suffered very high failure rates over the years (with depleted spare parts reserves at this point). Nothing wrong with the MX though - it's a mechanical workhorse, small, reliable, bright viewfinder. I'd actually categorize it as an underappreciated gem, even though it's fairly well-appreciated in the Pentax community.
FEs and FGs (and Pentax ME/ME Super) are notorious for electronics failures (which may be manifesting as "various mechanical issues"). They were early movers on flexible-printed-circuit technology and it did NOT work out for them in the long term.
(as opposed to the mechanical rube-goldberg approach of previous models - a camera is basically a series of mousetraps each springing the next mousetrap in the series. Pushing the button triggers the mirror and the stopdown lever, the mirror triggers the shutter curtain, the curtain triggers the flash and the timer, the timer triggers the second curtain, the second curtain triggers the mirror down, etc etc. Electronics let you orchestrate that all a lot more simply, but early electronics weren't as reliable in the long run.)
Generally, people seem to go for all-mechanical cameras (usually only the light meter is electronic, or sometimes they don't have a light meter) because at least those are repairable when they break. For the Nikon line the FM1 and FM2 and FM2n are very popular, the F and F2, as well as the Nikkormats. For Pentax, the highest end camera is the LX, but they are known as somewhat flaky, the MX is very common and a very nice camera with an extremely large and bright viewfinder.
In general you may just have to resign yourself to buying something and sending it in to be serviced. You can seek out someone else who's already done it for you, and maybe you can get a better deal like that vs buying something cheap and sending it in yourself, but either way, they are mechanical devices and someone has to clean and lube them every 20 years or so.
Unfortunately a lot of the people who do that repair are extremely old at this point, a lot of them did repair work at $BRAND service centers in the 70s and 80s and branched out on their own when it closed down. But there is no equivalent pipeline training new repairmen and when they die, that's it, the knowledge dies with them. And a lot of them have warehoused a lot of parts, and unless someone else buys the whole lot then parts get a lot tougher when they die too. So if you want something, don't hesitate, buy it and get it serviced and hopefully you will only run into minor cleaning/seal replacement/etc type issues.
As usual, 90% Of Everything Is Crap. Nobody wants to shoot a Kodak Pony 135 (or even something like the Argus C3, which I'd argue is actually OK in comparison...). The stuff that's spiking in price is the premium, professional-tier gear that people actually want and that can produce high-quality results. There is also a preference for certain name-brands that have better service chains or parts availability as a whole - I have no idea who I'd send a Kowa or Tokina (or even Canon FD) camera to, but someone is always going to be able to service Nikon or Hasselblad. The ability to put modern glass like Sigma or Samyang onto an older Pentax or Nikon body is really nice too, it gives you a full-frame body fairly cheaply, so "mount is still in use today" is a bonus IMO.
(note you don't need to buy a digital of the same brand... mirrorless cameras can use almost all the glass if you focus and stopdown manually, and this is actually more accurate because most digital cameras aren't designed for manual focusing, while mirrorless usually have some helper functionality like "focus peaking" on the Sony line...)
I personally think coatings are one under-appreciated characteristic. Pentax was a very early mover on multi-coatings with "SMC", Nikon had their own version that is alright, Hasselblad struck a deal where they adopted SMC as the T* coating in exchange for trading a license to the Distagon lens design (SMC Pentax K28/2 and SMC Pentax 67 55/4 late variant), Fuji had the "EBC" multi-coating. A lot of other 70s cameras either were single-coated or had inferior multi-coatings, and suffer from flare much more heavily. When Pentax's SMC patents expired in the early 90s, everybody else quietly copied SMC because it was just so far ahead of everyone else.
Sorry I don't have more specific information about pricing, but it's been years since I really looked, and I was kinda shocked by the prices I saw recently too. I don'tknow that I would have paid the prices these days either, some stuff is 4x or more what I paid 10-15 years ago. But maybe this helps explain some of the market psychology a bit.
I personally think the Pentax MX and Nikon FM/FM2/FM2n or Nikkormat FT2n are some of the best options all around, but I'm sure everyone else has realized that too. I mostly shoot medium format these days, and the Fuji GW690 and GSW690 are still fairly reasonable and provide top-tier optical quality.
Film was still around when I was a kid, but by the time I was old enough to consider the possibility of photography as a hobby, it had long been obsoleted by the DSLR.
I started shooting film about 2 years ago. Within a few months, I had my first medium-format camera, and I was developing my own black-and-white film in my bathroom. The (relatively) slow, intentional pace required to operate a 60s/70s SLR is calming for me. At the same time, that era isn't so far past that the ergonomics of the camera are unrecognizable. Sure, a digital camera is substantially better for any practical purpose. But as a hobby? Give me the film.
In short: If there's an old film camera sitting in your basement (or a relative's basement), go find it. Go for a walk, and take it with you.
I'm curious to know what sign was blurred out on the side of the machine spooling up the film. None of the process control screens were blurred but this and the truck company had to be kept hidden.
I saw this technique used at a steel rolling mill I toured. There were accumulators on both ends of the line. The output-side accumulator served the same purpose as in this video. On the "input" end a new roll's would be welded to end of the running roll as it emptied.
Great video! I was expecting to see something more like a clean room environment and less like a dirty basement, although not being a process engineer I’m not familiar with all the levels of clean and/or quality.
Eastman (or related affiliates) also make a lot of film for window tinting, and a friend of mine in the biz occasionally will get a roll with floating particles or an insect.
I had that question on an interview there. They said that they're only careful about dust when the film is wet. The velvet strip in the film canister wipes any dust off just before an exposure.
I think Destin is like the next gen Beakman or Bill Nye. Same role but with no gimmicks needed to justify it and a more direct, less formal, medium. I love it. Neil deGrass Tyson too.
People ahould really stop treating Kodak like they were just a film company. I knew someone who worked for Kodak as a software engineer right before they started having financial problems. They had a massive patent portfolio of imaging technology and image detection algorithms that is being used by google and microsoft right now. Some of the portfolio was so advanced that there was a bidding war between microsoft and google for the entire portfolio. We couldn't figure out what the bidding war was about until a few of our friends saw what was in the patent portfolio from the 1960s. I can't say what was in the portfolio but if they had to recreate what Kodak built in 1965 it would take half of Google a decade to get close. I'm not even remotely exaggerating. Kodak burned out a lot of people proving out their portfolio.
Definitely. Kodak did a hell of a lot of research. however let me nit a little about your statement. you make it sound like they had patents from the 60's that others wanted. patents expire after 20 years, anything from the 60's would be public domain at this point.
But yeah all them jucy patents from the 90's were extremely desirable.
They had an end-to-end (scanning, compositing, film out) 4K system back in the early 90s. They were able to crack the colour technology allowing for an image to be accurately represented and recorded back out to film without deterioration. I believe they pioneered using Lasers for this (Kodak Lightning Film Recorder).
I used to work at a facility that had one of the first 16-bit laser recorders. It was very finicky about things like humidity levels and what not. Working for this company I learned that when films are digitally remastered they are often saved back out to film masters; except not color negatives. They instead are separated into RGB* channels with each channel being recorded back to its own B&W negative. When restored from negatives, they have to scan each bit of film to be recombined for a final image. This in itself poses new issues as film behaves differently when stored for long periods of time and can actually shrink. Times 3. So the recombining of the final image can be a bit "tricky".
*I don't know if it was actually RGB or a YUV type of format. I never asked. I was just told separate color channels, and assumed RGB on my own.
Indeed. 35mm is actually a good archiving format if stored correctly; good for 100 years. No need to continually change tape formats every couple of years.
I've heard for some of the 3 strip technicolor restorations, they scan the 3 individual B&W camera negative rolls separately (red, green, blue) and do the technicolor printing process in software effectively. This can give better results if the final technicolor print has issues.
IIRC, Snow White was the first digital corrected film that went through this process. Each frame scanned from negative, stored as digital file, digitally restored*, rescanned into channel separate negatives via laser recorder.
*Restoration has multiple stages like film scratch removal, dust removal, color correction, shape restoration from any warping/shrinking in the film being scanned, etc. Lots of work goes into this that most people never even consider
It didn't help them survive the transition to digital though did it. They were pioneers when it came to digital but when you look back now perhaps it wasn't such a good investment. They couldn't stop what was coming but I can't help feeling they would have been better off realising they were a chemicals business, not an imaging business.
Kodak basically invented the modern digital camera. They made the first digital still image sensor, had the first commercially available DSLR and pretty much owned the (admittedly very small) Pro DSLR market in the early-mid 90s.
However management was scared that digital would eat into their film profits and pretty much killed their digital business.
The thing is that Kodak was never really a _film_ company. Or a camera company. They were a chemical company.
The lions share of their profit came from producing the chemicals and equipment used to develop the film. The digital switch wouldn't have "eaten into" their profits, it would have required a massive restructuring and refocusing of the company and they would lose most of their employees in the process.
Of course they didn't, and it happened anyway, just a few years later. I'm not saying it was a good decision, but it would have been an incredibly difficult decision to go the other way.
Kodak comes up as the assignee name in ~22000 patents in the USPTO (search at [0]), only counting since 1976, so certainly incomplete. Of those, some have been superseded, some are worthless false paths, and some are incredibly valuable. The patents may be public, but nobody is going to give out the other information for free.
The ultimate significance of the patents contained within the portfolio (how they will empower business plans, why they may be quite valuable) will not necessarily be apparent from simply looking at the technology described. And a potential buyer would always want to keep these hidden things (essentially its own business plans) secret.
Wow, I hadn't discovered Destin until now and love his style. I have the exact camera Destin shows at the beginning of the video and love it.
One of the big problems with film is the cost. I was surprised to find out last year that disposable cameras cost an average of $25 after you factor in development.
I've been working on a new product called Later Cam that turns your phone into a disposable camera and automatically mails you the prints. I just published this video about it last night:
https://www.tiktok.com/@latercam/video/7078825219833580843
I'm excited to watch this series over the weekend. This reminds me of a Boston-area envelope factory where I create all the envelopes for a photo delivery service I operate, NanaGram.co (Text your photos and we'll mail glossy, frameable 4x6 prints to your nana). USA manufacturing is awesome to see and support.
This video has a delightful correlation between explaining the high level schematic of how it's made, and then showing you a pretty nitty gritty on what those machines look and sound like when working and how they're monitored.
I really want to like Destin (SmarterEveryDay) as his videos are frequently on topics that interest me. That said, ever since he went about happily shilling for the armed forces (in exchange for access to fighter pilots for content), I am no longer personally morally willing to contribute to his view counts.
I understand it comes with the territory in the US south (he's also a devout christian, another hallmark of that archetype) but it's just not something I can stomach. Weapons of war are cool tech but we shouldn't be actively promoting ways we can kill other human beings, and we absolutely should not be promoting taking those types of jobs as a reasonable or legitimate choice.
When we promote content, we do so in a wider context: we are also promoting the creator of that content, and their views on society, and our attention and linking is materially enriching them to further those views. Watching his videos and suggesting that others do the same literally puts money in his pocket to advance this worldview.
I'm not sure how to put that in words, but I feel that we are loosing the ability to accept and interact with people who have a slightly different worldview. I am totally with you in your view on the military. In my country there used to be a mandatory military service or alternatively a longer civilian service; I choose the latter
However, I think that just because a person holds a different view on things we should accept that and not disregard other things this person does based on a diverging worldview. This tolerance can of course have boundaries, but these boundaries should be reasonably broad.
> I'm not sure how to put that in words, but I feel that we are loosing the ability to accept and interact with people who have a slightly different worldview. I am totally with you in your view on the military.
I can accept him, and will interact with him, but I won't do things that put money in his pocket to further advertise his views. Increasing his view counts, either via my watching, or my linking others to watch, does that. I am morally opposed to doing that. It's nothing to do with "the ability to accept or interact" with him; I just won't fund him.
> In my country there used to be a mandatory military service or alternatively a longer civilian service; I choose the latter
I'm sorry that your country condoned slavery. These sorts of policies and laws will eventually be condemned universally by history once they fall out of fashion.
>> In my country there used to be a mandatory military service or alternatively a longer civilian service; I choose the latter
> I'm sorry that your country condoned slavery. These sorts of policies and laws will eventually be condemned universally by history once they fall out of fashion.
Tell that to the people in Ukraine, which has mandatory service:
For more open societies, the people themselves can decide what is part of the social contract. Some places have made the collective choice that citizens being able to defend against external threats is a good thing. Not everyone has friendly neighbours.
It is no different than taxation (IMHO): through their representatives, people have chosen that each person shall given up a portion of their income for the collective good. Under your logic taxation would be theft. Some societies have decided that labour is part of what needs to be given up.
Is conscription not forced labour? How do you see it differently? You may think conscription is neutral or even good, but it seems fairly reasonable while maybe a little inflammatory for a general audience to describe it as slavery.
Let’s not throw the baby out with the bath water here.
Entirely professional armed forces risk filling up with people who actually want to go to war and shoot people. Conscription is a moderating force. You want a more representative selection. Americans probably wouldn’t vote for so many disastrous foreign interventions if they would have to personally fly over and do it themselves.
I think calling him a shill is a bit out of line. Shill implies dishonesty, but he’s pretty transparent about the fact that he used to work for the military, and that the reason he is getting access to nuclear submarines etc is that the military views it as good PR. I think it’s also fairly safe to assume that the military gets a say in what ends up in the final video, but that shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone - not least because a lot of what happens on a nuclear submarine is highly classified.
My sense is that he genuinely believes that the military performs a necessary role, and has a lot of interesting components, and is just trying to show that to the world. And we shouldn’t be so quick to label someone a shill just because we disagree with them.
Shill may imply dishonesty, but it is not by definition someone who is dishonest, simply a promoter. It means coordinated conspiracy; it may or may not include dishonesty.
Transparently advocating for people to join up with the military is no improvement. My issue is more fundamental than whether or not it is disclosed as an ad. My issue is with all of those who would promote violence as a solution to problems, regardless of how such promotion is carried out.
>My issue is with all of those who would promote violence as a solution to problems
You are completely delusional. Nobody wants war, but the truth of the matter is might makes right. We must be good at making war not because we want fighting, but because we want to be so good at it that other countries cannot just take over. You can choose to abstain from war, but you will quickly lose to those who do not. And those who do not may have systems and politics that make life much, much worse for those in the country.
Conspiracy by definition means secrecy. As the previous poster said, he’s been more than open that he worked on rockets for the military and his relationship with it. I don’t think there’s any secrecy here.
> My issue is with all of those who would promote violence as a solution to problems
I strongly promote non-violence, but there is always value in speaking softly and carrying a big stick. You need to be able to defend yourself or someone less keen on non-violence will obliterate you.
>My issue is with all of those who would promote violence as a solution to problems
That is all well and good up until the point where the other side uses violence against you and yours to get their way. Human nature, sadly, takes a very long time to change while destroying the lives and works of others takes much less time.
> My issue is with all of those who would promote violence as a solution to problems, regardless of how such promotion is carried out.
Sometimes force is the solution to problems. If the Ukrainians didn't respond to Russia's violence in kind, do you think they'd still have their own country?
So what exactly should we be doing? Not developing any technology at all with the military? Making the military look as unappealing and awful as possible so that we completely lose any and all advantage we have over other countries in military might?
War is awful. It's horrific and has killed millions and traumatized or impacted millions and millions more. But someone has to be good at it. Because if we as a nation decide to not be the best at it, someone else will. And I would much rather have the United States and it's moral systems be running things than our enemies.
>I understand it comes with the territory in the US south
Please, please, please stop talking about the south as a monolith. Or as if you are somehow so above the dumb hicks in the south, who are not enlightened with your amazing views such as "why don't we just stop killing eachother?".
>When we promote content, we do so in a wider context: we are also promoting the creator of that content, and their views on society, and our attention and linking is materially enriching them to further those views
This is such a horrible and terrible way to think about things on the internet. This type of thinking is how you get extremists and complete and utter polarization. Because when you not just unconsciously surround yourself with media that only you agree with, but WILLFULLY do it, you hurt yourself and make extremism even more likely. And that's only for things that are relevant - you are going a step further, and taking this to a level that makes no sense. If you were in charge of hiring people, would you never hire anyone who was pro-military? You putting money in their pocket is enriching them to help further their views which are oh-so-terrible. This type of thinking gets really bad, really fast, and it's not something we want to promote. It's exclusionary thinking that can only result in missing out on very talented people because of something that isn't actually relevant.
"A permanent peace cannot be prepared by threats but only by the honest attempt to create a mutual trust. However strong national armaments may be, they do not create military security for any nation nor do they guarantee the maintenance of peace."
"I believe serious progress (in the abolition of war) can be achieved only when men become organized on an international scale and refuse, as a body, to enter military or war service."
> If you were in charge of hiring people, would you never hire anyone who was pro-military? You putting money in their pocket is enriching them to help further their views which are oh-so-terrible. This type of thinking gets really bad, really fast, and it's not something we want to promote.
With the exception of those who are military veterans, who are a protected class in the United States for purposes of hiring (it's actually illegal to discriminate against them on that basis), yes, I can and do actively avoid hiring anyone pro-military who is not presently (and has not been) actually in the military (which is the maximum extent permitted by law).
There's no injustice in discrimination for purposes of association when such discrimination is based on the informed, adult choices of a person (as opposed to someone's inbuilt traits, which they have no control over). We rightfully discriminate during hiring based on whether or not someone chose to attend university, whether or not someone chooses to espouse racist views, whether or not someone chooses to use or avoid certain technologies, whether or not someone has chosen to develop (or not) their social skills, whether or not someone chooses to move to the location of the proposed job offer. These are great and useful.
Freedom of association is one of our most powerful tools for improving society (both in the macro, as well as in the micro, such as in a company or organization). We don't owe anyone our time or attention or association (or YouTube views) if we don't agree with the kind of world they're trying to build.
It also makes for a nicer workplace when you opt to avoid hiring people who are racist, or pro-violence, or anti-human-rights, or anti-equal-application-of-the-law, or any manner of a big list of optional adult choices that tell you a lot about a person's thinking (or lack thereof) about the world around them.
(Before the straw man argument: this is not an argument for hiring people who are "just like me", or only who share my views, or an embracing of the status quo, or any of the other obvious traps that are endemic in hiring. This is an argument for exercising judgement on specific constrained topics which should be universal in a civilized culture and unfortunately are nowhere near universal in our current culture.)
If I am advocating for anything, it is to discriminate more using your own criteria to build a better world, however you see best to do that. It's fine if you have different opinions from me (maybe you want to prefer hiring military promoters or something?), the point is that we should be making these choices more consciously to steer society in the right directions.
These are mine. Yours will be different. Choose to be a moral person, and do what is right. We'll all get there together eventually, because there are vastly more of us who don't want violence (or violent ideologies) in our societies.
>We rightfully discriminate during hiring based on whether or not someone chose to attend university, whether or not someone chooses to espouse racist views, whether or not someone chooses to use or avoid certain technologies, whether or not someone has chosen to develop (or not) their social skills, whether or not someone chooses to move to the location of the proposed job offer. These are great and useful.
We discriminate on those things during hiring because all of them are directly relevant to the job. If you have a social job, you need good social skills. If you work with other people, then someone who makes the people around them or certain groups of people they work with/could potentially work with feel unsafe shouldn't be there. If you have to use a certain technology to do your job, and there is no reasonable workaround for that, then they aren't suitable for the job.
Discriminating on literally ANYTHING else, on ANYTHING that is not relevant to the job being done, is blatantly awful and should not be promoted on any level of any organization. This shouldn't even be a controversial issue.
>this is not an argument for hiring people who are "just like me", or an embracing of the status quo. This is an argument for exercising judgement on specific topics which should be universal in a civilized culture.
What those specific topics are, or what you think should be "universal in a civilized culture", is completely up to each person. That's pretty much what political opinions are. And this type of thinking is the basis of a lot of discrimination that we should not be promoting in absolutely any way. If someone had a religion that promoted war , would you not hire them? What about if someone is from the south, and you haven't heard them be racist but you know how those southerners are. Is the law literally the only thing that's preventing you from saying no to these questions? If the answer to any of these are yes, then you are contributing to discrimination that has absolutely no place in the world.
> Discriminating on literally ANYTHING else, on ANYTHING that is not relevant to the job being done, is blatantly awful and should not be promoted on any level of any organization.
Why? Organizations are always subsets of the world in which they operate, and I don't see how being picky about the types of people with whom one associates is any sort of inherent injustice (other than the fact that, if applied improperly, it may hinder or otherwise impede/impair the organization, or (again, if applied improperly) deny opportunity to the disadvantaged on the wrong/unjust basis).
If I theoretically wanted to never hire people who are, say, sports fanatics, what's bad about that (outside of the fact that it may or may not make my team perform better or worse)?
Or, for a more concrete example: I do actually refuse to hire people who are both a) presently addicted to nicotine and b) consume tobacco combustion smoke to service that addiction. My personal thesis is that not quitting smoking in 2022 (and further not switching to a vaporizer now that such is widely available) is correlated with a specific lack of important personality and cognitive traits that make someone maximally effective in life (and at work). Am I being awful, and why?
You seem to approach it as something inherently bad, and I'm curious as to why, because I don't see any (external) harm whatsoever in it, and I should be free to make bad(?) hiring decisions that potentially kneecap (or benefit) my own team/company if I choose.
In fact, given that people working within the team/company are entirely opt-in, I see the ability to shape a team on other important social axes using these sorts of methods as a very important competitive differentiator (for better or worse; one would hope it results in competitive advantage) with regards to attracting and retaining talent (from relatively insignificant "your coworkers won't be ashtray stinky" all the way up to things like "your coworkers won't be TERFs").
> Or, for a more concrete example: I do actually refuse to hire people who are both a) presently addicted to nicotine and b) consume tobacco combustion smoke to service that addiction. My personal thesis is that not quitting smoking in 2022 (and further not switching to a vaporizer now that such is widely available) is correlated with a specific lack of important personality and cognitive traits that make someone maximally effective in life (and at work). Am I being awful, and why?
Aren't you precisely making the point that you would be discriminating on something relevant to the job being done?
I'm not going to explain to you why discriminating on things not relevant to job performance is bad. The fact that we have horseshoe'd our selves back to this conversation is honestly appalling.
I don't particularly like war, and ultimately it is almost always the result of greed and evil intent.
Most of us are appalled at the Russian war of aggression on Ukraine. While we all wish it would just stop with fine talk and reason at this point only the bravery of the Ukrainian people and the use of defensive weapons is going to limit Russia's advances until they see no further benefit from what they are doing.
> Weapons of war are cool tech but we shouldn't be actively promoting ways we can kill other human beings, and we absolutely should not be promoting taking those types of jobs as a reasonable or legitimate choice.
What is not legitimate about wanting to defend your country and defend the principles and values that it lives by? Especially in the context of current world events.
I remember his religion and morality coming up in more than one occasion in his videos, only to then learn that he worked for a weapons manufacturer. It was really jarring and made so much come off as disingenuous that I just can't watch his content anymore, not that promoting weapons on his channel was good on its own anyway.
Can you give a specific example of something that he said that you felt was disingenuous? Or even just elaborate further why you feel that is disingenuous?
It seems like you are implying that someone who works for the military cannot be religious or have morals. But even if your religious beliefs or morals prevent you from working for the military, surely you must recognize that there many people whose morals and religious beliefs do not conflict with military service. And that’s not being disingenuous, that’s just having a different point of view.
I'm not the poster that you replied to, but I feel the same way that this15testing does. I was turned off from all future videos by a specific line in one of this recent videos, specifically #242 "World's Fastest Pitch - Supersonic Baseball Cannon" (see starting approximately one minute into that video) because of just how unexpected him mentioning his work as a "developmental weapons tester" jarred with his supposed piety and his aw-shucks folksiness.
Couple that with a grinning photo of him sitting on top of an industrially-produced cannon-type weapon in that same video just made me uneasy. The end of every video on that channel has a bible verse citation so it's especially mind boggling. Isn't the fifth commandment "do not kill"? I believe if you're a religious person working in weapons development and choose to compartmentalize your beliefs for a paycheck then you are either naive or malicious, I don't know which is worse.
The commandment is more accurately translated as “though shalt not murder”, or commit unjustified killing. The bible provides many examples where killing is justified, such as punishment for a crime, defending ones’ self or property, and - especially relevant here - warfare. [1] So no compartmentalization of beliefs is necessary to work in defense.
I see this a lot where people try to use christians’ beliefs against them to try pigeonhole them into thinking and acting a certain way, or call them hypocrites for not acting the way they believe christians should act. But religion is open to many different interpretations - just look at the number sects within every religion - and we shouldn’t really assume anything about a person’s beliefs just because they are “religious”.
I do! I watch stuff made by other people. Veritasium is an example of a similar channel that's better.
I also inform others about the situation so they can make their own informed content consumption choices as may align with their own morals. Decisions are always better with more data, even if I don't agree with the ones others may reach.
Side note: I don't really agree with a lot of his other videos. Yet I am sharing this one, because I believe it's worthwhile and am not taking his other videos into account for a context that doesn't matter :)
Cringefest. Around 1986 I built all by myself a video frame grabber and suddenly I had instant pictures without film. Freedom.. They were also already digitized and available for Usenet and Gopher. Double Freedom.. http://timonoko.github.io/alaska/index.htm
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."
"Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community."
He censored the camera prices. The screenshot was presented as though it illustrated the point he was making, but it does no such thing. Very disrespectful.
This was shortly before the very steep decline in Kokak's business. That year there were over 14,000 employees working just at that one facility (Elmgrove). Our start and end times were staggered in 5 minute increments to manage traffic flow. Kodak now employs only about 5000 worldwide. Kodak famously invented the digital camera around 1975. But they failed to envision a future without film.
https://www.democratandchronicle.com/story/money/business/20...
https://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/08/12/kodaks-first-digit...