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Comment by originalvichy | Hacker News Reader

You would think you’re investing in a software technology company, but after reading a bit of news stories, you realize you’re quite literally funding war crimes. If I invested in an arms company, I’d have reasonable expectations about what I invest in. Investing in Anthropic at surface level looks like investing in software for hobbies and business.

It’s pretty depressing to be honest. I don’t know how I could work in any of these military industry companies.

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Normally Danish pension companies and banks will refuse to invest your money in weapons manufactures (unless you have a lot of money, then they apparently don't care). But as long as your money is invested as a pool, they won't do weapons.

I think you're right that e.g. Anthropic wouldn't be on the block list, because: It's an IT company, and I suspect that even Palantir might make the cut. It is fairly annoying, because my pension fund won't invest in Rheinmetall, SAAB or Kongberg, which I think they should, but they will probably invest in Anthropic, OpenAI, and SpaceX, which I don't really like.

It’s probably quite similar here in Finland. I’m interested to see what the current fund(s) contain.

All major indices have always included defense contractors.

Also, when you buy into an index fund, you are not funding the companies that the index tracks. That’s a misunderstanding of how the markets and index funds work.

you seem to be implying that, secondary markets have no effect on primary market prices, and i just want to make sure that's what you meant.

>I don’t know how I could work in any of these military industry companies.

You'd sing a different song quite quickly once the threat stops being abstract as you don't get to free-ride on the security a defense industry provides.

I wouldn’t, but thanks for the reply. I’ve gone through conscription and we are neighbours with Russia. I’ve not lived a day in my life without existential military threat.

You don’t think there are causes worth fighting for? Or that deterrence is immoral? Help me understand.

The defence industry that would be required to prevent an invasion of the US mainland is at least an order of magnitude smaller than what currently exists to sustain the US empire.

> you’re quite literally funding war crimes

What difference with Microsoft, amazon and google? They all heavily support the military.

(S)he said: "pulling my money from all of the US funds that I currently have".

Edit: OK, no the same person.

There is none. That’s why I wouldn’t invest in them either.

Replace "war crimes" with "hardware" and it's an equally good reason not to invest.

They're valued like software companies, but they have terrible margins compared to software. Investors haven't figured out how to value these companies.

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