Vincent Rioux

I’m glad everyone’s having fun in El Segundo, excited about building tech, partying, and e/acc’ing. But personally, I’d have a hard time sleeping if I knew the results of my life’s work, was taking the life of others. This video from Iraq haunts me. She can’t even remember her own name, her parents are gone, and she’s without food or a home. Making weapons of war shouldn’t be done lightly. It’s not joyous. It’s a grave, somber act with extremely heavy consequences. If you want to improve the world, there are many better choices than to increase our capability to make one another suffer. “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. 
This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter with a half-million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. . . . This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.” — Dwight Eisenhower , 34th president and commander of the allied forces in Europe during ww2