Rankings not all consistent:
- private military 6 but defense 39;
- surveillance tech 7, data brokers 9, but facial recognition 14, social media 17, advertising 34;
- polluters 3 but coal 26, oil 30, mining 37;
- scam 5 but clickbait 15, MLMs 18;
- influencers 22 but ads 34 (influencers *are* ads);
- lobbying / disinformation are close (1,2);
- escorts, adult platforms, dating, adult content all 47-50 (nice!)
my take on that:
- private military is different from (and not necessary for) defence. A country having an army for defence is bad but kinda necessary. A country hiring mercenaries is not necessary.
- you can have e.g. social media without surveillance tech, and the harm comes mostly from the surveillance tech. Likewise for the others. Facial recognition opens my phone, I'm fine with that. Surveillance tech is always bad.
- same for the resources industry; they could create a mine that doesn't pollute and cleans up after itself when done. Mining itself isn't necessarily harmful (and we need the resources). It's the pollution that does the harm.
- kinda same for scams - the thing we hate is the scam. The others could do this without the scam, but they choose not to which is why we hate them.
- influencers are a particularly annoying form of advertising, so I get why they're ranked differently. It would be interesting if all forms of advertising were ranked so we could really see what annoys people.
totally agree that the sex industry at the bottom is good :)
How is a country having an army for defense bad?
Well in an ideal world we wouldn't need armies, or defence, right?
I’m speaking of reality. How is a country having an army for defense a bad thing in the existence we currently find ourselves?
It's an interesting question.
Could we save ourselves the cost of a military, and put that money to better use, without actually endangering the lives of our citizens?
I would suggest, certainly in the case of the USA, that the answer is "yes". The USA's military budget is larger than most of the rest of world's combined. Yet the USA is not in any danger of being invaded. This massive, massive, military force is entirely about projecting force elsewhere, diplomacy by other means. It's not "defence".
The USA has huge social welfare problems. Hundreds of thousands of homeless people, for example. If the USA chose to, it could redirect even a small part of the military budget to building social housing, and (imho) the world would be a better place.
So while I agree that having a military for defence (and purely for defence) is probably not a bad thing, that's not the purpose that most countries have a military for. Hegseth aside, most anglosphere countries have a Department of Defence that has never had to defend anything [0], but has been at war for most of the last 50 years. I think this is bad.
[0] Falklands war is a little bit dubious; technically a defence of a UK protectorate. But colonialism, etc.