'I think it was Greg Mello who asked an interesting question once. If all the PE's and EE's and ME's and Ph.D.'s and M.S.'s were not up working on the Dark Side, would they be working on peaceful projects to the betterment of the local community?"
Oh, well we already know that answer to that. They go to Wall Street, work for hedge funds, go to work of NSA, CIA, Tesla, Microsoft, LLNL, startups,Facebook, Space X, or TickTock.
Greg Mello has lived far far to long in New Mexico.
Comments
Ask anyone who has worked at the labs for 5, 10, 15, 20 or more years and they will tell about half the people they know have left LANL. In general they leave Northern New Mexico and go work for all the places that have been noted. I would add a number have left for faculty positions, other government jobs like DOE, NNSA, or gone to the defense industries. In short they almost all leave New Mexico. Greg is just one weird guy, he seems to think that if Los Alamos or Sandia did not exist that all these tech bs, ms and Ph.Ds would still be around and start coffee shops or something. These people like everyone else in STEM go to places with jobs.
This is not to mention all the work that is done at Los Alamos that has all sorts of economics implications beyond nuclear weapons. Of course any one with any knowledge of the history of science and engineering knows that a large fraction technical advances where initially pursued or funded for military reasons, this is going back to the Greek times.
I am always stunned by the comments from Greg. Is he really this stupid and lacking of historical knowledge? I am guessing not and he is simply saying this extremely low level stuff because it appeals to the Santa Fe divorcees who give his group money.