Political Theory

Re: Zakaria: We owe all innovation to the DOD spending...

freeradicals — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 21:01:31 GMT

Okay, cool, sometimes the undertone with things read in text only can be ambiguous. Nice armchair conjecture, much better than the one's I hear on YouTube in objection when I leave comments in support of the free market :)

Re: Zakaria: We owe all innovation to the DOD spending...

Smiling Dave — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 19:04:57 GMT

Lol, you arent being redundant at all. I was giving an armchair conjecture, you confirmed it from experience.

Re: Zakaria: We owe all innovation to the DOD spending...

Clayton — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 18:33:59 GMT

The government didn't invent (directly or indirectly) computers. In fact, even the fathers of computing theory (Turing, Church, Kleene, von Neumann, and so on) did not invent computers. Nature invented computers - biological organisms are* computers. As always, the self-aggrandizing emperors of the universe that reside in the halls of academia and the halls of power and the back-alleys of journalism ascribe responsibility to themselves and to each other for things that not only did they not invent, no man did.

Clayton -

*They are at least computers, they may be much more but that's beside the point, here.

Re: Zakaria: We owe all innovation to the DOD spending...

freeradicals — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 18:09:21 GMT

Sorry Smiling Dave, I didn't mean to sound redundant, you are spot on with your analysis of the situation.

Re: Zakaria: We owe all innovation to the DOD spending...

Smiling Dave — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 17:51:29 GMT

Thanks for confirming my post, freeradicals

Re: Zakaria: We owe all innovation to the DOD spending...

freeradicals — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 17:35:31 GMT

From someone who has personally worked on DOD funded projects before I can at least make the case that the money (and there is LOTS of it) is spent very inefficiently! This fact alone might bring one to believe that without DOD money/contractors there would be much more efficient producers which would in turn produce much better products ;)

Re: Zakaria: We owe all innovation to the DOD spending...

Sieben — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 17:23:26 GMT

Internet is just telephones for computers. If the free market didn't make it up, its because there wasn't a free market in telephones. Verify and weep.

Re: Zakaria: We owe all innovation to the DOD spending...

John Ess — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 16:29:28 GMT

The reason we lost in Vietnam is cuz DARPA was too busy looking at and making early LOLcats.

Seriously, if DARPA is so innovative... why don't they still continue to be an internet provider even now in its non-crap edition (which happened only in the last 5 or 6 years). Why not monopolize their invention?

Re: Zakaria: We owe all innovation to the DOD spending...

bcyclwutztht — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 08:51:14 GMT

If one server gets hit by a bombing run, all the other servers can still talk to each other.

Can't servers crash?

Re: Zakaria: We owe all innovation to the DOD spending...

Azure — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 07:27:55 GMT

Gee. Who would have thought to connect computers together? DARPA probably also discovered that you can burn things with fire.

The specific innovation alluded to when it's claimed DARPA "invented the internet" is TCP. The thing about TCP is the network is decentralized. If one server gets hit by a bombing run, all the other servers can still talk to each other. The army declared TCP useless and released it to the private sector. But I seriously doubt nobody would have ever come up with a decentralized network design if DARPA hadn't.

Re: Zakaria: We owe all innovation to the DOD spending...

Caley McKibbin — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 06:16:50 GMT

Gee. Who would have thought to connect computers together? DARPA probably also discovered that you can burn things with fire.

Re: Zakaria: We owe all innovation to the DOD spending...

Bill — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 04:41:37 GMT

My apologies to you

Re: Zakaria: We owe all innovation to the DOD spending...

MrSchnapps — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 04:35:37 GMT

How can anyone guess what "might have been" if companies hadn't been so restricted by the heavy taxing?

Yes, it's fallacious; it's called hypothesis contrary to fact.

Example: "Good thing Markoni invented the radio because without him, we wouldn't have the radio today!"

Re: Zakaria: We owe all innovation to the DOD spending...

David — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 04:29:40 GMT

Bill Smith wrote the following post at Sun, Oct 31 2010 7:09 PM:

You can't possibly be trying to make a case that the DOD is more capable in Research and Development than the very Companies and creative hard working people they looted the money from

Oh, not me. It was a quote from Fareed Zakaria, I found the claim implausible. I guess he (and the guest CEOs on his show) are saying that without the DOD money, such things would not have been invented. Being in technology myself, I think they are all pretty bad examples. You might make a case that the GPS system might not have been deployed (when it was) without such a defense funding, but his suggestion that it is what makes the mobile phone industry a great success is quite a stretch.

Even with NASA, he doesn't really have a case since the very climate for private investment has been greatly handicapped by the taxing. How can anyone guess what "might have been" if companies hadn't been so restricted by the heavy taxing? I think the general problem with Zakaria's position is that he thinks that some omnipotent bureaucrat can better direct R&D funding than the market.

Re: Zakaria: We owe all innovation to the DOD spending...

MrSchnapps — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 03:04:22 GMT

If the government hadn't intervened, then X would not exist....

Sounds like hypothesis contrary to fact.