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You invoked morality. The moral calculus is pretty clear to me: I’ll take the gay loving advancer of technology over governments stealing money to use it to b
by rothbardrand 9y ago
You invoked morality. The moral calculus is pretty clear to me: I’ll take the gay loving advancer of technology over governments stealing money to use it to blow up people any day.
Apple has the moral high ground, and that ground is higher the less taxes they pay.
Remember military spending is far more than roads.
- gaius 9y agoMilitary spending got you the Internet, GPS, jet engines, microwave ovens and a million more things that you take for granted ...
- wallace_f 9y agoAnd the roads the parent commenter speaks of... remember Eisenhower's highway system was built as part of national defense. And without military conflict over the last 1 million years, human evolution would not be something to be admired. But when we have in front of us the longest military conflict in US history being against loosely organized foot soldiers living in tents, something is clearly wrong. If we look at how great thinkers had to tease out right answers from wrong--Tesla for example had a lot of wrong ideas and bad experiments, but eventually he came across brilliance. The benefits we see here from military conflict all came from real competition, and the troubles we can see here come from a consolidation of power under a global plutocracy that is consolidating power across the globe.
- hhtoyou 9y agoCreation of SPECTRE
- otherme1 9y agoAnyone with less than half the money the militars spend should had "got" me all those things. Militars have that awful economic drag building expensive things just to blow them in some far away place without any return.
- gaius 9y agoAnyone with less than half the money the militars spend should had "got" me all those things. But they didn't. As the old saying goes, the Swiss had peace for 500 years and all they invented was the cuckoo clock.
- tradersam 9y agoThe quote: "You know what the fellow said—in Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, and they had 500 years of democracy and peace. And what did that produce? The cuckoo clock." —The Third Man (1949)
- WalterBright 9y agoInternet? Everybody with 2 or more computers tried to connect them together. Without the internet we'd have BIX, FidoNet, Compuserve, Prodigy, MCImail, RBBS, or any of innumerable other schemes to network computers. Jet engines? Governments refused to fund jet engine development until they were confronted with FLYING jet aircraft. This happened in both England and Germany. The US government ordered Lockheed to stop working on jet engines and concentrate on piston engines.
- gaius 9y agoInternet? Everybody with 2 or more computers tried to connect them together. Those computers developed from the code-breaking machinery in WW2 you mean?
- tradersam 9y agoThe thing is, in total war the military uses all resources—people, money, ideas. Without the World Wars, who knows how technology would've progresses on it's own—since we can't compare it's disingenuous to say it's only because of these wars.
- WalterBright 9y agoBut we know that many different networks were created. The idea we would not have a global network without the internet is false by inspection (FidoNet was global). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FidoNet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FidoNet
- WalterBright 9y agoThe code breaking machinery was not the internet. Besides, the code breaking machinery relied on tubes (and later, transistors) both developed by the free market.
- dredmorbius 9y agoYou might want to think about what it was that, in a highly-competitive landscape of networking options, lead to TCP/IP and BGP succeeding where other options didn't. I've just unearthed my copy of The Matrix, John S. Quarterman's exploration of "computer networks and conferencing systems worldwide". It was published in 1990, just on the cusp of the breakout of the Internet (there's a late 1990s revised edition I've not seen). It covers a lot of ground. Not of much practical use at this point, but a phenomenal historical document: Layers & protocols, management protocols, administration. And the networks! AQ, HEPnet, PHYSNET, BITNET, USENET, UUCP, FidoNet, Ean, VNETT, XEROX Internet, EASYnet, Tandem, HP Internet, UUNET, DASnet, CUNYVM, CERN, EUnet, FNET, ARISTOTE, SMARTIX, REUNIR, Minitel, Dnet, DFN, AGFNET, BELWU, ARIADNE, HEANET, INFNET, SURFnet, Enet, JANET, UKnet, GreeNet, COSMOS, NORDUnet, DENet, DKnet, .... (Nothing about WWW or Gopher though. Al Gore is mentioned.) On the one hand, one network would have had to emerge. But on the other, why the Internet?
- nickpp 9y agoNo, government spending got us super expensive connections between a handful of universities. Free markets took that and brought it as the internet to our doors. Military invented expensive microwave radar. Free markets turned it into $100 kitchen appliances. The government put satellites on orbit at tremendous cost for military positioning system. Free markets put Waze driving directions on my phone. Yes, we have a bunch of expensive things due to government spending. Imagine how many more we would've had and how much cheaper if free markets were allowed to create them...
- noobermin 9y agoYou say it as if Russian oligarchs don't kill people, or corporations don't kill people. They have and do.
- fragmede 9y agoBetween the strip mining to supply the factories, and the factory conditions in China that are Apple in everthing but name, Apple may still be able to claim a moral high ground over the government that keeps Guantanamo Bay still open, but that's not a very high bar.
- TeMPOraL 9y agoApple only exists because taxes - yes, including military spending - allows them to exist. You don't have high-tech corporations in failed states. Stable society, highly-educated people, solid economy - all of this is enabled and secured by a well-functioning state.