Anteater

The fact you are sitting here and posting right now on an affordable mobile device or PC/Mac/Chromebook/whatever is thanks to capitalism, not the government.

Don't worry. When Bernie's NWO finally arrives, you can barter for a map.

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Lucem Ferre

Those aren't the only two options.

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Frownland

If you want to be even more obtusely reductionist about it, the fact that any of us are sitting here and posting right now on an affordable mobile device or PC/Mac/Chromebook/whatever is thanks to the American military's attempting to streamline the process of murdering civilians without pissing off that Geneva dude, not capitalism.

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Anteater

Specifics aside, there's Snow Crash or 1984.

Well, you would have never been able to afford a device (or the Internet connection) without those things being commercialized and brought out into the market. The Internet, at least the form of it that people actually enjoy, wouldn't exist without capitalism driving content either.

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Frownland

You wouldn't have a concept of affordability without a centralized governmental currency, so government is actually the singlular reason why the internet and all that other techno junk exists. All hail the godking government for bringing us internet.

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grindy

Yeah, it's a sticky situation.

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The Batlord

Beat me to it.

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Psy-Fi

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jwb

I don't believe that is the real Plymouth Rock tbh. I've been there. It's not a very impressive rock. It's maybe a few feet across. There's no way that rock made an actual lasting impression on the pilgrims unless those people were even smaller than we think.

Someone just picked a rock in the area and said let's call this Plymouth Rock to get the idiot tourists to come take their picture next to it.

Anteater

I'll reiterate: unless it was commercialized, you would have never even had the opportunity to use this tech under any circumstances. Why? Because before this tech was commercialized, it was clunky to the point of being unusable by most people. When Bill Gates was a teenager, there were like two or three universities in the entire country with an actual UI to code with. You can thank companies like IBM and Microsoft for having something usable by a regular citizen, not the government. Prior to them, the idea of anyone even having a personal computer was a fantasy. There was never any drive from the U.S. government or any other country to make technology usable or consumable for regular people: those desires came from people outside of government.

I know I say this to you at least once a month, but you tend to be wrong or gloss over the actual point. "Government research" is just a another way of saying that they hire 3rd party people from various parts of the private sector to implement something that somebody non-technical thought of in the upper echelon of that particular decision making body of that country. That includes when they hire researchers or people with particular tech backgrounds. They go through the exact same process a serious company would go through, except with tons more regulations and much longer timetables compared to what private enterprise might develop in that same time period. There's nothing fundamentally more special about a government funded project versus what a company might do under the same conditions. That's why when the government does produce results, it's because they worked with the private sector in some capacity to do so.

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