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Comment by pm90 | Hacker News Reader

I think it makes more sense if you look at the specific institution within MIT (the media lab) which has this particular problem.

So while MIT itself may have ample funding from non shady sources, Perhaps this institution doesn’t. Or perhaps it does and the people working there just want to prove their worth by securing funding (which is what most university administrators are incentivized to do).

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Yeah I mean most of the research at MIT is funded by the military and department of energy. Those guys are not shady at all.

[citation needed]

I don’t have a citation, but MIT and the defense/energy industry are definitely intertwined and everyone on campus knows it.

Most universities don’t have something like Lincoln Labs, which is literally a DoD research center: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_Lincoln_Laboratory

MIT restricts sharing funding info with non-MIT people. So you aren’t likely to find a concrete source. But this is very true.

> Those guys are not shady at all.

This appears to be sarcasm, but I think most of the country would unironically agree with this. Trying to slander MIT for taking money from DoD/DoE really puts you in a bubble.

to resolve the 2 plot holes of

1) impossible prestige-for-cash if Epstein's involvement is kept secret

2) the weird way in which Gates is involved

check out my interpretation at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20904781

As Churchill once said, mankind occasionally stumbles over the truth, but picks itself up and carries on.

I'd like to suggest that y'all are almost tripping over the connection that Epstein was possibly trying to get compromising material on researchers working on US military technology projects and then looking at it, going 'huh?' and wandering off again.

But in this case, they're securing funding from Bill Gates. So if Gates wants to give them money, and they want to take it, why drag a convicted sex trafficker (whose participation they than have to go to the trouble to hide) into it at all? Why not just have Gates, like, mail a check.

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