What are you talking about? Everyone is poor and miserable, families arent making rent. My uncle was just dumpster diving to feed his family two months ago.
They're wasting the people's money over at DARPA.
They're wasting the people's money over at DARPA.
Without aiming to insult here¹, is it interesting to anyone that the same things we say when we're 14-15 years old are the same things we say decades later? I remember having had this argument when I was a kid (and very space-obsessed) and it was almost exactly like this. I remember my classroom, even, and it was between Physics and English and the teacher hadn't come in yet.
It's like some number of people have to be thrown into the war of the ideas periodically to preserve the battle lines exactly as they are. Stop and you lose ground.
¹ like not saying I'm better than you guys, I could just as well do what you're doing.
Well, yes. Overton window and all that. Similar discussions on USENET 20 years ago. Although I think in some ways they've moved on, and in some ways regressed - the openness of troll conservativism, for example.
I sometimes think of these ideological fault lines as behaving like the geological ones; pressure maintained for years in equilibrium, then there is a crisis and a huge slip all at once. With a lot of stuff getting demolished along the way.
Calling the internet an ARPA system is like insisting on calling telephones the Bell system.
The government and military are very large consumers of internet hardware, software and services, all of which would look very different if they waited on the private sector. (Probably something specified by ITU).
There was actually a great response by a member of the German Labour Party (SPD) in the discussion about the spending on the Eurofighter project (sometime in the 90s IIRC). His response to the jobs argument was: We could also build a pyramid in honour of Helmut Kohl and it would create a lot of jobs, that doesn't mean it's a good idea.
So if you have a magic wand or just happen to become dictator, please keep in mind the multiplier effects when deciding where to spend the money. ;-)
I want that sweet high-speed rail, baby!
DARPA accounts for a pretty small part of the military budget and is probably not the reason for poverty.
I think "better spent than a lot of other military spending" was the point of the post you responded to. The military may be wasting The People's Money, but DARPA seems to have low costs / high return comparatively, and often has high returns for civilians/society.
Compare DARPA's $3B budget to e.g. the DoD's $650-700B budget. You can argue that either or both should be spending some portion of their budget on "the people" in a myriad of ways, but that argument gets way too close to personal politics for an engagement here to be worthwhile, IMO. Don't forget to vote!
GPS: Nuclear missile guidance system
Internet: distributed nuclear missile command and control system
Computer mice: windows
Onion routing: fbi honeypot, enabled multiple violent insurgencies in northern africa and southwest asia.
And the list of actual successful darpa projects is longer than the one you provided, and the omissions are not nearly as benign as the ones you have cherry-picked.
And that's just what made it out of the lab. How many full ride college scholarships have they left on the cutting room floor? How many insulin shots? How many pounds of fresh food? C'mon man. DARPA makes war, not life.
Same for GPS-- compare the number of deaths from GPS guided nuclear missiles (0) to the number of lives saved by GPS (through more efficient farming, turn by turn directions, E911, etc)
I dislike the american military-industrial complex, but if I had to keep one thing from it it might be DARPA.
Data: DARPA's 2019 funding was $3.556 Billion dollars. DoD budget for 2019 was $616.2 Billion dollars.
Lastly, a lot of DARPA's research actually gets used for projects that benefit the public. Other people already listed a ton of projects like GPS, so I wont do that here.