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throw0101c

NASA has developed all sorts of stuff over the decades:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_spinoff_technologies

Most of the modern technologies that we use in recent years has had initial funding from government:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Entrepreneurial_State

* https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/17987621

This includes early bootstrapping of the Silicon Valley ecosystem:

* https://steveblank.com/secret-history/

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The gov't made the iPhone basically. I mean think about it:

  * GPS — government technology
  * the internet — a government technology
  * ai voice assistants — Apple literally hired the head of this research straight from DARPA after DARPA had released its work to the public
  * touchscreens — DARPA
  * accelerometers — DARPA
  * speech recognition — more DARPA and MIT tech
  * digital cameras - Bell Labs which had a government enforced monopoly that required them to fund and release research

I don't know why the myth that private sector entities create technologies is so pervasive. Why would a company invest so much into research just to release it to their competitors? The only research that drives everything forward comes from the public sector.

If you'd like a more thorough historical breakdown, I'd recommend economist Mariana Mazzucato's book on debunking public vs. private sector myths.

https://marianamazzucato.com/books/the-entrepreneurial-state

These systems are typically developed in public-private partnerships. This is not really the same thing as "the government" creating it. The projects or technologies are typically evaluated by studies which, even if classified, are frequently conducted by private corporations contracted by the government; the research is undertaken by a mix of government and industrial labs; and then manufacturing is generally (though not always) undertaken wholly by private enterprises.

The government and industry both have a role to play. Maybe part of the reason the myth persists is because it is simpler to believe it's one way or the other -- government creates technology or private business creates technology -- than to think in terms of the more complex reality.

The more I read stuff like this the more I realize all countries on Earth should pay thanks to the USA and all the great advances it has gifted the world with. And I'm not being facetious it's really crazy just how much advances in the United States have forwarded technological progress. Please tell every seething European to thank America for keeping them safe from Russia too.

> The more I read stuff like this the more I realize all countries on Earth should pay thanks to the USA and all the great advances it has gifted the world with.

Before the US was the UK with the industrial revolution. After that it was DE with a lot of science (many of the important journals were in German pre-WW2) and chemistry. For the latter, and how the UK dropped the ball on having a chemical industry, see the book Mauve:

* https://www.simongarfield.com/books/mauve/

* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/580291.Mauve

Just because the US has carried the baton recently doesn't mean others haven't.

I’m not ungrateful but I’m also not convinced it isn’t the product of having significant power over most of the planet such that wealth and resources in order to fund and sustain R&D are easily obtained. A tremendous amount of brain drain occurs due to the USA as well, and has for a very long time. The knowledge and skill going into these accomplishments isn’t all native to American soil.

So I wonder. Is it really the USA simply being the best or is it globalism with one very powerful player reaping the most rewards? Kind of a right time, right place situation. Perhaps in both cases you might think thanks are still in order.

The magic is partially the wealth, but more a sense of transparent, free, public research. Moreso, peel back the layers and find the 1st or 2nd generation immigrant scientists, educated USA or abroad, who came here, obtained citizenship or LPR status, and helped create both this collaborative culture and the discoveries themselves (maybe not in that order). Yes, it is a global effort, and yes, USA deserves credit for creating and fostering creation.

Right time, right place. Europe was wrecked after WWII.

Governments are good at pure science, research, and individual technologies. They are not good at making products. That is fundamentally where private companies have a massive advantage.

> I don't know why the myth that private sector entities create technologies is so pervasive

Money pays to protect money, so all sorts of convenient myths are part of the common knowledge.

Privatization is destroying the world. Capitalism is only a plausible economic system under heavy regulation and governments with more power than the corporations.

It's only in the US that "libertarian" is associated with being pro-capitalist. In pretty much every other country it's inherently recognized that capitalism requires a massive state so libertarianism is considered a far left ideology that is anti-capitalist

What countries? I live in New Zealand and at least here, in Australia and in the UK libertarianism is a politically right ideology that's tightly wound with capitalism. In which countries is it a politically left ideology? It's certainly not true that your description is a uniquely American point of view.

NASA hired Cygnus (our first customer!) while we were figuring out how to do what we planned to do. The open source world would look quite different had they not!

We had a couple of key customers like that who hired us despite ourselves. NASA hired us and told us how to do our job. Intel hired us because they needed an alternate compiler to their official one for the i960 (they needed it to exist, it didn't have to work). We knew how to port gcc, gdb etc, but we didn't know how to do the job (i.e. send the reports and updates that a big corp needs). McGeedy flew down, read us the riot act and told us how to do our jobs.

A few customers like that and we had it down pat.

NASA has been consistently contributing to open-source and open data ecosystem:

NASA and open-source software:

https://lwn.net/Articles/923223/

HN post on the matter:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34815383

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