The Greatest Job Creator Of All Time

[Flopper]

Did the government help Bill Gates with Microsoft?

Did the government help Steve Jobs with Apple?

And where do you thing Apple and Microsoft would be today without the government funding for ARPANET, the precursor for today's Internet, NASA's Apollo program that funded the development of large scale integrated circuits and microprocessors, the government funding that put millions of computers and networks in our schools, the government funded research and development in the 1940's that lead to the first large scale computers.

A good question. ARPANet was a computer network that connected US defense installations and also some universities. It was not the only network in existence at that time. In fact, the only thing that made ARPANet unique was its "meta-network" nature, that is, its connecting of integrated networks together over very long distances. Even the packet system in the early ARPANet protocols was not unique or unprecedented. "Packet" network models had been described long before ARPANet came along.

The explosion of the desktop PC and its millions of private users, more than any technical issues related to how to format or route packets over an "inter-network", is what made the Web the invaluable part of everyday life that it has become.

If you spend hundreds of billions of dollars per year on research projects, inevitably, some of the developments will be used as components in valuable consumer products. It's impossible to spend that much money and not produce something of some redeeming value. That ARPANet was retooled and re-used by the public to suit its purposes, ultimately becoming the Web, is not any sort of credit to the government. It's just an unavoidable result of spending billions and billions of taxpayers dollars on all sorts of speculative projects. The real question is whether those billions of dollars would have been better spent elsewhere. The answer is certainly yes. Inter-networks existed, outside of ARPANet, and those inter-networks would have become the Web (in some ways, they did too, as the modern Web is cobbled together from many sources). The horn-blowing of DARPA regarding ARPANet is just bureaucratic back-patting.

Source and more information.

Then there are the laws that protect copyrights and intellectual properties and the treaties of 1996 that protect both Microsoft, Apple, and other software developers in other countries.

Yes, intellectual monopoly benefits companies granted the monopoly. But such laws cause many problems, such as centralizing power, hindering innovation, and reducing competion. If you grant certain companies privileges, of course they will be better off. That doesn't mean those privileges are justified, nor does it mean they are beneficial to consumers.

I certainly agree that government funded research and development is not very efficient. However private industry r&d is aimed at developing products that can be brought to market within a reasonable period of time. Spending hundreds of millions on research without a clear vision of what profits would be derived from that research is left mostly to government and foundations.

NASA provided the funding for development of the first microprocessors in the 1960's. Private industry wasn't interested in this r&d work because there was no market for the product until NASA created the market. Then, development in the 70's by private industry moved at rapid pace.

 

[Oddball]

Spending hundreds of millions on research without a clear vision of what profits would be derived from that research is left mostly to government and foundations.

Right...Because if anybody knows from failure and unprofitability, it's gubmint bureaucrats.

 

[Quantum Windbag]

And where do you thing Apple and Microsoft would be today without the government funding for ARPANET, the precursor for today's Internet, NASA's Apollo program that funded the development of large scale integrated circuits and microprocessors, the government funding that put millions of computers and networks in our schools, the government funded research and development in the 1940's that lead to the first large scale computers. Then there are the laws that protect copyrights and intellectual properties and the treaties of 1996 that protect both Microsoft, Apple, and other software developers in other countries.

Entrepreneurs such as Jobs and Gates developed products based on technology developed with government dollars and today they rely on government laws and treaties to protect those products both here and abroad.

What, exactly, do you think either Apple or Microsoft have to do with the internet?

Without the Internet both those companies would only be a fraction of their current size.

The Internet would exist if no one had ever heard of Arpanet.

 

[Vidi]

Nowhere does that irrefutably prove that socialist progressives are responsible for America's economic growth and might....All it does is reiterate the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy.

All the pretty colors and goofy pictures can't change that.

oh the irony...

 

[Flopper]

What, exactly, do you think either Apple or Microsoft have to do with the internet?

Without the Internet both those companies would only be a fraction of their current size.

The Internet would exist if no one had ever heard of Arpanet.

Eventually, yes. Someone would have developed a packet switching network, but the Internet would not be where it is today without ARPANET. The problem with most business sponsored development, is the goal is to develop a product that can be profitably marketed within a relatively short period of time. In the 1970's, there was no market for a packet switching networks. However, once ARPANET was up and running in government and universities, private industry began to see the possibles and that fostered a great deal of development work resulting in some of our early commercial networks.

 

[midcan5]

The Internet would exist if no one had ever heard of Arpanet.

Really? And you know that because? Assumption is often nonsense. Read a history of science sometime, all things are traced back and back and back to others. Again it is the reason today America is failing behind BRICS. Reactionary thought is useless thought. Do nothing tea party and other assorted politicians prove their uselessness daily.

...get fucked, you pompous ass

Regards,
Oddball

Now imagine being called pompous by a twelfth grader living in mom's basement, reading Atlas Shrugged as history, and thinking Sean Hannity is really really smart. Hopefully you grow up someday Dude, aka oddball.

 

[Star]

The Internet would exist if no one had ever heard of Arpanet.

Really? And you know that because? Assumption is often nonsense. Read a history of science sometime, all things are traced back and back and back to others. Again it is the reason today America is failing behind BRICS. Reactionary thought is useless thought. Do nothing tea party and other assorted politicians prove their uselessness daily.

...get fucked, you pompous ass

Regards,
Oddball

Now imagine being called pompous by a twelfth grader living in mom's basement, reading Atlas Shrugged as history, and thinking Sean Hannity is really really smart. Hopefully you grow up someday Dude, aka oddball.

Republican ad hominem attacks aside, I find it interesting that -- the citizens of Socialist countries are the citizens that can most afford to have internet access in their homes.


Countries with Highest Internet Penetration Rates - Internet World Stats


The US, i.e. the richest country on Earth only ranks #16.

 

[Quantum Windbag]

Without the Internet both those companies would only be a fraction of their current size.

The Internet would exist if no one had ever heard of Arpanet.

Eventually, yes. Someone would have developed a packet switching network, but the Internet would not be where it is today without ARPANET. The problem with most business sponsored development, is the goal is to develop a product that can be profitably marketed within a relatively short period of time. In the 1970's, there was no market for a packet switching networks. However, once ARPANET was up and running in government and universities, private industry began to see the possibles and that fostered a great deal of development work resulting in some of our early commercial networks.

I guess you missed the post that pointed out that packet switching networks already existed before Arpanet even existed. That poster has a better grasp of all the history than I do, so I suggest you go back and read it.

 

[Quantum Windbag]

The Internet would exist if no one had ever heard of Arpanet.

Really? And you know that because? Assumption is often nonsense. Read a history of science sometime, all things are traced back and back and back to others. Again it is the reason today America is failing behind BRICS. Reactionary thought is useless thought. Do nothing tea party and other assorted politicians prove their uselessness daily.

I know that because ARPANET wasn't the only network that sprang up around that time. It is a much larger leap to jump to the conclusion that ARPANET was solely responsible for the Internet than to assume that someone else would have done the same thing. History is full of examples of different people looking at problems and coming up with similar solutions, which is why there is a debate about who invented all sorts of things.

I am not the reactionary asshole here, you are. You know next to nothing about history, technology, and science, and always assume that I am an idiot because I am a conservative. I think the idiot is the person who never learns from his mistakes, like the way you keep getting your ass handed to you when you debate me about history, technology, and science.

...get fucked, you pompous ass

Regards,
Oddball

Now imagine being called pompous by a twelfth grader living in mom's basement, reading Atlas Shrugged as history, and thinking Sean Hannity is really really smart. Hopefully you grow up someday Dude, aka oddball.[/QUOTE]

At least he reads.

 

[Quantum Windbag]

The Internet would exist if no one had ever heard of Arpanet.

Really? And you know that because? Assumption is often nonsense. Read a history of science sometime, all things are traced back and back and back to others. Again it is the reason today America is failing behind BRICS. Reactionary thought is useless thought. Do nothing tea party and other assorted politicians prove their uselessness daily.

...get fucked, you pompous ass

Regards,
Oddball

Now imagine being called pompous by a twelfth grader living in mom's basement, reading Atlas Shrugged as history, and thinking Sean Hannity is really really smart. Hopefully you grow up someday Dude, aka oddball.

Republican ad hominem attacks aside, I find it interesting that -- the citizens of Socialist countries are the citizens that can most afford to have internet access in their homes.


Countries with Highest Internet Penetration Rates - Internet World Stats


The US, i.e. the richest country on Earth only ranks #16.

Your genius is showing again.

There is not a single country on that list above the US that is socialist. In fact, there isn't a country on that list that is socialist, as far as I know. All the countries that have a higher internet access rate than the US do have one thing in common, they are all smaller than the US.

 

[dilloduck]

NASA gave us Tang and velco. Can you imagine the cool drinks and fasteners we could have if we plan a zillion dollar trip to Mars ?

 

[Oddball]

Not even those....

The "Not Invented Here" list:

According the NASA, Tang, Velcro and Teflon were not spin-offs of the space program.

If you are of a certain age, saying Tang isn't from the space program is unthinkable. Actually, General Foods developed Tang in 1957, and it has been on supermarket shelves since 1959.

Today in history, May 25, 1961: Kennedy wants to put man on the moon - space age products are born - San Jose fitness | Examiner.com

 

[EdwardBaiamonte]

The right wing conservatives and libertarians worship the rich and markets, it is these wonderful rich people and in these marvelous markets that jobs are created. To hear the wingnuts say it, you'd think jobs grew from the rich and markets were just brimming with work. Like money growing on trees the wingnuts bow to their gawds of money and magic. So here's a little history on jobs.

"More Government, Please!' By Thomas Frank, excerpted from the December 2011 Harper's magazine

Speaker Boehner giving a speech at the Reagan Building:

"One of the reasons job creators aren’t doing their thing, Boehner explained, is that they had been “slammed by uncertainty from the constant threat of new taxes, out-of-control spending, and unnecessary regulation from a government that’s always micromanaging, meddling, and manipulating.” It was this last infraction—excessive regulation— that drew most of Boehner’s ire, and as the Speaker spoke, the indictment lengthened. Not only were “intrusion and micromanagement” by Big Brother causing job creators to rend their garments in frustration.

[...]

This is such a shibboleth among Republican politicians that to hear it is to yawn, to move a few comfortable inches deeper into somnolence. But then the Speaker said something that caused me to shake my head and rub the sleep out of my eyes. The building in which he was talking, he pointed out, “is named in memory of former president Ronald Reagan, who recognized that private-sector job creators are at the heart of our economy. And they always have been.”

In point of fact, the Ronald Reagan Building is the opposite of a monument to free enterprise and private-sector job creation. The gigantic structure, completed in 1998, is the second-largest federal office building after the Pentagon. It was built under the supervision of the General Services Administration, on a scale so inflated that the former president’s son Michael once called it “Mount Wastemore.” Had this palace’s existence been left entirely up to the private sector and the unfettered market, it would not be here. The jobs involved in its construction would not have been created at all."

[..]

"Here, if we are willing to see it, is a story that might prove instructive as we grapple with a second breakdown of our economic system. We can let people who are out of work languish on unemployment insurance, a program that didn’t exist in the 1930s, or we can count on food stamps to see them through. But if we are so concerned about job creation, why not just create jobs? It’s not an impossibility, despite the lessons intoned so soberly by Speaker Boehner and his colleagues."

Here come the jobs: Time Great Depression

"...The program’s administrator, Roosevelt confidant Harry Hopkins, had famously spent more than $5 million in his first two hours as a federal official. At the CAW, he found jobs for 4 million people in two months.

Although it would be a brain stopping system error to acknowledge it nowadays, these achievements would probably make Harry Hopkins— bleeding-heart, government- loving, unelected super bureaucrat Harry Hopkins— the all-time greatest job creator in American history. Yes, his manic spending infuriated laissez faire purists of 1933 just as much as the Obama Administration’s deficits bother such people today. But his tactics worked. The WPA, which Hopkins ran from 1935 to 1938, ultimately created about 3 million jobs per year.

[...] Even a thoughtful (so called) conservative agrees.

“Compared to almost any tax cut, the employment impact of direct federal hiring is far superior,” I was told by Ross Eisenbrey of the Economic Policy Institute. And as the economist Kevin Hassett, of the conservative American Enterprise Institute, assured a congressional panel in 2010, “If the economic stimulus moneys were spent directly hiring individuals, they would have created twenty-one million jobs.” Hassett went on to explain how federal money might be used to subsidize private-sector hiring."

Harper's Magazine

PS For the intelligent reader may I suggest checking into Harper's, for the wingnuts continue believing corporate created reality, corporations - so called job creators - love it when you all sing in tune.

so what is the greatest job creator of all time? The goof liberal forgot to say?????

Does the liberal want trickle up economics ?? We'll give tax breaks to the poor so they will have more money with which to invent products and create jobs to make those products???

 

[Flopper]

Spending hundreds of millions on research without a clear vision of what profits would be derived from that research is left mostly to government and foundations.

Right...Because if anybody knows from failure and unprofitability, it's gubmint bureaucrats.

Research is rarely profitable, regardless of how it's funded.

 

[Flopper]

The Internet would exist if no one had ever heard of Arpanet.

Eventually, yes. Someone would have developed a packet switching network, but the Internet would not be where it is today without ARPANET. The problem with most business sponsored development, is the goal is to develop a product that can be profitably marketed within a relatively short period of time. In the 1970's, there was no market for a packet switching networks. However, once ARPANET was up and running in government and universities, private industry began to see the possibles and that fostered a great deal of development work resulting in some of our early commercial networks.

I guess you missed the post that pointed out that packet switching networks already existed before Arpanet even existed. That poster has a better grasp of all the history than I do, so I suggest you go back and read it.

I guess I did miss that post. In the 60's there were a number of people who did research and wrote papers about packet switching, however ARPANET was the first fully operational packet switching network. Even more important, was TCP/IP, Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol developed for the DOD. This protocol became the ARPANET protocol and the protocol for the Internet which grew out of ARPANET.

History of the Internet
http://student.ing-steen.se/IPv4/TCP-IP.pdf

 

[Oddball]

Spending hundreds of millions on research without a clear vision of what profits would be derived from that research is left mostly to government and foundations.

Right...Because if anybody knows from failure and unprofitability, it's gubmint bureaucrats.

Research is rarely profitable, regardless of how it's funded.

You really are a total economic ignoramus, aren't you?

People who put money into R&D in the private sector do so with at least a marginal possibility of a ROI.

With gubmint research, the budgets are not constrained by longshots, waste and outright fraud....In fact, whether they get as much or more money next year as they got this year is largely based upon whether they blew through their funding, regardless of any results, in order to keep the cash flowing...IOW, gubmint research purposefully subsidizes failure.

 

[Quantum Windbag]

Spending hundreds of millions on research without a clear vision of what profits would be derived from that research is left mostly to government and foundations.

Right...Because if anybody knows from failure and unprofitability, it's gubmint bureaucrats.

Research is rarely profitable, regardless of how it's funded.

Don't try to sell that to Thomas Edison.

 

[Quantum Windbag]

Eventually, yes. Someone would have developed a packet switching network, but the Internet would not be where it is today without ARPANET. The problem with most business sponsored development, is the goal is to develop a product that can be profitably marketed within a relatively short period of time. In the 1970's, there was no market for a packet switching networks. However, once ARPANET was up and running in government and universities, private industry began to see the possibles and that fostered a great deal of development work resulting in some of our early commercial networks.

I guess you missed the post that pointed out that packet switching networks already existed before Arpanet even existed. That poster has a better grasp of all the history than I do, so I suggest you go back and read it.

I guess I did miss that post. In the 60's there were a number of people who did research and wrote papers about packet switching, however ARPANET was the first fully operational packet switching network. Even more important, was TCP/IP, Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol developed for the DOD. This protocol became the ARPANET protocol and the protocol for the Internet which grew out of ARPANET.

History of the Internet
http://student.ing-steen.se/IPv4/TCP-IP.pdf

Since my point is that, even without ARPANET, the Internet would exist, you have to prove that the engineering feat of actually building a network that was independently described by 3 different people over a period of 2 years would not have resulted in the Internet without the US government being involved.

Good look with that.

 

[ShackledNation]

And where do you thing Apple and Microsoft would be today without the government funding for ARPANET, the precursor for today's Internet, NASA's Apollo program that funded the development of large scale integrated circuits and microprocessors, the government funding that put millions of computers and networks in our schools, the government funded research and development in the 1940's that lead to the first large scale computers.

A good question. ARPANet was a computer network that connected US defense installations and also some universities. It was not the only network in existence at that time. In fact, the only thing that made ARPANet unique was its "meta-network" nature, that is, its connecting of integrated networks together over very long distances. Even the packet system in the early ARPANet protocols was not unique or unprecedented. "Packet" network models had been described long before ARPANet came along.

The explosion of the desktop PC and its millions of private users, more than any technical issues related to how to format or route packets over an "inter-network", is what made the Web the invaluable part of everyday life that it has become.

If you spend hundreds of billions of dollars per year on research projects, inevitably, some of the developments will be used as components in valuable consumer products. It's impossible to spend that much money and not produce something of some redeeming value. That ARPANet was retooled and re-used by the public to suit its purposes, ultimately becoming the Web, is not any sort of credit to the government. It's just an unavoidable result of spending billions and billions of taxpayers dollars on all sorts of speculative projects. The real question is whether those billions of dollars would have been better spent elsewhere. The answer is certainly yes. Inter-networks existed, outside of ARPANet, and those inter-networks would have become the Web (in some ways, they did too, as the modern Web is cobbled together from many sources). The horn-blowing of DARPA regarding ARPANet is just bureaucratic back-patting.

Source and more information.

Then there are the laws that protect copyrights and intellectual properties and the treaties of 1996 that protect both Microsoft, Apple, and other software developers in other countries.

Yes, intellectual monopoly benefits companies granted the monopoly. But such laws cause many problems, such as centralizing power, hindering innovation, and reducing competion. If you grant certain companies privileges, of course they will be better off. That doesn't mean those privileges are justified, nor does it mean they are beneficial to consumers.

I certainly agree that government funded research and development is not very efficient. However private industry r&d is aimed at developing products that can be brought to market within a reasonable period of time. Spending hundreds of millions on research without a clear vision of what profits would be derived from that research is left mostly to government and foundations.

I am not sure it is correct that companies do not invest in longer-term research projects. Technological advances do not occur instantly, but there is huge profit to be made when they do. This is a major incentive. Even if profits are not known, actors in the free market may still desire to develop new technologies. The X Prize Foundation is a good example of this. I would bet that if government were not spending so much money on research, more foundations like X Prize would exist. The free market is not purely about profit, it is about individuals spending their own money, not someone else's (which promotes efficiency) and doing so voluntarily. Government bureaucrats spend money taken involuntarily from others. Profit is often a goal in the free market, but people do care about knowledge as well. The developing private space industry is an excellent example of millions (if not billions) of dollars being poured into companies with uncertain profits. Planetary Resources is a new company that plans in the far future to mine asteroids for resources to be used in space and potentially on earth.

So yes, companies in the tradition sense want to make a profit, and profit grows less certain the later in time research will likely yield results. But it may be that focusing on shorter term research first would yield to an even better internet, or that people would in fact invest in long term projects. We cannot known for sure what would have happened without the government spending billions on ARPAnet. But the internet would still exist.

NASA provided the funding for development of the first microprocessors in the 1960's. Private industry wasn't interested in this r&d work because there was no market for the product until NASA created the market. Then, development in the 70's by private industry moved at rapid pace.[/QUOTE]

 

[ShackledNation]

This is a very interesting read on the history of the internet for anyone interested:
The History of the Internet