[QUOTE=YogSosoth]
You are trying to answer a question that was not asked, which is that who is responsible for the internet as it is today. Post #72 makes it clear, when you repeatedly claimed that:
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Um, no. Here is what I was responding too:
[QUOTE=Chimera]
I dunno, the goverment did a pretty fair job of building the internet.
[/QUOTE]
No developing the internet…not early funding. Chimera is claiming that the government BUILT the thing. Again, the government didn’t build the internet, at least not past the initial development stages. They funded much of the early technology, and funded various parts of it, but ‘the government’ (by which I assume Chimera meant the US government) didn’t build it. Hell, even if you are gun-ho on government being the be all and end all, it’s insulting to OTHER governments that had a hand in the internet as it is today. You wandered into the thread to provide a link to something I didn’t say and was basically a strawman of MY position rather nebulous position (i.e. you were responding to some Republican/Conservative assertions that, I take it, the government had no role at all in developing the internet…again, not something I said), claiming I was ‘wrong’.
That’s an easy question, really. The only result of this is that more people will have the same kind of insurance that already exists (since there’s no public alternative, single payer, etc…)
So more people will do what people with assurance already do. If there are already people who go to the doctor because their child have a cold, or take an ambulance rather than drive their car, then more people will do that. So, is it already a problem or not?
Saying the government built the internet is like saying the government built Mars colonies. The government does basic research and the government is willing to spend zillions of dollars on fantastic projects, but there is no evidence that this actually speeds up technological development.
Imagine if in 1880 the government had decided to invent the TV set. It would cost a billion dollars, it would be lame, and it is doubtful we would have had 60 inch LCDs any earlier. Likewise, I don’t think building rockets to the moon brings us a day closer to building interstellar rockets. The tech will come when it comes.
Could be. I can’t prove it, but then I don’t those who give government credit for all these technologies can prove that they deserve the bulk of the credit.
Having your finger in every pie doesn’t give you credit for every pie.
There’s a big difference between sticking your finger in someone else’s pie, and deciding there should be a pie, hiring a staff and providing the money for them to go buy ingredients and then baking it. The government wasn’t in the kitchen but why should they be? How far has private industry come in space exploration, anyway? You don’t think that NASA is using technologies that wouldn’t have otherwise existed if not for their need?
NASA is itself still basic research. We do not have commercially viable spacecraft yet. and we won’t get it from NASA. I think NASA is a great example of trying to build a TV in the early industrial age. We decided we really wanted to do something, so we scrounged up whatever mid 20th century technology we could find, developed what we could, spent unlimited amounts of money, and came up with something that will look remarkably primitive once the private sector is zipping around space at a tiny fraction of the cost.
To overuse the pie analogy, are you a piemaker if you only make the crust? the government gets the credit inasmuch as they did the basic research, but the government does not produce practical products. Try running straight Dope on ARPAnet.
Or imagine if in the 19th century the government had farmed out railroads to private companies, and in the twentieth century the government had built an interstate highway system. You’d expect the privately-built railroad system to be the one that was most effective, and that the government-built interstate system would be a bloated unworkable mess, because it’s not possible for the government to get a complicated network system right.
Not at all, considering that the interstate system was built (originally) with the express purpose of providing military logistics. I would expect that this is a role the government is suited for. Much like the early development of the technologies that are used to make up the internet we use today.
What any of this has with the government forcing us to buy Chevy is a mystery to me, however…
That’s not exactly the same argument, but yeah, you’re right. the primary issue is incentives. Many of us conservatives believe the private sector is always better, but that’s not true because sometimes the incentives lead to it being worse.
Now when it comes to making practical consumer goods, or business-to-business goods, the private sector is far superior to the government. The government doesn’t care how much it costs to build something or if anyone can ever buy it. They just build it. The private sector has to figure out how to make it cost effective.
With something like a road system, the private sector isn’t looking to serve the public, it’s looking to serve their customers. A road system built to satisfy a small set of paying customers is not going to look like the road system we have now, which is designed to serve the general public.
What good is a fission reactor? Really, in the long run scheme of things? Isn’t the fission reactor just something we use while waiting for something useful?
That’s my point, eventually some company will figure out how to make fusion or antimatter work, and some people will claim that if not for the fission reactor, it wouldn’t have been possible. Which is true as far as it goes, but it’s still crediting the molehill for the mountain.
[QUOTE=adaher]
With something like a road system, the private sector isn’t looking to serve the public, it’s looking to serve their customers. A road system built to satisfy a small set of paying customers is not going to look like the road system we have now, which is designed to serve the general public.
[/QUOTE]
Exactly. The interstate road system gets trotted out in these discussions all the time, but really something like that is ONLY going to happen if you involve a government, with the resources of a government. That’s because it was designed and originally built as part of a military effort, and no one cared about the cost…they just needed it for ‘national security’, and the funding coffers were opened wide. The private sector couldn’t do that because, well, what’s the ROI on something like that? Probably never, even assuming some bank or banks would be willing to fund the thing, which I doubt (for the price tag we are talking about).
Whatever you’re smoking today, I want some. Every single piece of technology that currently exists will eventually be replaced by something better (or more sustainable). That doesn’t mean none of it counts! The Chevrolet Cruze is really just the model we’re stuck with in the small family sedan/hatchback category while we wait for something better. So what?
What I’m getting at is that does the government deserve credit for later developments just because it built the primitive version first? Couldn’t it also be said that the development was before it’s time? We studied atomic energy and space travel for military reasons. The internet was developed for military reasons. Who is to say that absent the atmosphere of general fear and terror that the private sector wouldn’t have eventually discovered the virtues of these technologies?
I would say that for sure we’d have developed atomic energy…it just would have been much slower (that might have been a good thing, actually). Rocketry was also being developed (slowly) in non-government venues…but it got it’s big boost from it’s military applications. I think that, again, eventually it would have been developed even without the military applications…but it probably still would have needed government backing at some point in the process to get us to space travel and satellites. Most likely the internet is in the same category…we might have stumbled onto it without the government development, but it would have taken much longer to see the utility (the COMMERCIAL utility), and it’s possible that it might never have happened (in the same way).
The thing is, we’ll never know. Innovation doesn’t follow a linear path. Possibly, without the government being as heavily involved, we’d have completely different technologies today instead of what we got.
It was everyone.