Don't bother. HN is libertarian leaning thus will defend military spending and fight any criticism of the US military or its massive spending to the death.
I'm not even going to go into how a lot of that spending, if freed up, would go toward endeavors that are not military related and to a parallel timeline we can never know. Imagine NASA with 10 or 50x the budget. Or NSF with 10x the budget, etc. We'd probably be typing this on a moonbase or on a cottage on Alpha Centauri's earth-like planet.
Instead we fawn over the peanuts that falls out of the elephants mouth and praise its generosity for feeding the hungry.
I think you may have responded to the wrong person. I'm just making a point that who you credit with a discovery can change many times if you are willing to point at the owner of the shoulders that the inventor was standing on.
Transistors discovered by a private lab? A private lab with government funding? A private lab building on work done by individuals such as Faraday? Individuals who in many cases received government funding in the UK? Individuals who were building on work by Benjamin Franklin, a self-made and self-funded man? Benjamin Franklin, who doubtlessly was enabled by early work on the scientific method itself by Roger Bacon? Roger Bacon, who was supported by the catholic church? Roger Bacon, who built on work of earlier Muslim scholars?
If we want to play the "who gets credit" game, we need to decide beforehand how many times we are going to go down the "who funded who" tree, and "who researched the prerequisites" tree.
I'm not talking about politics; I am pointing out that you people are talking past each other because you all have different ideas of how to assign credit.
Right, my point is that a lot of people here are invested in the idea of "military solves all" and will try to disingenuously tie all innovations to military or defense financing.
I'm not even going to go into how a lot of that spending, if freed up, would go toward endeavors that are not military related and to a parallel timeline we can never know. Imagine NASA with 10 or 50x the budget. Or NSF with 10x the budget, etc. We'd probably be typing this on a moonbase or on a cottage on Alpha Centauri's earth-like planet.
Instead we fawn over the peanuts that falls out of the elephants mouth and praise its generosity for feeding the hungry.