You Didn't Build That
- Thread starter Agauholic
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Guest Post: You Didn't Build That
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/guest-post-you-didn’t-build
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/guest-post-you-didn’t-build
The government produces nothing... if it steals from someone and builds something I would say that "thing" was built by those who the money was stolen off
I can't believe people fall for such rubbish.
thatguy said:
Er, no, the government still builds the "thing" but the money to build it comes from the taxpayer.
Both are just as important as each other.
And I think its rather ironic that the meme pics of the Wright Brothers, Steve Jobs, Henry Ford and Alexander Graham Bell all feature "inventors" who borrowed heavily from others to build the things they're now famous for.
The Apple Macintosh Steve Jobs is leaning on, for example, featured a Graphical User Interface that he "borrowed" from Xerox Corp. Oh, and a mouse for input, which was invented by Doug Engelbart from SRI.
Meme fail.
Obama: "The Internet didn't get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all companies could make money off the Internet."
Who really built the internet? Xerox.
Who really built the internet
Who really built the internet? Xerox.
Who really built the internet
bordsilver said:
That WSJ article is a pile of steaming horsecrap...
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...o-argue-government-didnt-launch-the-internet/
The question 'who made the internet?' is a stupid one with no right answer (edited to add: this is talking about the current state of the internet, otherwise you could attribute the invention of the original to APRA funded Stanford guys: http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc675). There is no one single piece that suddenly became the internet, it was the combined work of many people in both private and public sectors that made it what it is.
Xerox? Nah. Maybe they did invent 'ethernet' but this slashdot comment puts it nicely:
Steaming horsecrap is a bit strong. The WSJ specifies a range of influences as well as its definition of what the "internet is". Whether the current internet is in any way related is irrelevant.
Big A.D. said:
"Apple" is the use of available resources, specific to Apples philosophy (whatever that may be). Now ofcourse Apple borrowed from many... they used wheels, they used paper... clearly borrowed heavily from the egyptians, but this "borrowing" was done by trading at market price. It was Apple's ideas, initiative and risk taking made use of all those available resources (money, loans, market technology), to develop products the market (anyone) can VOLUNTARILY use if they see a mutal gain. (ie: I get the iphone, you get my gold coin.)
This is called a market. This is basic economics.... which Obama and the rest of you statist punks still don't get...... so the rest of us get to laugh at you.
This is where voluntary exchanges of resources can be made for mutual gain.
BULL DUST the government "builds the thing". They build nothing. The Government is nothing more and a coercive guider of available resources, away from where the market would've placed them VOLUNTARILY, TO where the vested interest wants them BY FORCE.
We see this with coercivly funded green schemes, ford bailouts, holden bailouts, pink batts etc. The "Government" directed the available resources to these sectors, under threat of FORCE.
Statist-Punk fail.
Epic win "that guy". Governments create nothing, they only misdirect resources at a cost.
bordsilver said:
Feel free to educate yourself and read some of the insightful comments on slashdot:
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/12/07/23/1751223/who-really-invented-the-internet
They put it much better than I can be bothered to.
If you think that article is an informative source of information you clearly don't know enough about the history of networks & the Internet.
Crovitz is a retard and that's putting it nicely.
Agauholic said:
Hey, I'm not saying Apple didn't ever do anything revolutionary or that it hasn't been an extremely successful business, but Apple has used plenty of ideas that originated outside of Apple. They haven't always paid money for them, let alone market prices and they shouldn't always have to either, just like others should be able to borrow ideas from Apple and modify, adapt and change them to make them better.
The article about how "the government didn't create the internet", for example, mentions Xerox and how they were the ones who developed Ethernet. The thing is, the standards that define what Ethernet is were based on the ALOHA protocols developed by the University of Hawaii. Robert Metcalfe, who "co-invented" Ethernet, did research on ALOHAnet as part of his doctorate and borrowed a lot of the concepts when he was developing Ethernet for Xerox PARC.
Every satellite in the sky and every wireless device on earth use parts of the ALOHA protocol.
Seriously, IT is probably the worst possible example to pick if you're trying to argue that people don't borrow stuff from the people who came before them, with the possible exception of literature. Oh, and maths. And art. And also philosophy.
I highly doubt the private sector (which focuses intently on ROI/ROE) would invest in capital intensive and non-profit projects. Do you seriously believe private companies would voluntarily do something which gives them & their shareholders no benefit?
The free market is nice in theory but there are non-profitable things which are beneficial to the society as a whole which need doing.
The government is a perfect candidate to fill this gap, either through 'force' or 'legislation'.
I agree more often than not government spending is inefficient & distorts market forces (ie. waste of money) but there's still a place for them somewhere.
Imagine if private companies could do whatever they wanted, any infrastructure outside of Sydney & Melbourne would not be built because it is cost ineffective. The last mile is expensive and offers low returns.
You would not have internet in Byron Bay because population density is low. You would not have cellular signals in the outskirts of Sydney because it takes too many towers to cover the area and not enough people to justify the cost etc.
Also, governments do make things which other people then go on to use:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_spin-off_technologies
Apple on the other hand, is suing Samsung for round rectangles. Go figure.
Big A.D. said:
Whether they do something revolutionary or not is irrelevant. You have missed the point of the thread.
The point here is.... Apples profit is their own. Profit is the motivator for their philosophy, initiative and activity. Their profit is calculated by the volume of voluntary associations they attract and their efficiency servicing them.
What Obama is getting at, is that this profit when it appears can be confiscated by Force, for the common. This is the putrid, vile, cancerous mindset of the Statist-Punk.... which is just so darn funny cos of how stupid it is.
This vile nature is expressed, amongst other methods, through the collective chanting mechanism we call democracy, where bunches of people can chant loud enough and convince enough fellow men, so that THEY can organise STATE to use threat of FORCE, to confiscate and direct resources to where they want it applied.
This thread is where we get to laugh at how pathetically stupid it is to subvert the profit mechanism of voluntary associations.
the people who do that, i call, 'Statist Punks'
It just sounds cool and is fun to say. "Take my money you statist punk", "Nice wind turbine you statist punk", "Yeah, it's a bonfire, so what, you Statist Punk", "Ken oath my boat sank you statist punk"
I dare the bastard to turn up to a gig & tell the roadies that they didnt build it.
:lol:
:lol:
Thanks Fishball for the link.
Bid A.D./Fishball, I think we are getting bogged down in semantics. Almost EVERYTHING is an incremental progress on something else. Newton famously said "If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants." But this itself was paraphrasing earlier people. None of us have ever done anything that did not rely on the outcomes of someone else (with an infinite regress back to the proverbial amoeba).
I think you either do or do not understand thatguy, aquaholic, wrmcad, etc comments regarding the key difference between:
(a) what a government sponsored employee "builds" from resources taken from elsewhere in the economy under the threat of violence
and
(b) what the voluntary private enterprises "build" from resources that they had to save and invest.
It is irrelevant whether the government-sponsored building accidentally happens to have a beneficial outcome (many things clearly are), the point is that it was only accidental and/or achieved by force.
Bid A.D./Fishball, I think we are getting bogged down in semantics. Almost EVERYTHING is an incremental progress on something else. Newton famously said "If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants." But this itself was paraphrasing earlier people. None of us have ever done anything that did not rely on the outcomes of someone else (with an infinite regress back to the proverbial amoeba).
I think you either do or do not understand thatguy, aquaholic, wrmcad, etc comments regarding the key difference between:
(a) what a government sponsored employee "builds" from resources taken from elsewhere in the economy under the threat of violence
and
(b) what the voluntary private enterprises "build" from resources that they had to save and invest.
It is irrelevant whether the government-sponsored building accidentally happens to have a beneficial outcome (many things clearly are), the point is that it was only accidental and/or achieved by force.
Agauholic said:
Are you serious?
The philosophy Steve Jobs' developed for Apple was to build better computers that improved people's lives. He was an acid-tripping hippy dreamer when he started the company and didn't change much until the day he died.
Steve Jobs was famous for not caring about what his investors and shareholders thought. If you bought in, you bought into whatever Steve Jobs wanted to do and you bought in knowing that whatever Steve Jobs wanted to do, it was more than likely to change how everybody, everywhere engaged with the technology involved.
You really think he gave a toss about money after the first few billion?
No, what he's getting at is that if people don't recognise that nothing gets achieved independently in isolation, we're stuffed.
You have described a voluntary association. I have hope for you.Big A.D. said:
Go ask Apple/Jobs for a billion to be transferred to you right now. Let us all know how you go.
This is the combaya sales pitch that attracts the army of the Statist Punk..... It's funny cos they actually believe the filth, and don't follow through the consequences of his legislation.
"The Business" he refers to has already paid market rates to those inputs to the business. The transaction is done. Any retard knows this. (statis punks excluded).
If you care to follow the speech, he's actually talking about sets of legislation to increase tax rates. This is confiscation of the profit motive, this is the destruction of such. If you remove the profit motive, then you remove the profit motivated, and with it the benefit of voluntary associations.
History is clear on the success of this approach.