41–50 of 54 posts
Excellent, and something of an HN perennial favourite: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=581255 (2009, w/ "sblank" commenting). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17600305 (2018) 43 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8980498 (2015) 45 comments. Numerous others: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
1. There was a 4-20 percent chance a bomber would be destroyed in an allied bombing run over Germany in WWII.
2. An American airman would have to fly 25 bombing runs before they could go home.
Strategic bombing is a good example of network analysis of national economies. I don't know if anyone was doing this in 1914-1918[1], but an under-appreciated aspect of 1939-1945 is how much it was about nodes and links. Ford-Fulkerson wasn't published until 1956, but someone must've been doing similar analyses to pick allied bombing targets[2]. And linear programming, courtesy Kantorovich, helped save Leningrad duri…
I feel for those who are struggling right now, everywhere. Help those you can, near and far. That’s the best diplomacy, living your ideals in a predictable, consistent way. I think that was the genius and perhaps criminal aspect of Kissinger. He was duplicitous, in my opinion, but he told the truth using a lie, as an artist does.
[0] https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/silicon/
"More details emerged from a Freedom of Information Act request in 2014, which revealed that Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt were not only on a first name basis with then-NSA chief General Keith Alexander, but that Google was part of a “secretive government initiative known as the Enduring Security Framework,” and that this initiative involved Silicon Valley partnering with the Pentagon and the US intelligence community…
Corbett Report is an extraordinarily low-quality information source: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Corbett_Report
The case in point over Google's Sergey Brin and the NSA comes from a Freedom of Information Act request fulfilled by the NSA: https://archive.fo/V0fdG. The second point about backdoor data collection through PRISM comes from the Snowden leaks and the reporting from the Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/06/us-tech-giants....
In the video lecture of this post, Steve explains that military funded research from WWI all the way through the Cold War led to the birth of Silicon Valley as we know it today. After making Stanford the "MIT of the West" by bringing hundreds of million dollars of taxpayer money to Stanford for MIL research, in the mid 1950's Fred Terman "encourages his students to leave and start companies" and "professors to leave and consult for companies", and makes his position clear that "I don't want to build production systems for the military, I want to do research. I want other people to start companies and have the military fund them."
https://youtu.be/ZTC_RxWN_xo https://steveblank.com/2009/10/26/the-secret-history-of-sili...
Some of Silicon Valley's biggest companies today are the product of tax payer money through the same mechanism which privatizes profits from taxpayer funded MIL research. A prime example is Google.
Sergey Brinn and Larry Page had been doing research and building Google at Stanford with taxpayer MIL research money since at least 1995:
"In 1995, one of the first and most promising MDDS grants went to a computer-science research team at Stanford University with a decade-long history of working with NSF and DARPA grants. The primary objective of this grant was “query optimization of very complex queries that are described using the ‘query flocks’ approach.” A second grant—the DARPA-NSF grant most closely associated with Google’s origin—was part of a coordinated effort to build a massive digital library using the internet as its backbone. Both grants funded research by two graduate students who were making rapid advances in web-page ranking, as well as tracking (and making sense of) user queries: future Google cofounders Sergey Brin and Larry Page.
The research by Brin and Page under these grants became the heart of Google: people using search functions to find precisely what they wanted inside a very large data set. The intelligence community, however, saw a slightly different benefit in their research: Could the network be organized so efficiently that individual users could be uniquely identified and tracked?"
https://qz.com/1145669/googles-true-origin-partly-lies-in-ci...
As the Corbett Report explains, that relationship ensured Google's growth long after the company was founded:
"In 2003, Google signed a $2.1 million contract with the National Security Agency, the US intelligence community’s shadowy surveillance arm that is responsible for collecting, storing and analyzing signals intelligence in foreign intelligence and counterintelligence operations. Google built the agency a customized search tool “capable of searching 15 million documents in twenty-four languages.” So important was this relationship to Google that when the contract expired in April 2004, they extended it for another year at no cost to the government."
https://www.consumerwatchdog.org/sites/default/files/2017-09...
And as Corbett explains with cited sources available for reference, taxpayer money funded early R&D or provided direct investment in Facebook and Palantir as well. These are but a few examples.
Silicon Valley is product of taxpayer money, where the gov. has been picking white men, usually of privileged birth and position, to be winners by funding their research and their companies with taxpayer money.
So instead of attacking the messenger and committing a fallacy, are you willing to debate the message?
"More details emerged from a Freedom of Information Act request in 2014, which revealed that Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt were not only on a first name basis with then-NSA chief General Keith Alexander, but that Google was part of a “secretive government initiative known as the Enduring Security Framework,” and that this initiative involved Silicon Valley partnering with the Pentagon and the US intelligence community…
"More details emerged from a Freedom of Information Act request in 2014, which revealed that Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt were not only on a first name basis with then-NSA chief General Keith Alexander, but that Google was part of a “secretive government initiative known as the Enduring Security Framework,” and that this initiative involved Silicon Valley partnering with the Pentagon and the US intelligence community…
Corbett Report is an extraordinarily low-quality information source: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Corbett_Report
This is a very interesting presentation. On the topic of innovation policy, Mariana Mazzucato argues that governments should take a more active role in driving innovation towards particular goals. Be it electronic warfare / military electronics that begat Silicon Valley as detailed in this presentation by Steve Blank, or getting to the moon before the commies (Apollo program). See her Ted presentation at https://www.…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If a company promotes/hires people who make decisions deleterious to the company's financials, that company will be less profitable and the stock price will be less. I.e. the market corrects for things.
First, that does not make those people punished. At best it make the company punished. Second, it does not seem like those companies were punished in any measurable way.
Less profit adds up.