[gzu]

It's like if only we put more resources towards potential societal altering technologies like these instead of [insert random SAAS app]. Maybe tech investors aren't very comfortable with projects outside their domain knowledge and expect an quick return. Quaise last financing round was something like $20M...

[snarf21]

I don't think domain knowledge is issue. The issue is that SAAS apps or Twitter or w/e scale infinitely in an extremely short time. What is the time horizon for drilling geothermal all over the world? There are environmental factors to consider, etc. It is fairly trivial for 4B people to be on FB but getting 4B people to get their energy from geothermal doesn't scale the same way.

[XorNot]

The other issue is the margins are razor thin. Energy has to be cheap: so the issue is $1 billion going into this (1) might not be enough to have enough scale to make any money at all and (2) is competing with anything else you could do with $1 billion.

Which is why you need government subsidy if you want something to happen: but the you are also betting that you've picked either the right technology (it works at all) or at least you're accepting you're probably going to overpay.

[aredox]

Drilling and tunnelling is a huge industry with tons of markets.

If Elon was the one to do this, tech bros and investors would be all over it with ad-hoc rationalisations ("this is the tech we need to build a mars colony!"). Instead he used his "boring company" to kill public transportation, and you are here dismissing Quaise Energy - people who actually have put up the work to try something groundbreaking (literally) and whose future is not assured yet.

[Tagbert]

But they are capital intensive with long timelines and a high risk of failure. It's hard to get investment in projects like that.

[sanderjd]

This is, in my view, the biggest bummer about (what I see as) Musk's descent into madness in the last few years.

It's absolutely true that this stuff is capital intensive, slow, and risky, and thus hard to get investment for. But Musk had solved that problem using showmanship and a series of successful (whether through genius or luck, it doesn't matter!) risky bets to back it up. So I think it just really is the case that because of Tesla / SpaceX / Starlink, that he could easily get however much funding he wants in private or public markets to take a giant risky bet on something like geothermal energy.

But instead he got bored of doing useful things and lost himself in petty social media drama. Tragic.

[robertlagrant]

He's got solar things already. How many companies do you want one guy to run? The more stuff he does, it doesn't mean the stuff he doesn't do he's somehow to blame for.

[sanderjd]

I didn't blame him, I said that he's a tragic waste of potential at the moment.

If he were throwing himself into any of his impressive companies, sure, I'd be singing a different tune. But that's not what he's doing, he's either ignoring or actively sabotaging those, so that he has more time to be a social media influencer. He can do what he wants, but it's not admirable.

[imtringued]

He doesn't. His solar city acquisition was nothing but a bailout and solar city was gutted down to nothing. Tesla hardly does any solar installations except on their own factories.

[kolinko]

The issue is with the lack of good quality startups than with financing really. Long-term is not a big issue, because funds can exit before the startup’s exit through secondaries. Also some of the funds in this field are ok with long term investments.

(src: I tried setting up a climate tech venture builder / seedfund 2 years ago.)

[hoseja]

Kill public transportation? Kill? More like tries to build something upon its corpse.

[telotortium]

Elon Musk didn't kill public transportation - how could he have? the Boring Company has only drilled a few tunnels in Las Vegas.

[aredox]

https://daringfireball.net/linked/2022/11/30/boring-co-vapor...

[telotortium]

If unserious cities didn’t have Boring Company, they’d just choose another gadgetbahn.

[_aavaa_]

I don't think it's exactly a scaling issue, its that you can't turn the screws on your users and bill them monthly, siphon their data, and show them ads.

[baq]

one (1) good thing that may come out of OpenAI is thirst for electricity only satiable by fusion, just as demand for heat in UK could only be met by digging deeper for coal which ultimately spurred the industrial revolution.

[m463]

and coal mining (kind of) saved the forests and and drilling for oil (kind of) saved the whales.

[rbanffy]

Completely unintended side effect, but coal and oil might have created the need for massive rewilding efforts that might, ultimately not only save the forests, but winding cover back to pre-industrial levels.

[dylan604]

what a sad statement on the human condition that all of the other needs for limitless clean power did not meet the needs to justify developing fusion, yet you think that AI will? Jesus wept.

[baq]

yes. that's the game we're told to play, so might as well try to play it. there's literally truckloads of money in AI and the hyperscalers themselves point to power as a major issue for their datacenters, so why not try to allocate some of it to fusion?

[tivert]

> what a sad statement on the human condition that all of the other needs for limitless clean power did not meet the needs to justify developing fusion, yet you think that AI will? Jesus wept.

Well, AI has the promise to provide a supply of loyal slaves to anyone who can afford to pay for the electricity and compute. It's a capitalist's dream: with AI, they may never be forced by necessity to share a single thing with us poors again.

[robertlagrant]

You're thinking of anything but capitalism. Capitalism means you don't have to rely on powerful people sharing for you to have things. You get them because people can make money making the same product cheaper and sell it to a lot of people.

That's why all the capitalist countries are the ones where we have to keep increasing the standard of living that's counted as being in poverty. Up we go.

[tivert]

> You're thinking of anything but capitalism. Capitalism means you don't have to rely on powerful people sharing for you to have things.

No. Capitalism means you need to rely on being useful to the people who own things. If you're not useful to them, they won't pay ("share with") you.

For a capitalist, employees you have to pay <<< loyal robot slaves. Once you have those slaves, I predict the economy will make an abrupt shift away from consumer goods to vanity projects.

[robertlagrant]

People with things have to be useful to people who can do things as well. I work to get paid a salary; my employer pays me enough that I don't leave. The only exception to this is taxes, which don't require mutually agreed exchange.

[dylan604]

I hope that in your scenario that everyone that can afford this notion of yours receives a robot that at the minimum is as annoying as C3-P0 if not closer to a Jar Jar.

[hunter-gatherer]

That's a naive outlook. AI will do for humanity as much good as every other alleged redeeming technology has.

[dylan604]

Or worse. Personally, I think social media has been a net negative. It was done intentionally by their makers.

AI seems like it's just a victim of that, but seeing as how they have stolen all of the data they've built their tools on, then of course it's going to be no better than social media at best

[palata]

That's based on the (flawed, IMO) idea that fusion just needs more resources to go faster [1]. We won't have serious fusion before decades, it's just too late to save our energy (and climate) problem.

Better go with fission at this point (preferably 4th gen because uranium 235 is limited).

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month

[Retric]

Hydro, wind, and solar backed by batteries looks like an ~90% solution to grid power / ground transportation reasonably quickly and we have enough fission power plants to make up the difference.

So we already have the short term solution, it’s really 25+ years out when things get more interesting. Existing nuclear power is going to get increasingly expensive to maintain and recent construction projects have been boondoggles. So fusion has a real shot here assuming the economics work out.

Fission has gotten safer as we’ve learned from past mistakes, but each of those lessens directly results in increasing costs. Not just in obvious ways but getting better at foreign material exclusion means it takes longer to do the same tasks. Multiply that by every significant indecent at any power plant and it’s no wonder things keep getting more expensive.

[robertlagrant]

> So fusion has a real shot here assuming the economics work out.

They don't yet work out, and there's no evidence that they will. I would love it if they do, but I don't think past performance is evidence of future performance. We might run into a fundamental limitation at any moment, and that would be that.

Japan's median build time for fission is under 5 years[0]. If regulatory environments and engineering specialisms could be made to work, there's no reason (other than Greenpeace) that we couldn't massively curb CO2 production from power generation pretty soon; far sooner than we could do discovery and then build for fusion.

[0] https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/i/111356564/which-co...

[palata]

> Hydro, wind, and solar backed by batteries looks like an ~90% solution to grid power / ground transportation reasonably quickly

What? Currently, electricity makes for 20% of our global consumption. We're not remotely talking about replacing the 80% of fossil fuels with electricity, even with fission + hydro, wind and solar.

Batteries only work to store energy for a few days, not between seasons.

The reality is that we don't have a 90% solution to power. Not in the short term, not in the long term. Except if new technologies that do not exist yet appear. Have a look at all those huge boats that enable globalization: how do you propose we replace fossil fuels there? Or aviation.

The solution to the energy problem is to prepare to have (much) less energy. And a good way to prepare for that is to try to produce as much electricity as we can. And that quite obviously involves fission.

[Retric]

> What? Currently, electricity makes for 20% of our global consumption.

An apples to apples comparison gives very different numbers. A heat pump uses 1 kWh of heat to produce 3 kWh or more worth of heat. A furnace needs over 3 kWh worth of gas to produce just 3 kWh worth of heat.

An ICE engine is more extreme as extraction, transportation, refining, takes 1/3 of the energy in oil before you even out it in the gas tank. Net result under 20% of the energy in oil ends up being used at the end of the process.

> Batteries only work to store energy for a few days, not between seasons.

There’s no point in storing power between seasons, just add more generation. A seasonal battery storing 1 MWh gets used once a season. A solar panel only used in the winter is still useful for ~4h * ~90 days. But worst case a ~3kW of solar is equivalent to that 1 MWh battery at less than 1/100th the cost, and whisk generally redundant the rest of the year it’s still reducing outages.

[palata]

> An apples to apples comparison gives very different numbers.

I don't see the relation with apples. If you take electricity where it works well, then it works well. But the fact that it accounts for 20% of our energy consumption today means that it does not work well everywhere. Try planes or merchant boats, for fun.

And that's not even mentioning that on those 20%, a good part is coming from coal.

> There’s no point in storing power between seasons, just add more generation.

You're saying "just waste solar panels during the summer so that you have enough during the winter", right? I thought it was pretty clear that wasting energy was not a good idea for the future.

[nateglims]

I think the idea is more that the potential profit or the need for energy to prevent limiting this profitable venture will drive more capital into fusion projects. It's not clear that they will hit the man-month problem since it seems like there's dozens of fusion startups trying slightly different variants. Of course that doesn't mean it will solve the problem faster.

[palata]

> It's not clear that they will hit the man-month problem since it seems like there's dozens of fusion startups trying slightly different variants.

I read: "it's not clear that parallelization will not help, because they are parallelizing", which doesn't really make sense. Ok, it's not clear that parallelization will not help (just because it's hard to prove). But we have to acknowledge that fusion energy is not a new thing, and it's currently unsolved. So let's not bet our future on the hope that it will be solved in the next 10 years in such a revolutionary way that it will beat all our expectations by orders of magnitudes, shall we?

[nateglims]

The Man Month essay describes a breakdown in work throughput because of the exponential increase in communication channels and complexity of administration. Parallel startups do not communicate with each other. It appears from the outside that fusion does not have a known critical path to completion so increasing the number of bites at the apple seems like a logical way to scale attempting to solve it.

I agree we should not count on fusion (or wide spread carbon capture) to solve our problems and pretend we can continue as if there aren't any limits. Unfortunately unrealized miracle solutions are presented all the time to problems and since a lot of tech revolves around startup culture, our industry is prone to believing in them.

[zeristor]

Don’t forget about heat death.

More energy being used heats up the as atmosphere, it doesn’t simply just disappear.

[alxmng]

You might enjoy Sabine Hossenfelder's video exploring this "I recently learned that waste heat will boil the oceans in about 400 years": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vRtA7STvH4

It turns out we can probably solve this by building planetary chimneys 5km tall that move heat to the outer atmosphere.

[hollerith]

That is not what "heat death" means.

[JumpCrisscross]

> More energy being used heats up the as atmosphere

We’re nowhere close to this being a problem. (Our total energy production is dwarfed by the natural flux.)

[0x0203]

Since it seems like you've seen data pertaining to this, do you have any good/reputable sources? I've tried asking in various places about what percentage of planetary warming is due to direct heating from energy consumption, vs. greenhouse gas effects vs. natural causes, but usually just get accused of being a climate change denier and told to go educate myself. I'm really just curious about methodology, want to build a better mental model of how it works and how it's studied, and have never seen any discussions/papers talking about direct heating effects, so don't know where to start.

[JumpCrisscross]

> what percentage of planetary warming is due to direct heating from energy consumption, vs. greenhouse gas effects vs. natural causes

Humans produce 20 TW of power [1]. (15 if we remove solar, wind and hydro.) The Sun delivers, to the Earth, 44,000 TW [2].

So raising the amount of the Sun's energy the earth retains by 454 parts in a million (329 if we remove solar, wind and hydro) adds to the Earth the energy of our entire civilisation. That is why emissions are the problem. Not our direct heat production.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_supply_and_consum...

[2] https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/135642main_b...

[pfdietz]

More significantly, indirect heating from increased greenhouse gases is about 400 TW.

[kolinko]

It’s quite easy - we have numbers for humanity’s electricity and heat production. We also know how much atmosphere and oceans weigh, which we can multiply by specific heat of air and water. From this you can calculate how much we’ve heaten up the atmosphere/oceans - even ignoring the loss of heat to space/ground our impact is neglible.

Here is chatgpt doing the math - https://chatgpt.com/share/e/5d28257f-f51b-40e7-8742-75d75e2d... - it’s roughly correct.

[kolinko]

All the energy we ever produced and are likely to produce in the forseeable future has neglible impact on the atmosphere’s temperatures.

(Unlike co2 ofc)

Here is gpt doing estimates - the numbers are similar to the ones I calculated by hand some time ago: https://chatgpt.com/share/e/5d28257f-f51b-40e7-8742-75d75e2d...

[Beijinger]

Well, yes, kind of. But the Stefan–Boltzmann law has the temperature^4 means the earth should radiate it back into space. No?

[lmihaig]

Since the 70s our society gradually started putting more interest in producing useless things "for profit" or providing inane services instead of actually improving quality of life.

Imo it's a big reason for the productivity paradox

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox

The resources now go to "cheap plastic thing made in China but assembled in the USA" or "it's like Airbnb but for cat grooming" which don't fucking improve anyone's lives but make money.

[rbanffy]

This is a nasty side effect of capitalism - it's misaligned with the best interests of society and, sometimes, completely opposite to it. Where all you measure is capital flows, you are not serving the humans.

[m463]

what if the amazing mathematicians / physicists / statisticians that are sucked into wall street worked on fusion...

[bluGill]

Is that like trying to make a baby in 9 months by using more women?

[rqtwteye]

That’s not an apt analogy. Right now we are trying to make a baby with less than one woman

[navane]

How about trying to deliver any baby, using more women, and you don't know which one are infertile

[pfdietz]

Sounds like a winning plan, except what are the extra women for?

[s1artibartfast]

Maybe it is like trying to make more babies using more women, which absolutely works.

[jncfhnb]

9 women can produces babies 9x faster than one woman can

[fragmede]

Not really. The mythical man month fallacy of 9 women making a baby in 1 month is about rushing a specific project, and having the coordination between the individuals make it take longer. For something way bigger, like the whole field of nuclear fusion, as opposed to shipping an app next quarter, more people means more work can happen. Having more smart people work on fusion instead of HFT (eg Jim Simons), would lead to progress and advancement in the field, compared to not.

[kjkjadksj]

The issue is we have no mechanism for the sort of support this work needs, short of parallel development with military needs.

[defrost]

Say what now?

It's a gyrotron variation that requires tweaking to be useful in vertical and horizontal boring, currently supported with ~ $100 million raised from investors.

Ongoing development might well require that annually for ten years or so. It can likely kick along fine with that amount every four or five years.

This is easily within the envelop of currently ongoing development in both the energy and mineral resources exploration and aquisition domains.

When I worked tracking mineral resource development we looked at any and all mineral prospecting lease aquisitions and ownership changes globally, but for development we ruled out any intial prospectus for under $50 million as "too small to be of interest".

And that was just mineral exploration, O&G is where the big money plays.

Current drilling costs within Oil and Gas (and geothermal, a small but growing field) are huge, any work that can bring those costs down will be pursued and supported as long as some small glimmer of light shines ahead.

Eg: for a small example you could look to the R&D work being put in to reduce drill costs by 50% here:

https://www.power-eng.com/renewables/fervo-energy-claims-70-...

    Fervo says it drilled its fastest Cape well in just 21 days, a 70% reduction in drilling time from Fervo’s first horizontal well drilled at Project Red in 2022.

    Fervo says the increase in efficiency has resulted in cost reductions, with drilling costs across the first four horizontal wells at Cape falling from $9.4 million to $4.8 million per well.

[mateus1]

I mean, we’d probably be living like the Jetsons if the US routed 20% of the defense spend to STEM.

[colonCapitalDee]

We spend about 3.5% of GDP on defense [1], and coincidentally about 3.5% on R&D [2]. People tend to wildly overestimate how large the modern US defense budget is. It's only around 13% of federal spending [3]!

[1] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/MS.MIL.XPND.GD.ZS?locat... [2] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/GB.XPD.RSDV.GD.ZS?locat... [3] https://federalbudgetinpictures.com/where-does-all-the-money...

[itishappy]

National Defense: 13.9%

R&D: ???

https://www.usaspending.gov/explorer/budget_function

Defense: $813 billion

https://comptroller.defense.gov/Portals/45/Documents/defbudg...

R&D: $205 billion

https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/ap_18_...

I'm clearly missing something. I assume some of that Defense budget is R&D?

[okdood64]

We’d probably be living like the Jetsons if the Middle East was stable, China wasn't so aggressive in the South China Sea, and Russia didn't have some illusion of being able to restore the Soviet Union.

[DrNosferatu]

We’d probably be living like the Jetsons if we would make a serious attempt to curb (effective) tax evasion and profit offshoring to reduce inequality.

(ie: make returns on labor converge to - or at least track - returns on capital)

[airstrike]

> curb (effective) tax evasion and profit offshoring to reduce inequality.

that assumes cooperation on a global scale between competing tax jurisdictions, which in my book is infinitely harder to achieve than net power via fusion

[DrNosferatu]

Nevertheless, this was a good first step:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/07/03/global-mi...

Maybe next time they actually make it work?

[DrNosferatu]

Either the US or the EU could do it: which global company can afford to not do business in any of these economic blocks?

But the way the EU handled the COVID vaccine procurement, I think we’re still a long way.

[southernplaces7]

This is laughable, an ideological trope with little bearing on reality. Governments spend and also waste far more money than is not only hidden from tax obligations but also more money than is also collected through tax receipts of all kinds (all that sweet, sweet deficit spending at work). And they do indeed waste vast amounts of it, on military plans, boondoggles that go nowhere, bullshit drug wars, bloated bureaucracies that perpetuate themselves to never solve the problems behind their original purpose and so forth, but the blame for no Jetsons future is really with people hiding a fraction outside what's already taxed and keeping it from more of that same public spending waste?

If governments wanted to spend on long-term tech and energy investments, they most definitely could find the funds to do so from among their existing budgets. These budgets are in many cases at record levels anyhow. However they don't because, well, see wasteful spending causes listed above, none of which go away since they benefit so many entrenched institutional interests...

Money hidden by tax evasion is in any case not dead capital. It gets moved around, invested, reinvested, and through different means, channeled to the kinds of things that legitimate investments funds and VCs also spend their money on (presumably as a good thing, since you're not also blaming them for no Jetsons future).

[imtringued]

Money hidden by tax evasion is the deadest of all money. It literally doesn't get moved around, invested or reinvested, because that would trigger taxable events and get the IRS after your ass.

[southernplaces7]

You're flatly wrong and should read more about how tax evasion works. I assure you that if someone manages to skim an extra X millions of dollars away from the tax man, they certainly won't let it sit dead and being eaten by inflation after that effort and expense. They might as well have simply paid taxes on it otherwise.

Through an assortment of vehicles and mechanisms, that money does indeed get shifted, moved and invested in all sorts of sophisticated and fully diverse ways, just like assets that were legitimately declared. I mean, what do you think they keep it in? Giant vaults as stacks of cash, like Scrooge McDuck? Absurd, the kinds of childish ideas about tax evasion that appear here.

[DrNosferatu]

Ah, where do I begin? Southernplaces7, your argument reads like the greatest hits of neoliberal thought circa 1980. Sure, governments can be wasteful—cue the obligatory mention of military overspending and bureaucratic bloat—but that doesn’t negate the crux of my point: tax evasion and profit offshoring are significant drags on economic equality.

You suggest that hidden capital is always put to good use. But let’s be real, the majority of it ends up in the average urban Joe's much beloved real estate speculation, yachts, and financial instruments that do little to spur genuine economic growth or innovation. It’s like hiding your vegetables under the mashed potatoes and claiming you’ve eaten them. It’s still there, but it’s not nourishing anyone. Or, while it's lovely to think that the hidden wealth of the ultra-rich is busily working away like Santa's elves to create a better future, the reality is starkly different.

And about that Jetsons future: it’s not about just having the funds. It’s about allocating them efficiently and equitably. When capital returns far outstrip labor returns because the wealthy can hide their money and avoid taxes, we create an unbalanced system where innovation and societal progress are stunted. It’s not just about waste, it’s about skewed incentives.

Effective tax policy isn’t about bleeding the rich dry; it’s about ensuring that those who benefit the most from the system contribute proportionately to its upkeep and progress. And governments aren’t perfect, but they’re the only game in town for large-scale investments in public goods—think infrastructure, education, healthcare, and yes, tech innovation and green transition. So, before we go all in on the "government waste" narrative, let’s remember that the (current) alternative is a plutocracy where the rich get richer and the rest of us get crumbs. No Jetsons future in that, rather much more like the Flintstones.

[southernplaces7]

Your arguments completely miss my main point. Before I get to it briefly, bear in mind that i'm not opposed to tax collection or government spending on public works, social services and etc. I generally, with certain conditions, reservations and strong criticisms do support the modern liberal social democratic state as something close to the pinnacle of socioeconomic development so far.

On the other hand using the word "neoliberal" reveals little more than a cheap, all too human love of simplistic, idiotic ideological labels with little substance. Go ahead and define whatever the hell a neoliberal is. Name a few examples and exactly how their administrations were in any marked way different from any other modern western state. Here's a hint of the silliness inherent in that, via example: Under the Bush years, the fundamental structure of government and its obligatory spending was little different from how it was under any number of leaders previous to or following that time. Let's look beyond cheap labels and at the actual structure of how governments, markets, taxes and social systems work.

As for my main point: It's simply this (and related to what I just mentioned above) in the modern world, speaking particularly in the context of the developed countries, government budgets and tax receipts from economic activity are so enormous as they stand that losses from tax evasion are far more of a boogeyman than a reality as a meaningful hindrance to resources. The average budget of the average western developed country has so many avenues for allocating funds that using lost tax revenue from evasion as an excuse for why it doesn't do so for a better future is absurd.

The numbers simply don't back it up. To take the U.S. as an example, it's estimated that losses due to illegal tax dodging were something over 600 billion in 2021. Those are losses to both state and federal tax revenues. In the same year, the federal budget alone was over 6.8 trillion. If you add in state budgets, the number gets an extra 3.8 trillion added to it. That makes the total over 10 trillion in government spending. 680 billion is a lot, no doubt, but as an excuse for why government "doesn't have enough money" for better things, it's a pallid excuse.

[bluGill]

A significant portion of the defense spend is STEM. It takes a lot of engineering to build a bomb. It takes a lot of math to create/break encryption....

[mateus1]

That’s precisely the point. We’re using the science budget for bombs instead of helping people.

[kolinko]

Bombs help protect people from countries like Russia

[adhamsalama]

They also helped in killing hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians in Iraq.

[kolinko]

Sure, the point was that it’s not black and white.

[Retric]

That just makes things worse. Imagine if most people working on nuclear reactors in the navy instead spent the time building and maintaining civilian equipment. The kind of people designing and building the F-22 etc where capable of more long term useful activities etc.

The US could be safe spending 1% of its GDP on defense and largely importing foreign weapon system designs for local manufacturing. There’s clearly a lower limit, but half of current spending is perfectly reasonable starting point before decisions get tricky.

[aeonik]

A lot of the tech is at least dual use though. Think of imaging stuff: like DSP, radar, phased arrays, cameras and the like.

(I wish Thermal and Night Vision was cheaper)

I was just looking it up the other day and the first wireless time system was implemented by US and French defensive systems.

GPS, the Internet, etc... DARPA projects alone are impressive. https://wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA#Projects

I do miss those private research groups like Bell Labs and Xerox PARC though.

NASA does a lot of good work too, and there are some really cool space projects there that need more funding.

[Retric]

Is there really that much overlap or are the budgets just so insanely high you end up with accidental overlap? Seat belts are a perfect example where the military and non military application was quite different on day one. But, military had the budget so John Stapp made the argument around how many pilots died driving in their civilian lives. Definitely a huge public benefit, but from what amounted to military funding of civilian research.

Packet switching saw first implementation outside the US including some key ideas like a router. We ended up with the ARPANET > Internet story everyone is familiar with more as an accident of history and a dash of propaganda rather than something that required US military participation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NPL_network

Teflon is another one people bring up as coming from the military but was invented accidentally outside the military long before its use in the Manhattan Project.

[kortex]

> largely importing foreign weapon system designs for local manufacturing.

I'm pretty sure they legally can't "largely import foreign weapon designs". The Berry and Kissel amendments, not to mention ITAR and a few other regulations, put a strong incentive on in-sourcing when at all possible. The only exceptions are for things that are really hard to get domestically.

[Retric]

The people setting budgets are the same people creating laws. So, it’s not actually an issue.

I can’t tell if you’re unsure of basic civics, or if you’re implying something deeper.

[bluGill]

The people writting the laws also know the people designing weapon vote.

[kolinko]

Which foreign systems? If US would’ve withdrew from cold war, half of Europe would be learning cyrylic now, and there would be few countries to import tech from. Not to mention engineers from the eastern block working for the opposite side.

[Retric]

The USSR broke up 32 years ago and was impotent well before then. So any argument from the Cold War is really outdated.

[rbanffy]

OTOH, if the Soviets had won the Cold War, Americans would have free universal healthcare.

[Sevastopol]

> importing foreign weapon system designs for local manufacturing

You need to have local know-how from the ground up.

[yieldcrv]

I live in penthouse in LA Abe shuttle to other rooftops, one glance down at the sidewalk level and it kind of feels like the jetsons

at least the retcon sketches where they showed what the ground level was like

[dylan604]

This premise means that the extra dollars would be spent in a way that would justify your comment. Schools in Texas, Florida, et al would probably just replace those liberal texts with much more censored versions. They'd probably find a way to build bigger football stadiums or those other sportsball programs. New uniforms and things too. Then it'd probably pay for perks for principles and sporting directors, but sadly, there wouldn't be enough to increase the base pay of actual teachers. I'm sure there's other ways to spend that money and not a bit of it improves our advance towards the Jetsons' world.

[rcpt]

Not in my backyard you wouldn't. Those Jetson towers block my view.

[zeristor]

Probably not, this assumes that that 20% is efficiently spent.