[jmuguy]

And yet the grant writing process continues, as the perfect shouldn't be the enemy of the good. I'm glad someone at the DoD thought that ARPANET was a good idea to research so that 60 years later we can argue online about whether the govt is just giving out tax payer money to whoever for any reason.

[throwawaymaths]

what a tired old argument. you dont know what would have happened if DARPA did not fund ARPANET. we might have had something better. we don't live with access to reasonable counterfactuals.

[const_cast]

Au contraire, this is a tired armchair reasoning argument.

We don't know what could've happened, but we do know what did happen. It's like those people that say that the New Deal was bad, actually, and if we did nothing that would be the same or better!

Right... but no. Because the New Deal did pull us out of the depression. It's one of the most potent and effective pieces of policy in American History. We can play armchair economist all day. But we have to face what we know worked and think about why it worked.