None of the Tech in Your iPhone Would Exist Without Socialism

[Scuba]

http://usuncut.com/class-war/apple-exists-due-to-government-research/

Here’s How All the Technology in the iPhone Was Created by Socialism, NOT Capitalism

What the trolls on the #ResistCapitalism hashtag probably don’t realize is that all of the smart technology that goes into iPhones is a creation of socialism. And everything that Apple sells to make obscene profits (which are taxed at ridiculously low rates thanks to Apple’s cunningly evil accounting practices) was made possible by government-funded research. Even Google’s algorithm was created with funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF).

Aside from all of that, Apple as a corporation may not even exist as it does today were it not for government loans to startup businesses. The Harvard Business Review pointed out how Apple was a direct beneficiary of socialism in its earliest stages:

(Apple) also received its early stage finance from the U.S. government’s Small Business Investment Company program. Venture capitalists entered only after government funding had gotten the company to the critical proof of concept.

None of the major components in the iPhone would have been possible without scientific breakthroughs garnered from publicly-funded research. Here are a few examples outlined in economist Mariana Mazzucato’s book, The Entreprenurial State:

1. Hard drives: The Department of Energy (DoE), the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and the Department of Defense (DoD) built upon research already conducted by France and Germany to make hard drives, which silicon valley corporations then used to make profits.

Other examples include lithium-ion batteries, GPS and LCD's.

[underthematrix]

1. Most technology starts out as a military application but I'm not sure

how this relates to socialism when most of these applications start out as private sector subcontracts with DoD or the other agencies you mentioned. In other words, these are private companies doing business with federal agencies or departments.

[Scuba]

2. The manner in which they are funded is what makes them socialist.

[rjsquirrel]

5. In a technical sense maybe

But that funding is the passed on to private contractors which makes it state run crony capitalism, or what used to be called Communism.

[Scuba]

7. You don't seem to understand either.

[daleanime]

10. I think it's a case....

of don't want to understand. Which is getting to be fairly common.

[rjsquirrel]

11. Lol

Ok professor

[SCantiGOP]

29. OP is very convoluted

Since all new inventions are protected by a government-run Patent Office they are all...
....products of socialism??
Poster is trying to make a point and forces the facts where they don't really want to go.

[underthematrix]

8. Hmm subcontracts are not like grants

They're more like a vendor doing business with the government. The government does't have any control over their business. It only has control over the scope of work being purchased by the government. It's more of a private-public partnership. Social Security is a government program started by the government. It definitely falls within the meaning of socialist programs. we pay something in and when we have enough points we can start reaping the benefits of that participation. Medicare is a socialist program for the elderly and is income based. Wealthier people pay more. Poor people pay less.

[Igel]

20. The Ottoman empire was socialist.

Peter I of Russia was socialist.

Charlemagne was socialist.

The Catholic Church was and is socialist.

The Babylonian and Assyrian empires were socialist.


All the theocracries, feudal empires, monarchies, etc., were all socialist.

Rather makes the term "socialist" mean nothing more than "something or somebody organized people to pay for collective funding of some activity, whether voluntary or forced, with collective ownership or not." It confuses a means with an ideology.

By that token, the Robber Barons were socialist because they collected a lot of money from individuals in order to build large-scale activities.

Yes, I've just said that all capitalism--the accumulation of capital for investment and profits--is socialism.

It's rather a more dunderheaded approach to the topic than most of my (R) relatives can muster on a day after their crania have collected more dunder than usual.

[inquiring mind]

22. Disingenuous

The accumulation of capital from private investors, who then share in any profits, is a very different animal than the accumulation of capital from taxes, and then passed on to private business. The source of the bulk of that capital, taxpayers, receive no profits, and very little in earnings.

[GummyBearz]

12. 100% correct. You beat me to posting the samething. ARPANET was a military project

funded by ARPA, the predecessor of DARPA, in order to connect missile silos together I believe in the case of a nuclear attack taking out a key location. It later became the world wide web as we know it. And yes it was all built by private industry, initially funded by the government. So is that socialism, capitalism, or a mixture? Debate away...


edit: to add, this is something I bring up once in a while as an amazing example of how military funding for R&D has led to making the world a better place. There are other examples, but none as profound as connecting the world together electronically

[underthematrix]

15. If socialism means public ownership of the means of production then private companies who sell

their services to the gov't are operating under a capitalist model

[GummyBearz]

16. Yes it does

I personally think of it as a mixture. There is no way private industry would risk the cost to take on a huge R&D project that may or may not pay off... they need some government (ie. tax dollar) funding to make it feasible... so I think of it as a mixture of socialism and capitalism

[underthematrix]

18. Vendor services mean the gov't pays as they go

There's a scope of work, with targets and costs and both the seller and buyer of services must meet their targets, the gov't in terms of feedback and payment and the company in terms of goods and services. Contracts are extremely competitive, especially the big ones. Companies have to demonstrate they have the capacity to meet and/or exceed the triple constraints - can they manage the scope of work in the time required at the proposed costs? There are always problems and some of them have been deadly like the Challenger disaster.

BTW, I think this is an interesting issue because the company owns the technology they create but not the technology developed for the gov't.

[GummyBearz]

19. Pretty much

I've worked on multiple DARPA programs and that is how it goes. And to me it seems like a mixture of socialism and capitalism

[CommonSenseDemocrat]

26. Sounds like the military industrial complex

[Guy Whitey Corngood]

3. K&R. nt

[enid602]

27. Mafalda

Mafalda

[Tanuki]

4. And what if young Jobs and Wozniak had never met at their local, publicly funded school...n/t

[rjsquirrel]

6. They might have learned

to spell gud!

Lol.

[pintobean]

9. I don't have an iPhone

Most people don't.

[ronnie624]

13. You use computers,

the internet, touchscreens, LED and all of the other associated technologies developed with public funding.

[pintobean]

14. Yeah. All electronics manufacturers use that technology

not just Apple.

[meaculpa2011]

17. So... Volkswagen is a socialist company because it...

was originally conceived and funded by a government?

I don't get it.

[Igel]

21. ARPANET is not the Internet. It's one of the ancestors.

Not the ancestor.

Network technology was being created in private enterprise and by schools public and private. ARPANET resulted from grants given that leveraged already on-going research.

Network technology continued to be innovated by those groups. There were a not of networks that got set up with different protocols, different ways of transferring information and communicating.

Some people started to work on protocols to let the private, university, and military networks all talk together and share information. This produced a variety of linked networks and finally the protocol that was adopted for allowing inter-network communication and data sharing. Some of the people were in private business, some academics and grad students used state or private grant money, some used federal money; some were in the military, some not. Think of this as a movement. Collective, to be sure; collectivist, not hardly.

Finally some wonks at CERN produced the adopted hypertext transfer protocol (not by themselves, of course, but building on a lot of proposals and suggestions that came along before). Why? Because they had a lot of data and information to be shared between academic and military folk.

CERN, of course, is the home of many a particle collider, and they produce a lot of data. I guess we could say that the real driving force of the Internet was particle physics.

This is the kind of thinking that drives people to claim that a single innovation technology that's been improving for a century (and improved since that one improvement) was invented by that one innovator and simply wouldn't exist without it. It's a parody of thinking and causes people to laugh at the claim. It's so simplistic that "simplistic" fails to convey most of the ridicule to be heaped upon it.

[Rex]

23. But Scuba! Socialism is a scary word that my daddy said would lead to gonorrhea or pot!

And since I am incapable of independent thought, I will have to consider this thread to be nothing more than Commie propaganda! Because socialism and stuff and other words I pee my underroos over!

[CommonSenseDemocrat]

25. Spending 10% of our GDP on military, then giving away the technology to corporations is shameful

[enid602]

28. socialist?

Then why didn't they originate in Denmark? Or better yet, Venezuela?