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Comment by cjf4 | Hacker News Reader

This article had one interesting idea: the role of government funding in innovation. But rather than explore and flesh it out, it settled for a series of overgeneralized and unsubstantiated polemics against capitalism, akin to a sophomore political science student who's just finished the manifesto for the first time.

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that's fairly common for Guardian opinion pieces these days. They used to be a great source for investigative journalism (and I'm sure they still have some great journalists on the payroll) but in the last couple years they've definitely been sliding further and further into far-left political opinion pieces.

I think that was fleshed out, but yeah, the article doesn't even need the word capitalist in it. ("capitalist firms" - as opposed to what?)

Isn't military spending a type of government funding of innovation?

limited in scope and application.

In the book Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari makes a pretty strong argument that military spending has a very broad impact.

It always blows my mind that all of the Lambda-the-Ultimate papers were sponsored the Office of Naval Research.

It is, but I am ethically bound to not work on any project that has military funding. In general, engineers and software developers need to make better ethical choices.

How much flexibility do you give yourself?

For example, if a project uses a GPS receiver or GPS data, is that ok?

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