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Comment by ajross | Hacker News Reader

> SV as a whole is substantially a creation of military spending.

That's true, but not really in the general way you argue. Military spending on bay area R&D has been more or less insignificant for the entirety of the internet era. It exists, sure, but it's not driving meaningful revenue for any of the big players. Silicon Valley since the mid 90's has been a consumer thing only.

And even in the genesis of the valley, it was just one serendipitous application (missile guidance systems, which were willing to pay huge sums for early transistors which were literally 100x lighter than vacuum tubes).

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> Military spending on bay area R&D has been more or less insignificant for the entirety of the internet era.

This is ridiculously false. SV receives billions of dollars from the Pentagon, the CIA, and a variety of other government agencies annually. Here is just one example:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-09/peter-thi...

And that's just direct grants. The bigger role is, DARPA nurtures core tech in its earliest stages when commercial viability is still a decade or more off. The "big players in SV" are picking the fruit and bringing it to market, often for nominal technology transfer fees if any. It's like passing the baton from taxpayers to VCs -- but guess who keeps most of the profit.

You're having a Dr. Evil moment. "Billions of dollars" doesn't go very far in this context. Apple Computer's revenue alone was two orders of magnitude higher than that. Military spending is noise relative to consumer revenue in the valley.

Sorry, you just aren't informed on the matter. Not only does the military, CIA and other agencies pour billions in R&D development to SV, the CIA has run a hedge fund for almost 20 years that has significant ownership in hundreds of SV companies.

Here is a list of 219 tech companies owned in whole or part by the CIA hedge fund (just the ones they let us know about):

https://www.iqt.org/portfolio/

Here is their logo, which speaks for itself:

https://www.iqt.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/About-venn-di...

The CIA hedge fund and billions in R&D money are in addition to an unknown portion of the "black budget" controlled by various spy agencies, which is over $80 billion dollars this year.

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/feb/28/trump-admin...

The truth is that the tech industry is brimming with money from the military and spy agencies - and this is just what we know about.

Agreed. Thanks for sharing links. There's also an assumption that military necessarily equals evil. Do you think everyone who works for the NSA is out to curb our civil rights? It's not possible. And in fact, it's what a lot of people who work for the government or military believe in protecting.

There's a debate to be had over the "good" or "evil" that results in government/intelligence/military involvement in tech companies. In order to have a reasoned debate, people have to be aware of the facts. As evidenced in this thread (and elsewhere), many people are unaware of just how entwined our sprawling government and tax-payer funded quasi-government agencies are with "private" tech companies and others in SV.

I agree with you.

Except I have found this thread to be very novel, thought provoking, and seemingly well informed.

Palantir is just a minuscule part of SV ecosystem, entirely insignificant in the overall picture.

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