> This isn’t true. They literally do this all the time. They just need funding. This is also true for biotech.

Thus the sentence I immediately followed the one this was made in response to where I said "They tend to die in that time if they have no funding."

> Right. So they raise funding.

In many, many cases when it comes to the DoD, their wants aren't seen as dual-purpose and start-ups struggle to find funding that isn't from some DoD-aligned and defense-focused investment firm - which haven't historically invested in large numbers of startups. At least not when I last checked several years ago.

And just to get ahead of this - a DoD want not being seen as dual purpose and the tech later being used for a dual purpose are two very different things.

> Your argument boils down to “the DoD won’t work with startups that don’t have funding,” which is both true and, frankly, as it should be, in my opinion.

My argument is that DoD contract law is poorly suited for funding meaningful sums of money to start-ups that do not have significant non-DoD sources of funding. I'm to understand relatively small sums of money can be awarded on a short time scale, but those sums of money are tiny compared to what's needed to execute on most contracts.

I don't need a 13 page pamphlet to convince me that people are motivated by making money. But that's orthogonal to wanting a powerful military under whose umbrella you are pontificating.

From this article, it does sound like it’s a newer development:

> Goals for Hacking for Defense

> A decade ago, our goal for the class was to teach students Lean Innovation methods while they engaged in national public service. We wanted to familiarize students with the military as a profession and help them better understand its expertise, and its role in society. We also hoped the class would show our sponsors a methodology that builds problem understanding before writing requirements.

> The class still does all this, but now that the DoW is buying from startups and defense venture capital is abundant, the class has turned into a national security incubator. Most of our teams form defense companies.

Every tech company that can is selling war machines to the DoW because that's where most of the country's money is - that and stock markets.

That’s literally the whole point of the course if you read the original intent of the course it was to change the acquisitions approach of Silicon Valley to match or influence the way the Department of defense does acquisitions and they’ve been extremely successful in capturing the Department of defense as you can see

What a thing invented (or at least large parts) by DARPA. An agency of the United States Department of Defense.

You expect that the whole point of something there not to boost the US military?

No... that sounds an awful lot like revisionist history trying to force a utopian ideal where none exists. If anything, the advent of the Internet and social media in particular has made us more tribal, not less.

The majority of the Internet is geared towards feeding the hedonistic treadmill of porn, cat pictures, selling things, influencer chasing, faking happiness on Instagram and trolling political sides on X or Blue sky.

We aren't better people as a result.

If you think suicidal fanatics or megalomaniacal dictators are motivated by sub-optimal resource allocation, you haven't been paying attention.

I don't see how we could remove states and boundaries and warfare. Boundaries aren't bad things, they're a natural consequence of living in a natural world