Who invented the iPhone?
The U.S. federal government did – according to U.S. House of Representatives Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi is statements that echoed Barack Obama’s 2012 comments, “If you’ve got a business. you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.”
“‘Anybody here have a smartphone?’ Pelosi asked an audience at a Democratic National Convention Platform hearing in Washington, D.C.,” Aaron Kliegman reports for The Washington Free Beacon. “Pelosi then held up an iPhone for everyone to see, telling those in the room, ‘In this smartphone, almost everything came from federal investments in research.'”
“She then listed elements of the iPhone that various parts of the government have contributed to in certain ways,” Kliegman reports. “‘The list goes on and on. If you want to learn more, look at the Association for the Advancement of Science in America, and they have the full list,’ Pelosi said. ‘They say Steve Jobs did a good idea designing it and putting it together. Federal research invented it.'”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Lay off the peyote, Nance.
Okay – lets play her game.
If the Federal Government Invented the iPhone with its research – then the government should embrace it more.
Furthermore, the government should invest in hiring someone like Steve Jobs to run the business side of government – then perhaps the US would not be so freakin’ in debt.
Wake-up jet-lag brains… same bs as xerox inventing everything – yet didn’t have to balls or energy to see a great thing put on the market.
Pelosi is a politician, so grandstanding is par for the course. Term limits are the obvious solution. It’s ridiculous that she hasn’t been thrown in the same cell as corrupt McConnell long ago.
Nevertheless, US technology grants and development money — most funneled through the most accomplished universitiy system on the planet — have made the difference between the USA being a military & economic superpower versus other less socialist nations being also-ran backwaters. So while the extreme right wing political operatives whine about government assistance for ANYTHING in public, it is usually true that they line up to the pig trough right next to equally corrupt democrats whenever there’s a chance for getting hands on government money.
1. you have no idea how much the feds embrace any technology. the iPhone is actually a relatively dumbed-down consumer product compared to the specialized equipment that many organizations — both government and private — use.
2. Why? Apple doesn’t have the level of technology nor product offerings that most branches of the military have. Do you think the military uses MacBooks on deployment? Of course not. Compare a Panasonic Toughbook to any MacBook and you might have a clue to the difference in reliability and environmental requirements that professionals — and that includes the military of you big bad government – need to do their jobs. Boeing makes the phones for the government, not Apple, and for good reasons. Military contractors have written orders of magnitude more code than Apple, Microsoft, and Google combined. Maybe it’s time they received respect for their excellent work.
3. The purpose of a democratic government is NEVER to make money. Show me a government sitting on cash and I will show you a corrupt semi-dictatorial regime or communist experiment. Democratic republics cannot run surpluses for any extended period of time because if they did, the TEA party would be crying bloody murder. The anti-tax groups are already demanding that taxes be reduced to starve government, not realizing of course that it only baloons the deficit. You gotta cut spending before you cut taxes. Reagan proved that, twice. Repubs still haven’t learned.
4. All the stuff that anti-government groups claim is waste is claimed by another group to be essential for one reason or another. You can’t build a bridge in any part of the USA without somebody whining that their bridge needs are more important and that whatever government monies were used must have been totally wasted.
5. Economists worth listening to are wise enough to point out that a dollar spent is a dollar that circulates around the economy. It doesn’t matter if its the government or business or private citizens, what matters is that the money circulates. Money is fertilizer. What is bad today is that corporations hoard wealth. Small business and citizens haven’t got deep enough pockets to hoard wealth, so in their hands, the multiplier effect is strong. Corps forgot that long ago when Henry Ford died. The Feds PER THEIR MISSION STATEMENT have to ensure liquidity in order to keep the economy healthy per modern measures. will every time go into debt to buoy the economy when corporations refuse to spend money. The American people demand it to be so.
6. Despite all the perceived problems with the inefficient bad evil federal government, the USA remains the best place in the world to do business. You will not see Us companies rushing to move their headquarters to China or India or Africa — those are places of far greater waste, corruption, and graft. You will see a few transcontinental mergers, but those are NOT for tax reasons. Those are strategic industry consolidation moves.
Not that anyone here would understand the complexities of national policies or international economic trends.
Oh, and one final thought: do you think that congress is any worse than the average American at managing money? Look up the relative amounts of public versus private debt if you want to learn how bad off Americans themselves are. Until Americans get fiscal discipline, it’s hard to believe they will demand it from their representatives. After all, the most popular republican-in-name-only right now has zero fiscal plans other than to blow unspecified amounts of money on the Great Wall of Mexico, lots of money on military adventures apparently intended to make people feel great again, all while slashing taxes on the top 0.10% of wage earners. These aren’t my empty assertions, these come directly from the mouth of the populist blowhard himself.
Term limits and better education are desperately needed NOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I’m noticing several posts from people I’ve never noticed posting before and they seem to fall into two groups; those agreeing with Pelosi and those saying how intelligent such posts are.
Anyone else smell anything funny?
So, if I understand this correctly, there is no concept of “property”, intellectual or otherwise, in the US. All your inventions belong to US because federal (tax) sponsored research produced some component or other.
And by the way, since electricity production and/or distribution can be traced back to some federal project, any invention that uses electricity is not entirely yours either.
I don’t think even the communists of old had this much imagination in defining the reach of government ownership over everything and everyone.
I worked at UCLA for 13 years. In that time, the research we did was funded mainly by the NSF. And same goes for most research, unless it medical, and that often gets private (pharma) money.
If not for that money, many fo the things we use today indeed may not exist – at least not in the advanced state we currently enjoy.
I have Polosi as much as anyone can, but in this case, she is correct, even if it was unintentional…
F*ck, let me edit my crappy mistakes. This forum software blows MDN.
yeah, it needs an edit option.
I’d like to edit your option, Botty. Know what I mean?
(Meet me in back of the RNC at midnight. I’ll be the the one with guns cocked).
Melvin, shut-up, you püssy.
If the federal government “invented” the iPhone, then why did they want Apple to unlock its security for them?
Okay, after her blanket statement, she apparently presented a big list of specific items. So, is there anything on that list that is . . . specifically . . . wrong?
It is always good to get another source. Don’t trust what you read on the Internets, after all.
OK, so both Business Insider and Bloomberg agree with her. Here’s the latter:
“The picture is similar throughout the economy. Of the roughly 100 most important innovations from 1971 to 2006, as identified by R&D Magazine, almost 90 percent depended heavily on federal research support…”
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2013-06-19/who-created-the-iphone-apple-or-the-government-
Okay here’s the final analysis of the story, why it is wrong and why it bugs everyone. (not that anyone is going to read it at this late date)
Nancy’s statement that the government invented XYZ is false.
The government doesn’t invent anything, they DO provide money to partially fund other people to put in the hard work and invent stuff.
This is the kind of reverse logic that sounds right but is just wrong. It’s like saying to a cop he works for you because your taxes pay his salary. Governments do not invent anything. People do. And people build on what was learned and invented by people before them. Learning and invented has been going on long before governments. Governments are just consumers of things made by people and companies. Nancy’s logic fails when put in other contexts. It like saying your masterpiece wasn’t created by you because the paint and canvas was purchased. Or LeBron is not really a great athlete because he didn’t invent the game of basketball and Chinese factory workers made ball.
I wonder if Cook is realizing why Jobs stayed the fuck away from all of these braindead schmucks yet?