From the article:<p><i>“Y Combinator, the San Francisco start-up incubator that launched Airbnb, Reddit, Stripe and Coinbase, is backing a weapons company for the first time, entering a sector it has previously shunned.</i><p><i>“Ares Industries, which launched last week, has pitched its “low-cost cruise missiles” as suited for use in a potential war between the US and China in the Taiwan Strait. The start-up claims that US weapons stockpiles would be exhausted within weeks in such a conflict, and that “recent conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine have shown that our weapons are too large, too expensive for the wars of today”.</i><p><i>”Ares’ founders, Alex Tseng and Devan Plantamura, say their $300,000 anti-ship cruise missiles “will be 10x smaller and 10x cheaper” than today’s alternatives. On the YC website, Tseng’s biography consists of a single sentence: “Missiles are cool.”</i><p>Yeah… a couple million people in Ukraine, Israel, Gaza and elsewhere might have different feelings about the inherent coolness of missiles.<p>Is it inevitable that the startup heroes of twenty years ago become absorbed into the worst aspects of the old system? The creator of Mosaic and Netscape is now a crypto-peddling Trump supporter, and Paul Graham’s YC is part of the military-industrial complex.