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> Part of it is the increased complexity of app development. Part of it is the walled gardens of our suppliers. And our current culture contributes to both of

by scroot 7y ago

> Part of it is the increased complexity of app development. Part of it is the walled gardens of our suppliers. And our current culture contributes to both of these issues. We got the kind of computing that fits that culture, which is one that emphasizes profit making over other types of activity, and one soaked through with short term thinking. We need well funded basic research (to create computing media systems in the spirit of hypercard et al) and companies willing to push malleable computing systems out to their customers. Hypercard was extremely popular in its day, and Apple let it die on the vine. It's because they didn't know what to do with it -- the culture had become about shrinkwrapped solutions, and it no longer made sense.

dannyw 7y ago
This comes from our capitalist economic model. Absolutely everything in the America, from healthcare to education is profit-driven. Some countries have decided to prioritise social outcomes over profit, hence government-funded healthcare, education, etc. To change this "culture", you have to change our economic model for how we allocate resources in the world.
- smabie 7y ago
  America has public schools, but they mostly suck. I would take a profit driven private school over a public one any day. I would also take dealing with a corporation’s customer service over a government office like the DMV any day. And while you mention healthcare, the actual problem is that they aren’t profit driven enough and instead exist as this Frankenstein’s monster of a public/private partnership. I currently live in a 3rd world country with no health insurance or government intervention in medicine and healthcare and the system works well(ish). Fixing a broken bone or getting a tooth pulled is only going to set you back $10. And while this is a lot for poor people, it’s still only between 2-10 days salary for an average person. That being said, there are major trade-offs in quality. I wouldn’t recommend giving birth or getting a life saving treatment here, but for anything somewhat routine, the healthcare provides great value. Also, all meds are over the counter and are very cheap. One med in particular is 100x cheaper here than the out of pocket costs in America.
- scroot 7y ago
  > This comes from our capitalist economic model. Definitely, as culture is in hefty ways influenced by (and itself influences -- dialectic!) political economy. > To change this "culture", you have to change our economic model for how we allocate resources in the world. Yes, but the severity of this change is open to interpretation. Part of the "culture" I was referring to was a business culture that emerged in the late 70s and called for viewing shareholder value as the sole purpose of corporations. This was not necessarily the received wisdom in the prior decades -- decades which gave us places like Bell Labs and Xerox PARC, and the decades in which, arguably, the biggest qualitative leaps in computing occurred. It's worth noting that most of these leaps in computing come from the ARPA research culture and/or from Bell Labs, the latter of which was a government regulated monopoly and not the case study of a normal private company doing basic research. Ditto for PARC, which was more or less an extension of the ARPA group at a time when the government funding was threatened. The lessons from this (for basic research in computing) are simple: fund people and not specific projects, while having a general overall vision; fund at the appropriate timescale of half to full decades; don't interfere.

by scroot 7y ago

dannyw 7y ago

This comes from our capitalist economic model. Absolutely everything in the America, from healthcare to education is profit-driven. Some countries have decided to prioritise social outcomes over profit, hence government-funded healthcare, education, etc. To change this "culture", you have to change our economic model for how we allocate resources in the world.

smabie 7y ago
America has public schools, but they mostly suck. I would take a profit driven private school over a public one any day. I would also take dealing with a corporation’s customer service over a government office like the DMV any day. And while you mention healthcare, the actual problem is that they aren’t profit driven enough and instead exist as this Frankenstein’s monster of a public/private partnership. I currently live in a 3rd world country with no health insurance or government intervention in medicine and healthcare and the system works well(ish). Fixing a broken bone or getting a tooth pulled is only going to set you back $10. And while this is a lot for poor people, it’s still only between 2-10 days salary for an average person. That being said, there are major trade-offs in quality. I wouldn’t recommend giving birth or getting a life saving treatment here, but for anything somewhat routine, the healthcare provides great value. Also, all meds are over the counter and are very cheap. One med in particular is 100x cheaper here than the out of pocket costs in America.
scroot 7y ago
> This comes from our capitalist economic model. Definitely, as culture is in hefty ways influenced by (and itself influences -- dialectic!) political economy. > To change this "culture", you have to change our economic model for how we allocate resources in the world. Yes, but the severity of this change is open to interpretation. Part of the "culture" I was referring to was a business culture that emerged in the late 70s and called for viewing shareholder value as the sole purpose of corporations. This was not necessarily the received wisdom in the prior decades -- decades which gave us places like Bell Labs and Xerox PARC, and the decades in which, arguably, the biggest qualitative leaps in computing occurred. It's worth noting that most of these leaps in computing come from the ARPA research culture and/or from Bell Labs, the latter of which was a government regulated monopoly and not the case study of a normal private company doing basic research. Ditto for PARC, which was more or less an extension of the ARPA group at a time when the government funding was threatened. The lessons from this (for basic research in computing) are simple: fund people and not specific projects, while having a general overall vision; fund at the appropriate timescale of half to full decades; don't interfere.