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Right, it wasn't meant to be a complete list. Maybe I should have added more etceteras. > We had this 100 years ago No, we had things like this: https://en.w

Right, it wasn't meant to be a complete list. Maybe I should have added more etceteras. > We had this 100 years ago No, we had things like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lohner%E2%80%93Porsche https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lohner%E2%80%93Porsche. The state of art was completely dependent on lead-acid chemistry, and there was no way around it for the next hundred years. In light of that fact, it's a damn good thing electric cars were killed in the crib, because all that lead was going to be handled with the same stewardship as fossil fuels have been. Plus, they just sucked. Tell me, if not for Elon Musk, how exactly do you think we could have gotten to where we are now? Do you think the government was going to do it? Elon is disagreeable, possibly Aspergers, and both a paper billionaire and a transient. But it's possible that normal people don't do things like force open a new market against impossible odds using new and speculative technology. Exact same goes for SpaceX. If you have a plan to compete with NASA and cut the cost of launch services by ninety percent, I'd love to hear it. > [medical imaging and diagnostics] For whom? And at what price? For me. My family is on Medicaid. My daughter's life was saved this past year by state-of-the-art ultrasonography, which was provided to us for free. Some years ago my father, who's on Medicare, was saved by an MRI that found a brain tumor. The development and manufacture of those machines doubtless made a lot people wealthy. I think they deserve every penny. > To back up a sec: the thing I'm getting at in these posts isn't an objection to modernity per se I agree with everything in this paragraph. > Cleaner air than what? Cleaner than the mess made by the coal and oil that powered the industrial revolution, and that was subsequently propped up by generations of corrupt industrialists and politicians. I wish it weren't so, but photovoltaics and gigawatt scale wind power took time to develop, and in the mean time I'm glad we had things like electricity and cars, as dirty as they may have been. Regardless of how we got here, we need these breakthroughs. There's a lot of money to be made, and that's a good thing, because it means the people engaged in this fight are in a hurry to get there. > I'm not even sure what this means. Like the satellites that detect how badly we've fucked everything up? This is sort of a glass-half-empty point of view. Yes, that, but also for the endless, unpredictable rewards of discovery. All the other stuff you wrote, I think we'd find we mostly agree.

maybelsyrup 5y ago
> Do you think the government was going to do it? That we live in a time where this question will be read as rhetorical by most people (answer = "obviously not") is proof of how thoroughly we've been had by the group of people I'm muttering about. I don't know if the government was going to do it -- if the "when" in question was after ~1970, I don't think the business elite would've allowed it -- but I certainly think they could've. And why not? We funded the government to split the atom, go to the moon, defeat the Nazis, and invent the internet. If we'd wanted it like we wanted the Civil Rights Act, for instance, or like how thirstily we murdered a few hundred thousand people and spent a trillion bucks in Iraq, we'd have gotten them to at least incentivize electric car production. We can go at historical counterfactuals til we're nauseous, but no, I don't think an Elon Musk is required at all. > Medicaid That's amazing! But you know this as well as I do: the people who live on billionaire's row do not want Medicaid or Medicare to even exist, and they'll go for the jugular when they think they can slip it past us. (See GWB attempting this move on Social Security.) > I think they deserve every penny. If they can get rich as hell in a society where everyone with a pulse can get access to the MRI's and ultrasound and not pay a penny, then take the money. Until then ... > Regardless of how we got here I've reread a couple of times and I think this phrase is at the root of the disagreement. I'm just unwilling to disregard how we got here. It's the faulkner thing about the past: it's not dead -- it's not even past. The good ol' boys who got us here still run the show and it's still working very well for them. The trouble is that if it turns out that solving these problems means that they have to give something meaningful up, we're fucked, because the powerful do not give up power willingly. Never have, never will. So until they're no longer running the show we will not avoid a 21st century that's poorer and bloodier than the 20th. And in the meantime they'll desperately continue to feed us the belief that the way things are is the only way they could ever be.

maybelsyrup 5y ago

> Do you think the government was going to do it? That we live in a time where this question will be read as rhetorical by most people (answer = "obviously not") is proof of how thoroughly we've been had by the group of people I'm muttering about. I don't know if the government was going to do it -- if the "when" in question was after ~1970, I don't think the business elite would've allowed it -- but I certainly think they could've. And why not? We funded the government to split the atom, go to the moon, defeat the Nazis, and invent the internet. If we'd wanted it like we wanted the Civil Rights Act, for instance, or like how thirstily we murdered a few hundred thousand people and spent a trillion bucks in Iraq, we'd have gotten them to at least incentivize electric car production. We can go at historical counterfactuals til we're nauseous, but no, I don't think an Elon Musk is required at all. > Medicaid That's amazing! But you know this as well as I do: the people who live on billionaire's row do not want Medicaid or Medicare to even exist, and they'll go for the jugular when they think they can slip it past us. (See GWB attempting this move on Social Security.) > I think they deserve every penny. If they can get rich as hell in a society where everyone with a pulse can get access to the MRI's and ultrasound and not pay a penny, then take the money. Until then ... > Regardless of how we got here I've reread a couple of times and I think this phrase is at the root of the disagreement. I'm just unwilling to disregard how we got here. It's the faulkner thing about the past: it's not dead -- it's not even past. The good ol' boys who got us here still run the show and it's still working very well for them. The trouble is that if it turns out that solving these problems means that they have to give something meaningful up, we're fucked, because the powerful do not give up power willingly. Never have, never will. So until they're no longer running the show we will not avoid a 21st century that's poorer and bloodier than the 20th. And in the meantime they'll desperately continue to feed us the belief that the way things are is the only way they could ever be.