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> Q: What does software do? > A: It produces and reproduces capital. > Q: Who does software benefit? > A: People who own capital. This makes a lot of sense. If

• TuringNYC 4y ago
  There is an old joke that the US government cancelled the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC) in Texas because it would "cost too much" primarily. Yes, a lot of cap-ex, but it would have also employed an army of Physics and other PhDs (2000+ staff.) The cost was in the single digit billions. The joke goes that all those PhDs had to find work, and found well-paying jobs on Wall St, created exotic derivatives, and blew up the world. Then we paid hundreds of billions to solve the 2008 financial crisis.
  • jfkfmgmvmvm 4y ago
    $2 billion had already been spent with only a tunnel bored. Officials said it needed $12B more. It was a money pit. Many scholars were against it.
  • tawaycrypto 4y ago
    Not only that developed countries/NGOs blame developing countries for investing in science related projects. They think money is wasted. My country gets this crap all the time.
  • wizardforhire 4y ago
    Spoiler alert: It’s funny because it’s true.
  • ecpottinger 4y ago
    Well, my friend study in university for Nuclear Physics, yet ended up working for the Toronto Stock Exchange programming monitoring software of the trades. They also paid a full year's bonus for working in December for Y2K, so yes, there is the money.
    • TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
      One of the reasons progress in physics has been slow is because Wall St hoovered up much of the talent. Even if you have a good PhD, opportunities in physics are very limited. And they don't pay all that well. Get a job as a quant and it's not remotely hard to earn $500k a year.
      • Consultant32452 4y ago
        Not just Wall St, but also Silicon Valley. For several years it felt like the big names would literally just hire everyone they could with exorbitant salaries to starve the rest of the market (and other markets by proxy). A bunch of our brightest spent their energy trying to shove one more ad in your brain.
  • Mountain_Skies 4y ago
    The story I've heard is that Congress was wary of the growing deficit and gave the president a choice of going forward with either TSSC or ISS. The political optics of a space station are much better than those of a super collider and there was still a desire to have aerospace projects for former Soviet scientists to be engaged in so they wouldn't end up working for a terror state. Had TSSC been picked over ISS, those Wall Street quants might have been kept busy underground in Texas but the folks who created the International Space Station would have been left to find their own opportunities, with unknown consequences.
    • CRConrad 4y ago
      > ... but the folks who created the International Space Station would have been left to find their own opportunities, with unknown consequences. Space-X and its ilk decades earlier? Might not have been too bad... Except of course half of them might have gone to work for Russia (or those private actors) developing ICBMs and hypersonic missiles. So maybe we'd all be speaking Russian now, praising God-Emperor Putler. (ETA: or Elon or Jeff. But those, probably in English. Small mercies...)
  • ArnoVW 4y ago
    On YT there's a science history documentary Channel "BobbyBrocoli". He did a trilogy on the SSC saga. Recommend it (and his other docs) : https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ivVzGpznw1U https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ivVzGpznw1U
• pmarreck 4y ago
  The truth is reversed. Software eliminates work; that is, it makes people more productive by making the boring parts of their jobs automated, which as a side effect can increase capital (and profit everyone, not just startup founders). The diatribe against capitalism is thus unnecessary.
  • _oghd 4y ago
    > The diatribe against capitalism is thus unnecessary that would be true if you had no understanding surplus value. i highly recommend you at least try and read the first few chapters of Marx's Capital, which was quoted directly in the article. notice profits are skyrocketing while wages are dead? "rising tide raises all ships" economics is dead.
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    • bobleeswagger 4y ago
      Just wait a few more years, it'll trickle down soon ;)
    • chefandy 4y ago
      What they didn't tell you is that there's not nearly enough ships.
    • cowl 4y ago
      The diatribe against capitalism is unnecessary because there is no better system. You can quote Marx's Capital all you want. I have lived the system build upon it's premises and it's the worst system possible. It destroys the human Initiative and intrinsic motivation bringing all the people to an equal poverty and apathy not an equal prosperity while the Ruling class still remains even better than the richest capitalist. And no what is often touted as it was never implemented properly is not true either. Half the world tried several forms of it's implementation, in all forms it goes against the human nature and is always destined to fail. There is no redistribution of the Surplus value simply because the surplus vanishes whenever you try that system. While the rising tide is not raising all ships you at least have a chance to fight to jump to another ship and not being forced to navigate the ocean using rafts.
• ytygg775 4y ago
  > If it pays more to work for a crypto exchange or the next data-stalking start-up than to cure cancer then most of the knowledge people will work on them. Building stronger morals could also help.
  • shanebellone 4y ago
    Moral high ground is low intelligence.
  • 662587649495439 4y ago
    Stronger morals, perhaps, but also redirecting the collective moral compass from favouring the individual to favouring the collective. Today, one can feasibly frame working for a megacorp for $$$ as morally just to provide one's own family with a comfortable, safe life. Morality focused on the individual. Things like effective altruism seem to be an attempt at redirection, but they have their own problems. Until someone or something succeeds with redirection, having stronger morals will only make the problem worse.
  • namaria 4y ago
    This is just yet another "if people would be just so" brand of wishful thinking.
• rightbyte 4y ago
  I would say both who benefits and who pays is key. So it is better for me if it is X Corp's stockholders who benefit money wise and I who pay, than some spyware company like Google paying. The problem is that companies now seem to want to make me pay and still take money from Google et al. Like Samsung's TVs. Or Microsoft becoming like Google in their consumer products. There probably need to be some regulation in the IoShit space to keep it from eating away all "dumb" spyware free devices.
• randomdata 4y ago
  > If it pays more to work for a crypto exchange or the next data-stalking start-up than to cure cancer then most of the knowledge people will work on them. Curing cancer would be infinitely more profitable than yet another crypto exchange. But humans are greedy. They won't wait for the big payday when a metaphorical marshmallow is dangling in front of them. Even holding out for the rewards of a crypto exchange is more than most people can handle. Most people will indulge in the not-so-tasty treat in front of them as soon as someone offers them a mediocre job. > Governments exists to regulate society and set rewards and punishments That may be true of an authoritarian regime, but under democracy, as I imagine most of us here are, government does not regulate society. It regulates individuals who try go against society. Society defines expectations, government cleans up those who refuse to comply. If the general public interest turns one way government can step in to ensure that the remaining people are brought into line, but a (democratic) government will not lead the charge.
  • cowl 4y ago
    > That may be true of an authoritarian regime, but under democracy, as I imagine most of us here are, government does not regulate society. It regulates individuals who try go against society. Society defines expectations, government cleans up those who refuse to comply. That is not what most of us want in a democracy otherwise we would never go forward. Our society expects the government to Lead and not simply comply with the current mood. That is the problem we have now when every action is calculated on short term election result and not long term benefit for the whole society. If a democratic government were supposed to only enforce the majority expectations we would never change those expectation and our view of what is right/wrong.
    • randomdata 4y ago
      > Our society expects the government to Lead If that were the case we would let leaders rise up to take the lead instead of calling on representatives to carry our messages to the central meeting place. It may be your dream to be able to sit back to not have to speak with your representative frequently – and fair enough, democracy is unquestionably hard work! – but that sentiment is not at all reflected in the democratic societies that I'm familiar with. Most definitely not the USA, which HN is skewed towards. American society as a whole is quite clear about the importance of hiring public servants to represent the people, to not have rulers take over. There is no liberty held more dear. Indeed, there are always outliers who don't align with the rest of the society. Hence why we have government to clean them up. Unquestionably there are Americans who don't believe in, or at least don't wish to participate in, democracy, but the individual does not a society make. There are societies that do expect leaders to take the lead. It is not an unheard of concept and you might even stay it is historically common. But those are not democratic societies.
• DrScientist 4y ago
  Yep. Another way to look at it is markets are very powerful local optimisers - so if you rely on them exclusively you end up trapped in a rut. Everyone hooked on naturally produced molecules that activate opioid receptors via your dark reward patterns, or indeed on synthetically produced and injected versions is not necessarily a globally optimal solution. The job of government is to make sure the external costs, that are not immediately felt by the markets, are applied. So the cost of addiction is put back on the sources of it, or the costs of pollution makes it's way back to the polluters. That's what in essence good regulation is. Obviously centrally deciding what's best for everything is of course doomed to failure - it's a massive under utilisation of talent and too centralised control is far too easy to lead to corruption and stagnation. The trick is to find the right balance - and the right balance is a pragmatic one - not a clean ideological one - but you have to embrace that complexity, not try to over simplify. So "wasting" money - with multiple people working on the same thing, or things that fail - is actually essential for innovation - markets work. But at the very same time, it is important to have the confidence to state the obvious and take centralised action. So if you leave the dealing of climate change to short term capital markets alone - you are signing up to it being much much worse before it get's any better. Something that you can avoid with collective action.
  • marcosdumay 4y ago
    > markets are very powerful local optimisers At their best days, when everything goes right. One of the tasks of a government is to keep markets that way. Current governments seem not very interested on that task, worldwide.
• indigochill 4y ago
  > unless there is a society will to end it This is another retreat into passing the buck to a non-entity that https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33982377 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33982377 alludes to in talking about where "software" went wrong. Society doesn't exist in a practical sense, it's just a word that refers to a collection of individuals (and the culture/etc that those individuals share). Individuals can do things like donate to free open source projects to keep incentives aligned with their users. Tangentially... > Governments exists to regulate society and set rewards and punishments, we currently reward data gathering so it is what we get. I'd say governments exist to regulate specifically violence (e.g. punish citizens who use it in an unauthorized manner against each other). Other stuff like interstate highways are cool too, but they're easier to negotiate in a federated way than e.g. regulation of violence between states would be (short of just having states go to war with each other). Towards the end of regulating violence, surveillance is super useful. And this is why we cannot leave tech decisions in the hands of government either, because they have incentives going to the very core essence of government to build a surveillance state.
  • Kinrany 4y ago
    If government regulates violence, it also necessarily authorizes violence. There's no neutral way to make the choice of which violence to authorize.
    • Kinrany 4y ago
      We also know that centralizing violence is not necessary for minimizing it: there is no world government that regulates all violence, yet countries mostly manage to avoid wars.
      • MichaelZuo 4y ago
        Yes there is, it's called the UN Security Council. Within certain thresholds of course due to practical limitations.