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You're so close! It's not the issues with tech but the whims of the uber rich that prevent adoption of most innovations. They have the money and choose the pr

You're so close! It's not the issues with tech but the whims of the uber rich that prevent adoption of most innovations. They have the money and choose the profitable things to invest in, which are nearly always the opposite of the practical things that would help the most people. Once you begin to see the world through this lens, it all makes sense. The best place to start is to talk to old people 40, 50, 60 years old plus. They'll tell you how so much of this was solved in the 60s and 80s and even earlier, but the powers that be suppressed any innovations that reduce fossil fuel usage, the influence of finance, the profits of the arms industry, etc etc etc.

robomartin 3y ago
> It's not the issues with tech but the whims of the uber rich that prevent adoption of most innovations. Please provide a list of 25 innovations who's adoption was prevented by the uber-rich. In addition to that, also provide a list of the uber-rich who participated in each instance of preventing each of the listed innovations from being adopted.
- coryrc 3y ago
  You got to spend money to make money. Larry Ellison and Oprah spend money on real estate, the Waltons on crushing American small business, and Buffet on fleecing poor people buying mobile homes. The EV revolution and much cheaper space access can be traced to one billionaire. Bill Gates is curing diseases. Imagine what else could be achieved if the other rich put their money toward similar projects.
  - moffkalast 3y ago
    So in short, innovation beyond the lab stage requires major funding and few people want to take on the risk? Sounds perfectly logical. It's human nature to value the same amount of loss far more severely than the same amount of gain. I suppose that's why most new tech is either deployed with government funding because they don't care about burning boatloads of other people's money for some small strategic gain, or by rich lunatics with a god complex that believe they can't possibly lose despite the risks involved.
- zackmorris 3y ago
  I'm not going to do that, because the list is endless. It's more useful to list the practices which the uber rich use to suppress progress by the general public: * Rent seeking * Planned obsolescence * Commodification * Underselling to break competition * Duopoly * Regulatory capture * Private ownership of formerly public media * Deregulation to avoid environmental law * Tax avoidance * Austerity to break organized labor * Public relations * Jury tampering * Copyright and patent abuse * Divide and conquer strategies like othering * Pork barrel projects * Gerrymandering * Nepotism and generational wealth sequestration * Private school vouchers to undermine public education * Private prisons for the prison industrial complex * Free trade instead of fair trade Now I just made this list, but it's probably at least 5 times longer than this, and we don't even actually know what well-connected networks of billionaires are capable of stopping. The problem is that Gen X people like me or older watched as most true innovations were suppressed between roughly Kennedy's assassination in the mid-1960s and 2020. That looked like fossil fuel companies preventing nearly all research into alternatives like solar, wind and lithium ion batteries. Even though we had the tech to scale those by the 80s. See Who Killed the Electric Car and similar for in-depth analysis. What we really needed were moonshots for key tech like lithium-ion batteries, blue/white LEDs, mRNA vaccines, etc etc etc which traditionally would have come from public funding like grants to universities. Instead we got monopolization by companies like Microsoft which bought up or killed the competition. Every billionaire CEO represents perhaps 1000 individual success stories that never came to be. Millenials and younger don't see a lot of this struggle, because they were born into a world where keystone technologies already existed. Whereas I grew up without a telephone, cable TV or the internet. Take the rose colored glasses off and the actual reality I'm speaking of is readily apparent. We're watching the same Middle East proxy wars where established power structures dominate impoverished people of color as when I was a child in the 80s. Times everything, everywhere. You want specific people? William Randolph Hearst created cannibis prohibition to ban hemp so as not to undermine the paper mills for his newspaper empire, which led to the racist War on Drugs stealing the lives of millions of people. And also prevented cars from running on hemp oil, even though Henry Ford made cars that could run on it. Before that were fossil fuel robber barons who monopolized shipping by rail. Wealthy conservative donors to the Reagan administration suppressed AIDS research and withheld World Health Organization funds which might have saved millions of lives. Wealthy Apple investors look the other way as workers at Foxconn commit suicide as long as profits remain high, when those jobs could be fully automated and those people could be working in other fields like alternative energy. Jeff Bezos and Charlie Munger enjoy constructing windowless buildings because it's cheaper than giving employees/students a say in their quality of life. Elon Musk killed twitter under the guise of propping up free speech (that he and right-leaning financiers approve of). Billionaires in Dubai build skyscraper monuments to their own egos as thousands of people struggle to survive in the streets around them. Whole countries in the global south are little more than banana republics propping up a single billionaire dictator to supply raw materials to developed nations while their people toil and starve for a lifetime to die penniless. I've barely scraped the tip of the iceberg as to why we don't have stuff like UBI for working on our own inventions. The most appalling thing for me is that I thought all of this was common knowledge, but it's being swept under the rug of revisionist history. I can't even believe that we are still arguing about racial and class divides that I remember we were starting to overcome by the late 90s.
nemo 3y ago
Old person here - this does not resonate with my experience at all. It's been the middle class driving consumer technology since the '60s at least. The stuff that was "solved" almost always turned out to be breathless reporting hyping technologies that didn't pan out for various reasons.

robomartin 3y ago

> It's not the issues with tech but the whims of the uber rich that prevent adoption of most innovations. Please provide a list of 25 innovations who's adoption was prevented by the uber-rich. In addition to that, also provide a list of the uber-rich who participated in each instance of preventing each of the listed innovations from being adopted.

coryrc 3y ago
You got to spend money to make money. Larry Ellison and Oprah spend money on real estate, the Waltons on crushing American small business, and Buffet on fleecing poor people buying mobile homes. The EV revolution and much cheaper space access can be traced to one billionaire. Bill Gates is curing diseases. Imagine what else could be achieved if the other rich put their money toward similar projects.
- moffkalast 3y ago
  So in short, innovation beyond the lab stage requires major funding and few people want to take on the risk? Sounds perfectly logical. It's human nature to value the same amount of loss far more severely than the same amount of gain. I suppose that's why most new tech is either deployed with government funding because they don't care about burning boatloads of other people's money for some small strategic gain, or by rich lunatics with a god complex that believe they can't possibly lose despite the risks involved.
zackmorris 3y ago
I'm not going to do that, because the list is endless. It's more useful to list the practices which the uber rich use to suppress progress by the general public: * Rent seeking * Planned obsolescence * Commodification * Underselling to break competition * Duopoly * Regulatory capture * Private ownership of formerly public media * Deregulation to avoid environmental law * Tax avoidance * Austerity to break organized labor * Public relations * Jury tampering * Copyright and patent abuse * Divide and conquer strategies like othering * Pork barrel projects * Gerrymandering * Nepotism and generational wealth sequestration * Private school vouchers to undermine public education * Private prisons for the prison industrial complex * Free trade instead of fair trade Now I just made this list, but it's probably at least 5 times longer than this, and we don't even actually know what well-connected networks of billionaires are capable of stopping. The problem is that Gen X people like me or older watched as most true innovations were suppressed between roughly Kennedy's assassination in the mid-1960s and 2020. That looked like fossil fuel companies preventing nearly all research into alternatives like solar, wind and lithium ion batteries. Even though we had the tech to scale those by the 80s. See Who Killed the Electric Car and similar for in-depth analysis. What we really needed were moonshots for key tech like lithium-ion batteries, blue/white LEDs, mRNA vaccines, etc etc etc which traditionally would have come from public funding like grants to universities. Instead we got monopolization by companies like Microsoft which bought up or killed the competition. Every billionaire CEO represents perhaps 1000 individual success stories that never came to be. Millenials and younger don't see a lot of this struggle, because they were born into a world where keystone technologies already existed. Whereas I grew up without a telephone, cable TV or the internet. Take the rose colored glasses off and the actual reality I'm speaking of is readily apparent. We're watching the same Middle East proxy wars where established power structures dominate impoverished people of color as when I was a child in the 80s. Times everything, everywhere. You want specific people? William Randolph Hearst created cannibis prohibition to ban hemp so as not to undermine the paper mills for his newspaper empire, which led to the racist War on Drugs stealing the lives of millions of people. And also prevented cars from running on hemp oil, even though Henry Ford made cars that could run on it. Before that were fossil fuel robber barons who monopolized shipping by rail. Wealthy conservative donors to the Reagan administration suppressed AIDS research and withheld World Health Organization funds which might have saved millions of lives. Wealthy Apple investors look the other way as workers at Foxconn commit suicide as long as profits remain high, when those jobs could be fully automated and those people could be working in other fields like alternative energy. Jeff Bezos and Charlie Munger enjoy constructing windowless buildings because it's cheaper than giving employees/students a say in their quality of life. Elon Musk killed twitter under the guise of propping up free speech (that he and right-leaning financiers approve of). Billionaires in Dubai build skyscraper monuments to their own egos as thousands of people struggle to survive in the streets around them. Whole countries in the global south are little more than banana republics propping up a single billionaire dictator to supply raw materials to developed nations while their people toil and starve for a lifetime to die penniless. I've barely scraped the tip of the iceberg as to why we don't have stuff like UBI for working on our own inventions. The most appalling thing for me is that I thought all of this was common knowledge, but it's being swept under the rug of revisionist history. I can't even believe that we are still arguing about racial and class divides that I remember we were starting to overcome by the late 90s.

nemo 3y ago

Old person here - this does not resonate with my experience at all. It's been the middle class driving consumer technology since the '60s at least. The stuff that was "solved" almost always turned out to be breathless reporting hyping technologies that didn't pan out for various reasons.