5 ms·

Without American capitalism you wouldn't have computers, the Internet, smartphones, AI, electric cars and countless other things. That, and the Costco hot dogs

• loopback_device 5mo ago
  Except that the www came out of Switzerland, the first electric vehicles out of Scotland and Germany, the earliest descriptions of neural networks - also Scotland, and countless other things, like Rockets and whatnot, also out of Europe. But, sure, congrats on that ARPANet thing.
  • bluebarbet 5mo ago
    Final sentence was unnecessary.
  • matchbok3 5mo ago
    Can you point to the stock markets and silicon valley, and tech leaders and military of those countries? Oh, wait...
    • pocksuppet 5mo ago
      Those are bad things to have.
  • drnick1 5mo ago
    It is American ingenuity that turned academic curiosities like neural nets into usable products. The missing ingredient in places like Europe or Asia is not intelligence, it is a business friendly environment and the right incentives for entrepreneurs. This is why countries like China can copy existing stuff and make derivative improvements, but don't meaningfully innovate.
    • tardedmeme 5mo ago
      Thank god we have "American ingenuity" to enshittify new inventions. Where would we be without that?
• 1vuio0pswjnm7 5mo ago
  "Without American capitalism you wouldn't have computers, the internet, ..." In fact, the internet was born out of the American military, i.e., government, and American universities, not "American capitalism" The first time I used this internet, there were rules against using it for commerce
  • matchbok3 5mo ago
    The American military would not exist without the economic freedoms we have.
    • acdha 5mo ago
      Dude, we get it, you’re a super fan but these are some intellectually lazy comments. Our military is powerful, yes, but if you want to make some exceptional claims you need to show your homework demonstrating that kind of claimed huge leap over other economies (China, Russia, Germany, etc.). Be sure to explain how Iran is doing so well for so much less.
      • matchbok3 5mo ago
        Um, where did I mention China or Russia? Intellectually lazy? What are you even talking about? Stay on topic, you are embarrassing yourself.
    • dosisking 5mo ago
      We don't have any of these so-called 'econonic freedoms'. Anybody can be de-banked at any time.
    • 1vuio0pswjnm7 5mo ago
      These "economic freedoms", specifically the actions of so-called "tech" companies with respect to the internet, are the cause of "age verfification" legislation The original internet had rules against using it for commercial activity It lacked "economic freedoms" FWIW I still found it worth using at the time, despite no so-called "tech" companies It also lacked websites of unmanageable size with hundreds of millions of pages of user-generated content used as bait to lure in ad targets for data collection and surveillance, so-called "platforms" or "social media" It lacked "age verification" to access those websites because those websites did not exist There will be at least one HN reply arguing that the original internet sucked, or some other brainless dismissal As if the internet we have now does not suck. Clearly, it does suck for some people It is not a lack of "economic freedoms" on the internet that has led to "age verification". It's quite the opposite
• 1vuio0pswjnm7 5mo ago
  "The global Internets progenitor was the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) financed and encouraged by the U.S. Department of Defense. In order to understand the wonder that the Internet and various other components of the Net represent, we need to understand why the ARPANET Completion Report ends with the suggestion that the ARPANET is fundamentally connected to and born of computer science rather than of the military. The Completion Report goes on to differentiate the research ARPA supported from the research done by the computer industry: The computer industry, in the main, still thinks of the computer as an arithmetic engine. Their heritage is reflected even in current designs of their communication systems. They have an economic and psychological commitment to the arithmetic engine model, and it can die only slowly.12 The Completion Report further analyzes this problem by tracing it back to the nations universities: furthermore, it is a view that is still reinforced by most of the nations computer science programs. Even universities, or at least parts of them, are held in the grasp of the arithmetic engine concept.13 Computer networking was developed and spread widely in an environment outside of commercial and profit considerations, an environment that supported such research." Michael Hauben Netizens: On the History and Impact of Usenet and the Internet (1997) IEEE Computer Society Press ISBN 0-8186-7706-6 https://www.columbia.edu/~hauben/book-pdf/CHAPTER https://www.columbia.edu/~hauben/book-pdf/CHAPTER 7.pdf HN commenters/voters may reject the use of the term "military" in the origin story of the internet That's fine However it was American taxpayers, through the _Department of Defense_, that financed the creation of the internet That's government spending, not "American capitalism" The original internet was non-commercial and was not the result of "American capitalism" As above, the American computer industry (capitalism) at the time was not focused on computer networking and using computers for communication, it was focused on computers as "arithmetic engines"
  • thefz 5mo ago
    And the WWW is a Swiss invention.
    • graemep 5mo ago
      British or European. Inventor was British, working for a European organisation.
• thefz 5mo ago
  Smartphones and AI are tady's cancer, so good job America! Polluting the earth and its inhabitants once more. For electric cars, I have my doubts that without China we will have them, but I'll leave you simmer in your exceptionalism.
• timbit42 5mo ago
  The world would still have them but perhaps not as quickly is the only difference.