• 1 Post
  • 2.14K Comments
Joined 9 months ago
cake
Cake day: June 13th, 2024

help-circle






  • In fact, that would make any democrat (as in believer in democracy, not Democrat™) or republican (as in believer in a republic, not Republican™) leftists as well, since they believe in democracies or republics instead of a monarchy.

    Or that’s what you’d think, but the guy who created conservatism was a monarchist trying to figure out a way for the aristocracy to exist within democracy. The right is stanning for monarchy under a different name, as proudly admitted by their ideological leader. For details look up Edmund Burke.






  • Ok, please tell me one thing they did to advance space exploration. And please don’t say reusable rockets that bring down costs, because this is still a pipe dream.

    Since its founding in 2002, the company has made numerous advancements in rocket propulsion, reusable launch vehicles, human spaceflight and satellite constellation technology.

    -Wikipedia. I don’t know nearly enough about space exploration to explain these advances, but again if they weren’t good at what they do they wouldn’t be the biggest space launch provider in the world (even counting national programs).

    Jokes aside, why do you need ultra-high-speed internet always and everywhere? For emergencies or normal usage, it definitely doesn’t matter if a request takes 10ms or 250ms.

    I don’t know why but Ukraine was using it so clearly it’s good for something. It’s also useful for people in remote places where there’s no good internet otherwise, or to avoid government censorship.

    But does it need private institutions for that? Innovation, at least in my opinion, means making possible something we previously thought was impossible. Production and distribution aren’t.

    I don’t think anyone in the 80s thought a smartphone was possible, nor did anyone in the 50s think the Macintosh possible. Maybe it didn’t have to be private institutions making them, but it was.

    If something is truly wanted or needed, people will manufacture and distribute it easily without the need for private corporations to tell us what we need.

    No? For a lot of modern technology decades’ worth of infrastructure and know-how are needed to even think about making the stuff, and most of that is the product of private investment and development. I, as someone from the Middle East, don’t have access to that infrastructure and know-how and therefore am forced to pay through the nose for an American phone or a Japanese car. You can make the argument that private innovation is nonexistent or unnecessary only by using the results of decades upon decades of private innovation. You only need to look to the Global South to see what happens when you don’t have that.

    If you think that money is the driving factor, how would you explain the entire open-source ecosystem?

    A lot of it (but not all) is in fact developed by developers in companies. Also there are many applications where the best option is closed source, one example being Excel.


  • NASA sent people to the moon in the seventies. SpaceX must be happy if their rocket gets into low earth orbit without falling apart.

    Okay I’m all for Musk hate but there’s a reason SpaceX came to prominence and it’s not because their rockets are always falling apart. Hell, the whole reason we’re now talking about a European space industry is because of Starlink, so clearly capitalism was able to innovate that. Europe is now realizing it’s falling behind because they have nothing to compete with SpaceX.

    It’s a widespread myth that capitalism is best at innovation. Quite the contrary is true. Most (real) innovations get developed with public resources in public institutions and private companies then take it and commercialize on it.

    It’s a myth that capitalism has a monopoly on innovation, but it’s also a myth that capitalism can’t innovate. Public institutions and universities usually make the big breakthroughs, but the commercialization is also important. Taking something from a proof of concept in a lab into factories all over the world and then continuously improving it is innovation. Governments around the world made the computer, but it was Steve Jobs who put it in people’s homes.

    And as we see it doesn’t and will never happen in our current system.

    That seems more of a problem with lack of spine than anything else.


  • Eg, free education, citizen pay, more renewable energy good but unchecked, uncontrollable immigration bad.

    That just sounds like a center-leftist with one extra step, and that’s the problem with centrism: The right has little to no good ideas, so someone who thinks critically about their positions will strongly lean left, and someone who doesn’t will strongly lean right. “Centrists” are therefore people who simply don’t care about politics and not subscribers to a coherent political ideology.







  • I don’t look at one person saying “Murdering 5 year olds is bad”, look at another person saying “Murdering 5 year olds is good!” and try to find a way where both are right.

    This is literally what centrists all over the world (well, the parts that show up in English-language news anyway) think about Palestine, though.