I'm so tired of the thoughtless repetition of this talking-point.
I'm so tired of the thoughtless repetition of this talking-point. Yes, some technologies developed serendipitously for luxury products. But when you take a broader view than the latter half of the 20th century, most of the technological progress that actually made our lives better were the results of targeted effort: wastewater treatment, antibiotics, essentially all medications. We didn't get to these things accidentally. Maybe those technologies were expensive at first and came down in price with adoption, but that's different than making the claim that if we just work on whatever rich people want today , we'll automatically get to places that are beneficial for society. Want to help the third-world feed itself? Perhaps you should invest your resources in that , not in a silicon valley nutri-shake startup. Hell, most of your examples are cases where the military did something to solve a known problem that was too expensive (or too speculative) to be left to private industry. How you turn that into an argument that our best-and-brightest should be working on ad-optimization eludes me. This industry, I swear: we whine about the loss of space exploration, and wonder what happened to our flying cars, but we brush off criticisms when someone invests millions of dollars in the sixty-seventh niche food-delivery service for the SF bay area. Perhaps the two things are related?
Posted by timr on Jun 29, 2015, 11:02 PM
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- I was hosting on a PC at home like 10 years ago.
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- It was a long time ago, so I don't remember.
Raise real-world problems, find people facing the same issue, and discuss solutions.5,500 issues0 comments
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Fake websites pretending to be legitimate websites in order to steal your passwords was considered a HUGE problem.
3.5 Flash was always too expensive for a "flash" model.
I don't think the realistic alternative here was “hire a team for a month and get a better semantic conversion” For a rewrite of this si...
I was hosting on a PC at home like 10 years ago.
I live in walking distance of all these things, and the farthest I’ve gotten my kid to do things alone is to walk to and from school (a w...
It was a long time ago, so I don't remember.
I still like to buy my cheap and esoteric Chinese stuff from Amazon.
My local area used to be great to find old used woodworking tools for cheap.
I'm so tired of the thoughtless repetition of this talking-point.
I'm so tired of the thoughtless repetition of this talking-point. Yes, some technologies developed serendipitously for luxury products. But when you take a broader view than the latter half of the 20th century, most of the technological progress that actually made our lives better were the results of targeted effort: wastewater treatment, antibiotics, essentially all medications. We didn't get to these things accidentally. Maybe those technologies were expensive at first and came down in price with adoption, but that's different than making the claim that if we just work on whatever rich people want today , we'll automatically get to places that are beneficial for society. Want to help the third-world feed itself? Perhaps you should invest your resources in that , not in a silicon valley nutri-shake startup. Hell, most of your examples are cases where the military did something to solve a known problem that was too expensive (or too speculative) to be left to private industry. How you turn that into an argument that our best-and-brightest should be working on ad-optimization eludes me. This industry, I swear: we whine about the loss of space exploration, and wonder what happened to our flying cars, but we brush off criticisms when someone invests millions of dollars in the sixty-seventh niche food-delivery service for the SF bay area. Perhaps the two things are related?
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