Companies never innovate. The government builds new technology using taxpayer dollars and companies build products off of that after the government has done all the expensive work.

That's because of what a margin is. The margins on research and development are really shitty. Truly innovative technology more often than not takes decades and decades to pay off. So if you are investing there is no way in hell you are going to put money behind something like the internet because you're looking at spending hundreds of millions of dollars for a payoff you're not going to see in your lifetime when you start at the investment.

It's like how we've got all these billionaires getting into rockets after the government did the really expensive work of developing the tech and then acting like they are all innovative and shit...

Another good example is that fancy insulation. It was developed in the 50s but there wasn't any way to make it affordably or economically. It wasn't until I think the 2010s that there was even a way to manufacture it in a way that was worthwhile for any applications outside of the space shuttle.

Try to imagine something to takes 60 years before you can even think about an affordable way to manufacture and monetize it. That's how most technology actually is. And that's why most innovations come out of public universities and public research grants.

The Reason China is ahead of America is because their government is still pouring money into basic research. They can do this because their economy is still growing rapidly as they use up the excess population they got from a couple of big baby booms.

America Can't do that because our economy is in growing fast enough to satisfy the greed of our ruling class and also maintain a functioning civilization. It's kind of like how Japan is stuck in a permanent recession because they don't have enough resources and money to simultaneously maintain a ruling elite that can hang with guys like Elon Musk and a functioning working class.

Basically your economy needs to be able to support mega yachts while also supporting a small middle class on top of research and development and you need a super fast growth cycle to pull that off that isn't sustainable. Give China a few years and they're going to have the same problem everybody has. Capitalism is breaking down and socialism isn't acceptable to people (and no China is not socialist or communist they have a private Health Care system for fucksake).

I've said this before but given the capitalism is breaking down and socialism isn't emotionally acceptable we need to figure out a third option or we need to get comfortable with intense poverty for everybody except about 10,000 people.

If you're reading this you are not part of that 10,000

Fun fact the reason your grocery prices aren't going down thanks to antitrust law enforcement is that companies don't bother demanding enforcement and instead just Sue the monopolies and trusts themselves and get a payout every few years. McDonald's for example got 170 million from suing the four major meat packers.

You will be shocked to learn McDonald's isn't passing those savings on to consumers.

The Biden administration was knee deep in preparing antitrust actions before they lost the election. So a major source of consumer price relief just went away. Ironically because consumers were chasing lower prices...

Also in other news Democrats really really really suck at messaging...

It's quite amusing that some troll follows me around modding down any comments where I suggest humans should cooperate with one another. They are literally proving my point by moving things backwards with their solitary cowardice.

Companies no longer invest in r&d because it doesn't generate instant profits. We'll never see another Bell Labs.

1. Try and charge him with crime. As stupid as the SC immunity ruling is they still left doors open on charging the President or former President. Of course I would say SC reform is much much needed.
2. Still worth doing and if things get bad enough you could get some defectors for such moves.
3. If Trump pardons people you can still try and get them under insurrection under the 14th amendment and bar them from holding future office.
4+5. Yeah, probably should be done but quite a long shot.

Because that's only open to nepo babies.

If you're wondering why Hollywood movies suck so much look at who is making them and who their parents are.

Never ask a man his salary, a woman her age or a Hollywood screenwriter why his parents' names are blue on Wikipedia.

Yeah of course people from high income families get better paying jobs. They can hold out longer for better pay and are less likely to take the first thing that comes along, they have a lot more connections and family that can get them better paying jobs because it pays to be a nepo baby and they can afford to take more risks in their career jumping from job to job for better pay because they know that they have family they can fall back on if all else fails.

All this study did was discover the phenomenon of generational wealth.

It's not treason to try and end the war but the manner and candor about it is pretty disgusting. The constant cowtowing to Putin, the pomp and circumstance of the Alaska summit, the disrespect Putin has shown to the US negotiators, the fact that Russia has broken at least a couple ceasefires that Ukraine agreed to.

Ukraine has been giving the Trump admin concession after concession and Russia has refused or continued bombing pushing the front so much so that remember earlier this year Trump was pleading them to stop ("Vlad Stop!!")

So it's pretty clear one actor here is operating in complete bad faith so why do we keep bending over backwards for them? Why is Steve fucking Witkoff negotating? How many bad faith moves will Russia make before we stop trusting them?

And I agree that maybe now arms shipments may not help but a fucking year ago they probably could have helped quite a bit. Remember this war was expected to be over quickly, the odds were totally in Russia favor and all this year theyve been able to expand the front like 5%, it has not been so inevitable as the pro Russia ghouls like to make it out to be.

It's just as absolutely ghoulish to tell Ukraine "ehh, just give up your agreed upon border because Russia wants it" even if it's the humane move today it's still appeasement and makes us all fucking ghouls because we could have stopped it if we had any leadership whatsoever.

That it's a competitive system is the problem. The world advances through cooperation.

Completely removing internet anonymity. There was just a story of some dumb racist commenting on a black woman's Facebook and since Facebook has real names she tracked them down and drove to his place of work.

Now it's all well and good for some racist asshole, although that's a really dumb thing to do this since you never know if he has a gun, but increasingly internet anonymity is the only thing we've got to push back

When that piece of shit Charlie Kirk died multiple people lost their jobs for doing nothing more but either quoting what the man said or just saying he was an asshole which he objectively was. Also funny to watch after decades of the right wing complaining about cancel culture being happy to use it to attack their enemies...

It's like nobody around here remembers the McCarthy era. Did they stop teaching at the kids in schools or something? I mean we stopped teaching slavery was bad so...

A good chunk of that is labor and environmental regulations. China doesn't have to pay for either of those things. We know damn well they have slave labor in their supply chains. And you can Google the phrase cancer villages and start reading.

American businesses cannot compete against the government that abuses its people as badly as China does.

This is not to say that the Auto industry doesn't have problems with affordability. They've gotten used to selling $60,000 SUVs as a base model and that's not really going to fly. Hell a base Honda Civic is 25,000. A low mileage used Corolla is 20K... Also doesn't help that I'm using Japanese car companies as my example because American owned corporations employ fewer Americans...

So yeah the American Auto industry has problems but at the same time make China follow the same environmental regulations and clean up their supply chains and we will talk.

You seem to have forgotten we have read your comments.

Good. Fuck off and don't come back, hypocrite.

I see that you are ignorant of the USA's entire history in Central and South America. This is my surprised face.

So here's the thing: I think most websites can tell whether their content is "safe" or not, even given the varied desires of parents. And it'd take all of thirty seconds for the W3C to come up with a standardized way of indicating whether a page is intended to be adult or not. And it'd take all of an hour for Google to add something to Blink to respect a preference set somewhere, password protected of course, as to whether to show adult pages or not.

Most of the arguments would be "But can we guarantee that this type of content isn't seen as adult-only" and TBH I think the W3C could easily define it, and legislators could then basically decide whether it's worth the hassle of going beyond the W3C's recommendations. (Remember that a world wide standard for what constitutes adult material is going to be an issue anyway, to obey Australia's law as well as those of various US states a website will have to go for the most all encompassing definition to cover both. So having the W3C define something reasonable, and having nations decide whether they want to accept that, or basically create something unworkable more likely to result in their region being blocked than anything useful, would be an improvement.)

So we have a potential solution that doesn't involve the extreme "Upload your driver's license and other forms of ID and basically reveal to the world who you are and fuck anonymity just when we need it most" garbage, we just need to implement it.

The question then becomes: would Reddit support it under threat of prosecution? My guess is they would. My guess is Facebook, Reddit, X, etc, would happily mark their websites as adult-only to comply with a social-media-adults-only law. They wouldn't be happy with it, but the alternative, which blocks adults too, is worse.

It’s like pissing in lake Erie. No republicans will break from the cult and vote for impeachment.