The myth that innovation is "...the province of maverick individuals, not stodgy legacy players and certainly not cumbersome government bureaucracies..." Or as my informatics professor used to tell us back in the day, "slow and steady wins the race", she was also fond of, "Close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades."
Innovation is when you do something people that study the thing already determined was a bad idea bc you’re built different
There must be a very fine line between innovation and immolation.
There's a book out there called The Entrepreneurial State that tackles that very same idea, and debunks the notion that significant technological innovations come most frequently out of the private sector rather than government-funded laboratories.
government-funded laboratories
I.e. the military industrial complex (MIC). The only good thing about it, is that many of the technological innovations we enjoy today can be traced to advances made in government and military labs. People shouldn't take it as some kind of vast conspiracy, it's just the way our system of research and development happens to be set up, err I should say, the sick amount of budget that gets dumped into military spending rather than arts, for example. Personally I do feel that with the advent and gearing up of the internet, places like Silicone Valley have stepped in. The problem is that they're as much a good ol' boys network as anyplace, and indeed the argument can be made they're simply an extension of the MIC.
Oh, 100%. The phones that I'm guessing most of us use to access this site are my favorite examples. Most if not all of the core technologies that allow smart phones to do what they do were borne from shit that was originally developer for use by the military. The idea behind pointing that out is of course not to sing the praises of the MIC, but rather to bust through decades of pro-privatization propaganda by pointing out the (to us, rather obvious) observation that of course the private sector rarely innovates. It isn't profitable. It's more profitable to get the government to give you access to tech that's already mature and market it back to the taxpayers who payed for it, while of course denying them any kind of equity share, and in fact denying that they paid for it at all.
not to sing the praises of the MIC
Yes agree.. In fact the opposite we must keep the war hawks contained.
that book is really good. the points about how almost everything that makes up a phone was created by the state or by grants provided by state goes hard.
It's my absolute favorite rebuttal to anybody who tries to insist that privatization is a good thing
I'm not sure which quote they're referring to either. Here are three random ones.
"The worse, the better."
“We know today that there is no such thing as absolute truth, that everything is relative, that everything is dependent on the conditions of time and place; but precisely for that reason, we should be very cautious in judging the “ignorance” of various historical periods. Their ignorance, to the extent that it is manifested in their characteristic social movements, aspirations and ideals, is also relative.”
"Hello, I am Georgi Plekhanov."
they should have just listened to Ariana and Just kept breathin' and breathin' and breathin' and breathin' smh
Stockton was a grown man he was fully capable of making a decision without just listening to cultural trends
