this post was submitted on 09 Feb 2024
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I'm not sure how you come to this conclusion. For every example of a capitalist avoiding risky investments, there are 100 capitalists betting on the next innovation.
Venture capital. Heard the term? AI, Metaverse, crypto, web 2.0, .com... The tech space alone is full of capital making (stupidly risky) bets. They also make good bets too, like PC, search engines, online shopping (oh, look how the tech giants came to be).
I get it, capitalism bad. But this is just a nonsensical argument.
I was working for a place that was the market leader in a certain niche of simulation software. Their simulation was about 10x more efficient than their competitors. However, that version of the software is strictly off limits for the public, and made a version which they sold with a sleep statement so that it was only 1.1x faster than the next best solution. That way they could remain market leaders any time the competitors released a better version. Even though many systems rely on growing simulations to simulate bigger scenarios that could help save lives.
Just an example of capitalism impeding progress.
Open source software solves that kind of hidden bullshit.
Exactly why I left that company.
Specifically free (libre) licences, as permissive licences allow corporations to improve/adapt the software without contributing back to the community.
I only work on software with GPL compatible licences now.
And open source software is explicitly anti-capitalist.
free software is. open source is an attempt to sell free software out to capitalist interest.
eric raymond and the OSI are not good.
There are many forms of free and/or open source software.
but open source isn't anticapitalist
Yeah, I guess the original statement was too broad, but any FOSS using a GPL license effectively is. I guess not anti-capitalist though, but un-capitalist. It doesn't try to remove capitalism, it tries to be seperate from it.
Yeah metaverse and crypto are such innovate projects that will really change the world and not just more the same bullshit cash grabs.
Really undermining your own argument.
You completely missed the point there, damn. He's saying those things are very likely to be bad investments.
No I get the point. But showing they make make stupid decisions doesn't prove capitalism drives innovation, because those ideas aren't innovative.
Innovative ideas are rarely smart ideas.
Not saying those will change anything but I'm pretty sure there was people saying the same as you about electricity, radio, phone and the internet.
Sure, it happens sometimes. However, the goal is never innovation for the sake if innovation. It's innovations to create profit. The idea is you invest into one of these ideas that then creates a monopoly that can practice anti-completive behaviors to create more profit.
For example of something better, look at research universities. They are normally outside of capitalism and create innovation primarily for the goal of advancing knowledge of a subject or to solve some issue. It's rarely purely for profit to sit on the thing after it's created and ensure no one else can use it.
This is something that's often poorly understood. There's no profit in a perfectly competitive market. That is, according to orthodox economic theory, the most efficient market conditions are the ones where no participants make profit. From that you can derive what you said - that innovation is sought for moving a business away from perfect competition by gaining competitive advantage, which is anticompetitive! 😆
The ratio might not be 1:100. It might not even be tilted towards the risk takers. Also some if not most of the examples you mentioned are based research done in universities and defence agencies. That research is typically a much riskier endeavor. That's why the private sector doesn't even attempt it and only shows up to productize or build upon that research once the risk for not turning profit is minimized.