201–210 of 257 posts
Crunchyroll acquired by Sony, BD acquired by Hyundai, Slack acquired by Salesforce... Our economic system seems to have a natural tendency towards monopoly. This is happening before our eyes and we don't even realise it.
Crunchyroll acquired by Sony, BD acquired by Hyundai, Slack acquired by Salesforce... Our economic system seems to have a natural tendency towards monopoly. This is happening before our eyes and we don't even realise it.
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Alternative take: consumer behaviour that demands complex integrated products incentivizes the formation of large corporate bodies that can marshall the many skills and resources required to make them, with the economies of scale that make them viable. Semi-facetious summary: there’s not a lot of demand for local, organic, artisan all-terrain robot packhorses.
That's true in the case of Boston Dynamics. Definitely seems less true in regards to a company like Crunchy Roll though.
I have been secretly hoping Tesla to buy Boston Dynamics and revolutionize autonomous manufacturing. One day, a Starship fleet will send an army of robots to Mars and build out a city.
What is the moral case for implementing autonomous manufacturing? If you eliminate one kind of job, then another, then another, and then implement general purpose job elimination, where does it end? Is it not an axiom of the world that there simply isn’t enough knowledge work to go around all seven billion of us? By taking away jobs what do those of us who aren’t programmers, architects, novelists or day spa wait sta…
Normally we dread this coming from the supply side, “will we end all possible work through automation?”
But if you think it from the demand side, people will always need something like “work”: structured schedule, socialization, ways to differentiate yourself from others through “achievements” that not everyone can do, etc.
Even in an utopian society where all material needs are covered and wealth redistributed, people would create and consume art, “fight” for relevance, create petty politics... and gladly “pay” for part of that. So we will end up inventing new jobs in any case, so we can keep on using the same old concepts and social structure, just not for food acquisition.
If you think about it, this sophistication has been happening for some centuries already.
Cutting edge high tech company goes to die under ownership of massive conglomerate. It’s an old but consistent story.
Cutting edge high tech company goes to die under ownership of massive conglomerate. It’s an old but consistent story.
Slightly racist but lighten up its funny
Crunchyroll acquired by Sony, BD acquired by Hyundai, Slack acquired by Salesforce... Our economic system seems to have a natural tendency towards monopoly. This is happening before our eyes and we don't even realise it.
In market based economies there will always be a general movement of capital to the top, because simply having money allow you to earn more money. It's a positive feedback loop. That's why it is important for an external force, which pretty much has to be a government, to tax the wealth at the top and move it back to the bottom. Otherwise the system gradually turns into feudalism by its very nature. A government that…
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As an immigrant engineer I feel this is actually good because it shows that the market in the US is bullish on new technologies. I believe this is what has led to most of the major inventions in the past 100 years to come from the US. In my home country (India) it’d be impossible for a company to reach such valuations based only on research and prototypes, which in turn leads to low salaries for STEM people, culminat…
A ~30 years bet on a company is difficult in any country or any sector for the matter of fact unless it has potential to change the landscape of future wars, thereby providing ROI in the form of strategic superiority or at least that's what U.S. DoD hoped for with Boston Dynamics and it didn't happen. On the same context, Imagine if Boston Dynamics was only involved with drones, it would have never changed hands.
My point was that the economic culture in the US supports and this kind of innovation. No other country - maybe barring China, can do that.
I’m not praising the US as a country either (infact I’m moving to Canada). The US has deep flaws but it’s one redeeming quality is industrial innovation.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In market based economies there will always be a general movement of capital to the top, because simply having money allow you to earn more money. It's a positive feedback loop. That's why it is important for an external force, which pretty much has to be a government, to tax the wealth at the top and move it back to the bottom. Otherwise the system gradually turns into feudalism by its very nature. A government that…
Thats not at all correct. In the mid to long term money will move to the person allocating it most efficiently. This of course assuming a non corrupt government. And thats where I see the actual positive feedback loop: People like you want the government to have more power, with more power there is more room for corruption/lobbyism, people demand even more government power
Now I get the issue with a over-regulating bureaucratic government, but the real world is more complex than 'powerful government is bad'.
> In the mid to long term money will move to the person allocating it most efficiently
Is that so?