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posted by martyb on Monday May 29 2017, @03:27AM   Printer-friendly
from the it's-all-gone-to-bits dept.

From the RooshV Forum:

I constantly get the vibe from people that they think our technology is skyrocketing, that we're living in a new tech age, "where was all this ten years ago?!" etc.

But I disagree with this assessment of our technology. It has made steady improvements in one specific space: software and electronic hardware. That is all. On top of that, the improvements on the hardware have not even been ground breaking. GPS is a ground-breaking invention. Smaller screens are not: they are just an incremental improvement.

Smartphones are merely the result of incremental improvements in the size and quality of electronic components. The only breakthroughs involved are ages old. The invention of the transistor, the laser, etc. The existence of google, facebook, uber, and so on, are merely inevitable "new applications" stemming from these improvements. They are not breakthroughs, they are merely improvements and combinations upon the telephone, the directory, and the taxi.

In my opinion, technology as a whole is borderline stagnant.

A list of why technology is still shit:

The posting goes on to list examples of incremental, rather than breakthrough, changes in the areas of:

  • Electronics & Machines
  • Energy
  • Medicine
  • Clothes
  • Food
  • Finance

Have we really stagnated? Have we already found all of the "low-hanging fruit", so new breakthroughs are harder to find? Maybe there is greater emphasis on changes that are immediately able to be commercialized and less emphasis on basic research?

 
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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 29 2017, @04:44AM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 29 2017, @04:44AM (#517011)
    If we killed all of the sales and marketing types.

    Our tech would no longer be shit.

    Since they're the ones that turn everything to shit when they get ahold of it.
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 29 2017, @05:02AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 29 2017, @05:02AM (#517018)

    Workers controlling the means of production rather than the capitalist parasite class of marketing and sales?

    It'll never happen. The workers are too busy living in a dream world where they're millionaires because they grunted hard enough "working hard."

    And every now and then, the grunting pays off. One sometimes wonders if it's really the grunting that does the trick or just a safety valve lottery system.

    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by khallow on Monday May 29 2017, @12:05PM

      by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Monday May 29 2017, @12:05PM (#517102) Journal

      Workers controlling the means of production rather than the capitalist parasite class of marketing and sales?

      Notice the huge bias here. Marketing and sales isn't considered "working" even though that's how most businesses actually get business. The ugly truth here is that no group, not the workers, marketing and sales, or rich people are entitled to ownership of the means of production. It's a poisonous ideology that produces nothing. In the real world, we don't constrain how such things are done. What works ends being what survives.

      It'll never happen. The workers are too busy living in a dream world where they're millionaires because they grunted hard enough "working hard."

      And every now and then, the grunting pays off. One sometimes wonders if it's really the grunting that does the trick or just a safety valve lottery system.

      If only you had looked at the real world before parroting that tripe. In the US (which seems to be where a lot of this tripe comes from) the middle class is shrinking because more people are becoming rich [reason.com] than are becoming poorer.

      "The American Middle Class is Losing Ground," is the title of Pew Research Center's new report on income inequality. That headline informed the headlines that other media outlets have settled on as well. The Los Angeles Times states "Middle-Class families, pillar of the American dream, are no longer in the majority, study finds." The Washington Post declares "Income inequality has squeezed the middle class of the majority."

      The headlines all appear to be accurate, but in that specialized newspaper way that attempts to reinforce an existing narrative and ignore some relevant information. It is true that Pew's analysis shows that the number of households that fit within their categorization of middle class has shrunk by 11 percentage points since 1971. It is true that the proportion of households that are classified as lower class has increased from 25 percent to 29 percent. But it is also true that the proportion of households that are classified as upper class has increased from 14 percent to 21 percent.

      That is to say, part of the reason that the middle class is disappearing is that they are succeeding and jumping to the next bracket. And a greater number of them are moving up than moving down. Be wary of the assumption that the drop in the middle class is a sign of a crisis.

      In other words, roughly 60% of the movement of US households away from middle class (from 1971 to 2015) became too wealthy to be considered middle class.

      But we're global citizens right? Even if the US might be doing well, surely, the world isn't. Well, that's another bit of fake news. Turns out that the world has been getting richer [voxeu.org] (and for those who still care about income inequality, relatively more equal in income as well). The article shows the bottom two-thirds of the world's population grew in income - adjusted for inflation, by at least 30% between 1988 and 2008.

      So sure, you can comfort yourself with the narrative that hard work isn't rewarded and that people are all getting poorer. Who knows? Some day it might become true and then you'll be well positioned attitude-wise for this brave, new world.