• Uriel238 [all pronouns]@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    9 months ago

    Capitalism breeds profit-maximizing innovation which is not the same as product-quality innovation.

    Early on this meant fins on your boxy car and special clappers in your car door to make them sound more rugged when they’re slammed closed.

    Later on innovation meant creative ways to bribe elected officials so they’d refuse to pass safety laws, or allow for effective law suits when too many people died horribly from collisions.

    It meant pressuring officials to pass laws requiring so much parking per retail location that cities automatically became a sprawl that required everyone have a personal vehicle.

    And innovation included bunches of ways to stay pollution control measures while they were resisted in the federal courts. In the meantime I was choking on smog every day in hazy Los Angeles.

    When we finally got cars that produced less soot and carbon monoxide, capitalist innovation meant automotive computers that detected when they were being smog checked and would fake being within limits (looking at you, Volkswagon).

    Oh and of course capitalist innovation included the suppression of reports on the effects of greenhouse gasses on climate, until it became a crisis, and a major population correction in the next century is inevitable. (Efforts we make now to fix it are all damage control.)

    • TankovayaDiviziya@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      Later on innovation meant creative ways to bribe elected officials so they’d refuse to pass safety laws, or allow for effective law suits when too many people died horribly from collisions.

      If libertarians could read, they’d blame the government as usual.

      But seriously, I can’t count the number of times they always blame the government for merely existing for being bribed. Like, what is that even supposed to mean? I don’t follow the logic. You’re not supposed to offer bribes to the government in the first place or you even give one when asked, you bloody bollocks!