Hacker News Reader

Comment by thomascgalvin | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, those are called "lies".

Please don't take HN threads further into ideological flamewar hell. It's just what we don't want here. It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

It’s amazing to see comments like this on a technology focused website - an industry that has moved leaps and bounds due to competition and free markets.

I assume these commenters are either too young to have much life experience or young and idealistic without seeing how the world really works.

Or maybe some of us are aware of huge amounts of public grants that went into building up the foundations of that industry till it could operate without induced demand. And many of us also are aware of different constraints impacting monopoly creation and how capital intensive areas behave differently.

Sure, the military bootstrapped the semi-conductor industry, but we’re a long fucking way from the 8088 processor - thanks to capitalism.

I mean for $1,000 I can have effectively a 1990’s supercomputer in my pocket. The government didn’t do that, greedy capitalists did.

Greedy capitalists use the roads, power, water, education system and political stability that government creates.

One of the most important things for a modern cell phone is the GPS receiver. Most couldn't function without it. GPS was and continues to be a system funded by the US government. In fact, the opening of GPS civilian use in 1999 directly corresponds with the global rollout of cell phones in general.

A modern cell phone can function perfectly fine without a GPS receiver; only things like map functionality would be lost without it. What needs a GPS receiver (or other timing synchronization source; GPS is a simple and inexpensive one) are AFAIK the cell phone base stations.

If you think government push ended with 8088, I fear you don't have any idea of history. Even in early 1990s, some companies pushing the edge only had customers because DARPA bankrolled it pretty much directly, a lot of success for many foundational tech in modern devices happened thanks to not just government grants for research, but grants for things like MOSIS.

Took some serious decades and big money to switch from government having outsized impact on demand.

> I mean for $1,000 I can have effectively a 1990’s supercomputer in my pocket. The government didn’t do that, greedy capitalists did.

Heavily reliant on research funded by the government, ambitious funding for things the internet, the financial stability and access to markets supported by the government, etc. Neither side of this is doing it on their own — it’s like trying to decide whether the wheel or chain deserves credit for making your bicycle work.

The point is - the government did not and would not create the phone in my pocket.

Greedy capitalists trying to make more and more money figured they could do that by making better and better phones.

Nobody is saying the government made your phone. The point is that those private companies depended on a business environment stabilized by the government, workers educated by the government, research funded by the government, business opportunities created or protected by the government (e.g. patents), etc. I realize there’s a lot of libertarian propaganda in certain circles but it’s not like the last century’s guiding policies weren’t regularly recognized & discussed.

I'm not sure what you're trying to say. In communist Russia the government provided stability, research funded by the government, etc and could barely feed their population.

Capitalism is why we have super computers in our pocket.

Yet the standard of living in USSR was steadily rising compared to what it was before.

Thing is, those capitalists wouldn't have markets to exploit or tools to do so if not for over 50 years of government inducing the demand ("Silicon Valley" literally started because US Navy colocated a bunch of aviation projects, and later it pulled electronics industry there)

You can only have that because said supercomputer is manufactured in China, with semiconductors manufactured in Taiwan. Greedy capitalists absolutely did that, you’re right - and gutted the US in the process.

The problem is, in most countries, electricity sales aren't a free market full of competition.

No-one here is arguing if the free market helped improve CPUs, but I think it's an entirely different question if things like free electricity + gas markets are useful (the evidence from Texas exactly seems to suggest "no").

Our industry developed due to the labour put in by so many and central planning and funding by several governments, not due to free markets.

It's a literal idealist position to insist that free markets cause development, when the vast majority of material evidence across the world points to the contrary.

How much life experience do young people need to understand that they're being screwed over and that the society in which they live is becoming ever more tilted towards the benefit of the rich?

Your constant amazement indicates that either you don't understand something, or the rest of the world are idiots can't see what's so self-apparent to you.

The "free" market gets too much credit: the best tech came from monopolies[1]

Android is more "free market" than iOS: network providers and OEMs can extend the source code to their requirements and "compete" to consumers detriment. The consensus on HN seems to be that the centralized planning/walled garden approach of iOS is superior.

1. I'm being intentionally provocative,but hear me out: Unix, the IBM PC, Angular, React, CUDA

Reply on news.ycombinator.com