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Comment by Henchman21 | Hacker News Reader

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Selling the solution to the problem you caused ought to be illegal.

> Selling the solution to the problem you caused ought to be illegal.

Most tech solutions are built on the problems they created. This includes phones, cars, computers, every software upgrade, and almost every electronic gadget. You are forced to use them because the world around you is no longer compatible with the way of life that was before the introduction of these tech.

I probably agree with you but what on earth are phones and cars doing in this list? They solve obvious physical problems not caused by a company.

My interpretation would be that cars are necessary to live in places where urban design assumes that we'll use cars to get around. Many cities are designed this way.

Similarly, phones are required now for some activities, like online banking. First it was an option, then it became the norm.

Exactly.

General Motors contributed significantly to the decline of passenger rail in the USA.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_consp...

I’ve spent some time thinking about this. I’ve basically decided this is nonsense. Please give me the problem that the following both created and solved: phones, cars, computers.

In my view the problems of “communication over distances”, “quickly traveling over distances” and “having information to process” all existed as problems well before we invented these solutions.

So that leaves only the idea that we’re forced to use these tool because the world has changed. That is frequently true but hinges on the amount of effort an individual is willing to make - and their economic prowess in an economy that rewards groupthink.

I stand by my original statement: selling solutions to problems you created ought to be illegal.

This would eliminate the credit report, monitoring and fixing industry, which would be a good thing.

Court records are public in the US. If creditors want to know if you’ve been in financial trouble, they should check for bankruptcies and lawsuits, not the extrajudicial version of those that the credit reporting companies run based on hearsay.

Credit reporting is better in some ways than alternative systems of “vouching” for someone.

It’s not better in all ways, of course, but the alternative is not “everyone gets cheap credit extended to them” but rather “people who rich people know and trust get cheap credit extended to them, some others get more expensive credit, and some get no credit extended”. It’s not obvious to me that that’s better.

We definitely are already in the second regime. The credit rating industry just makes sure the bottom 99% of the decision making also happens in secret.

I come from purely middle-class roots (100% blue collar grandparents and public school teacher parents).

I got a lot of inexpensive credit extended to me throughout my life, without any rich people knowing me from Adam.

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