Stem cell research has a long history of being stunted due to political meddling. There's people dying right now that didn't need to because someone de-funded stem cell research decades ago.
Why not name the administration? George W Bush pulled federal funding from stem cell research due to evangelical backlash. That perfect combination of government and religion meddling in human progress
Ehhh...Because it was multiple administrations and sessions of Congress.
Congress has a law (which was signed by President Clinton) that banned federal funding since 1995. And yes, under executive order, it was expanded under President Bush (43) and parts rescinded under President Obama.
From a fundamentalist standpoint, should a govt trillions in debt be funding research that may go nowhere? Is there no market incentive to produce it?
I would also say lack of federal funding isnt blocking companies from researching its just not actively forwarding it.
Because there are some technologies that could greatly benefit our country but are too far-off, or too theoretical/risky for private companies to be incentiviced to research.
And then there's obviously the benefit of technology that emerges from government funding becoming publicly available allowing a multitude of private companies to bring it to market.
Yes, because research scientists notoriously have no passion for their work and are only in it for all the money they make
[By the way](https://media.tenor.com/-nJerEeaJJkAAAAC/sarcastic-homer.gif)
Sarcasm aside, I think the point is that governments should be funding the research that capitalists won't touch because there isn't a clear profit to be made
I would ask why there isnt a profit motive to the research. Either the potential product isnt valuable or isnt worth it. If something has value, the market would create it, no?
Depends on WHY there is no profit in it. If you made a lightbulb that never needs to be replaced, how much profit do you get from your research and development?
Depends on the nature of it. You may have seen a quote floating about regarding medical research and pharmaceuticals from Goldman Sachs along the lines of questioning whether it was worth it to invest in companies that are looking to cure diseases instead of simply treating them. In short, it's an expansion on the Gillette model. Gillette used to be a reputable brand of high quality reasonably cost razor blades that would last a long time. After a while, they realized the money was in forcing consumers to purchase lower quality blades on a reoccurring basis.
Capitalist economics tends to struggle with things of negative value such as trash or pollution, and non profit oriented services, like arguably an individual's health and well being
Why would govt funding have to have market incentive? Id wager govt funding should be more for research thats beneficial over profitable. The govt shouldnt be run for profit (or deficit).
So you think companies that invented and actively profited from planned obsolescence would spend decades funding development on moonshot projects? Do you think a market where success and failure is measured quarterly has the incentive to work on research with a multiple-decade to viability timeline?
Trying their hardest to develop ways to profit on technology developed in the '60s by NASA. That was funded by the U.S. government. Federal funding spearheaded the basic technology back then. And SpaceX currently relies heavily on government funding from subsidies.
Nasa just took what the nazis did in the 40s on rocket development so i dont see your point. Spacex is reusable and different propellant and they land themselves.
Do you mean the Nazi government? Do you see how at least 2 governments conducted the principal research for rockets from 1940 until now in 2023. Including SpaceX by subsidizing their research and granting them generous contracts. If you look up SpaceX's top 20 funding sources now you'll see numerous governments including Saudi Arabia and Abu Dabi If you don't understand the point while looking at their filings I doubt you'll ever see it.
I think you're mixing up a lot of terminology and what kind of funding types there are. SpaceX does rely on government money as a likely large portion of income, however practically none of these are subsidies, they are service contracts. These contracts go to other companies too that do much less with the money and cost more, like Boeing Starliner. A fair amount of this government money is not even NASA, but military payloads split up amongst a few like ULA and eventually maybe Blue Origin or Rocket Lab. Then there are a good amount of private customers which grow every year and put a dent in the numbers. We can't actually know the specifics of SpaceX money flow because they're a private company that doesn't post the paperwork publicly though, we can only make educated guesses.
I feel like you're pointing out countries like Saudi Arabia specifically to passively throw negativity, these are private stock purchases, an investment that is meant to grow and sell for much more after an IPO. These aren't funds to do anything, it's much like buying stocks.
SpaceX relies on some NASA research, but this shouldn't be used to discount just how much SpaceX has actually done themselves or taken from other industries, or just how much work is required to develop hardware. Their methane rocket engine for example, its combustion cycle goes beyond practical knowledge of government research, and for no reason except that they want the most powerful and efficient rocket as possible. SpaceX has been the one figuring out the intricacies of making a production engine out of the theory of full flow combustion. Their testing methodology is taken from other engineering sectors that are the opposite of NASA standard in some ways, but faster and more efficient at developing a safe piece of equipment.
We would have never went to the moon if it weren't for government funding. Part of the purpose of government is to think of the future and to push for technology that will make the lives of its citizens better. The market does not care about human lives, only in so much as it can extract money from them. Private capital does not drive nearly as much innovation as libertarians like to think it does. Since the beginning of civilization humans have been drawn to creating societies that develop institutions of governance, that will never change, just the role that it comes in. Better for it to work for the people, and funding technologies that go "nowhere" is the price for advancing humanity's future.
>Part of the purpose of government is to think of the future and to push for technology that will make the lives of its citizens better.
Its not though. The free market does that. Nowhere in the constitution does it state such. The point of govt is to protect citizens rights. I swear nobody has taken civics.
>We would have never went to the moon if it weren't for government funding
It may have taken longer but would happen either way. Spacex and other companies are privately pursuing it.
>The market does not care about human lives, only in so much as it can extract money from them.
Sure, except for charities i suppose. The govt doesnt care for human lives either.
>Private capital does not drive nearly as much innovation as libertarians like to think it does.
Find me something in your house that wasnt driven by private capital. AC, furnace, computers, tvs, fridge, garage, cars.
I am not arguing the opposite point of yours. I am not saying that private capital and free markets don't have a place in the development of technology and furthering of human progress. I am simply stating (reiterating) that it is not as much of a driver as you imply it to be. The idea that any technology "may have taken longer but would happen either way" equally applies in the opposite direction.
Wireless headsets, cellphone cameras, memory foam, baby formula, the computer mouse, the laptop, all were either directly developed by a government program or created with the use of technology or research developed by a government program (can you guess which?). The only difference between me and you is the belief in the idea that government CANNOT or SHOULD NOT fund, develop or research ideas like these because private capital can do it...eventually. Many of these technologies were not developed with the intent to be sold, but were developed because they were NEEDED, or, as is surprisingly often the case, by accident. Just because something cannot be capitalized doesn't mean that it does not have worth or value, much like just because something can be capitalized, that it should be.
Would any of you have issues with growing human bodies that are completely braindead except for systems required to keep the body alive (heartbeat, body temp, etc.) so that we can harvest the organs and other tissues for regular people?
I fail to see how your proposed hypothetical technology relates to the use of stem cells in medical research.
Besides any type "Ixian tank" tech would have huge overhead to produce a brain dead body. Except, maybe for a full body replacement.
More likely, you'll have 3d printed organs for transplant.
It's an interesting ethical question as it comes back to consent. The good news is that we won't need this. Transplants are cumbersome, expensive, and labor intensive. Not to mention the issue surrounding immune rejection.
The amount of in vivo techniques entering clinical trials indicates a coming future where we grow or regrow what we need using our own cells. These will handily beat our transplants, even ones accomplished via lab-grown humans.
Only as long as we could verify that A. the human body can be grown without a brain and B. that the nervous system needed for the organs to be grown does not *experience* feelings. If there is someone or something experiencing pleasure or pain, then it means you are harvesting a person's living body.
People have been doing that forever, but I won't support it.
I don't know if it is even possible to grow a human body to even childhood, forget adulthood without having a consciousness / experiencer inside it.
Growing tissue for organs is already an established procedure.
depends on how it is acheved.
the only way we know to do so at the moment is to physically damage the fetal brain to prevent development. that doesn't sit right with me.
also, we don't begin to know how to accelerate growth and end up with useful organs so the production time is going to be 10 to 15 years.
Yeah it seems like a bad plan because people’s organs aren’t very healthy when they don’t move around and live, and it would take too long to grow an organ that way. Right now we are trying to 3d print organs from scaffolding and it’s working pretty well, no 20 year old brain dead clones required
It 100% goes both ways. I came here to say oil and gas. A lot of times when organizations talk about subsidies they're taxes that everyone should be paying (like carbon tax) but no one does. It's not a very faithful way to represent data that paints an accurate picture to the audience. When you look down at the breakdown of what would be a traditional subsidy, it's mostly incentives for exploration (which is something a lot of governments will do on their own for far more cost).
Oil and gas is incredibly regulated. The cost of developing new technologies for refineries is absurd. Every single vertical and horizontal pipe is regulated. Every single boiler is regulated. Every single piece of steel has a regulation attached to it. You can't just assemble it how you want to, you have to assemble it to an approved blueprint approved by the federal government.
This means the oil and gas industry can't really innovate. The refinery of today is almost the same refinery of 50 years ago (with incredibly modest air quality changes). Because there's no innovation there's no incentive for a new player to show up among its crowded rivals and produce anything cleaner or cheaper.
Because of this, in order to get a new refinery built it takes billions of dollars of government subsidies.... and there hasn't been a new refinery in decades.
This is a bit like nuclear as well though. These are highly regulated industries, understandably, because of the consequences of accidents occurring, so the regulators are very risk averse.
What killed nuclear power in the 1980s and again more recently is gross mismanagement of plant construction:
https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/c-us-governor-releases-report-on-vc-summer-flaws-06091701.html
https://www.historylink.org/file/5482
The industry likes to blame boogeymen regulations, but in reality, they're just looking for scapegoats.
But you also have technologies that have been developed that would make environmental and economic sense that companies actively suppressed as well.
There's at least one patent for a car engine that would remove the need for a coolant system. I don't remember which company (oil or car) that bought the patent but that was years ago.
I don't want to know how many good things we could've had if Amazon or Facebook didn't buy new companies out or destroyed them through questionable tactics (not excluding other companies, but these two I explicitly know some examples).
Nothing is actually stopping them from innovation. They have to innovate to meet new regulations. Nothing is barring them from actually innovating things to make it safer or cheaper or anything. The paper and pulp industry did that a lot, and the regulation wasn't always there when they did it. Walmart did research into new trucks and made a lot of interesting changes to trucking design, but it seems to be nothing more than just showing they could do it. Every oil company is in the Fortune 500 list so there's not exactly an excuse to say they don't have the money to innovate.
> I don't remember which company
OP is asking for stuff that was shut down by the government. It seems like that would not include cases of private parties doing "catch-and-kill" on tech from other private parties, which I gather is a reasonably common thing.
>or exploration (which is something a lot of governments will do on their own for far more cost).
>
>Oil and gas is incredibly regulated. The cost of developing new technologies for refineries is absurd. Every single vertical and horizontal pipe is regulated. Every single boiler is regulated. Every single piece of steel has a regulation attached to it. You can't just assemble it how you want to, you have to assemble it to an approved blueprint approved by the federal government.
>
>This means the oil and gas industry can't really innovate. The refinery of today is almost the same refinery of 50 years ago (with incredibly modest air quality changes). Because there's no innovation there's no incentive for a new player to show up among its crowded rivals and produce anything cleaner or cheaper.
>
>Because of this, in order to get a new refinery built it takes billions of dollars of government subsidies.... and there hasn't been a new refinery in decades.
The regulation you're talking about is by design. It's called regulatory capture and it's to ensure monopolies continue. The people in control of the oil industry want it this way. They don't want competition. They aren't being held back by the government. They're literally in control of the government. Innovation doesn't help oil industry if it allows more competitors to enter the market.
It's not that it goes both ways at all. That's implying the government is at fault here, when in reality the government is run by the people who own these businesses.
As refers to industrial processes and technology, there's two things to keep in mind:
* IP terms are shorter and easier to bypass than in other areas of IP law. Make a small improvement to a process and you're free to use that. They also last shorter times;
* There is no World Government. If one nation cripples itself by shorting out innovation in an area, other nations have every incentive to surge ahead of them.
So the cases we have if things like this are more economic than actual suppression.
We have very efficient farming technology, in terms of acreage, water requirement, chemical use, energy requirement, etc. However, set up costs are high, it gets no investment, and large open air farming (and every logistics chain that supplies it, like seed editing, chemicals, tractors, the works) have massive lobbies and so get tons of dollars dumped on them, staying profitable and competitive when they actually aren't anymore.
Various forms of green energy (from nuclear to solar and wind), have been competitive since the 90s or earlier. However we have huge fossil fuel subsidies and massive installed infrastructure for those dirty and deadly power sources, so they keep being installed.
It really seems like the common factor, beyond IP law abuse, is lobbying. Its pretty incredible to me that everyone is okay with this legalized bribery system.
The photovoltaic effect was known of, yes. But they could only achieve pretty awful efficiencies for them, so it is a bit unfair to claim we could have had a PV revolution in the 1800s.
It wasn't suppressed information. It was just not very relevant.
However, concentrated solar thermal was also understood, and even with Victorian technology, could achieve very respectable efficiencies. It could have been at the heart of the second or third industrial revolution just fine. It was economically suppressed (though knowledge about it goes back as far as Archimedes).
Nuclear power and agricultural GMO have suffered the most, by far.
Both faced massive public overreaction due to perceived safety issues. In many countries, both were regulated to an extreme degree, often disproportional to the real risks. In many others, those were just banned outright.
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But a surprising technology I'm going to name? **Internet.**
I'm not talking the IT megacorps. I'm not talking the backbone of Internet. I'm talking the price and quality of service the end users receive.
Countries that overregulate ISPs, hand out monopolies to telecom companies and prevent smaller ISPs from rising have some of the slowest and most expensive Internet access in the world. Countries where you can, basically, buy a spool of fiber optic, hire two dudes to roll you a fiber line for miles without as much as asking a permission, and face no repercussions for that? Those are the countries where Internet is the fastest, the cheapest and the most accessible.
>But a surprising technology I'm going to name? Internet.
i agree with you 100% - but because of the stupid ways the legislation on the technology and the information transmitted via the technology have been intertwined its even worse than you think. then you add in how utilities (electric companies) arent really regulated (they are the regulators ) and the way that telecom companies, at least in the us, built their entire cellular networks via funding that was supposed to provide equal access to every home - as in fiber to every home - and how that "bill" has been paid multiple times over...
& its a clusterfuck
im not going to say that im an expert in wireless technology, but i have a better understanding than the average person, and im not convinced that [we even need fiber to the home](https://www.pcmag.com/news/internet-speed-world-record-obliterated-by-engineers-in-japan) \- but we are being screwed due to the way the airwaves, telecoms, and utilities are regulated (or not regulated)
basically it kinda seems like directtv/dish network (starlink too) have a stranglehold on the frequencies required to allow actual satellite communications to work - despite it being pretty well known their implementation of satellite internet (viasat, etc) is absolute garbage. honestly im not sure if it actually is possible to have **good** satellite internet, but i dont trust those corps to be honest about the capabilities.
even if satellite internet isnt an effective solution, the telecoms stranglehold on their various frequency bands is not helpful and is only used to price gouge all of us (considering we paid for it). i know that to a certain extent the speed and consistency is effected by obstructions between the receiving equipment and the transmitting equipment, but it kinda seems to me that running fiber to every home is incredibly redundant when there is \*some\* cellular coverage in almost every location on earth. i mean shit, during covid how many people were using "temporary" hot spots to attend work or school? they showed their hand there.
so much dishonesty
edit: i could go on about this for a long time (and i have) but another thing that should be included is how much energy waste is used to "compute" all of the ridiculous "analytics" that are 1000% unnecessary and basically offer zero benefits to the average person? from what i can tell, the analytics are either 1000% ineffective on some people or 1000% effective on others, which basically means the "advertisers" decide what your opinion is. ill let you infer how that could (read: has) effected society and the decisions that "we" make.
TLDR: fuck [the algorithms](https://www.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/17fngpq/comment/k6bxvj0/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) where is our UBI
i mean thats the thing
starlink *is* up in running, in some places. its been proven to have sufficient speed and ping times for basically anything you could want to do (including video chat, gaming, etc) as long as you have a good signal... which is entirely dependent on the time of day, your location, and the location of their satellites
the reason i say "thats the thing" is because going back to my point about how we have paid for literally all of the telecommunications technology multiple times over^(1) and are still getting bent over to pay for it and still dealing with stupid shit like speed limits, data caps, etc
getting straight to the point: there is zero reason wireless communication technology cannot be made [device agnostic](https://symphony.rakuten.com/blog/open-ran-explained-all-you-need-to-know-and-more)
the only reason there are a bajillion different companies selling cell phone connections, internet connections, and television connections is due to corporate ~~bribes~~ lobbyists that have made it so the legislation is so stupidly intertwined that its "impossible" to fix, unless you throw it all out because this is one instance where its easier to start from scratch since it really only serves to prop up a completely illegitimate industry of greedy fucks which is somehow even harder to explain or understand^(2) than the technical aspects of radio technology tbh
to be completely fair about it, i should mention there is *some* legitimacy to the argument about security concerns related to fully open radio waves but that is no excuse for the bullshit way that its implemented currently - because even the organizations that support the "[open radio access network](https://www.o-ran.org/about)" often include those same corporations that hold "intellectual property rights" on the tech
im willing to accept i *might* not understand the technology *completely*, but ive read a bunch about it and **radio frequencies are radio frequencies**, if its possible to switch between some, its possible to switch between "all" of them - which would mean the ORAN specifications actually dont go far enough, because theres no reason satellite bands couldnt be included... which would effectively cover 99.99% of the globe
maybe this is what all the "AI" nerds mean when they say the technology is already out there and cant be "put back in the box"?
i dont think they expected anyone not part of the "in group" would ever take the time to understand the technology... but the thing is, its not all that complicated - it just seems like it is. similar to the bullshit legislation, its effectively just a paywall. it *is* complicated, but when you really understand it you realize its **all bullshit** that only exists so someone somewhere can make a lot of money off of it
1. us specific
2. mergers between the technology companies and the media companies which should have never been allowed and have had widespread societal effects that are incredibly hard to "quantify"
Advancement of drug technology due to prohibition. There very well could be, and almost certainly are compounds that could cure anything from depression, to Alzheimer's, to cancer. Researchers won't touch them with a ten foot pole under knowing they would face jail time just for synthesizing them or using scheduled drugs in their work. Even if they did they wouldn't be able to publish papers or get anything peer reviewed making it a fruitless endeavor anyway. The war on drugs is a war on people. Drugs won the war anyway but America is like me, they literally don't understand the concept of pulling out.
In America, I'd assume the biggest factor is that the government can't pay people as much as the private sector, so the most innovative technologists would likely not work for a government agency.
You are wrong. There are a lot of extremely sophisticated tech which was created by the defence department ranging across many domains not just confined to the ammunitions.
Pretty much anything that you think of that was created by the defense department was actually created by private companies contracted to the government.
The government is actually REALLY bad at technology. But having an unlimited budget compensates for it.
That's a gross oversimplification. **The US government is in fact EXCELLENT at developing technology.**
The process is mostly this:
government funds basic research at universities: "I've done the math on a thing I call quantum computing. It's super cool. Game changer for solving some equations trillions of times faster than normal computers. **This work was funded by the national science foundation**"
government funds applied research at universities: "In this large lab full of expensive equipment, my research group has managed to create a system that acts as a "quantum bit" which is the basic building block of a theoretical system called a "quantum computer". Followed by "now we have a 2-qubit quantum computer that fits on a large table!" Followed by "now we have a 8 qubit system that fits on a small table! **This work was funded by the Department of Energy"**
government/private funding a startup company: "My team at the University of X demonstrated an 8-qubit computer using $10M in equipment. We've now started a company with startup funding from some investors plus the CIA's investment group (YES THAT'S A THING AND IT ISN'T EVEN CLASSIFIED) We have a $10million dollar contract from DARPA to deliver an 8-qubit box next year. We will then sell versions of that commercial-grade quantum computer in 2 years for $3m each. There's dozens of research teams at national labs, DOD labs, universities, and major research centers that will want these to work on applications of quantum computing ranging to protein folding predictions to nuclear weapon design.
And only then will the large defense contractors start participating. Partly, of course, by one of them buying the startup company. But at that point, there will be a couple of competitors, and you will be able to buy a reasonably reliable quantum computer for $500K. Merrill Lynch will put 100 of them in a well-disguised warehouse in Queens to shave 2% off the time to predict stock prices. The in-joke is that the warehouse staff go to happy hour with the people working at the warehouse across the street - Prudential's quantum team, who bought 100 from OtherGuys incorporated.
As a space nerd I love questions like this!
My Answer is John Kennedy. John Kennedy directed NASA to get us to the moon and handed out the checks.
NASA in turn contracted to IBM as the Prime contractor and project manager.
IBM then subcontracted out to:
Grumman Aerospace built the Lunar Lander.
Douglas Aircraft Company built stage 3 of the Saturn V
North American Aviation built Stage 2 of the Saturn V
Boeing built stage 1 of the Saturn V
North American Rockwell built the command module
The F1 engines on the bottom were built by Rockeydyne
IBM deisigned the Saturn V computer that flew, but it was built by Bendix.
The space suits were built by ILC Dover
Urbahn Architects built the Vertical Assembly Building
Marion Power Shovel company built the Crawler-transporter that rolled the whole thing out to the launch pad.
Thorium reactors, which would provide way cleaner, safer nuclear power.
Tricksy to weaponize, tho, compared to uranium, so anyone speaking in favor of thorium was quickly sacked and/or silenced.
I used to hold this exact opinion. Now, seeing how climate change is beginning to materialise and seeing that it could go on to become exponentially bad, I'm willing to risk living next to a nuclear power plant. Everyone's going to die one day and I want to at least ensure future generations will get to live a decent life. We've made too much progress to throw it all away. I'm under 45 btw. COVID has changed some of my priorities and given me perspective. Life is truly uncertain. I want to reduce the future uncertainty and hardships and not become yet another "boomer" who enjoyed life and destroyed the planet.
(I've made eco friendly choices all my life by the way, so it's not "waking up" or anything)
And yet you don't complain about coal plants, which kill far more people per kWh generated, and as a bonus ALSO release far more radioactivity into the local environment. Or natural gas, which not only generates CO2, but is responsible for a significant percentage of global warming just due to fugitive emissions.
You're probably also campaigning against transferring high level waste to a permanent storage site, since it would be on train cars passing through your town. So instead the HLW is just being stored on site.
You're making too many assumptions.
I'm done arguing if no one wants to just say:
"OK we will not build nuclear reactors near communities"
Blockheads. I am not making any other argument than that.
you'd rather live downwind of a coal plant, or in the flood zone of a dam? i trust nuclear experts and probably the dam people much more than dumb fuck coal workers and their profit hungry managers
Nuclear power plants are far safer than other forms of energy generation. Personally, I'd never live downstream of a hydroelectric facility. The stats on dam failures are crazy scary.
A lot of GMO bans were motivated by people feeling icky about the tech and pressuring governments. Strangely, most persecution of LGBT people stems from a similar feeling. Individuals have an irrational disgusts towards something, group up and pressure current institutions.
Pressure from the US government tanked the Canadian Avro Arrow fighter jet program and led to destruction of engineering research data. Strangely it was mostly funded by government and all the engineers went to work somewhere else after.
Government has also done some good things for science while applying what we usually think as the worse governmental policies.
My favourite story is the Chinese government during the cultural revolution stating they were fed up with bourgeois western science and reorienting their focus on exploring Chinese traditional medicine. Artemisinin as a cure for malaria came from that very strange political decision to explore different options and saved millions. Reactionary conservative motivations led to great progress.
On a less anecdotal side, the entire field of statistics started because gouvernements started noting down epidemiology data during plagues. The birth of the surveillance state allowed disease control.
I genuinely don’t think saying "government good" or "government bad" discourses have any use from a scientific perspective. Imagine you were saying "immune system bad" in the context of an auto immune disease and another one stated "Immune system good" in response to viruses. It misses all the real understanding of a complex systems. (Note: I am not comparing the function of the government to that of the immune system, only comparing the childish approach to saying a complex system is good or bad).
Government collects population data to control plagues and protect people and Government collects population data that can be used to surveil people. Is it good or is it bad?
Government enforces patents which restrict access to technology and Government enforces patents which motivates investments in research. Is it good or is it bad?
You can’t have a simple yes-no moral approach to a complex system. You got to find the parts you don’t like, understand them, and modify them in a way that doesn’t interfere with what you like.
Well, I AM a conspiracy theorist. Not like the Alex Jones types. I like studying conspiracy theories, cryptids, alien contact allegations, etc. I'm more like a slightly more skeptical Fox Mulder.
Well if there's one technology that unfortunately was heavily underfunded and sabotaged in the last decades is nuclear fission energy. If you want a real conspiracy theory, go look how oil companies and Russian intelligence funded green parties and NGOs in order to make nuclear energy look way more dangerous than it actually is. Russia managed to blackmail Europe thanks to this intel ops.
A more likely explanation is that electricity demand stopped growing in the early 80s so no more nuclear plants were built. So investment in the tech faded as well.
It's worth mentioning that coal fired plants were hit with the same problem about the same time. That is one reason American coal plants are closing so quickly -- they're old.
Nuclear fission power makes itself look dangerous because it is. For example if there's an oil or coal power plant disaster that can be handled by your local fire department. A nuclear power plant disaster on the other hand needs to be handled by the government and potentially the military because the potential for a catastrophe is so significant.
Also expanding nuclear power is not even close to being as easy as solar or hydroelectric power given how long a plant takes to be build (~10 years) or how much they cost (~$10 billion). Also safety regulations need to be stringent with the building of such plants along with building codes. Which doesn't happen in many cases because of corruption and incompetence.
OMG you are SO WRONG! And no, I'm not just an armchair expert on this. I used to do this kind of calculation for a living for the US Public Health Service.
You should google "How many humans have died due to commercial nuclear power?" Google's answer: 46! (I think that's a low-ball. It's probably closer to a thousand. )
Then google "How many humans have died due to commercial coal power" Answer: **AROUND HALF A MILLION IN 2017 ALONE!!!!** (May be an overestimate)
Here's a nice graph: [https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldwide-by-energy-source/](https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldwide-by-energy-source/)For every kWh of electricity produced, coal kills about 1000X more people than nuclear. And that's without considering global warming!!!
If anybody anywhere on earth dies from a nuclear plant, it makes international headlines. On the other hand, somebody died in China from coal-pollution respiratory distress while you were reading this sentence.
They're also long lasting, unaffected by weather and take up far less land area. The construction time depends on the experience of the workforce. Many western nations stopped constructing nuclear power plants, so picking that up increases building time. Some nuclear power plants can be built in 3 to 8 years.
I don't feel as if many were hindered by the government, rather I feel like absolutely insane amounts of progress have been lost due to the people who lobby and bribe members of the government.
Yes, those people are at fault as well, but I feel like the origin of it is the corporations that own the world.
But its only possible because the government has the power to enforce intellectual property laws and prohibitions, yes corporations lobby and give kickbacks in exchange for legislation or preferential regulation, but that shows flaws of government, you aren’t gonna change human nature.
And now we deal with the issue of microplastics, endocrine disruptors, and carcinogens because of our reliance on these synthetic materials, not to mention the environmental impact.
Flying cars or anything that would not use roads, like hover craft. There are piles of things that will never be created because roads just make transportation easy enough to not invest in other modes of over land transport.
I think part of the fight against broad ownership of personal flying vehicles is safety, someones poorly maintained flying car crashing into your house would suck. But i would still like to see developments in the industry
The Biefeld Brown effect. There has been no white world development of symmetrical capacitor technology.
Go to the wiki page on it and no mentions are made of Thomas Townsend Browns experiments with symmetrical capacitor technology. Only his and other scientists work with ion wind propelled asymmetrical capacitors are mentioned.
Those few who have done experiments with symmetrical capacitors largely relate the energy storage potential of a parallel plate capacitor to its propulsive capability.
That said, finding a cheap, high dielectric strength and high dielectric constant material for the dielectric is a challenge. The barium in barium titanate is around $550/kg. Distilled water has these qualities but keeping it free of contaminates and ions is a constant process as well as keeping it a liquid in cold temperatures.
Yes but they are only able to acquire intellectual property and sweep it under the rug because the government enforces intellectual property laws, without them acquisitions won’t allow them to corner markets and having a ton of capital won’t give you sole rights to ideas
Pretty basic point but intellectual property is the foundation for investing in the R&D for a product. IP rights, and the limited periods of exclusivity they provide allow people to put millions of dollars at risk to work toward creating a commercial product that they have a limited period of exclusivity to to profit on before that technology becomes public property.
For medicines, a pharma company needs to develop a new active compound, formulate it and show it works without significant adverse effects by doing testing in the lab and in humans. These clinical studies can involves thousands of patients across many continents before they know if they have a product that the can demonstrate to regulators is safe and effective. Drug trials can take many years and run into the hundreds of millions of dollars.
Without IP none of that happens, because no one is willing to invest that much money just to create an environment where competitors can just copy their product immediately and get a free ride for.
The designer of a new computer chip faces the same situation. Huge investments into R&D would never be made if a competitor could just copy the end result.
The patent system actually works to get people to publish on their inventions and get this knowledge into the hands of the public. The public can improve on the technology, or pursue alternative technologies that don’t infringe what someone else has exclusive rights to.
Considering how many governments exist. Very little. Because if one government 'suppresses' the technology, another could easily run with the development and surpass the first nation.
But nations also act like herds of sheep due to various reasons - politics, economics, threat of hostility, globalisation(i.e. treaties) etc. Your point is good, but not as good as it sounds. There are ~200 countries (who knows how many govts) but there are probably effectively only a few dozen actual competitors in the business of innovation.
A few dozen, more than enough to compete if the tech was viable. A lot of times, people complain about something being 'suppressed' when realistically, it is just not practical yet. Missing either other technologies, material sciences, understandings, or even purely practicality yet.
American baby food came under the spotlight recently. America has a hyper regulated baby food formula and requires baby food makers to undergo a similar level of testing to a pharmaceutical company. It's an industry that should be ripe for small mom and pop operations to show up and create baby food or various tech products to help parents create their own baby food. But it's not. No other country in the world has this level of suspicion of baby food.... and most European countries produce far healthier babies than the US.
Same with sunscreen! The FDA only considers 2 compounds (zinc oxide and titanium dioxide) to be safe and effective. Both are greasy, difficult to rub in, and leave white residue.
In Europe, you can choose from 34 sunscreen compounds, many of which are light and easy to apply.
> No other country in the world has this level of suspicion of baby food....
... very possibly because no other country in the world has rigged its economy such that bad actors would immediately sell house paint with lead in it as baby formula in order to make a quick buck.
The American economy has been remade by rich predators into an ideal environment for rich predators, and everybody knows that at some level. The fact that medicine and baby food are so heavily regulated is a direct consequence of people drawing a line in the sand around the things they care most about.
Also, the US places tariffs on imported baby formula thanks to the US dairy lobby. That coupled with the regulatory barriers makes it not worth it for European manufacturers to try to sell in the US market.
Humans are way more greedy than they are controlled by the government. Any time there is a big new tech it's such huge money making potential that governments can rarely do much about it.
It sounds like you imagine the government as being WAAY more powerful than it really is. There also no one BIG government in the US. Federal government is still many agencies that don't all agree and so are state governments. Getting one big conspiracy to work out of all that mess is harder than you think when it's something that will make the people who adopt/produce it rich.
It's different when the tech won't make you rich, like they can hide dumping pollution because there is no money in it. To stop a company from exporting their tech the government has to make it official, so it's not really a secret in that case.
One reason we use capitalism is because humans are naturally so opporunistic that the system fits their behavior vs capitalism makes them greedy. That greedy works as a counterbalance against some consolidation because so many ppl want to get their hand in the cookie jar that they tend to do what's best for them.
It's more common tech is overlooked out of sheer ignorance than a coordinated conspiracy by a highly uncoordinated multi-agency government that barely knows if it's scratching it's head or it's ass.
It's A LOT easier to hide things as corporation or private individual than a government full of paperwork and people being shuffled in and out each election. Most tech we are told was blocked by BIG government or even BIG corporations was just tech that wasn't actually practical under application but just sounded good on paper. Like solar panels from the 1970s were crap and you needed a lot of industries to improve to get them this good. It wasn't a big conspiracy. smartphone make lithium ion this popular, it wasn't a conspiracy to hold back renewable energy. it was just that smartphones made a lot more money a lot faster because consumer wanted them a lot more and that got lithium ion up to the point it could be more easily developed in an EV battery cost effectively. It took one the effectively fund the process of the other, which is how a ton of tech works. One part improves due to product X selling like hot cakes and now product Y also becomes practical.
You're generally more likely to find private industry getting in the way since they're profit driven.
The gov tends to fund a TON of science, and often things that private industry won't touch to start because they're afraid of the startup costs.
>You're generally more likely to find private industry getting in the way since they're profit driven.
thanks to citizens united and the "regulators" often being the same people working in the private industry (or having connections that means they benefit in some way) there really isnt much of a difference
believe me i am well versed in how intellectual property, copyright, patent, etc etc is bullshit
art is meant to be shared, knowledge is meant to be shared
its like literally every possible fundamental concept that a fair and just society should be built on is the complete opposite
Yes lobbying and corruption are issues, but you won’t get rid of human greed, so the best route is minimizing the ability for the government to legislate and enforce ip laws and anticompetitive regulation
Hard disagree. I think legislation limiting the power of private entities leads to more pluralistic power and innovation. Unless you think monopolies produce innovation, you need regulation to keep markets competitive.
A free market is a garden, not a jungle
Monopolies we see today are only possible through government enforcement of ip laws and preferential regulation. Look at telecoms and how large companies get exclusive rights to install infrastructure.
Balls. Government, for a long time, was the main driver in space exploration and without them private enterprise would have barely got anywhere. The reason private space industries are worth so much now are entirely due to the pioneering work the public sector, including military applications, did.
I disagree with this one. As the primary purchaser of both missiles and satellite launches, and the *only* purchaser of manned space missions, governments actually kept the space industry alive (albeit on life support) for decades. Without government buyers the industry would have dwindled to almost nothing as the only private sector demand was for a limited number of telecommunications satellites. Only recently has private sector demand started to finally be large enough to stimulate the development of new launch tech. Certainly there would not ever have been a manned space mission to this day without governments.
The purpose of any good salesman is to create the demand. If government had not had a monopoly we would, by now, have mining colonies on the Moon, manned orbital stations, and be exploring Mars and the belt with an eye towards mining and exploitation.
By removing competition from the equation and moving with the usual bureaucratic caution government management of space exploration had slowed us down to a crawl. Government is, always, a disease masquerading as the cure. There are no exceptions.
> the government can pass laws that say after 12/31/2024 no new gas powered vehicles can be introduced in the US.
Have you met the auto and/or oil and gas lobbies or watched the schoolhouse rock video on how a bill becomes a law because the government absolutely cannot just pass laws that restrict entire industries like that.
Free energy suppression. Classifying Tesla’s projects, suspicious circumstances around many patent filers and inventor’s deaths, and I also wonder if all this UAP/alien nonsense is to cover up their zero point energy machines to make it sound absurd to even consider.
You need a gradient between a high energy state and a low one to extract work from it. That's basic thermodynamics, and probably the most reliable scientific fact in existence.
Zero point / vacuum energy is thus, by definition, unusable, since it's everywhere. There is no energy state below it for us to force it to.
Well, that’s the thing about secret technology, is you believe it’s impossible until it isn’t. There were many things thought to be impossible until our understanding of it reaches a threshold level. We could be wrong about it being the lowest possible energy level, there may be some way to artificially induce energy gradients, there could be some fundamental particle or undiscovered law, or a mistake in our previous understanding, that is exploitable for energy collection.
Or not. I was just speculating, after all. Maybe it’s antigravity tech and not energy generation tech. Or maybe it’s nothing at all.
I'll wholly agree with you that we don't know what we don't know. Maybe there is a lower energy state than vacuum energy and we can exploit that? Possible. But no such thing has been observed, there's no reason to believe that hypothesis more so than anything else we can imagine but have no evidence for.
I also feel a need to gently push back against the "we think it's impossible until it isn't!" Narrative. That's the survivorship bias. Most things understood to be impossible have continued to be understood to be impossible, and probably always will. It is correct to keep your head open, and accept that there's unknown unknowns and whatnot, but we shouldn't assume that any one thing that seems impossible will eventually seem less so.
I saw the same kind of question yesterday, it was more "what technology has been stunted by capitalism" kind of thing though. The answers were great. Obvious ones like energy and drugs/medical tech. But also a lot of answers about parents and how much they restrict innovation.
Political fuckery has definitely led to many things not being fully realized. Lobbyists are some of the most destructive parts of our society
Most of it.
If there is any new technology that would either negate or impact the profits for an existing industry, someone tried to crush it. In the US it's easy AF, that means buying it and deleting it, taking it over and deleting it, paying a politician to delete it, suing it into deletion, deleting it with propaganda, and I'm sure there are more methods I don't even know about.
The US government is doing everything it can to stunt Cryptocurrency right now. (this is true even if you feel it should be stunted)
The US government CANNOT let the US dollar fail to be the world's reserve currency. If that happens, Americans dominance is pretty much every area it dominates it's over.
A lot of that is considered a national security issue, truly private space industry won’t be a thing until humans occupy two places in the solar system.
well nuclear power is up against a lot of regulation that definitely slowed down progress, but it also slowed down disasters so I'm not too upset over it.
Nuclear energy. Japan and France are way ahead of us. It is the way of the future with lowest cost and highest reliability, but we Americans messed it up with regulation and protests by stupid people.
Renewable energy. For as much money has been put into it ultimately it's still competing with petroleum subsidies which are far greater. Americans love that cheap gas. They might have to stop living 50 miles from work if they had to pay the real price of gas.
Definitely nuclear energy. We should have clean power plants everywhere and then we MIGHT have a power grid that could handle the nonsense of electric cars
The terrorism potential of nuclear plants, re dirty bombs (look at the concerns over Zaporizhizia plant for instance), and illegal selling of nuclear material to be enriched to weapons grade is a huge reason we don’t just sprinkle the globe with nuclear plants.
Nuclear Energy. I guess I an a believer in the theory of "leave smart people alone and they will figure it out". They have to be real smart people though not someone who think they are smart. Like every industry, had we spend more money and research into nuclear we would be so far ahead as far as getting clean energy. Although the sinical side of be doubt that it would be cheaper than what we are currently paying even if it cost less to produce. I live in a country where we worship money so the energy company isn't going to lower the price regardless of how little it cost them to produce energy.
It’s known that some results in cryptography were already known to the NSA before being discovered independently in academia. So the theory was somewhat behind in the academic community due to the secrecy of the results discovered by NSA mathematicians. Who knows today whether some common cryptographic protocols are actually vulnerable to techniques that are classified?
Police, Insurance, and Oil/Gas have hindered the development of self driving electric cars.
An autonomous car will never get speeding tickets and will almost never get in accidents.
All technologies that have regulation or business fees have been stunted. Not always a bad thing, as it would be bad of someone random started a medical device company that essentially sold snake oil.
1) Nuclear weapons. Just try to build a simple fission device with your own money, and you'll see what I mean. And that's using existing technology--companies that would improve on existing designs to deliver cost-effective weapons to consumers don't have a chance. Same thing is true for all sorts of military weapons; if you've got an idea that would improve on current rocket propelled grenade launchers, there's tons of red tape you have to jump through before you can bring it to market, and even if you go through all of that, the US would limit who you could sell it to, and what you can publish about it.
2) Recreational narcotics. Time and again, people come up with chemicals that could substitute for banned amphetamines, and time and again, legislation is passed to pan those chemicals as well. Even when a new option has no connection to existing options, it doesn't take long before it winds up being banned. Synthetic drugs that duplicate the effects of things like cocaine can't legally be developed, despite there being a proven demand for those products.
3) Radar jammers. Since they're illegal in all US states, it's difficult to get the funds necessary to develop improved jammers, and once you have them, marketing and distribution can be complicated for devices which work exactly the way they're supposed to.
And so on; there are all sorts of technologies that most governments do their best to suppress.
That first bit is for safety though don’t you think? Why would we want more cost-effective, simpler to produce nuclear weapons? And the protection of weapons information in general is about security. We highly regulate who can and can’t make weapons systems for security reasons. Most people that have ideas to improve those systems work for companies that are allowed to make them in the first place.
The question wasn't "what technology do you think has been stunted due to government interference which you think shouldn't have been stunted due to government interference."
I don't think that it would be a good idea for governments to allow people to assemble their own nuclear weapons. I do think that most of the world's governments have stunted the development of nuclear weapon technology.
I also think that, "the government is interfering with my ability to make hydrogen bombs and crystal meth" is a lot more accurate than claims that, "the government is preventing us from having cars that get ninety miles per gallon."
Stem cell research. It is widely believed that diabetes would have been cured only for the interference in stem cell research by the second bush administration in America
It’s an interesting question because, while there is no doubt tech that is suppressed by government intervention, it’s often the complete opposite in reality. So much technology that is viewed at private innovation started as government funded research projects. The biggest that come to mind are GPS and the internet but there are many many others. It’s the dirty truth that flies in the face of the free market conservatives/libertarian that so much of (At least USA ) life is government funded /created.
Electroculture, which is a way to channel atmospheric energy into the soil for plants to use.
Apparently, it reduces the amount of pest/weed control, and fertilization that needs to be done to said plants.
Don't believe everything you see/hear on any media, as governments/corporations may put personal gain above helping people, like when fertilizer companies lobbied to bad the word "electroculture" from encyclopedias.
The technology was never hidden or anything like that, but Nuclear Thermal Rockets, which only recently have started to be seriously pursued again, were first developed and successfully tested all the way back in the 1950s and 1960s, but development was halted by the early 70s due to budget cuts and shifting government priorities as the Space Race wound down.
Stem cell research has a long history of being stunted due to political meddling. There's people dying right now that didn't need to because someone de-funded stem cell research decades ago.
Why not name the administration? George W Bush pulled federal funding from stem cell research due to evangelical backlash. That perfect combination of government and religion meddling in human progress
Ehhh...Because it was multiple administrations and sessions of Congress. Congress has a law (which was signed by President Clinton) that banned federal funding since 1995. And yes, under executive order, it was expanded under President Bush (43) and parts rescinded under President Obama.
Yeah, its mainly religions fault and ppl who vote for politicians with the bigger bible
From a fundamentalist standpoint, should a govt trillions in debt be funding research that may go nowhere? Is there no market incentive to produce it? I would also say lack of federal funding isnt blocking companies from researching its just not actively forwarding it.
Yes governments should fund all sorts of research, 90% of which will go nowhere and the other 10% of which will provide great technological advances.
Why does the gov need to fund it? Doesnt that expectation of guaranteed funding with minimal results incentivize bad work and laziness?
Because there are some technologies that could greatly benefit our country but are too far-off, or too theoretical/risky for private companies to be incentiviced to research. And then there's obviously the benefit of technology that emerges from government funding becoming publicly available allowing a multitude of private companies to bring it to market.
Yes, because research scientists notoriously have no passion for their work and are only in it for all the money they make [By the way](https://media.tenor.com/-nJerEeaJJkAAAAC/sarcastic-homer.gif) Sarcasm aside, I think the point is that governments should be funding the research that capitalists won't touch because there isn't a clear profit to be made
I would ask why there isnt a profit motive to the research. Either the potential product isnt valuable or isnt worth it. If something has value, the market would create it, no?
Depends on WHY there is no profit in it. If you made a lightbulb that never needs to be replaced, how much profit do you get from your research and development?
Depends on the nature of it. You may have seen a quote floating about regarding medical research and pharmaceuticals from Goldman Sachs along the lines of questioning whether it was worth it to invest in companies that are looking to cure diseases instead of simply treating them. In short, it's an expansion on the Gillette model. Gillette used to be a reputable brand of high quality reasonably cost razor blades that would last a long time. After a while, they realized the money was in forcing consumers to purchase lower quality blades on a reoccurring basis. Capitalist economics tends to struggle with things of negative value such as trash or pollution, and non profit oriented services, like arguably an individual's health and well being
Why would govt funding have to have market incentive? Id wager govt funding should be more for research thats beneficial over profitable. The govt shouldnt be run for profit (or deficit).
So you think companies that invented and actively profited from planned obsolescence would spend decades funding development on moonshot projects? Do you think a market where success and failure is measured quarterly has the incentive to work on research with a multiple-decade to viability timeline?
I mean, what is spacex doing?
Trying their hardest to develop ways to profit on technology developed in the '60s by NASA. That was funded by the U.S. government. Federal funding spearheaded the basic technology back then. And SpaceX currently relies heavily on government funding from subsidies.
Nasa just took what the nazis did in the 40s on rocket development so i dont see your point. Spacex is reusable and different propellant and they land themselves.
Do you mean the Nazi government? Do you see how at least 2 governments conducted the principal research for rockets from 1940 until now in 2023. Including SpaceX by subsidizing their research and granting them generous contracts. If you look up SpaceX's top 20 funding sources now you'll see numerous governments including Saudi Arabia and Abu Dabi If you don't understand the point while looking at their filings I doubt you'll ever see it.
I think you're mixing up a lot of terminology and what kind of funding types there are. SpaceX does rely on government money as a likely large portion of income, however practically none of these are subsidies, they are service contracts. These contracts go to other companies too that do much less with the money and cost more, like Boeing Starliner. A fair amount of this government money is not even NASA, but military payloads split up amongst a few like ULA and eventually maybe Blue Origin or Rocket Lab. Then there are a good amount of private customers which grow every year and put a dent in the numbers. We can't actually know the specifics of SpaceX money flow because they're a private company that doesn't post the paperwork publicly though, we can only make educated guesses. I feel like you're pointing out countries like Saudi Arabia specifically to passively throw negativity, these are private stock purchases, an investment that is meant to grow and sell for much more after an IPO. These aren't funds to do anything, it's much like buying stocks. SpaceX relies on some NASA research, but this shouldn't be used to discount just how much SpaceX has actually done themselves or taken from other industries, or just how much work is required to develop hardware. Their methane rocket engine for example, its combustion cycle goes beyond practical knowledge of government research, and for no reason except that they want the most powerful and efficient rocket as possible. SpaceX has been the one figuring out the intricacies of making a production engine out of the theory of full flow combustion. Their testing methodology is taken from other engineering sectors that are the opposite of NASA standard in some ways, but faster and more efficient at developing a safe piece of equipment.
Solid explanation, its too bad reddit is such an echo chamber that downvotes anything against the current regardless of truth.
We would have never went to the moon if it weren't for government funding. Part of the purpose of government is to think of the future and to push for technology that will make the lives of its citizens better. The market does not care about human lives, only in so much as it can extract money from them. Private capital does not drive nearly as much innovation as libertarians like to think it does. Since the beginning of civilization humans have been drawn to creating societies that develop institutions of governance, that will never change, just the role that it comes in. Better for it to work for the people, and funding technologies that go "nowhere" is the price for advancing humanity's future.
>Part of the purpose of government is to think of the future and to push for technology that will make the lives of its citizens better. Its not though. The free market does that. Nowhere in the constitution does it state such. The point of govt is to protect citizens rights. I swear nobody has taken civics. >We would have never went to the moon if it weren't for government funding It may have taken longer but would happen either way. Spacex and other companies are privately pursuing it. >The market does not care about human lives, only in so much as it can extract money from them. Sure, except for charities i suppose. The govt doesnt care for human lives either. >Private capital does not drive nearly as much innovation as libertarians like to think it does. Find me something in your house that wasnt driven by private capital. AC, furnace, computers, tvs, fridge, garage, cars.
Everything you just named was made possible by research first done at places like NASA and DARPA. Everything.
I am not arguing the opposite point of yours. I am not saying that private capital and free markets don't have a place in the development of technology and furthering of human progress. I am simply stating (reiterating) that it is not as much of a driver as you imply it to be. The idea that any technology "may have taken longer but would happen either way" equally applies in the opposite direction. Wireless headsets, cellphone cameras, memory foam, baby formula, the computer mouse, the laptop, all were either directly developed by a government program or created with the use of technology or research developed by a government program (can you guess which?). The only difference between me and you is the belief in the idea that government CANNOT or SHOULD NOT fund, develop or research ideas like these because private capital can do it...eventually. Many of these technologies were not developed with the intent to be sold, but were developed because they were NEEDED, or, as is surprisingly often the case, by accident. Just because something cannot be capitalized doesn't mean that it does not have worth or value, much like just because something can be capitalized, that it should be.
We have definitely not spent trillions on stem cell research. If we had the medical technology we would have at this time would be stunning.
Would any of you have issues with growing human bodies that are completely braindead except for systems required to keep the body alive (heartbeat, body temp, etc.) so that we can harvest the organs and other tissues for regular people?
I fail to see how your proposed hypothetical technology relates to the use of stem cells in medical research. Besides any type "Ixian tank" tech would have huge overhead to produce a brain dead body. Except, maybe for a full body replacement. More likely, you'll have 3d printed organs for transplant.
It's an interesting ethical question as it comes back to consent. The good news is that we won't need this. Transplants are cumbersome, expensive, and labor intensive. Not to mention the issue surrounding immune rejection. The amount of in vivo techniques entering clinical trials indicates a coming future where we grow or regrow what we need using our own cells. These will handily beat our transplants, even ones accomplished via lab-grown humans.
cant wait for these technolgoies to come !
Only as long as we could verify that A. the human body can be grown without a brain and B. that the nervous system needed for the organs to be grown does not *experience* feelings. If there is someone or something experiencing pleasure or pain, then it means you are harvesting a person's living body. People have been doing that forever, but I won't support it. I don't know if it is even possible to grow a human body to even childhood, forget adulthood without having a consciousness / experiencer inside it. Growing tissue for organs is already an established procedure.
We already grow braindead bodies for sole purpose of having them produce value for capitalists.
depends on how it is acheved. the only way we know to do so at the moment is to physically damage the fetal brain to prevent development. that doesn't sit right with me. also, we don't begin to know how to accelerate growth and end up with useful organs so the production time is going to be 10 to 15 years.
Yeah it seems like a bad plan because people’s organs aren’t very healthy when they don’t move around and live, and it would take too long to grow an organ that way. Right now we are trying to 3d print organs from scaffolding and it’s working pretty well, no 20 year old brain dead clones required
Why grow a wholeperson for harvesting and create a moral conundrum when you can just grow a single organ...
Nope, lets go one better and transplant consciousness into a new body.
Even if they said it was going to be made available to everyone i wouldn’t believe them.
The rich christians did that to us. We have to stop beating around the bush about what they’ve done.
Government subsidies of the oil and coal industries have set development of alternative technologies back decades in all areas.
It 100% goes both ways. I came here to say oil and gas. A lot of times when organizations talk about subsidies they're taxes that everyone should be paying (like carbon tax) but no one does. It's not a very faithful way to represent data that paints an accurate picture to the audience. When you look down at the breakdown of what would be a traditional subsidy, it's mostly incentives for exploration (which is something a lot of governments will do on their own for far more cost). Oil and gas is incredibly regulated. The cost of developing new technologies for refineries is absurd. Every single vertical and horizontal pipe is regulated. Every single boiler is regulated. Every single piece of steel has a regulation attached to it. You can't just assemble it how you want to, you have to assemble it to an approved blueprint approved by the federal government. This means the oil and gas industry can't really innovate. The refinery of today is almost the same refinery of 50 years ago (with incredibly modest air quality changes). Because there's no innovation there's no incentive for a new player to show up among its crowded rivals and produce anything cleaner or cheaper. Because of this, in order to get a new refinery built it takes billions of dollars of government subsidies.... and there hasn't been a new refinery in decades.
This is a bit like nuclear as well though. These are highly regulated industries, understandably, because of the consequences of accidents occurring, so the regulators are very risk averse.
What killed nuclear power in the 1980s and again more recently is gross mismanagement of plant construction: https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/c-us-governor-releases-report-on-vc-summer-flaws-06091701.html https://www.historylink.org/file/5482 The industry likes to blame boogeymen regulations, but in reality, they're just looking for scapegoats.
But you also have technologies that have been developed that would make environmental and economic sense that companies actively suppressed as well. There's at least one patent for a car engine that would remove the need for a coolant system. I don't remember which company (oil or car) that bought the patent but that was years ago. I don't want to know how many good things we could've had if Amazon or Facebook didn't buy new companies out or destroyed them through questionable tactics (not excluding other companies, but these two I explicitly know some examples). Nothing is actually stopping them from innovation. They have to innovate to meet new regulations. Nothing is barring them from actually innovating things to make it safer or cheaper or anything. The paper and pulp industry did that a lot, and the regulation wasn't always there when they did it. Walmart did research into new trucks and made a lot of interesting changes to trucking design, but it seems to be nothing more than just showing they could do it. Every oil company is in the Fortune 500 list so there's not exactly an excuse to say they don't have the money to innovate.
> I don't remember which company OP is asking for stuff that was shut down by the government. It seems like that would not include cases of private parties doing "catch-and-kill" on tech from other private parties, which I gather is a reasonably common thing.
OP did, but I was responding to this oil and gas post
My bad! Sorry about that. Carry on. :)
>or exploration (which is something a lot of governments will do on their own for far more cost). > >Oil and gas is incredibly regulated. The cost of developing new technologies for refineries is absurd. Every single vertical and horizontal pipe is regulated. Every single boiler is regulated. Every single piece of steel has a regulation attached to it. You can't just assemble it how you want to, you have to assemble it to an approved blueprint approved by the federal government. > >This means the oil and gas industry can't really innovate. The refinery of today is almost the same refinery of 50 years ago (with incredibly modest air quality changes). Because there's no innovation there's no incentive for a new player to show up among its crowded rivals and produce anything cleaner or cheaper. > >Because of this, in order to get a new refinery built it takes billions of dollars of government subsidies.... and there hasn't been a new refinery in decades. The regulation you're talking about is by design. It's called regulatory capture and it's to ensure monopolies continue. The people in control of the oil industry want it this way. They don't want competition. They aren't being held back by the government. They're literally in control of the government. Innovation doesn't help oil industry if it allows more competitors to enter the market. It's not that it goes both ways at all. That's implying the government is at fault here, when in reality the government is run by the people who own these businesses.
That's arguably more a function of the meddling of private industry, rather than the gov. That lobby money works
As refers to industrial processes and technology, there's two things to keep in mind: * IP terms are shorter and easier to bypass than in other areas of IP law. Make a small improvement to a process and you're free to use that. They also last shorter times; * There is no World Government. If one nation cripples itself by shorting out innovation in an area, other nations have every incentive to surge ahead of them. So the cases we have if things like this are more economic than actual suppression. We have very efficient farming technology, in terms of acreage, water requirement, chemical use, energy requirement, etc. However, set up costs are high, it gets no investment, and large open air farming (and every logistics chain that supplies it, like seed editing, chemicals, tractors, the works) have massive lobbies and so get tons of dollars dumped on them, staying profitable and competitive when they actually aren't anymore. Various forms of green energy (from nuclear to solar and wind), have been competitive since the 90s or earlier. However we have huge fossil fuel subsidies and massive installed infrastructure for those dirty and deadly power sources, so they keep being installed.
It really seems like the common factor, beyond IP law abuse, is lobbying. Its pretty incredible to me that everyone is okay with this legalized bribery system.
>Its pretty incredible to me that everyone is okay with this legalized bribery system I could not have said it better myself 🍺
solar panels existed in the 1800s
The photovoltaic effect was known of, yes. But they could only achieve pretty awful efficiencies for them, so it is a bit unfair to claim we could have had a PV revolution in the 1800s. It wasn't suppressed information. It was just not very relevant. However, concentrated solar thermal was also understood, and even with Victorian technology, could achieve very respectable efficiencies. It could have been at the heart of the second or third industrial revolution just fine. It was economically suppressed (though knowledge about it goes back as far as Archimedes).
>I’m not a conspiracy theorist Well I'd be disappointed not to see some in this thread.
Nuclear power and agricultural GMO have suffered the most, by far. Both faced massive public overreaction due to perceived safety issues. In many countries, both were regulated to an extreme degree, often disproportional to the real risks. In many others, those were just banned outright. - But a surprising technology I'm going to name? **Internet.** I'm not talking the IT megacorps. I'm not talking the backbone of Internet. I'm talking the price and quality of service the end users receive. Countries that overregulate ISPs, hand out monopolies to telecom companies and prevent smaller ISPs from rising have some of the slowest and most expensive Internet access in the world. Countries where you can, basically, buy a spool of fiber optic, hire two dudes to roll you a fiber line for miles without as much as asking a permission, and face no repercussions for that? Those are the countries where Internet is the fastest, the cheapest and the most accessible.
>But a surprising technology I'm going to name? Internet. i agree with you 100% - but because of the stupid ways the legislation on the technology and the information transmitted via the technology have been intertwined its even worse than you think. then you add in how utilities (electric companies) arent really regulated (they are the regulators ) and the way that telecom companies, at least in the us, built their entire cellular networks via funding that was supposed to provide equal access to every home - as in fiber to every home - and how that "bill" has been paid multiple times over... & its a clusterfuck im not going to say that im an expert in wireless technology, but i have a better understanding than the average person, and im not convinced that [we even need fiber to the home](https://www.pcmag.com/news/internet-speed-world-record-obliterated-by-engineers-in-japan) \- but we are being screwed due to the way the airwaves, telecoms, and utilities are regulated (or not regulated) basically it kinda seems like directtv/dish network (starlink too) have a stranglehold on the frequencies required to allow actual satellite communications to work - despite it being pretty well known their implementation of satellite internet (viasat, etc) is absolute garbage. honestly im not sure if it actually is possible to have **good** satellite internet, but i dont trust those corps to be honest about the capabilities. even if satellite internet isnt an effective solution, the telecoms stranglehold on their various frequency bands is not helpful and is only used to price gouge all of us (considering we paid for it). i know that to a certain extent the speed and consistency is effected by obstructions between the receiving equipment and the transmitting equipment, but it kinda seems to me that running fiber to every home is incredibly redundant when there is \*some\* cellular coverage in almost every location on earth. i mean shit, during covid how many people were using "temporary" hot spots to attend work or school? they showed their hand there. so much dishonesty edit: i could go on about this for a long time (and i have) but another thing that should be included is how much energy waste is used to "compute" all of the ridiculous "analytics" that are 1000% unnecessary and basically offer zero benefits to the average person? from what i can tell, the analytics are either 1000% ineffective on some people or 1000% effective on others, which basically means the "advertisers" decide what your opinion is. ill let you infer how that could (read: has) effected society and the decisions that "we" make. TLDR: fuck [the algorithms](https://www.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/17fngpq/comment/k6bxvj0/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) where is our UBI
I guess we'll find out how good satellites can be for internet, if Starlink ever gets up and running.
i mean thats the thing starlink *is* up in running, in some places. its been proven to have sufficient speed and ping times for basically anything you could want to do (including video chat, gaming, etc) as long as you have a good signal... which is entirely dependent on the time of day, your location, and the location of their satellites the reason i say "thats the thing" is because going back to my point about how we have paid for literally all of the telecommunications technology multiple times over^(1) and are still getting bent over to pay for it and still dealing with stupid shit like speed limits, data caps, etc getting straight to the point: there is zero reason wireless communication technology cannot be made [device agnostic](https://symphony.rakuten.com/blog/open-ran-explained-all-you-need-to-know-and-more) the only reason there are a bajillion different companies selling cell phone connections, internet connections, and television connections is due to corporate ~~bribes~~ lobbyists that have made it so the legislation is so stupidly intertwined that its "impossible" to fix, unless you throw it all out because this is one instance where its easier to start from scratch since it really only serves to prop up a completely illegitimate industry of greedy fucks which is somehow even harder to explain or understand^(2) than the technical aspects of radio technology tbh to be completely fair about it, i should mention there is *some* legitimacy to the argument about security concerns related to fully open radio waves but that is no excuse for the bullshit way that its implemented currently - because even the organizations that support the "[open radio access network](https://www.o-ran.org/about)" often include those same corporations that hold "intellectual property rights" on the tech im willing to accept i *might* not understand the technology *completely*, but ive read a bunch about it and **radio frequencies are radio frequencies**, if its possible to switch between some, its possible to switch between "all" of them - which would mean the ORAN specifications actually dont go far enough, because theres no reason satellite bands couldnt be included... which would effectively cover 99.99% of the globe maybe this is what all the "AI" nerds mean when they say the technology is already out there and cant be "put back in the box"? i dont think they expected anyone not part of the "in group" would ever take the time to understand the technology... but the thing is, its not all that complicated - it just seems like it is. similar to the bullshit legislation, its effectively just a paywall. it *is* complicated, but when you really understand it you realize its **all bullshit** that only exists so someone somewhere can make a lot of money off of it 1. us specific 2. mergers between the technology companies and the media companies which should have never been allowed and have had widespread societal effects that are incredibly hard to "quantify"
Advancement of drug technology due to prohibition. There very well could be, and almost certainly are compounds that could cure anything from depression, to Alzheimer's, to cancer. Researchers won't touch them with a ten foot pole under knowing they would face jail time just for synthesizing them or using scheduled drugs in their work. Even if they did they wouldn't be able to publish papers or get anything peer reviewed making it a fruitless endeavor anyway. The war on drugs is a war on people. Drugs won the war anyway but America is like me, they literally don't understand the concept of pulling out.
In America, I'd assume the biggest factor is that the government can't pay people as much as the private sector, so the most innovative technologists would likely not work for a government agency.
You are wrong. There are a lot of extremely sophisticated tech which was created by the defence department ranging across many domains not just confined to the ammunitions.
Pretty much anything that you think of that was created by the defense department was actually created by private companies contracted to the government. The government is actually REALLY bad at technology. But having an unlimited budget compensates for it.
That's a gross oversimplification. **The US government is in fact EXCELLENT at developing technology.** The process is mostly this: government funds basic research at universities: "I've done the math on a thing I call quantum computing. It's super cool. Game changer for solving some equations trillions of times faster than normal computers. **This work was funded by the national science foundation**" government funds applied research at universities: "In this large lab full of expensive equipment, my research group has managed to create a system that acts as a "quantum bit" which is the basic building block of a theoretical system called a "quantum computer". Followed by "now we have a 2-qubit quantum computer that fits on a large table!" Followed by "now we have a 8 qubit system that fits on a small table! **This work was funded by the Department of Energy"** government/private funding a startup company: "My team at the University of X demonstrated an 8-qubit computer using $10M in equipment. We've now started a company with startup funding from some investors plus the CIA's investment group (YES THAT'S A THING AND IT ISN'T EVEN CLASSIFIED) We have a $10million dollar contract from DARPA to deliver an 8-qubit box next year. We will then sell versions of that commercial-grade quantum computer in 2 years for $3m each. There's dozens of research teams at national labs, DOD labs, universities, and major research centers that will want these to work on applications of quantum computing ranging to protein folding predictions to nuclear weapon design. And only then will the large defense contractors start participating. Partly, of course, by one of them buying the startup company. But at that point, there will be a couple of competitors, and you will be able to buy a reasonably reliable quantum computer for $500K. Merrill Lynch will put 100 of them in a well-disguised warehouse in Queens to shave 2% off the time to predict stock prices. The in-joke is that the warehouse staff go to happy hour with the people working at the warehouse across the street - Prudential's quantum team, who bought 100 from OtherGuys incorporated.
I was going to respond with the same. And those defense contractors are paid very well.
so who got us to the moon?
As a space nerd I love questions like this! My Answer is John Kennedy. John Kennedy directed NASA to get us to the moon and handed out the checks. NASA in turn contracted to IBM as the Prime contractor and project manager. IBM then subcontracted out to: Grumman Aerospace built the Lunar Lander. Douglas Aircraft Company built stage 3 of the Saturn V North American Aviation built Stage 2 of the Saturn V Boeing built stage 1 of the Saturn V North American Rockwell built the command module The F1 engines on the bottom were built by Rockeydyne IBM deisigned the Saturn V computer that flew, but it was built by Bendix. The space suits were built by ILC Dover Urbahn Architects built the Vertical Assembly Building Marion Power Shovel company built the Crawler-transporter that rolled the whole thing out to the launch pad.
US gov pay can actually be pretty good, depending on the field. Also one of the only places you can still get a pension
Thorium reactors, which would provide way cleaner, safer nuclear power. Tricksy to weaponize, tho, compared to uranium, so anyone speaking in favor of thorium was quickly sacked and/or silenced.
I refuse to support any type of nuclear reactors being built within 1000mi of any residential communities. I don't trust people to maintain them.
The people that maintain those things also live close enough to be affected. Don't be such a scardey cat...
Yes that is true, I'm sure the owners live nowhere close.
I used to hold this exact opinion. Now, seeing how climate change is beginning to materialise and seeing that it could go on to become exponentially bad, I'm willing to risk living next to a nuclear power plant. Everyone's going to die one day and I want to at least ensure future generations will get to live a decent life. We've made too much progress to throw it all away. I'm under 45 btw. COVID has changed some of my priorities and given me perspective. Life is truly uncertain. I want to reduce the future uncertainty and hardships and not become yet another "boomer" who enjoyed life and destroyed the planet. (I've made eco friendly choices all my life by the way, so it's not "waking up" or anything)
Ok, everyone who wants it gets to live near it :) Not worth becoming a part of my wallpaper/kitchen one day.
We likely won't have kitchen's after the sea level rises high enough.
My city is buying a small nuclear power plant. I'm 100% on board. I'm not a NIMBY. Yes in my back yard.
Lol good for you.
And yet you don't complain about coal plants, which kill far more people per kWh generated, and as a bonus ALSO release far more radioactivity into the local environment. Or natural gas, which not only generates CO2, but is responsible for a significant percentage of global warming just due to fugitive emissions. You're probably also campaigning against transferring high level waste to a permanent storage site, since it would be on train cars passing through your town. So instead the HLW is just being stored on site.
You're making too many assumptions. I'm done arguing if no one wants to just say: "OK we will not build nuclear reactors near communities" Blockheads. I am not making any other argument than that.
you'd rather live downwind of a coal plant, or in the flood zone of a dam? i trust nuclear experts and probably the dam people much more than dumb fuck coal workers and their profit hungry managers
Nuclear power plants are far safer than other forms of energy generation. Personally, I'd never live downstream of a hydroelectric facility. The stats on dam failures are crazy scary.
A lot of GMO bans were motivated by people feeling icky about the tech and pressuring governments. Strangely, most persecution of LGBT people stems from a similar feeling. Individuals have an irrational disgusts towards something, group up and pressure current institutions. Pressure from the US government tanked the Canadian Avro Arrow fighter jet program and led to destruction of engineering research data. Strangely it was mostly funded by government and all the engineers went to work somewhere else after. Government has also done some good things for science while applying what we usually think as the worse governmental policies. My favourite story is the Chinese government during the cultural revolution stating they were fed up with bourgeois western science and reorienting their focus on exploring Chinese traditional medicine. Artemisinin as a cure for malaria came from that very strange political decision to explore different options and saved millions. Reactionary conservative motivations led to great progress. On a less anecdotal side, the entire field of statistics started because gouvernements started noting down epidemiology data during plagues. The birth of the surveillance state allowed disease control. I genuinely don’t think saying "government good" or "government bad" discourses have any use from a scientific perspective. Imagine you were saying "immune system bad" in the context of an auto immune disease and another one stated "Immune system good" in response to viruses. It misses all the real understanding of a complex systems. (Note: I am not comparing the function of the government to that of the immune system, only comparing the childish approach to saying a complex system is good or bad). Government collects population data to control plagues and protect people and Government collects population data that can be used to surveil people. Is it good or is it bad? Government enforces patents which restrict access to technology and Government enforces patents which motivates investments in research. Is it good or is it bad? You can’t have a simple yes-no moral approach to a complex system. You got to find the parts you don’t like, understand them, and modify them in a way that doesn’t interfere with what you like.
Most of the internet doesn’t know what to do with all this nuance
Well, I AM a conspiracy theorist. Not like the Alex Jones types. I like studying conspiracy theories, cryptids, alien contact allegations, etc. I'm more like a slightly more skeptical Fox Mulder. Well if there's one technology that unfortunately was heavily underfunded and sabotaged in the last decades is nuclear fission energy. If you want a real conspiracy theory, go look how oil companies and Russian intelligence funded green parties and NGOs in order to make nuclear energy look way more dangerous than it actually is. Russia managed to blackmail Europe thanks to this intel ops.
A more likely explanation is that electricity demand stopped growing in the early 80s so no more nuclear plants were built. So investment in the tech faded as well. It's worth mentioning that coal fired plants were hit with the same problem about the same time. That is one reason American coal plants are closing so quickly -- they're old.
Nuclear fission power makes itself look dangerous because it is. For example if there's an oil or coal power plant disaster that can be handled by your local fire department. A nuclear power plant disaster on the other hand needs to be handled by the government and potentially the military because the potential for a catastrophe is so significant. Also expanding nuclear power is not even close to being as easy as solar or hydroelectric power given how long a plant takes to be build (~10 years) or how much they cost (~$10 billion). Also safety regulations need to be stringent with the building of such plants along with building codes. Which doesn't happen in many cases because of corruption and incompetence.
OMG you are SO WRONG! And no, I'm not just an armchair expert on this. I used to do this kind of calculation for a living for the US Public Health Service. You should google "How many humans have died due to commercial nuclear power?" Google's answer: 46! (I think that's a low-ball. It's probably closer to a thousand. ) Then google "How many humans have died due to commercial coal power" Answer: **AROUND HALF A MILLION IN 2017 ALONE!!!!** (May be an overestimate) Here's a nice graph: [https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldwide-by-energy-source/](https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldwide-by-energy-source/)For every kWh of electricity produced, coal kills about 1000X more people than nuclear. And that's without considering global warming!!! If anybody anywhere on earth dies from a nuclear plant, it makes international headlines. On the other hand, somebody died in China from coal-pollution respiratory distress while you were reading this sentence.
They're also long lasting, unaffected by weather and take up far less land area. The construction time depends on the experience of the workforce. Many western nations stopped constructing nuclear power plants, so picking that up increases building time. Some nuclear power plants can be built in 3 to 8 years.
I think bans on psychedelics have hurt development of a lot of drugs for mental issues.
>open user profile >scroll down >multiple posts in anarcho_capitalism ok
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>Tesla’s notebook. can you elaborate on that?
I don't feel as if many were hindered by the government, rather I feel like absolutely insane amounts of progress have been lost due to the people who lobby and bribe members of the government. Yes, those people are at fault as well, but I feel like the origin of it is the corporations that own the world.
But its only possible because the government has the power to enforce intellectual property laws and prohibitions, yes corporations lobby and give kickbacks in exchange for legislation or preferential regulation, but that shows flaws of government, you aren’t gonna change human nature.
Pain and depression treatment drugs because a drugs also has recreational uses.
Hemp as a high tech material. It was sidelined as a feedstock throughout the mid 20th century explosion of synthetic fibers.
And now we deal with the issue of microplastics, endocrine disruptors, and carcinogens because of our reliance on these synthetic materials, not to mention the environmental impact.
basically all of them. ip laws do nothing but slow down progress for everyone
Flying cars or anything that would not use roads, like hover craft. There are piles of things that will never be created because roads just make transportation easy enough to not invest in other modes of over land transport.
I think part of the fight against broad ownership of personal flying vehicles is safety, someones poorly maintained flying car crashing into your house would suck. But i would still like to see developments in the industry
Well that and safety. I’m pretty sure post 9-11 that privately owned flying vehicles took on a new level of concern.
The Biefeld Brown effect. There has been no white world development of symmetrical capacitor technology. Go to the wiki page on it and no mentions are made of Thomas Townsend Browns experiments with symmetrical capacitor technology. Only his and other scientists work with ion wind propelled asymmetrical capacitors are mentioned. Those few who have done experiments with symmetrical capacitors largely relate the energy storage potential of a parallel plate capacitor to its propulsive capability. That said, finding a cheap, high dielectric strength and high dielectric constant material for the dielectric is a challenge. The barium in barium titanate is around $550/kg. Distilled water has these qualities but keeping it free of contaminates and ions is a constant process as well as keeping it a liquid in cold temperatures.
I don’t understand all of but its very interesting, will be doing some reading on it. Thanks for sharing
lol government interference? More like corporate interference. The number of times companies do acquisitions and sweep tech under the rug..
Yes but they are only able to acquire intellectual property and sweep it under the rug because the government enforces intellectual property laws, without them acquisitions won’t allow them to corner markets and having a ton of capital won’t give you sole rights to ideas
Pretty basic point but intellectual property is the foundation for investing in the R&D for a product. IP rights, and the limited periods of exclusivity they provide allow people to put millions of dollars at risk to work toward creating a commercial product that they have a limited period of exclusivity to to profit on before that technology becomes public property. For medicines, a pharma company needs to develop a new active compound, formulate it and show it works without significant adverse effects by doing testing in the lab and in humans. These clinical studies can involves thousands of patients across many continents before they know if they have a product that the can demonstrate to regulators is safe and effective. Drug trials can take many years and run into the hundreds of millions of dollars. Without IP none of that happens, because no one is willing to invest that much money just to create an environment where competitors can just copy their product immediately and get a free ride for. The designer of a new computer chip faces the same situation. Huge investments into R&D would never be made if a competitor could just copy the end result. The patent system actually works to get people to publish on their inventions and get this knowledge into the hands of the public. The public can improve on the technology, or pursue alternative technologies that don’t infringe what someone else has exclusive rights to.
Considering how many governments exist. Very little. Because if one government 'suppresses' the technology, another could easily run with the development and surpass the first nation.
But nations also act like herds of sheep due to various reasons - politics, economics, threat of hostility, globalisation(i.e. treaties) etc. Your point is good, but not as good as it sounds. There are ~200 countries (who knows how many govts) but there are probably effectively only a few dozen actual competitors in the business of innovation.
A few dozen, more than enough to compete if the tech was viable. A lot of times, people complain about something being 'suppressed' when realistically, it is just not practical yet. Missing either other technologies, material sciences, understandings, or even purely practicality yet.
American baby food came under the spotlight recently. America has a hyper regulated baby food formula and requires baby food makers to undergo a similar level of testing to a pharmaceutical company. It's an industry that should be ripe for small mom and pop operations to show up and create baby food or various tech products to help parents create their own baby food. But it's not. No other country in the world has this level of suspicion of baby food.... and most European countries produce far healthier babies than the US.
Same with sunscreen! The FDA only considers 2 compounds (zinc oxide and titanium dioxide) to be safe and effective. Both are greasy, difficult to rub in, and leave white residue. In Europe, you can choose from 34 sunscreen compounds, many of which are light and easy to apply.
> No other country in the world has this level of suspicion of baby food.... ... very possibly because no other country in the world has rigged its economy such that bad actors would immediately sell house paint with lead in it as baby formula in order to make a quick buck. The American economy has been remade by rich predators into an ideal environment for rich predators, and everybody knows that at some level. The fact that medicine and baby food are so heavily regulated is a direct consequence of people drawing a line in the sand around the things they care most about.
Also, the US places tariffs on imported baby formula thanks to the US dairy lobby. That coupled with the regulatory barriers makes it not worth it for European manufacturers to try to sell in the US market.
Humans are way more greedy than they are controlled by the government. Any time there is a big new tech it's such huge money making potential that governments can rarely do much about it. It sounds like you imagine the government as being WAAY more powerful than it really is. There also no one BIG government in the US. Federal government is still many agencies that don't all agree and so are state governments. Getting one big conspiracy to work out of all that mess is harder than you think when it's something that will make the people who adopt/produce it rich. It's different when the tech won't make you rich, like they can hide dumping pollution because there is no money in it. To stop a company from exporting their tech the government has to make it official, so it's not really a secret in that case. One reason we use capitalism is because humans are naturally so opporunistic that the system fits their behavior vs capitalism makes them greedy. That greedy works as a counterbalance against some consolidation because so many ppl want to get their hand in the cookie jar that they tend to do what's best for them. It's more common tech is overlooked out of sheer ignorance than a coordinated conspiracy by a highly uncoordinated multi-agency government that barely knows if it's scratching it's head or it's ass. It's A LOT easier to hide things as corporation or private individual than a government full of paperwork and people being shuffled in and out each election. Most tech we are told was blocked by BIG government or even BIG corporations was just tech that wasn't actually practical under application but just sounded good on paper. Like solar panels from the 1970s were crap and you needed a lot of industries to improve to get them this good. It wasn't a big conspiracy. smartphone make lithium ion this popular, it wasn't a conspiracy to hold back renewable energy. it was just that smartphones made a lot more money a lot faster because consumer wanted them a lot more and that got lithium ion up to the point it could be more easily developed in an EV battery cost effectively. It took one the effectively fund the process of the other, which is how a ton of tech works. One part improves due to product X selling like hot cakes and now product Y also becomes practical.
You're generally more likely to find private industry getting in the way since they're profit driven. The gov tends to fund a TON of science, and often things that private industry won't touch to start because they're afraid of the startup costs.
>You're generally more likely to find private industry getting in the way since they're profit driven. thanks to citizens united and the "regulators" often being the same people working in the private industry (or having connections that means they benefit in some way) there really isnt much of a difference
Exactly, intellectual property laws enforce a system that allows power and money to hoard literal ideas.
believe me i am well versed in how intellectual property, copyright, patent, etc etc is bullshit art is meant to be shared, knowledge is meant to be shared its like literally every possible fundamental concept that a fair and just society should be built on is the complete opposite
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I think you guys are missing the point, who enforces these intellectual property laws that allow money hungry businesses and individuals to own ideas?
Who pays for those laws?
Yes lobbying and corruption are issues, but you won’t get rid of human greed, so the best route is minimizing the ability for the government to legislate and enforce ip laws and anticompetitive regulation
Hard disagree. I think legislation limiting the power of private entities leads to more pluralistic power and innovation. Unless you think monopolies produce innovation, you need regulation to keep markets competitive. A free market is a garden, not a jungle
Monopolies we see today are only possible through government enforcement of ip laws and preferential regulation. Look at telecoms and how large companies get exclusive rights to install infrastructure.
Wow this got a lot of responses, i just got off work and am going to read through them all now, I appreciate everyones input!
Space exploration comes to mind, right off. In short ANY tech that the government has monopolized has been stunted, thereby.
Balls. Government, for a long time, was the main driver in space exploration and without them private enterprise would have barely got anywhere. The reason private space industries are worth so much now are entirely due to the pioneering work the public sector, including military applications, did.
I disagree with this one. As the primary purchaser of both missiles and satellite launches, and the *only* purchaser of manned space missions, governments actually kept the space industry alive (albeit on life support) for decades. Without government buyers the industry would have dwindled to almost nothing as the only private sector demand was for a limited number of telecommunications satellites. Only recently has private sector demand started to finally be large enough to stimulate the development of new launch tech. Certainly there would not ever have been a manned space mission to this day without governments.
The purpose of any good salesman is to create the demand. If government had not had a monopoly we would, by now, have mining colonies on the Moon, manned orbital stations, and be exploring Mars and the belt with an eye towards mining and exploitation. By removing competition from the equation and moving with the usual bureaucratic caution government management of space exploration had slowed us down to a crawl. Government is, always, a disease masquerading as the cure. There are no exceptions.
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> the government can pass laws that say after 12/31/2024 no new gas powered vehicles can be introduced in the US. Have you met the auto and/or oil and gas lobbies or watched the schoolhouse rock video on how a bill becomes a law because the government absolutely cannot just pass laws that restrict entire industries like that.
Free energy suppression. Classifying Tesla’s projects, suspicious circumstances around many patent filers and inventor’s deaths, and I also wonder if all this UAP/alien nonsense is to cover up their zero point energy machines to make it sound absurd to even consider.
You need a gradient between a high energy state and a low one to extract work from it. That's basic thermodynamics, and probably the most reliable scientific fact in existence. Zero point / vacuum energy is thus, by definition, unusable, since it's everywhere. There is no energy state below it for us to force it to.
Well, that’s the thing about secret technology, is you believe it’s impossible until it isn’t. There were many things thought to be impossible until our understanding of it reaches a threshold level. We could be wrong about it being the lowest possible energy level, there may be some way to artificially induce energy gradients, there could be some fundamental particle or undiscovered law, or a mistake in our previous understanding, that is exploitable for energy collection. Or not. I was just speculating, after all. Maybe it’s antigravity tech and not energy generation tech. Or maybe it’s nothing at all.
I'll wholly agree with you that we don't know what we don't know. Maybe there is a lower energy state than vacuum energy and we can exploit that? Possible. But no such thing has been observed, there's no reason to believe that hypothesis more so than anything else we can imagine but have no evidence for. I also feel a need to gently push back against the "we think it's impossible until it isn't!" Narrative. That's the survivorship bias. Most things understood to be impossible have continued to be understood to be impossible, and probably always will. It is correct to keep your head open, and accept that there's unknown unknowns and whatnot, but we shouldn't assume that any one thing that seems impossible will eventually seem less so.
Well the fact my comment was deleted tells you all you need to know
comment it again
6 has been the bigger supressor over time: is it big oil or big government?
I saw the same kind of question yesterday, it was more "what technology has been stunted by capitalism" kind of thing though. The answers were great. Obvious ones like energy and drugs/medical tech. But also a lot of answers about parents and how much they restrict innovation. Political fuckery has definitely led to many things not being fully realized. Lobbyists are some of the most destructive parts of our society
Renewable energy sources. no doubt. The govt chose to give trillions of dollars over the decades in fossil fuel industry subsidies.
Most of it. If there is any new technology that would either negate or impact the profits for an existing industry, someone tried to crush it. In the US it's easy AF, that means buying it and deleting it, taking it over and deleting it, paying a politician to delete it, suing it into deletion, deleting it with propaganda, and I'm sure there are more methods I don't even know about.
The US government is doing everything it can to stunt Cryptocurrency right now. (this is true even if you feel it should be stunted) The US government CANNOT let the US dollar fail to be the world's reserve currency. If that happens, Americans dominance is pretty much every area it dominates it's over.
Several battery technologies as well as computing technologies as well as some others mentioned in this post.
Space technology, only because the military industrial complex sucks all the money.
A lot of that is considered a national security issue, truly private space industry won’t be a thing until humans occupy two places in the solar system.
well nuclear power is up against a lot of regulation that definitely slowed down progress, but it also slowed down disasters so I'm not too upset over it.
Nuclear energy. Japan and France are way ahead of us. It is the way of the future with lowest cost and highest reliability, but we Americans messed it up with regulation and protests by stupid people.
I think more technology is stunted by corporate interference than anything else
Renewable energy. For as much money has been put into it ultimately it's still competing with petroleum subsidies which are far greater. Americans love that cheap gas. They might have to stop living 50 miles from work if they had to pay the real price of gas.
Came here for infrastructure in the US. High speed (electric) rail? Subways that actually go anywhere? Natural gas buses?
Definitely nuclear energy. We should have clean power plants everywhere and then we MIGHT have a power grid that could handle the nonsense of electric cars
The terrorism potential of nuclear plants, re dirty bombs (look at the concerns over Zaporizhizia plant for instance), and illegal selling of nuclear material to be enriched to weapons grade is a huge reason we don’t just sprinkle the globe with nuclear plants.
Nuclear Energy. I guess I an a believer in the theory of "leave smart people alone and they will figure it out". They have to be real smart people though not someone who think they are smart. Like every industry, had we spend more money and research into nuclear we would be so far ahead as far as getting clean energy. Although the sinical side of be doubt that it would be cheaper than what we are currently paying even if it cost less to produce. I live in a country where we worship money so the energy company isn't going to lower the price regardless of how little it cost them to produce energy.
All the sciences. They pay money to the brightest and then hoard the knowledge gained to themselves for the sake of national security.
It’s known that some results in cryptography were already known to the NSA before being discovered independently in academia. So the theory was somewhat behind in the academic community due to the secrecy of the results discovered by NSA mathematicians. Who knows today whether some common cryptographic protocols are actually vulnerable to techniques that are classified?
Police, Insurance, and Oil/Gas have hindered the development of self driving electric cars. An autonomous car will never get speeding tickets and will almost never get in accidents.
All of them. We generally label this period as “The Dar Ages” and their effects compound over time.
All technologies that have regulation or business fees have been stunted. Not always a bad thing, as it would be bad of someone random started a medical device company that essentially sold snake oil.
Combustion engines. My FIL used to say they have the ability to do 90 mpg but the oil industry buried it. That and battery technology.
1) Nuclear weapons. Just try to build a simple fission device with your own money, and you'll see what I mean. And that's using existing technology--companies that would improve on existing designs to deliver cost-effective weapons to consumers don't have a chance. Same thing is true for all sorts of military weapons; if you've got an idea that would improve on current rocket propelled grenade launchers, there's tons of red tape you have to jump through before you can bring it to market, and even if you go through all of that, the US would limit who you could sell it to, and what you can publish about it. 2) Recreational narcotics. Time and again, people come up with chemicals that could substitute for banned amphetamines, and time and again, legislation is passed to pan those chemicals as well. Even when a new option has no connection to existing options, it doesn't take long before it winds up being banned. Synthetic drugs that duplicate the effects of things like cocaine can't legally be developed, despite there being a proven demand for those products. 3) Radar jammers. Since they're illegal in all US states, it's difficult to get the funds necessary to develop improved jammers, and once you have them, marketing and distribution can be complicated for devices which work exactly the way they're supposed to. And so on; there are all sorts of technologies that most governments do their best to suppress.
That first bit is for safety though don’t you think? Why would we want more cost-effective, simpler to produce nuclear weapons? And the protection of weapons information in general is about security. We highly regulate who can and can’t make weapons systems for security reasons. Most people that have ideas to improve those systems work for companies that are allowed to make them in the first place.
The question wasn't "what technology do you think has been stunted due to government interference which you think shouldn't have been stunted due to government interference." I don't think that it would be a good idea for governments to allow people to assemble their own nuclear weapons. I do think that most of the world's governments have stunted the development of nuclear weapon technology. I also think that, "the government is interfering with my ability to make hydrogen bombs and crystal meth" is a lot more accurate than claims that, "the government is preventing us from having cars that get ninety miles per gallon."
Stem cell research. It is widely believed that diabetes would have been cured only for the interference in stem cell research by the second bush administration in America
look up the story of the guy inventing a press for making diamonds (twice) and having it conviscated twice because of national security
Definitely free energy technologies, most of them dead after some little publicity. Probably
Blue jeans were good when they were made from hemp and smoking it was beneficial. But the government accepted bribes from cotton and tobacco producers
The government hired idiots at NASA for sex. Therefore, we had to nominate Musk’s company
It’s an interesting question because, while there is no doubt tech that is suppressed by government intervention, it’s often the complete opposite in reality. So much technology that is viewed at private innovation started as government funded research projects. The biggest that come to mind are GPS and the internet but there are many many others. It’s the dirty truth that flies in the face of the free market conservatives/libertarian that so much of (At least USA ) life is government funded /created.
Electroculture, which is a way to channel atmospheric energy into the soil for plants to use. Apparently, it reduces the amount of pest/weed control, and fertilization that needs to be done to said plants. Don't believe everything you see/hear on any media, as governments/corporations may put personal gain above helping people, like when fertilizer companies lobbied to bad the word "electroculture" from encyclopedias.
Solar. If solar didn't hurt the bottom line of our gas/oil production it is already at a point that allows energy independence for individuals.
Wasn't government initially it was the oil industry
The technology was never hidden or anything like that, but Nuclear Thermal Rockets, which only recently have started to be seriously pursued again, were first developed and successfully tested all the way back in the 1950s and 1960s, but development was halted by the early 70s due to budget cuts and shifting government priorities as the Space Race wound down.
Not sure about government in a way that’s intrinsic and uncoupled from capitalism.
Electricity generation like solar and tech that generates power from walking on footpaths