I don't mind having a lot of different hot sauces. What I mind is "financial innovation" like debt-backed securities, and "tech innovation" like tracking people as they browse the web.
75The point is we're getting "innovation" at the expense of people. That person says they have no teeth because they can't afford dental care in America since for-profit healthcare is another feature of capitalism.
38I find it beyond infuriating that dental isn't even considered healthcare per se. It requires entirely separate "insurance," all of which is hot garbage. I need my wisdom teeth out, because they never fully erupted and now they're rotting in my gums. I shred my cheeks eating because I can't afford the $5,000 they quoted me for an oral surgeon. My dental "coverage" only pays out a max of $2,000 annually so I just deal with it and pull out the chunks as they break off.
26This is one of the forms of alienation Marx talked about. Products aren’t made because they’re good or needed, but because they’re profitable
12Well, the point is also that it's not useful innovation. Profit is prioritized, not utility. Sometimes that results in useful innovation, but frequently it results in potentially useful innovation being avoided because it'd cost too much with a low chance of return on value.
6Not true at all. Your country is just sold to the highest bidder. Don't pretend you are a democracy. Don't pretend you are a capitalism society.
Please admit you are a slave of your corporate masters and that they need you toothless. It's called a corporatocrazy (sic.).
Europe has 418 hotsauces (incl from USA and Cuba) and nobody needs to have toothpain (but replacing them with expensive implants may require more money as average person has)
-9
and one mega corp owns all 27
42Do you have a reliable source to back up any of this? 🤔🤔
-11Search engines exist. Pretty easy to find facts from a large number of different sources. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/2021/jul/14/food-monopoly-meals-profits-data-investigation
10
That's assuming that those brands aren't just one or two actually different sauces from the same couple of suppliers
26It's Nestlé all the way down.
19A lot of them used to be different businesses. But capitalism gotta capitalism and the largest companies bought out all the smaller ones like Agar.io for rich people.
Same with media too. Remember when Marvel, Lucas Films, and 21st Century Fox all used to be their own things?
6
Innovating exciting new ways to replace ownership with rentals/subscriptions and giving you less while charging you more
22Mhm. Ask all the scientists whose work has been suppressed by corporations claiming IP but not doing anything with it because it competes with their main product lines. Ask those whose work would be of wide public interest but is paywalled by the for-profit journals they’re required by their institutions to publish in.
The ‘capatalism breeds innovation’ thing is a massive lie. In reality, brilliant people drive innovation, and capitalism beats them to death then scavenges their corpses.
eta: This applies to the military version of this argument, too. No, the military doesn’t drive innovations and achievements; it hides them from the public so that society is constantly two or more decades behind what’s possible. Again, people are doing it, but we’re not allowed to benefit from many things until they have no real strategic value. It’s bonkers to think about. Even more bonkers to realise we’re paying them to do this to us.
20🍿 🥤 🍬
I’m ready for the show to start
10Turns out it was just a circle jerk. But I guess that's a show, too, though. So, hooray!
1
To be fair, you could enjoy all 27 brands of hot sauce without teeth.
9Or without a mouth!
4
"Innovation" is not necessarilly improvement and "New" is not necessarilly better, and I say this as somebody who has spent most of his career at or near the bleeding edge of Tech.
I even get the feeling (from myself and from comments I read sometimes) that techies who do or did bleeding edge stuff and with a few years behind their backs, like me (so, not the bright-eyeds naive young ones who haven't seen much yet and which the industry uses as fuel), are less prone to be technology early adopters than the average person exactly because we've seen a lot of brand-new innovative glittered turds sold on hype, not on genuinelly being a good thing.
8Is innovation fundamentally/inherently a good thing? Are things that drive innovation fundamentally/inherently good?
I'm starting to feel like 98% of what we call "innovation" is really just trial and error as capital owners try out methods of extracting the wealth of the working class. Like some dudes in suits said "lets make 5 new hot sauce flavors and make this profit graph go up", or "This year we'll see if big bags and platform shoes are more effective at increasing profits", or "this new drug will allow people to eat like shit and still live long enough to continue to consume".
The remaining 2% of real innovation are things that help people and fix damage caused by the other 98%.
8While you can debate if "the good ol days" were better...innovation has completely changed the would multiple times in the last 30-40 years. We are likely in the most innovative time in human history and not just for multiple hot sauce flavors.
-2Completely changed the world in ways that I now am forced to trade most of my life for survival money, have little access to many of the innovations, and that have caused massive irreparable damage to the planet we all share.
My claim is that about 2-5% of those innovations, the basic science, the innovations that enable those with poor vision to see, the victims of accidents to heal, those that enable us to share high quality audio and video reproductions, and speak to friends and family too far travel and a few others are the good ones and the rest are unneeded waste that causes more problems than they solve that came about to take our money.
This is why I like Solarpunk, it's about the simple life using technology that helps and discarding the rest. Just because we can doesn't mean we should when it comes to technology and innovation.
Because of a few with high ambitions and low empathy, we are all forced into a rat race. Having a desire for innovation does not mean it's ok to force others to innovate.
1
I think a lot about how venture capital spends billions on companies that send gifs over the Internet, and how that money could have been spent on, say, anything useful.
8Just be glad you didn't die from eating the the pink sauce.
6Why would you bring craft hot sauce into this mess? They don't deserve that
5Capitalism for things you want, Socialism for things you need
4Business opportunities like dentures and anti acids are only the beginning!
3Image Transcription: Twitter
swizz keats @iluvbutts247
~capitalism breeds innovation~ yeah for sure bro i love having 27 brands of hot sauce and no teeth
3Capitalism is when no teeth.
Bro, you sure it isn't meth that's to blame for this?
0Communism is when no iPhone.
Without communism there would be no AK.*
*It's technically an M1 Garand.
0Permanently Deleted
0This isn't a informed statement just a hot take, but maybe capitalism wouldn't be so evil if everyone tipped into the growth end of Maslow's before turning insulin into high-end consumer goods.
-3It's pretty informed. Left to its own devices this is what unregulated capitalism has done. Increased profits for those who already had stolen capital. Leaving most everyone else behind. While simultaneously whittling away their effective access to things like housing, nutrition, and healthcare.
It could be fixed by regulation and socialist policy. But that's not capitalism.
14This is unregulated capitalism left to its own devices? Limited liability corps? Corporate personhood? FDA, USDA, the entire stock market being tilted toward entrenched interests and big business? Drug and software patents? That's what you think unregulated means. Fuck me.
This is the capitalism regulations have given us.
0
