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.
this post was submitted on 25 Nov 2023
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The 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.
I 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.
$5000?!! That is insane.
In the UK, dental care isn't free (unless you're below 18, a student, unemployed, pregnant, have been pregnant in the past year, or there is a serious risk to your wider health), but it still caps out at £307 for the most serious dental work. Most people here are furious about it costing anything at all.
Though getting prompt dental care has been way harder after the COVID backlog...
And $5,000 isn't even out of range. Kids needed a couple fillings? $1,000 with insurance. Grandma needs a root canal? $1600 with insurance and Medicare.
It's a huge fucking racket and the fact that it still exists decades after Obamacare is extremely frustrating
This 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
Well, 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.
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and one mega corp owns all 27
And it's PepsiCo.
A publicly traded company with 64% of shares owned by Nestle
So much innovation 😍
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That's assuming that those brands aren't just one or two actually different sauces from the same couple of suppliers
It's Nestlé all the way down.
A 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?
Innovating exciting new ways to replace ownership with rentals/subscriptions and giving you less while charging you more
Mhm. 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.
🍿 🥤 🍬
I’m ready for the show to start
To be fair, you could enjoy all 27 brands of hot sauce without teeth.
Or without a mouth!
Is 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%.
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"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.
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.
Why would you bring craft hot sauce into this mess? They don't deserve that
Just be glad you didn't die from eating the the pink sauce.
Business opportunities like dentures and anti acids are only the beginning!
Image Transcription: Twitter
swizz keats @iluvbutts247
~capitalism breeds innovation~ yeah for sure bro i love having 27 brands of hot sauce and no teeth
Capitalism for things you want, Socialism for things you need
Communism is when no iPhone.
Without communism there would be no AK.*
*It's technically an M1 Garand.
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