this post was submitted on 17 Oct 2024
113 points (98.3% liked)
Technology
59589 readers
2838 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
That's incredibly incorrect.
Bell labs invented or laid the groundwork for, among other things:
Take your anti-research propaganda out of here. Government backed scientists who don't have shareholders holding them accountable are crucial to progress. Capitalism is toxic to scientific progress. Great for improving around existing concepts, terrible for making new ones.
I wasn’t saying Bell Labs wasn’t innovative. The “they” in that sentence was referring to average, non-tech consumers like my grandma. The monopoly AT&T had over the Bell System funded all that research and consumers paid higher rates and had worse service because it was a monopoly.
I’m not anti-research. I’m anti-monopoly.
I agree with almost all of it. Surely your grandmother or eldest living non-troglodyte relative has benefitted from transistors and calculators. Even lasers. Probably even Unix, if they use a Mac, as most tech-illiterate do.
However, the silver lining here is that this monopoly actually invested... heavily...into R&D. You don't see that now, not to the levels that they did.