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The blue LED was supposed to be impossible—until a young engineer proposed a moonshot idea.

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[-] avidamoeba@lemmy.ca 169 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

It's an extreme example that perfectly illustrates how profit is extracted from employees by the employers. He didn't have any leverage to get a larger share of the profit from his labor, as is the case with most employees. You could call it toxic behavior, and it is, but it's the expected behavior, the behavior incentivised by the system.

[-] Cethin@lemmy.zip 78 points 9 months ago

It also shows how capitalism hinder innovation. It doesn't create it. The potentially innovative path took money without any guarantee of creating profit. It's bad business to be innovative. Capitalism prioritizing profit never chooses the best path, even if it gets a good ending eventually despite itself.

[-] SkyNTP@lemmy.ml 12 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

I'm not sure how you come to this conclusion. For every example of a capitalist avoiding risky investments, there are 100 capitalists betting on the next innovation.

Venture capital. Heard the term? AI, Metaverse, crypto, web 2.0, .com... The tech space alone is full of capital making (stupidly risky) bets. They also make good bets too, like PC, search engines, online shopping (oh, look how the tech giants came to be).

I get it, capitalism bad. But this is just a nonsensical argument.

[-] muix@lemmy.sdf.org 19 points 9 months ago

I was working for a place that was the market leader in a certain niche of simulation software. Their simulation was about 10x more efficient than their competitors. However, that version of the software is strictly off limits for the public, and made a version which they sold with a sleep statement so that it was only 1.1x faster than the next best solution. That way they could remain market leaders any time the competitors released a better version. Even though many systems rely on growing simulations to simulate bigger scenarios that could help save lives.

Just an example of capitalism impeding progress.

[-] TimeSquirrel@kbin.social 11 points 9 months ago

Open source software solves that kind of hidden bullshit.

[-] muix@lemmy.sdf.org 6 points 9 months ago

Exactly why I left that company.

Specifically free (libre) licences, as permissive licences allow corporations to improve/adapt the software without contributing back to the community.

I only work on software with GPL compatible licences now.

[-] Cethin@lemmy.zip 2 points 9 months ago

And open source software is explicitly anti-capitalist.

[-] bigMouthCommie@kolektiva.social -3 points 9 months ago

free software is. open source is an attempt to sell free software out to capitalist interest.

eric raymond and the OSI are not good.

[-] Cethin@lemmy.zip 1 points 9 months ago

There are many forms of free and/or open source software.

[-] bigMouthCommie@kolektiva.social 0 points 9 months ago

but open source isn't anticapitalist

[-] Cethin@lemmy.zip 1 points 9 months ago

Yeah, I guess the original statement was too broad, but any FOSS using a GPL license effectively is. I guess not anti-capitalist though, but un-capitalist. It doesn't try to remove capitalism, it tries to be seperate from it.

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this post was submitted on 09 Feb 2024
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