• 0 Posts
  • 14 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: July 4th, 2023
  • Void_Reader@lemmy.worldtopics@lemmy.world•The whole island of Sicily covered by wildfires tonight. It's a catastrophe. Here is a satellite image.English
    61·
    1 year ago

    Lmaooo “Greenablers”. What a joke. That’s literally a corporate PR puff piece. How is corporate greenwashing PR supposed to convince me that Capitalism drives innovation (or is good for the climate?) when countless studies of data prove it wrong? The only piece of data he cites is about the billions being spent on the ‘energy transition’. I checked out his source. A good chunk of that is just government investment. Another big chunk of that is electric cars - a really stupid thing to invest in as they’ll compete with renewable energy for rare earth minerals etc. Not to mention all the emissions they’ll cause in production, and the fact that they’ll still need half the world to be paved over in asphalt for roads and parking. Better than petrol or diesel sure, but hardly efficient.

    Dense cities yes. End single-family zoning yes (doesn’t really exist where I live, the US is an insane place).

    Energy deregulation no. I’m sure it will be great for opening new coal plants, not a chance in hell will it lead to more nuclear power or anything useful.

  • Void_Reader@lemmy.worldtopics@lemmy.world•The whole island of Sicily covered by wildfires tonight. It's a catastrophe. Here is a satellite image.English
    111·
    1 year ago

    Ah the innovation argument, so original. “Capitalism creates innovation”. Everyone says it all the time so it must be true right? Well it isn’t. Data doesn’t support this argument.

    Pretty much every major innovation of the past century has come from publicly funded and/or not-for-profit research and development. Capitalists only step in once the difficult part is done and the ‘innovation’ can be repackaged into something profitable in the short term.

    See the following: https://academic.oup.com/ser/article/7/3/459/1693191

    https://demos.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/files/Entrepreneurial_State_-_web.pdf

    Capitalism definitely creates barriers to certain types of innovation. Mainly innovation that isn’t profitable - see ‘planned obsolesence’. It also creates barriers to profitable innovation sometimes; just look up ‘patent trolls’.

    But I was never even talking about innovation. You just jumped to it because that is the classic buzzword talking point that is constantly repeated everywhere. ‘Develop better alternatives’ doesn’t have to be ‘innovation’. We have the technology already, we’ve had it for decades. Trains and cycle lanes = better alternatives to cars. Nuclear energy = better alternative to fossil fuels.

    Market capture exists everywhere, in every economic system.

    Sure, this might be the case for every existing economic system. I believe we need to develop something new. Just like modern Capitalism was inconceivable to someone living in the Feudal era, a new system might be inconceivable for us right now. But it is imperative we try.

  • Void_Reader@lemmy.worldtoShowerthoughts@lemmy.world•Paywalls aren’t a new thing for journalism. Newspaper delivery fees were a paywall.
    1·
    1 year ago

    I think the difference here is paying for a single newspaper vs having to get recurring subscriptions that are a pain to cancel. With print media, if I want to check multiple sources’ take on an issue, I could go out and buy 5 different newspapers, and that’s it. But with online news, I’d have to spend like an hour cancelling all the subscriptions after I’m done and if I forget to cancel any i’ll realise when I’m down like £50 6 months later.

    Also don’t like having to enter personal details into so many websites.

    Thank god for Archive.org.

    I wonder why no news company has tried the ‘buy today’s digital newspaper for £1 and that’s that’ approach. I could be wrong and maybe someone has, haven’t seen it though.