this post was submitted on 09 Feb 2024
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Really annoying that the company shat on him for years, and continued to do so after he multiplied the value of the company. Toxic behavior.
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.
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.
It's a capitalist company that funded him to go to Florida and bought him the machine to do his work.
Where do you think he would get the 3 million the company gave him? It's the company that spent that money to bet on innovation and they got a return on investment
Capitalism never chooses the best path, but neither does any other system. We haven't invented a perfect system, and it's probably impossible. Sounds like a strange critique since we'll never reach perfection
And then capitalism that made the company repeatedly ask for him to stop researching it.
It's the opinion of one person at the company. Under socialism there are also people who decide which research deserves funding.
Just because nothing is perfect doesn't mean we can't call out stuff for not being it. Sounds like a strange critique since we're supposed to improve on things.
Yes, but in any system some guy will decide which research is important. And that guy can't possibly make correct decisions every time.
I don't see a way to improve on it
Doesn't matter. What matters is that they make correct decisions oftener than before.
And the way to improve on it is clear: do more of that, with peer review.
Come on this is not news, this is how progress has worked in the last [checks smudgy writing] 4600 years.
Then invest in a company that is structured that way, there's no actual constraint on how a company is organized in capitalism
As the story describes, it was the founder who was acting emotionally that funded him. It was no different than a noble patronage of someone like DaVinci in medieval times. When the capitalist son in law took over, he was cut off. It was only Japanese culture from Japan's pre-capitalist era that saved his job.
The founder was acting in the company's interest, that's why you fund research.
He was actually not cut off either, he wasn't fired when he continued his research despite being told not to. He still received a salary and was able to use the equipment purchased with company funds
You're right that nothing is perfect. How does that make critique invalid though?
Capitalism prioritizes profit. That's it. We can imagine systems that prioritize any number of things; public welfare, innovation, creativity, equality, etc. Nothing will be perfect, but I'd say any goal is better than the selfish goal of profit seeking. Do you disagree?
Yeah where he went to a university not a capitalist company to learn. Then persisted in his research despite the capitalist company wanting to shut him down for not being profitable, then that company specifically and consciously screwed him over and didn't reward him for it. Then tries to screw him over once again when he got a different job because of it.
Who funded him to go? It's not like he paid for the trip out of his pocket
The company could have also just fired him for not listening to orders. But I agree that they didn't compensate him enough
The CEO of the time who actively went against the conventional wisdom of capitalism to fund a person he had know for decades and personally knew how capable he was.
Then as soon as that CEO left the personal connection was gone and typical capitalist mentality took over and tried to shut it down
Just like almost every big discovery this happened in spite of capitalism, not because of it.
That could happen in socialism, where a government grant runs out and research is no longer funded because the person in charge of funding science changes.
Socialism isn't "when the government does stuff" it's better thought of as when companies become democratised, so while it could still happen you have more chance to appeal to average people rather then purely answering to the CEO chasing profit margins.
There's absolutely no law preventing you from starting a company like this
Okay?
Capitalism doesn't force you into a particular corporate structure
Not explicitly, no, but there's a reason almost every company has the exact same corporate structure.
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.
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.
Open source software solves that kind of hidden bullshit.
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.
And open source software is explicitly anti-capitalist.
free software is. open source is an attempt to sell free software out to capitalist interest.
eric raymond and the OSI are not good.
There are many forms of free and/or open source software.
but open source isn't anticapitalist
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.
Yeah metaverse and crypto are such innovate projects that will really change the world and not just more the same bullshit cash grabs.
Really undermining your own argument.
You completely missed the point there, damn. He's saying those things are very likely to be bad investments.
No I get the point. But showing they make make stupid decisions doesn't prove capitalism drives innovation, because those ideas aren't innovative.
Innovative ideas are rarely smart ideas.
Not saying those will change anything but I'm pretty sure there was people saying the same as you about electricity, radio, phone and the internet.
The ratio might not be 1:100. It might not even be tilted towards the risk takers. Also some if not most of the examples you mentioned are based research done in universities and defence agencies. That research is typically a much riskier endeavor. That's why the private sector doesn't even attempt it and only shows up to productize or build upon that research once the risk for not turning profit is minimized.
Sure, it happens sometimes. However, the goal is never innovation for the sake if innovation. It's innovations to create profit. The idea is you invest into one of these ideas that then creates a monopoly that can practice anti-completive behaviors to create more profit.
For example of something better, look at research universities. They are normally outside of capitalism and create innovation primarily for the goal of advancing knowledge of a subject or to solve some issue. It's rarely purely for profit to sit on the thing after it's created and ensure no one else can use it.
This is something that's often poorly understood. There's no profit in a perfectly competitive market. That is, according to orthodox economic theory, the most efficient market conditions are the ones where no participants make profit. From that you can derive what you said - that innovation is sought for moving a business away from perfect competition by gaining competitive advantage, which is anticompetitive! 😆
Capitalists are motivated to innovate if there's undistorted competition. If they don't they will lose new markets. For exemple Microsoft and IBM failed to build the start of general public web search and Google won. More recently, Google failed the race to release the first general public LLM, OpenAI backed by Microsoft did.
There are probably as many examples of this as there are of companies ruining innovation for stupid reasons.
Though, what better system that a regulated "free" market do we have successfully tested? A bunch of political leaders deciding alone of what the companies should do? How does that prevent irrational decision that stops innovation? How do you prevent them from just doing whatever benefits them as seen in many authoritarian regimes that were supposedly socialist?
Sensible employers would go, holy shit, this guy delivered a moonshot and wants to keep going. Maybe let's give him a teensy fraction of the money he made us, to encourage more of that from him and others.
That too is capitalism. That would be plain self-interested greed, and also reward the guy who did all the work. It was stupid business to spend millions of dollars to not employ that guy.
The real issue is that when someone in power is a complete idiot asshole, there's fuck-all people can do to fix that. That systemic issue is honestly more of a problem than the money itself or the power itself.
The systemic problem you recognize is a fundamental feature of capitalism.
Again: this was a bad decision, even from the perspective of raw greed. Paying the guy enough to keep him at the company is also capitalism. So it's not useful or relevant to just say 'that's capitalism' when a business makes a fucking stupid decision that loses them money.
Nor is petit autocracy unique to capitalism.
Makes me presume power harassment.
On the flip side, he was using up millions and millions of company dollars on his singleminded pursuit with no obvious results to show for it. Had things gone even a little differently, things would've gone very differently indeed. Hard to imagine most companies tolerating an employee flat ignoring instruction to change to another task when their old task was proving fruitless.
Hindsight is clear enough here, but in context it was pretty nuts what the guy was doing.
Makes you wonder how many great inventors of revolutionary tech were shoved off their path by dumb luck.
Probably far fewer than never had the opportunity to realize they could be great in the first place.
If greatness is one in a billion we have 8 (boy would the richest like us to believe that!). If it’s one in 100 million (I’m bad at math. I think it’s like) 80. Or if it’s one in a million, that’s 350 in the US alone. I’m inclined to lean toward the later, after all, if there aren’t a lot of greats waiting to be called up, how the fuck did we beat the odds by such a large margin??
The greats are beat into submission by capitalism and the horrors they went through to achieve greatness (usually a garbage childhood of some variety)
Didn't fire him though. I don't think my boss would let me sit in an office doing my own project and binning notes from him for 20 years.
I bet he was ok with : Nobel prize bitch!
That's Japan, baybee. They love their toxic work culture. Thankfully, it is slowly changing with the younger generations, however.
Works there, makes fuck-all.
Leaves.
"Hey you can't exist outside our company! Your expertise is worth a lot of money for us!"