America's railroad boom isn't a great example, it got us the worst rail infrastructure in the world, built by private monopolies solely for maximum short-term profit, i.e. moving freight and not passengers, and now American industry is largely gone and we're stuck with rail infrastructure that is useless to almost everyone and it costs far more to maintain it than it's even worth.
America's internet infrastructure, like the railroads, was also left in the hands of private monopolies and it is also a piece of shit compared to other countries. It's slow and everyone pays far too much for it and many are still excluded from it because it's not profitable enough to run fiber to their area.
The AI bubble won't leave behind any new infrastructure when it bursts. Just millions of burned out GPUs that get sent to an e-waste processing plant where they are ground up into sand, trillions of dollars wasted, many terawatt hours of energy wasted, many billions of liters of freshwater wasted, and the internet being buried under an avalanche of pseudorandomly-generated garbage.
This would only be applicable to in-vitro fertilization, in which case there's no point in trying to remove the extra chromosome when you could just find another sperm donor that doesn't have Down Syndrome.
The reason for Google's massive success has nothing to do with the business acumen or the innovative ideas of its founders - it's because a) in the 1990s, antitrust law in the US was pretty much dead and Google came in at just the right time to take advantage of this fact and make world domination their goal from the outset, and b) Google used their excess reserves of cash to host the worlds most popular website with no ads and no real revenue stream for many years, taking a risky and extremely expensive gamble that their slowly-cultivated vendor lock-in would eventually recoup their losses many, many times over, which it did. In other words, it was dumb luck, being in the right place at the right time. Just like Larry and Sergey, the trust fund babies born to wealthy successful parents with lucrative careers from the 80s tech boom.
These kinds of articles pop up all the time, along with all the "Web 3" ideas, and all of them seem to view the past with a sort of rose-tinted nostalgia, forgetting that the corporate business world of the 80s, 90s, and early 2000s was just as sleazy and run by assholes as it is today; the only difference is that the technology is finally catching up with the ambitions of said sleazy assholes and allowing them to do what they've been trying to do since the outset, i.e. grow into enormous ungovernable conglomerates and wield godlike omnipotent control over the flow of information.
As a matter of fact, this stink of sleaziness that permeated the early Web was so prominent and overpowering that it played a key role in the rise of these huge companies like Google. Google's algorithms and page crawlers were not that revolutionary or different from anything the other search engines were doing; Google just happened to be in a position where they were sitting on lots of cash and were able to run a search engine for several years with no ads or clutter or any of the other annoyances of its competitors, seemingly providing a free service that asks nothing in return. They made this part of their carefully curated public image, of being the hip and cool tech company with the "don't be evil" mantra. They probably burned through ungodly amounts of money doing things this way, but once all the competing search engines withered away and died and Google had the entire market cornered they grew into a multi-trillion dollar megacorporation and are now unstoppable and now all their services they provide are deteriorating because they have no competition.
Ironically, it was this false underdog narrative, the idea of the young trendy cool tech companies overthrowing the stuffy old corporate tech companies, that sort of paved the way for the tech industry to become more monopolized and horrible than ever. And now it's happening again with lots of "Web3" companies trying to present themselves as the new champions, who will overthrow the stuffy old corporate tech companies like Google and bring us into a new era of the Web that is even worse than this one.
I think the fact that Steve Ballmer could be considered a good CEO by anyone today is just another reminder of the fact that our society has lost all understanding of what a sustainable business model is and our modern conception of capitalism is really just feudalism, i.e. private owners with significant political influence eliminating all competition with the help of the state and wielding monopolistic control over essential resources and earning their profits by charging rent rather than actually producing anything of real value.
We've been locked in this cycle for centuries now - technological progress opens up some new uncharted territory that is up for grabs and there is the brief period of booming growth and diverse competition in this new thriving industry, then the boom is over and the system no longer encourages competition or innovation or intelligent decisionmaking, instead it encourages overreach and incompetence and cancerous uninhibited growth and parasitic behavior - stealing ideas and flooding the market with cheap inferior imitations, aggressive anti-competitive practices, increased lobbying and increased dependence on state funding. The industry becomes dominated by these bloated behemoths that add nothing of value to the world and are an enormous burden on society and eventually they become so unsustainably huge that even the combined wealth of every sovereign nation cannot keep them afloat and then they collapse.
I mean, seriously, everyone knows Windows has always been shit and people have never had anything but negative things to say about it, everyone knows that every product Microsoft has ever produced has been absolute trash and that they have never had any interest in doing anything innovative or original or contributing anything useful to the world. Microsoft isn't a company and people like Steve Ballmer are not CEOs or businessmen of any kind, they're just landlords.
Was it really a vicious attack? He wanted to come here and tell me about his law firm and what he does and asks me what I think about it, so I gave him exactly what he asked for.
And I'm not an immigrant, I was born in the US and have lived here my entire life and H-1B has no effect on me personally at all. But I do work for a living and I have enough common sense to understand that one group of workers being exploited is the same as all workers being exploited.
The problem is not nation states or borders - people were being enslaved and exploited and abused by powerful autocrats long before there were ever any nations or borders, it's just human nature. The purpose of "the system" is to protect human society from its own destructive self-serving irrational urges, and this system is not some outside force that we can point the finger at, we are the system and everything we say and do and think and believe determines what kind of system it is.
I could argue that I am attacking the system, by not biting my tongue when confronted by the landed gentry, rather than playing along with my culture's indoctrinated tendency to roll out the red carpet and start kissing ass whenever a successful millionaire enters the room.
The U.S. has misused the law to exploit migrant laborers from Western Europe in the past, such as Irish immigrant workers building railroads a hundred years ago. The difference is, those Irish railroad workers were eventually able to ascend the social ladder and be treated as equals in our society, because they are white. They were similar enough to us that they could "pass" and be accepted in mainstream American society and not be looked upon forever as outsiders. Other exploited workers from that era were not as fortunate and continue to be dehumanized and marginalized even today. Every attempt they ever made to join the club and be participants in the great American Dream was systematically crushed, either by force of law or by force of mob violence. Because they are not white. We invented a whole victim-blaming narrative about this where we chalk it up to inferior genetics or lack of perserverence, but anyone with a brain can plainly see that it is the natural inclination for people to adapt to their surroundings and to do whatever they can to be accepted and welcomed into the social collective. It takes a powerful outside force to stop that from happening, to keep the outsiders from eventually turning into insiders, who will then start compelling us to share the commons with them.
The person is not here to help others, he is here to promote himself and his business. Do you really think a professional multi-millionaire attorney with his own law firm came here in the middle of a work day just to socialize?
Ah yes, those poor immigration attorneys just trying to get through life one day at a time on their six figure income, having to endure the unimaginable agony of reading the occasional snarky internet comment. Let me play you a song on the world's smallest violin while thousands of migrant workers get deported every time Elon Musk has to pay child support.
>How many more decades before the unions do their job?
You're ignoring over a hundred years worth of history of the American labor movement being relentlessly battered into the ground by private power and its enormous influence over state and federal government. There hasn't been a real labor movement in the US for a very long time, the percentage of unionized workers in the US is only 10% and most of them work in the public sector.
>Labor unions are also the reason the police are untouchable even when they commit horrendous crimes.
Then why are the states with the highest levels of police violence Republican anti-union states with right-to-work laws and no collective bargaining?
>Anecdata, but
Then why bother typing it?
>Rarely unions do their jobs. During COVID hospitals in my hometown were