[Terr_]

> SOMEONE has to invest for that progress to be made.

History often has cases where the surrounding context/infrastructure/market/culture just wasn't suitable for an invention to take off--so it fails--and then somebody 5-100 years later tries something almost the same thing and it becomes a wild success and they get all the credit for it.

For example, look at the AT&T Picturephone from ~1964. [0] Even if someone from today time-traveled with the benefit of ~60 years of economic and technological hindsight... do you think a strategy of "just keep investing--somebody has to" would been enough to make the video-phone a widespread and profitable thing in any reasonable timeframe?

I'm pretty sure you'd go quite bankrupt first, just trying to stay solvent while making hundreds of other enabling-inventions and cost-savings in a wide range of fields while completely replacing global infrastructure.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQMnlKMFD8M

[tsunamifury]

But we did people continuously invested through the 80s then 90s then Cisco then Google and now zoom. Do you and the writer not know that video calling was a consistent investment for over 40+ years?!

[Terr_]

By that logic, somebody was so desperate to get convenient warm food that they decided to "invest" for decades in side-projects like airplanes and bombs just to finally get a microwave-oven, obviously true purpose of everything that came before.

Just because something else in civilization might somehow help someday isn't enough to make it part of "the investment" which a company or individual is deciding whether to make or abandon for a different goal they are focused on.

[tsunamifury]

Sorry but I feel like you are trying to be clever here but failing entirely because yes that is how it works. Continuous investment yields unexpected outcomes is like the core tenet.

[oliveshell]

Dude, the core tenet of this forum is making a good-faith [1] effort to really understand the fantastically complex issues at play here, and then to communicate about them honestly in a collaborative, rather than competitive, spirit.

You are not doing that.

[1]: https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/2020-07/Good_Faith...

[tsunamifury]

Dude…

[oliveshell]

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

^ Go read the comment guidelines. Really read them.

I dare you (rhetorically, not really: I won't read any further replies from you so save your breath) to then assert with a straight face that you've been paying even a lick of heed to a single one of them.

With this in mind, I am unwilling to engage with you further on the matter-- but I will say in closing that I genuinely hope that you may someday find true peace and self-acceptance.

I don't mean this flippantly: you'll truly be lots happier if you can eventually let go of the compulsive need to "win" every argument or exchange and learn to actually listen to others with an open mind.

Where's dang at?