• Manticore@lemmy.nz
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    1 year ago

    They said capitalism bred innovation too but all it actually bred was profit. Innovation is work. Why improve a bad product when you can cripple or buy out the competing ones?

    I’m reminded of how the English tried to lower the cobra population during their occupation of India, offering a bounty for each snake head that was turned in. The locals started breeding cobras into a profitable enterprise. When the colonials realised what was happening, they cancelled the bounty; all the breeding stock was then simply released. Yet more cobras.

    The metric by which a system is measured will determine how that system is optimised, not the system’s original intention.

    Schools measure grades, not learning. The English measured snake heads, not population. Capitalism measures capital, not innovation.