Vaccines. the original against smallpox was revolutionary, probably one of the most important discoveries of human history. Smallpox was a horrendous disease but we found a way to save the lives of millions of people
And know we have outbreaks of diseases like measles because the vaccines were so effective that people starting to believe that the disease was not so bad and that the risk of the vaccine was greater than the risk of the disease 🤦♀️
I’m so sick of people, and their bullshit
Harambe. His death is what caused this timeline to branch off from the correct one.
Nah, he sacrificed himself to save us from an even worse timeline. It was a canon event.
If this is the better of the timelines i would rather him still be alive to lead us into the apocalypse that could have been.
Voice calls.
facebook’s reach.
Cambridge Analytica has used it for elections.
some android phones have fb factory-installed (and not easily removable).
in some countries fb data consumption is totally free~
there were reports of [publicized?] fb experiments manipulating user’s feed to elicit feelings of sadness, despair and hope.
The creation of IMF and how it destroyed any hope for European communism post ww2
Maybe the Steam Link/controller or the Ouya? I don’t know if they were particularly influential but I feel like they both did something before it was popular.
Now there’s a fair amount of game streaming devices and Android TV boxes made for emulation and gaming
Remember OnLive?
Capitalism. For all the awfulness goodness gracious, quality of life has skyrocketed as we’ve figured it out. Parents almost never bury their children anymore, disabled folks who aren’t royalty have better lives than almost ever before, if you break a bone you can get it taken care of rather than have it heal poorly and cause pain for the rest of your life, almost no one gets literally crucified and most have access to clean drinking water in their house!!!
Yeah, we maybe don’t have it as good as our parents generation but goddamn we have it so much better than their parents and grandparents etc.
(I’d argue climate change is more a political problem than capitalism. A sane society would’ve put a carbon tax in place decades ago and let the free market sort it out. But we get into stupid political fights and the youth, who are most affected, don’t vote in primaries when it really matters.)
Literally all the benefits you mention are benefits of advancing science. All of those would still exist if there had been a global communist revolution in 1917…
Ahhh yes, who can forget the glorious communist food sciences that led to the mass starvations of millions?!?
(Heck, have you ever seen that photo of Gorbachev in a supermarket, stunned by the variety and availability of food?)
Yeah, science tends to advance more quickly under capitalism. It’s not a coincidence that the scientific revolution and capitalism advanced hand in hand.
Because the Soviets were so well known for their social and technological innovations, right?
Let’s not forget they managed to match the Americans in the space race even though their space budget was so small they were using cardboard boxes as office furniture.
The Soviets might have aspired to socialism early on, but slipped into totalitarian state capitalism.
Even so, they did start the space race from which a surprisingly large number of technical advances came. There are over a dozen advances in your cell phone that came from NASA research. That includes almost everything except the touch screen which was invented by the Smithsonian museum.
This post is completely absurd. All of these things have happened in spite of capitalism and they’ve developed simultaneously in non-capitalist states. We (mostly) have access to clean drinking water because of environmental activism that forced companies to stop dumping industrial waste in bodies of water. We have access to healthcare because activists maneuvered politically to ensure it became a right, not a privilege. That’s to say nothing of developing capitalist countries that offer none of these privileges to their people. Capitalism didn’t give us these things. If you spend any amount of time reading about the history of labor or the development of regulatory bodies, capital has hindered social progress wherever possible to avoid any restrictions or taxation. These things were demanded and fought for by the people they were affecting. Industry and finance are owed none of the credit.
You are confusing capital with capitalism.
No I’m not. Capital usually refers to the individuals or corporate bodies that control or direct investment. Capital is the anticident to capitalism.
And under capitalism, capital and labour are generally in conflict. Same way most capital owners are in conflict with each other (that’s basically the engine of growth.)
Saying that labour battled for these advancements is no more an indictment of capitalism than the fact that McDonalds battles with Wendys for revenue.
I’m not indicting capitalism. My point was that capitalism isn’t responsible for the last century of social improvement.
Since we’ve “figured it out,” we’ve made sure that most people don’t have access to basic services unless they spend huge amounts of money and that the planet is in a state of disaster.
(How is this not a capitalist problem?Having the government imposed a carbon tax goes against the idea of a free market. Most of the politicians in power are capitalists.)
What services do you think people had for free earlier?
And you misunderstanding how capitalism works doesn’t mean a carbon tax is against a free market any more than rules againat pouring nuclear waste into rivers goes against a free market. A free market had all sorts of rules to protect us from the excesses of capitalism, that’s literally the entire point of anti-trust law, because the correct capitalist move for a company is to become a monopoly, which would be bad for consumers. Thus, we tame the excesses of capitalism.
Give it up OP, you won’t find an audience here. Just angry kids bitching about capitalism on their devices, made by capitalist economies. LOL, want to piss off some of these tankies? Point out that China was a struggling, failing mess until they allowed capitalism into their economy. China is poised to become the 21st century America.
FWIW, I’m with you. Capitalism is the best economic system yet, but it needs guardrails. In America we’ve stripped those out. Anti-trust law isn’t a thing any longer.
Nothing of that is thanks to capitalism. All of it is despite capitalism.
What? Wait… So when parents were burying most of their children back in the day and now don’t, that is somehow despite capitalism giving us the goods, services, hospitals, nurses, doctors, ample nutritional supplements etc?
Hmmm…
Life expectancy in the U.S. has dropped sharply in the last two years, to the point that now the average Cuban will live nearly three years more than the average American.
I remember a talk show where some Christian minister or priest thought he could attribute western advancement (political, social, science) to Christianity. Because, look at all those Muslim countries and how backwards they are. Which, of course, is complete nonsense. All social, political, and scientific progress in Europe (and by extension the world) was achieved against church resistance. If it was for the church, we would still live in monarchies, without electricity, and only pray for health. You’re making the same fallacy: here (west) good and we have capitalism, there bad and %something_else. So it must be thanks to capitalism. No. Capitalism is happy to exploit you in a dictatorship, theocracy, oligarchy, … Capitalism loves slavery. Capitalism loves monopolies to extract even more money (and by extension undervalued labor) from you. Capitalism loves poverty because it means cheap workforce. Capitalism doesn’t give a fuck if you are killed or maimed at a job if replacing you is cheaper than preventing accidents. Capitalism only serves the people with the capital. Everybody else gets fobbed off with peanuts and will happily be sacrificed to the machine if it makes a profit. Are we better off in a capitalist system than our ancestors three or four generations prior? Yes. Is that thanks to capitalism? No. It is despite capitalism and thanks to the restrictions we put on it. Restrictions which get continuously eroded.
I’m pretty sure these are all coincidences. It seems like a stretch to say that these are all because of capitalism. And they’re definitely not because of free market capitalism.
Capitalism is what gives us our fast food and our smartphones.
It’s (usually) governments keeping capitalism in check that gives us things like clean drinking water and accessibility and equality.
Thanks to capitalism, almost every aspect of society is being viewed through the lens of economics. Profit and loss, surplus and deficit. We’re privatising everything that promises to make a profit for someone, no matter the drawbacks - healthcare, education, water supply. Everything else is being neglected even destroyed. Politics is utterly beholden to economic concerns (read: the will of wealthy donors). Which is one of the reasons why we don’t have a carbon tax. The free market doesn’t work in a system where growth and profit trump everything. We’re literally running government like a business.
We literally have a pandemic going on in which millions of people have died completely preventable deaths in only a few years, but we didn’t try to prevent those deaths for economic concerns. We literally had capitalists tell us that it’s better to let those people die so we can save the economy. That’s just one example of how completely and utterly capitalism has fucked up our society.
But sure, climate change is a political problem.
