Where is the US economy headed?

Gee, I don't know.. Search engines such as Gopher, Archie, Veronica

ARPA itself wasn't part of a business venture

A lot of the major innovations occurred before they became a business venture. Facebook, Google, DOS. The list goes on and on. The technology was created and then found to be marketable after it was created.

You stupid pussy, when I wrote business, I meant business. The sort of thing, as my daughter would say, "people without common sense" go to business school to study.

Thanks, parados, for making concrete for poor lonesome george what is common knowledge.

parados, You forgot some biggies like HP and Apple.

New technological innovations, whether in the IT field or others very often start out as the creations of individuals or small groups. In many other cases they are the work of dedicated research & developments in large corporations. However, in both circumstances, their continued development and deployment to markets is almost always done in business ventures. Moreover it is the prospect of major business success that drives most such innovation, however it occurs. It is the absence of the possibility of individual business success, and the associated conflict with human nature , that made centrally planned socialist systems such drab poverty-ridden failures.

Here is the exchange that started this and has now reduced plainoldme to stupid sputtering and name calling;

To which plainoldme responded;
Her subsequent rationalization for this absurd response was as follows;
So what she means by “innovation” remains undefined …. a mystery in that it apparently does not involve new technologies of any kind or even new products. It appears her statement didn’t mean anything at all, and that she simply lacks the courage and character to acknowledge it, resorting to evasion and name-calling instead.

Plainoldme is very quick to spew out belittling comments on any and all who don’t duplicate her views, but also strangely unable to engage in any coherent dialogue about the ideas under discussion. I’m willing to believe that, beneath these weak and neurotic defense mechanisms there might be a decent person. However, I’m not willing to let that garbage pass unchallenged.

George has very low reading comprehension. This is because he is so eager to baselessly expound on everything and anything that is on his mind. Carefully reading someone else's post might interfere with this.

Actually, georgeob's reading and comprehension skills are above average. How he expresses them may not agree with our sense of the English language, but the jest of what he says has truths in them. Most of the big US companies now in existence may have started off as personal ventures, but have developed into mega-conglomerates based on the business to expand its primary base of interest and selling to a larger market.

Intel is a good case in point; their sales of computer chips continues to develop generation after generation of smaller and bigger memories. Without this increase in technology, Intel would have become stagnant and died.

Many companies that have become successful essentially followed this same pattern. Innovation does come out from established businesses.

You wrote:



I replied:

I have seen no evidence of "innovation" in American business.

Now, do you get it?

@CI

This sort of thing is exactly what I mean! He did not follow the thread from his statement to mine. I was responding to the word innovation, which I set off in quotation marks. Jesh!

"Innovation in American Business?" Think Henry Ford; he developed the assembly line manufacturing.

And how long has Henry Ford been dead?

Consider what happened as the baby boom came of age. Left wingers wanted to work part-time in professional jobs and have the same level of income their parents did (hardly sounds greedy, does it?) so that husbands and wives could share in providing for the family, child care and home keeping.

Business said no. That is hardly innovation.

No, it is often that something is created to take care of a problem and then someone realizes it can be sold after the fact.

DOS is the perfect example of that. It wasn't created by Microsoft. They bought it because they recognized the potential to sell it.

Google is another example. It wasn't created to market.

George Obiwan Kenobi always brings out stuff that are not the cause of the problem. He tries to divert attention from the culprits. The innovators or busninessmen like Henry Ford, Steve Jobs, or Bill Gates only get praise from me and maybe a few roasts but the crux of the problem are the CEOs like Republican Enron executives, Wall Street executives like Hank Paulson and the other Paulson of Abacus or other creature of Goldman Sachs that defrauded their investors.

Businesses motivate, finance, manage, market, and deliver innovations that their employees produce and their customers purchase.

There are good business and bad business which you represent.

pom, Not true; business said yes to many who now work at home; this saves the environment, fuel, and the wasted time to commute to the workplace.

The increasing use of computers for work has increased productivity, and companies continue to make more use of computers.

Do you think we are addicted to computers ci? I mean addicted. Like collective nervous breakdown with sudden withdrawal.

I can't see weaning as an alternative because anybody who tried it would go bust.

spendi, How many posts have you written on a2k? Are you addicted?

I totally disagree with you. The matter was not working at home, it was job sharing. As for working at home, that is something of the recent past, not forty years ago when we were demanding it.

That is nonsense, and in major part, factually wrong. The massive entry of women into the workforce was accomodated fairly well. That it did not result in a proportional reduction in average salaries was a result of the expansion nof economic activity by individuals and businesses. Many large companies have surprisingly large numbers of employees who work from home. Much depends on the conditions surrounding the work in question. and this option works better in some industries (marketing and consulting) than it does in others.


If you are imagining a fantasy world in which people work 20 or 30 hours per week for the same wage they formerly got for forty hours, you need to get real. Even France found its 30 hour week didn't achieve the desired economic objective - the number of jobs didn't increase, precisely because the cost of adding employees in a heavily regulated labor market were so high. This was primarily the result of heavy and intrusive state regulation and taxation. The same conditions are being created here by another group of left wing political leaders.

The economic incentives for businesses direct them to the addition of real economic value - not the daydreams (or "innovations") of "left wing" authoritarian social planners. They produce only stagnation, the loss of individual freedom, and drab poverty for all.

Speaking as a former, and hopefully future, employee of the high tech sector, I give you my word that you are mistaken on this point.

On the supply side of this market, you cannot produce microchips for pennies a piece without mass production in large factories, which are typically run by businesses. Don't be fooled by the mystique of the startups in Silicon Valley garages. Without big businesses like Hewlett Packard, these startups would have had no electronic components to play around with and make their first product from.

And once the product is there, somebody has to buy it. And although, in principle, individuals and small businesses are as capable of using technology as big businesses are, big businesses seem to do best at drawing tangible benefits from it. It would take me a while to retrieve the studies from my old computer's backup disk, but the greatest productivity gain from computers so far has turned out to be Big Box retailers squeezing inefficiencies out of their supply chains.

So technology does need the superstructure of business. On the supply side as well as the demand side of the market, it needs it to seize economies of scale.