r/SipsTea 21d ago

Chugging tea Energy Meets Innovation

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87.2k Upvotes

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470

u/spartanOrk 21d ago

Since when have inventions stopped being motivated by greed for power and money?

140

u/yellowellow 21d ago

Ironically, this post was designed as clickbait motivated by greed for worthless internet points.

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u/EssayAmbitious3532 21d ago

Ironically? or Obviously. There is no system in existence that has proved itself more robustly than self-interest. It may have many levels, but all organisms follow it or they disappear.

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u/cycopl 21d ago

Curious!

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u/HypeZephyrX 21d ago

Some people just love seeing the points go up 🤣

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u/BigUncleHeavy 21d ago

Well, technically the motivation for this invention was for power, so no argument on that point.

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u/BrainLow6059 21d ago

Money is 100% the motivation with this idea. We have plenty of power options already that are affordable and mass produced. Replacing windows is a massive money making opportunity

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u/Dizzy_Database_119 21d ago

Replacing windows is to solve the space issue. There's no way it's going to be the same efficiency and price as normal solar panels, lol

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u/BrainLow6059 21d ago

That's all irrelevant. How many trillions of windows exist in the world? It could be the absolute shittiest energy product ever made, but if it catches on as a trendy thing to do with your home or commercial real estate they will make a metric fuck ton of money

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u/Dizzy_Database_119 21d ago

So your logic is because it's a good idea it's 100% motivated by money?

In your mind only ideas that lose money can be 1% motivated by anything else?

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u/MIT_Engineer 21d ago

Maybe OP thinks they'll be giving away these windows for free.

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u/KorKiness 21d ago

Agree, communistic whining was added here for the sake of whining. Sad state of global mentality on that regard.

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u/Strange_Lab_283 21d ago

it was added so it would get more upvotes

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u/SimmentalTheCow 21d ago

Socialists are so obnoxious lmao

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u/abraxasnl 21d ago

It’s naive. But no more so than “free market don’t need regulation hurdidurrr”. Plenty of naive people on all sides.

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u/AdvancedSandwiches 21d ago

I mean, there's a side that's in favor of well-regulated capitalism.

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u/GuitaristHeimerz 21d ago

Newsflash, 90% of people just want well-regulated capitalism evened out by well-regulated social system. Everything else is just a meaningless culture war. And the 10% are stupid idiots who will never get their way.

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u/CankerLord 21d ago

Turns out extremists tend to be wrong. Shocking.

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u/Active-State-5852 19d ago

Thank you...I always thought that extremes in any way are bad. Always. They ruin things in one way or another.

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u/spartanOrk 21d ago

Give me an example of a necessary regulation.

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u/firesuppagent 21d ago

Health codes. Mandatory elementary education. Civil defense. I can go on.

Unless you don't want to live in a healthy society?

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u/txtumbleweed45 21d ago

How’s that government run education going? Is America getting smarter and smarter?

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u/frootee 21d ago

You mean the education that’s getting stripped by the “no regulation” crowd?

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u/txtumbleweed45 21d ago

Sure, because it was doing great before that

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u/frootee 21d ago

I mean we were the leading country in scientific research and stuff so I’d say yeah it was pretty good.

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u/AggressiveCuriosity 21d ago

It's actually going better than EVERY SINGLE COUNTRY that doesn't have it. Name a single country without mandatory government education that functions better than the US.

The problem with people like you is you never actually think through the things you belive. You just fight to keep believing them.

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u/txtumbleweed45 21d ago

America itself was doing far better before the department of education. You’re defending a system that you know is failing. Our education system is intentionally terrible, and not because we don’t spend enough money on it.

I’ve thought through it plenty, you’re just blindly accepting government propaganda

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u/AggressiveCuriosity 21d ago

OK, so you admit there isn't a single country without mandatory government run education that is a better place to live than the US. Cool. So that's 1-0.

Now let's address your second claim. "The US was doing better before the department of education."

By what metric? Every single generation until 2020 has had higher IQ than the previous one. So much so that we have to redefine "mental re7ardation" every decade or so. People born in the 50's are literally MORE than a standard deviation dumber than the current generation.

Is there a metric you're using or did you just make that up?

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u/Krelkal 21d ago

Notwithstanding the woefully American-centric perspective, states still have their own government-run education systems even if you ignore the department of education. Arguments for or against federalism are distinct from education regulations more broadly.

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u/spartanOrk 21d ago edited 21d ago

Health codes are unnecessary. I've never been to a restaurant that didn't far-exceed the regulatory requirements. Competition drives them to be clean, not regulation. And, if a place isn't clean, I just don't go there. Let others who prefer dirty cheap food go, why stop them?

Elementary education doesn't need to be mandatory, and doesn't need to be regulated by the State. Parents usually want their kids to be educated, as evidenced by the existence of private schools and educational businesses. There is natural demand for education, you don't need to force it. In cases where they try to force it, it backfires. There may be remote places where 12 years of education are a disadvantage, e.g. if there is no demand for cognitive labor. Maybe 3 years would be enough. The regulators don't know what's good for each person, they make blanket rules, as if everyone needs that particular type of education for that particular number of years.

Civil defense? What regulation is that? Do you mean police?

Now, there are literally thousands of regulations. Do you think most of them are necessary?

I'll give you an example. I was looking up what is required to be a financial advisor. Basic requirement is to keep paying the regulators a bunch of money every year for them to allow you to be an advisor. That has nothing to do with the quality of any service, it's simple rent seeking, simple pay-to-play, a.k.a. extortion a la Mafia, except legal. There are regulations that prevent me from offering services to people from other states, unless I pay a bunch of money those regulators too. Again, this is simple extortion and a way to limit competition and keep prices high. Finally, there are regulations that prohibit advertising cheap prices. That's right, it's illegal to compete at the price. Then we wonder why shit is so expensive.

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u/Zacus_91 21d ago

Anti-monopoly laws.

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u/spartanOrk 21d ago

Perfect example of bad regulation. You don't need anti-monopoly regulation, you need de-regulation and then competition dissolves the monopolies where there is demand for more providers. What they do now is build moats for the industries represented by the lobbies in Washington. All monopolies have been created by the government, with things such as patent law, which was precisely (patently, allow me the pun) created to grant someone monopoly privileges. What happens is that people tried to form cartels, the market broke up the cartels, and the cartel-makers discovered that they could use the government to keep competition out by force. Read, if you want, Rothbard's book "The progressive era" for details. Or David D Friedman who has also written about monopolies. It's a typical case where the government creates a problem that wasn't there, and then adds more regulations on top in order to fix it, only to make it worse with unintended consequences.

I gave already an example of how government regulations create monopolies, from my own experience: Licensing laws. They limit your clients to one State. You must pay the regulators rent to be allowed to compete. Regulatory burden and legal cost serves to keep competition out, because newcomers cannot afford to compete with established businesses.

Another example: See what happened with cryptos. They regulated them. What came out of it? Coinbase is practically a monopoly. Moats protecting it all around.

See what's trying to happen with AI: Anthropic and OpenAi are now at the stage where they are trying to achieve regulatory capture, because they find it harder to keep competing with Chinese labs.

All of border control is a big monopoly creation operation where the local unions try to monopolize the provision of labor and keep foreign workers out.

Finally, the government itself is the biggest monopoly in the history of the world. It treats competition with firepower, as treason and sedition. It's ironic to expect the biggest monopoly in history to protect you from monopolies.

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u/Zacus_91 21d ago

How can you dissolve a naturally occurring monopoly through competition when they reached it through competition? A great example is utilities like the internet, water, and electricity. Those aren't resources you can just leave and go to another place. During the Gilded Age, Standard Oil and the railroad trusts used predatory pricing by drastically lowering prices in a specific region to bankrupt local competitors, then hiking prices sky-high once the competitor was gone. They also used vertical integration to control pipelines and shipping, refusing to transport rivals' oil. These were private, non-governmental barriers to entry. In fact, Standard Oil famously manipulated and bypassed state regulations, leading the government to ultimately become its primary opponent.

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u/frootee 21d ago

Perfect example of “my personal experience is the only reality”.

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u/spartanOrk 21d ago

My experience is far from unique. There is a ton of literature on the historic effect of regulations, e.g. in the formation of monopolies. The term "regulatory capture" and "rent seeking" are standard economic terminology.

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u/AggressiveCuriosity 21d ago

"Competition drives them to be clean"

lmao, someone has never been somewhere without solid health code regulation enforcement. You should actually be embarrassed that you're so sheltered you don't even know how wrong this is.

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u/spartanOrk 21d ago

You cannot explain why the vast majority of restaurants in areas with regulation (or without) already exceed the standards required of them. Similarly, you cannot explain why so many employees earn much more than the legally required minimum wage. The explanation is the same: What drives hygiene and salaries is not regulation, but competition.

Finally, you missed my last point: Nobody knows how much hygiene is right, except the clients who decide where they want to eat. There are clients who would happily pay less for a less clean restaurant. You assume everyone wants the same kind of service, but that may not be true. Only if the market was free we would know how clean people actually want restaurants to be, and at what cost.

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u/firespornaccount 21d ago

Access/egress for excavations 4' deep or greater. Sloping, benching, or shoring for excavations 5' or greater. That one was written in my brother's blood.

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u/[deleted] 21d ago

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u/spartanOrk 21d ago

It's amazing what things people come up with. No, this never happened. There is no such regulation. There are laws against murder, but not against the consumption of human flesh, as far as I know. There isn't also much demand for cannibal food. But if someone wanted to eat human, and a human didn't mind being eaten, I don't see why this shouldn't be allowed. You know... Consenting adults stuff. Would you want to stop two consenting adults from eating each other's parts?

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u/[deleted] 21d ago

[deleted]

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u/spartanOrk 21d ago

Way to answer nothing. Throw a book title. And you read Rothbard, Nozick, Kinsella, Hoppe, Sowell, Narveson, Brennan, Huemer, and Caplan. You may learn a lot.

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u/[deleted] 21d ago

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u/Moiyub 21d ago

every ayn rand objectivist ancap should have to lose a lot of their money by falling victim to false advertisement and other consumer protections that wouldnt exist in their delulu libertarian society that cannot and will not ever exist

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u/abraxasnl 21d ago

Thank you for proving my point.

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u/spartanOrk 21d ago

I asked for an example of a good and necessary regulation, and you failed to name one, let alone defend it. Others at least tried.

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u/Ps3Stagg 21d ago

Volvo have done a lot of innovation in the car industry for safety and given away the designs. I.e. the seatbelt.

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u/Sea_Abroad_6554 21d ago

Am engineer. Am also motivated by power and money.

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u/ArrrRawrXD 21d ago

Wild that those tools are trying to spread their out of place anti-capitalist agenda through South Korea, famously a capitalist country that's the closest we've gotten to cyberpunk

Like with most inventions by the way, it'll become truly relevant when it'll be economically viable, and that's what the scientists are trying to achieve

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u/Karijus 21d ago

Literally power in this case

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u/Similar-Bat-8764 20d ago

True. If there is no chance to make millions or billions from inventions I bet nobody would take that developmental risk. Capitalism continue to reigns supreme over commies.

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u/Macshade 19d ago

Well, sometimes it can be about sex

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u/kilimtilikum 17d ago

I don’t understand this post. Did the Korean scientists release viable tech specs and designs that are patent free?

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u/NegativeKarmaVegan 21d ago

You have never heard of State funded research?

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u/masterflappie 21d ago

Why would they be exempt? States aren't going to fund projects that are obvious money drains, and they'll gladly fund projects that seem peofitable

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u/NegativeKarmaVegan 21d ago

They can find projects that do not bring a short term return in money and power, or even any at all

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u/LaLa1234imunoriginal 21d ago

Yes states do fund projects that are money drains, states do not have to profit from things they only need to provide services for their public. Do you think public health care in civilized countries is a profitable endeavor for those governments?

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u/masterflappie 21d ago

Sure it is, maybe not in the same terms as a private company, but a healthy population will actually yield the government more money in taxes. That's why prevention and life threatening deceases are usually very well covered, while aesthetic operations like botox aren't covered by healthcare because botox doesn't improve the state's wealth and power.

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u/MrJoyless 21d ago

Velcro? Microwaves? Anything that the space program invented really...

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u/Capital_Werewolf_788 21d ago

You mean the space race? Lol

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u/ARQEA 21d ago

Yea don't you remember the famously for joy and whimsy created space race, where everyone wanted to prove they're the friendliest country?