

Can a new cycle of technological innovation save the US from stagnation? - winanga
http://www.oftwominds.com/blogmar11/stagnation-innovation3-11.html

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SamReidHughes
This is a bad article. At the risk of picking out particular points...

Minute power savings on power-eating devices are ignored, even if they cost
140 power plants, because apparently consumers' energy bills aren't high
enough for them to care. It isn't because they're unsexy. Apparently there are
better ways for companies to spend their engineering effort, like making
features that save an hour of users' time instead of saving $1 of electricity.
So it makes the fallacy of thinking that engineers have free time to worry
about X, and that regulation to force them to care about X is a good idea
instead of considering the opportunity cost. (On the other hand we could point
out that consumers are going to be rationally ignorant of the cost while it
would actually be worth a day of an engineer's time to improve such and such,
so we should regulate that in the interest of optimizing the behavior of human
beings. But then we'd have to worry about the externalities of such
regulation, and <imagine a libertarian argument here>.)

> What we have is a bloated network of fiefdoms and cartels, all of whom are
> hoping that some new technology will enable their continued siphoning of the
> nation's wealth and income stream.

It's sentences like these that show this is not worth a second skim. The last
thing that helps established income streams is new technology.

