
Prohibition Tossed a Wet Blanket on America’s Inventors - lisper
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/things-invented-in-bars
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hprotagonist
One of the odd echoes of this is in the nascent cannabis herb vaporizer
market. (Controversies and health concerns about the oil-based pens are real
but aren’t related here.)

There’s a positively cambrian explosion of form factors, heater designs, heat
sources, materials, control systems, etc. right now in the product space, and
it’s more or less all driven by crazy people making stuff in their basement
and selling it via word of mouth on reddit and instagram and web forums.

No one design has won, so we’re still in that “try everything!” mode. It’s
kind of fun to see.

~~~
fourstar
I’d say Pax has won this category.

~~~
hprotagonist
Nope. Arizer and Storz and Bickel are up there and absolutely pulling their
weight. The solo, volcano/mighty/crafty are certainly well known, so Pax
doesn't have the lock down on brand recognition.

There's a second tier of cheap-but-probably-safe that's companies like
boundless or healthy rips.

Then there are the fan favorites / esoteric-nerd things like dynavap or the
aforementioned basemenet-makers or hobbyist/lifestyle companies. They're not
going to hit mass-market volume but they've got the nerds covered.

Pax is killing it with the Era (but that's for concentrates) and their parent
company is Juul, so they're well positioned -- but they are not setting the
trend of the market at all. They continue to make good-but-overpriced
conduction-only units that are increasingly just totally eclipsed by
convection/hybrid units with replaceable batteries or alternative heat
sources.

~~~
simlevesque
the Pax Era is one of the worst concentrate portable device on the market.

~~~
vokep
Why do you say this? It isn't the most cost effective maybe, but it is
convenient and the bluetooth control stuff is kinda nice.

~~~
simlevesque
Because there are numerous better device available like the Saionara,
Molecule, Quartz Quest v4, TRVP and many others

~~~
vokep
Wow, I had no idea about any of these. Good to know!

~~~
simlevesque
check out r/waxpen

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schnevets
Whenever I hear one of these articles about idea exchange and location's
impact on innovation, I always wonder if indie game development is a notable
exception. Indie success stories frequently suggest one lone developer (like
Stardew Valley's Eric Barone) or an extremely intimate team (like Celeste's
Matt Thorson). It seems like breakout hits happen in completely random
cities/locations and no one area is the definitive "epicenter of game design".

I highly doubt game design is some notable outlier - it's simply a union of
software development and creative industries. I think the only reasonable
explanations is that the vibrant community and exchange of ideas happens
through the internet. If so, I think there are lessons for other
entrepreneurs/industries to follow so they can be less geographically bound.

~~~
mntmoss
Game development eras and their style have a substantial correlation to
locations and the teams assembled in them, but as you allude to, increasingly
the demographics don't seem to matter as much as the culture, because the
capital requirements have dropped so much.

A surprising amount of stuff, for example, came out of Chicago between the
80's and 90's. Why? Because amusement manufacturing was located there, so
there was a direct crossover from solid state pinball to video games.
Williams, Gottlieb and the rest all operated in the area. For similar reasons
the bulk of Japan's game output in the 80's came from its three largest
cities.

As the industry became more software-driven, it got easier to spread out, and
with the merger mania of the 90's pooling up capital, you got the existence of
studios with multiple offices in different cities. But you still needed some
infrastructure and financing to run a studio, and so most large game studios
are in "hip metros" even today.

But when you get down to the realm of current indie games doing digital
distribution and Twitch streaming, your physical bottleneck is approximately
the same as a writer: fast internet and basic city services. But writers
benefit from having a creative circle, salon or similar gathering, and that
creates an effect in indie games which I will forever remember from a
TIGSource forum thread as the "globetrotting international hipster clique":
creators who live very far apart and only see each other at big conferences.
Often this ends in people from the same city learning of each other's
existence by flying to a _different_ city where a conference is. After you hit
a critical mass of people aware of each other in a city, it's just a matter of
running a regular local event.

And what I've noticed personally in some 9 years of attending or helping host
those events is that while the games scene in a city will derive most of its
people from other industries(e.g. in SF you get a lot of tech workers with a
hobby project) the way in which it's shaped depends on the type of regular
events held and their focus. Some events are focused on business or technical
lectures; others are co-working of some form; still others are public-facing
showcases. Each of those has their purpose and you do need a sufficiently
large city to experience all categories, since without a balance you end up
with an average game output that has too little creativity, is poorly shaped
as a product, lacks in technical ability, etc. There is a lot of wasted time
in indie games that results from someone, somewhere retreating into the work
without other eyes on it.

~~~
adventured
> A surprising amount of stuff, for example, came out of Chicago between the
> 80's and 90's.

The Dallas / Ft Worth area has a similar cluster story around early 3D gaming,
thanks heavily to 3D Realms and then id Software. Companies like Ritual,
Hipnotic, GOD Games, ION Storm, Gearbox. Then you also had Ensemble Studios,
Terminal Reality and others in the area. DWANGO down in Houston was heavily
built on what id Software did. Dozens of small indie companies spawned in the
DFW area thanks to the foundation put down by some of those companies.

"Commercial real estate firm JLL found gaming companies are on the rise in
North Texas. According to JLL, nine colleges offer gaming degree programs that
help build a labor pool in North Texas. The firm counts 87 gaming companies in
North Texas. That’s nearly a third of all gaming companies in Texas, which
only trails California in the number of design and development studios."

"It used to be that Austin was the de facto answer for game development in
Texas. But actually, Dallas has a rich history of game development companies
going back to id Software," explained Bettner. "That spawned a bunch of
studios in the area."

[https://www.nbcdfw.com/news/tech/Gaming-Gaining-Ground-in-
No...](https://www.nbcdfw.com/news/tech/Gaming-Gaining-Ground-in-North-
Texas-494553621.html)

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throwawayjava
Man, Econ really is the miserable science. "I started with a politically
charged theory passed down from The Elders and, after 6 years of being paid to
search for evidence of that theory, guess what, I found some".

For starters, using patents as a proxy for innovation is dubious at best.
Patents are a terrible proxy for innovation. My own experience has been the
inverse: organizations/individuals that patenting shit lots of shit are
consistently the least inventive. Not sure if this was true in the early 20th
century, but it certainly is today.

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bjourne
There might be some confounding variables at play... Such as counties voting
in favor of prohibition could be more conservative which in turn could be
caused by them having an older population. Older people are, generally, both
more conservative and less inventive than younger people.

That said, all the best music was made in the 60's and 70's so maybe he's onto
something. :)

~~~
temporaryvector
This is a bit of a tangent, but sometimes I get confused by the US definition
of "conservative."

It seems to me that someone who is conservative would be against something
like the prohibition both because it changes the status quo and because it
results in regulation and a bigger government.

Has this always been the case in the US or has the word conservative changed
meaning at some point in history? Did the people who vote for the Prohibition
back at the turn of the 20th century identify themselves as conservative? Were
they identified as conservative by others around them?

~~~
abfan1127
Conservative Politics are not necessarily conservative (i.e. keep it the same)
and Progressive Politics are not necessarily progressive (i.e. make progress).
Thats the beauty of American Politics. It literally starts with lies and only
gets better from there... :/

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nullc
If you spend less time drunk you're less likely get suckered into paying
people to file worthless patents for your useless brainfarts.

Patent filing is a really weak proxy for the creation of actually useful
inventions.

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rexreed
To me this seems like correlation, but I'm not convinced of causation.

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asdf21
Imagine what drug prohibition has done...

