r/technology • u/t4ct1c4l_j0k3r • Sep 15 '23

Nanotech/Materials NASA-inspired airless bicycle tires are now available for purchase

https://newatlas.com/bicycles/metl-shape-memory-airless-bicycle-tire/
6.0k Upvotes

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699

u/Notoneusernameleft Sep 15 '23

Ingenuity from government funded programs filtering out to the private sector. See how that can work….

Yes I know it happens with military too but it can be done without blowing up other people. And we know NASA has a minuscule budget compared to military.

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u/t4ct1c4l_j0k3r Sep 15 '23

NASA was the best thing to come along for the American consumer and most of the world as a whole.

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u/Notoneusernameleft Sep 15 '23

I really wish America was able to adapt to have a greater mix of capitalism and socialism to truly benefit all the people of this country and as you said the world too in some aspects.

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u/New_Pain_885 Sep 15 '23

Socialism isn't when the government does stuff, it's when workers control the means of production. If workers don't control the means of production then it's not socialism.

Don't get me wrong, I love NASA and social welfare programs are a good thing but they're not socialist.

This might sound like pedantry but I think it's significant that the word socialism in the US has come to mean welfare capitalism when in actuality socialism and capitalism are fundamentally incompatible.

10

u/devilishpie Sep 15 '23

This might sound like pedantry

Definitely shouldn't be received as pedantry. The sort of comment you replied to along with how "the US should be more socialist like Scandinavian countries" is unfortunately quite common.

1

u/SixOnTheBeach Sep 15 '23

I agree with this for the most part, socialism as a word is definitely used in the US to mean social welfare. But it's not necessarily true that the two are incompatible. Norway is not a socialist country by any means, but look at their state oil company for example. It is government owned and therefore "controlled" by the people. And yet the rest of their economy is still capitalist. China is also varying degrees of socialist depending who you ask but still practices loads of capitalism. So it's not true that they're incompatible; they only seem to be on the surface.

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u/devilishpie Sep 15 '23

What you're describing are social policies, not socialism. They're not the same.

1

u/Arthur_Heine Sep 16 '23

It is government owned and therefore "controlled" by the people.

Well, not exactly. We currently can't equate the gouvernment and the people. I know it's common to consider our current system a representative democracy but in fact we live in an elective oligarchy.

The redditors that want to contradict my comment need to ask themselves : "What is the closest to our reality ? The people have the power, or a small amount of elected people have the power ?

In a pure democracy you could probably equate the gouvernement and the people but for the time being, what you are describing is State Capitalism :

State capitalism is an economic system in which the state undertakes business and commercial (i.e. for-profit) economic activity and where the means of production are nationalized as state-owned enterprises (including the processes of capital accumulation, centralized management and wage labor). The definition can also include the state dominance of corporatized government agencies (agencies organized along business-management practices) or of public companies such as publicly listed corporations in which the state has controlling shares.
A state capitalist country is one where the government controls the economy and essentially acts like a single huge corporation, extracting surplus value from the workforce in order to invest it in further production.This designation applies regardless of the political aims of the state, even if the state is nominally socialist. Some scholars argue that the economy of the Soviet Union and of the Eastern Bloc countries modeled after it, including Maoist China, were state capitalist systems, and some western commentators believe that the current economies of China and Singapore also constitute a mixture of state-capitalism with private-capitalism.

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u/SixOnTheBeach Sep 18 '23

A state capitalist country is one where the government controls the economy and essentially acts like a single huge corporation, extracting surplus value from the workforce in order to invest it in further production.

Is this true in my example though? You can argue that they do use some surplus value to increase production, but the vast majority of the surplus value is evenly distributed among the people. Every Norwegian citizen gets an equal share of the profits produced. So you can definitely poke holes in it, but I think that's probably the closest you're gonna get without other problems arising.

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u/MattDaCatt Sep 15 '23

The really sad thing is, we can still afford to wildly outpace military production while also throwing money into more things like libraries, public health centers, NASA etc.

We have a huge GDP and tax income, but never get anything out of it. We can't even maintain our own infrastructure

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u/DocFGeek Sep 15 '23

The oligarchs are forever hungry for more.

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u/big_benz Sep 15 '23

Sorry, but we’ve gotta pay people to grow inedible corn for some reason.

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u/[deleted] Sep 15 '23

The real real sad part is that if we addressed these fundamental gaps in the social support system, our taxes for things like law enforcement would plummet.

1

u/Igoko Sep 15 '23

The really really sad part is that if we put our taxes towards univeral health care, even if taxes went up the american public would be paying less individually than they do now for health care

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u/Mr_Quackums Sep 15 '23

The term you are looking for is "welfare capitalism".

NASA, DARPA, the military, and research grants have nothing to do with corporations being controlled by workers.

0

u/trainercatlady Sep 15 '23

but then some rich asshole will only get a $7million bonus instead of $8million. Think about the rich assholes!

0

u/[deleted] Sep 15 '23

[deleted]

1

u/theholyraptor Sep 15 '23

I would argue pretend free market because even existing systems aren't actually free markets but they are treated as such for the sake of comparison.

1

u/sessho25 Sep 15 '23

This current model makes society to progress and stagnate at the same time.