Yeah and that’s where the capitalism angle comes in. With supply side economics pushed by Reagan, wealthy people are supposed to do things that’ll create jobs. They’re “job creaters”, right?
Problem is they don’t have any good ideas. And that would normally be fine, you could have employees that know what they’re doing developing technology that’ll make a production line 2% more efficient. Those kinds of advancements are important… if we’re 2% more efficient, we can make 2% more stuff, and so we’re 2% better off. But that’s not exciting and doesn’t attract investment. So instead we get these big bold “visionary” ideas that soak up a lot of investment, and we have a whole lot of people making marketing campaigns to promote these “game-changer” ideas to attract even more investment. So we have a society where we’re near full employment but a lot of people not producing anything that has a benefit to society.
So those scientists in Jurassic Park (or the real life scientists at that “Dire Wolf” company) could be working on something beneficial like applying their skills towards curing diseases. But instead they’re working on useless things because the money goes towards “visionaries” that don’t actually have good ideas on how to contribute to society. But I don’t think that absolves the scientists from taking those jobs. But people have to pay the bills I’m not going to judge them for it either. The Dire Wolf thing seems stupid to me but nowhere near as dangerous as Jurassic Park. In the case of JP, at some point you have to ask yourself “is my job going to cause harm to people”, but the JP scientists didn’t seem to ask the question because they were just interested in the challenge of making a dinosaur.
But yeah the Dire Wolf thing is stupid and useless… for now. But hey, eventually that company might do something useless that’ll get people killed!
There’s a recent Behind the Bastards episode on the main dude behind Colossal (who is actually a very well known scientist) and exactly how he is using science to do bad things without considering the consequences.
Yeah and that’s where the capitalism angle comes in. With supply side economics pushed by Reagan, wealthy people are supposed to do things that’ll create jobs. They’re “job creaters”, right?
Problem is they don’t have any good ideas. And that would normally be fine, you could have employees that know what they’re doing developing technology that’ll make a production line 2% more efficient. Those kinds of advancements are important… if we’re 2% more efficient, we can make 2% more stuff, and so we’re 2% better off. But that’s not exciting and doesn’t attract investment. So instead we get these big bold “visionary” ideas that soak up a lot of investment, and we have a whole lot of people making marketing campaigns to promote these “game-changer” ideas to attract even more investment. So we have a society where we’re near full employment but a lot of people not producing anything that has a benefit to society.
So those scientists in Jurassic Park (or the real life scientists at that “Dire Wolf” company) could be working on something beneficial like applying their skills towards curing diseases. But instead they’re working on useless things because the money goes towards “visionaries” that don’t actually have good ideas on how to contribute to society. But I don’t think that absolves the scientists from taking those jobs. But people have to pay the bills I’m not going to judge them for it either. The Dire Wolf thing seems stupid to me but nowhere near as dangerous as Jurassic Park. In the case of JP, at some point you have to ask yourself “is my job going to cause harm to people”, but the JP scientists didn’t seem to ask the question because they were just interested in the challenge of making a dinosaur.
But yeah the Dire Wolf thing is stupid and useless… for now. But hey, eventually that company might do something useless that’ll get people killed!
There’s a recent Behind the Bastards episode on the main dude behind Colossal (who is actually a very well known scientist) and exactly how he is using science to do bad things without considering the consequences.