> The technology has progressed less in the last fifteen years than it did every two or three years under Dragon Systems.
I suspect he is biased, but it's hard to not agree with the sentiment. It's a shame that someone with such enormous personal motivation in the specific technology space lost the ability and the will to be part of it. And as such, that technology space has suffered. It's a matter of belief since we cannot know how things would have played out differently, but I agree with the sentiment.
Finance firms are the parasites of society, they take advantage of all the flaws in the system to make money for themselves and give their top employees massive bonuses to keep doing what they do whilst keeping their mouths shut.
That's a pretty childish view. Lots of people enjoy home mortgages, savings accounts, and investing in companies, all of which depend on finance firms.
Nobody 'enjoys' their mortgages. Mortgages are responsible for making housing less affordable for everyone.
In the old days when people actually saved up to buy a house, the average house would cost something like 4 times the average person's annual salary. Today, we're looking at 10 to 20 times.
Mortgages allow people who would otherwise not have been able to afford a house to buy it outright - This increases the demand for housing and thus drives prices up. In the old days, people worked hard to achieve the American dream (it was an optimistic pursuit). Today, people work hard to avoid bankruptcy (we have become a fear-driven society).
As for 'investing in companies' - Big firms like Goldman Sachs mostly invest in big corporations which enslave people for profit. People in finance are more interested in helping big companies create and maintain strategic monopolies than allowing new companies to improve people's lives. Monopolies are profitable and don't require any R&D investment.
As for savings accounts, well they're not so bad, but what is the point of having a savings account if you have no money to put in it?
Also, with all the new automated payment features offered, people are encouraged to spend all their little money on things that they don't need. That means everything significant has to be purchased using credit.
What's worse is that all of these evils leverage off of each other to make things even worse overall. For example, the rise of corporations means that people are forced to move to big cities to find jobs (since jobs are harder to find in smaller towns - Because small businesses there are being crushed by corporations), this drives city apartment prices up, which increases the amount of mortgage people have to take to buy a house, which increases peoples' dependence on their jobs and reduces their ability to negotiate better salaries and prevents them from improving their conditions of living.
Mortgages offered far more people their own house that could have never purchased a house otherwise. Increased demand was met in the majority of the country with increased supply (you may have noticed that houses can be built and the majority of the US is empty). Only a few places on the coasts are so constrained that it pushes people out. The main reason that houses have gotten to be so expensive is because wages stagnated and people don't want to compromise on their demands for space/features (look at the features and size of a new KB home and compare that to the box of shit you got in the 70s). Stripping demand would not make it any cheaper to build houses the way people want.
You can buy a unit in a trailer park on a year or two of low salary. Why do you think people aren't doing that?
If you eliminate mortgages, it only forces people to rent which is a massive waste of money that concentrates wealth into those who are privileged enough to own homes.
WRT wall street, if they were only interested in supporting monopolies, they wouldn't be involved in the IPOs of any company that has a competitor ever. It's not even optimally greedy to only support monopolies because the best returns come from investments in companies that disrupt competition. So you're whole rant against wall street is a bit dumb because it doesn't even line up with the behavior of purely sociopathic greedy actors like you seem to think they all are. Keep ripping down those strawmen.
How do you feel this contrasts with the Student Aid/Loan/FAFSA regime? I made the exact same argument as op the other day about higher education and I really thinks it fits much better in that context than it does when used with housing finance.
Student loans are awful because they entice students to take on massive amounts of debt that they will have a really hard time repaying. Taking on a mortgage eliminates your rent cost. Taking on a student loan eliminates nothing.
Additionally, with student loans there is essentially no due diligence on the lender's behalf because the loans are not dischargeable in bankruptcy. So students are paying a hundred+ thousand dollars for a masters in art history that will have no return (other than intellectual). Compare that to a house, where a bank won't give you a loan if they don't agree that the house is worth that.
Savings accounts are the most honest thing in that list, and that is an exceedingly small portion of GS' business. The rest are rackets of some form or other.
Building something where nothing stood before is monumental, but last weekend I spoke to Google Translate (at a noisy party) and had it instantly and correctly translate what I said to mandarin.
I guess what I'm trying to say, is that taking the technology and making it ubiquitous on a mass market is no small fry, either.
Depends on the resources available to the company trying to popularize the product/idea. If it's a tiny start-up with limited resources, then absolutely, it's a huge accomplishment. If it's a massive company with tons of cash, together with the name recognition and momentum of n number of other products already out...then it's probably not that big of a deal, but still commendable, I guess.
> The technology has progressed less in the last fifteen years than it did every two or three years under Dragon Systems.
I suspect he is biased, but it's hard to not agree with the sentiment. It's a shame that someone with such enormous personal motivation in the specific technology space lost the ability and the will to be part of it. And as such, that technology space has suffered. It's a matter of belief since we cannot know how things would have played out differently, but I agree with the sentiment.