Comment by leoc
6 months ago
Eric Gilliam's "How did places like Bell Labs know how to ask the right questions?" https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/bob-johnstone/we-we... Also, to be fair, "Areoform" did mention Xerox PARC once in TFA.) Indeed, overstating the uniqueness of Bell Labs helps to billow up the clouds of mystique, but it's probably harmful to a clear understanding of how it actually worked.
But the ultimate problem with TFA is that it seems to be written to portray venture capitalists(?), or at least this group of VCs who totally get it, as on the side of real innovation along with ... Bell Labs researchers(?) and Bell Labs executives(?) ... against the Permanent Managerial Class which has ruined everything. Such ideas have apparently been popular for a while, but I think we can agree that after the past year or two the joke isn't as funny as it used to be anymore.
ExxonMobil also closed this year the NJ based prolific Corporate Strategic Research center that among many chemical process related breakthroughs, identified the CO2 emissions risks (way before academia), and invented the lithium battery.
CO2 emissions risks were already being discussed in the 1800s.
Furthermore, Big Oil notoriously suppressed any hint of their internal climate change models from being published and hired the same marketing firms that Big Tobacco employed.
It really pains me that the people involved in this cover-up likely led lives of absurd luxury rather than seeing the meanest hint of justice for what they did.
People talk about climate change as though we're all equally responsible but this is false, there may be few saints on this subject but there's certainly degrees of sinner and these people are at the very highest level of blame in my opinion. How much of the world will be uninhabitable by the end of the century due to their lies delaying timely climate action?
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Do you know of any literature that shows it being discussed in earnest before ~1905, which is when the newspaper article about it I've read was published?
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Just read that article you mentioned--I find the most interesting part of it is "system integrators," or those who intentionally pay attention to both the research going on, and the on-the-ground problems. It's fascinating how it mentions how they brought information back and forth, and even generated new ideas from all the connections they formed.