this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2026
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In a better world, all of these technologies that get stolen by various corpo espionage and reverse engineering teams would be freely shared with the world so everyone can benefit from them, and people not in the dev teams might have improvements they can suggest.
But instead we have a bunch of rich adult children who would rather take the ball and go home because they don't think they've recieved enough praise for bringing it, and wanting to charge everyone just to look at it.
It's not a great metaphor, but honestly dealing with companies and governments feels a lot like dealing with children you aren't allowed to discipline or even talk sternly to because their parents have forbidden you from interfering.
Cambridge University found that the steam engine was held back for ~40 years because of bad patents
https://archive.org/details/againstintellect0000bold
You mean 40 years of delay for the destruction of our biosphere?
I'd call that a win.
40 years of burning far more coal than necessary due to inefficient engines
Whether the overall effect was positive or negative with respect to the biome, no clue
Yes, but also induced demand. More efficient engines means less coal per task, but more tasks, maybe so many more that total coal use increases.
That's why I said we don't know the overall effect on the biome due to less efficient engines
With how quickly we industrialized, my intuition is we were mining and burning it as fast as possible, but maybe more efficient engines could have let us mine and burn even more
Let's not forget that mega corpos benefit heavily from government subsidized R&D in universities, insert themselves within the R&D and claim innovation as their own.
Tech is built on FOSS and private corporations act like they invented butter.
The thing is that with the current laws, even if China would open source all the info they have gathered, companies in other countries couldn't use it.