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Comment by pierat | Hacker News Reader

To be fair, our current capitalist country isn't really innovating much. Most of our products are getting worse due to de-featurization, engineering-obselescence, anti-repair, throw away culture, and the like.

Like vehicles, the new feature is monthly charge for heated seats, or 'enable the whole battery pack to be used'. Cell phones are battery-sealed for 'reasons', along with easy rapid charging (read: battery destroying charge).

I know plastics are used EVERYWHERE, including things like gears and structural members that will guaranteedly break. And where old electronics had schematics and repair diagrams, now "just throw it away" cause there are no replacement parts to buy.

Or worse yet, theres the expensive gadgets that have required cloud tie-in. Cloud changes/goes away? Hello garbage bin.

I get tired of all this.

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This is nonsense. There is massive innovation in America:

1. BEV production

2. Only AVs in the world in production

3. LLMs come from here

4. Reusable launch vehicles

5. EUV tech was invented here

There's so much more in every field. The reality is that the USA is a hotbed of innovation: in software, hardware, biotech, materials science. There's a reason that the town of Berkeley has more Nobel Prizes than many European countries.

You are right that there is a lot of plastic crap out there leading to physical waste.

But remember that capitalism doesn’t optimize for minimal physical waste - it optimizes for minimal waste overall.

This includes cost of capital, human brainpower, opportunity cost, taxes, input material, and of course, physical waste.

So the optimal product doesn’t necessarily last forever - that would involve an unaccetable amount of investment in material and labor.

One must also take tech progress into account - consumers may not want a product that lasts forever, since they might want version 2.0 some years down the line, and throw away a perfectly functional version 1.0.

> But remember that capitalism doesn’t optimize for minimal physical waste - it optimizes for minimal waste overall.

No, at best it optimizes for minimal waste of capital. If you can't find a way to use it for marketing or to receive subsidies, giving food to people who can't afford to pay for it is the same as throwing away food within capitalism: both are waste in a capitalist sense.

Material waste is only relevant within capitalism inasmuch as the material in question is valuable.

> But remember that capitalism doesn’t optimize for minimal physical waste - it optimizes for minimal waste overall.

Such a weird take.

Capitalism only optimizes to increase profit. If waste is profitable, it will be very wasteful, especially if the downsides of this waste can be externalized.

This is obvious in terms of pollution and physical waste, but given the perfect perverse incentives, it will also waste human brainpower, opportunity cost, et cetera and so forth.

It doesn’t and learning any bit of rigorous economics would show how off you are

How can economic waste be profitable? Maximum profit = minimum (economic) waste.

Minimizing physical waste isn’t always a good thing. Take it to an extreme to illustrate: one million engineers spend their whole careers to make a platinum toaster that will last billion years.

On the other extreme: one engineer slaps together a plastic toaster that breaks when you put the bread in.

Somewhere in between those two is an optimal point. We have to balance our energy, resources, brainpower, time, physical waste, and optionality effectively.

That balancing point is the perfect toaster, it makes a ton of profit, it doesn’t break before one use, and it doesn’t last forever either.

Economic waste, as it seemed the previous commenter meant, can definitely be profitable. The cleanup of that waste can be treated as an externality that the company doesn't have to pay for at all - that was done a lot in prior decades when they would dump chemicals, for instance. The damage and waste plastic causes to the overall environment is the same way: the companies producing that plastic do not have to pay to clean it up, so that cost for them isn't counted because it's being paid for elsewhere.

Fair point. That is a form of legislation and regulation I heartily support: addressing the tragedy of the commons, and de-distorting the market (most regulation introduces new distortions).

Things like a carbon tax, or making especially dirty companies clean up their own pollution.

This aligns minimum total economic waste, which includes environmental damage, with maximum profit.

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