Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48943373

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

Krugman: "I've been writing some about downsides of technological change and I realized afterwards that if I really wanted a really stellar example of a productive important innovation that had terrible effects on society would be the cotton gin."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJxQbfbpf7M&t=25m38s

Richardson: "I always have a hard time articulating this, but the number of large plantations in which enslavers owned in air quotes, you know, more than 25 or more than 50 other human beings was a very very small proportion of the American South, less than 1%. The majority of people who again owned their black neighbors had one or two enslaved people on their farms. They weren't necessarily called plantations. And they would be working alongside those black Americans. And the cotton gin could have made small farms viable and could have ended human enslavement. And instead what they gave us was, you know, the the Trail of Tears in the 1830s that cleans indigenous Americans out of the southwestern land. You get an extraordinary land rush into the American South in the 1830s and the 1840s. And you get the establishment of these gigantic essentially factory farms. And that's a place where, you know, the majority of southerners, obviously the indigenous southerners and the black southerners, wanted no part of this system, but it actually didn't serve the white farmers either. It served a really small, less than 1% group of American enslavers in the American South. And you look at that and you think that wasn't the technologies fault. That was the fault of the people who um who set up the political system that enabled it to work that way."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJxQbfbpf7M&t=28m18s

I have no idea what this is and a web search turned up Harbor Freight woodworking tools.

Split traffic on the way to the farmers market while getting waves from random people? Easy.

80mph up a hill on the way to the park? Also yes.

Ride through the park to set up a picnic? Not only yes but it literally has a built in cooler.

Just a total zero compromise vehicle.

And you can buy one for what five grand? All other motorcycles (which I have many of) are stupid.

No it doesn’t. It’s enshrined in the constitution. The entire point of the United States is to be able to change the system. I’m struggling to imagine a worse take than this.