this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2025
191 points (99.5% liked)

Technology

73534 readers
3496 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related news or articles.
  3. Be excellent to each other!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
  10. Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.

Approved Bots


founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] rottingleaf@lemmy.world 2 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

Transatlantic telegraph, I think, was very expensive, or Panama channel projects. Before they were finished to any useful degree.

In this particular case - I don't think it's more expensive than Soviet attempts at turning Kazakh steppe into agricultural land, let alone all the space and defense projects.

It's an ideology-driven effort all right - an idea that you can create an inherently totalitarian technology. Probably caused by the popular (in the 90s and early 00s) belief that the Internet is inherently anti-totalitarian, so there's a need to compensate. Both are wrong.

[–] wewbull@feddit.uk 6 points 7 hours ago

I think there was an inherent demand behind those examples though. Just the number of lives lost looking for the northwest passage showed how useful the Panama canal would be.

You're also comparing government spending in a lot of those cases Vs private capital. That fact shows how much power has shifted in the world already.