Progress

G

GamesCreation

New member
I've been thinking about this since having a long discussion about it with some friends.

When is progress good?

SO many times progress is bad. "New Receipes" in food that makes them taste worse than before, Shops/Restaurants etc. being taken over making them worse, "Progress" in the government :P , Progress in security breaking things and hurting small developers.

So I ask this to you, is progress good?
 
It's neither good nor bad. It just is. At its heart, progress is change. Change is neither bad nor good, though every change can contain elements of both.

I think that some of the "progress" during the whole dotcom-boom-bust was extremely badly handled. It did cause a short-term economic growth, but the resultant correction has been absolutely ugly, even outside of Silicon Valley (where I am.) I once read a former co-worker's site where he claimed to have worked for a successful dot-com company. He called it "successful" because it was ramped up, filled full of hot air, secured a few rounds of VC funding, and was then sold. Their "products" were still utter bupkis; but according to Wall $treet the company was successful.

Yeah. I know. Go figure. :confused:

Progress has meant that women are allowed to choose just about any career they wish, rather than all being mothers and housewives by default. While that choice works very well for some people, I am not temperamentally suited to be either - and had I lived even a generation ago, that would probably have been what I ended up doing. Yet on the flipside of that, you have some women - and men, as well - who think that leaving their families to pursue personal fulfilment is somehow okay because of this "social progress". So what, then? We should roll back the clock? Have women stay at home and have children and have the men be solely responsible for providing for the wife and any kids? I don't lay the blame for that at the feet of progress, but at the feet of the people who didn't teach them that, once you accept a responsibility, you don't just lark off and leave it. You either make some arrangements for the children to be properly cared for; or (even better) you give a good long hard think before having children.

Progress is neither good nor bad. It just is.
 
Progress is good. You have to see it from a positive angle. Even if progress means that something negative has been discovered - it is important what you make out of it.

Chris
 
But a lot of the time it's bad, for example, a game I really enjoyed playing and loved, the sequel to it is going to be terrible and spoil the whole thing :(
 
That's progress in that specific instance. In your case, for that particular situation, it isn't good. Other people may like the progress (change) in that game. Still others may like both states equally well, for different reasons.

For every person who says that progress is good, there are counter-examples of why progress is bad.

Another example: I was editing a document where a biotech company used the phrase, "We increased our profits in the quarter ended March 31, 2004, but exiting certain product lines." What they were talking about was, essentially, they stopped researching a drug to cure cancer, and thus they made more profit. Maybe good for their shareholders, but - hey, I'm all for additional research into how cancer works and how we can halt or reverse its progress. Still, this particular company no longer found it profitable to progress in that direction, and they stopped. Their research, which was probably patented out the wazoo, will probably not be shared. Other research laboratories will probably follow some of the same blind paths that this company took. But there's no way that this company will release its research into the public domain, nope nope nope. They own it. It didn't work for them. It might work in the future. More importantly, they might be able to strategically leak some of it to a competitor, let that competitor use all or part of that information in their own product, and then when the product is brought to market, Company A will go lawsuit happy, possibly delaying FDA approval for this drug. Even if it isn't significantly delayed, Company B will probably have to raise their prices for the drug. Neither of these alternatives works out well for consumers. But Company A doesn't care. If they're thinking ahead at all, they're thinking how much money they can get from a potential future lawsuit.

*stops, catches breath*

Sorry. That's a hotbutton issue for me.

But do you see how progress can be surrounded by bad and good situations, yet be neither bad nor good in and of itself?
 
I guess you have a point, Lesli, but the majority of people agree, it's just a few high up people that dont - and the ones in power always seem to get what they want.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Supporters

Back
Top