Where would the world be without the USA?

[Stokdgs]

Australia does have some dangerous creatures,but then so does the more dangerous New York city! Personally,I'd feel safer with the snakes of Oz.

Probably the most dangerous city today is still Chicago.. Sad..

 

[AdamE]

No internet
No porn industry
No Snapper mowers
No crappy cars and trucks
No TV's
No good music
No computers - which later lead to cell phones
No microwave ovens

many many more

Al Gore STILL would've invented the internet! He's that good...

 

[Hammermechanicman]

?

 

[Sparkie]

No ignorant ilinformed people with a massive over inflated ideas about their own supremesy unwilling to believe that there are other people on the planet with a functioning brain and claiming they own everything while being too bone lazy to actually check anything except with other Americans .

1) Internet, well that is tricky because it was a world wide collaboration .
Americans will tell everyone that the internet evolved from ARPNET, but ARPNET was just a private email network and in reality it goes back to technologies the USA got from Germany as reptreations.
What makes the INTERNET the internet is TCP/IP and that came fro CERN in Switzerland

2) Porn was around in the Greek & Roman times, if not before and is clearly depicted in some of the pottery which for reasons of the "Fake" modesty is hidden in the basements of museums & universities for use by scholars only
IF you want some porn in literature search for the works of the Persian poet Suffi or perhaps the Kama Sutra

3) ?

4) The UK & soviets were making crappy vehicles long before the USAthey just don't pretend that they are the best on the planet.

5) TV was first introduced back in 1840 by Scottish & German scientists wanting to share the results of laboratory experiments with each other.
In 1926 an Australian back yard inventor broadcast the Melbourne cup ( horse race ) from Flemington Melbourne to Ballarat Victoria then lost interest and went into rocketry .

6) a matter of taste

7) again tricky one.
Most objective historians would put the origin at the Bletchly Park WWII research station.
Now the personal computer can definately be attributed to Apple .

8) an Australian invention .
Because the telephone system in Aust was originally government owned , every Australian was deemed to have equal rights to a telephone . ( never happened in the USA )
Because Australia is the same land masa as continental USA we had to be able to send telephone signals over massive distances .
But because of the geography & small population running wires was not an option so we perfected the use of microwave radio transmission for telephones which at a latter date sold to Bell Industries
At one time Aust had over 90% of the microwave patients world wide .
The technicians working on the towers noticed that the eggs in the nests of birds in & around the towers were all cooked .
The CSIRO ( government research facility ) investigated and invented the microwave oven.
Now at that time we had an unbelievably conservative government and part of that government policy was anything the government developed that had commercial potential to make a profit must be sold to private enterprise. No Australia company wanted it ( or could afford it ) so GE bought the technology & release the domestic microwave oven. ( same story with Rank Xeros & copiers )

And Cable TV was also an Australian invention ( developement would be more appropriate ) and again at one time he held over 80% of the world wide patients for the use of optical fibre for communications. The longest fibre was the Sydney Melbourne line and that was also the first one to send TV signals down a fibre cable thus inventing ( if you like ) cable TV and for the same reason as above the technology was again sold off.
Up until 2015 Australia had the largest optical fibre network on the planet and had the government appointed board members of the now privatised telephone company ( Telstra ) back in 2000 not vetoed the plan to take the fibre network to each house hold we would have had the worlds first all fibre network on the planet .

All the USA really is happens to be the largest single private market on the planet which means it benefits from the mass effect so any new technology introduced can get massive market penetration very quickly which results in massive profits which in turn causes massive product development very quickly as every Tom Dick & Harry attempts to catch the cash train .
Oh and the Wi-Fi you use to connect your computer, phone,TV etc to your fibre modem & the WWW, you guessed it another Aussie invention / development .

I watched a documentary on Xerox a number of years ago. What we call a photostat was invented by an American and his work was was inspired by pub;ished works of a Hungarian physicist.

He developed it in the 1930's, but it was not until after WWII when a company took a chance, (they were having problems, seems no war meant no business, they sold mimeograph equipment to the US Government and the war was over.

With a 3 million dollar loan from the SBA Haloid Xerox is born and it is developed eventually to a leader, then a fall, then a regroup and they are huge again.


What made them was the concept of rental, like telephones. Now we own them, when I was a kid we did not. We all rented. The kicker was the TV Ad (I remember it). A little girl 6 or so dressed properly climbed onto a chair placed a picture she drew on the platen (glass plate) selected the number to print and pressed print. Mere seconds later a perfect copy emerges. Managers of every part of a company could see the usefulness for their needs.


But what is most interesting is they shopped it around and there were no takers. IBM did research and figured this: the machine would be in the $200 K cost and they could sell about 200 of them, and the only guy who would have it were CEO's of Fortune 200 comapnies. They had sufficient typist pools that could make new copies as needed. They passed. They not IBM came up with small personal computers and The Mouse, The Track ball, The GUI. They then came to the same concept that I B M came to and passed up on the idea they invented. Apple founders saw it and it was over.

below is a piece from wiki.



from Wikipedia

Haloid Company​

The commercial breakthrough came when John Dessauer, chief of research at the Haloid Company, read an article about Carlson's invention. Haloid, a manufacturer of photographic paper, was looking for a way out of the shadow of its Rochester, New York, neighbor, Eastman Kodak. Through previous acquisitions, Haloid was already in the duplicating-machine business; Dessauer thought that electrophotography might allow Haloid to expand into a new field that Kodak did not dominate.[31]

In December 1946, Battelle, Carlson, and Haloid signed the first agreement to license electrophotography for a commercial product. The $10,000 contract—representing ten percent of Haloid's total earnings from 1945—granted a nonexclusive right to make electophotography-based copying machines intended to make no more than twenty copies of an original. Both sides were tentative; Battelle was concerned by Haloid's relatively small size, and Haloid had concerns about electrophotography's viability.[32]

During this period, Battelle conducted most of the basic research into electrophotography, while Haloid concentrated on trying to make a commercial product out of the results. In 1948, Haloid's CEO, Joseph Wilson, convinced the U.S. Army Signal Corps to invest $100,000 in the technology, an amount that would double later. The Signal Corps was concerned about nuclear war. The traditional photographic techniques they used for reconnaissance would not function properly when exposed to the radiation from a nuclear attack; the film would fog, much as consumer photographic film can be fogged by an airport X-ray machine. The Signal Corps thought that electrophotography might be developed into a product that would be immune to such radiation. Through the 1950s, over half the money Battelle spent developing electrophotography came from government contracts.[33]

In 1947, Carlson was becoming worried that Battelle was not developing electrophotography quickly enough; his patent would expire in ten years. After meeting with Joe Wilson, Carlson accepted an offer to become a consultant to Haloid. He and his wife Dorris moved to the Rochester area, to be near the company's base of operations.

After years of trying to interest additional licensees in electrophotography, Battelle agreed to renegotiate with Haloid, making it the exclusive licensee for the invention (except for a few minor uses that Battelle wished to retain for itself)
.

 

[wolfey01]

Funny, but I was under the impression that this was a LAWN MOWER FORUM, not a political discussion forum. Maybe it's opposite day or something? Or am I missing the point?

 

[Scrubcadet10]

Funny, but I was under the impression that this was a LAWN MOWER FORUM, not a political discussion forum. Maybe it's opposite day or something? Or am I missing the point?

Welcome to the front porch.

 

[Hammermechanicman]

I was a service rep for Xerox for 40 years. Besides the copying machine xerox invented the telecopier (fax), ethernet, the PC it was called the Alto and the first computer to use a GUI, the laser printer, the GUI, the icon and the mouse, desktop publishing software, word processor, WYSIWYG, multi beam lasers, plus a whole bunch of other stuff. Too bad the idiots at the top were too stupid to know how to properly market it or patent it. The Apple Lisa computer was an almost exact copy of a prototype computer at the Xerox PARC ( palo alto research center) so much for protecting intellectual property.

 

[StarTech]

Or better known as the Lairs Bench... Boy some whoopers can be told here. Like I am from Torland where mighty Tor still rules...

 

[Hammermechanicman]

Torland, vacationed there once. ?

 

[bertsmobile1]

To be qualified to answer this question, you have to understand that the American state is not the same thing as America.
It's obvious that the world would be much poorer if not for the ambition and genius of American entrepreneurs. But it would be much better off without the American state, at least in its current incarnation.
It was a fantasy to believe that a written Constitution could ever contain it. The useless loudmouths in D.C., most of whom have never in their lives produced anything that people would voluntarily pay their own money for, do whatever they want – because general welfare and interstate commerce.
And the people put on their masks and obey.

I can see where you are coming from and to an extent there is some truth in it.
A massive market to be exploited that has a single currency & language is a marketing dream.
So that allows products that have a marketing potential to be brought to the market quickly.
However the original infferance, that without the USA these things would not have happened is still there .
And that is the point I would argue against as it is fundamentially racist .
No peoples on the planet are any smarter ( although I often believe Australians are the stupidist ) than any other .
Then there is the question of what is "better"
The indiginous peoples had lived here for what is now thought to be longer than 100,000 years
During that time no river had become so posionious that it is toxic to the touch let alone drinking it .
No plant , animal , nor instinct had gone extinct,
The people suffered almost no life shortening diseases and lived to an average age of 70 ( contested by some ) with the oldest remains being dated at over 90 at the time of death.
They had everything they needed for living according to their culture worked for less than 3 hours a day on average and managed to avoid massive wars apart from a couple of warrior tribes from Tasmania & the Cape . Children were all looked after as were the elderly there was no poverty & no homeless , even the dissabled & mentally ill were looked after.
I have almost no factual knowledge of American natives but from the little I have heard, their life style was not much different

Our children could very well be the last humans to walk the planet , if the worst case the scientists have been talking about comes to pass .
And it looks very well like they could be correct as storms have been getting more violent & destructive each year, droughts are far more intense and floods substantially more severe.
Your Hurricanes are becoming more intense as are our cyclones .
Then there are the problems like Covid-19 that come ultimately from over population and because of crowded living style spread like wild fire and on the subject of wildfires, yours this year look to being eclipsing last years which were the worst on record.

So if better is having your kids kill themselves because some one did not like their face book post fast enough, or having your daughter lured to her death by a sexual pervert on a dating app, then perhaps we are in fact better .
If better is working 10 hours a day to make sure the roof over your head is secure and you won't end up living in the gutter when you get old then yes we are better.
DEcades ago when I had a marital crisis I had to revaluate my life and part of this was to look at everything and ask "will this improve my life " and 90% of the time the answer is no
Thus there is not a 72" oled TV sitting on the wall over the top of the 2000W 30 speaker home theatre, no 700 litre French door fridge with ice cub dispenser in the door gracing the kitchen etc etc etc