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this post was submitted on 21 Feb 2026
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
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- All posts must be showerthoughts
- The entire showerthought must be in the title
- No politics
- If your topic is in a grey area, please phrase it to emphasize the fascinating aspects, not the dramatic aspects. You can do this by avoiding overly politicized terms such as "capitalism" and "communism". If you must make comparisons, you can say something is different without saying something is better/worse.
- A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
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If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.
Whats it like to be a mod? Reports just show up as messages in your Lemmy inbox, and if a different mod has already addressed the report, the message goes away and you never worry about it.
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a) how are you measuring "innovation"?
b) how are you measuring the "benefit", and for who?
Regulations and standardization can hold back an existing company from trying a new idea, however, they are also the only thing that creates true, lasting, interoperability, and interoperability is what let's new companies enter markets.
i.e. Theoretically, Apple may be held back if they want to innovate their charging port because they have to make it compatible with USB-C.
However, now new companies that aren't apple that want to innovate on cables and chargers can enter the market, and they'll benefit from a consistent specified interface and not having to design a million proprietary variants, and they'll be able to plan their products in a stabler, longer term environment, that will make it easier to attract investment.
Standards are effectively a government created platform / framework for building and designing new ideas. True innovation often strives when you have some thoughtful constraints that lets everything work together predictably.
Patents, breakthroughs. Most happen in US or China.
No risk, no reward.
Lmao. So how many "breakthroughs" happened in the US last year and how many "breakthroughs" happened in the UK?
And how are you measuring their relative significance and scale?
In case youre not aware, the overall point im making us that you have literally no idea how to measure innovation in a reliable or meaningful way.
So again, I would point you to overall outcomes, rather than chasing shiny buzz words. At the end of World War 2, the US was orders of magnitude wealthier per capita then virtually every single European country, and yet, today, Europeans are happier, healthier, and richer then Americans. So all those patents helped Americans how exactly?
The NASDAQ