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On Disruption by MLR

Hi. I'm Tech Man, founder of Innovative Innovations Inc., and I'm here today to tell you about an exciting new idea that will change the way you look at transportation.

On founding this company, I came to a simple realization: no matter who you talk to, in no matter what part of the world, when you ask someone to describe a "vehicle", there's always one thing that gets brought up: round wheels. And this has been true for centuries. For millennia, even. Maybe even eons! For as long as humans have needed to push heavy things around without carrying them, the wheel has always been there. Well, I and my colleagues at III say: no more.

I present to you the next generation of wheel, which we call, simply: Box (TM). A wheel with flat sides.

Now, I am the first to admit that I have no experience as an engineer, and, being an elementary school dropout, I don't even have a basic understanding of fundamental physics, logic, or philosophy. In fact, the only thing I'm qualified for is programming spread sheet applications using Perl. But I know a good idea when I see one, and Box (TM) is a good idea.

Here's the basic concept: if you think about it, a standard wheel has more sides than any one person could count---in fact, it might even have an infinite number of sides! How can one object require that many facets? It's a level of complexity that's beyond most peoples' understanding.

But what if a wheel only had four sides?

We present to you, Box (TM): a wheel with only four sides. By reducing the number of sides from infinite to only four, we reduce manufacturing costs by an infinite amount. This in turn reduces the cost of vehicle manufacture by nearly 3.14%, saving your automotive company millions annually. It's also environmentally friendly; did you know that for every ten surfaces we remove from the standard wheel, we are reducing carbon dioxide production by 0.01%? That may not sound like much, but considering that every wheel currently requires manufacturing an infinite number of sides, we predict that the mass manufacture of Box (TM) wheels will not only stop global climate change, but will cause the Earth to instantaneously stabilize its climate into that of pure blackbody radiation, resulting in global temperatures of only -23 degrees Celsius.

Now, during the past year, we have managed to raise nearly $10,000,000,000 in venture capital funding, putting us at the very top of the S&P 500 without having produced a single product or having hired a single new employee. But in order to make our dream a reality, we need an additional $15,000,000,000 so that we can build ourselves a private, fully self-sustaining space station in orbit around the Kuiper Belt Object Eris, so that we can permanently sequester ourselves in a life of pure luxury while the planet Earth continues to decay and human civilization crumbles, which is something we have implicitly resigned ourselves to believing is going to happen.

So please, help us achieve our dream, and together we can forever disrupt one of mankind's oldest technologies!

On Disruption

MLR

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    The Box will be the perfect accessory for your gig work in Uber.

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      I love the thought of pulling up to the airport, to pick up a passenger, in a car with square wheels.

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        And to be even more innovative. Just a rollling cardboard box as a car.

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    Reinventing the wheel? Who would have thought of that!

    I like that this piece being a satire of tech disruption that those Silicon Valley-esque (probably pretentious) tech firms are creating, thinking that they are solving world problems when they themselves are quite useless in the face of a global crisis like the recent viral pandemic.

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      I wrote this in response to an article I read about some tech geniuses down in Utah who are trying to 'disrupt' the COVID testing scene. They came into the problem with no expertise on epidemiology, viruses, or medicine in general---they just knew that current testing is a bit on the slow side and strove to rectify that---and lo and behold they mostly ended up making all the mistakes you'd expect an amateur in any field to make. But because they consider themselves geniuses (because they know how to program, I guess), they refuse to admit these mistakes or learn from them, OR to accept the advice of actual experts in the field. So now a number of States are using their botched testing technology, resulting in a high rate of false negatives, leading to a large number of individuals who now think they're COVID-free and consequently act accordingly now walking around spreading the virus and not getting the care that they also need.

      I despise the Silicon Valley ethos, and the paradoxical anti-elitism that comes with it. I've earned myself an advanced degree: I understand exactly how limited my own knowledge really is, and why it's critical to trust the people who have the relevant expertise over those who merely believe themselves to be geniuses.