Dear Dr Oliver Hartwich, research fellow at the Centre for Independent Studies: You, sir, are a grossly ignorant douche.
It's a nice concept for an op-ed, the idea that the pornography industry is a hotbed of innovation. It must have even seemed nicer, when you had the genius idea of attaching “social improvement” to the end of that sentence. It allows you to talk about porn, *and* about how every slither of capitalism is awesome.
Shame that you don't know what you're talking about.
On Monday the [Sydney Morning] Herald reported from the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas where 3D porn was the hot issue for technology geeks this year. A porn actress, who had just starred in one of the industry's first 3D films, was quoted as being ''very excited'' to pioneer this new field. She should be. Once again, the porn industry turns out to be a force for good - unintentionally.
Schools will use new 3D television techniques to teach. Imagine how geography lessons will come alive if classes can virtually wander in faraway places using 3D glasses. Physics and chemistry experiments too dangerous or complicated for classrooms could also be shown on a 3D screen.
You know that 3D television is just an optical illusion, right? If there's a 3D porn star facing you on the 3D television, you can't go behind the TV and see her ass. Likewise, 3D glasses won't allow you wander virtually in a 3D world. An ability to explore in the third dimension requires the information to be stored in 3D. Such technology won't be available until well into the distant future, in a world where America has a black president, and where electricity is as common as running water.
Did you even Google “3D maps”? What decade are you living in that 3D maps have to be “imagined”?
And have you even been to school? What kind of physics or chemistry experiments are better understood with 3D video than with 2D video? Is looking at a beaker in 3D more informative than seeing it in 2D? Are you going to illustrate projectile motion experiments with “OMG – it's coming right at you! (thus making it virtually impossible to see what it's actually doing)”?
If experiments are too dangerous to perform in schools, how can students see them? WITH VIDEOS!! BECAUSE THAT'S WHAT 3D VIDEOS ARE. **VIDEOS**!!
Christ.
Before you and your thinktank declare 3D television to be porn's gift to children, you ought to have a clue about what it actually is. 3D television adds fake depth perception. So does drawing shadows and shades. It's pretty cool as an experience, but it adds very little information.
Should the parents of the future wish to thank the brains behind these teaching improvements, they would be surprised. Far from being the result of some philanthropic engagement, the new technologies will have been conceived not in an ivory tower but as a byproduct of the sex industry.”
You, sir, are just plain making shit up.
Do you have any factual basis to claim that 3D television is somehow there because of the porn industry? That it was even developed by the porn industry?
The porn industry buys 3D equipment. Great. But rather than crediting people who use the technology with its development, perhaps you should credit the people who developed the technology for its development? Maybe? Just a little?
You've given porn credit for a technology that it didn't invent or create, you've claimed that the technology can do things that it can't (while other technologies have been doing those things for a decade), and then you've claimed that because porn brought such miraculous gifts into the world, and because it's greedy, therefore greed is a bringer of gifts into the world.
No, I think you've just made a case for greed being 3D.
And then, you said:
That lazy government officials could be preferable was demonstrated nicely in Hong Kong. When it was still a British crown colony, its financial secretary, Sir John Cowperthwaite could not be bothered collecting extensive statistics; he just kept taxes low and regulation to a minimum. Whether this was genius or just plain laziness, it definitely helped to make Hong Kong one of the most prosperous places on the planet.”
Maybe the massive influx of capital, skilled and unskilled labour was significant too? Maybe people didn't move to Hong Kong for the low taxes and the liberal regulatory regime, but for the absence of a civil war and a cultural revolution? Maybe? Just a little?
Dr Oliver Hartwich, research fellow at the Centre for Independent Studies, you and your organisation claim to champion innovation and enterprise, but you show utter indifference to the science, technology and reality on which innovation and enterprises is built.
Or, you're a mole who've just done a fantastic job of discrediting the CIS.