Debunking “America has become so anti-innovation – it's economic suicide” • Hacker News Board

Re: Debunking “America has become so anti-innovation – it's economic suicide”

#71

Post by mark_edward » Fri, May 19, 2017, 11:42 PM UTC

valuearb wrote: post #21

Crye wrote: post #6

I'm tired of these articles. Seriously. Government has funded hi-tech through the military for the last 70 years. That's not a secret and we wouldn't have what we have now with out it. The government knows this and the large corporations who benefit from it know it. Corporations are not willing to take on the risk to sink billions of dollars to develop a technology which may or may not pay out. Plus once it does pay…

Why would you fund billions in research if you can get government handouts?

The same reason you'd fund it without them, for a competitive edge. If you're getting handouts and everyone's getting handouts you still have incentives.

Re: Debunking “America has become so anti-innovation – it's economic suicide”

#72

Post by xbmcuser » Sat, May 20, 2017, 3:01 AM UTC

otalp wrote: post #15

Interesting that he mentions Elon Musk when his companies are literally kept alive by billions in government subsidies and contracts. I don't like the binary view of "Give all power to corporations, with no government intervention" and "Let the state control all means of research and access" The ideal is clearly in between, where the state should break up monopolies and punish companies that have detrimental external…

  Pure socialism doesn't work. As most people are selfish and only give a shit about themselves or their families. 
   And pure capitalism doesn't work because humans have a short life span so are mostly thinking about 5-10 years from now not 50 to 60 years in the future. So goverment intervention is needed to plan far into the future.

Re: Debunking “America has become so anti-innovation – it's economic suicide”

#73

Post by ThomPete » Sat, May 20, 2017, 11:45 AM UTC

pixl97 wrote: post #61

ThomPete wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That industrywide, the individual companies will soon find out if the overinvested or not.

The old saying "The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent" always applies. It really doesn't matter if you are a responsible company that takes on low/no debt if a significant number of your competitors take on debt, and their investors allow it. "Soon" is highly overrated. Amazon is going to make lots of money 'soon' unless they are wrong about future market conditions, yet their investors…

Sure but the point is once the market dries up the companies will know. Thats not the same for governments who do their budgetting rather different.