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UK to launch taxpayer-funded high-risk tech research agency exempt from FOI

thetimes.co.uk

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Re: UK to launch taxpayer-funded high-risk tech research agency exempt from FOI

#151

Post by KoftaBob »

motohagiography wrote: post #12

I still don't see how any government granting committee can outperform hundreds of private venture funds competing for exposure to new opportunities. Even if you have a government dept. of 10x geniuses, they don't scale to compete with a healthy investment community. As described, the risks I see are that, it has the incentives for a patronage slush fund, there will be selection bias to hedge political risk around pe…

Government research funds like this are able to have a much bigger risk appetite than a traditional VC would.

Many moonshot projects require a very large amount of capital to get up and running, and run a high risk of failing. For a typical VC firm, they will rarely choose to invest in something like that if there are other opportunities that don't require as much up front capital, and with better odds of succeeding.

When you don't have LPs and/or shareholders to answer to, you can afford to take greater risks on more ambitious projects.

Re: UK to launch taxpayer-funded high-risk tech research agency exempt from FOI

#152

Post by g_p »

lordnacho wrote: post #123
dalbasal wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, corruption and insiderism is an important topic in its own right. Up and down this thread though, it seems that British HNers are insisting that it's the only topic. IE, they're against this agency (and presumably everything else that spends money in any way) because corruption. Is this true for roads? No new schools, parks or research agencies until corruption is gone? It seems over the top to me. The " Boris'…

Ideas that I haven't tested: - Once you leave office, you get a big salary for life, but can't have another job. No working for a bank, or happening into consultancy. No speaking fees, though you are of course free to give speeches to whomever you like. Yeah it's draconian, but there's plenty of people who want the role. - Make all the government's accounts visible to everyone. All the money, wherever it goes, is tie…

1. There's something far less draconian than this in place for senior roles in civil service, where restrictions are put in place upon leaving for a period of (say) 2 years, to prevent you using information gained in the process within a relevant sector, and requiring approval of appointments for that period of time. [1]

2. That pretty much exists as it stands [2], at least for sums above a certain level (usually 25k). Similar rules exist for spend above £500 on purchasing cards [3].

3. In some niche sectors, there aren't a lot of competent people. There are generally a lot of people who think they are competent. It could be problematic in these areas (some of which are pretty important), but clearly this doesn't apply for all. Competitive procurement is the ideal approach, but it has many, many flaws when you know the system and how to game it. The big outsourcing companies have that finessed down to the N'th degree. Over-promising and committing to things that can't reasonably be delivered make competitive procurement a problematic system, but short of the ability to "blacklist" suppliers who inexcusably fail to deliver in bad faith (which would be controversial too!) this one seems hard to fix.

[1] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

[2] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/guidance-for-publ...

[3] https://data.gov.uk/dataset/42c4d19b-aef7-45d1-bd92-1167d2f8... (as a random example for purchase card payments above 500)

Re: UK to launch taxpayer-funded high-risk tech research agency exempt from FOI

#153

Post by motohagiography »

madaxe_again wrote: post #83
notahacker wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

VC has quite specific expectations for an opportunity: the company that develops the service enjoying massive growth (or a massive strategic acquisition) within a decade or so. VCs weren't competing to fund Apollo missions or poverty reduction and not because nobody wanted them. Government can invest in projects which have different types of return: projects which are only beneficial or more beneficial if given away…

For an indication of how this will go, it’s worth looking at how the existing R&D grants system is used and abused. I have done a few “hold your nose” consultancy gigs for an outfit that specialises in the entirely legal, if morally dubious, process, of importing the family of high net worth individuals on entrepreneurship visas - and laundering their money into the U.K. I was approached in 2016, after I cashed out o…

So glad you told this story. We have analogous arrangements in Canada. The investment visa is one side of it, but we have a massive money laundering issue, to the point where casual BBQ conversations are about how many of the retail businesses in Toronto are obvious fronts and it's a significant factor in retail rents. Normal people think their politicians are paid off by foreign gangsters to turn a blind eye to the laundering operations.

The problem is that local politicians can stay in power using "donations," from this grey/black market foreign money, laundered through the R&D credit system, and they don't need the support of the local citizens or businesses. The R&D credit system risks being more than just a public spending problem, it's a corruption problem.

Re: UK to launch taxpayer-funded high-risk tech research agency exempt from FOI

#154

Post by literallylol »

JeanQuille wrote: post #133
dalbasal wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, corruption and insiderism is an important topic in its own right. Up and down this thread though, it seems that British HNers are insisting that it's the only topic. IE, they're against this agency (and presumably everything else that spends money in any way) because corruption. Is this true for roads? No new schools, parks or research agencies until corruption is gone? It seems over the top to me. The " Boris'…

> Insiderism exists. It existed yesterday, last year. I'm guessing you're not living in Britain? The last few years have been on a different scale entirely. We've had to get used to a government that delivers contracts free of tender to shell companies owned by friends and donors that fail to deliver and don't even pretend to be legit (have you heard the one about the "ferry company" that thinks it's a takeaway resta…

> have you heard the one about the "ferry company" that thinks it's a takeaway restaurant?

As an American, no, so I Googled it. [1]

> It added: 'Seaborne Freight (UK) Limited reserves the right to seek compensation through legal action for any losses incurred as the result of hoax delivery requests and will prosecute to the full extent of the law.'

> ...

> And Bristol North West MP Darren Jones added: 'Hilarious. Government Hard Brexit start-up champion Seaborne Freight Limited reserves the right to sue you if you order a hoax pizza.'

OMG, I'm dying here. This is gold. A level of corruption and incompetence rivaled only by our own Republican Party.

[1] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6554499/No-deal-Bre...

Re: UK to launch taxpayer-funded high-risk tech research agency exempt from FOI

#156

Post by g_p »

motohagiography wrote: post #12

I still don't see how any government granting committee can outperform hundreds of private venture funds competing for exposure to new opportunities. Even if you have a government dept. of 10x geniuses, they don't scale to compete with a healthy investment community. As described, the risks I see are that, it has the incentives for a patronage slush fund, there will be selection bias to hedge political risk around pe…

I think the intention is to fund riskier investments that traditional VC would turn its nose up to and say "come back with an MVP and a customer".

The internet is probably a cliche example, but it came out of DARPA as a resilient control network for the military. Nobody at the time envisaged the impact it would have - it was an interesting technical piece of work that scratched an itch. Funding it resulted in a huge economic and strategic benefit for the US. It makes sense for other countries to attempt to replicate this model.

Being able to strategically fund technically interesting (but highly adventurous) moon-shots is not really attempting to out-perform VCs - the goal is to evaluate and fund a portfolio of crazy (but credible) ideas, accepting they may fail, and that they won't run according to nice quarterly deliverable schedules, as things will go wrong.

Academic funding is very broken to begin with, as it focuses so hard on reducing the risk of projects that non-delivery (i.e. negative outcomes) are frowned upon or not tolerated (depending on the field) - this is a very unhealthy set of incentives. We should allow research to fail and return negative results, and not penalise the researchers. Not everything will work. Especially for early career researchers, they might be over-optimistic about how long something will take.

Researchers are trained to be so risk-averse that they are often seeking grant funding for work they've already done, in order to reduce (to near-zero) the risk of non-delivery. They then use that grant funding to tide over doing innovative research on the side, or doing the majority of the de-risking of it, in order ot be ready to bid for future funding for that idea, keeping the conveyor belt moving. But you have to find a way to get onto the conveyor belt and get started running on it.

Hopefully this research approach will embrace failure and delayed delivery for good reason, and focus instead on what can be learned, rather than on having low-skilled box-tickers focused on managing other people's projects - the two hallmaks of current govt funded research.

Re: UK to launch taxpayer-funded high-risk tech research agency exempt from FOI

#157

Post by mcguire »

dalbasal wrote: post #92
grey-area wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For those doubting the above, here is an example from the recent past of corruption from the Prime Minister, paying his lover with public funds: https://metro.co.uk/2019/10/31/10000-grant-given-boris-johns...

The problem with this line of argument is that it applies to anything and everything done under the current conservative banner. IE, Torrie/Boris corruption is the only topic. Whether it's a British DARPA, new sewage plant, or change to the tax code, the only thing to say is " They're corrupt. This is just another pilfering. " I'm sympathetic to the focus on corruption. Corruption is bad. That said, I don't think the…

The problem with this line of argument is that it ignores the specifics of the case and overgeneralizes to a version of the slippery-slope fallacy.

If someone were proposing building a sewage plant immune to FOI requests, I'd be feckin' terrified, much less worried about corruption. And I'm pretty blase about corruption in various activities (such as the ever-popular road construction and maintenance) in the US.

Re: UK to launch taxpayer-funded high-risk tech research agency exempt from FOI

#158

Post by rjsw »

emptyfile wrote: post #116
dominotw wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> fund new tunnelling is this supposed to be a double entendre ? I don't see how this follows from the parent comment.

The comment is making fun of a proposal Boris Johnson once made about building a bridge from Scotland to Northern Ireland, which is considered borderline physically impossible as far as I understand.

There was a suggestion that he was trying to do a bit of SEO to distract attention from another bridge [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_Bridge

Re: UK to launch taxpayer-funded high-risk tech research agency exempt from FOI

#159

Post by mcguire »

dalbasal wrote: post #103
lordnacho wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a good point, Labour did a bunch of PPI deals that didn't seem to benefit the public as much as the private collaborators. So it's not exclusive to one party, but the Conversatives have been in power for a fairly long time now. Long term we need transparency from whoever is in charge.

Sure, corruption and insiderism is an important topic in its own right. Up and down this thread though, it seems that British HNers are insisting that it's the only topic. IE, they're against this agency (and presumably everything else that spends money in any way) because corruption. Is this true for roads? No new schools, parks or research agencies until corruption is gone? It seems over the top to me. The " Boris'…

"> Long term we need transparency from whoever is in charge."

Corruption is bad, but not necessarily that bad, of course. But this case is about an agency almost literally immune to outside investigation.

Re: UK to launch taxpayer-funded high-risk tech research agency exempt from FOI

#160

Post by anonymousDan »

rusk wrote: post #150
onei wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The bridge is unfeasible because the channel is around 200m deep in places which makes it crazy expensive. I also found a couple of references to nuclear waste in the trench, but that might have been for another site.

Both of which I was aware of but I heard that some kind of suspension design would work. The tunnel is infeasible because there’s a very deep trench there, and that as you mentioned is filled with all sorts of nasty stuff.

I believe the latest proposal would swerve to avoid the trench.
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