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Some people can't produce any output when sleep deprived.
Goodbye Academia
21–30 of 217 posts
Re: Goodbye Academia
#22Re: Goodbye Academia
#23My own theory is that it will take academia another generation to figure out what it has done to itself. With entry-level conditions becoming more and more terrible, the best students will increasingly seek careers outside the academy, and academia will become populated by the second tier. At that point, it will have lost a prestige which will take another century to repair.
Re: Goodbye Academia
#24This is a really thoughtful post highlighting many of the deeply-rooted problems in securing funding as an early-stage academic. It's depressing for bright young scientists to be looking forward to lives as assistant professors submitting grant after grant with an expected ~10% success rate. But what surprised me most was that at the end of the essay, after having described his fear of facing such uncertainty in NIH…
Indeed, I left academia for a startup. Securing funding for ZappyLab is by no means easy ( http://anothersb.blogspot.com/2014/03/hello-startup-sequel-t... ) But as hard as it is, there are many VCs, angels, and there is crowd funding (we are running a Kickstarter campaign now). Certainly not easy, but there are more options. You run a genetics lab and lose your NIH grant - where do you go?
Do VCs not fund biotech startups? Or are they only interested in social media iOS apps?
Re: Goodbye Academia
#25not sure why such a mundane story got such a huge outpouring
Re: Goodbye Academia
#26Not to sound like some crazy person with the word SOCIALIST written on the inside of my forehead in neon colors, but: It should be possible for WhatsApp to get "only" $18 billion and scientific research gets the remaining $1 billion. About a 5% tax. That way, venture capitalists could claim to fund innovation and would actually be truth-tellers.
Fastest. Downvote. Ever. \o/
Why? What would be the problem with taxing large acquisitions? It seems relatively painless and with little dead-weight loss compared to other taxes.
Re: Goodbye Academia
#27Not to sound like some crazy person with the word SOCIALIST written on the inside of my forehead in neon colors, but: It should be possible for WhatsApp to get "only" $18 billion and scientific research gets the remaining $1 billion. About a 5% tax. That way, venture capitalists could claim to fund innovation and would actually be truth-tellers.
There's already a tax on that $18 billion, it's at least a capital gains tax of 20% (not to mention the income taxes on all the attorney's, accountants, etc... involved in the deal). You just need to fix the allocation of the tax dollars.
Re: Goodbye Academia
#28Can someone post some numbers please?
How many people are getting doctorates (probably increasing)?
How many faculty positions are there over time (probably increasing much less)?
How much money per researcher is out there (probably shrinking RAPIDLY)?
How can we measure if we are getting more lenient with giving out PhD's? Shouldn't only the cream of the crop get to do research, not just the ones who claim to love it.
Re: Goodbye Academia
#29Not to sound like some crazy person with the word SOCIALIST written on the inside of my forehead in neon colors, but: It should be possible for WhatsApp to get "only" $18 billion and scientific research gets the remaining $1 billion. About a 5% tax. That way, venture capitalists could claim to fund innovation and would actually be truth-tellers.
I didn't downvote you, but WhatsApp affects more people than obscure scientific research.
WhatsApp is just cheap text messages. If we had a sane telecom market to start with, SMS would already cost nearly nothing and there'd be no market for WhatsApp.
They've done a good job filling a niche in a broken market, and delivered real value for consumers, I admit.
Re: Goodbye Academia
#30Not to sound like some crazy person with the word SOCIALIST written on the inside of my forehead in neon colors, but: It should be possible for WhatsApp to get "only" $18 billion and scientific research gets the remaining $1 billion. About a 5% tax. That way, venture capitalists could claim to fund innovation and would actually be truth-tellers.
It's funny to me when people call companies like Twitter "tech companies". What technology has twitter invented? There are open source clones with 70% of the features in It's time we got rid of this misnomer. Just because part of your company revolves around a piece of software you wrote doesn't mean you are a tech company. Writing software is not necessarily creating technology. Otherwise anyone who's written their own html site has just progressed technology.