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No science, no startups: The innovation engine we're switching off

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Re: No science, no startups: The innovation engine we're switching off

#151

Post by dexwiz »

portaouflop wrote: post #72
dexwiz wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dunno about the last part. Rich people under 60 seem to be under the impression they might live forever, either biologically or digitally. Within our lifetime we see people trying to make their digital twin their legal heir.

I get the longevity angle (even if I think it’s not possible or even desirable) but digital twin I don’t understand. It’s like a different person altogether. Even if it was possible to completely clone a persona digitally it would not be you but someone else.

I totally agree with the ridiculousness of it, but that's not going to stop people with outsized egos from trying. Or companies that are trying to ride the coattails of a cult of personality.

Re: No science, no startups: The innovation engine we're switching off

#152

Post by ModernMech »

intalentive wrote: post #102

"Government funding is the engine of economic innovation" is a tacit admission we have a planned economy.

That would depend on how the funding is controlled. If funding approvals had to go through partisan bureaucrats in the White House for approval, yes, that's a planned economy. Historically it's been disparate groups of scientists who decide how block grants from Congress get divided. I've had colleagues who go and work at the NSF just for that role. I wouldn't say that guy making decisions about what kind of programming languages research gets funding is planning the economy.

I also wouldn't say Congress allocating this or that block grants toward broad areas is planning the economy either. Usually planned economies are bad because it's one guy or one committee doing the planning, and they're really just a dysfunctional and doesn't incorporate evidence to make decisions. You get better decisions when you spread the planning across groups of loosely affiliated experts in their field.

Re: No science, no startups: The innovation engine we're switching off

#153

Post by overrun11 »

triceratops wrote: post #74
bulletsvshumans wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But dividends also result in a concrete financial reward for all shareholders, yes?

> all shareholders That's the key phrase, they benefit all shareholders. Buybacks on the other hand only benefit the following shareholders: 1. those with regularly vesting stock options and stock grants - basically employees. For non-tech companies especially, this only means high-ranking employees 2. those who intend to sell - that is, soon-to-be-ex shareholders 3. those who borrow against their stock - typically h…

This is just nonsense. Anyone can sell the stock if they wish, there is no privilege for the high-net worth. Additionally, shareholders benefit from reduced share count because it increases their claim on future profits thereby increasing compounding.

Re: No science, no startups: The innovation engine we're switching off

#154

Post by echelon »

some_guy_nobel wrote: post #134
ilamont wrote: post #115

Universities spend ~$109 billion a year on research. ~$60 billion of that $109 billion comes from the National Institutes for Health (NIH) for biomedical research, National Science Foundation (NSF) for basic science, Department of War (DoW), Department of Energy (DOE), for energy/physics/nuclear, DARPA, NASA. Let's talk about the other $49B. I read or heard someplace that at many universities tuition paid by students…

Raising (already record high) tuitions that have far, far outpaced wages and inflation should be a last resort. You can start by cutting bloated admin, reduce fraudulent procurement/graft (e.g. the $700k Berkeley Chancellor's fence: https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/700k-iron-fence-co... ), vanity construction, study abroad admin budgets that dwarf actual student grants, and the executive compensation/perks b…

This.

Cut spending on admin staff and facilities.

Schools do not need amenities to attract students. They need lower tuition. You could teach students out of a tent and do away with all the flashy health spas and do a better job at the core mission of empowering students.

No new buildings, no land acquisitions, no taking over facilities from the state for millions of dollars.

University leadership does not need to make $300k, $600k salaries. They should make what the median professor makes.

Universities will tell you they need all of this to compete with other universities. So to get the ball started, tax all of this as a negative externality and give it to the universities that do not spend in this way. Or turn it into scholarships.

Speaking of scholarships, stop putting a cap on admissions. Let everyone that wants to come in do so if they meet academic thresholds. Let them stay if they maintain a good GPA.

And make student loan debt dischargable. That might mean not everyone qualifies for a loan, but by making the system an "infinite money glitch", universities have grown into gluttons for tuition. They've taken this "free, unlimited money" to grow to obscene proportions. It's malinvestment propped up by an artificial quirk of economics.

Re: No science, no startups: The innovation engine we're switching off

#155

Post by ActorNightly »

convolvatron wrote: post #77
ActorNightly wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The bigger problem today is that there is simply nothing more left to research. Everything that is being worked on are at most optimizations, which allways have a dollar spent vs dollar returned amount on them.

that patently ridiculous, we're just getting started

Really? What is so innovative?

LLMs are just better google. In the past, you used to google shit, and copy paste from stack overflow, now you just skip the middle man and go directly to Chat GPT. Anyone that has been programming for a while can attest to that the answers aren't any better, its just more efficient to iterate on them now.

AI hasn't even begun to be solved yet. Everyone is focused on feedforward transformer architecture that is never going to replace the imperative processing of actual intelligence.

Smartphones are pretty much solved, as they have replaced a lot of the need for in person interaction (which by extension means transportation). The last decade has been all about monetizing smartphones.

Wearables aren't transforming society at all.

3d printing and home fab is still too niche and expensive for most people, and you can't really make it cheaper and more accessible.

Electric vehicles largely suck. Self driving is mediocre.

We literally went through a pandemic and people got richer because they had to stay at home and not spend money on things like daycare or gas or car maintenance, without losing any productivity.

Hell, the state the US is in currently is largely explained by the fact that most all the problems in society have been solved to the extent that people have to invent bogeymen and elect a demented felon into office on the promise of solving those problems.

Re: No science, no startups: The innovation engine we're switching off

#156

Post by Tuna-Fish »

triceratops wrote: post #74
bulletsvshumans wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But dividends also result in a concrete financial reward for all shareholders, yes?

> all shareholders That's the key phrase, they benefit all shareholders. Buybacks on the other hand only benefit the following shareholders: 1. those with regularly vesting stock options and stock grants - basically employees. For non-tech companies especially, this only means high-ranking employees 2. those who intend to sell - that is, soon-to-be-ex shareholders 3. those who borrow against their stock - typically h…

4. Those who intend to re-invest all returns in to the stock, who avoid a taxable event when their ownership of the company goes up without having to first pay tax for the dividend.

A stock buyback rewards all stockholders equally. Those who sell, get their reward in cash. Those who do not sell, get their reward in the proportion of their ownership of the company going up.

Re: No science, no startups: The innovation engine we're switching off

#157

Post by terminalshort »

fidotron wrote: post #64

There's something odd in this argument. If you come at it from a Canadian perspective Canada seriously spent on neural network computer science when almost no one else did (many in AI considered the entire thing discredited and impossible), now the (financial) gains from that are almost entirely in a foreign country. The US science establishment was all about buying and utilizing Russian rocket engines until he-that-…

Not only did SpaceX make breakthroughs considered impossible by the "experts" in the industry, they did it by hiring a guy who literally built rocket engines in his garage to design the engines. The key here is personality. And the type of person who actually wants to build things and get things done absolutely recoils at bureaucracy and the type of people who like it.

When you build something to the point where there is a bureaucratic "establishment" in control you can be sure that innovation slows to a crawl. You may still have a few individual scientists doing great work, but you can be sure that some miserable bureaucrat will pat him on the back and stick it in a drawer somewhere never to see the light of day again. The same is true whether that bureaucratic establishment is at a government or in universities, or any other type of bureaucratic organization.

Re: No science, no startups: The innovation engine we're switching off

#158

Post by nyeah »

terminalshort wrote: post #144
twobitshifter wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not why it can’t be done so much as why it isn’t done. Share buybacks allow companies to reward executives directly as their compensation is tied to stock price. If we started not doing that, the priorities might shift, but those executives like things the way they are. Before Tim Cook Apple had never done a buyback - Jobs was always thinking Apple could do better with the money in R&D than paying off shareholders. W…

If companies want to reward executives directly they can cut out shareholders entirely and pay salaries and bonuses. If companies want to reward shareholders (including executives) they can pay dividends (which Apple did do under Jobs). Nothing about the priorities of companies changed with share buybacks.

For one thing, buybacks aren't charged against profits. Compensation is.

Re: No science, no startups: The innovation engine we're switching off

#159

Post by clusterhacks »

ilamont wrote: post #115

Universities spend ~$109 billion a year on research. ~$60 billion of that $109 billion comes from the National Institutes for Health (NIH) for biomedical research, National Science Foundation (NSF) for basic science, Department of War (DoW), Department of Energy (DOE), for energy/physics/nuclear, DARPA, NASA. Let's talk about the other $49B. I read or heard someplace that at many universities tuition paid by students…

> tuition paid by students in the social sciences is effectively subsidizing the STEM fields

This is not true at my state flagship R1 institution. Tuition and fees make up a little over 10% of the institution's total revenue. General funding provided in our state budget provides a larger percentage of the total revenue to the university and federal research funding provides an even larger percentage than the state.

The essential takeaway here is that our state taxes subsidize the actual cost of providing education to in-state students. In-state students are mandated to be at least 80%-ish of students.

The professors in the STEM fields are required to raise a significant percentage of their salary via research grants ("soft" money), teaching, and service work. The non-STEM professors are more often funded via "hard" money - eg, the institution has committed to pay the salary of history professors.

I googled and apparently a little more than 70% of undergraduate students in the US attend public schools. I don't know much about how funding works at the private universities that have the other 30% of undergraduate students.

Re: No science, no startups: The innovation engine we're switching off

#160

Post by terribleperson »

wbl wrote: post #37
photochemsyn wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article doesn't mention that Bayh-Dole made it legal for a university to exclusively license a patent generated by a government-financed researcher to a corporation. Prior to this, if a corporation wanted to have exclusive rights to basic patents, they'd have to run their own private research labs to generate those patents. Prior to Bayh-Dole, university inventions were patented but there were no exclusive licens…

Repealing Bayh-Dole is a terrible idea. A lot of research produces enough to get a patent but still requires a lot more development to get a product. Drugs are probably the best example.

Wouldn't a company still be able to patent the additional development they did to turn the original research into a product? E.g. delivery method patents are very common.

I don't see why they need to own the original research.

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