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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

#171

Post by [deleted] »

cgh wrote: post #104
helsinkiandrew wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Share buybacks allow companies to reward executives directly as their compensation is tied to stock price. To be fair share owners also like the stock price to go higher, they also like dividends (and higher dividends would tend to drive the stock price higher too), but an X% increase in share price caused by buybacks is favoured over an X% dividend because it isn’t immediately taxed.

Also, I believe in the US ordinary dividends are taxed at the income tax rate which is much higher than the capital gains rate.

[deleted]

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

#172

Post by nradov »

nyeah wrote: post #82
triceratops wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would they do that when they could pay shareholders and themselves?

Right now, in the US, we've given them no reason. But that's not a law of nature. For example a country might have an industrial policy.

Having an industrial policy has been disastrous for most countries that have tried it. Works fine for a few years and then everything falls apart as the grifting builds up and disruptive innovations destroy the underlying reasons for the original policy goals.

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

#173

Post by lotsofpulp »

nyeah wrote: post #158
terminalshort wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What does that even mean? Both stock buybacks and dividends are the distribution of profit.

Compensation expenses (such as stock options, RSUs, etc) are accounted as expenses, which of course reduces profit.

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

#174

Post by ModernMech »

mike_hearn wrote: post #168
ModernMech wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 programm…

The difference between a planned and unplanned economy isn't whether the bureaucrats claim to be politically neutral, scientists or anything else. The first head of GOSPLAN was a scientist and its members were academics. Academic funding is absolutely a planned economy. No way around that. It's literally committees of people allocating money requisitioned through tax and deciding what to spend it on, whilst having no…

Then maybe I don't understand what you mean by a planned economy, because I understand them to be characterized by centralized decision-making, not distributed decision-making across committees.

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

#175

Post by overrun11 »

cratermoon wrote: post #21
terminalshort wrote: post #3

> In the 20th century, U.S. companies put their excess profits into corporate research labs. Basic research in the U.S. was done in at Dupont, Bell Labs, IBM, AT&T, Xerox, Kodak, GE, et al. This changed in 1982, when the Securities and Exchange Commission ruled that it was legal for companies to buy their own stock (reducing the number of shares available to the public and inflating their stock price.) Very quickly B…

Note the "maximize shareholder value" aspect. That's the essential driving force behind business since then: The Friedman doctrine. Now consider the choices a company makes when executives hold the Friedman doctrine as orthodoxy. Put money into basic research that might generate shareholder value in some unknown time, or buy their own stock back and pump up the price?

Where do you think the capital being returned is going? If it's not being consumed but instead is mostly getting reinvested somewhere else than what is the problem? Capital markets are working as intended to move capital out of a firm that cannot generate high returns with it into ones that can.

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

#176

Post by convolvatron »

ActorNightly wrote: post #155
convolvatron wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 transfo…

oh, I was thinking about science. material science is doing some pretty cool things. quantum is getting interesting. we're just starting to really get a handle on reverse engineering the cell. battery chemistry. whether or not we're going to see practical fusion it seems likely that we'll see knockoffs. I just saw an ad yesterday that Avalanche is planning on selling waste (I mean useful quasi-stable elements). not just that but the non-sexy science (I met a guy yesterday and we talked about how a lot of his colleagues got the axe. he's working on characterizing the response of skin tissue to uv damage. that doesn't sound that sexy, but wouldn't it be nice to know?)

yeah, mostly forget about computers, we're still just coming to grips with the fact that we stopped doing largely innovative work decades ago. my bet is its going to go back to being interesting pretty soon. we are having a lot of interesting discussion about cognition though :)

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

#177

Post by zkmon »

some_guy_nobel wrote: post #146
zkmon wrote: post #25

>> Scientists are driven by curiosity Ok, then why do they get affected by funding? The truth is, today there is not a scientist, artist, researcher or writer who is not driven by funding. The era for curiosity-driven science is was over a long time ago. The direction of research or science is all driven by funding.

Here we have someone who clearly practices little real science, as evident by the ease with which they speak absolute statements that apply extremely broadly.

I'm sure you are a Scientist. I worked as a Scientist (not a data scientist etc), worked on pure science projects that ran under grants from government, spoke at international conferences presenting the findings etc. Believe me. Every single move in this "science" work was guided by funding. Not just my projects, but all of them.

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

#178

Post by mike_hearn »

ModernMech wrote: post #174
mike_hearn wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference between a planned and unplanned economy isn't whether the bureaucrats claim to be politically neutral, scientists or anything else. The first head of GOSPLAN was a scientist and its members were academics. Academic funding is absolutely a planned economy. No way around that. It's literally committees of people allocating money requisitioned through tax and deciding what to spend it on, whilst having no…

Then maybe I don't understand what you mean by a planned economy, because I understand them to be characterized by centralized decision-making, not distributed decision-making across committees.

It's about independence. Academic funding committees are not distributed or independent in any meaningful way. They might appear to be physically spread around the country, but look at what happened once the Trump admin came in. Academic funding policies changed over night.

In an unplanned economy, people make decisions about how to allocate their own resources, in the hope of earning a profit. There are not institutes setting policy frameworks that they have to follow, or committees arguing about how to give away money that they didn't earn to begin with.

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

#179

Post by Agraillo »

When dealing with patents, public interest, and their consequences, Bell Labs should be treated separately imo. My vague recollection of the book The Idea Factory [1] and a brief search indicate that AT&T was always treated as a special case due to its status as a regulated monopoly. This status at least culminated in the 1956 Consent Decree [2], which required making all prior patents royalty-free and (as I read elsewhere) mandated that all future patents be licensed on reasonable terms. Given Bell Labs' well-known portfolio-including the transistor, laser, CCD, DSP, and fiber-optic-related patents, this shows a significant exception to how other companies might have innovated and monetized their innovations.

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

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_System#1956_Consent_Decre...

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

#180

Post by nyeah »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #173
nyeah wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

What does that even mean? Both stock buybacks and dividends are the distribution of profit. Compensation expenses (such as stock options, RSUs, etc) are accounted as expenses, which of course reduces profit.

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