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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

#281

Post by queuebert »

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…

Corporate R&D dies under the short-term thinking of quarterly profits. The best pure R&D seems to be coming from private companies that are able to sustain losses for long periods of time until a significant breakthrough is achieved (e.g. SpaceX, OpenAI, etc.).

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

#282

Post by mitthrowaway2 »

helsinkiandrew wrote: post #73
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…

> 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.

My understanding is that executives prefer buybacks because they mostly are compensated with stock options, which don't pay dividends (until exercised) but which appreciate disproportionately from buybacks.

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

#283

Post by slavik81 »

triceratops wrote: post #185
saulpw wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't group #2 sell 4% of their holdings, thereby remaining shareholders, and delivering to themselves the tax-advantaged equivalent of a 4% dividend?

> delivering to themselves the tax-advantaged equivalent of a 4% dividend? Long-term gains and qualified dividends (shares held longer than 60 days) are taxed at the same rate. What's the tax advantage here?

That is US-specific tax policy, but many international companies are listed on US exchanges and purchased by international investors. As a Canadian, my retirement savings in my TFSA are subject to 15% taxes on dividends and 0% taxes on capital gains (for US-listed stocks).

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

#285

Post by IG_Semmelweiss »

whatshisface wrote: post #262
echelon wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lecture halls sit empty while universities build amenities to make college seem like a staycation. If a university truly needs more classrooms, so be it, but much of the spending is going to perks like gyms, saunas, and sports facilities.

If the free market says that young adults 18-24 want to spend thousands of dollars on gyms, saunas and sports facilities, why should government regulators get involved?

because government regulators are backstopping the loan that young adult took for that sauna.

There's no free lunch. Its not a free market when a 17yr old with zero job experience can enter loan agreements of 100k per year.

And you know that's true because in any other scenario, the same 17yr old will get laughed out of any loan office. I'm not even sure a 17yr old would get a 400k bank loan if the kid showing up at the bank as the patent holder of Wegovy, for example.

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

#286

Post by UncleOxidant »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #273
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…

And yet when Jobs returned to Apple he blew up ATG (the Advanced Technology Group) that gave us Quicktime, etc. He also shutdown Apple's research library (and gave all the books to Stanford, I believe). He seemed to have little patience for "scientists" — preferred engineers that shipped shit. I think that at best he saw research as expensive, at worst he saw it as elitist.

And yet, he went to Xerox PARC and copied their research.

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

#287

Post by IG_Semmelweiss »

ModernMech wrote: post #257
mike_hearn wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 institut…

Yeah, that's not really how I view central planning. To me, central planning is when decisions go through a central authority. The only thing centralized here is the money pot. The decision making about what gets funded is mostly distributed though. Yes the Trump administration is wielding influence but the way they are doing it is by exerting control over the purse strings, which is decidedly not constitutional. Ind…

>>>The grant committees didn't earn the money, but as practicing scientists of some renown they have earned the right to weigh in on how public dollars should be spent.

No. They have not. They haven't earned anything. If they did, they would have had a connection to a company and thru their technical expertise, chosen exactly what to develop next, with their own (or investor's) dollars at stake.

You can't claim the best at a subject and purport to demonstrate it by writing a book. Say, risk management. Real risk managers open hedge funds. Academics write about other's hedge funds.

One has battle scars. The other is soft. Soft people don't get to make decisions on how to allocate anything. No cowards for leaders, since time immemorial.

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

#288

Post by Nasrudith »

cadamsdotcom wrote: post #227

It feels like in the past 20-ish years, maybe longer, game-changing innovations have become rarer, making science lower ROI. If that’s true (maybe it’s not? all I have is vibes!), if it is indeed true, and science is becoming less able to convert into invention- it stands to reason that at some point it becomes rational for a country to direct resources elsewhere. Political will becomes strained, and politicians deci…

It depends upon the field you are talking about for diminished return and less innovations. Returns have been thoroughly diminished when it comes to raw power in weaponry for instance. With anti-ship missiles already it is rather 'you get hit and you die'. Railguns haven't really been working out well for instance, and even if they did succeed all they would do is create 'stable magazines' while adding 'unstable' additional power production. Precision is the area where real work is being done, lumping in drones as an example of precision compared to say missiles or bombs which just explode at a destination, or mines which just explode when anything triggers it.

There are some major advancements in biotech for instance that are nothing to sneeze at, and even more in the pipeline (which admittedly may not pan out). Organs may not qualify as an invention technically, but being able to manufacture them certainly does. Not to mention how environmental tech is needed now more than ever.

Science being less convertible to inventions could have counterintuitive effects if it were true. Like smaller nations being in a 'don't even bother' situation while superpowers gain a literal monopoly on invention due to the rareness raising the barrier to entry to get anything meaningful out of it.

Politicians defunding and discouraging science is based more around memes and suppressing dissent than anything concrete. The reason not to create such 'stability' is generally that when the rest of the world passes by it will not be kind to you. But even if science somehow became literally useless tomorrow (an impossibility, of course), I highly doubt that politicians would not be such rigorous cost-oriented stewards that they would consider it worth the political capital to uproot the entrenched bureaucracies which no longer serve a purpose. Even if they knew it for certain was useless they might consider the spending a worthy price to pay for false hope. Crowds get real ugly when you tell them that things will never get better.

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

#289

Post by lutusp »

> But few people have asked what, exactly, is science? How does it work?

The author asks the question, but then never answers it. That isn't surprising -- nearly no one outside science understands how it works.

* Science rejects authority and doubts expertise. The greatest amount of scientific eminence is trumped by the smallest amount of scientific evidence.

* The basic scientific posture is that a theory is assumed to be false until proven true.

* Contrast this outlook with pseudoscience, where a theory is assumed to be true until proven false.

* A conscientious scientist lists all the reasons his theory might be wrong. In other fields, this task is left to critics.

This summary may seem to be at odds with modern scientific practice, but that's because much of modern scientific publishing is not science, it's marketing.

In a now-famous science story, during an astronomy conference a researcher stood up and confessed that he had made a mistake -- his detection of an exoplanet actually resulted from a failure to subtract Earth's own annual motion from his data.

The audience came to its feet and gave the researcher a standing ovation.

That is science.

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

#290

Post by lgleason »

What almost nobody in SV wants to talk about it the gutting of STEM in the early 90's when real wages for STEM began it's decline in the US via labor arbitrage. Of course Blank and most of Silicon Valley benefited from this, because it allowed them to get cheap, compliant labor. Eric Weinstein did a great paper on this years ago https://users.nber.org/~sewp/references/archive/weinsteinhow... . Looking at the current unemployment in STEM, which is higher than the national average, this arbitrage has just hit a point where it has killed the goose that laid his golden egg.
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