No science, no startups: The innovation engine we're switching off • Hacker News Board

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

#301

Post by astrange » Tue, Oct 14, 2025, 5:06 AM UTC

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #130

intalentive wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read "stock buybacks in 1982" as shorthand for "financialization and short-term thinking at the expense of long-term gains", which certainly happened across corporate America and Britain starting with Reagan and Thatcher.

In tech it was the switch from creative corporatism, which is focused on opportunities, invention, and infrastructure, to extractive corporatism and oligarchy, which are focused on scams, exploitation, and the creation of rigid hierarchies of privilege. We're now in the end stage of the latter in the US. The US still plays at invention - or rather a few of its oligarchs do - but it's far, far behind what's happening…

The US doesn't have oligarchs except maybe Alex Karp.

Oligarch is a specific thing with a specific meaning.

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

#302

Post by astrange » Tue, Oct 14, 2025, 5:06 AM UTC

dzonga wrote: post #96

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…

share buybacks are sort of a voting mechanism - it shows the company has no other uses for the money than to reward shareholders - hence pumping stock price up. if the company has a vision - then reinvesting that money into research or what else is better. it might reap the benefits, it might not. companies use buybacks if they can't do anything productive with the money - Apple is a recent example.

The buybacks also compensate for dilution from paying employees in shares.

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

#303

Post by astrange » Tue, Oct 14, 2025, 5:08 AM UTC

epistasis wrote: post #269

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-…

"Seriously spent" where serious is less than the cost of a single bomber for the military. I forget what Geoffrey Hinton said it was, but it was an embarrassingly small pittance. Military spending is largely economic dead weight, roughly the equivalent of handouts. And the end result is deterrence in a game of prisoners dilemma. Yet it is sacrosanct, and subject to ever increasing budgets for no gain.

The % of US GDP spent on defense has been going straight down ever since Eisenhower gave that speech about the MIC.

(Another fun fact is defense companies make fewer profits during war, not more. Presumably because they have to make real products instead of designing imaginary ones.)

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

#304

Post by whatevaa » Tue, Oct 14, 2025, 5:12 AM UTC

smaudet wrote: post #292

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…

Maybe some of these 2-brain cell executives should consider that their "buybacks" will be worthless when US throughput starts to be equally worthless compared to the rest of the world... Of course, I'm being a bit pejorative, they aren't thinking big picture at all, just concerned with what happens tomorrow not the day after... However, they are in part responsible for the nonsense happening at the moment wrt to Amer…

Oh they know. They just don't care.

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

#305

Post by astrange » Tue, Oct 14, 2025, 5:13 AM UTC

treis wrote: post #253

echelon wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You clearly aren't familiar. These "universities" are a step above DeVry. They might be worse in that they cost an arm and a leg to attend. I used to tutor CS students at several different universities during my first two years at college. I would bet my arm that none of the ones I taught from KSU wound up with a career in software. The student perspective at these schools is that they're there for the credential, no…

I know several graduates of GA State and KSU. Including one KSU grad that works as a software engineer.

I went to SJSU (now KSU) briefly before transferring to a better school (because I slept through all of high school and didn't do any homework) and I did not get the feeling that anyone else in my classes was going to be a successful software engineer. Rather I got the feeling their parents told them to do CS because they really liked video games.

I took a group project game development class and it went beyond doing all the work in the group, I think I did all the work in the class.

Two people I know did graduate then change careers and become successful animators on Archer though.

At GA Tech the quality of students were better, but it mostly seemed to me that it worked by beating everyone to death such that you washed out if you couldn't work nonstop. They still weren't especially good eg not a single other student knew what version control was.

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

#306

Post by noobermin » Tue, Oct 14, 2025, 5:14 AM UTC

twobitshifter wrote: post #48

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…

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…

Isn't corportate csuite compensation the highest it's ever been? This isn't that great of an argument.

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

#307

Post by wordpad » Tue, Oct 14, 2025, 5:16 AM UTC

kristianp wrote: post #280

aurareturn wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Share buyback is the same as giving dividends - except the share holder doesn’t have to pay taxes until they sell. To the company, they spend the same amount on share buyback vs giving dividends. I don’t see how this argument holds up. Further more, while some might argue that corporate R&D is better due to being closer to the problem but it is private research and not shared with the world like university research i…

It's not exactly the same: if the company does buybacks and then loses value or goes bankrupt, shareholders never get the benefit of those buybacks.

Shareholder prefer buybacks for tax reasons.

He didn't say it was exactly same, only that in principle it's the same - company returning money to shareholders.

Such an action has no effect on company valuation.

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

#308

Post by astrange » Tue, Oct 14, 2025, 5:19 AM UTC

IG_Semmelweiss wrote: post #287

ModernMech wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 b…

This kind of marginal risk thinking has never made sense to me because of the declining marginal value of money.

If you have $0 you can't accept any risk and can't make any decisions correctly. But if you have like $4 million you also have no reason to make any decisions correctly because risk no longer matters to you. So it relies on them having expensive tastes such that they can't just retire?

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

#309

Post by astrange » Tue, Oct 14, 2025, 5:24 AM UTC

quantummagic wrote: post #277

Then fund science. Just because the government has done it previously doesn't mean it always has to be like that forever. Maybe if science depended on the average Joe actually having a living wage, enough to donate some directly to science, the incentive structures of our society would become more healthy than they currently are. Rich people, worrying about rich people jobs and outcomes, is getting a little tiresome.…

Income inequality in the US hasn't increased since 2014. Wage inequality severely decreased between 2019 and 2023.

https://www.nber.org/papers/w31010

Sometimes good things happen!

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

#310

Post by nofriend » Tue, Oct 14, 2025, 5:24 AM UTC

astrange wrote: post #308

IG_Semmelweiss wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>>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 b…

This kind of marginal risk thinking has never made sense to me because of the declining marginal value of money. If you have $0 you can't accept any risk and can't make any decisions correctly. But if you have like $4 million you also have no reason to make any decisions correctly because risk no longer matters to you. So it relies on them having expensive tastes such that they can't just retire?

It has to do with the lindy effect. If you have $X, statistically you will quit trying to accumulate money when you have $2X. Hence you are safe to entrust some reasonable fraction of $X in without fear of you running away with it. Someone with substantially less than $X will see that as the most money they will ever see in their lifetime and immediately being trying to cash out.