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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

#411

Post by fakedang »

zaphar wrote: post #381
whatevaa wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh they know. They just don't care.

I don't think they do know. Nor do I think most of the shareholders know. If they did they would know that they can make way more money with forward thinking and planning beyond a quarter. The lack of that is the clearest indication I can imagine that they do not know.

Most investors today are basically stock printer go brrr....

If one looks at US money printing in the past two decades, they'll find that the S&P's gains are basically just a mirror to the increased injection of dollars, a facade made to prop up the market. There really has been no actual growth compared to like Japan in the 1980s or China and India in the early 2000s, or Vietnam today. Just a few companies, mostly in tech, which are propping up the rest of the market.

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

#412

Post by sillywabbit »

Agraillo wrote: post #179

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 els…

Not to be confused with:

https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262731423/the-idea-factory/

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

#413

Post by rybosworld »

cloverich wrote: post #93
oblio wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Xerox and Kodak, at least, stumbled into the future and then refused it. The same thing will happen to Google & co. And DuPont is very much alive doing DuPont things.

My mental model as an outsider, is the vibe out of Google is that they push the most talented folks out via process / politics. Not intentionally, just the reality of squeezing the creative type employee / work. Replacing creative smarts which is difficult or impossible to measure, with operational smarts, more easily measured. Those creative smart people mostly go on to start up other companies. Its worked out ok fo…

Bureaucrat-ification isn't a phenomenon unique to Google - it happens at every company eventually.

It's really hard to describe why it's inevitable (there are a lot of factors).

But it's self-evident really. All of the major tech players started with a single innovation that afforded them enough revenue to acquire almost everything else in their portfolio.

Aside from search, the only major product Alphabet built-in house that meaningfully moves the needle revenue-wise is their cloud segment. Youtube was acquired - and it's effectively an extension of search.

Meta had to acquire Instagram and WhatsApp. Without those acquisitions, I have strong doubts they'd still be a major player today.

You can run through this exercise with Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, NVDA etc.

The common theme is they did 1 or 2 things really well, and got big enough to acquire/copy/bully smaller players out of the market.

What's crazy is most of them still rely on that one original thing they did well for >50% of revenue.

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

#414

Post by clusterhacks »

echelon wrote: post #244
treis wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is absurd. These universities aren't diploma mills. They're solid institutions in the "directional state U" tier.

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…

> Even at the risk of false negatives, I would actively filter out resumes listing schools like these.

I am occasionally on hiring committees and use a rubric for ranking candidates. The rubric usually has 8-10 yes/no questions that might be best summarized as "Does this applicant's resume and cover letter indicate that they have actually written code deep enough to 'map' to our requirements?" Some of the rubric may be a little more specific to the actual job role, but the main idea is to filter out what I have come to think of as "aspirational" software developers.

I think one nice thing about the rubric approach is that candidates don't score "prestige" points or get "penalty" points for their specific educational background. Honestly, it seems like a lot of students from many institutions (some quite well known for rigor) are mostly about the "credential, not for the learning." The rubric seems to effectively filter out the less skilled or interested without eliminating skilled candidates with less "sterling" credentials.

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

#415

Post by runako »

ludicrousdispla wrote: post #316
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…

> Jobs was always thinking Apple could do better with the money in R&D Turns out Jobs was right, relevant article from 2006: https://appleinsider.com/articles/06/01/16/apples_jobs_says_...

Scale matters.

From TFA:

> pushed the company's market capitalization to $72.13 billion

This, on annual revenue of ~$19B.

Apple today is closing in on 2x that revenue every month now. Quarterly net profit exceeds annual revenue in 2006. The Apple Watch group is roughly half the size of the whole company in 2006.

At some point, it became clear that the business throws off vastly more cash than can be productively used in R&D (here I will note that Apple's recent profit gusher is already net of investments in things like the Titan car project, Vision, and all the other stuff they work on but never release).

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

#416

Post by philipallstar »

mexicocitinluez wrote: post #402
anonymousDan wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Umm, no. Maybe they have better PR departments than universities but this is clearly nonsense.

God, the irony in saying "All major research is done by companies" while typing your message out to post ON THE INTERNET. LOL.

Basically all of the internet is powered by software, standards, computers, networks and storage created by companies.

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

#417

Post by modo_mario »

philipallstar wrote: post #366
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…

> I'm not seeing how you get from share buybacks to a shift in priorities in corporate research. Share buybacks are just the new go-to thing to blame. Economics students (at least "development economics") are memorising this concept all over the globe, so you can expect it more and more.

New? It's been blamed for a long time now.

And it makes sense on this front.

You make tax optimising by dumping profits on R&D less attractive (and around the same time change patenting law with bayh-dole) and make it more attractive to spend it on stock buybacks to directly benefit shareholders

Results seen in the real world line up as less is spent on the former and more on the later so i'm not sure how the blame is unfounded

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

#418

Post by triceratops »

barchar wrote: post #325
triceratops wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Qualified dividends (stock held more than 60 days) and long term capital gains are taxed at the same rate.

At any given point in time for an individual yes, but your cap gains rate can vary substantially over time. Also trusts are taxed fairly punitively. So it's still better for everyone since only those who need or want the income have to take it.

> Also trusts are taxed fairly punitively

That only reinforces my viewpoint that buybacks advantage rich shareholders.

> your cap gains rate can vary substantially over time

It is 0% (up to like $100k for a couple filing jointly), 15% (up to about $580k), and 20% above that. Income tax has many more brackets than that and they kick in at way lower incomes.

It's true that your income can vary substantially over time. It might be nice to do earn all your capital gains and dividends in retirement. You will likely need less income then to live on and can incur $100k/year in gains and dividends tax-free. On the other hand, remaining invested in a stock that does buybacks during your working years also concentrates your risk in that stock. So people will likely sell anyway and take some capital gains to diversify.

And finally, if we want companies to improve productivity (read: fewer employees) then we can't solely tax labor to fund everything. We have to tax the part of the pie that's actually growing: this is represented by stock prices and dividends.

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

#419

Post by runako »

terminalshort wrote: post #237
treis wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is absurd. These universities aren't diploma mills. They're solid institutions in the "directional state U" tier.

Georgia State has an average SAT score of 1070. Nobody with a brain goes there. Just a societally sanctioned diploma scam for people who would be much better served by starting work right out of HS.

National average SAT score is ~995. Georgia average is 1030.

The Georgia university system has a set of goals for the advancement of the state of Georgia. It's difficult to make an argument that graduating seniors performing above average are unworthy of higher education, and that this would be best for the state.

Georgia, like most states, recognizes that not every student will fit in every situation and has options to help most/all of them. Georgia Tech is very different from UGA. Both are very different from the network of community colleges.

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