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

#441

Post by ryandv » Tue, Oct 14, 2025, 3:55 PM UTC

dxdm wrote: post #380

wosined wrote: post #346

So is gender research or feminist queer dance theory studies a part of basic or applied science?

> So is gender research or feminist queer dance theory studies a part of basic or applied science? People's ideas about how humans should live together can be beneficial for the wealth and well-being of whole societies and its members. Was Rousseau part of basic or applied science? We can wonder about how useful certain efforts are, of course, especially in all their extent; but I don't know how wise it is to dismiss…

> Was Rousseau part of basic or applied science?

This one is easy - neither. The term "science" has gone through semantic dilution in a manner similar to how everyone is now an engineer - software engineer, prompt engineer, sanitation engineer.

Falsifiability is one of the key distinguishing characteristics of a proper science, as famously propounded by Karl Popper.

"Gender identities" not only can not be falsified, they should not be falsified, because that would amount to transphobia; denying the existence of someone's felt and lived gender identity is the definition of transphobia.

Since they cannot be falsified, nor even directly observed, measured, nor quantified, they are not scientific notions.

The closest most well-studied analogue to the "gender identity" is the legacy religious notion of "the soul," to which you will see you can ascribe most, if not all, of the same attributes as ascribed to the "gender identity."

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

#442

Post by dehrmann » Tue, Oct 14, 2025, 3:56 PM 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.

If they really wanted that dividend, they could see that the company is doing $X in buybacks, figure out what percent of its market cap that works out to, sell a corresponding amount, and pretend it's a dividend.

A lot of shareholders also DRIP, but they should prefer buybacks for tax reasons.

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

#443

Post by notfromhere » Tue, Oct 14, 2025, 3:58 PM UTC

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…

New Deal-era regulations on financial flows made it painful tax-wise to remove cash from a company. So you either had to pay it as dividends, or you invest it in R&D, wages, or benefits for employees (this is why companies used to have very plush benefits even for lower level managers). When combined with pretty aggressive anti-trust, it also funneled cash into business expansion via conglomerates.

Companies were asset rich (which is the seam of valuable companies that private equity has been strip mining for 40 years, but even those are running out now).

Share buybacks are more symbolic that the Reagan era made it easy to take cash out of companies, which led to a race to the bottom of extracting as much cash as possible while leaving little for operations, wages, or expansion.

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

#444

Post by balls187 » Tue, Oct 14, 2025, 3:59 PM UTC

treis wrote: post #191

fidotron wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China are certainly better at turning the results of research into products, whether that research was them or anyone else. The canonical example here is 5G. Once again the US science establishment had the guy, he ends up doing the breakthroughs for polar coding, they failed to appreciate him, he left and ended up being funded by Huawei. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erdal_Ar%C4%B1kan The US science establishment isn…

Eh, China is better at directing massive state level resources at incrementally improving technology. Nothing truly revolutionary has come out of China. The West is still ahead in that sort of stuff.

> The West is still ahead in that sort of stuff.

Such as?

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

#445

Post by guywithahat » Tue, Oct 14, 2025, 4:16 PM 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.…

Not only that, but science was largely a privately-funded industry until a few decades ago, and many would argue governments do a bad job of funding science because a lot of nonsense gets wrapped up in it. It's frustrating because people will whole-heartedly claim science research needs more funding, and then hand the funding over to John Money so he can publish what happens when you sexually abuse children (spoiler: they committed suicide).

I don't think a lot of the people defending government backed research understand everything they're defending

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

#446

Post by prewett » Tue, Oct 14, 2025, 4:16 PM UTC

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #373

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. If we started not doing that, the priorities might shift, but those executives like things the way they are. This isn't right but it's adjacent. Executives don't need buybacks to get whatever compensation. Their compensation is negotiated and you can write the contract to make it whatever. However, paying divi…

I like having a dividend. A company like NVDA forces shareholder returns to the whim of the market price, but dividends stabilize things because the stock is actually tangibly worth something. It also forces a certain discipline in the company, since shareholders don't like dividends getting cut. It also limits empire-building, di-worsification, and "good ideas" that have questionable ROI.

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

#447

Post by prewett » Tue, Oct 14, 2025, 4:18 PM UTC

barchar wrote: post #317

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.

Dividends actually directly lower the stock price. Keep an eye on your portfolio when your holdings go ex-div -- the price falls because it no longer includes that cashflow.

It does not lower it in any long-term sense, because, unless it's a one-time dividend, there's another dividend next quarter, and generally assumed to be continuing payments for the foreseeable future if the company is healthy.

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

#448

Post by timr » Tue, Oct 14, 2025, 4:23 PM UTC

treyd wrote: post #404

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. This isn't right but it's adjacent. Executives don't need buybacks to get whatever compensation. Their compensation is negotiated and you can write the contract to make it whatever. However, paying divi…

> Companies often use it to acquire other companies, which is the worst. We also used to enforce antitrust law.

> We also used to enforce antitrust law.

I've been reading the Chernow biography of Rockefeller, and this simply isn't true. We've almost never enforced "anti-trust law", and it's basically never been particularly effective.

The Sherman Act was widely considered a failure (even after passage in 1890). It did little/nothing to affect the fate of Standard Oil, which actually grew for a decade after passage, to over 90% control of the market by 1904. This is despite the state of Ohio engaging in a much more successful legal attack, based on technicalities of the trust charter, having nothing to do with the federal law.

The thing that actually brought down Standard Oil was...competition. By the time the company was actually broken up in under the Sherman Act in 1911, it had declined to ~60% market share. The overall story is essentially the same as today: the law ends up being used to punish declining companies for prior bad behavior.

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

#449

Post by prewett » Tue, Oct 14, 2025, 4:24 PM UTC

Tuna-Fish wrote: post #156

triceratops wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

That only works if the stock buyback increases the price permanently. Intel stock buybacks at $50 don't look so great now, but the dividends you got are still worth the same.

Buybacks of overpriced stocks also do not benefit investors.

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

#450

Post by robotresearcher » Tue, Oct 14, 2025, 4:25 PM UTC

triceratops wrote: post #193

fn-mote wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you make this argument more rigorous? I’m just not following the connections here. It seems like your assumption is that a stock buyback is a short term gain. One of your arguments is that the strike price for options is set based on a certain amount of stock in circulation, and decreasing that amount will “artificially” raise the stock price, making the options more valuable. I agree that higher stock price bene…

> It seems like your assumption is that a stock buyback is a short term gain. My argument is a stock buyback isn't a gain for a long-term, buy-and-hold investor. Unless a) they sell some of the stock or b) it pays dividends they don't see the benefit of a higher stock price or reduced share count. Qualified dividends and long term capital gains are taxed at the same rate. So anyone who says "buybacks are more tax-adv…

If a buyback gives stockholders the choice of selling or holding, realizing the gain now or later, and a dividend does not, why not prefer the buyback?