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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

#491

Post by runako »

terminalshort wrote: post #490
runako wrote: post #483

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for adding that color, it is clarifying. I would suggest that your position is a minority position. In particular, that view is out of step with most employers, who generally require college degrees (even non-technical ones) for most white-collar jobs.

Employers can only require those degrees because lots of people have them. Lots of people have them because we subsidize them. If we didn't, they would hire people without them. If you have any respect for employer posted job requirements you probably haven't read the listed requirements for the job you have now. If SWE doesn't actually require a degree, and I know it doesn't because I don't have one, then neither do…

> If SWE doesn't actually require a degree, and I know it doesn't because I don't have one

There's a lot embedded in here that for political reasons I'm not going to get into.

Back on the subject, I will just saw the GA university system regents disagree with you about the purpose of the GA university system. Successive state legislatures and governors have broadly supported, over many decades, their view of the purpose of the system.

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

#493

Post by gamblor956 »

ThrowawayTestr wrote: post #481
gamblor956 wrote: post #456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lol. SpaceX wasn't the first private company to develop a reusable rocket. It was just the first one owned by a billionaire that convince other people to fund it. SpaceX is notorious in the aeronautical industry for attempting to interfere in the research and funding of other companies. Over a decade ago a competitor had viable plans for a 2 stage rocket... until Musk sued to block the funding.

SpaceX was funded by Musk until it started making money. I don't think he was even a billionaire when he founded it.

If by funded you mean SpaceX received hundreds of millions in government funding, then yes he funded it himself.... the same way he built Dragon all by himself...

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

#494

Post by zarenor »

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.

See, this is the thing. An investor isn't tied to the fortunes of any one company. An investor can bail when things go south, and investors who care enough to be writing to executives or the board are also the ones most sensitive to signals things are going badly.

This is why 'activist' investing works - you can take on debt, or drive a debt-funded acquisition so that the immediate value of a share goes up, bail while people are buying the inflated price, and be running the con again while the debt kills the company. The execs are bound by the board, and don't feel empowered to fight these kinds of changes - often, they're replaced if they do (or as part of the board takeover).

Long-run, this is bad for the companies this happens to, and the overall economy, but it's good short-run for investors, and savvy investors don't need to worry about long run, because at worst they can liquidate their position before the market catches up and sit in treasuries if there's no other good poaching target.

The failure of anti-trust enforcement, of anyone to sue for long-term over short-term gains, the tax-advantaged position of stock-centered comp, and the acceptance of even debt-funded buybacks all work together to reinforce this failure state.

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

#495

Post by oskarkk »

gamblor956 wrote: post #456
oskarkk wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any American company could use NASA's designs for reusable rockets... Oh wait, only SpaceX did it. And 10 years after they did it, they're still the only company that did it (not counting New Shepard of course, as it can't put anything into orbit). Are some congressmen forbidding other companies to use their own money to make better rockets?

Lol. SpaceX wasn't the first private company to develop a reusable rocket. It was just the first one owned by a billionaire that convince other people to fund it. SpaceX is notorious in the aeronautical industry for attempting to interfere in the research and funding of other companies. Over a decade ago a competitor had viable plans for a 2 stage rocket... until Musk sued to block the funding.

> SpaceX wasn't the first private company to develop a reusable rocket.

It surely was the first to actually make a reusable orbital rocket.

> It was just the first one owned by a billionaire that convince other people to fund it.

Elon Musk became a billionaire in 2012, when they were already working on reusability. They didn't even need that much money to develop it, they mostly experimented with it on operational flights for their customers. Anyway, companies in the industry could also assign/obtain funds to do it, but they chose not to (until Blue Origin and the current wave of space startups).

> SpaceX is notorious in the aeronautical industry for attempting to interfere in the research and funding of other companies. Over a decade ago a competitor had viable plans for a 2 stage rocket... until Musk sued to block the funding.

Source? Never heard anything like that.

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

#496

Post by oskarkk »

gamblor956 wrote: post #493
ThrowawayTestr wrote: post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SpaceX was funded by Musk until it started making money. I don't think he was even a billionaire when he founded it.

If by funded you mean SpaceX received hundreds of millions in government funding, then yes he funded it himself.... the same way he built Dragon all by himself...

That's how most space launch companies work, they get government contracts to do things for government. ULA (joint venture of Lockheed & Boeing) gets nearly all of its revenue from the government. Musk funded SpaceX until they made enough progress to have NASA consider them worthy of getting a contract for resupplying ISS (and they got other commercial customers).

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

#497

Post by ricksunny »

AfterHIA wrote: post #488
ricksunny wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remain perpetually perplexed why people who invoke Mansfield's name almost universally shrink from describing why they feel it is relevant to invoke Mansfield's name. Yes, there was a Mansfield amendment and a would-be 'nother Mansfield amendment. It had some (waves hands) ever-unarticulated effect on defense funding of research. Motivations of Mansfield are never articulated. Seems so self-defeating to not describ…

Going into the specifics of what motivated Mike Mansfield requires going beyond the conversation we're having about R&D into the domain of politics and ideology. I want to stick to relevant realities related to people in technology: 1) This killed research in the United States. This killed the program that paid for Alan Kay and Douglas Engelbart's PhDs. This has led to or is at least heavily correlated with the decli…

Ok, starting to get somewhere, so I thank you for that much. We have the understanding now that there is some discontent with one of Mr Mansfield’s amendments, specifically its perceived outcome on innovative, not-necessarily-defense-oriented-but-still-could-be research funding.

Still unanswered questions:

• Which Mansfield amendment is wing referred to? Namong the year would be suffiicnetly identifying

• What were Mr. Mansfield’s goals in pushing his eponymous amendment.

And I would like to ask a follow-on, once again in appreciation of your response: • Among the people (usually academicians in my experience) who express unhappiness with (one of) the Mansfield amendments, why don’t they express at least equal level of unhappiness with the NSF not being allocated a larger budget with mandate to fund the future Engelbarts & Kays? Or why don’t they advocate the standing-up of a National Engineering Foundation, or a peacetime non-weapons version of the OSRD to fund the next Engelbart, as vociferously as they express discontent with Mr. Mansfield’s amendment?

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

#498

Post by lovich »

prewett wrote: post #446
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…

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.

To be pedantic, NVIDIA shares have a dividend yield

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

#499

Post by creer »

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…

> Jobs was always thinking Apple could do better with the money in R&D

> Jobs wasn’t one to listen to anybody, so it did not matter.

It did matter. Jobs was wrong. Apple indeed couldn't do better. It's not even that Apple couldn't produce R&D results worth all this money. Apple couldn't even manage to spend at that pace. Steve Jobs' projects could and did use a lot of money but nowhere near that pace. And the pace of earnings got better still after Jobs.

Jobs was right on another aspect which was that this pile of money provided Apple solid, safe ground. Apple was safe from any risk of a few years of bad earnings. That was very costly safety.

It took a different CEO to finally work to reverse the damage. That project has taken many years and (arguably) isn't finished yet. And that's in parallel to massive increases in R&D.

It doesn't do a lot of basic science - I expect. But it does or funds a lot of engineering and applied science. that's the point of the article, that in the up-to-recently US system, corporations even with lots of earnings didn't have to.

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

#500

Post by creer »

xixixao wrote: post #59
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…

Dumb maybe question: Why couldn’t the companies with excess profits just pay they employees more in salaries?

> couldn’t the companies with excess profits just pay they employees more

Would that improve productivity (for that company)? Do most people refuse to work for Apple because it doesn't pay enough? Is apple limited by lack of productivity? Is Apple limited by lack of R&D budget? Would Apple release on the world more, better stuff if it paid 10% more?

Then too, most US Apple employees own a lot of Apple shares - they do get paid more when Apple pays dividends, buys back, increases the share price (/ shrinks the number of shares - same thing). Even recent Apple employees who did buy/ get the shares they could really did very well! They are shareholders.

As it is, Apple has a large number of employees in the most expensive areas of the world. It's not exactly that it's desperately skimping on employee compensation.

My impression is that Apple, still now, has a hard time finding worthwhile things to do with its profit. It generates a lot of cash, uses everything it can manage, and releases the rest productively.

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