The rise and fall of the industrial R&D lab • Hacker News Board

Re: The rise and fall of the industrial R&D lab

#81

Post by sgt101 » Mon, Aug 31, 2020, 9:38 AM UTC

HarryHirsch wrote: post #47

sgt101 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ummh - Index funds definitely do not have guaranteed returns.

There's "too big to fail" and network effects, can't let Bank of America or Boeing go bankrupt and wipe out shareholders, especially pension funds are major shareholders. There is so much government backstop going around that returns are certain. Compare that to bringing a new pharmaceutical compound into the clinic. The time from discovery to approval is ten years, with a billion spent over the lifetime of the proje…

Crumbs - I've never heard anyone say "returns are certain" before everyone gets stripped, ever, in any financial setting.

Huge chunks of the indexes are now made up of a small handful of stocks, and as the stocks (FANNGS) go up so the indexes buy more, and guess what. They go up. And this will carry on, and on, until at some point a structural failure will occur. This may well be fraud, it may be government (not even the US government) intervention, it may be a supply chain failure or a market destruction. For example in November there may be a civil war in the USA... At that point the stocks will fall and if they fall disproportionately (which they will if the artificial pump that is floating them up turns off) then the indexes will unwind their positions... in fact they have to unwind. And this will glut the market, which will force more unwinding.

This is made worse by how the indexes actually track the market - you see, guess what! They (often) don't actually buy the stock! They trade synthetic securities over the movements of the stock with counterparties... and these counterparties never ever ever fail - they are solid players like investment banks, like Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, and Merrill Lynch and RBS. So - safe as houses.

Re: The rise and fall of the industrial R&D lab

#82

Post by thu2111 » Mon, Aug 31, 2020, 10:22 AM UTC

aspaceman wrote: post #68

thu2111 wrote: post #56

This is a good article but I'm not sure it completely nails it. Firstly, it's not clear the industrial R&D lab has actually fallen. The article starts to engage with this at the end but doesn't really do so properly. It's easy to find examples of firms doing large scale expensive R&D: - Many firms making big investments in AI - Self driving cars - SpaceX reusable rockets, plus all the other Musk firms - Advanced data…

> Advanced graphics R&D is driven primarily by video game firms Just going to speak from my experience here; this makes it very hard to get into computer graphics research. Any academic won't want you working on stuff that's "funded by industry" rather than funded by NSF and DOE. But you won't be able to get an industry research position unless you did graphics research during schooling. You can sometimes make a case…

Surely the issue there is academia? Some universities do publish papers in collaboration with industrial researchers, why do academics block that in graphics?

Re: The rise and fall of the industrial R&D lab

#83

Post by p_l » Mon, Aug 31, 2020, 11:23 AM UTC

opo wrote: post #78

p_l wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tax incentives are also responsible for the return of open office plan since 1960s, as depreciation rules regarding buildings and furniture changed. In addition, you have people believing that Milton Friedman's biggest lie is a law, namely that maximising shareholder value (which is often interpreted to include dividends) is fiduciary duty for the corporation. (It's not)

>...Milton Friedman's biggest lie is a law, You are misrepresenting what is called the Friedman doctrine. He didn't claim it was the law of the land. As the wikipedia article states: >...The Friedman doctrine, also called shareholder theory or stockholder theory, is a normative theory of business ethics advanced by economist Milton Friedman which holds that a firm's main responsibility is to its shareholders. This sh…

I'm not saying he claimed it law. I'm saying that his claim of it being fiduciary duty is taken as law by many, when it's not.

Re: The rise and fall of the industrial R&D lab

#84

Post by p_l » Mon, Aug 31, 2020, 11:24 AM UTC

tome wrote: post #9

p_l wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tax incentives are also responsible for the return of open office plan since 1960s, as depreciation rules regarding buildings and furniture changed. In addition, you have people believing that Milton Friedman's biggest lie is a law, namely that maximising shareholder value (which is often interpreted to include dividends) is fiduciary duty for the corporation. (It's not)

> Tax incentives are also responsible for the return of open office plan since 1960s, as depreciation rules regarding buildings and furniture changed. Strange. How does that work?

By making it so that furnishing a building is much cheaper than other aspects, so cost structure started to "disincentive" making smaller offices vs. plopping big halls.

Re: The rise and fall of the industrial R&D lab

#85

Post by opo » Mon, Aug 31, 2020, 4:38 PM UTC

p_l wrote: post #83

opo wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>...Milton Friedman's biggest lie is a law, You are misrepresenting what is called the Friedman doctrine. He didn't claim it was the law of the land. As the wikipedia article states: >...The Friedman doctrine, also called shareholder theory or stockholder theory, is a normative theory of business ethics advanced by economist Milton Friedman which holds that a firm's main responsibility is to its shareholders. This sh…

I'm not saying he claimed it law. I'm saying that his claim of it being fiduciary duty is taken as law by many, when it's not.

Thanks for the clarification. When you wrote "Milton Friedman's biggest lie" the implication to the reader is that Friedman is deliberately saying something is true when it is not. As the wikipedia article says, Friedman did not say it is recognized that maximizing returns to shareholders as a fiduciary duty simply saying he thought it should be. As a normative theory of business ethics, people can agree or disagree with the idea. (Just as in a different context, if someone argues prisons should focus on rehabilitation and someone disagrees, that doesn't mean the first person lied.)

Re: The rise and fall of the industrial R&D lab

#86

Post by aspaceman » Tue, Sep 01, 2020, 9:46 PM UTC

thu2111 wrote: post #82

aspaceman wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Advanced graphics R&D is driven primarily by video game firms Just going to speak from my experience here; this makes it very hard to get into computer graphics research. Any academic won't want you working on stuff that's "funded by industry" rather than funded by NSF and DOE. But you won't be able to get an industry research position unless you did graphics research during schooling. You can sometimes make a case…

Surely the issue there is academia? Some universities do publish papers in collaboration with industrial researchers, why do academics block that in graphics?

Industry blocks it. They want to keep all advances as IP and trade secrets, so they’d rather all research was done in house. Academics would love to collaborate, but they can’t if all the research is under-NDA and not publishable.