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It’s almost become normal now that bureaucrats get to decide which social group to spend money on, or which region to renovate buildings in, but the arrogance o
by zpeti 6y ago
It’s almost become normal now that bureaucrats get to decide which social group to spend money on, or which region to renovate buildings in, but the arrogance of thinking you can spend your way to the most cutting edge of current technology is just the next level of bureaucratic arrogance.
- scotty79 6y agoThat's how we got to the current cutting edge. Research of most important technological inventions of the past century was funded by beaurocrats. Market is only good at figuring out how to make things cheaper and in volume. Both very important things. But true scientific breakthroughs that push the business over next decades happen on taxpayers bill as distributed by beaurocrats. It sucks a bit that it's this way but if you are profit driven, you can't gamble 140 billion of your own money in hopes of developing new tech.
- yvdriess 6y agoYep, this cannot be repeated enough. Government funding is how a lot of innovations happen, but it's not as visible as a private company bringing that innovation to market. To put in optimization terms, private companies are good at following the gradient. Government funding is necessary to escape the well and find new minimas.
- rapsey 6y agoGovernment funding is extremely wasteful and will generally go into the pockets of the well connected. The problem is this game has been played for a long time and it has diminishing returns. The players have had decades to get the exploitation down. Yes sillicon valley exists because of government money. But that was like 70 years ago. The world has changed and corruption is more severe. You will get no such bang for your government grant buck now.
- ClumsyPilot 6y agoRemind me how is that WeWork and Theranos investment going?
- nickpp 6y agoPlenty of startups crash and burn. It comes with the territory. What is your point?
- ClumsyPilot 6y agoNo-no, this is not examples of ordinary wastefullness and 'crash', these were outright fraud. The exact same thing the OP accuses government grants of perpetuating. Your post is a perfect example that with startups that's just accepted and glossed over.
- nickpp 6y agoWell maybe because in government grants waste and fraud are the rule, while in private startups they are the exception. And it is the investors problem when a startup fails, and they are aware of it. But with governments, it is OUR money squandered away by politicians and their friends.
- Apocryphon 6y ago> Well maybe because in government grants waste and fraud are the rule, while in private startups they are the exception. Are they really? What are the failure rates for both? > But with governments, it is OUR money squandered away by politicians and their friends. https://qz.com/1719019/wework-and-ubers-losses-may-be-subsidized-by-taxpayers/ https://qz.com/1719019/wework-and-ubers-losses-may-be-subsid... https://www.businessinsider.com/weworks-investors-include-pension-plans-like-union-unite-here-2019-8 https://www.businessinsider.com/weworks-investors-include-pe...
- andybak 6y ago> The world has changed and corruption is more severe Are you sure? This rather smacks of the "good old days" fallacy.
- throw0101a 6y ago> Government funding is how a lot of innovations happen, but it's not as visible as a private company bringing that innovation to market. A recent example of 'basic' research coming to fruition in a practical fashion (eventually): > "S glycoprotein signal peptide (extended leader sequence), which guides translocation of the nascent polypeptide chain into the endoplasmic reticulum" - part of the BioNTech/Pfizer vaccine. I don't ever want to hear anyone question fundamental science again. 1/2 > The level of control and understanding we now have over our biology came from literally millions of person-years spent working on things that at the time were obscure and "useless". And now? We can leverage all this into a 95% efficient vaccine _at the first try_. 2/2 * https://twitter.com/PowerDNS_Bert/status/1342159339767934978 https://twitter.com/PowerDNS_Bert/status/1342159339767934978 We have no way of knowing ahead of time what knowledge will be needed or "useful" in the future, so in some ways it is prudent to try to acquire as much knowledge of the natural world as possible and sort it out later.
- hungryhobo 6y agoI love this analogy!
- dahele 6y agoVery well put. Take AI as an example - foundational research in deep learning and reinforcement learning was first done in academia. Everyone knows the story of how long neural networks languished in the shadows, before its time. Even commercial research labs only really took note after the potential of these methods was discovered. Government funding is a good thing, but it’d be even better would be if we could harness the free market. One solution could be to equip research institutions with the means to capture value from IP that follows on from basic research.
- WanderPanda 6y agoI was thinking in a similar direction. What about an adaptive patent law? Where the duration of the protection in a particular area of interest can be set by e.g. a committee (with a strict ruleset and a big time constant of course). So when there is not much progress in a certain area (e.g. cancer or nuclear fusion) the patent protection is increased to incentivise investments. A problem with this approach are obviously the unknown unknowns, which might prevent this system from incentivising inventions like the transistor. So this approach can probably only help with problem driven areas and not in cases where the tech innovation gives rise to new problems/solutions
- krona 6y agoThen by your own definition, and the statement issued by the EU commission, this is a bad investment. I've worked for the large, sclerotic organisations that once put man on the moon. They will take your 100bn, crush it in to dust, and outsource the production of 1 million pages of documentation in 32 languages detailing the workings of something your never asked for. All in the blink of an eye.
- scotty79 6y agoYes. It's bad investment for the one who pays. Possibly great for everybody else and humanity in general. If efficiency is your thing go into business. The smaller the better. But if you want to have a chance at literal moonshot stay in your job and swallow inefficiencies that come from size, ample capital, and no expectation of monetary profit.
- andi999 6y agoWhy 32 languages? I thought there is only one language in the country that put a man on the moon (apart from the one other language)
- thu2111 6y agoResearch of most important technological inventions of the past century was funded by beaurocrats Important defined how? The car wasn't. The mobile phone wasn't. Computers in their post-WW2 form basically weren't, for the last half decade if not more it's all been private sector. Yes, DARPA did some very early work on packet switching networks and their work became widely adopted mostly because it was free: nice. But the moment these inventions started to matter, all R&D was taken over by the private sector. Governments spray so much money at things that I'm sure for almost any broad category of thing, you can find something they funded. But that's no evidence that stuff would never have been researched anyway, given the enormous and long term R&D efforts routinely mounted by non governmental entities. Look at AI: government funded institutions are constantly lagging behind. It sucks a bit that it's this way but if you are profit driven, you can't gamble 140 billion of your own money in hopes of developing new tech. Alphabet alone spends something like $21 billion on R&D per year. It doesn't take many years of that to reach $140 billion, and Alphabet is not the only company doing basic research. Having spent many years reading research papers coming out of both academia and industry, my conclusion has been that the best papers are always those with corporate funding - some academic teams receive partly corporate funding and these tend to be in the middle, pure corporate labs tend to do the most exciting work. The bureaucrat-distributed money often gets allocated for decades to intellectual dead ends nobody cares about, purely through inertia and lack of institutional incentives to maximise ROI.
- oblio 6y agoCompanies rarely do basic research. Yes, there are exceptions.
- nickpp 6y agoCompanies do plenty of research, just not basic, since they don’t need to: the government funds it instead. With money taxed from said companies, so...
- oblio 6y agoYeah, us peons don't pay any taxes and corporations don't evade them... All those taxes are collected from companies, look at the nice graph that proves it: https://www.lynalden.com/wp-content/uploads/corporate-tax-rate.png https://www.lynalden.com/wp-content/uploads/corporate-tax-ra... I'm being ironic, the average corporate tax rate went from 40% in 1960 to 10% today.
- zpeti 6y agoEven if I agreed with you, we are talking about the cutting edge of optimisation, of driving down costs, of doing things in volume. The exact things you also say a market is needed for. We aren't talking about a military research project like packet switching, or getting to the moon for the first time.
- bosswipe 6y agoChina beurocrats have been quite successful with this strategy.
- wongarsu 6y agoThe US recently spent their way into a cutting edge private space launch provider industry, and that seems like a roaring success. What makes you think it doesn't work?
- wwwwwwwww 6y agoNot true. SpaceX was almost completely privately invested and private risk. Once they had shown that they were serious, NASA awarded them contracts, because it was a great deal for NASA, compared to what they would pay otherwise. Its sad to see these kind of attempts to trash talk the SpaceX achievements.
- _ph_ 6y agoThis isn't trash talking the SpaceX achievements but stating the fact that government money played a huge role in developing a space industry which was the base for SpaceX becoming reality.
- MichaelApproved 6y agoIt’s so strange to read a comment like this one. They have the facts but completely miss how the facts connect with each other. Yes, Space X is a private company but they wouldn’t exist without the innovations that came out of NASA, a publicly funded organization.
- _ph_ 6y agoAnd of course the market. The supply contract for the ISS gave SpaceX the necessary money to grow, without public money no ISS, and as a consequence, no supply contract.
- paulryanrogers 6y agoHow much of that was really private? My guess is the NASA launch facilities, former employees, and potential for future contracts were a big part of the picture.
- jryle70 6y ago
- wwwwwwwww 6y agoIt's always been normal in the EU. There is little innovation here based on private risk taking, almost no venture capital, and huge barrieres for banks to lend money to innovators.
- djbebs 6y agoThe fact that its practically impossible to legally invest and create a business in the EU makes that almost inevitable
- ClumsyPilot 6y agoI have 2 legal entities in 2 EU countries, you are free to invest any time.
- nirv 6y agoEU haters much, eh? It takes 30 mins to 3 hours to establish[1] an LLC in EU (Estonia). [1] https://investinestonia.com/business-in-estonia/establishing-company/process https://investinestonia.com/business-in-estonia/establishing...
- usr1106 6y agoEU has very limited to no impact how businesses are created. Some member states are more flexible (Estonia) than others (probably a long list).
- jcfrei 6y agoJust like the NASA bureaucrats thought they could make a dent in rocketry - how foolish of them. Seriously though, some projects are just too expensive and risky for a privately funded venture. That's why public-private partnerships are created - it's always been like this and there doesn't appear to be an alternative.
- dagaci 6y agoJust like those EU CERN bureaucrats funding Tim Berners-Lee, what were they thinking
- bzb6 6y ago“bureaucratic arrogance” is a great name to define the EU. I’ll borrow it.