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Yeah if you go check almost any major scientific breakthrough of the past century it usually starts with "some guy was working in a corporate lab with an unlimi
by moffkalast 1y ago
Yeah if you go check almost any major scientific breakthrough of the past century it usually starts with "some guy was working in a corporate lab with an unlimited budget". We're stagnating as a species a lot more, but at least the shareholders got a payout for their hard work of doing literally nothing. Rent seeking at its worst.
- terminalshort 1y agoYes, let's not pay out the investors. That's how you get lots of funding.
- moffkalast 1y agoYou get funding by inventing and selling shit people need, not by pretending to be something people want. At least in a sane world it would be.
- kochikame 1y agoThere needs to be a balance
- mexicocitinluez 1y agolol hwut? Except for DNA, CRISPR, WWW, mRNA, the manhattan project, ARPA, GPS, etc
- anonymousDan 1y agoUmm, no. Maybe they have better PR departments than universities but this is clearly nonsense.
- mexicocitinluez 1y agoGod, the irony in saying "All major research is done by companies" while typing your message out to post ON THE INTERNET. LOL.
- philipallstar 1y agoBasically all of the internet is powered by software, standards, computers, networks and storage created by companies.
- fragmede 1y agoAh yes, companies like UCLA + MIT (TCP), USC/ISI (DNS, Email/RFC 822), CERN (HTTP, World Wide Web), UC Berkeley (Unix sockets / BSD networking stack). IETF (BGP,TLS), University of Delaware (NTP), MIT/CSAIL/W3C (HTML, CSS, Ethernet).
- philipallstar 1y agoDo you mind removing all the work done that was sponsored by companies before I proceed with a response on what's left?
- anthonylevine 1y agoWhat kind of person sees a claim like "No, not all major breakthroughs were done at private companies. Like the internet, for example" and immediately feels the need to tell them private companies are doing stuff? Are you not reading the reply chains before commenting? What motivates you to interject with information that is meaningless? The only thing I can think of is that you've voted for the people who are currently slashing the funding and have to continuously try to convince yourself it's okay.
- philipallstar 1y agoLots of the internet was and is powered by research from private companies. The internet is not particularly public sector.
- mexicocitinluez 1y agoOP said "almost any major scientific breakthrough of the past century" was done at private companies. Which is objectively not true. They transmitted that message using technology that was created by the government. That's ironic. Your reply > Basically all of the internet is powered by software, standards, computers, networks and storage created by companies. Is meaningless. It's someone jumping out of the woodwork to white knight the private sector. It's weird. It doesn't change what I said or what OP said. It doesn't make it less ironic to say "all major things were done by private companies" using a technology that wasn't invented by a private company. It's irrelevant.
- andrewlgood 1y agoSilly argument. Everything in gravitational physics goes back to Newton? Who cares about Convex Optimization if you do not undertand gravity? Math goes back to Euclid and the Greeks? Mankind has consistently built upon existing knowledge. "If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants. (Newton)" IMHO, what we are seeing is the US was generating 50% of the world's GDP at the end of World War II. In that era it could afford to many non-economical things - Marshall Plan, funding research at universities, etc. The US is no longer the dominant economic engine. It actually has to prioritize its spending. Money spent on research is money not spent on food stamps, housing the homeless, defense. What is never mentioned in these discussions is how much money has been spent on research that did nothing. Advanced nothing. When that is factored in, what is the ROI of university-based research?
- Ar-Curunir 1y agoOh no! I wonder what the US could have achieved if instead of spending 10s of billions of dollars per year, it could instead have used those to fund more trillion-dollar wars!!
- mainecoder 1y agothis is silly money spent on research is always going to be better spent than the numerous misuse of tax payer dollars spent. ICE has a bigger budget than NASA and NSF combined consider this how little is science being valued. We have gained tremendously from NSF and NASA and now we are seeing that only SpaceX and maybe Rocketlab could hold a candle to China's CNSA and their private industry which is quickly going to be catching up because they have the ability to produce it in scale.