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well with capitalism the only viable option is to waste money until a project works... didn't bill gates already say something about it ? the revenues from IT

by jokoon 12y ago

well with capitalism the only viable option is to waste money until a project works... didn't bill gates already say something about it ? the revenues from IT project investments are so high compared to investment costs, that in the end you never lose money by seeing so many projects crash like that. Of course if the government would manage those things, it might be a little more efficient and might deliver more results... I guess that's how the silicon valley works... Freedom has the advantage of letting the market decide, but for innovation it's never really obvious... go and downvote my political comment

macspoofing 12y ago
>well with capitalism the only viable option is to waste money until a project works... What's the alternative? The economy is an incredibly complicated system. Any top-down model will fail. What we have right now (free-market base and government regulation) kinda works. Or at least, it works better than anything else we tried.
- jokoon 12y ago
  > What's the alternative? government research, like darpa.
  - macspoofing 12y ago
    Government-funded research is perfectly fine, and necessary even. Private market wouldn't send a man to the moon or build the LHC because it's just too expensive and not at all commercializable. Then again, government research can't match the rate of innovation of private industry, when it comes to products with an actual market need, across the millions of products in the industry (from cars, to smartphones, to web-apps, to blenders, to toothpaste). So you need both. A top-down approach to controlling all aspects of the economy, a la communism, has pretty much been shown to be a disaster. It has to be. How can you create a bureaucracy to track millions of products and expect to 'compete' with a bottom-up approach of free enterprise? Even conceptually, at best, you'll be behind. At worst, you destroy the economy.
    - jokoon 12y ago
      You sound like the classical nowadays ron paul libertarian. > How can you create a bureaucracy to track millions of products and expect to 'compete' with a bottom-up approach of free enterprise? Because real, ground breaking research is truly expensive. Making a new product is not research. Kickstarter has its flaws because it's often made of non-experts. Meanwhile, the IT field is mostly filled with codemonkeys making products, who will only end up doing "innovation" who can benefit them but not their competitors or the whole industry. The true innovators are entities like intel, nvidia, IBM, AMD, ARM, the IETF and IEEE who are able to create standards like USB, wifi or bluetooth. You won't see Kickstarter pushing new standard that would have a real impact on markets. I don't see kickstarter to help funding something like bittorrent, the raspberry pi, firefox or docker for example. Kickstarter is great to give a chance to broke, talented hackers so they can get some experience in the business, but I don't think I could expect anything else really meaningful. Everything is patents, and real research is gloomy. It's lego prototypes at best, against patents holders. That's why I think the capitalistic, patent holding investment model is doomed to waste money over and over until you might end up with some groundbreaking product. If a new product can threaten a company market, it will most surely land in a trash bin one way or another.
      - macspoofing 12y ago
        >The true innovators are entities like intel, nvidia, IBM, AMD, ARM, the IETF and IEEE who are able to create standards like USB, wifi or bluetooth. You mean all those private companies? I wasn't talking about Kickstarter. Kickstarter is a toy service for funding toy products. When I said a top-down vs bottom-up approach to the economy, I meant a single government-controlled bureaucracy vs. private enterprise. In this case it would be government vs. IBM, AMD, Intel, Microsoft, and every other private enterprise. I didn't mean Fortune 500 companies vs. startups.
        jokoon 12y ago
        Of course those companies will do the work, but the difference is in where the money comes from and on what research it's spent on. Was is the government, or did it come from private profits ? How much money private companies are willing to invest, and where do they really direct their research ? That's why the government's spending is a little more focused and objective because it won't be research that will increase profits of certain companies. You can be sure government research will benefit everyone. If apple invests a lot of money to have a unscratchable screen, it's not really smart research. In the same idea, intel doesn't seem to really improve its processor designs like it was able to increase frequency for so many years. That's why darpa, the DOD and NASA do more relevant research, because they know what direction to give it. The development of computers for example, started because the army was using it. Darpa released the internet protocols to the public. The DOD made the GPS possible. Today technology is much more complex than what it was 100 years ago, so even if the research is executed by private companies, you can't really expect private capitals to search for discoveries that might not be exclusive to them. Even patents can't always generate revenues because it's easy for china or russia or other countries to find out what discoveries were made, and find it back and sell it. That's why it's important to consider how research funds are spent, on what, for what expectations.

by jokoon 12y ago

macspoofing 12y ago

>well with capitalism the only viable option is to waste money until a project works... What's the alternative? The economy is an incredibly complicated system. Any top-down model will fail. What we have right now (free-market base and government regulation) kinda works. Or at least, it works better than anything else we tried.

jokoon 12y ago
> What's the alternative? government research, like darpa.
- macspoofing 12y ago
  Government-funded research is perfectly fine, and necessary even. Private market wouldn't send a man to the moon or build the LHC because it's just too expensive and not at all commercializable. Then again, government research can't match the rate of innovation of private industry, when it comes to products with an actual market need, across the millions of products in the industry (from cars, to smartphones, to web-apps, to blenders, to toothpaste). So you need both. A top-down approach to controlling all aspects of the economy, a la communism, has pretty much been shown to be a disaster. It has to be. How can you create a bureaucracy to track millions of products and expect to 'compete' with a bottom-up approach of free enterprise? Even conceptually, at best, you'll be behind. At worst, you destroy the economy.
  - jokoon 12y ago
    You sound like the classical nowadays ron paul libertarian. > How can you create a bureaucracy to track millions of products and expect to 'compete' with a bottom-up approach of free enterprise? Because real, ground breaking research is truly expensive. Making a new product is not research. Kickstarter has its flaws because it's often made of non-experts. Meanwhile, the IT field is mostly filled with codemonkeys making products, who will only end up doing "innovation" who can benefit them but not their competitors or the whole industry. The true innovators are entities like intel, nvidia, IBM, AMD, ARM, the IETF and IEEE who are able to create standards like USB, wifi or bluetooth. You won't see Kickstarter pushing new standard that would have a real impact on markets. I don't see kickstarter to help funding something like bittorrent, the raspberry pi, firefox or docker for example. Kickstarter is great to give a chance to broke, talented hackers so they can get some experience in the business, but I don't think I could expect anything else really meaningful. Everything is patents, and real research is gloomy. It's lego prototypes at best, against patents holders. That's why I think the capitalistic, patent holding investment model is doomed to waste money over and over until you might end up with some groundbreaking product. If a new product can threaten a company market, it will most surely land in a trash bin one way or another.
    - macspoofing 12y ago
      >The true innovators are entities like intel, nvidia, IBM, AMD, ARM, the IETF and IEEE who are able to create standards like USB, wifi or bluetooth. You mean all those private companies? I wasn't talking about Kickstarter. Kickstarter is a toy service for funding toy products. When I said a top-down vs bottom-up approach to the economy, I meant a single government-controlled bureaucracy vs. private enterprise. In this case it would be government vs. IBM, AMD, Intel, Microsoft, and every other private enterprise. I didn't mean Fortune 500 companies vs. startups.
      - jokoon 12y ago
        Of course those companies will do the work, but the difference is in where the money comes from and on what research it's spent on. Was is the government, or did it come from private profits ? How much money private companies are willing to invest, and where do they really direct their research ? That's why the government's spending is a little more focused and objective because it won't be research that will increase profits of certain companies. You can be sure government research will benefit everyone. If apple invests a lot of money to have a unscratchable screen, it's not really smart research. In the same idea, intel doesn't seem to really improve its processor designs like it was able to increase frequency for so many years. That's why darpa, the DOD and NASA do more relevant research, because they know what direction to give it. The development of computers for example, started because the army was using it. Darpa released the internet protocols to the public. The DOD made the GPS possible. Today technology is much more complex than what it was 100 years ago, so even if the research is executed by private companies, you can't really expect private capitals to search for discoveries that might not be exclusive to them. Even patents can't always generate revenues because it's easy for china or russia or other countries to find out what discoveries were made, and find it back and sell it. That's why it's important to consider how research funds are spent, on what, for what expectations.