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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 expensiv

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.
    - macspoofing 12y ago
      >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 just wrong and it hurts ... Intel is improving their design every year. They extract much more efficiency per CPU cycle, per Watt than we have ever before. It turns out there are fundamental physical limits to what we can do with Silicon and we are hitting them now, after near 40 years of exponential growth driven largely by private industry. Are you purposely so ideological blind that you aren't even willing to grant that??! You're arguing for either-or and I'm saying you need both. There are areas where, the government laid the ground work and private industry took and ran with it. The government was never going to create a smartphone. Smartphones are a product of years of iteration, coupled with runs of hundreds of millions of units. >That's why darpa, the DOD and NASA do more relevant research, because they know what direction to give it. No, they don't. They didn't know that people would have wanted to use computers at home or in their pocket. They didn't know you could miniaturize transistors to the extent that quantum effects would be a problem. They didn't know, and they didn't care. I honestly don't know what you're arguing. You seem to argue for some form of traditional Communism in place of the free market system with now (with government regulation). We generally know how that goes. Focused government research will create the impressive Soviet space program and leave little room for TVs, microwaves and smartphones, and spread misery and massive waste around.

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.
  - macspoofing 12y ago
    >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 just wrong and it hurts ... Intel is improving their design every year. They extract much more efficiency per CPU cycle, per Watt than we have ever before. It turns out there are fundamental physical limits to what we can do with Silicon and we are hitting them now, after near 40 years of exponential growth driven largely by private industry. Are you purposely so ideological blind that you aren't even willing to grant that??! You're arguing for either-or and I'm saying you need both. There are areas where, the government laid the ground work and private industry took and ran with it. The government was never going to create a smartphone. Smartphones are a product of years of iteration, coupled with runs of hundreds of millions of units. >That's why darpa, the DOD and NASA do more relevant research, because they know what direction to give it. No, they don't. They didn't know that people would have wanted to use computers at home or in their pocket. They didn't know you could miniaturize transistors to the extent that quantum effects would be a problem. They didn't know, and they didn't care. I honestly don't know what you're arguing. You seem to argue for some form of traditional Communism in place of the free market system with now (with government regulation). We generally know how that goes. Focused government research will create the impressive Soviet space program and leave little room for TVs, microwaves and smartphones, and spread misery and massive waste around.