Universities also privatize science through patents and IP. Research publications privatize research by bundling and charging exorbitant fees for journals and proceedings. Our generation doesn't have a NASA or Bell Labs. The closest thing to those outfits are vanity projects from billionaires... SpaceX, etc.
The only reason we have a shot at affordable commercial spaceflight, as well as an eventual affordable journey to Mars, is because of that vanity project. If it was left up to the public sector alone, I don't think we'll be able to go to Mars in 20 or 30 years.
But this hasn't really changed. Even in NASA's hey day space missions weren't government-only projects - The space capsules and Saturn V were built by contracted private firms like Lockheed Martin, Boeing, North American Aviation. Nothing really has changed in that regard - NASA is still contracting private companies, only now we have an American company, SpaceX, that can not only build a rocket, but design and launch one as well.
Ultimately having innovators like SpaceX who can contract out to more than just the American government will drive the cost of spaceflight down. This can only be a good thing, in my book.
Musk is doing the same thing with electric cars. As far as I can tell the only way we're going to get highly reliable, affordable, mainstream electric vehicle in the next ten years is because of his vanity project, Tesla.
I mean, I'm as skeptical as anyone about pinning the future hopes of humanity on a few extremely rich people. But it's also comforting that incredibly wealthy people like Elon Musk are preoccupied with how to benefit humanity, and not just themselves.
They are engineering projects, rather than something that discovers something new, per se. Even so, extending our capability to explore space allow us to do more scientific research, rather than less of it. With the advent of electric vechicle, the money that went to buying gas and doing maintenance can be better spent on something else.
Yeah, I think SpaceX's main win is that they're taking tech that has existed in various forms for decades, and updating/optimizing it. That's not quite the same as aerospace research, but it's useful. Of course, the research is also needed, or there would be no existing designs and prototypes to update/optimize, which is a big part of why they can do their work more cheaply.
Lots of research projects in the past were underwritten by rich people for the lulz, or by newspapers in exchange for exclusive stories to sell.
I've often wondered why big corporations, as marketing, don't finance something like launching another Hubble space telescope. The corporate logo would go on the side, the corporation could host a conference to collect and analyze the results, it would be fantastic PR (instead of those silly commercials and celebrity endorsements they spend so much money on).
I've often wondered why big corporations, as marketing, don't finance something like launching another Hubble space telescope.
It's because flagship spacecraft and things like the LHC are projects that require a budget of several billions and a 25-year commitment. This kind of budget is within reach only of a wealthy nation with stable finances and a stable political system.
I think the budget explanation also explains the pharmco crisis. It takes about a billion and a decade to bring a drug to market, and that's why you see statins, antidepressants and antidiabetics in the pipeline. Meanwhile, antibiotic resistances are going to be a public health crisis, and Chagas disease, sleeping sickness and malaria are major killers in the developing world. A new model is needed here; we don't need to try coroprate sponsorship in space when it's already failing on Earth.
> This kind of budget is within reach only of a wealthy nation with stable finances and a stable political system.
The LHC, yes, various probes, no. I read that the beachball Mars lander was $250m. Another Hubble could be built for far less than the original, because it is a known design.
These are well within the abilities of many billionaires and their corporations.
The beachball lander? That must be Mars Pathfinder. Pathfinder was just a technology demonstrator for the Spirit and Opportunity rovers, and the science return was rather thin - about a dozen spectrographic analyses of rocks, half a year's worth of weather data, and a few hundred pretty pictures.
The real mission was Spirit and Opportunity, and those two are a giant success. With USD 900 million the price tag is four times higher, and this is getting out of reach of even the ultrawealthy.
Really? Public money got us to the moon in 10 years but couldn't get us to mars in 30? I think it is more about a lack of will than a lack of resources. Driving down costs isn't an issue. Imagine if we had the will to go to mars and spent the one trillion dollars we spent to go to Iraq on a mars project instead.
Getting to Mars is an order of magnitude more difficult than a quick jaunt to the moon, so it's really shouldn't be surprising we haven't gone. Not least because there isn't any reason to go. Hell, there isn't any reason to go to the moon, which is why we haven't bothered to return for forty years.
In fact, I would argue the moon landings were a mistake, in that we spent a whole lot of money building a system that did one useless but amazing thing instead of spending less money figuring out how to give ourselves the capability to do lots of useful and amazing things at a reasonable cost.
If Elon Musk wants to pay for a Mars trip I'll cheer him on, but nobody's ever been able to articulate a compelling reason for it. A trillion dollars is a lot of money, and I'd rather see it go toward tax cuts or paying down the national debt.
Driving down costs is not only an issue, it's the primary issue. If we have to pay $10k per kg to get stuff into LEO none of the activities that would support a permanent presence in space are worth doing.
Well yes, if we stopped doing stupid things than we might be able to bear the cost of the trip. If we stopped doing stupid things...
But it's also a lack of will because we don't have a rival as formidable as Russia threatening to beat us to the punch. Well, at least not at the moment. Russia looks more and more like it has the desire to play the role again - the desire, but probably not the ability. And if that's true, there's always China. In fact I wouldn't be totally surprised if China's increasing interest in space were the thing that finally got Americans to Mars.
But failing that, what's going to get us to commit the resources to a risky mission like travelling to Mars? A trip whose only reward is first saying we've been there, and only down the road a few decades the ability to colonize it and mine its natural resources?
The only thing more powerful in the nation's mind than projecting military power is money...and maybe that will be enough to get us there....
>The only reason we have a shot at affordable commercial spaceflight, as well as an eventual affordable journey to Mars, is because of that vanity project.
I'm not sure why you're calling SpaceX a vanity project. The company is already profitable, and if things play out like Musk is planning the company stands to make a lot of money. That's not a vanity project; that's a business.
Now, a Mars shot would be a vanity project if it were self-financed. But I doubt it will happen if taxpayers aren't willing to pay for it.
I wonder about this. Is Tesla driving battery technology much (which is really sort of the key for EVs), or are they just putting themselves in a good position for when they get good enough?
I realize that they are creating demand for millions and millions of cells, but cell phones, tablets and laptops have been doing that for a decade now.
I think that they are trying to find the lowest possible cost for current technology. Part of this is building their own factory, which is supposed to cut costs by, I've read, 30%. Chipping off a percent here, and a percent there, and making the process as efficient as possible could make things quite affordable quite quickly.
I feel conflicted, at one hand you're complimenting Elon Musk's achievements by comparing SpaceX to NASA and Bell Labs, on the other, you are calling it a vanity project. Which I am sure Musk would not agree with.
Donating money and having your name on a University building, that might be vanity, but more importantly charity. Let's not put mundane judgements on such niceties.
But investing in and aiding in the realization of an operation that comes close to bankrupting and ruining you, that's not vanity, that's a man achieving his dreams and life goals. I'm sure he's flattered and proud of being compared to Iron Man, but I don't think "be likened to Iron Man" is as high on his bucket list as "change the world for the better" is.
Maybe on paper, but in reality the old Bell system was a monopoly, profited more than a non-monopoly would, and on top of that got vast subsidies from the government. I wouldn't be surprised if the money spent for Apolo project was in the same ballpark as the Ma Bell subsidies.
> A look at major initiatives suggests that the philanthropists’ war on disease risks widening that gap, as a number of the campaigns, driven by personal adversity, target illnesses that predominantly afflict white people — like cystic fibrosis, melanoma and ovarian cancer.
The #1, #2 richest Americans have specifically targeted funding research for diseases that affect only the poor. I think this is a more valid criticism of the NIH rather than philanthropists.
... diseases that affect the poor in other countries. As an organization funded by US tax dollars, NIH is primarily responsible for advancing the health of Americans. It's not an international charity.
Unfortunately, the poor in America are more affected by 'lifestyle diseases' (smoking and obesity related illnesses, for instance), which may be more difficult to cure as they need to be addressed from a social angle, not just a medical one.
Well according to some graphs I found on Google, malaria mortality rates have reduced significantly in the past few decades [1], as have AIDS death rates [2]. Diabetes rates and mortality have however been continuously increasing.
> American science, long a source of national power and pride, is increasingly becoming a private enterprise.
Oh how quickly journalists forget the past. The only reason we ever became a scientific superpower in the first place is because of one man, John D. Rockefeller.
I don't know why you would employ a science adviser who thinks that physics isn't "sexy." It's damn sexy. And anyone who really understands even a small amount of physics will think that physics is "sexy."
Think about what these uber-rich entrepreneurs would find sexy. Curing cancer, a condom people actually want to use, extending human life, saving the world from meteor impacts, bringing mammoths back, flying to space... It's all near-future, commercializable stuff. Next, go read some article titles/abstracts under quant-ph on arxiv and think about how many would of those would really grab these rich dudes by their eyeballs and make them drop a few million.
A huge portion of physics is driven by basic curiosity, has no commercial applications in the near future, and is so esoteric that even other physicists have to work very hard just to understand what's going on. Much of this stuff will wind up being dead-ends, but some of it is the foundation the future will be built on top of. No trained physicist currently alive can predict what will change the world and what won't. Why should we let people whose only qualification is money try to decide what's important?
Or the Nobel Prize before that, funded based on inventions in explosives (used for mining, construction, and armament), and to a lesser extent through Alfred's father's and brothers innovations in plywood, the torpedo, oil refining and international finance / business.
'Why should we let people whose only qualification is money try to decide what's important?'. Let! Gosh, lovely implications. What constraints do you have in mind to fetter the lawful activities of very rich people? Who is the 'we' and how will you define 'important'? But it's the 'let' that worries me.
What constraints? Adequate public funding for fundamental science so that brilliant minds and productive labs can pursue their chosen field of inquiry rather than abandoning it to chase grant money reserved for sexier topics.
Bill Press (the quoted adviser) is an outstanding physicist -- I believe he was the youngest physicist ever tenured at Harvard. I think the quote was out of context. He wasn't saying he doesn't like physics, he was saying it can be hard to sell as a political priority.
That makes a lot of sense. I read that article too quickly and the quote sounded weird when I read it. But it would make perfect sense if he were talking about what he thinks other people think of physics.
The more philanthropy or private investment we can attract to scientific innovation, the better.
The public gets the benefit of inventions that wouldn't have existed without this investment (assuming they're marketed in the short term, and in the long term the patents eventually fall into the public domain).
Or alternatively, if billionaires start doing more research, this could be offset by cutting, or slowing the growth of, taxpayer-funded research spending. And give the money back to taxpayers in the form of tax cuts, deferred tax hikes, or different services.
Also, there's less of the waste and uncertainty associated with government spending (think about how many articles you see on long-running science experiments disrupted by Washington's latest budget spasm; if Gates has dumped $100 million into AIDS research and needs $100 million more to produce a vaccine, he's probably going to follow through).
And if things go awry the fallout's not as bad (if Solyndra had happened to some billionaire spending his own money, I don't think anyone would have been outraged).
I don't expect the NYT to have a multi-century sense of historical perspective, but is a multi-decade sense of perspective too much to ask? The present government-funded model of science was created by Vannevar Bush less than seventy years ago—"in the lives of those now living."
From the article: “They target polio and go after it until it’s done — no one else can do that,” he said, referring to the global drive to eradicate the disease. “In effect, they have the power to lead where the market and the political will are insufficient.”
This is actively not true. The eradication of small pox was an international, government-led effort. That we have since abdicated that ability doesn't mean we "can't", just that we have chosen not to.
"Because of science - not religion or politics - even people like you and me can have possessions that only a hundred years ago kings would have gone to war to own. Scientific method should not be take lightly.
The walls of the ivory tower of science collapsed when bureaucrats realized that there were jobs to be had and money to be made in the administration and promotion of science. Governments began making big investments just prior to World War II...
Science was going to determine the balance of power in the postwar world. Governments went into the science business big time.
Scientists became administrators of programs that had a mission. Probably the most important scientific development of the twentieth century is that economics replaced curiosity as the driving force behind research...
James Buchanan noted thirty years ago - and he is still correct - that as a rule, there is no vested interest in seeing a fair evaluation of a public scientific issue. Very little experimental verification has been done to support important societal issues in the closing years of this century...
People believe these things...because they have faith."
-From Kary Mullis, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry winner (and the genius inventor of PCR) in an excellent essay in his book "Dancing Naked in the Mind Field".
Seems like the US response to the EU flagship research and innovation programme, "Horizon 2020", which aims to provide 80 BN € (110 BN $) for groundbreaking research withing the next 7 years. One of the "flagship projects" selected for this programme is the "Human Brain Project", which seems similar to what Obama calls “the next great American project: a $100 million initiative to probe the mysteries of the human brain.". Although he should probably add a few digits to that number if he really means what he says, because I think 100 M$ will hardly be enough to unravel the mysteries of the brain.
In any case, as a scientist that's exactly the kind of competition I want to see more of!
here's an anecdote from a german communication network professor i was sitting at lunch with.
as comparison, the pay for a professor here is 50k a year, but can be more. you heard that right, that's what a bsc in low pay southern states gets.
he said the following thing which made me rethink the whole thing a little:
"conversely i get to research anything i want to, and i don't have to worry about pleasing business with my research results"
germany though has a big problem of americanization like so many other countries.
i've heard of so many research in the us getting shut down, or the researchers discredited, because they pissed off the wrong company funding the department they were working for.
it's a double edged sword.
EDIT: it's funny this got downvoted. i was personally involved in evaluating software that was written for the DHS by a huge contractor SAIC. they paid 20+ million for that piece of junk, and my supervisor was scared of passing on the assessment, because they were scared we would lose opportunities on further grants(they were impressed by the assessment, apparently we were the only ones that did such a thorough assessment).
i never said professors in germany don't have to get research money or grants, but they are way less dependent on what outcome the industry dictates.
Does it really work that way? My impression was that professors are constantly trying to raise money from the government. Instead of proving industry value, they have to convince bureaucrats that their ideas are worth pursuing. I think strong cases have been made that that's not the optimal way of allocating money for scientific research. For example: http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2011/05/posi... (government funding is not good in pursuing wild ideas)
german academics get a lot of money from industry too. but the numbers are absolutely not comparable to the numbers in the us.
this is not always the case as you can see from the nepomuk thing[1]
but to further strengthen your point, in europe program code or implementation is not considered research. european scientific funding is reserved for research, so a lot of the research you see will never be turned into viable products. that notion also exists in german universities. universities of applied sciences see this differently, but people sometimes joke that these are not real universities.
a lot of what was turned into money is actually european inventions. most americans, don't even know that europe has a lead in neuroscience research(that includes countries like spain). or at least used to, most americans also don't know how great the cs dpt of the tu wien(vienna) is for example.
In fact, the base salary of a full University professor (so-called W3 group) is 5672,13 € per month (http://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Besoldungsordnung_W), so in total (with extra 13th salary) 73737 € / year, hence about 101k$ / year. This excludes extra pay for fulfilling faculty functions etc. which can easily double that amount. Take in addition the generous retirement money, the fact that they are state functionaries and thus cannot be fired and do not pay any social security taxes (usually about 15 % of your salary) makes this look pretty good to me. Btw the salaries of older professors (which are still payed according to the old C standard from before 2005) is even higher. Of course there are so-called "Fachhochschulprofessoren" that earn less than this, but since they usually have strong ties with industry and focus on applied research they profit from other income streams.
The cause of man's suffering is: "this belongs to me" (Anthony De Mello)
Science and knowledge belongs to everybody and to no one, regardless of where you are from. Nationalism was pretty fancy and efficient a long time ago, if I see myself as more "American" or "French", than "human", humanity is screwed.
> What distinguishes American science, and why is this distinction important?
this isn't one of the article's complaints, but one distinguishing characteristics of american science funding -- indeed, of the u.s. govt's entire budget -- is disproportionate spending on the military. see the chart at
anyway, i agree with most of the other comments as i don't see anything seriously wrong with private investment in science. perhaps the fact that these are individuals rather than committees is what the author finds most loathsome, but my perspective is probably biased b/c the first thing that came to mind on reading the title was the allen institute for brain science, that's the first example in the article, and i think it's doing interesting and important research.
i absolutely hate paywalled sites and refuse to read the articles.
that said, this is entirely unsurprising since scientific and mathematics research were almost entirely patronized fields until the rise of the modern university. this is very similar to computing in that first monolithic centralized computing was the path, then it was the PC, then it was the cloud, now it's moving back to a decentralized network. these things are bound to yo-yo and academic research is no different than most human-designed processes.
Never had a problem. I use a plugin for auto deleting regular cookies and evercookie requires javascript, which I have disabled by default.
That being said, I probably wouldn't read more than 20 articles a month on the NYTimes either - just the occasional one posted to HN that catches my interest.
I may be wrong, but the way I understand it he couldn't do that even if he wanted to due to congress having ultimate authority to approve/disapprove spending?
It seems to have gone more in the other direction. At least in CS, if you want big funding nowadays you need to do DARPA research, because their budget has fared better. And DARPA research has gotten more micromanaged; gone are the days where they'd hand out large block grants to promote general American excellence in areas of "national importance". Nowadays they partner you with effectively a professional "minder" (called an "integrator") from a contractor like Lockheed or BBN, whose job is to make sure your research stays on the DARPA agenda and is going to deliver what they want.
Partly because I think we no longer feel much of a need to prove we're better in science/tech than a major rival, which was once the Soviets, so general science/tech advancement is a harder sell.
> Partly because I think we no longer feel much of a need to prove we're better in science/tech than a major rival, which was once the Soviets, so general science/tech advancement is a harder sell.
I truly, truly hate articles like this. The constant tone of judgement and scepticism. The underlying assumption that the rich don't deserve to spend their money however they want. Why can't you just celebrate success and encourage people to emulate the successful? Why can't you just say thank you that so many wealthy people choose to turn their fortunes towards so many philanthropic causes? Why do you have to have so much bile and resentment towards individuals choosing freely and harming no one?
Whatever happened to America being the land of the free? When did it turn into the land of cutting down tall poppies?
> The underlying assumption that the rich don't deserve to spend their money however they want. Why can't you just celebrate success and encourage people to emulate the successful?
Well let us look at these rich people, on the Forbes 400 richest list. So people can celebrate success and encourage people to emulate the successful.
#1 Bill Gates - had a million dollar trust fund from his bank president grandfather, mother on United Way board with president of IBM
#2 Warren Buffett - father was a congressman, grandparents owned a chain of stores in Nebraska
#3 Larry Ellison - after a middle class upbringing, he was inspired by a 1970 CACM article and proceeded to hit several home runs over the the next few decades
#4 Charles Koch - inherited an oil company
#5 David Koch - inherited an oil company
#6 Christy Walton - inherited Wal-Mart
#7 Jim Walton - inherited Wal-Mart
...and the rest of the Wal-Mart heirs...
Aside from Larry Ellison, all of these people were to the manor born. Telling people to "emulate their success" is ludicrous. Plenty of people are paid good money to tell us why we should "celebrate success" for these people, and should try to "emulate the successful". Anyone who would actually believe these people's press clippings is clearly a fool. They have the same kind of "success" the czar in Russia had - they were born into it.
He worked very hard, it just came natural to him. If he was lower-class he would have never had access to early computers and it would be much less likely that he would have been successful at all.
He was a natural leader, but you can't just start out as a CEO unless you have a product or service to offer. Bill Gates couldn't have had time to build his software if he had to work daily to put himself through school (to have access to the computer).
Starting with a million dollars is no different than starting with 100 million, it all depends on how good the person is at spotting opportunity, learning from mistakes, and manipulating (not in a bad way) people to help you build your empire.
>He worked very hard, it just came natural to him. If he was lower-class he would have never had access to early computers and it would be much less likely that he would have been successful at all.
At the time you didn't have to be rich to be a computer enthusiast. Silicon Valley was full of average Joes who had breadboarded up a simple computer but couldn't figure out what to do with it. Gates may have had more trouble if his family was at the very bottom end of the income spectrum, but computer geekery was a middle class thing. Literally millions of people could have done the same.
>He was a natural leader, but you can't just start out as a CEO unless you have a product or service to offer.
That's just nonsense. Anybody can be a CEO - you just need to start a corporation. When Gates and Allen started Microsoft it was just the two of them. There was no product either. This is all on the wiki page, by the way.
>Bill Gates couldn't have had time to build his software if he had to work daily to put himself through school (to have access to the computer).
That might be true except that he dropped out of school as soon as the company was founded.
>Starting with a million dollars is no different than starting with 100 million, it all depends on how good the person is at spotting opportunity, learning from mistakes, and manipulating (not in a bad way) people to help you build your empire.
You don't need a million dollars to start a company, and lots of now-powerful companies were started with far less. Apple, for instance. If Gates was lucky it was because he came of age in a time where computers were changing so fast there were more opportunities for small, agile companies. But that was true of his entire generation.
Microsoft was bootstrapped from an initial investment of about $5000, as I recall. Hardly uberwealth, and no VC.
I worked for a contemporary of Microsoft at the time. We had better technology, knew microcomputers upside down, had better everything, except had no vision. And that company was booted from nothing.
> They have the same kind of "success" the czar in Russia had - they were born into it.
Oh brother. Most of these people started out in life ahead of the average person, sure. But you know what, they all took what they started with in life and worked their asses off to build it into something even greater. I'm sure for every person on this list there's ten people who started with a silver spoon in their mouth, and through sloth and weakness blew everything. Some probably wound up on the streets.
And have you looked into the family histories of these successful people? How many of these families started off with members who had nothing, who worked hard and made it? Does it invalidate their original success that they were smart enough to build a family culture which preserved and built upon success? Oh, I suppose that's another thing we shouldn't bother trying to emulate.
But hey, let's not bother trying to build a representative sample base for our snide claims eh?
Bill Gates may have come from privilege, but then he built on that - he brought computing to the world, introduced untold economic efficiencies to every single industry on earth, and produced more economic growth arguably than any other single individual in the last century. Buffett again worked hard, made smart bets, took risks, and it paid off. Ellison you admit invalidates your hypothesis. Koch I'm not familiary with. The Waltons have obviously been working diligently because last I heard Walmart was a powerhouse that millions of Americans choose of their own free will to shop at every day.
Comparing Bill Gates and the others on this list to a blatantly parasitic ruling class extracting resources from the toil of slaves through a monopoly on state violence is just plain, unforgivable idiocy.
I would expect better from the audience of a website devoted to the idea that anyone who has a valuable idea and works hard can make something of themselves.
Their success is on the backs of people who do the real work. They are also on the backs of the American people who contribute significant amount of money through government sponsorship. The tech we use today is based on government investment that the private industry coudn't stomach.
So no, I do not celebrate their success and I will judge them sharply for profiting so handsomely from public investment.
And don't give me crap about how we benefit too. If our economy was working as a free market that the same billionaires feel it should, they coudn't be billionaires.
What kind of drivel is that? If you create a product/service which nobody else can duplicate and the demand for it is there, you are going to make a profit. That's exactly how a "real" free market functions.
why wouldn't someone be able to duplicate? You keep things secret? Government protects you via patents and copyright? I mean econ 101 is that markets bring profits towards zero. A perfect market with perfect information means zero profit. Any market that tends towards "perfection" would therefore be anathema to any capitalist.
In other words, fuck man, capitalists hate markets. They would prefer that you don't have a choice but to buy from them.
Keeping secrets is only one option. Another is the cost to duplicate. Your myopic understanding of manufacturing processes likely cannot be alleviated in the comments section here, but just consider that the cost to build certain chip fab plants is up in the billions and takes years to build. Once the first entity builds that, it is guaranteed a profit for at least the number of years it takes to build a duplicate manufacturing process. This is true under any definition of a real free market, making your assertion false.
>In other words, fuck man, capitalists hate markets.
Nope, you mean incumbents hate markets. I think you need to revisit the definition of a capitalist. A real capitalist dreams of when they can come in with a better price/service/product and unseat the incumbents.
Profits would only go to zero if everybody was equally talented, equally educated, equally industrious, and equally lucky. Reality, of course, is quite different.
> The tech we use today is based on government investment that the private industry coudn't stomach.
Wasn't that, in at least part, the reason why government felt the investment was worth making? To fund (expensive) basic research that can then be taken to drive and create enterprise?
Notice we are talking about the government as some "other" instead of what it should be, made of you and me. Lets rephrase what you said with that in mind.
"Wasn't that, in at least part, the reason why WE felt the investment was worth making? To fund (expensive) basic research that can then be taken to drive and create enterprise?"
and let me finish it off for you.
"that can then be taken to drive and create enterprise so that we can pay out the ass for everything we buy so that a couple of snakes can have billions."
The reality is the government made that decision behind our backs. Nobody asked you and me. They made that decision to pad the pockets of their friends. They are just administrators after all.
How much of the funding of Intel/Amd/ARM, who probably built the cpu you're using to access this side, came from the government? How much of the funding of this site itself, and of other sites you may use on a daily basis such as Google and Facebook, came from the government? How much of the funding for the GPU that's rendering this site came from the government? How are you not benefiting from all these things?
Long term profit has no space in models of a _perfectly competitive_ market, a theoretical concept used in the exploration of various economic ideas. The "free"ness of a market doesn't necessarily imply anything about the potential for profit within that market.
I mean, are you familiar with the history of google and facebook? Pagerank was paid for by a government grant. Why aren't the profits of google being distributed into our pockets? Facebook had early investment from CIA connected sources. SpaceX is almost all funded by NASA.
I mean look at the technologies they built. Largest people tracker (Google) and largest communication graph (Facebook). Look at the current web technologies and the massive centralization of technology.
Let the government turn off the money spigot, and silicon valley will be bankrupt in a week.
No, I'm not familiar with the history of Google and Facebook, hence why I was asking for data regarding what proportion of their business was funded by government money. As in, a percentage.
>Their success is on the backs of people who do the real work.
Oh really? And when was the last time you attempted to do what these people do? Easy to judge sitting from an armchair, isn't it?
While you're at it, why don't you stop using any of the products that these people create? And stop using any of the products created by people using their products? Why don't you stop patronising for instance any business that uses Microsoft or Oracle software? Let's see how much choice that leaves you.
>They are also on the backs of the American people who contribute significant amount of money through government sponsorship.
The American government decided to use public resources to fund research without attempting to monopolise the application of results. If you don't like the fact that people have created successful businesses and products with this, you should blame the government, not the people who took risks and brought the applications to market. You don't get to hold out your hand and ask for something back when you gave it away for free in the first place.
>I will judge them sharply for profiting so handsomely from public investment.
Perhaps you should be judged too. After all, aren't you this very moment enjoying the internet? Isn't your enjoyment of it, its enrichment of your life (even potentially your dependence on it for your economic niche) a profit of your own? And how much have you decided to donate to the government as compensation for this profit from your use of the fruits of public research funding?
>Profit has no space in "real" free markets.
I suggest you educate yourself in basic economics before making such stupid claims.
I am too nice to do what those people do. I am too nice to fire anyone, to stab my partner in the back. To steal millions from my employees. To lie to investors.
I am just too honest damned. and just too damn nice to attempt to do what these people do.
Remember the Simpsons episode with Bill Gates where he says "I didn't get rich by writing checks!"
And why the hell are you defending those people? Do you wish to be one of those one day? What is in it for you to spend time with a dope like me sniffing their shit?
"tall poppies"? Our system allowed these Poppies the to
flourish. These tall Poppies were never subject to shakedowns, or out right theft of their usually inherited
monies. Most never served their country. They lived
safe privileged lives. They didn't need to worry about
much; other than making money. If we don't start closing
the inequity gap, I wonder just how long this "cake walk"
for the wealthy will last. I hope we never become, well
like Mexico, where the wealthy need to be constantly on
alert for kidnapping, or getting shot? As to letting the
tall poppies do the right thing with there benevolent gifts; I believe they need some guidance. Bill Gates
comes to mind. Spending millions on expensive genetically
modified seeds--only to see one crop for some poor tribe
in Africa. I do admire he brought up the condom issue
though. I don't have any concrete answers, but "only
in America" could a lot of these rich dudes make their fortunes. What really irks me is is when they take advantage of all the thing most of us take for granted(like
an honest judicial system, right down to the cops on the streets), and then store their money offshore--all because
they want a few more shekels. And then when they get in
trouble they proudly proclaim,"I am an American.! I have
rights".
Did you read the article, or just assume that it says what you hate?
The article is about the balance of funding -- how much of it is private, and how much of it is public. Nobody is claiming that rich people shouldn't be allowed to fund vanity science projects.
I read the whole article thanks. It was stupid and judgemental - eg criticising rich people for only supporting research into rich white people disease - woops, never mind Bill Gates!
"Balance of funding" is a cute euphemism though for "let's punish rich people for exercising their free choice, steal more of their money and give it to bureaucrats and congressmen in the White House to squabble over and divert into kickbacks for districts and lobbyists." Because everyone knows the government's track record of wise use of funds is so fantastic.
