Just musing don't be angry with me, but seems rather circular that R&D needs public money in order to benefit the economy. Over-simplistic I suppose, but I'd think if it were economically productive it would be able to make a self-sustaining feedback loop.
The problem with private R&D is that it's quite difficult for any individual company to fully capture the benefits of research. There are lots of ways this happens. Company does innovative research then gets copied by other firms. Or, they don't recognize an idea's potential but another company does. Or, the research is useful twenty or fifty years in the future. Or, the research is very useful both for them and for many, many other fields and they're only able to capture a tiny sliver of the total value.
For a couple concrete examples: Xerox-PARC did incredibly innovative computing research that turned Apple into a trillion dollar company. For a more modern take: DeepSeek literally used ChatGPT to build their own cheaper competitor.
So, R&D is incredibly societally useful and it's in the collective interest of companies to have access to research results to keep them innovative and competitive. But, it doesn't make sense for any one company to actually do R&D. It really only works as a public good.
In this scenario would it not be attractive for investors to fund multiple (all, even) companies conducting the research into a given field/advancement knowing they will loose money on most but one will capture the benefit? (which, per the premise, is greater than the cost)
I think this happens to some degree with venture firms taking multiple bets on multiple companies working in the same area. The individual companies are still hamstrung, though. Why would ten companies all take the same bet on a speculative technology, especially if they know that other companies are already working on the same ideas?
Also, not to be glib, but it sounds like you’re describing a very wealthy investor willing to spend a lot of money to advance social good by broadly funding an individually unprofitable research goal. That's just a government right?
I'm not angry and I totally get your point of view. I don't think you're wrong.
My belief is that the underlying issue is that most companies and their drive for quarterly results means that they won't front a bunch of the "we're not sure if this will result in anything but it's an interesting thing to look into" style of research on their own. The Bell Labs of the olden days are gone and publicly-funded R&D has essentially replaced it.
It's not all bad though, having all of that research published instead of tucked away in a private research facility can be beneficial.
Which makes sense and also prompts the question: Why is research funded by public money published in journals that are not freely available to the public?
There’s a couple factors - one is the payoff time and risk levels make basic research difficult for even businesses with long time horizons to engage with, and American businesses are notoriously short term. The other is that there’s a large public benefit to making the fruits of that research widely available by way of risk mitigation - it’s commercial companies that take the research over the line, but making the research public allows multiple companies to take a shot at commercializing the results,
In general, considering the government and public money to not be part of “the economy” will make your internal models less performant - the public is an actor in the economy and so is the government, and both make decisions on the basis of their needs, values, and resourcing. Those entities seeing higher rates of return for their investment than other actors like private companies is absolutely consistent with, for example, different companies seeing different rates of return for the same investment dependent on their needs, resourcing, and constraints.
It's no more circular than spending money on education to get a high-paying job, or spending money on changing your A/C filters so that your air conditioner doesn't prematurely fail.
> but I'd think if it were economically productive it would be able to make a self-sustaining feedback loop.
A "self-sustaining" feedback loop still has humans in the loop, deciding to reinvest money in future improvements. If those humans decide to shut the loop down then obviously the benefits will stop being realized.
For the same reason government in general (e.g. the US military) isn't funded by one big GoFundMe. The marginal value any individual actor gains from their investment in public research or services is almost zero. It only works when it's prescriptive on a large scale. See: the tragedy of the commons.
Yeah, that’s an oversimplification and short-sighted. Do you really think even a small fraction of the AI research that led to LLMs and trillions in corporate market capitalization was funded purely by private money? No, it was largely driven by public funding. Even more, not just from the US, but from governments and academic institutions around the world over several decades.
My experience of it in Lisbon was undramatic. I was able to buy medication from the pharmacy. Life continued as usual more or less apart from some inconveniences, people playing cards in the street and a sense of everyone stepping away from the tech. Eyes were rolled as the reflexive suggestions of "putin" were inevitably voiced, more to make conversation than anything else. I met neighbours that I'd never talked to before, and reconnected with some I hadn't talked to for years. People played guitar on their balconies rather than spotify bluetooth speaker pop. The neighbourhood cheered as it came back online but part of me, selfishly, would have liked a few more hours of blackout.
Would have been a very different story if it were a week rather than a day, but I was left with a sense that this complex community of locals and foreigners is stronger than I previously suspected.
I'd argue somewhat less so recently. my gripe with the guardian is that like many left-wing publications and sources recently, they've been far too willing to engage in nothing-y culture nonsense and nowhere near willing enough to engage in the class and wealth inequality issues that are plaguing us nowadays. it has felt a little bit too aimed at the comfortable upper middle classes for a good while now (if it ever wasn't)
Are you saying a focus on racial politics and feminism, and less on socialism/class politics? I think that is a wider Leftist trend in the last 10-15 years.
The Guardian has decent reporting but it also has some terribly embarrassing content. To wit:
"In Dark Laboratory, her groundbreaking new book, Goffe argues that it was the colonisation of the Americas by Christopher Columbus that set off the chain of events that has led us to where we stand today, on the precipice of global catastrophe.
Climate breakdown, she says, is the mutant offspring of European scientific racism and colonialism, conceived in the suffering millions of Africans, Asians and Indigenous Americans endured at the altar of capital accumulation.
The climate crisis is, put simply, also a racial crisis, and it is only once we come to terms with this, Goffe says, and what it means for the ways we relate to the world and each other today, that we can hope to find a solution."
From https://www.theguardian.com/news/2025/mar/28/dark-laboratory...
I don't like the language and method of phrasing that she's chosen here, and I think trying to lead it back to Columbus is a bit ridiculous, but she's not really wrong about the climate crisis also somewhat being a racial crisis. it's not the white West that's going to bear the brunt of the damage from climate change, is it?
Do you mean that the reporting is less good recently? Or that the opinion pieces have been less smug leftie intellectual recently?
Either way I take your point. There's been a lot of fodder for right-wing figures to attack the guardian for ignoring or alienating the white working class.
Quite the opposite, thank you very much. "Death tax" sounds like cruelty compounded. And a birth windfall? It's all over the culture. Stupid people with inherited money and inherited power.
i've enjoyed the fluidity of startup software work. have a job for a bit, it's exciting, the thing blows up or goes bust. get a new job. hire some other devs. have to fire them because out of cash (sorry, no hard feelings i hope). burning out? quit!
maybe i'm just in a fortunate enough position to be able to take risks, but i have no interest at all in unions, strikes, secret conversations that the article suggests. would be a mild red flag for hiring for me (expressing overt interest in unionizing). it has a hint of difficult to work with, politicising the workplace, power games.
i will say this though: talk about salaries with your colleagues (if you want)! employers have the deck stacked in their favour with this taboo and there is no good reason to uphold it afaiks as an employee. the more you all know the better position you are in. don't need a special club with dues and leaders for that
Any non-abserd definition of free speech concerns the expression of ideas rather than allowing hyperlinks to competitor platforms. I don't see this as a violation of free speech at all
Bookmarking this comment to remind myself in the future how far people will twist their logic to fit their narrative. Thank you for making this so clear for me.
Not a Twitter fan or a social media user but I see no problem with this at all. Looks like a private company playing hardball with competitors. I don't see any hypocracy unless you adopt some very neive definition of protecting free speech
While this is, of course, a racist counterargument, it is also correct. Doing research without a activist agenda is now a political stance. The sooner neutrals realise this the better
I think most of their stuff sounds pretty silly, usually – like someone's mucking around with knobs in Ableton over a decent drum loop: https://sevish.bandcamp.com/track/tritavium
I've been a big fan for a couple years. Initially it was really weird to me. Now it's not! I've gotten more used to microtonality, for one thing, and for another I think he's toned down the really xenharmonic aspects of his music. When his latest album comes up on Spotify the harmonies don't sound particularly strange to me, just a little smoother than what you would get out of 12 Edo.
edit: ideologues already attaK! sad to see ><