Where Have You Gone, Bell Labs? 552
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Soulskill
from the i'm-guessing-china dept.
from the i'm-guessing-china dept.
theodp writes "Name an industry that can produce 1 million new, high-paying jobs over the next three years, challenges BusinessWeek. You can't, because there isn't one. And that's the problem. So what's the answer? Basic research can repair the broken US business model, argues BW, saying it's the key to new, high-quality job creation. Scientific research legends like Bell Labs, Sarnoff Corp, and Xerox PARC are essentially gone, or shadows of their former selves. And while IBM, Microsoft, and HP collectively spend $17B a year on R&D, only 3%-5% of that is for basic science. In a post-9/11 world, DARPA's mission has shifted from science to tactical projects with short-term military applications. Cutting back on investment in basic science research may make great sense in the short term, but as corporations and government make the same decision to free-ride off the investments of others, society suffers the 'tragedy of the commons,' wherein multiple actors operating in their self-interest do harm to the overall public good. We've reached that point, says BW, and we're just beginning to see the consequences. The cycle needs to be reversed, and it needs to be done quickly."
Basic research in Ireland - billions spent (Score:5, Informative)
We've invested in basic research here in Ireland, and the government is being criticised for it (link to Irish Times opinion piece [irishtimes.com]).
Certainly there is a problem here in Ireland that there are a lack of opportunities for those who've acheived a PhD qualification through basic research. Already a lot of even ordinary degree graduates in science and technology have emigrated from Ireland, and the number of entrants into such undergraduate courses is dropping year by year.
However, possibly there's nothing inherently wrong with investing so much in basic research and the issues arise merely from the ineptitude of those running this country and the blind voting that such a section of the populance do for the current ruling party - who've throughout Ireland's history acheived lots of public support but attempted to ruin the country at various stages (starting with the Civil War, continuing with the economic war with the UK in the 1930s, going crazy in the 1970s even abolishing car tax to win votes as the country went bankrupt, deliberately facilitating a property bubble after the dot-com crash, attempting to have the taxpayers continue to pay into the Ponzi scheme with a unique Irish version of the bad bank - i.e. pay speculative amounts to banks for bad loans and attempt to keep prices up until a new bubble is created).
Not just Bell (Score:5, Informative)
Re:It's not the business model that is broken. (Score:5, Informative)
mmmmm pie [wikipedia.org]
Re:Individual (Score:1, Informative)
Err I think you have copyright and patent mixed up. The Piratebay is primarily a copyright issue not patent. And most people's problem with patents are more because of patent trolls and how patents with clear prior art can still get passed.
Re:Individual (Score:2, Informative)
Where Have You Gone, Bell Labs? (Score:5, Informative)
If you want the literal answer to this question, they're part of Alcatel-Lucent now, after being part of Lucent Technologies since AT&T spun them off in the 90s.
Re:The money AT&T didn't make from Bell Labs (Score:1, Informative)
You might want to read about the 1956 AT&T consent decree as it prevented Bell Labs from profiting from its patents. Any company that wanted it could get a license for transistor technology for $25K. Also, the reason Unix took off was it cost a university only the one charge of a magnetic tape to receive the full source code.
Re:The money AT&T didn't make from Bell Labs (Score:5, Informative)
Bell Labs was a subsidiary of the Bell Telephone company. Since the telephone company was a regulated utility, and a monopoly, the US government did not allow it to commercialize many of its discoveries and inventions. UNIX for instance was "given away" with a license to universities (e.g. UC Berekely), companies, and the government.
I believe the conclusion you drew is incorrect because it was based on the faulty assumption that Bell Labs tried to commercialize and profit off its products, when in fact it could not.
Re:It's not the business model that is broken. (Score:2, Informative)
Actually if you add SS, Medicare, Medicaid, Unemployment and Welfare, Housing and Urban Development, and Health and Human Services
Uhhm No Unemployment is paid through unemployment insurance that employers pay to the government.
The higher your rate of claims against you the higher your rates will be.
Apple spends 25.24% of total operating exp. on R&a (Score:3, Informative)
It's not all funny ads. Apple's earning their success.
Re:Pie is in the eye of the beholder (Score:3, Informative)
Isn't comparing the number against tax receipts a bit misleading because total budget is going to be >100% of tax receipts when you're running a deficit.
Re:One Research Lab is Still Hiring... (Score:5, Informative)
They're looking for talented engineers and scientists with LOTS of imagination to take important projects from concept to reality! Check out their website and apply if you want to turn this trend around! [go.com]
Back when I was doing my undergrad, Disney send some recruiters over to try to get people to sign up for summer internships. They sent fliers around that included that "free access to disney parks" crap and said they were giving a presentation to explain the details. I thought, "summer internship at disney. Could be kind of cool." I convinced my roommate to go with me to check it out.
Well, I'll say one thing for them: they're not liars. I listened to their presentation while they gave everyone there every reason not to apply. The most important one being, "we don't really pay you enough to make any money. You probably can break even, but you'll most likely end up spending more money on rent and food than you'll get paid." Then they told us all how awesome it was because it was Disney! And you had free admission to theme parks and discounts on merch! And all you need to do to apply is fill up this form!
My roommate and I both essentially said, "fuck that," but it was a lesson on the advantages of being a huge and famous company, especially one in the entertainment business. There were no lack of other people filling up those forms and disney gets some seriously cheap labor.
Re:It's not the business model that is broken. (Score:2, Informative)
These numbers don't really mean a lot, as they do not reflect what the money is actually spent on, nor do they reflect what the money is subsequently employed to do after the money is spent (recirculated). For example, although Social Security is roughly 21% of the budget, one can not necessarily conclude than none of it is spent on science and research, either directly or indirectly.
Although you are generally right that the actual amount directed exclusively toward "science" is a undoubtedly a very small percentage of each of these "budget line items" to calculate the actual amount of spending requires more than a simple tallying of budget categories. Within those billions for Medicate and Medicade are no doubt moneys that flow to research on cures and technical advance. More transparency is accounting would greatly facilitate the accurate amounts spent on support of our national scientific infrastructure.
Re:Apple spends 25.24% of total operating exp. on (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Want to get more basic research? (Score:3, Informative)
Highly-paid artists, actors, and athletes deliver a small value, but they deliver it to millions of people at once, and they can do it over and over. The total amount of value is huge. Hence their compensation is huge.
I can remember people whining about performers' pay since the 1980s. It's been 25 years now and people like you still don't understand the way mass media multiplies value. Maybe you just don't care to understand it because you prefer whining. Who knows?
I'm not going to address the rest of your post because of the ignorant and/or poorly-reasoned premise.
Re:It's not the business model that is broken. (Score:2, Informative)
You'll never, ever find a business which factors in the infrastructure items they depend upon because they are assumed to be there to be used, much like mana from heaven.
No. From the small to the large, they never have to factor those infrastructure items explicitly because they are already factored out as local, state and federal taxes in addition to a myriad other taxes that individuals do not have to pay, double taxation and all that. If infrastructure is paid by taxes, and if business pay their taxes, then they have already factor that out.
Consider also that the greatest users of infrastructure are not business, but individuals. For them, the rate of individual infrastructure usage is inversely proportional to the tax bracket they belong to. The larger your gross income, the larger the tax % you have to pay (while at the same time reducing your dependency on infrastructure.) OTH, the poorer you are, the less tax % you have to pay WHILE having to rely more on the infrastructure.
It's funny that people say "wealth owners these, wealth owners that", but fuck, wealth owners are also creators of wealth and employment, and they are the prime contributors in taxation, at a proportion larger than their proportion on total gross income. What else do you people want? Tax them more? (And thus reduce their total net income which is what is used to keep business [and employment] going?)
Equality is not just on wealth but on responsibility as well. This society already has a fair distribution of wealth and taxation. Social illnesses that we see today are of a cultural origin rather than "OMG, wealth owners!!!!"
but what happens when business controls most of the wealth of the society?
Uh, isn't that the general case, that business control most of the wealth in a society?
Who then plans, builds and maintains the infrastructure items necessary for business to function?
That's a government function.
No one.
Wrong. Government, with tax, most of it disproportionally obtained from wealth creators and disproportionally used by those least capable of paying taxes.
Nerdconomics might be cool to talk and post about, but they are fucking wrong by and large.
Re:Spaceship Earth (Score:3, Informative)
Now, to the second and more important point, you cannot show me a single study published in the last thirty years that demonstrates that any part of our ecosystem is healthier than it was the year before. Maybe in some extremely local cases there has been progress, but on the whole, every year the earth becomes less capable of supporting life.
While I agree entirely with the rest of your post, I do have to point out that this is incorrect. If you'd like, I can get you some examples and studies later, but there are still a few areas we're doing better in, and many of them are directly due to environmentalist initiatives. London fog, for instance, is a thing of the past. We've had some serious success with the Clean Air act, and many major metropolitan areas have had increasing air quality simply because we're not polluting as badly as we did before.
Other than that, I'll agree that overall we're reducing the Earth's carrying capacity while simultaneously increasing the number of people.
Re:It's not the business model that is broken. (Score:3, Informative)