Neal Stephenson On 'Innovation Starvation'

Geoffrey.landis writes "In an essay discussing the space program, author Neal Stephenson suggests that the decline of the space program 'might be symptomatic of a general failure of our society to get big things done.' He suggests that we may be suffering from innovation starvation: 'Innovation can't happen without accepting the risk that it might fail. The vast and radical innovations of the mid-20th century took place in a world that, in retrospect, looks insanely dangerous and unstable.'" Though the context is different, this reminds me of economist Tyler Cowen's premise that the U.S. has for decades been in a Great Stagnation.

Comments

Patents aren't helping

[pieterh]

Actually I'd conclude that patents are a main cause that innovation has stagnated in the last 20 years. Innovation depends on sharing knowledge.

What I really wonder is whether the strangulation of research will put our survival at risk at a time in history when we need to be smarter than ever about how we use energy, land, water, and raw materials? Why patents are evil.

Re:Patents aren't helping

[Anrego]

So what is the solution?

Not snarky, I'm serious. I totally agree, patents have created a world where unless you are a huge company, it's pretty damn hard to invent something new. All the patent nonsense has raised the bar way above the head of the garage tinkerer, and given that this is where a lot of earlier innovation came from, that seems like a really bad thing.

But at the same time, I don't like the idea that if I spend a year of my time developing something, someone else can spend 2 weeks making a slight improvement and start selling it.

How do we let people invent stuff while at the same time preventing blatant rip-offs and ensuring inventors get paid for their work.

Re:Patents aren't helping

[0123456]

Patents aren't evil. Only in a perfect utopian world could somebody develop an idea and not have to fear it being ripped off for the profit of others.

I've worked in a patent-heavy industry. There was no 'innovation' being protected, because every company had to cross-license their patents with every other company in order to remain in business. The only things the patents did were keep more efficient competitors out of the market and keep patent lawyers well paid.

Re:Patents aren't helping

[ArhcAngel]

The submission has the main cause in it. Fear of losing. Our society has come to treasure the status quo so much they aren't willing to risk what they have to make something else. The use of Patents is just one of the ways we are using to keep what's ours. Take all our toys away and watch how creative we become.

Re:Patents aren't helping

[0123456]

But at the same time, I don't like the idea that if I spend a year of my time developing something, someone else can spend 2 weeks making a slight improvement and start selling it.

If your idea is so simple that someone else can copy it and improve it in two weeks, why should you have the armed might of the state preventing them from doing so?

If I also spend a year of my time developing the same idea, but complete my work a week after yours, why shouldn't I have the same rights you do? I spent all that time and now you're saying I can't use my own invention just because you finished a few days earlier?

Re:Patents aren't helping

[Anonymous Coward]

Not trying to steal the thread, and these are not perfect solutions but I suspect they would have a huge impact on bogus litigation and create an ongoing boom innovation investment...

* 5 year legal monopoly beginning the day you file the patent.
This will force patent holders to put up or shut up. You invest in your patent now or forfeit your monopoly.

* A producer requirement rule, you automatically lose in infringement litigation if you do not produce a product or service based on your patent.
I witnessed first hand an engineer who was paid per technical drawing to develop "innovative" patentable designs based on the work of others he found on the internet. He and the patent troll that paid him never invested time, money or effort into creating prototypes or marketable products. The product was a stream of patents that the troll marketed to patent holding ventures to use in future lawsuits against actual producers which may even include the original developers who posted pictures and video of their work online.

A producer rule would not stop lone engineers developing ideas and selling them but they would end up in the hands of producers who would have a limited amount of time (see the 5 year rule) to invest in actually producing the product or service based on the patent.

Re:Patents aren't helping

[spire3661]

Developing an idea does not mean you can claim whole ownership of it. You OWE for what our forebears wrought. All inventions draw on millions of years of human existence and progress. Intellectual Property laws draw a line in the sand, only perspective dictates if that line provides net good or ill. As it stands now, from my perspective, if you stripped away all IP protections, people would still invent shit.

Re:Patents aren't helping

[pieterh]

The solution is legally enforced sharing of knowledge. That is, you can steal anyone's ideas and they can steal yours right back. This is how the fashion industry works and the notion that "big guys will steal your precious ideas" is shown to be bogus. The state should enforce mandatory share-alike on every aspect of technology. The large firms will complain they have no motive to invest. Fine, allow the small ones to.

Re:Patents aren't helping

[Anrego]

I spent all that time and now you're saying I can't use my own invention just because you finished a few days earlier?

Hold on there, I didn't say that anywhere. In fact, I agree that this is a big problem with the current system. The whole point of my post was that the current system is flawed (but that simply having no system wouldn't work either).

If your idea is so simple that someone else can copy it and improve it in two weeks, why should you have the armed might of the state preventing them from doing so?

Both time figures were somewhat unrealistic, but the point is copying something is usually a lot cheaper and quicker than developing something from scratch. Certainly I think something could be ripped off after release long before an inventor would see his profit.

That, and some "simple" things come out of long periods of trying to solve a problem. The end solution might be a simple widget, but coming up with that widget as a solution to the problem may have involved significant resources. If someone can then just start producting that widget with no money going to the people who came up with it, you'll see people a lot less willing to spend money inventing.

Re:Patents aren't helping

[pieterh]

Yes, it's quite simple. Take existing models that work, copy those. Use science, not philosophy. Fashion, food, open source. Industries that are incredibly innovative and where ideas are properly treated as worthless. It's execution that counts, not ideas. Here's an idea: "send a man to the moon". Now execute that.

To suggest that innovation needs patents is like suggesting reproduction needs divorce lawyers.

Re:Patents aren't helping

[cpt kangarooski]

Intellectual property laws protect innovation - not deter it.

Well, that statement is overbroad and wrong anyway.

Trademark, copyright, trade secret, publicity, etc. all fall under the umbrella of 'intellectual property' but have nothing at all to do with innovation. You're really only talking about patents, and it would help matters if you'd say so more clearly. The whole term 'intellectual property' really just adds confusion; it's best avoided.

In any case, what patents are meant to encourage is the invention, disclosure, and bringing to market of useful, novel, nonobvious inventions that otherwise would not have been invented, disclosed, and brought to market, whilst placing no or minimal restrictions on the public in terms of scope and duration, all in order to provide the greatest public benefit for the least harm to the public.

But make no mistake; patents can discourage innovation:

For example, patents aren't free; it costs a fair bit of money to get a patent. Thus, an inventor who comes up with numerous patentable inventions, all of which he could invent, disclose, and bring to market, might have to spend time and money seeking a patent, thus reducing the resources he has available to spend on his inventions directly. If the inventions he chooses to pursue first turn out to be duds, he could be left unable to pursue the others for a lack of resources.

Another example is that patents don't confer a right to practice the invention, or build devices embodying it, etc. Patents are a negative right, and only allow a patent holder to prohibit other people from using the invention in certain ways. Thus, if Alice invents something, and Bob invents some improvement to that thing, they can both get patents, but Alice cannot use Bob's invention without Bob's permission, and Bob can't use his own invention without Alice's permission, and neither of them is obligated to grant permission to the other. This means that an invention can exist, and be well-known, and be entirely kept off of the market for many years (perhaps longer than it's of any value, if the later invention is eclipsed by things that are better still), depriving everyone of most of its value to society.

Only in a perfect utopian world would patents have only beneficial effects. In the real world, they cause both good and ill, and it's important not to lose sight of that, lest you become unable to steer the system so as to produce the most good effects and the fewest bad effects.

And you make it seem like patents are something new but it existed during America's greatest years of innovation.

Not so much as you think. Patents existed, sure, but a patent is just a piece of paper. You have to go to court in order to enforce it on someone else, and for many long stretches of American history, courts tended to find against patent holders for various reasons. From, oh, the 1930's to the creation of the Federal Circuit in 1982, a patent holder stood little chance of success when suing an infringer in the US. I wouldn't go so far as to say that patents may as well not have existed during that time, but they were vastly weaker than they are now. It certainly didn't seem to do much harm during some of our greatest years of innovation. Perhaps you'd agree that weak patents might not be such a bad idea after all?

Re:Patents aren't helping

[Chris Burke]

I've worked in a patent-heavy industry. There was no 'innovation' being protected, because every company had to cross-license their patents with every other company in order to remain in business. The only things the patents did were keep more efficient competitors out of the market and keep patent lawyers well paid.

.

Same here. And I've been told directly by corporate patent lawyers not to see if anything I'm inventing might infringe on someone else's patents, because 1) something involved in what I'm making almost certainly does and 2) if you do a patent search that can show willful violation which is treble damages and screws up the "we both infringe each other so let's create a sharing agreement based on the relative value of our portfolios" negotiations.

As you say, the main real effect is to create an artificial barrier to entry into an industry when it's a minefield of patents.

The other real effect is to give patent trolls free reign to ruin the real innovation that these patent-holding corporations are engaging in because they're immune to the "well you're infringing too so let's just strike a deal and get on with business" tactic, having no products of their own.

Re:Patents aren't helping

[ArcherB]

So what is the solution?

Well, there are several solutions.

First, stop the patenting of the obvious. For example, multi-touch on a touch screen. Or a patent for a rectangle smart phone with icons.

Next, stop patenting how people use things. The multi-touch (above) is an example. Could you imaging what the GUI would be like if Apple were able to patent the double-click?!!? How about if Ford patented where hands were placed on a steering wheel? Could Gibson patent a guitar chord or method for rock stars to bash a guitar on stage? Or how about "A handheld computing device is introduced comprising a motion detection sensor(s) and a motion control agent. The motion detection sensor(s) detect motion of the computing device in one or more of six (6) fields of motion and generate an indication of such motion. The motion control agent, responsive to the indications of motion received from the motion sensors, generate control signals to modify, one or more of the operating state and/or the displayed content of the computing device based, at least in part, on the received indications." Also known as an accelerometer. Yes, this patent was granted.

Stop patenting evolution. If I were to patent the web browser, someone else shouldn't be able to patent using graphics in a web browser. If were to hold the patent to the TV, someone else shouldn't be able to patent the wide-screen.

Stop patenting conventions. If something is accepted as an industry standard with the patent holder's blessing, USB for example, the patents should immediately expire. This would prevent patent holders like Apple, Intel and Rambus from pushing their patented solutions over better, open ones.

Stop overly-broad or vague patents. Patents should include a proposed use for the idea. For example, if I were to make the language vague enough, I could easily get the patent for the automobile. Someone could have seen the PAD on Star Trek and grabbed a patent for that. "Flat, rectangular, electronic device used to hold and present information". I've seen examples of patents filed years ago that were violated by products that were not what the patent holder was thinking of when he got the patent.

There are more. These are just off the top of my head.

Re:Patents aren't helping

[smellsofbikes]

Both time figures were somewhat unrealistic, but the point is copying something is usually a lot cheaper and quicker than developing something from scratch. Certainly I think something could be ripped off after release long before an inventor would see his profit.

That, and some "simple" things come out of long periods of trying to solve a problem. The end solution might be a simple widget, but coming up with that widget as a solution to the problem may have involved significant resources. If someone can then just start producting that widget with no money going to the people who came up with it, you'll see people a lot less willing to spend money inventing.

I'm not sure this answers your question: I work in an area -- integrated circuit design for consumer markets -- where we can patent things until we're blue in the face, and someone else can still come up with another implementation that does the same thing we do, and get it to market. (Despite what so many people claim, the US patent office *does* reject things for being too obvious, like, oh, say, building an LED driver that can work with wall dimmers, so if you want to build those you have to build a specific implementation of a dimmer driver, and patent that, and then someone else will just find another clever way of doing it.) So we do the research, build a product, and everyone else copies it. But we still make money, and the way we do that is by choosing markets where we know it'll take long enough for the copies to hit the market that we'll have already repaid our investment and made a profit. I'm not saying that's the best way of doing things, but one nice side-benefit is that instead of just one solution to the problem, there are a half-dozen, and that's a huge amount of information being dumped into the public pool for future inventors to use. We almost don't need patents at all, because they don't actually help us -- but they do help the world, by requiring people to publish their implementations to problems. We keep investing on innovation because we make money, and the world gets a lot of value from that, as a very nice side-effect.

Now where that doesn't work is, say, drugs. It costs us like I dunno let's say a million dollars to bring a new IC to market. We can recoup that in six months. It takes more like a billion dollars to get a new drug on the market, so you either need to find something that is going to sell a billion dollars in six months or you need long-term patent protection. Maybe that means we should have variable patent lengths, maybe patents should expire in 5 years unless you reapply for continued protection. I don't know. But patents have some obvious and huge benefits over trade secrets. We have trade secrets we've kept for 30 years, and some of them appear to me to be exactly the sort of stuff that'd really help a lot of other designers. I don't think that's a great idea either.

Re:Patents aren't helping

[GospelHead821]

Openness works because ideas can be made abundant at practically no cost. The economy of ideas right now is illustrative of the characteristics of a system in which artificial scarcity is applied to abundant resources. This is important because so many of the big things that we could be building would serve to eliminate or at least reduce scarcity even with regard to material resources. A quote that I read earlier regarding the Occupy Wall Street movement touches upon the same idea: "They mean to show that there is an inappropriate and correctable disconnect between the abundance America produces and the scarcity its markets manufacture." More generally, I am interested in any philosophy that endorses the pursuit of shareable abundance over profitable scarcity.

Re:Patents aren't helping

[gizmo_mathboy]

The $1 billion cost from pharma R&D has been questioned.

Even if it were true, pharma can easily make that in the patent life of the drug. Let alone the derivatives that they will patent after it.

Need another cold war

[Anonymous Coward]

The cold war was great for this. Massive amounts of money were dumped into stuff with the only goal being "get it done before the other guys". Some stuff needs a tonne of money and time sunk into basic research with only a thin vision of the end goal to happen.

These days, we are very good at the standard cycle of:
a) release product
b) collect feedback
c) update product based on feedback
d) release updated product

A business man can understand "if we spend 2 years an $xx researching hard drive technology, it will probably give us something that we can sell in the end". This is why we see continuous advances in the stuff we already have.

We are less good at "hey you smart guys! here's a few billion dollars and a huge lab... give us something cool".

Re:Need another cold war

[jklovanc]

ICBMs contributed to launch vehicle technology which contributed to satellite technology which contributed to a lot of things.
Yes there were a lot of money spent on things that are now obsolete due to the end of the cold war. There were also a lot of things that may never have been built without it. GPS is an excellent example of this. It was originally a Defence Department project because the military needed a way to target munitions accurately and to track it's assets. Private companies have tried and failed to put up satellite constellations, think Uridium, but the Government paid for GPS and ensured that it worked. Another major project that was advanced by the military was the US Interstate system. There was a lot of opposition to paying for the system but the defence department chipped in quite a bit because one of the considerations in the placement of these highways was the movement of troops and materials during time of war.

Look at all the things that come out of DARPA. Many DARPA technologies are now in civilian use.

Yes, there has been a lot of money spent on the military in the 20th century. It is also debatable whether or not it was a waste. Is it a waste for a bank to spend millions of dollars on a safe that will never be attacked by thieves because the thieves know they can never get in? I have a saying; any state not sufficiently protected by military assets will soon become the property of another state. Were the Trident submarines a waste? Maybe. Did Trident submarines ever fire a nuke in anger? No. Did they deter the USSR from attacking the US and the countries it protects? Maybe.

Insanely dangerous and unstable?

[Hatta]

Sounds a lot like today.

Re:Insanely dangerous and unstable?

[Tokolosh]

Sounds a lot like today.

This proves the point. We have never been safer, had more access to food, energy, technology, safety nets, education, clean air and water.

We are so coddled that we are paralyzed by our fears.

Recommended reading & watching

[toxygen01]

Even though I'm not a big fan of cutting the NASA budget, here is some (reasonable) reading about why is it good:
http://tech.mit.edu/V130/N18/nasap.html

For fans of Neal, there was recently interview on goodreads with him (however, interviewer was, nicely said, boring):
http://www.goodreads.com/topic/video_chat/14

and the evergreen of Neal @google (a lot of interesting ideas - e.g., about wikipedia):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lnq-2BJwatE

Re:Recommended reading & watching

[sonicmerlin]

LOL yes because the same people who are cutting NASA's budget and think "government is too big" despite all the government services they rely on *really* care about the poor, don't they?

Markets do not work

[damburger]

The period that Stephenson identifies with a decline in the ability to get 'big' things done coincidence near perfectly with the rise of neoliberalism in the west. The more markets are deregulated, the less ability we have to actually get things done, because corporations will break up anything large scale for profit - with the full cooperation of sleazy, dishonest politicians who are in their pockets.

But a whole bunch of us are ingrained with a kind of market fundamentalism, that the 'invisible hand' will make things right if you just deregulate some more, that you simply cannot see any way to stave off this decline.

It isn't just technology. This deregulated, global market lets 25,000 people starve to death each year, despite global agriculture producing enough food for each person get 3000 calories per day.

Now cue the stream of /.ers defending their dead ideology because they can't face up to the fact that something they support, both with their ideas and their everyday activities, is so corrosive and destructive to our prospects for survival, happiness, and development.

Re:Markets do not work

[0123456]

The period that Stephenson identifies with a decline in the ability to get 'big' things done coincidence near perfectly with the rise of neoliberalism in the west

I believe you mispelt 'big government welfare statism'.

Re:Markets do not work

[0123456]

Really? Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher were proponents of "big government welfare statism" were they?

Yes. Reagan called it 'military spending', while Thatcher increased welfare spending during her time as Prime Minister; and, even if they hadn't been welfare statists, they were only in power for a few years of the last forty.

But don't let reality spoil a good rant.

Re:Markets do not work

[DarkOx]

I don't see the evidence. I see plenty of cases where we can't get things done because the "rules" don't allow it. All they way down to the girl down the street can't open a Day Care or a Hair Salon because compiling with Government requirements written in by existing rent seeking industry or liberals who put risk avoidance ahead of basic pragmatism always seeking to eliminate any personal responsibility from everyone.

We have never ever "deregulated" anything! Financial deregulation did not make it any more possible for me and few neighbors to get together and open bank! What it did was simply remove oversight from a group "winners" government had already picked, and continued to preserve them with barriers to entry.

Real deregulation would be just that it would be repealing laws, WITHOUT writing new ones. Its never been tried, on any kind of scale. Still everyone points at "deregulation" as some failure of libertarian policy ideas when what the "deregulation" that has actually occurred does not even remotely resemble what and real libertarian would call deregulation!

Re:Markets do not work

[damburger]

My entire life (born 1981) has been a history of market deregulation, so don't come at me with all that 'government gets in the way' horseshit. Deregulation has not protected pre-appointed 'winners', otherwise the dot com bubble would never have happened. Government has been rapidly getting out of the way for 3 decades plus, and the result has been a market running out of control with greed and bad information (which, according to the prophets of neoliberalism, shouldn't happen)

Libertarians have their ideal, utopian state - its called Somalia. Kindly go live there.

Re:Markets do not work

[damburger]

Its not a state, its a petition. You can try and create your pathetic little Galt's Gulch if you want, but after you've realised that you aren't quite the innovators you've convinced yourselves you are, and that you rely heavily on public goods, you will come crawling back.

Re:Markets do not work

[geekoid]

"Are you frustrated at the loss of freedom and responsibility in America, while the growth of government and taxes continues unabated?"
see both those statement are false, I have a hard time getting on board with this thing. It's working, as in there getting there goal, but it won't work as a form of government. Because libertarians seem to be afraid to actually read history, here is a clue: we did that. Please look at robber barons, and industrialist of the late 19th and early 20th century.

So it's been tried, it ended with women being burned to death because exits were locked, people being killed for their homes, and toxic chemical being dump into drinking water and whole towns dead.

Re:Markets do not work

[jmrives]

Deregulation is the war cry of the conservative corporatist -- not the liberals. Of course, the terms conservative and liberal are used in such general ways as to be mostly useless. Someone who is in favor of more EPA regulation can rightly be considered to be an environmental conservative (as in conservation). It is quite possible for someone to be fiscally conservative and socially liberal at the same time -- those are not mutually exclusive concepts or stances.

Re:You bet.

[Anonymous Coward]

But if you check their lives you will see they got that way by taking a lot of risks

You obviously haven't. There are a few poster examples but most of them were born rich.

Education

[RazzleFrog]

The problem is that the education system teaches children only how to work towards passing an exam. There is no incentive to learn just for the sake of learning.

Re:Education

[0123456]

Why is it the educations systems responsibility to provide incentive to learn for the sake of learning?

Kids go into the 'education system' wanting to learn. The 'education system' is what destroys that natural desire.

I'm still amazed at the level of skill required for my teachers to take subjects that are naturally interesting and make them boring.

Re:You bet.

[ideonexus]

Yes. And we know they got rich by hard work and risk-taking because they spend billions of dollars on advertising to convince us of this.

To the Moon

[lymond01]

Kennedy's Moon Speech

"We go to the Moon not because it is easy, but because it is hard."

There's lots of innovation, but it's based around CEO income and stockholder investments. When we went to the Moon, we were threatened with the possibility of becoming #2 on a public stage. We may see this again with China, and redirect our public funds accordingly back to the space program. Or America may just roll over this time, financially broken after fighting multiple wars over the past 8 years. Or it may be that private industry, not public industry, gets the backing of huge investors and the Industrial Revolution begins again, this time to construct space-based mining platforms.

I realize that most great achievements come from either survival instinct or financial gain (which are related). "What's in it for me?" seems to be how things generally work. I'd like to see more basic research funded so we can have better nanotubes, more efficient RAM, and light sabers. Oh, and teleportation.

As Heinlein put it...

[medcalf]

Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty. This is known as "bad luck."

Big, risky, innovative projects have shifted

[Overzeetop]

All the big unknowns appear to have shifted from physical to intellectual projects, like Finance. Credit default swaps were amazingly new, and amazingly risky on the down side, but we built that manned rocket to Jupiter and then watched it explode before our eyes as it tried to pick up too much speed around Mars and went careening into the planet, packed from stern to stem with all of our retirement money.

And who would have thought that spending money on all sorts of interesting things, and deciding that nobody had to pay for it because we could borrow the money for just a couple cents on the dollar (and the people who could pay for it found ways not to pay), would end in tears. And yet, here we are in the US, desperately trying to figure out how to lock in that pennies rate to long term debt, 'cause if we see bond rates like we did under Reagan we're going to look like the dumb, ugly sibling compared to Greece.

If you think big risks aren't being taken, you're wrong - they're just in different places.

Re:You bet.

[Anonymous Coward]

We don't protest the success of the top 1% richest people, we protest the inequality in the division of rewards of success.

http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/02/income-inequality-in-america-chart-graph

Re:You bet.

[RazzleFrog]

If you read Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers you'll find that the rich got rich by being at the right place at the right time and having important friends to help them.

The Low-Hanging Fruit is Gone

[ideonexus]

I appreciate the second link's take on things, with the "Low-Hanging Fruit" metaphor, but I think the author misses some key elements in how it applies to modern society. Fifty years ago, discovery and innovation was much easier and the things invented were just lying around (like oil) to be simply picked up and applied. Just as the Enlightenment 200 years ago resulted in an explosion of discoveries about the natural world because the realm of scientific knowledge was so small at the time... You couldn't investigate any natural phenomena without discovering a new element or species.

It's getting harder and harder to push the frontiers of knowledge, and nearly impossible for and individual acting alone to do. In America we have this mythos of the "Great Man" a single inventor like Zuckerberg, Jobs, or Edison, but in reality these people are the exception while the rule is that it takes large teams and incredible financial investment to innovate today, but our mythos of innovation downplays the collaborative side of invention.

Space Exploration is an important example of this. We emphasize Capitalism as the best engine for innovation, but it was Socialism that took man to the Moon. Capitalism is only just now reaching space, 40 years later. Teamwork accomplishes great things, but in America we emphasize individualism and personal profit, which are great motivators, but create silos of productivity that are disadvantaged for lacking the cross-pollination of ideas that comes with collaboration.

Queue the "Marxist" ad hominem attack in 3... 2... 1...

Re:The Low-Hanging Fruit is Gone

[rAiNsT0rm]

Socialism is a great thing for many areas of daily civilized life, I can't see how anyone would attack this notion except out of sheer ignorance. Roads, infrastructure, education, emergency systems, space, healthcare, etc. (I would say basic food, shelter, and clothing as well personally, and the arts.) Why we think these things need to be privatized or that they would somehow flourish if they were is beyond me. Anyone that has worked in private industry sees the incompetence, waste, and greed... why in the hell they would want this to be in charge of their well-being or advancement as a society when they see it fail at building widgets is beyond me. It has its place too but not in obviously non-profitable or explorative ventures with no direct gains.

We will never learn from history or our mistakes and we are doomed to repeat them over and over again.

Re:You bet.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, those CDOs with the fake AAA credit rating were some scary shit. For a second there the 1%ers were at a huge risk of missing out on their multi-million dollar bonuses.

And the Koch brothers, they took a major risk inheriting millions from their father and then took huge risks with other people's lives and health by skirting laws and regulations put in place after the risk takers before them risked other people's lives and health and lost, well, the people living and working around the risky operation lost not the 1% risk takers.

There are many 1%ers who are taking personal risks in beneficial efforts, Steve Perlman, the guys around start ups like SpaceX, etc. But there are many more who are taking risks where failure is more of a loss for those around them than a failure of their own. The risking of everyone else for non-innovative based gains is part of the basis for the protests. You probably realize the protests aren't actually protesting success but acknowledging the destructive actions of a fair number of the 1%ers doesn't quite work for your snarky comment.

Re:Who the hell do you think you are?

[Sponge Bath]

To be fair to damburger, the OP's baseless rant is repeated so many time by brain dead people who can't be bothered with facts that it is easy to become testy after refuting it a few thousand times. It starts with creating a fantasy enemy that bears no relation to anything in reality and applying a label used by people who disagree with you, in this case 'liberals'. Then you claim the fantasy enemy did some horrible thing that never happened, in this case "taking over" the education system.

So damburger's response may be blunt, but it is totally correct to ask for even a tiny shred of evidence to support the outlandish claims.

Re:dotcom

[geekoid]

It's a false premise to presume next big things aren't based on previous things. That always are.
And the internet was the next big thing. To say otherwise s to be living under a rock.

"real innovation"
that's a nonsense statement that makes me think you don't know what innovation means.

"something novel"
Please name one novel big thing? Small pox vaccine was based in previous technology and knowledge, the moon landing was all based on previous technology.

Re:Its the war

[Hartree]

Carter tried to return the US to being a space and science society? I'd sure not agree on space.

His VP was Walter Mondale, who along with William Proxmire with input from James Van Allen nearly got the office of manned spaceflight shut down.

Nasa did not do well under his administration. The great achievements were from long previous. The shuttle was completed in spite of them rather than due to them. And do you really think they would have done something better if it had been abandoned? Remember that was the time of double digit inflation. Big new projects weren't in the cards.

It had been suffering under others back to LBJ, but let's not rewrite history.

To quote Will Rogers "Things ain't what they used to be and never were."

Re:Of course it looked dangerous

[guspasho]

I'm with parent. What changes are you talking about? You just sound like an old crank. "Everything was fine before those damn liberals came along and screwed everything up with their liberalism!" Stupid liberal things like evidence, I suppose.

Re:Of course it looked dangerous

[Sponge Bath]

OK, I understand the difference between American and European usage of the word "liberal" (in Europe "liberal" is center-right, in the US "liberal" is "center-left" [which is "extreme left" to many USians and still pretty right-wing in European eyes]; from the context it is clear that you're talking about American liberals), but what is the difference between "liberal" and "Liberal"?

The OP's intended meaning of liberal is anyone who disagrees with him, and the usage generally follows other terms that describe an intentionally undefined enemy like "them" and "illuminati". What caused these problems? Them.

Resources not innovation...

[Baron von Daren]

I don’t think it is as much an issue of innovation as resource outlay. We live in a world where profit is the prime motive, and thus the prime value. This is fine for markets, but this mindset has overreached markets themselves and become the default value system for societies as a whole.

In the past societies invested in large scale visions for reasons that aren’t always easy to articulate, but that were certainly not limited to economic gain. Whether it’s space exploration or building cathedrals and monuments, large scale projects require massive resources and corporate (as in group) commitment. Our epoch is dominated by self-interest (some might argue enlightened self-interest), market forces and market mentalities. Obviously, there is no incentive for corporations to outlay massive resources for projects that are either risky and/or that offer limited or negative ROI. But that’s not really the issue; I wouldn’t expect them to do so. The problem is that the market mentality has so thoroughly usurped dominance across all facets of society, the common opinion is that everything should be run like a business.

If you run government like a business, or put differently if you govern your society as though it was a giant company, society has no place for grand vision. We are constantly told that only markets know what society needs and are best equipped to efficiently provide those needs. Of course it isn’t profitable to engage in these kind of projects (or not obviously profitable), so markets will not engage in them. Moreover, if government engages in them, it will require resources, i.e. taxes revenues, and we are constantly told that taxes destroy markets (though the actual data doesn’t bear this out). Anyway, I could follow this tangent into a political debate, but salient point for this thread is that we have become a market society and a market only values grand vision if it leads to obvious monetary profit. If the same resources can be spent toward a greater profit elsewhere it would ‘be foolish’ not to spent to spend it elsewhere.

Re:Of course it looked dangerous

[Darth Snowshoe]

"We have a generation afraid to take risks, expect to be rewarded for being mediocre, and generally a failure, yet have a massive ego issue."

Maybe I simply don't belong here anymore - but as a parent, a self-described liberal, and someone who generally looks upon my own life and career in science and engineering as being at least moderately successful, it's hard to see how you might contrive a more offensive comment without stooping to profanity.

lies, damn lies, and accounting; wet space dream

[epine]

I don't think $55 million passes the smell test, either. Why would it not work for a public company to do (revenues-profits)/FDA_approvals over a two decade time span? Even then, it doesn't prove that Pharma couldn't have brought good two drugs to market for the cost of one home run. It suggests that Pharma believes one home run is worth a pair of extra base hits.

Then usual PR ruse then kicks in. After you pack your squad with nine 50 home-run hitters, divide your Yankee payroll by total number of hits to paint a sorry picture of escalating costs totally out of control. Do not divide by runs scored. And further, slather on the Hollywood accounting, where cost is equated to short term cash obligation ignoring future tax rebates. The version of "cost" says something about the need for deep pockets, while hatching a sleepy lie about just how quickly those pockets are full again.

I'm not with Neal whatsoever in this piece. I sat on the same rug, watching the same TV, showing the same moon mission, at very nearly the same age. I was sneaking out of bed to do so, having only barely learned how to tell time.

Freeman Dyson has long maintained that the least realistic payload in space is a human being. It's a lousy frontier for flag planting. Since the 1960s, were about half-way to having a non-human payload that can do nearly as much--possibly more. And at a tiny fraction of the launch cost, independent of launch vehicle. While Neal was hunkered down for seven years spewing out the Baroque Cycle (a mammoth achievement) he seemed to miss the entire story of Spirit and Opportunity.

Around the same age as my late night visits to Apollo mission countdowns, I used to sit in the bathtub and use my legs as pistons and my shiny backside as a battering ram to propel water out of the local gravity well. In a tame mood, this started with several iterations of harmonic amplification. Subsequent to gaining the ability to reason past glory (some heartless trudge would always point out the wet floor), I've never had any desire to continue with the wet space dream.

If the advantage of space is vacuum micro-gravity, we could accomplish the same by building an evacuated tube around the equator, with hardly any launch costs at all. Plenty of engineering challenge there.

If the mission is viewing, that's being handled fairly well by a combination of ground stations and spectacular satellites.

If the mission is seeking life in the cosmos, we need to bulk up our skinny little legs until we can generate a plume from the tub in the basement up through the skylight in the loft on the third floor. Or we can wait for 50 years and let dry flakes of dust float up on a thermal waft instead.