See, communism and the free market do have at least one thing in common: they're both models which look good on paper, but do not take human flaws into consideration.
The difference is that it doesn't matter in markets, if the participants are flawed. They can be flawed in other ways and still have a functioning market.
For example, there is a tremendous, unregulated, global market out there where the vast majority of the traders involved have the intellect of a rutabaga. We call this market, "pollination". Yet despite the incredibly grave flaws of the traders in this market, it has worked for many tens of millions of years, starting in the age of the dinosaurs.
Maybe you should read a little on trade and economics before you post on this subject ever again? Mutually profitable trades are the norm not an impossibility.
And profit is not measured by whether you have more currency after a series of trades. It's measured by whether you have more assets which have monetary value after a bunch of actions. Actual money makes up a very small sliver of the things with value.
Half of all the people who live in coastal US cities now live below sea level.
No offense, but I don't count imaginary people.
If nothing else, what comparing Amsterdam to New Orleans proves beyond all reasonable doubt is that spending billions of tax dollars building and maintain seawalls is by far the cheapest and most humane solution.
Not at all. Amsterdam is a productive and competently run city. And how humane is it to encourage people to live in dangerous regions with poor systems for protecting those people from the risks?
NYC pays for itself. New Orleans is just an incompetent mess that'll get into another disaster someday and require another bailout. I see no double standard here.
Adjusted for inflation, it's greater than 50% of the peak spending for NASA. I consider that close enough. NASA just doesn't operate anywhere near as effectively as it did in the 60s.
Why? What ever happened to free speech? People can't bitch unless they have the approval from khallow, regulator of the Internet?
To the glue factory with you! I will not tolerate uppityness on my internet!
I was speaking of this from an ethical point of view. If one looks at the actual complaints about HFT, it falls into two categories: complaints about general (and dubious) investment or brokerage practices (such as fronting or insider trading) which have nothing to do with HFT or attributing ridiculously superhuman properties to HFT such as being able to sense when you're about to make a mouse click and initiate a trade.
So what possible harm can he do? Why won't YOU leave him alone and let him bitch?
If all he does is bitch and his ignorance doesn't find its way onto my computer screen or into the rules for my market, then I'm fine with it. But that doesn't seem to be happening here.
It brings liquidity, which is good, but it has tended to move the market in unreasonable (and sometimes dangerous) ways.
Harm for how long? A few minutes at most. Are you claiming that there's genuine harm coming from a market that might be off for a few seconds to a few minutes?
HFT doesn't lead to good price discovery, it obscures it.
And your basis for this claim is? I'll just have to disagree.
When talking about long-term stewardship of institutions, we really need to move away from unreasonable earnings expectations every quarter. When the focus of the market is on ever narrowing periods of time, corporations simply cannot properly invest in the future. Yes, some corporations are lead by unusual people who can leave market panic behind them and truly lead... but most companies are run by very smart idiots.
Well, if we're going to speak of long term institutions and investing in the future, perhaps we should speak of those long term institutions which undermine investing in the future, such as, Too Big To Fail, social safety nets, publicly funded R&D, and the widespread use of Other Peoples' Money whenever a problem shows up. As I see it, we've removed most long term risk and as a result we've removed most incentive for long term planning and investing.
The question for the rest of us is: what is the social value? Wall Street has some social value, but it also has considerable social expense.
Bullshit. What social expense? In markets, pretty much the only social expense is externalities. And being traded on a stock market doesn't magically make a company have higher externalities that it would otherwise have.
My take is that if you removed stock markets, you'd lose that bit of social value, but keep the alleged social expenses.
Sometimes we forget that. We also tend to forget that "the markets" are still based upon similar principles that brought us the great depression.
Principles like "Let's screw with the productive people so that we can make society better." "Let's eliminate all long term risk and then complain when no one plans for the future any more (or when as in the stock market crash of 1929, reality intrudes)." "What we're doing isn't working. That means we didn't do it hard enough!" You mean those sorts of principles?
We need to keep in mind that the stock market crash was as bad as it was because of how delusional the market participants became. They were throwing money at anything that moved without regard for any long term profitability. That sort of insane risk ignorance is common to many market crashes. Here, the disease is the cure. Delusion gives way when real money gets lost.
When the market crashed, corporations, banks, and investment groups collapsed. Much of that imaginary wealth vanished. Sure, that sucked, but what made it worse was the same people who were making short-sighted decisions about such investments, then made short-sighted decisions about how to fix things. For example, assuming that one could get back to that wealth by imposing restrictions on foreign trade or merely by talking things up.
Stock/commodity/bond markets are not capitalism. They are merely outgrowths of one particular variation on capitalism. They're finicky, hard to properly balance, and break if you try to exert too much control.
Then let's not break these markets by trying to control them! Remember that breaking a functioning market (especially on the flimsy pretexts given elsewhere in this discussion for the assault on HFT) is itself a "social expense". I'd say it's a rather considerable one because there's not much of a limit to how you can apply that process to anything that someone doesn't like.
Shouldn't you have to show first that there's something wrong before you spout bullshit about how broken the "system" is? Remember HFT means "High Frequency Trading". It doesn't mean whatever you think is wrong with the world or perhaps with finance today.
We need to really start to recognise that profit isn't all and long term stewardship of our instituitions and systems is key to our long term quality of live.
I think we ought to start by getting clueless people away from these institutions and systems. You can't have long term stewardship when idiots are meddling in things they don't understand.
As I see it, there should be a rule of "live and let live". If someone's system or institution isn't causing harm, then don't mess with them, even if they're rich.
It's also worth noting that the HFT gold rush is already ending. You better hurry or there won't be anything to complain about.
I take issue with your characterization of funding, though - NASA spending went way down compared to the rest of our spending. It's clearly not the priority it was for us in the 60s.
It's a correct characterization, so there's not much point to taking issue to it. It doesn't have to be at Apollo levels as a percentage of GDP in order to be spent well.
Heh, I think we can add your entire post to the "not strictly accurate" pile. The story which we're commenting on already shows your assertion false that plastics kill "everything in the area as animals try to turn it into food". Some animals are quite successful at turning plastics into food or into a surface for living on.
So this discussion is about the definition of a "long time"?
Not on my side. I though it was well accepted that 50 years was a long time especially when it comes to human technology development and industry.
I think 50 years is not that long to establish a completely new industry in a completely new place.
OTOH, we went from putting something into orbit for the first time to putting men on the Moon in about twelve years. The world currently spends the entire budget of Apollo (excluding Skylab) on space activities every five years or so. NASA and the US Department of Defense alone might spend that much on space activities.
Just because you consider 50 years to be a long time does not mean we should give up.
Nothing I have said, implies we should give up. Instead, my view is that our standards are way too long. We're complacent and willing to squander vast sums of money on negligible space activities which don't get us anywhere.
Consider this, until 1984, NASA had a monopoly on commercial space launch. That's twenty years of the fifty year period where no one outside of NASA could legally launch private payloads. They didn't actually help a business develop any significant launch infrastructure until they funded Pegasus launches in the early 90s, that's getting towards thirty years. And the real progress has been SpaceX which didn't start till about 11 years ago.
Suppose during the build up to Apollo, the US government had encouraged private orbital launch development. I think the same launch capability we have now, could have been in place in the mid-70s! There are technological advances that have helped SpaceX build a cheaper and more reliable rocket, but as most people have noted, the basic technology is fifty years old.
After the demise of Saudi Arabia's current regime, within a foreseeable time now, the ensuing chaos will be unimaginable.
I don't really have any trouble imagining the supposedly unimaginable. From the rest of the world's point of view, it'll be a considerable disruption of global oil supply possibly with a bit of domino toppling of neighboring governments over subsequent years. In other words, the mid to late 70s revisited.
Public research has the advantage that it can explore areas that may have no obvious short-term economic benefits
In other words, public does things which have no obvious benefits - economic or otherwise, near or far term. When scientists have to face limited resources, they pick and choose which research to do usually on the basis of what sort of results they expect to obtain. Why should governments do things differently than the scientists themselves?
There was no driving need for transistors on Earth, vacuum tubes had become pretty reliable, but were far too heavy and fragile to put in a space ship, so transistor research got a major incidental push from the space race.
I see no evidence of that. Military spending. which incidentally was much larger, might have had such an impact, but it is worth noting that even in the complete absence of support from the federal government, there would have been widespread and rapid development of transistors and integrated circuits.
Sure, we probaby would have moved to transistor-based computers eventually, but what do you suppose the economic value is of getting them a decade or three sooner.
I doubt it's even five years sooner. And due to governments' propensity to hire lots of people and have them do unproductive things, government might have obstructed such progress over the long term by hiring significant fraction of scientists and engineers who would otherwise have assisted in IC and computer development.
A common misconception shared by a lot of Hindus in India. For example, there was a 1857 rebellion that started because Indian soldiers were required to bite the ends off of bullet cartridges (it was part of the loading process for rifles of the time) coated with animal fat (allegedly both beef and pig, which offends just about optimally).
Even if we could beam all of that energy, I suspect that would be the last thing that we want to do. Adding more energy to the earth, will raise temps VERY quickly.
Depends on the amount of energy you're talking about. Adding that much more energy (which is roughly 3600 times more than the Earth currently receives from the Sun) probably will be vaporizing crust (depending on how fast the heat dissipates to space).
So you're telling me that the infrastructure for intercepting and using as much energy as is present in the world's fossil fuel supply every minute (or rather every 5-10 minutes after efficiency losses, I suppose) is going to be difficult? Who knew?
What do you think costs more, setting up 5 m^2 in a desert or sending 1 m^2 into space - or building it in space?
That depends. But there's no reason to expect space relative activities to remain expensive. For example, if you can get a self replicating factory onto the surface of the Moon, then the cost is the R&D, launch, and the cost of supervising the resulting infrastructure which is built (which might just be monitored by a few people on Earth remotely). Materials and land are free for the taking - while on Earth, they form a firm floor for how cheap you can get solar power. It might be a high price tag to get it started, but you can end up with infrastructure capable of covering the entire Moon with solar cells (though perhaps over a considerable period of time, like many human lifetimes) for far less than the equivalent infrastructure would be on Earth (assuming it were even allowed to that extent).
Science uses aren't magically better than party balloon uses. I don't see ITER, for example, being a better use of helium than character balloons at Tokyo Disney.
Part of the point of having a functioning market with relatively competent buyers and sellers is to decide who gets scarce resources without having to make dubious and subjective moral judgments. As the price goes up, the more spurious demands will drop out. Tokyo Disney finds some other way to entertain its guests while ITER gets the helium it wants.
In other words commercial R&D has to be obviously profitable, in a short-to-medium term. It can't be tentative or exploratory, curious or inquisitive. It must be about earning, with no regard for learning.
There are two things to note here. First, you clearly don't any experience with commercial R&D. It can be more farsighted and considerably more effective than the publicly funded equivalent (in large part because they have a goal other than burning a certain amount of public funding).
Second, commercial R&D is not the only sort of privately funded R&D. The Keck Telescopes in Hawaii, for example, are privately funded, but they aren't for profit.
In other words, tremendous costs, paltry returns, and the real R&D gets disguised as "derivative products".
You made that up.
Maybe you ought to research NASA's "spinoffs" some time and see how much work is actually done by the private side.
There is ZERO requirement for public-funded R&D to be more expensive than commercial, less productive than commercial or in any way shady.
There's no requirement for this R&D to be more useless, it just is.
The real question is why you trust corporations
Nope. I don't trust business. It's just an observation that they do R&D better than government does. And there's a simple model of self-interest that explains why that happens.
Ask yourself, if drug companies could cure serious ailments, would they?
Yes and no. If the business has huge income now and in the future from a treatment for a serious ailment, they won't be so interested in killing that golden goose for a cure. But if they don't and they can take out a competitor's cash cow, then sure, they would. Not every drug company has such indefinite treatments for every disease. Small businesses in particular don't have this problem.
So perhaps you ought to look at what obstacles there are to small businesses developing cures. First and foremost is a complex regulatory process that can cost tens to hundreds of millions of dollars per eventual successful drug to navigate. That's not imposed by corporations but by various developed world governments.
Your ability to dictate company behaviour is an illusion, citizen.
I merely note that this is routinely observed phenomena.
Take a look at glorious situations like... EA.
I have no dealings with EA, but their customers continue to buy EA's products. If you buy crap, you get crap.
These companies are screwing us around. And we - as individuals - have no influence on them.
Except the obvious - don't buy their stuff. All this crap doesn't matter to the people who don't own their stuff.
NASA's job is learning.
Sure it is. But if their job is "learning", then they have a long way to go. I recommend starting with some lessons on economics.
I don't trust you to influence them, frankly.
I don't trust you to buy an Apple product much less recommend anything for NASA, but that's not my problem. When NASA or other government agencies squander my money, then it becomes my problem.
Slashdot Mirror
See, communism and the free market do have at least one thing in common: they're both models which look good on paper, but do not take human flaws into consideration.
The difference is that it doesn't matter in markets, if the participants are flawed. They can be flawed in other ways and still have a functioning market.
For example, there is a tremendous, unregulated, global market out there where the vast majority of the traders involved have the intellect of a rutabaga. We call this market, "pollination". Yet despite the incredibly grave flaws of the traders in this market, it has worked for many tens of millions of years, starting in the age of the dinosaurs.
Wait a minute, you can breathe and hold a job at the same time? I grow more impressed by you, the more I learn.
Maybe you should read a little on trade and economics before you post on this subject ever again? Mutually profitable trades are the norm not an impossibility.
And profit is not measured by whether you have more currency after a series of trades. It's measured by whether you have more assets which have monetary value after a bunch of actions. Actual money makes up a very small sliver of the things with value.
Ok, that makes sense. Will there likely be cell phone coverage in the case of power grid collapse? That's the part that has me a bit dubious.
Half of all the people who live in coastal US cities now live below sea level.
No offense, but I don't count imaginary people.
If nothing else, what comparing Amsterdam to New Orleans proves beyond all reasonable doubt is that spending billions of tax dollars building and maintain seawalls is by far the cheapest and most humane solution.
Not at all. Amsterdam is a productive and competently run city. And how humane is it to encourage people to live in dangerous regions with poor systems for protecting those people from the risks?
NYC pays for itself. New Orleans is just an incompetent mess that'll get into another disaster someday and require another bailout. I see no double standard here.
It's not anywhere near Apollo levels
Adjusted for inflation, it's greater than 50% of the peak spending for NASA. I consider that close enough. NASA just doesn't operate anywhere near as effectively as it did in the 60s.
Shouldn't you read the news first rather than spout "YOU HAVE TO TELL ME WHAT'S GOING ON FIRST"?
Of course. And fortunately for my rhetorical standing, I have read the news first. You may move on now.
Why? What ever happened to free speech? People can't bitch unless they have the approval from khallow, regulator of the Internet?
To the glue factory with you! I will not tolerate uppityness on my internet!
I was speaking of this from an ethical point of view. If one looks at the actual complaints about HFT, it falls into two categories: complaints about general (and dubious) investment or brokerage practices (such as fronting or insider trading) which have nothing to do with HFT or attributing ridiculously superhuman properties to HFT such as being able to sense when you're about to make a mouse click and initiate a trade.
So what possible harm can he do? Why won't YOU leave him alone and let him bitch?
If all he does is bitch and his ignorance doesn't find its way onto my computer screen or into the rules for my market, then I'm fine with it. But that doesn't seem to be happening here.
The same wisdom that said that CDO's, CDS's and other three letter scams shouldn't be regulated. How did that work out?
It's worth noting here that CDOs and CDSs were regulated and remain so. That regulation didn't prevent the "scams" from happening.
It brings liquidity, which is good, but it has tended to move the market in unreasonable (and sometimes dangerous) ways.
Harm for how long? A few minutes at most. Are you claiming that there's genuine harm coming from a market that might be off for a few seconds to a few minutes?
HFT doesn't lead to good price discovery, it obscures it.
And your basis for this claim is? I'll just have to disagree.
When talking about long-term stewardship of institutions, we really need to move away from unreasonable earnings expectations every quarter. When the focus of the market is on ever narrowing periods of time, corporations simply cannot properly invest in the future. Yes, some corporations are lead by unusual people who can leave market panic behind them and truly lead... but most companies are run by very smart idiots.
Well, if we're going to speak of long term institutions and investing in the future, perhaps we should speak of those long term institutions which undermine investing in the future, such as, Too Big To Fail, social safety nets, publicly funded R&D, and the widespread use of Other Peoples' Money whenever a problem shows up. As I see it, we've removed most long term risk and as a result we've removed most incentive for long term planning and investing.
The question for the rest of us is: what is the social value? Wall Street has some social value, but it also has considerable social expense.
Bullshit. What social expense? In markets, pretty much the only social expense is externalities. And being traded on a stock market doesn't magically make a company have higher externalities that it would otherwise have.
My take is that if you removed stock markets, you'd lose that bit of social value, but keep the alleged social expenses.
Sometimes we forget that. We also tend to forget that "the markets" are still based upon similar principles that brought us the great depression.
Principles like "Let's screw with the productive people so that we can make society better." "Let's eliminate all long term risk and then complain when no one plans for the future any more (or when as in the stock market crash of 1929, reality intrudes)." "What we're doing isn't working. That means we didn't do it hard enough!" You mean those sorts of principles?
We need to keep in mind that the stock market crash was as bad as it was because of how delusional the market participants became. They were throwing money at anything that moved without regard for any long term profitability. That sort of insane risk ignorance is common to many market crashes. Here, the disease is the cure. Delusion gives way when real money gets lost.
When the market crashed, corporations, banks, and investment groups collapsed. Much of that imaginary wealth vanished. Sure, that sucked, but what made it worse was the same people who were making short-sighted decisions about such investments, then made short-sighted decisions about how to fix things. For example, assuming that one could get back to that wealth by imposing restrictions on foreign trade or merely by talking things up.
Stock/commodity/bond markets are not capitalism. They are merely outgrowths of one particular variation on capitalism. They're finicky, hard to properly balance, and break if you try to exert too much control.
Then let's not break these markets by trying to control them! Remember that breaking a functioning market (especially on the flimsy pretexts given elsewhere in this discussion for the assault on HFT) is itself a "social expense". I'd say it's a rather considerable one because there's not much of a limit to how you can apply that process to anything that someone doesn't like.
HFT is a symptom of a deeply broken system.
Shouldn't you have to show first that there's something wrong before you spout bullshit about how broken the "system" is? Remember HFT means "High Frequency Trading". It doesn't mean whatever you think is wrong with the world or perhaps with finance today.
We need to really start to recognise that profit isn't all and long term stewardship of our instituitions and systems is key to our long term quality of live.
I think we ought to start by getting clueless people away from these institutions and systems. You can't have long term stewardship when idiots are meddling in things they don't understand.
As I see it, there should be a rule of "live and let live". If someone's system or institution isn't causing harm, then don't mess with them, even if they're rich.
It's also worth noting that the HFT gold rush is already ending. You better hurry or there won't be anything to complain about.
I take issue with your characterization of funding, though - NASA spending went way down compared to the rest of our spending. It's clearly not the priority it was for us in the 60s.
It's a correct characterization, so there's not much point to taking issue to it. It doesn't have to be at Apollo levels as a percentage of GDP in order to be spent well.
Heh, I think we can add your entire post to the "not strictly accurate" pile. The story which we're commenting on already shows your assertion false that plastics kill "everything in the area as animals try to turn it into food". Some animals are quite successful at turning plastics into food or into a surface for living on.
Congress has that power as well.
So this discussion is about the definition of a "long time"?
Not on my side. I though it was well accepted that 50 years was a long time especially when it comes to human technology development and industry.
I think 50 years is not that long to establish a completely new industry in a completely new place.
OTOH, we went from putting something into orbit for the first time to putting men on the Moon in about twelve years. The world currently spends the entire budget of Apollo (excluding Skylab) on space activities every five years or so. NASA and the US Department of Defense alone might spend that much on space activities.
Just because you consider 50 years to be a long time does not mean we should give up.
Nothing I have said, implies we should give up. Instead, my view is that our standards are way too long. We're complacent and willing to squander vast sums of money on negligible space activities which don't get us anywhere.
Consider this, until 1984, NASA had a monopoly on commercial space launch. That's twenty years of the fifty year period where no one outside of NASA could legally launch private payloads. They didn't actually help a business develop any significant launch infrastructure until they funded Pegasus launches in the early 90s, that's getting towards thirty years. And the real progress has been SpaceX which didn't start till about 11 years ago.
Suppose during the build up to Apollo, the US government had encouraged private orbital launch development. I think the same launch capability we have now, could have been in place in the mid-70s! There are technological advances that have helped SpaceX build a cheaper and more reliable rocket, but as most people have noted, the basic technology is fifty years old.
After the demise of Saudi Arabia's current regime, within a foreseeable time now, the ensuing chaos will be unimaginable.
I don't really have any trouble imagining the supposedly unimaginable. From the rest of the world's point of view, it'll be a considerable disruption of global oil supply possibly with a bit of domino toppling of neighboring governments over subsequent years. In other words, the mid to late 70s revisited.
Public research has the advantage that it can explore areas that may have no obvious short-term economic benefits
In other words, public does things which have no obvious benefits - economic or otherwise, near or far term. When scientists have to face limited resources, they pick and choose which research to do usually on the basis of what sort of results they expect to obtain. Why should governments do things differently than the scientists themselves?
There was no driving need for transistors on Earth, vacuum tubes had become pretty reliable, but were far too heavy and fragile to put in a space ship, so transistor research got a major incidental push from the space race.
I see no evidence of that. Military spending. which incidentally was much larger, might have had such an impact, but it is worth noting that even in the complete absence of support from the federal government, there would have been widespread and rapid development of transistors and integrated circuits.
Sure, we probaby would have moved to transistor-based computers eventually, but what do you suppose the economic value is of getting them a decade or three sooner.
I doubt it's even five years sooner. And due to governments' propensity to hire lots of people and have them do unproductive things, government might have obstructed such progress over the long term by hiring significant fraction of scientists and engineers who would otherwise have assisted in IC and computer development.
How can you say that when there are hundreds (thousands?) of commercial satellites floating around?
And what else? That's not much to show for half a century of activity.
When we have private companies starting to engage in space tourism?
They could have started in 1980.
"Half a century" is not even a single lifetime.
A lifetime, let us note here, is a very long time for us.
A common misconception shared by a lot of Hindus in India. For example, there was a 1857 rebellion that started because Indian soldiers were required to bite the ends off of bullet cartridges (it was part of the loading process for rifles of the time) coated with animal fat (allegedly both beef and pig, which offends just about optimally).
Even if we could beam all of that energy, I suspect that would be the last thing that we want to do. Adding more energy to the earth, will raise temps VERY quickly.
Depends on the amount of energy you're talking about. Adding that much more energy (which is roughly 3600 times more than the Earth currently receives from the Sun) probably will be vaporizing crust (depending on how fast the heat dissipates to space).
What do you think costs more, setting up 5 m^2 in a desert or sending 1 m^2 into space - or building it in space?
That depends. But there's no reason to expect space relative activities to remain expensive. For example, if you can get a self replicating factory onto the surface of the Moon, then the cost is the R&D, launch, and the cost of supervising the resulting infrastructure which is built (which might just be monitored by a few people on Earth remotely). Materials and land are free for the taking - while on Earth, they form a firm floor for how cheap you can get solar power. It might be a high price tag to get it started, but you can end up with infrastructure capable of covering the entire Moon with solar cells (though perhaps over a considerable period of time, like many human lifetimes) for far less than the equivalent infrastructure would be on Earth (assuming it were even allowed to that extent).
Much better to use it for science
Science uses aren't magically better than party balloon uses. I don't see ITER, for example, being a better use of helium than character balloons at Tokyo Disney.
Part of the point of having a functioning market with relatively competent buyers and sellers is to decide who gets scarce resources without having to make dubious and subjective moral judgments. As the price goes up, the more spurious demands will drop out. Tokyo Disney finds some other way to entertain its guests while ITER gets the helium it wants.
That said, I feel that it's worth it because it will eventually boot-strap the private sector.
It hasn't yet and they've been doing this for more than half a century.
In other words commercial R&D has to be obviously profitable, in a short-to-medium term. It can't be tentative or exploratory, curious or inquisitive. It must be about earning, with no regard for learning.
There are two things to note here. First, you clearly don't any experience with commercial R&D. It can be more farsighted and considerably more effective than the publicly funded equivalent (in large part because they have a goal other than burning a certain amount of public funding).
Second, commercial R&D is not the only sort of privately funded R&D. The Keck Telescopes in Hawaii, for example, are privately funded, but they aren't for profit.
In other words, tremendous costs, paltry returns, and the real R&D gets disguised as "derivative products".
You made that up.
Maybe you ought to research NASA's "spinoffs" some time and see how much work is actually done by the private side.
There is ZERO requirement for public-funded R&D to be more expensive than commercial, less productive than commercial or in any way shady.
There's no requirement for this R&D to be more useless, it just is.
The real question is why you trust corporations
Nope. I don't trust business. It's just an observation that they do R&D better than government does. And there's a simple model of self-interest that explains why that happens.
Ask yourself, if drug companies could cure serious ailments, would they?
Yes and no. If the business has huge income now and in the future from a treatment for a serious ailment, they won't be so interested in killing that golden goose for a cure. But if they don't and they can take out a competitor's cash cow, then sure, they would. Not every drug company has such indefinite treatments for every disease. Small businesses in particular don't have this problem.
So perhaps you ought to look at what obstacles there are to small businesses developing cures. First and foremost is a complex regulatory process that can cost tens to hundreds of millions of dollars per eventual successful drug to navigate. That's not imposed by corporations but by various developed world governments.
Your ability to dictate company behaviour is an illusion, citizen.
I merely note that this is routinely observed phenomena.
Take a look at glorious situations like... EA.
I have no dealings with EA, but their customers continue to buy EA's products. If you buy crap, you get crap.
These companies are screwing us around. And we - as individuals - have no influence on them.
Except the obvious - don't buy their stuff. All this crap doesn't matter to the people who don't own their stuff.
NASA's job is learning.
Sure it is. But if their job is "learning", then they have a long way to go. I recommend starting with some lessons on economics.
I don't trust you to influence them, frankly.
I don't trust you to buy an Apple product much less recommend anything for NASA, but that's not my problem. When NASA or other government agencies squander my money, then it becomes my problem.