[HN Gopher] What would it take to recreate Bell Labs?
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What would it take to recreate Bell Labs?
Author : nickwritesit
Score : 93 points
Date : 2024-07-18 19:28 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.construction-physics.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.construction-physics.com)
| csours wrote:
| Crystals! (Tangent, but fun)
|
| Lab Grown Quartz https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fcu8Lz5PHMw
|
| Alan Holden https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wp6bN9vN6e4
| retrac wrote:
| It would require Ma Bell. As the article correctly deduces (IMO),
| it was related to their quasi-monopoly. It was a partial and
| insecure monopoly; they did need to innovate or they would
| eventually be eaten. Telecoms was their business, in the very
| broadest sense. New ways of drawing wire more efficiently would
| benefit their bottom line. New forms of amplifier technology
| would almost certainly benefit them ten or twenty years down the
| line. Same with a new kind of treatment to make telephone poles
| last longer. So basic metallurgy, forestry, and cutting-edge
| semiconductor physics were all within the remit. In hindsight
| it's almost like a public/national research laboratory, that
| happened to be privately held.
| foobarian wrote:
| Google or Microsoft are pretty close nowadays. Look at all the
| infrastructure both of these sponsored over the years. It may
| not be as foundational as what BL did, but then again there is
| not as much low hanging fruit today either.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| Also Google and Microsoft for the most part are not even
| trying to be innovative. Rather they try to milk out every
| last cent of existing products, driving people to buy their
| cloud services, or directly or indirectly sell user data to
| third parties.
| fragmede wrote:
| self driving cars and transformers not good enough for you?
| beezlewax wrote:
| What self driving cars? None of them are up to the task
| from what I've seen.
| NullHypothesist wrote:
| Waymo's got an open-to-public service in SF & Phoenix.
| Testing in LA & Austin now. It works really well, and has
| been expanding quickly (relatively speaking).
| https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/22/travel/self-driving-
| cars-...
| bobmcnamara wrote:
| Not when hipsters in my town strand them with a sack of
| flour.
| nox101 wrote:
| You're saying Google's long work in AI, Quantum Computing,
| etc... are not trying to be innovative? Their researchers
| certainly put out a lot of influential papers.
|
| https://research.google/
| abadpoli wrote:
| There is an insane amount of innovation happening at Google
| and Microsoft et al. The amount of investment going into
| efforts like making data centers more power efficient,
| making better cooling systems, reducing latency or using
| fiber more efficiently etc is incredible and rivals the
| work done at Bell Labs back in the day. You just don't hear
| about it because these private companies have no incentive
| to share it.
|
| And that's entirely separate from the fact that Generative
| AI wouldn't even be a thing if not for the research that
| Google published.
| buildbot wrote:
| Literally just watched an internal talk about this topic
| at work (Microsoft). Lots of cool internal research to
| make things better in every domain, but as you said, it
| won't be shared that much.
|
| The Open Compute Project is great though, and MSR does
| awesome research across many domains too, as does
| Alphabet.
| count wrote:
| Was the Bell Labs Systems Journal shared outside of Bell
| Labs contemporaneously? I have original copies of the
| Unix issue, for example, but have no idea if that was
| 'generally available' back when it came out...
| ghaff wrote:
| Without deeply researching the topic, my understanding is
| that Bell Labs didn't really "open source" everything or
| really most things. Just look at the later law suit over
| Unix.
| esafak wrote:
| https://blog.google/outreach-
| initiatives/environment/deepmin...
| didgetmaster wrote:
| So if Microsoft discovered something very useful (e.g.
| new battery technology, or more efficient air
| conditioning system), but decided that it was something
| they didn't want to develop and market; would they share
| the knowledge or just bury it in case they might want to
| use it someday?
| abadpoli wrote:
| I imagine they would do something like this: https://news
| .microsoft.com/source/features/innovation/datace...
|
| These innovations don't always have to be "marketed" to
| be shared. Things like this get developed and used
| internally, and then sometimes the company likes to brag
| about their accomplishments, even if it's not an
| externally facing product.
| exe34 wrote:
| do you happen to know why the tremendous progress at BL
| was shared (did it take a long time?) whereas the
| progress that happens at today's datacenters are mostly
| secret? I fear that no matter how much progress they
| make, if it's not eventually shared, it'll just be
| lost/wasted and others will have to reinvent it.
| abadpoli wrote:
| My take is that it's related to the parent commenter's
| thoughts on the relative monopoly that Bell had.
|
| If you're a monopoly with no practical competition,
| sharing your accomplishments gets you good will and has
| little downsides. But if you're Microsoft, and one of
| your big moats and competitive advantage is the massive
| fleet of data centers you've been building up over the
| years, you don't want to hurt yourself by giving your
| competition the information they need to build new, more
| efficient data centers.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| > not even trying to be innovative
|
| it was Google's research that led to the current LLM
| revolution
| throwaway81523 wrote:
| Ma Bell was regulated and they used the labs partly as a
| slush fund to smooth out their apparent earnings. When they
| got a rate increase, the labs would be well funded for a
| while, so AT&T wouldn't have to show an unseemly spike in
| profits. When they went for a long while without an increase,
| the labs would run lean until the next increase came. At
| least that's what someone told me back then.
| tedunangst wrote:
| I've read more than one history of bell labs and never
| heard about this dynamic.
| flenserboy wrote:
| Tax law would also have to change:
| https://pro.bloombergtax.com/insights/federal-tax/rd-tax-
| cre....
| mullingitover wrote:
| Winner winner chicken dinner.
|
| I think, ironically, the "Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017" has
| gutted tech jobs and R&D in a profound way.
|
| > The TCJA amended I.R.C. SS174 such that, beginning in 2022,
| firms that invest in R&D are no longer able to currently
| deduct their R&D expenses. Rather, they must amortize their
| costs over five years, starting with the midpoint of the
| taxable year in which the expense is paid or incurred. For
| costs attributable to research conducted outside the U.S.,
| such costs must be amortized over 15 years. This will be the
| first time since 1954 that companies will have to amortize
| their R&D costs, rather than immediately deduct those
| expenses.
|
| The act actually took us back by many decades in terms of R&D
| incentives, and devastated US competitiveness vs China by
| disincentivizing R&D across the board.
| nkozyra wrote:
| Rather than a monopoly, I'd say it takes 2 things (that are
| often present in monopolies):
|
| 1) Big piles of money 2) Enough of a moat that there's no
| _immediate_ threat from competition
|
| #2 drives a lot of the desire to innovate, the hope being that
| by the time competition catches up, you've got so much new
| stuff that they're back where they started.
|
| The closest thing I can think of in the tech space now is Apple
| with consumer hardware moat. The other big players are still
| cannibalizing and copying each other's business segments.
| trelane wrote:
| You are forgetting a vital element: the C-suite must want to
| plow the money into research instead of lining their yachts
| and various houses with it.
| bumby wrote:
| Somewhat less cynical view, but maybe corporations were
| allowed to be more long term focused in the past?
| ElevenLathe wrote:
| Or maybe they had to be, with interest and tax rates what
| they were?
| bumby wrote:
| Could you elaborate or be more specific? Given how long
| BL existed, I'm not sure I can pin down what rates you're
| talking about
| ramblerman wrote:
| > 1) Big piles of money 2) Enough of a moat that there's no
| immediate threat from competition
|
| You just described google 10 years ago. And I would argue
| they have been on a downhill slop ever since.
|
| So I think its something else, perhaps great leadership at
| the right time. Google certianly had the talent, but pichai
| has been an awful steward.
| runevault wrote:
| Even when you create the conditions there's always some
| luck factor. Whether it is leadership with the right vision
| or the right people in other key roles to create
| innovation. But I feel like the 2 points above are sort of
| the starting point that makes it possible for the other
| things to matter (or more likely, flukes can occur).
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Part of the problem, I think, is that Google's relentless
| focus on information is just never to end up being as sexy
| as the stuff Bell Labs worked on over the years.
| passwordoops wrote:
| 3) tax laws that mandate buybacks + dividends cannot exceed
| more than a % value of R&D + CapEx spend.
|
| Otherwise 1+2 result in the C-suite deciding to divert all
| that cash to their pockets. Reference: the past 40 years of
| big business
| YouWhy wrote:
| Thank you - that's a spot on answer. Bell Labs was the only way
| Ma Bell could stay relevant given that the rest of the world
| was making progress on their own.
| rightbyte wrote:
| Dunno. Essentially AT&T founding is no different than tax
| founding. Any uni lab could recreate the conditions.
|
| I believe the academic system is way too gamed nowadays for these
| kind of institutions to not drown. Like, there is focus on
| metrics and numbers rather than fundamentals.
| ertgbnm wrote:
| The vertical monopoly is the big key. A uni lab couldn't
| replicate that.
| n4r9 wrote:
| > Being a subsidiary of a government-sanctioned, vertically
| integrated monopoly gave Bell Labs a broad research scope and
| freedom to pursue long-term research projects unavailable to most
| other industrial labs.
|
| This feels like a big-hitter. In the UK, most government
| expenditure these days is subject to a sort of KPI management
| process. It's very difficult to do long-term work when the team
| has short-term targets to fulfill. That said, I wonder if
| security-critical organisations like GCHQ work that way.
| Obviously Bell labs was a US phenomenon, but I'd be surprised if
| the same problem doesn't persist over there to some degree.
| readingnews wrote:
| You will not "recreate" it, as everything now is short term
| shareholder profit/dividend driven. As others and the article
| notes, they held the long view on innovation.
|
| We could really use a large number of bell labs today. It will
| not happen.
| iwontberude wrote:
| Craigslist is an example of where this doesn't occur but the
| innovation also doesn't exist.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Yes, the trillion dollar market cap businesses got to where
| they are by focusing on short term shareholder profit (what
| does that even mean?) and dividends.
|
| Nvidia famously did not play the long game. Nor did Apple with
| their smartphone bet, or Amazon with their 10+ years of near
| zero profit margins while building a nationwide logistics
| network. Or Alphabet with their data centers, plowing billions
| into YouTube to give access to streaming HD video on demand
| around the world.
| LarsDu88 wrote:
| Google already did this. Google X, Google Brain, Deepmind...
|
| The invention of the transformer architecture that underpins
| modern AI, dozens of core papers in the field.
|
| What they haven't revolutionized is materials science. Memristor
| technology for example, is still grossly underdeveloped.
| nine_k wrote:
| Both memristors and 3D XPoint aka Optane are in a patent limbo.
| The current patent holders tried them, and found the current
| crop too hard and unprofitable, but further research and
| commercialization would require either buying the key patents
| or waiting for them to expire.
| pklausler wrote:
| Commercialization, yes, but not necessarily further research.
| jahewson wrote:
| Hard to get research funded when it can't be commercialised
| sufficiently to merit the risk.
| LarsDu88 wrote:
| That one's on Intel. They marketed Optane poorly and created
| a subpar product for the market they were tackling.
|
| The whole point of memristors is to make something better
| than DRAM and SRAM. Perhaps even blow up the dichotomy
| between storage and memory altogether (as memristor MRAM can
| store information even when powered down, unlike DRAM and
| SRAM). Let here we are in 2024 with no viable memristor
| products on the market.
| lemoncucumber wrote:
| Unfortunately that's the Google of a decade or two ago. Today's
| Google is very focused on cost-cutting and I can't imagine them
| investing in new future-focused projects like those which are
| not under pressure to turn a profit any time soon.
| ASalazarMX wrote:
| It's the circle of life, companies eventually get captured by
| accountants and lose their initial spark. Even companies like
| Microsoft had an era of exciting innovation.
| novia wrote:
| The paper on transformers come out in 2017. Less than a
| decade ago.
| ozim wrote:
| 7 years is basically rounding error from a decade ago.
| LarsDu88 wrote:
| Just like _cough_ Bell Labs maybe?
| fuzztester wrote:
| mumble clayton mumble christensen
|
| mumble business cycles
|
| mumble corporate cycles
|
| mumble evolution
| fuzztester wrote:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clayton_Christensen
| blueboo wrote:
| Demis on designing DeepMind:
|
| "When we set up DeepMind, I took inspiration for our research
| culture from many innovative organizations, including Bell Labs
| and the Apollo program, but also creative cultures like Pixar."
|
| https://www.theatlantic.com/sponsored/google-2023/unlocking-...
|
| As for materials science, there's signs of life in graph nets
| https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/millions-of-new-
| materi.... Meanwhile maybe AlphaFold indicates a precedent
| towards deep learning systems that advance chemistry. I don't
| claim these are revolutions, but extrapolating into the future,
| they might be seen as the catalysts. Maybe.
| andrewstuart wrote:
| Lots of companies recreated Bell Labs.
|
| It's not the 20th century though.
| IshKebab wrote:
| A time machine.
|
| These places (Xerox Parc is the other obvious example) existed
| because recent breakthroughs opened up the possibilities and they
| exploited almost inevitable inventions.
|
| I think the mistake is thinking that the flurry of creation is
| linked to the _company_ or the _institution_ rather than the
| general state of progress.
|
| As soon as someone invents viable Human-Machine Interfaces or
| whatever there will be _some_ company that invents a load of
| seminal stuff around that.
| nine_k wrote:
| It certainly linked to a company or institution that were able
| to harness the potential and release the innovation as research
| or products. Not all of them.did.
|
| It's like wind energy: the wind blows for everyone, but some
| build a turbine or a windmill. (Though indeed, when the wind us
| not blowing, even the best turbine is going to be a
| disappointment.)
| photochemsyn wrote:
| Didn't high top marginal tax rates in the 1960s-1970s era give a
| lot of corporations an incentive to put profits back into R & D
| as it would avoid high taxation on those profits (and I think the
| R & D outlay was a tax writeoff, too). E.g.
|
| https://slate.com/business/2012/07/xerox-parc-and-bell-labs-...
| renewiltord wrote:
| It exists. It's called the Thiel Fellowship and they're
| everywhere.
|
| If you want a research facility that failed to take advantage
| then it's Google.
| fragmede wrote:
| It's fascinating how Google --transformers--> OpenAI looks like
| Xerox Parc --gui--> Apple if you squint real hard.
| drowntoge wrote:
| While I agree with you, the amount of the squinting required
| hurts my eyes.
| treyd wrote:
| Except that's supporting the ego of a particularly questionable
| billionaire instead of being truly R&D for its own sake in
| advancing technology.
| Krustopolis wrote:
| What is questionable about Peter Thiel?
| drowntoge wrote:
| That I'd happily go back to the stone age rather than have
| him and the likes of him own the tech sector and be left
| alone in driving it into the next century.
|
| And I'm far from alone in feeling this way.
| treyd wrote:
| He's closely associated with the Neoreactionary movement
| (NRx, for more research look up Curtis Yarvin) and
| coincidentally happens to be on good terms with the new VP
| pick JD Vance. They see principles like democracy as
| barriers to achiving personal power and enrichment. It
| makes a lot of sense he'd build a surveillance firm.
|
| Relatively recent article from the Atlantic specifically on
| Thiel: https://archive.is/1Nz71
|
| Slightly older article in Vanity Fair that covers his
| connections with NRx and other topics:
| https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/04/inside-the-new-
| right...
| akira2501 wrote:
| What would it take? Two world wars leading a protracted cold war
| between two "superpowers."
|
| No surprise that the end of the cold war brought about the end of
| our collective need of a closely held quasi-national entity like
| AT&T.
|
| I think the real question is "What would it take to recreate it
| in the abstract, from the disparate components we have attached
| to the internet today?" Or to rephrase it "What happened to the
| early promise of the internet when it was mostly available only
| through Universities?"
| pipeline_peak wrote:
| Corporate dominance.......Sorry!
| vondur wrote:
| At the most basic level it's all about money. ATT had a monopoly
| on telecom in the US and had the money to set up the research
| labs. After that you need people that can recognize and fine
| brilliant people in their respective fields and giving them the
| resources they need.
| Philip-J-Fry wrote:
| Bell Labs and things like it were around when the primary purpose
| of a business was to make money, and do it healthily, rather than
| to find a bigger fish. It's no wonder many of these companies
| were quite old. They created sound businesses.
|
| For the giants of today it's all about milking existing products
| for all their worth. Not finding new revenue avenues. The modern
| stock market is to blame. If number goes down then the earth is
| on fire apparently.
|
| The other aspect is, why try and innovate yourselves when you can
| wait for someone else to do it and then try and acquire them?
| It's short term thinking but that's what business is largely
| about these days.
|
| Maybe this will change with time. I suspect it will as the world
| is on a track to become more insular again. This may drive
| innovation at home.
| jcgrillo wrote:
| I was thinking about a very small version of this topic the other
| day--how can you re-create the intrinsic motivation of a startup
| in a large company? My conclusion was you just can't. The
| combination of scarcity, urgency, and potential opportunity
| present in startups seems to catalyze something that can't (at
| least maybe not ethically) be simulated.
|
| Maybe in the large what we really need to get it together and
| pull these things off is immediate existential threat e.g. a
| world war or crisis of similar magnitude.
| nxobject wrote:
| Everyone talks about the monopoly - don't forget the pressure to
| Do Good Deeds and to look like You're Bringing New Tech to avoid
| the general public's grumbling about, well, having to rent your
| phone from Ma Bell for $$$$$ and to live with their restrictions
| on what you could hook up to their lines. An expensive PR
| operation, but a good one for sure.
|
| I prefer cynical explanations for why the C-suite would like to
| keep Bell Labs around, and other posters have also mentioned
| managing perceived profits, and avoiding anti-trust.
| mhneu wrote:
| The key thing is time horizon.
|
| Bell Labs invested in research that would bring payoff 20+ years
| in the future. That's in part because they were a quasi-monopoly.
| (Also because there was less pressure back then on execs to focus
| on short-term stock prices.)
|
| It's also because Bell Labs ran a lot on government contracts and
| grants. The government CAN look 20+ years in the future. And it
| does.
|
| You can see the same effect in pharma today. Pharma R&D develops
| drugs that will hit the clinic in the next 5-10 years at most.
| The true basic research of identifying targets and understanding
| cancer/Alzheimer's mechanisms to launch future drugs -- that's
| all funded by the government.
| jackcosgrove wrote:
| Agreed on the public-private nature of Bell Labs.
|
| I would also ask how we could recreate another exemplar in that
| space, DARPA. Now of course DARPA is alive and kicking, but
| what about another DARPA, say in Europe?
|
| The two organizations did have different missions, with DARPA
| being mostly an investor while Bell Labs was mostly a
| practitioner.
|
| The question that springs to mind is, why did Bell Labs decay
| while DARPA did not?
| colinng wrote:
| We don't need to recreate Bell Labs.
|
| We have SpaceX and Starlink - that's where innovation is
| happening. Compare Dishy to the Starlink Mini (which can run off
| a power bank), or the first live-feed (no radio blackout period)
| on orbital re-entry. And they costed much less than ULA and
| provided much more to the public. Practically saved Ukraine (try
| defending your country with no communications). Or Tesla who has
| made EVs (and charging stations) an actual thing. Or Neuralink
| who's allowed a quadriplegic to use a computer like you and I.
|
| We don't need giant monopolies like Microsoft who - what did they
| deliver over the past 3 decades? A knockoff of the Mac. OSes full
| of vulnerabilities that require antivirus and firewalls. Clippy.
| Nearly killed Apple (who gave us the first usable GUI, all our
| songs in our pocket, and the first actually smart smartphone.)
|
| What does Microsoft do that is innovative? They buy actual
| innovative companies (they "own" OpenAI for all intents and
| purposes). But also open source dotnet. Typescript. LINQ and EF.
| And I hate to hand them the trophy, but the Surface Pro is a real
| computer - the iPad Pro can't do real work like build you an App
| or site with VS Code - it can't even run Apple's own XCode.
|
| We don't need giant monopolies. Plenty that smaller companies can
| do to outmaneuver incumbents. SpaceX will figure out passenger
| planes before anyone at the ULA will figure out how to make their
| spacecraft not leak.
| ayakang31415 wrote:
| Lots of innovation came from Bell Labs or other national
| laboratories that are foundations of many modern technologies. I
| always thought that private sector alone cannot make
| technological progress fast without the help of the government
| sponsored science facilities. It is incredible to see what came
| out of those facilities because the scientists worked really hard
| because of their genuine interest in working on such projects
| because they either like the process of figuring things out or
| their curiosity cannot be quenched until they get it.
| jackcosgrove wrote:
| Also, it seems like promising (a real promise that can be
| backed up) researchers a comfortable upper middle class income,
| job security, good benefits, and light-touch supervision is a
| good match for the type of person who excels at basic research.
|
| Too little security and nothing ever comes to fruition. Too
| much money sloshing around and you attract the wrong sort of
| crowd.
|
| Public entities are best suited to providing this type of
| compensation and employment arrangement.
| unkoman wrote:
| From a non-tech perspective, IKEA, as a private company, shares a
| similar focus with Bell Labs on enhancing individual components
| to improve the overall system.
| nox101 wrote:
| What are some examples?
|
| What I've noticed buying Ikea stuff over the last 30 years so
| that it's gotten progressively lower-quality.
|
| Take for example their Kallax shelves. I've purchased them at
| least 4 times in the last 20 years, each time, a part that was
| metal before got replaced by a plastic or wood part, the wood
| got thinner or less dense, .... They still work so maybe that's
| innovative.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Many outfits have tried to reinvent the Lockheed Skunk Works, but
| to no avail, because they always tried to improve on it by
| removing its core principles.
|
| Though I must say, SpaceX may be its worthy successor.
| LarsDu88 wrote:
| SpaceX doesn't really do any sort of frontier research. They do
| technology. They are taking concepts that have been done in the
| past and doing them more economically.
|
| They have pushed the state-of-the art with projects like
| Raptor-2, but doing fundamental research and simply doing
| engineering are different things.
| UniverseHacker wrote:
| Skunk works also did technology
| WalterBright wrote:
| I liked Bell Labs ever since 1986 or 1987 or so. I was
| considering developing a C++ compiler, but was concerned about:
|
| 1. would I need a license to develop a C++ compiler?
|
| 2. would I need a license to call it C++?
|
| So I called up their head intellectual property lawyer. He
| laughed, and said feel free, and thanked me for asking. He said
| other people just went ahead and copied things hoping BL wouldn't
| notice.
|
| So thank you, Bell Labs! You guys were the best.
| 1992spacemovie wrote:
| Ironically wholesome lawyer story. That's a short list btw.
| GreedIsGood wrote:
| None of this addresses perhaps the main issue. Bell Labs predated
| the venture capital revolution of the 1970s.
|
| The key insight of venture capital was that firms like Bell Labs
| were holding on to very valuable resources at compensation rates
| that were far below what those resources could generate if they
| were empowered to create their own firms.
|
| This was tremendously successful. While we have no
| counterfactual, innovation in the US blosomed ove the last 50
| years. The fundamental research may have languished (I would
| probably disagree, moore's law didn't happen through magic for
| example) a tremendous number of companies, and all of the large
| companies we know of today, which provide all of the services of
| the modern world were a result of venture capital.
| SuperNinKenDo wrote:
| I'm not sure that last part lands quite the way you meant it
| to.
| coliveira wrote:
| Moore's law is dead in the USA for almost 20 years. The
| improvements we see come from research in Asia and the
| Netherlands.
|
| Also the idea that US tech companies are doing much innovation
| is debatable. They are designing products for the international
| markets, but the core technologies are more and more coming
| from Asia.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Thomas Edison invented the first commercial invention laboratory.
|
| The Wright Bros invented the first directed research and
| development program, where theories are developed and tested on a
| series of prototypes, leading towards the objective.
| ge96 wrote:
| a ranch and infinite money
| kkfx wrote:
| What made Bell Labs so successful is simple:
|
| - public funds
|
| - researchers free to research instead of producing something
| marketable in 6 months or less
|
| - long term projects and goals as a NORMAL thing instead of being
| considered folly
|
| - a school system designed to make citizens not useful idiots
| https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/08/i-was-usef...
|
| Unfortunately the last point in the present time demand IN THEORY
| at least some new generations to be achieved, in practice the
| ruling class do not want at all anything like that so it's mere
| utopia.
|
| As a bottomline: EU was the most advanced countries of the world,
| when it do public funded research and industry, it commit suicide
| with WWI, the USA have copied and advance the EU model after
| WWII, then commit suicide as well with finaciarisation of
| anything, now it's China who rule, but the model, the substance
| is the same: countries grow and prosper with public funded
| research with long terms goals and researchers free to master
| themselves with the industry picking marketable research from
| them instead of commanding research. Countries might vary,
| populations might vary, implementations might vary a bit, but the
| principle so far have proved to be the same.
|
| As a result we are in a decline phase, which probably result in a
| series of LOST wars, and a long era of poverty and destruction
| before a new start.
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(page generated 2024-07-18 23:03 UTC)