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by mrjangles
1676 days ago
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What on earth? Bell Labs wasn't publicly funded. Talk about turning things around. Bells Labs is the best example of the universal rule that just about every good piece of science for the last 70 years was produced by the private sector. Every time I see something along the lines of "<so and so> tech wouldn't exist without government funding because...." I do some research and it turns out that the article was based on one person working for the government who contributed about 1/100'th of the important work, meanwhile the other 99% of the work being done by the private sector doesn't get mentioned. Sometimes the government also takes credit because they funded 50 million out of a 5 billion dollar budget, or something equally ridiculous. As for Bell Labs, I remember watching a documentary about Shockley and co inventing the transistor. The military decided they needed that technology and managed to get their hands on some samples from Bell Labs. They set up a team to try to work out what Bell Labs was doing. Even having all of the Bell Lab's work in front of them, and knowing what to do, they couldn't keep up. They interviewed the military scientists much later for the documentary and they were all very depressed by the whole situation because for every one month of work the military group did catching up, Bell Labs had pulled 3 months further ahead. The government can't even keep up with the private sector when they are copying them, let alone actually initiating that kind of research. It isn't a coincidence that almost all the best research in the world is done at privately run American universities. At best, good research can get done at public universities when they receive industry funding. |
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Someone checked that argument, and found out that out of thousands British lighthouses, not a single one was built by government. They all were built by various associations of mariners or traders.