Tbh loads of R&D initially is done by universities.

When I look at how much R&D ASML has offloaded to my old university... shocking. Of course they pay for the PhD and such, but it's also partly paid for by the public.

Not all innovation is purely corporately driven or purely publicly driven. It's a mix of the two, that sometimes favours a bit too much towards public.

I'm also not a big fan of the stock buybacks instead of investing in new R&D/tech.

Unis get the ball rolling and then the students go work for those private entities. Maybe it's different in Europe but here those students pay a pretty petty for that education. Sometime they may get stipends/scholarship but again those aren't freebies from the public, usually, other segments of the university subsidize that spending or the University uses their work as justification to get certain grants from various non for profits or gov't agencies.

Stock buybacks are great when you're invested in that company but not necessarily for others. If I own stock A and they announce buybacks, of course, I'll be happy since the financials of that company will look better now.

This post was edited by ofthevoid on Apr 2 2019 02:25pm

https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/437069-two-more-women-accuse-biden-of-inappropriate-touching

biden getting bombed like Dresden 1945

I'll agree on gay marriage.

When it comes to climate change, the question is mostly how to react to it. It's not a settled issue, and will take a couple of additional decades before we can fairly assess whether the approach of the political left from the 2010s (panic, calls for deindustrialization, demobilization and sacrifice) was the correct one or not.

There is a big difference between granting trans people basic civic rights, like for example choosing their gender in their passport, and granting them special treatment. Do we really have to change every public bathroom to accomodate a tiny minority making up less than 1% of the population, like for example New York is already doing? And does acceptance of transgender people necessarily have to entail allowing people of the opposite sex to infringe on the privacy of others in locker rooms? And what about those ridiculous cases of transgender persons with the size and body structure of a man competing in women's sports?




At least some aspects surrounding the transgender debate are a good example for my point that whatever the liberals/progressives/leftists are supporting does not necessarily have to be progress.
Which is also my answer to your comparison with post-revolution france. Back then, the conservatives were supporting a bad and lost cause. But support for such causes isnt limited to conservatives, just look at those leftists which still support communism despite ample historic counterexamples.

At the end of the day, there simply is no automatism making any change and any progressive policies a step in the right direction. In fact, they can very well be a step backwards. Ideology-driven approaches to climate change, a silly implementation of transgender rights and many affirmative action programs are examples of such progressive causes which are going in the wrong direction. Celebrating any kind of diversity without regard for cultural compatibility and integration success is another example.



"Progressive = good, conservative = bad" is a simplistic and naive worldview. As is "progressive = bad, conservative = good".

This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Apr 2 2019 10:35pm

Glad we can agree on gay marriage.

Climate change has NOT NOT NOT only been about how to implement the fix. That's total bullshit and I think you know it is.... At least in America. If it's different in Europe then I'm glad for you. Conservatives in America started with "it doesn't exist" and only went away from that position in the late 2000's or early 2010's when the evidence was so overwhelming they couldn't ignore it. (lots of Conservative think-tanks still taut that it's fake). Then the talking point was that we aren't causing it anyway, and that was only recently dropped. Now that we're basically at the end of the line for solving the problem conservatives are saying we can't do anything to reasonably solve it. That's probably true.... but it wasn't in the 70's when the problem was first identified.

Your rant on transgender issues is basically irrelevant to the conversation. I never claimed that progressive = good, I claimed that conservatives don't build things, which was in reference to movements that alter society. When you lump everything that changes into "progressivism" then naturally the bad ones that get discarded and forgotten about are included in that.

This post was edited by Thor123422 on Apr 3 2019 05:31pm

The internet was created by hippies...funded by the army, made by radical leftists.

Life is strange.

Familiar with Marshall McLuhan? "The medium is the message", "Global Village".

His work is very good to read

Not by name, but by concepts. I'll have to put him on the list.

The Democratic Party made some serious errors in judgment with the current pool of candidates they encouraged to run.

Sanders was always going to be in the race to fundraise for whoever the eventual candidate will be allowed to be.

Beto, Kamalah, Amy, and Pete shouldn't even have a platform this cycle. They aren't ready for another 8 years in reality (Amy will never be ready for anything higher than a cabinet position). Biden is Toxic Joe. He may be able to pull off a small victory but it's doubtful.

The best Dem ticket in 2020 would be Roy Cooper with Stacey Abrams as his VP pick. If the DNC and DCCC are smart, they'll tell everyone except Bernie and Joe to drop out, give their money to the party, and then start backing Roy and Stacey in a serious way.

This post was edited by inkanddagger on Apr 4 2019 12:58pm

Media demands ‘tax returns’ from prominent politician who has worked in Congress since the stone age.