[ExI] Private and government R&D [was Health care in the USA]

[Rafal Smigrodzki]

On Mon, Jun 29, 2009 at 8:52 AM, Stathis Papaioannou<stathisp at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> What you're listing here is engineering achievements, not basic or
> pure science. Pure science is by its nature something private industry
> won't fund: a particular project is very unlikely to produce
> commercial returns, and if it does it may be decades down the track
> and the initial discovery probably won't be patentable. No company is
> going to invest in high energy physics in the hope that it may lead to
> wormhole technology.

### This completely incorrect. Universities, private trusts and large
private companies are funding basic research all the time. AT&T has
supported a lot of pie-in-the-sky research. So does Google, and even
Microsoft. You gain goodwill, advertising revenue, in-house
competence, a lead over competition in commercialization, this all
adds up to real money.

Rafal