innovation entrepreneur

1019

this is a generic node for innovation, invention, entrepreneur

see techo-optimist lomborg, shill, libtard delay BS

see also concept myth : yankee ingenuity, innovation, invention, techno-optimism

see prev variant eg social entre

see R&D

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AN 12 25

After President Donald Trump returned to the White House on January 20, his administration aggressively downsized a long list of federal government agencies with the help of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and its then-leader, Tesla/SpaceX/X.com head Elon Musk. Trump claimed that his goal was reducing "waste, fraud and abuse," but critics of the Trump Administration/DOGE cuts argued that they were robbing the agencies of crucial personnel they need in order to function properly — from the U.S. Social Security Administration (SSA) to the National Weather Service (NWS) to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).

Another agency that has been suffering chaos during Trump's second presidency is the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

In an article published on December 4, Axios' Pete Sullivan describes the FDA departures that are contributing to instability at the agency.

"Another abrupt departure of a high-ranking Food and Drug Administration official is raising alarm about a brain drain that could mean new drugs take longer to reach the public," Sullivan reports. "Why it matters: Biotech and pharmaceutical companies rely on the FDA for dependable guidance as they spend huge sums developing new treatments. The American public needs the agency to ensure treatments are safe and effective…. Driving the news: The latest uproar surrounds the unexpected departure of Richard Pazdur, a respected oncologist who just three weeks ago became the fourth person to direct the FDA's drug center this year."

Sullivan adds, "Pazdur's appointment had helped calm nerves to some degree within industry after months of turmoil. But now, executives and even former FDA commissioners are publicly questioning the agency's direction."

One of the people who is sounding the alarm about the FDA is Biotechnology Innovation Organization CEO John Crowley.

Crowley told Axios, "This constant turmoil is undermining America's leadership in biotechnology, creating unprecedented regulatory instability and unpredictability, and risks ceding this critical sector to China."

According to Sullivan, "morale" has "plummeted" at the FDA.

A former FDA staffer, interviewed on condition of anonymity, told Axios, "They don't talk to each other. They go to the bathroom, they come (back), they shut their door."

*Read Peter Sullivan's full article for Axios is available at this link.

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an 10 25

After President Donald Trump returned to the White House almost nine months ago, his administration carried out an aggressive campaign to downsize a range of federal government agencies. And it did so with the help of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which was led by Tesla/SpaceX/X.com head Elon Musk at the time.

Agencies ranging from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) to the U.S. Social Security Administration (SSA) were targeted for mass layoffs. Another was the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE).

In a Canary Media article republished by Mother Jones on October 16, journalist Maria Gallucci details the Trump Administration's push to eviscerate the Energy Department's Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations (OCED) — a move that might have killed a lot of job creation.

"The Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations was supposed to be a launchpad for ambitious projects to help America lead the way on cleaner power and manufacturing. Now, it's been reduced to a shell of itself," Gallucci explains. "As the Trump Administration slashes spending and fires workers across the federal government, the U.S. Department of Energy has emerged as one of the hardest-hit agencies — and perhaps no other of its divisions has been singled out as deliberately as OCED…. The situation is best summarized by the budget the White House has requested for OCED for the next fiscal year: $0."

According to Gallucci, this is a "dramatic reversal" from former President Joe Biden's energy policies.

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"During the Biden Administration," Gallucci explains, "Congress endowed it with nearly $27 billion to try to scale up cutting-edge technologies that could curb planet-warming pollution from industrial facilities and power plants. Trump officials have, in recent months, hollowed out the office, canceling billions in previously issued awards for everything from low-carbon chemical manufacturing to rural energy resiliency, while also dismissing over three-quarters of its employees…. Experts and insiders warn that the tumult within OCED and the DOE more broadly is eroding the private sector's trust in the federal government and its ability to drive energy innovation."

Advait Arun of the Center for Public Enterprise told Gallucci that the Trump Administration "has really created a chilling effect on the willingness of future early-stage technology developers to work with the Department of Energy."

A former OCED staffer, interviewed on condition of anonymity, told Gallucci, "We are eliminating ourselves as a leader in the clean energy space, especially for the industrial complex. What I'm seeing is China is about to slip right into that position. Just logically and economically, I don't understand the steps that are being taken."

*Read Maria Gallucci's full article at this Mother Jones link.

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AN 7 25

Comments that Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) made about Indigenous people have recently resurfaced, and they could cause a headache for former President Donald Trump's campaign among Native American voters.

The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reported Tuesday that when Vance argued last year against renaming the Wayne National Forest in Ohio, he referred to Native Americans as the "enemy." On another occasion, the GOP's 2024 vice presidential nominee called Indigenous People's Day — which some cities celebrate instead of Columbus Day — a "fake holiday."

Wayne National forest is named for Major General Anthony Wayne, who massacred Indigenous people during the Northwest Indian War, most notably during the Battle of Fallen Timbers in present-day Maumee, Ohio. When making his case against changing the name of the forest in spite of requests from Indigenous tribes, Vance wrote that "[Wayne] fought wars and won peace for our government, the government you now serve, and hewed Ohio out of rugged wilderness and occupied enemy territory."

Marin Webster Denning, who is a member of the Oneida tribe, said in an interview with the Journal-Sentinel that Native Americans are "not the enemy."

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"There is an occupation, and there are enemies, but revisions of history like this erase us," he said.

"Some people may view [Wayne] as a hero," Oneida activist and Milwaukee, Wisconsin resident Jacob Abrams told the paper. "[B]ut not for us."

Vance's disparaging comments about a holiday celebrating Indigenous culture in 2021 are also being scrutinized in the wake of the Ohio senator's selection as Trump's running mate. ICT Journalist Mary Annette Pember of the Red Cliff Ojibwe Tribal Nation in Wisconsin dug up a **tweet from Vance during President Joe Biden's first year in office in which the eventual Ohio seantor wrote: “Indigenous Peoples’ Day is a fake holiday created to sow division. Of course Joe Biden is the first president to pay it any attention."

"A half a millennium ago Columbus used technology developed in Europe to sail across a giant ocean and discover a new continent. Today we celebrate that daring and ingenuity," he wrote in a follow-up tweet. "Happy Columbus Day!"

Indigenous People's Day became a substitute for Columbus Day as knowledge of Columbus' brutal enslavement of Indigenous people in the Caribbean broke through into mainstream consciousness. Spanish Dominican priest Bartolomé de las Casas, who accompanied Columbus on several of his expeditions, described some of Columbus' atrocities in his journal.

"[Spaniards acted] like ravening beasts, killing, terrorizing, afflicting, torturing, and destroying the native peoples, doing all this with the strangest and most varied new methods of cruelty, never seen or heard of before, and to such a degree that this Island of Hispaniola once so populous (having a population that I estimated to be more than three million), has now a population of barely two hundred persons," he wrote in 1542. "And the Christians, with their horses and swords and pikes began to carry out massacres and strange cruelties against them. They attacked the towns and spared neither the children nor the aged nor pregnant women nor women in childbed, not only stabbing them and dismembering them but cutting them to pieces as if dealing with sheep in the slaughter house."

Vance's comments about Native Americans may hurt the Trump campaign's voter outreach efforts, particularly in Arizona. Biden won the Grand Canyon State by roughly 11,000 votes in 2020, largely due to turnout from Indigenous voters in Navajo country.

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2 stories at war at fossil fuel ceo:

note god devil terms

https://gizmodo.com/republicans-slobbered-all-over-themselves-to-apologize-1847959116

ref 3 gizmodo bAD CODE NO LNX

gop have a, shall we say,...relationship. But that relationship went from snuggly to downright NSFW on Thursday at a hearing ostensibly about...The House Oversight Committee welcomed executives from four fossil companies and two trade groups as well as a pipeline welder to probe decades of campaigns to confuse the public. There’s plenty of fodder. The past few years have seen...$59,956 in oil and gas money in the 2020 election cycle) said, thanking the company for increasing production. “I want to thank those companies that are actually increasing production,” Jordan later added.

“These companies beingvillainized,” said Rep. Jody Hice (recipient of $5,000 from the oil and gas industry in 2020, which talk about getting your money’s worth). Hice did not ask a question.

“It’s just people who don’t have anything better to do than type on their keyboards,” Rep. Byron Donalds ($18,110 from oil and gas interests so far this cycle) said of climate activists before turning to the oil CEOs. “Let’s be very clear, you need anapology. What I witnessed today isrank intimidation by the chair of this committee. ... It is disgusting, it is absolutely disgusting. Somebody better call Merrick Garland, tell him to get in here, and watch the intimidation that came from this very panel today. It’s not about defending Big Oil. ... I’m sorry for you. And I’m sorry for the people in our country who have to witness shenanigans like this.”

“While this committee may not like you because you’re executives, because your companies have been successful, I just want to apologize for the decorum. Because thank you for what you’ve done,” said Rep. Yvette Herrell ($115,126 from the industry she was overseeing, making her the second-biggest oil and gas recipient in the House so far this cycle). “There are people here who believe in you. Thank you. ... In fact, I would just submit tosaving anybody who has gotten a vaccination or who is going to get one, thank you to the oil and gas industry because I would bet that almost every single one of the syringes has been touched by a petroleum product. ... I just want to thank all of you for being here today.”

“You guys all have a good story to tell. Don’t be afraid to tell people how much cleaner things are than in the past. It doesn’t do any good for you any good to get allwokeon us,” Rep. Glenn Grothman ($30,576 from oil and gas in 2020 and $3,570 so far this year.)

“It’s been very shameful how the other side wants to demonize ouroil and gas industry. I’m very proud of our oil and gas industry, the innovators that adopt new tech, provide a higher standard of living, and jobs throughout our country,” saidRep. Bob Gibbs, the $28,558 oil and gas man in 2020. He later added, “I’m disappointed the chair failed to recognize that and demonize them on that.”

“I apologize to our witnesses that were called and asked to take part in this today,” said Rep. Pete Sessions, who has so far received $11,400 from oil and gas interests and raked in $237,375 in 2018. (2020 data was unavailable.)

“There is a moral case to be made for the fossil fuel industry and fossil fuels as a whole,” Rep. Pat Fallon, who has taken in $5,600 in oil and gas money. “If we want more abundant and inexpensive and cleaner energy—which we all should do—these witnesses here should be the ones that we are supporting and applauding and not demonizing.”

“These very important energy companies and the [American] Petroleum Institute understand you’ve got yourself here, you’ve seen the attitude of the folks on the left of this committee. When you get asked this morning that, aren’t you embarrassed, that’s really an irrational question to ask CEOs about their company,” said Rep. Andy Biggs, the receiver of $27,253 in oil and gas money in 2020.

“My, my, my. Good lord help us to be protected from this threat from within. American patriots are so done with career politiciansand Democratic socialist insanity... We are nauseated by thecontinuous attacks on working [ie real ie white?] Americans and American industry. This entire debacle of a hearing today of why my colleagues across the aisle will lose their majority status very soon,” Rep. Clay Higgins predicted. (Higgins has received $10,426 in fossil fuel cash so far this cycle and $40,773 in 2020.)

“Did President Biden or anyone from the White House apologize to you?” Rep. James Comer, who received $18,500 in fossil fuel cash in 2020, asked the welder Republicans invited. (For the record, he did not....

a United Nations report out this week warns the world as a whole is facing a “production gap,” with more fossil fuels on tap to be produced than is compatible with a safe climate. Other reports have warned that new fossil fuel exploration must stop next year, emissions must fall at unprecedented rates over the next decade, and that cutting fossil fuel production and use is the most surefire way to do that. The reason we’re at this precipice is because the fossil fuel industry pursued a misinformation campaign while further entrenching their product with the global economy, fully aware that it would cause major climate damage.

It is also because Republicans (and a handful of Democrats) have blocked climate action, and have maintained a grip on power in no small part thanks to millions of dollars from the fossil fuel industry. The industry has directed roughly 85% of its donations in 2020 to Republicans, and is on track to do the same this year (and has done the same in past years, too). Those same Republicans who apologized to the industry and thanked it on Thursday.

Anyways, this is all very cool and very legal.

aha recall CoC bunch of big monopolistic corps, so gotta throw up little guy am dream indiv rugged invis hand who wants to be a millionaire Steve Jobs entre BS innovation see sbec, sm biz survive comm etc // MLM amway devos pyramid schemes

aha 820 sparked by rnc convention: entre is also a GOD term, ties into Yankee ingenuity/ am exceptionalism sil valley garage mystique: affirms meritocrisy [sic] that racism will fix itself when AA POC start small biz that expand (cain godfather pizza 999 RIP?] over looking the fact that redlining by gov't and banks deprived of capital for decades; but of course you have to get rid of burdensome regulation/red tape that stiffle [when in fact corps/amazon will use data to steal your idea/product and crush you or buy you out.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/how-the-pandemic-pulled-back-the-curtain-on-the-flawed-global-economic-system/

no lnx

How the pandemic pulled back the curtain on the flawed global economic system

Written by Marshall Auerback, Jan Ritch-Frel April 2, 2020

When the wealthiest country in the world is unable to produce basic medical gear to cope with a rampaging pandemic, it is dealing with a strategic vulnerability by depending on multinational supply chains to produce manufactured goods. Absent sufficient redundancies and physical reserves of resources, “just-in-time” lean supply systems can’t cope with sudden disruptions. The global pandemic of 2020 is a case in point.

This pandemic continues to unfold, but it will serve as the D-Day equivalent of a new predominating economic model for the world, and which in many ways was beginning to take shape before COVID-19. At its core, developed and mixed market economies will factor in the health risk and growing military cost of sustaining international supply chains against investing in high-tech production closer to their markets, and increasingly export their goods to the rest of the world.

Dozens of economies that developed in the past 50 years by enmeshing themselves in the international supply chain on the basis of their labor price advantage will find themselves increasingly cut out of the new process. The contest for global power will increasingly pivot to the extraction and refinement of minerals and component materials that are critical to sustaining the high-tech economy model, away from carbon energy resources. We will be hearing much more about “national stockpiling” and “strategic reserves” beyond oil in the months and years ahead.

Not only has COVID-19 exposed potential health risks and costs involved (as globalized trade routes become vectors of contagion), but the champions of the offshoring phenomenon increasingly resort to myths and misconceptions that are irrelevant to a 21st-century economy. They are as obsolete as spending trillions annually on managing the supply and price of Middle East oil, which American foreign policy figures, including Martin Indyk, are beginning to openly say “isn’t worth it.”

Before we get into the details on thefuture economy, let’s quickly review how the U.S. saw a massive decline in its industrial capacity. Bad ideas and pernicious orthodoxies grew like barnacles over the decades on what was once the world’s leading manufacturer. First was the idea that offshoring is essential to preserving profitability. Often this assertion has been more apparent than real. As far as profitability goes, many companies have made choices to move manufacturing offshore despite continuing domestic profits on home shores. For example,the five North American plants that General Motors (GM) shut down in 2019 were still profitable, but the company, which had received a government bailout in 2009, chose to refocus on the higher-margin operations in China.

Of course, capitalism controlled by bankers and speculators gives free rein to companies to make profits on how they see fit.The consequences are that for decades, Detroit’s “Big Three” automakers have consistently underperformed their German and Japanese counterparts because of their decision to embrace a Wall Street-driven culture that has prioritized short-term quarterly earnings, massive dividend payouts and unprecedented spending on stock repurchases over productive investment in innovation. And as GM’s 2019 experience illustrates, the resultant profits did not go to spur domestic reinvestment, which in turn creates domestic employment, but abroad to expand China’s manufacturing base. GM is but one example of the hundreds of major corporate actors that have denuded the country’s industrial ecosystem, creating gaps in the U.S. workforce and shortages of vital skilled labor.

There are also multiple examples of companies acquiring smaller innovative companies “solely to discontinue the target’s innovation projects and preempt future competition,” according to researchers Colleen Cunningham, from London Business School, and Florian Ederer and Song Ma, both from Yale. A particularly poignant example of these “killer acquisitions,” given today’s ongoing ventilator shortage, is Covidien’s attempted 2012 purchase of California-based Newport Medical Instruments, a smaller competing medical device company that had secured a contract from the federal government in 2010 to produce up to40,000 mobile ventilators.But as David Dayen of The American Prospect observed, the purported rationale for the acquisition was bogus: It had nothing to do with expanding Covidien’s product base and everything to do with destroying a competitor whose product “could cut into its existing profits.”

For years, the political economist Seymour Melman argued that companies that embraced the soft option of downsizing/offshoring labor would ultimately create grave production weaknesses in the U.S. economy and stifle innovation. Higher domestic wages, by contrast, would induce competent managers to compensate by using and investing in more and better machinery, which in turn would lead to a virtuous cycle of production: higher profits, which can lead to higher wages, leading to better machinery and organization of work.

While American companies may think they are improving their individual competitiveness in the short term by shifting operations to low-cost labor economies, the current pandemic illustrates that they collectively undermined America’s (and their own) competitiveness over the long haul.

...

https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/the-surprising-decline-of-innovation-in-the-west-entrepreneurship-has-actually-been-on-a-worryingly-downward-trend-since-the-1980s-heres-why/

n o lnx

The surprising decline of innovation in the West: Entrepreneurship has actually been on a worryingly downward trend since the 1980s ?— here’s why

Photo by Mavo, Shutterstock

Written by Wim Naude, The Conversation October 8, 2019

The idea that we are living in an entrepreneurial age, experiencing rapid disruptive technological innovation on a scale amounting to a new “industrial revolution” is a pervasive modern myth. Scholars have written academic papers extolling the coming of the “entrepreneurial economy”. Policymakers and investors have pumped massive amounts of funding into start-up ecosystems and innovation. Business schools, universities and schools have moved entrepreneurship into their core curricula.

The only problem is that the West’s golden entrepreneurial and innovation age is behind it. Since the 1980s entrepreneurship, innovation and, more generally, business dynamics, have been steadily declining – particularly so in the US. As economist Tyler Cowen has found:

These days Americans are less likely to switch jobs, less likely to move around the country, and, on a given day, less likely to go outside the house at all […] the economy is more ossified, more controlled, and growing at lower rates.

The ossified economy

No matter what measure of entrepreneurship you use, the underlying trend is the same: downwards. For instance, measured as the ratio of new firms (those younger than one year) to total firms, then entrepreneurship in the US declined by around 50% between 1978 and 2011. In terms of the share of young firms (those younger than five years), entrepreneurship declined from 47% in the late 1980s to 39% in 2006. Meanwhile, people working for big firms (those employing more than 250 people) rose from 51% to 57% of the overall workforce and the average firm size increased from 20 to 24 people over the same period.

Job-to-job mobility, within job mobility and geographical mobility – all indirect measures of business entry and exit dynamics – have been declining. There is also evidence that after 2000, job creation in the US shifted from the creation of high-paying jobs to low-wage (low-skilled) ones. Similarly, the share of entrepreneurs with higher education in the US declined from 12.2% in 1985 to 5.3% in 2014. As economist Nicholas Kozeniauskas puts it, “the decline in entrepreneurship is concentrated among the smart”.

Several measures indicate that entrepreneurs are also less innovative. The ratio of patents to GDP in the US is declining and the cost of patenting is increasing. The age of inventors, when they registered their first patent, and the average size of research teams, are on the rise. Plus, as economist Nicholas Bloom and his co-authors have found, “research productivity for the aggregate US economy has declined by a factor of 41 since the 1930s, an average decrease of more than 5% per year”.

As well as being a problem in the US – the world’s largest and most complex economy – evidence also confirms that entrepreneurship and innovation are declining in Belgium, the UK, and Germany. And, as I found in a recent paper, ILO data shows a decline, from 8.2% in 1991 to 6.8% in 2018 in entrepreneurship in high-income economies.

Reasons for the decline

One reason for this decline is a fall in population growth and population aging. Europe’s fertility rate is 1.6 children per woman, which means that each generation will be 20% smaller than the previous one.

Another reason is growing market concentration. Incumbent firms have a growing amount of power that stops new ones from entering the market. Similarly, new competition is suppressed by the proliferation of so-called zombie firms. These are firms older than ten years that have low productivity levels and are often kept in business by subsidised finance. There may be more than 100,000 zombie firms in the UK alone.

These reasons are probably interlinked. Poor population growth means lower levels of demand, which encourages existing companies to profit as much as possible from their existing markets. This means they stifle the entry to new competitors and extract more profit by paying employees less. The increasing number of mergers and acquisitions, as well as decline in initial public offerings, with young companies preferring to be bought by large incumbents, reflects this too.

Based on the nature of the problem, the solutions to this entrepreneurial decline are straightforward: break up monopolies, improve competition, allow markets to work better, facilitate knowledge diffusion. Moreover, and vitally, it will require boosting overall demand. This means more investment by governments in public services and infrastructure, reducing high levels of inequality and improving the bargaining power of labour unions.

The case for these policies is overwhelming. But, unfortunately, it might not be as simple as this. In a recent paper, I argue that the fact that the decline in entrepreneurship is confined to wealthy and complex economies, suggest that this may be a price to pay for complexity.

As Geoffrey West has stressed, the same growth curve that characterises living organisms also applies to the growth of cities, economies and companies. After growing beyond a certain threshold, size and complexity stabilises and growth levels off. So it becomes more challenging to create and use new valuable knowledge once you reach a certain size. And, the more complex a production process is, the more that can go wrong.

But how concerned should we really be? Some scholars have questioned whether the decline in entrepreneurship is necessarily undesirable. They point out that the decline has been accompanied by more employment, more job stability and better job matching (where people find jobs that better fit their preferences and talents). It may also reflect that the most productive firms, which happen to be larger, are being allocated the most resources, which is good for the economy.

If indeed this is the case, then the downside may be that complex, ossified, modern economies will gradually become less flexible, less adaptable to external change – and hence more vulnerable. Survival will therefore involve finding ways to deal with systemic societal vulnerability.The Conversation

Wim Naudé, Professorial Fellow, Maastricht Economic and Social Research Institute on Innovation and Technology (UNU-MERIT), United Nations University.

This article is republished from The Conversation