Remix clone Hacker News

> It's interesting because in some respects we are in the middle of a cultural and scientific Renaissance

I'm sorry to rebutt your very first assertion but we had been in a cultural and scientific Renaissance and the last 15 years have been the slow unwinding of that. We got lucky that the internet explosion overlapped with the tail end of publicly supported cultural and scientific production.

I hung out with physics majors in college, all of them smarter than us compsci chuds, and uniformly they are absolutely struggling to survive as post docs or in industry. One of my college buddies has worked at nasa for 4 different firms and has had to move to Texas, Kansas, and Maryland for these gigs and has once again landed on a project where the funding got cut and is looking for a new job. Another works in nano scale semiconducting and had to move to Finland to get project funding from the EU since the US has made basic research funding so scarce. And after several post doc roles he is leaving the field after his last grant wasn't renewed, with not an ounce of negative feedback. Just, sorry we don't have any money anymore. He's now going to go into failure analysis for a mobile phone manufacturer to pay the bills.

The woes of cultural production have also been well documented.

We are in a cultural and scientific collapse

▲

HKH2 3 days ago | parent [-]

But there's so much money in academia. Where's it going?

	▲	okwhateverdude 3 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Universities charge stupid amounts (50%+) of overhead to researchers. The PIs basically run a lab, hustle for the funding writing grant proposals, and uni takes a big fat cut of whatever funding gets pulled in. And that overhead all gets spent on useless administration, buildings and facilities, investments, and basically anything other than the research the grant was for. https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/25910/what-does...
	▲	zoolily 2 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		The problem is that there's so little money in academia. In the US, state support for public universities has plummeted in the 21st century. In the last state I lived in, the state university near me went from providing over 75% of teaching costs to under 25% in less than 20 years. Tuitions have risen, but it's important to understand the sticker prices are usually discounted with financial aid. If a university raises tuitions by an amount x, they are usually brining in less than 1/2 x new funding. Ironically, reducing university funding leads universities hire more administrators, as they attempt to replace lost funding with donations or indirect costs.