In industry you _eventually_ need to show result and earn money, it never get to that part in academia.
beginloop People publish papers that are practically useless but can be cited by other people in the same position, which then improves their standings endloop
There's a sucker born every minute and a skilled con man can exploit that unfortunate truism to keep a scam for quite a while. Moller's skycar is an example of a flagrant scam that lasted for decades.
> It doesn't take long to think of entire industries that are shady, from payday lenders
I trust you aren't arguing that payday lenders don't earn money!
There's a huge difference between "I don't like what this industry is doing" and "this industry is fraudulent, can never produce the goods/services claimed, and will never turn a profit for the investors".
The immorality of Pay Day is very much known, and it is not relevant because Pay Day is scamming their customers, not their investors.
The rideshare industry famously doesn’t make a profit.
Neither does the electric scooter industry.
The meal in a box industry has retention problems, because eventually their customers learn to shop and cook.
Electric scooters are a little iffier, as they take significantly more capex and there isn't much data on market acceptance (Or, at least, none of which I know.)
Meal-in-a-box is not a bad idea either; new people are showing up every day whining about how, "Adult-ing is hard." The fact that people eventually "graduate" is not an issue so long as more people are being born. It's just not necessarily something Joe Six-Pack is going to buy.
If you've noticed a common theme here, it's that the idea of hyper-scaling can be flawed. The above all have significantly lower threshold for market saturation than they believe, if you ask me.
Ride-sharing can be successful, but may not take over the world. Electric scooters can be successful, but may not take over the world. Meal-in-a-box can be successful, but may not take over the world.
SV gets stuck in the pareto trap of scaling past economies of scale and to the point where that next 20% of your customer base takes 80% of your capital. You can push scaling, but the market only moves so fast.
Ditto for electric scooters - I rarely see anybody use one but it is somehow already costing my country millions in medical costs.
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/385406/scooters-2-point-...
Like Whole Foods or broadcast.com?
Edit: Not such a good idea in 1999, when operating without economies of scale and scope, and with high transportation costs.
But this is stupid levels of over-hype, and it has nothing to do with academia / business. It has everything to do with overbranding and rushing the hype.
https://twitter.com/SarahTaber_bww/status/117189568344985600...
By the way, the "research" about texting while driving you might have read about or heard discussed on NPR is just highly plausible bullshit.
Sure, Springer is making money, but I never met — nor heard of — anyone in academia making money through publishing. The truth may come as a surprise to you, but publishing articles, reviewing articles, editing journals, all of that is done for free.
You might make some money through consulting, but publishing? No. Not even when you write a textbook.
But _sometimes_ it’s entirely not warranted, the party just wanted the name attached. Just like how company brings in a consulting firm to confirm its existing decision.
Which sometimes buffles me because it doesn't reward particularly well for a position reserved to people with strong intellectual prowess, it merely prevent people from being fired for doing nothing.
There are definitely people in academia that are driven for truth, but I don't know if that's the majority or a minority.
But academic projects are inherently closer to aspirational, so I'm not sure it's fair to conflate aspirational with fraud. This episode sounds like fraud. Aspirational is claiming your novel magnetic media "could" enable a terabyte per centimeter storage density when you know perfectly well it couldn't hit that in a real application. I dislike the rhetorical overreach and would not use naive statements like that, but it is a different thing entirely to take claim for work that wasn't even done.
This is true for every major industry and the political class and has been true for decades.