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Comment by 8note | Hacker News Reader

Really this sounds like a problem of missing government intervention. The government could treat graphene like corn until all the industries have built up around it

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The problem is that there isn't a graphene farmers lobby group

How about instead of building and shuttering a billion dollar chat app every 2 years google puts some resources into it in the interest of diversification. All these tech companies are gonna need ever more batteries and Google would be well ahead if they can make the best ones.

Because rebranding a chat app as it evolves instead of calling it '2.0' doesn't imply you have spare resources to check notes utterly revolutionize battery technology out of nowhere.

Google's CFO's strategy has been to incubate those ideas and either sell them to industry or spin them off with independent investment after the, say, first $10 billion in costs.

It's not anything specific to Google. Tech is awash in cash and breakthroughs have been lacking. This seems like an obvious opportunity yet no one seems to be going for it.

Google supposedly is doing exactly this in some fields, e.g. Quantum computing. But I don't know enough about Quantum computers to tell if that effort is producing anything of value, I'm leaning towards no at this point. Maybe just throwing cash at a problem isn't as easy as it seems.

And that’s how Google wins these days, we turn to them to solve all our problems like a child praying to God every night before bed.

The National Graphene Institute has £61m of government funding: https://www.graphene.manchester.ac.uk/about/ngi/

WhatsApp was acquired for $16-19b IIRC. (Or: "FB bought our contact books for $16-19b.")

I'm not saying that we could solve all of our problems by investing this amount of $$ in graphene, or that "FB sucks, duh", but it's hard to argue that we can maintain this ridiculous waste of resources and human brain power for longer.

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