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Comment by screamingninja | Hacker News Reader

Exactly. What's even worse is that it takes a huge research grant to come up with this.

> With a new $1.2 million dollar grant from the National Science Foundation...

That amount of money is absolutely nothing compared to the waste that goes on in the startup industry. Remember the $445 million self driving pizza oven delivery van?

The "waste" in the startup industry has corrective mechanisms built in. Investors can pull their money out and take their business elsewhere.

Taxpayers cannot pull their money out of the NSF and reallocate it to a different government agency.

Sure. In theory, investors can behave as rational actors. In practice, you get all sorts of chasing the Next Big Thing because there’s too much money flowing around to too little fundamental research.

So I’m ok if we spend $1.2M on research. That’s like 5 developers for one year who would otherwise be allocated by the invisible hand into effectively useless endeavors like high frequency trading or ad tech.

Cut to the alternative universe where they’re working at Blackrock and a car thief is driving their car away.

> So I’m ok if we spend $1.2M on research.

I'm not. Where do I opt out of funding government grants?

At least I can decide not invest in something if I don't want to risk losing money.

You don't get to, because you don't get to opt out of the social benefit that they result in.

(remember that government spending basically created transistorized logic, microchips, and computer networking as we know them today. would you have opted out of those too?)

Government funded research gave us computers, the internet, EUV technology, GPS, lasers, and all sorts of other shit.

If you're on HN in the first place, there is an approximately zero percent chance that the few dollars of your tax money spent on this kind of research hold a candle to the benefits you've gained from it.

You can opt out here: https://www.irs.gov/individuals/international-taxpayers/expa...

You didn't lose any money. Nor did the country, the money didn't vanish, it ended up in employees pockets. Given they are probably low paid researchers, it'll all be back in the engine of capitalism by the end of the month. Some of it will even be back in the gov's coffers, where you can pretend it's doing something you prefer, like barely covering maintenance of a single road for a year.

> Remember the $445 million self driving pizza oven delivery van?

What I find hilarious about our industry is that this could be completely made up ... or not.

>Pizza robot truck startup Stellar snags $16.5M from Jay-Z

https://www.restaurantdive.com/news/Stellar-pizza-robot-truc...

>Stellar, which was founded by former SpaceX employees in 2019, uses a robot to cook mobile ordered pizzas which are then delivered by the truck driver.

That's nowhere near the $445M claimed though. Crunchbase lists them as having only having raised $25.5M. The $445M if real, must be the valuation.

https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/steller-pizza

edit: looks I'm looking at the wrong company, see replies for details

The $445M figure is for another mobile pizza startup, Zume.

https://www.axios.com/2023/06/12/softbank-pizza-robot-shuts-...

Discussed last month: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36293636

Also, the vehicles have a human driver rather than being self-driving.

People get irate about government spending here's a big difference between someone wasting your money and someone wasting their own money.

If you could get that robot-cooks-as-you-drive idea right, even without the self-driving bit, you can out-compete Dominos by saving half the trips (back to store from delivery address).

The technology was immature but the fundamentals were there, and they'd save a not-insignificant amount of gas.

> they'd save a not-insignificant amount of gas

I wonder the efficiencies of cooking in a vehicle as opposed to a fixed pizza oven.

That's easy. Put it on treads, and add a tree cutter/stripper, and a hopper, so that it can pick up all the fuel it needs to wood-fire the pizza off the side of the road before it goes to the next destination.

Vertical integration. Great idea. It could also have a grain mill so it can stop by some wheat fields and make its own flour.

It all comes down to insulation I'd assume

It will necessarily be worse than the fixed oven.

Internal Cooking Engine.

I really can't imagine that. So you save some driver time. They're usually idle before delivery already, there's no driver shortage, and drivers/delivery isn't expensive. So there's only a small amount to undercut. For the profit to become interesting, you'd need a massive volume, but then you'd be forced to maintain a large fleet of mobile ovens. There's no automated driving, so you'd need drivers anyway. You'd have to pay everything from their idle return time, including the increased energy consumption.

Back-of-the-napkin says no.

The fact that Dominos practically begs people to come in and pick up their pizzas themselves undercuts your arguments about driver idle time. Maybe in your market they sit idle, but in mine I'd imagine they are spending 90%+ of their time fulfilling orders. My orders often spend 10min in the "Quality Check" state (waiting for a driver under a heat lamp).

Automated driving is orthogonal to the bake-as-you-drive model. Dominos will also switch to self-driving when they can.

The cost of owning 10 oven-vans vs 1 store + 10 regular cars will be the tough part and will require scale, but pizza is big business.

Arch that "quality check" thing bugs me to no end. It's the lie that bothers me: it's not like they're individually inspecting every single pepperoni or anything. They just don't have a driver available. Don't lie to me!

Startup waste is generally funded from investors though. This seems like it might be funded by government grants which are funded by taxes.

Investors using 0% interest loans funded by taxpayers.

Are you referring to quantitative easing/ZIRP or specific government programs that give favorable loans to specific industries?

The Fed is the cause of QE/ZIRP, but it's not "funded by taxpayers" in any meaningful sense. The mechanism by which QE is done is that the fed prints money and uses it to buy government bonds and other assets, which pushes bond prices up, and consequently yields (and therefore interest rates) down. All of this doesn't cost the fed anything. The money is printed by them, after all. It's not like they're borrowing money from some other bank at 2%, and then distributing to the wider economy at 0%.

100% of the direct monetary cost of QE is borne by the American people.

And what is the mechanism by which the "direct monetary cost" arises, and is borne by the american people?

Inflation? Devaluation of the dollar? Debt? Current interest rates?

I’ve noticed 10-15 years of almost no innovation, but a ton of wealth transfer… but the FED still says ZIRP was a good idea.

> almost no innovation

The last 15 yrs in Biotech (esp genetics) and ML were more exciting than the previous 50.

Domino's has a near $14B market cap. Disrupting pizza delivery is a worthwhile venture!

Wait... so the pizza would be delivered, fresh from the oven?? Is... do you know ... are they taking investors?

Yeah, that startup doesn't sound terrible to me. Like the other comments say, it's a multi-billion dollar industry. If you cook the pizza while you're driving it to the destination, then you change the time 15 minutes cooking + 15 minutes driving to just 15 minutes cooking and driving. Twice as fast.

But of course, you could offer the same latency by having a non-customizable menu and having pizzas ready to go when they're ordered. If it's 6:30PM on a Friday night, odds are someone wants the Pepperoni pizza that just came out of the oven. No fancy hardware required. The pizza is technically less fresh, but are minutes of freshness worth millions in VC? I don't know.

How could one justify the other? Justifying waste by pointing to more waste is insane.

whataboutism

The more politics I see, the more its just grifting.

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