[kafkaIncarnate]

That's also definitely true for universities with enough reputation and infrastructure to score large contracts/grants with private sector corporations (or mega US defense contractors).

I also know of a couple of chemistry professors and one is new and his PhD was overseas in Saudi Arabia and he basically said it was just large scale brute force data analysis and discovery of chemicals in Python with a small amount of lab work to prepare the datasets. Basically there's a huge pipeline for this sort of work to discover new chemicals in labs, get a PhD out of it, but it's all just sort of an engine that functions to brute force the chemical possibilities not real meaningful research. I never asked but I assume the results just get fed into a pharma company or something.

Then you have those chemists on the opposite end, ready to retire, who are working on cold fusion because why not it's interesting to study even if it goes nowhere.

Our whole society has kind of turned into a giant web of a machine that can't be untangled without ripping everything apart. Some of it is stupider than others, but most of it is kind of a bullshit layer on top of a bullshit layer. We obviously see that in IT as well, with marketing tools that are just wrappers for simple underlying tech that anyone could set up. Sometimes there is significant value added, sometimes there is none (or even negative value).

I don't know where I'm going with this so I'm going to stop typing.