I've worked for two such companies in my career (and partnered with a few others) and both of them were really just normal businesses that used their non-profit status as part of their business model. They used that status to position themselves as an objective second party to various governments and businesses and signal trust. They also internally represent themselves as something different from commercial businesses, just with a weird way of mopping up profit at the end of the fiscal year. At one I was a researcher and the other a low-level executive.

At the working level, both paid slightly under comparable jobs in the private sector, were often very top heavy, and spent lavishly on facilities and had large internal R&D programs that often went nowhere but acted like overamped hands-on training programs that expressed themselves in additional expertise they could offer their clients without having to turnover staff.

I often had multiple personal offices, subsidized mid-level restaurant quality lunches, laboratories, assistants, and research budgets stretching into the low millions of dollars. This was in addition to the regular work we were contracted out to do, which was often either direct work on fairly cutting-edge S&T like programs or providing special advisory and expertise services to those same customers.

All of the companies I know in this space are also fairly top-heavy with, executive and administrative pay helps sop up any profit.

The law requires these companies to report quite a bit of information about their financials into the public space every year [1]. Some of the executives make quite extraordinary pay.

https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/

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Totally worth a watch.

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From there you can continue to process and ferment them to produce a variety of sauces, pastes, soup bases, and so on - soy sauce is the most famous in the west, but the rest of the products have honestly mind-blowing, highly complex, tastes.

There's also a broad tradition of preserving and fermenting various seafoods, from the corvina to fermented skate (hongeo) [2].

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meju

2 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hongeo-hoe

The Western 19th and 20th centuries's approach to foods have been an incredible disservice to culinary and health history and modernist trends.

- My wife is Korean, and a lot of Korean food is fermented, preserved, or otherwise kept using a traditional pre-refrigeration method. There are a number of really beautiful traditions that come from the logistics of keeping stuff around for months, or even years. The idea of things being diverted off at various stages of fermentation for different uses was a massive revelation to my American mind.

- That being said, my Korean relatives are completely blown away by some old Western methods of fermentation especially around land mammal meats -- various sausages, smoked meats, salted meats -- and fermented milk products like cheeses.

- The best restaurant in the world, I think in Norway, featured a dedicated fermentation R&D lab as part of their core restaurant menu development process.

- The global trade in alcoholic drinks in based on truly beautiful and sophisticated battles between various micro-organisms.

- My friends in the bio-world recently (in the last few years) have taken an interest in fermentation as part of the thinking on long-term food sources for space habitability. Nothing produces the incredible complexity in microbiology, specifically ones good for food sources for humans, creates anything close to the complexity of fermentation. The thought it using stages of fermentation to produce all of the feed material needed for complete human nutrition. But it's perpetual.

Bonus - you might also divert some parts of the process into fuel, air, and other required processes. It's incredibly compelling, highly technical (informed by modern AI models) research.

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At CES this year, one of the things that was noted was that "AI" was not being pushed so much as the product, but "things with AI" or "things powered by AI".

This change in messaging seems to be aligning with other macro movements around AI in the public zeitgeist (as AI continues to later phases of the hyper curve) that the companies' who've gone all-in on AI are struggling to adapt to.

The end-state is to be seen, but it's clear that the present technology around AI has utility, but doesn't seem to have enough utility to lift off the hype curve on an continuously upward slope.

Dell is figuring this out, Microsoft is seeing it in their own metrics, Apple and AWS has more or less dipped toes in the pool...I'd wager that we'll see some wild things in the next few years as these big bets unravel into more prosaic approaches that are more realistically aligned with the utility AI is actually providing.

Even worse, they were almost always wrong about the diagnosis and I'd find myself on 3 or 4 rounds of antibiotics, or would go to the pharmacy to pick up something and they'd let me know the cocktail I had just been prescribed had dangerous counterindications. I finally stopped going when I caught a doctor searching webmd when I was on my fourth return visit for a simple sinus infection that had turned into a terrible ear infection.

My next doctor wasn't much better. And I had really started to lose trust in the medical system and in medical training.

We moved a few years ago to a different city, and I hadn't found a doctor yet. One day I took sick with something, went to a local walk-in clinic in a strip mall used mostly by the local underprivileged immigrant community.

Luck would have it I now found an amazing doctor who's been 100% correct in every diagnosis and line of care for both me and my wife since - including some difficult and sometimes hard to diagnose issues. She has basically no equipment except a scale, a light, a sphygmomanometer, and a stethoscope. Does all of her work using old fashioned techniques like listening to breathing or palpation and will refer to the local imaging center or send out to the local lab nearby if something deeper is needed.

The difference in absolutely wild. I sometimes wonder if she and my old doctors are even in the same profession.

I guess what I'm trying to say is, if you don't like your doctor, try some other ones until you find a good one, because they can be a world difference in quality -- and don't be moved by the shine of the office.

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