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Why Isn't the US Government Funding Research?
thesandbender writes "The recent post about GM opening its own battery research facility led me to wonder why the US government is pouring billions into buying companies instead of heavily funding useful research. You can give $10 billion to a company to squander or you can invest $10 billion into a battery research and just give the findings to the whole of the US industry for free. From a historical standpoint, the US government has little experience with commercial enterprise ... but has an amazing record for driving innovation. The Manhattan Project and the Apollo moon missions are two of the pinnacles of 20th century scientific achievement, yet it seems to me that this drive died in the '70s and that's when the US started its slow decline. To be true to the 'Ask Slashdot' theme, what practical research do you think the US government should embark upon to get the most return for its citizens and the world?"
From a historical standpoint, the US government has little experience with commercial enterprise... but has an amazing record for driving innovation during war-time.
obviously we need to get on the ball and invade china.
The Manhattan Project and the Apollo Moon missions are two of the pinnacles of the 20th century scientific achievement
So, extrapolating from those two points, we just need a big, old-fashioned war. (hot or cold, as desired)
... and that's when the C.H.U.D.'s came at me.
The government could be investing billions of dollars into robotics research. This will reduce our reliance on human troops and enslave us all to the robot overlords.
We ran out of German scientists =/
We have to overcome diseases of all kinds, because that is the first step to immortality. The clearest path to this is through nanotechnology, because if we can deal with problems like cancer and infections on a molecular scale, we stand a much better chance of defeating them.
Raw research properly conducted on unexplored issues always discovers something. Either the experiment worked or it did not, and either way, something was learned. It always pays dividends - if not in new products and methods, in the avoidance of the repetition of failed experiments. This doesn't help the profits of the corporations that fund the election of political tools. That's progress. Progress is not the government's goal. The purposes of government are to ensure its persistence and toward that goal to deplete the surplus productivity so as to eliminate a surfeit of leisure. An excess of leisure is an invitation to insurrection.
TFS is correct that the US government forgot these things for a while, but they've remembered them since.
But... to answer the question: the big and the small. The fast and the slow. The literal, the virtual and the speculative. Most importantly, how to get offsite backup on the human genome. If we don't do that then nothing else matters.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
fembots.
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
AND Robot Zombies, and zombies for jesus.
The house just passed a bill that is being advertised to encourage cleaner vehicles.
The requirement:
Trade in your 18MPG car (SUV) for a 20MPG car (SUV), ...and you get $3500.
Yes, 20MPG. The Model T got 20MPG, 100 years ago.
What exactly is the point of that?
Fill up the landfills with trade-in SUV's?
Help liquidate big auto's supply of bad vehicles.
Transfer money from taxpayers to well paying/donating companies.
Hot Fusion, not Cold Fusion that is.
We need to solve the world's energy problems, and as much as we all love green solar and wind its never going to scale to the levels needed to power the entire world like Fusion would.
You can tell how powerful someone is by the magnitude of the crime they can commit and be able to get away with.
The government exists to pave roads, protect the borders, pick up the trash (at least in my city), and maintain parks. Public water is a good idea too. Everything else is a waste of good tax payer dollars. The more dollars that are in your pocket the more you can spend on things that drive innovation. There is surely a market for long lasting batteries, and as in the case of GM, companies have been investing heavily in new technologies. How is getting some public governmental research entity started going to be remotely cost effective and efficient, because we all know that government departments are the model of efficiency? Oh, and do you just start from scratch? I mean there are scores of next generation batteries being worked on right now, with a lot of inroads being built behind closed doors. It doesn't really make sense to just start with nothing and try to compete with that. This is also market manipulation. A public domain battery concept would ultimately undermine any company's investment in battery research and development. Doesn't the government own GM anyways now? I mean, look at it this way, your tax dollars are already going to battery research.
At least the new cameros look sweet. There might be some hope left for good old gm....
zosxavius photography
It seems to me that the first and heaviest place to go is medical research. Healthcare costs in the United States are so high that international health insurance plans generally just cover every country that isn't America. A huge part of the problem is the extreme expense associated with the opaque nature of the pharmaceutical industry. When it's actually profitable to run extremely long primetime commercials advertising certain medicines, it's blatantly obvious that there's something horrendously wrong with the system -- clearly the proper medication shouldn't depend on what you saw on TV last night.
Worse, a lot of drug research is publicly funded, but then the results wind up privatized. I'm guessing that if we got healthcare costs down on the supply end we wouldn't have so many problems with health insurance in this country.
I used to read Caltizzle. I was a lot cooler than you.
The US government should teach you when to use "its" instead of "it's".
Do you really need to think about this?
It is simple.
We Don't Have Any Money!
The National Institutes of Health annual budget: $29 billion. That money funds most of the university biomedical research in the US http://www.nih.gov/about/budget.htm Current NIH funded projects include among other things the human genome, the human microbiome, almost all cancer research in the US, obesity, diabetes, communicable diseases.. The National Science Foundation has an extramural grant budget of $6 billion. The Department of Energy has an extramural research grant budget of $24 billion Among other things they fund alternative energy research, genomic research, You might say the US federal government should be funding more, but you cannot say it is not funding anything at all. The space race and the Manhattan project were both driven by wars: WWII and the Cold War. Maybe that is what it takes for a government to fund major research: fear of losing power and primacy to an opponent.
End of transmission...
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
I blame the baby-boomers, they were raised on idea of continual gain of benefits. Whether it was from capitalism, increased government benefits, or lower taxes. They continually have driven everything out of total self interest an screw society.
You say I am crazy? It was not my generation that,
I may be generalizing about baby boomers as a whole, but the leadership from my generation has not become CEOs, congressmen or senators, the baby boomers have.
I would think something like nanotechnology or enhancing existing renewable energy sources. It would be really cool for consumer-grade solar power to actually create competition with the electric utility industry. As well as the extremely broad applications of nanomanufacturing and biotech that could be gained by learning to manipulate/control objects smaller than any current instruments can match.
why the US government is pouring billions into buying companies instead of heavily funding useful research. You can give $10 billion to a company to squander or you can invest $10 billion into a battery research and just give the findings to the whole of the US industry for free
You're linking two not-really-related issues. Bailouts for large companies are intended to avoid a chain reaction of collapses and thus preserve economic confidence. Publicly funded "Blue Sky" research will provide for very long term improvements to the human race from scientific progress. If you're wanting to increase the money supply to prevent a recession, you're better off allocating the cash to areas that can absorb them readily (such as construction and consumer finance). Or just get Ben Bernanke a helicopter...
The US funding for international plant breeding projects has dropped dramatically in the last decade. Dollar for dollar I'm pretty sure nothing else provides the same mitigation of human suffering as breeding crops that yield more, and fail less often (with greater tolerance or resistance to pests, drought, flooding, you name it).
And the great thing is when the government funds the research, the seeds go for almost or completely free to the people who need them the most around the world, instead of getting entangled in webs of patients and trade secrets.
In order to get all the Taxpayer Joes out there to not shit their pants because you want to "cure cancer" or, god forbid, "develop alternative energy sources," you have to have a reason. A fake reason or a very important reason. The Apollo mission and Manhattan project weren't started in the spirit of scientific exploration, they were started first to destroy the Nazis, then to fight the Commies. US science has always relied on our conflicts. Do you think the King of Spain would have bankrolled exploration to America if he didn't think he could gain by it strategically? Same with Britain and France. Why do you think US combat robotics has advanced so rapidly in the last decade? It's not because DARPA thought that it would be cute to have a bunch of dog robots for us to pet. Nor did they think the internet was going to be the massive consumer and cultural revolution it was - merely meant to be a DoD network for further weapons research and emergencies.
There are exceptions of course but the bottom line is that if you want to get something done, you have to give people some kind of dire reason for doing so. The International Joint Commission was formed in 1909 and warned of heavy pollution and potentially catastrophic wildlife destruction in the Great Lakes region as early as 1920. It wasn't until 1970, when Lake Erie literally died due to eutrophication, that anything was done about it. Nothing like a good catastrophe or threat to national security to get the science gears moving - one of the reasons I'm hopeful the media takes off with this whole "China cyberthreat" thing.
It was the 80's. reagan and the neo-cons PURPOSELY cut the RD in science that we had back then. MASSIVE CUTS. The idea was that the large number of RD labs that we had would do the work. Bell Labs, Watson Labs, Ge Labs and nearly all major labs were killed, cut, or moved to other nations. Basically, the RD labs that we had were tied to the gov's huge budgets as well as our education, which was THE TOPS. Now, they are simply moved elsewhere and we have been witness to the largest 30 year dismantling of one of the few historical superpower nations.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
The US Government IS Funding Research!
The US has fantastic research. And, it is huge. Very few countries are in that ball-park, and can only compete on a per capita level, e.g. Switzerland, Sweden etc.
The scientific production in the US is great, and is the norm everyone else is measuring against. OK, again, a few per capita level runners up. But, in general, US research is well funded.
The Far East and Europe are catching up, but with the US economy as large as it still is it may take more than a decade.
Finally, the US Government IS funding research also through the system with tax reduction for private funds. Very few other governemnts would allow that, where research is funded via the tax bill only.
All i can say is that I cry myself to sleep every night. I don't care what administration it is, we are flushing money down the same pit. A lot of people are going to be very rich because of all the give aways going down a black hole. Few people in washington even remotely know what they are doing.
"The Manhattan Project and the Apollo Moon missions are two of the pinnacles of the 20th century scientific achievement"
Nonsense. These are two great achievements in technology. Neither was an attempt to generate new science though the application of money and talent at such scales can have beneficial effects for science. The basic science for both existed before either project was initiated. Since both pertained to crucial strategic objectives, it made sense for the government to pay.
In most cases, for example battery research, the benefit of achieving the goal is rather clear and private capital is available based on the perception of likelihood of success and resulting payoff. Unfortunately this sort of calculation would almost never work in favor of what is called basic science. These are problems that are pursued because of intrinsic interest rather than expectation of any return on investment. For instance the search for the Higgs boson or the creation of Bose-Einstein Condensate. In such cases the research might lead someday to subsequent research that leads to more immediate economic return, e.g. Quantum computers.
The system that arguably has worked well is to fund basic science by the government and applied research by private companies (e.g. Intel doing research for next generation silicon fabrication). Of course the world does not always split cleanly into basic versus applied but it is fairly clear that battery research is closer to the applied end of the spectrum.
The big money is in replacement parts for your POS gas guzzler. Filters, oil changes, tune-ups, sensors, you name it, these all cost you money and car manufacturers are in business to make money. They don't want to sell you a car and that be the end of it. So it does not matter, if the Government gave the money to a company that produced electric cars, that company would get bought by a combustion engine car maker. (Just look at Tesla motors). Tesla was a good idea, but the Bitches sold out. It was nice knowing you Tesla Motors... bye.
17 days ago STS-125, the forth in-orbit service of Hubble, ended successfully
12 days ago Gov. Schwarzenegger dedicated the largest laser on Earth to fusion research
Last week the DOE produced video of a potential carbon nanotube memory device in operation.
3 days from now 7 people will blast into orbit, rendezvous with the ISS and further the construction of a giant orbital laboratory.
No government in history has ever, is now, or will ever again (post dollar collapse) facilitate as much raw research as the US federal government.
Just STFU please. Thanks.
Lurking at the bottom of the gravity well, getting old
I'm sorry, you think that the Government doesn't spend billions in research every year?
Just because GM is funding research doesn't mean that the government isn't.
It's not either or.
The US government is funding research. A lot of it. So much that a giant company like GM opening a *single* research lab is big news. Either directly (through grants and contracts) or indirectly (through tax incentives) the government is funding much of the industrial research that is done anyway.
Why has science stalled since the 70s? That's when the number of physicists being trained exceeded the demand. The job market for physicists tanked and has never recovered (due to an excess of government funding for training). Physics became very competitive (rather than collaborative), and focused on making very small incremental changes in niche areas so that you could keep your job (big risks are bad, now). We've make tremendous scientific progress, but the system isn't designed for rock-star leaders and breakthroughs any more. More industrial labs will only change that until growth saturates again.
We need to either stop training too many physicists (and make sure we're not doing the same with other fields), or live with what we have (which does work well, for anyone who is not a physicist). To encourage risk (and thus greater... or at least flashier scientific rewards), we need more long term grants and contracts (long term being >10 years). If I know a several year project can fail, but I'll still be able to pay the rent, I'm more likely to try something new. To actually answer the question, I would put those grants in solar fuel research.
I know they do it but it's not constitutional. It is the role of private companies and they would probably have made much more progress if they didn't have to give all their profits over to the IRS. The free market puts research dollars where they will be most beneficial. Politicians put research dollars where they will buy the most votes.
Let's see, in 1965, we instituted Medicare and Medicaid, and that's an easy 500 billion a year
then, in 1972 we expanded SSI Disability and that's now 150 billion bucks a year
in the 1980s Reagan expanded coverage to include pregnant women
and lately we just added Medicare Part D...
If we all had our grandparents move back in and die in some quiet room upstairs, put disabled people out on the street with those old alms cups to beg for change, had pregnant women just have babies themselves or have more abortions, we'd have a lot more money for cool stuff.
This is my sig.
The US government pioneered the internet and, IMO, this has been the greatest enabler of research and innovation since the the invention of the movable type. What we're seeing now is just the tip of the iceberg. I don't think historians will ever be able to comprehend the full impact of the internet on science and technology. The cross-pollination of ideas and the easy availability of information is so mind boggling, it's scary. You are living in truly interesting times.
3x the investment, 1/4 the bureaucracy, none of the political risk, none of the cost
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
...US research is just fine and growing if you look at, you know, the actual numbers. As is Asia. Europe, by contrast, is in serious decline.
The vast majority of research in the US is privately funded, and has been for many decades. A half century ago this was not the case, but today it is. Furthermore, private research in the US is highly productive as such things go, so this distribution is not necessarily a bad thing. It is not so much that the US government is cutting research funding as it is that private funding continues to grow faster than public funding.
The US government is even a declining percentage of so-called "basic research", though still the majority of such funding at around 60%. These are all the pure science things that would nominally never get funded if the government didn't though obviously that is overstating the case given the stats.
On the upside, total US research spending continues to grow, just faster in the private sector than the public sector as it has for many decades, and the US still invests more in public and private R&D than anyone else by a large margin.
The most startling statistic related to R&D funding is that Europe runs a somewhat distant *third* behind the US and Asia despite its GDP and per capita GDP. Europe is arguably the most glaring example of a region not pulling its weight, though Germany is doing a decent job of it. A lot of European R&D has migrated to the US and Asia, but they should be a wee bit embarrassed about that.
ITER is the world's best chance of obtaining almost infinite amounts of clean energy. Most of the recent press about the National Ignition Facility has ignored one key fact - the NIF is about creating fusion explosions to model bombs. Sure, it can also be used for fusion power research, but that's not the primary reason it received it's funding. ITER is about developing commercial fusion using a tokamak.
Also, the way the US cancelled all funding for ITER for 2008 was pretty disgusting. If a country becomes a partner in such large science projects, they need to stick with it, rather than screwing everyone around
todo - The developer's equivalent of confession: "Forgive me Father, for I have sinned..."
That means funding research into electric cars (including those that use things like biofuel powered internal combustion engines as a backup)
That means funding research into (and building) new nuclear reactor designs that can take all the harmful waste (both from power generation and nuclear weapons) currently sitting in cooling ponds, storage facilities and vaults all over the US and turn it into more electricity (and into waste that will become radiation free in a much shorter time).
That means funding research into sustainable biofuels (both for vehicles and power plants) including hemp and switch-grass but NOT biofuels like corn that replace food crops
That means funding research into solar technology (and covering all that empty desert in the southwestern USA with solar collectors)
Most of all it means telling all the vested interests to go jump. The anti-drug campaigners who refuse to allow hemp to be grown because of its ties to marijuana. The anti-nuclear campaigners who fail to see that its possible to build a new nuclear reactor with a modern design (which is far less likely to fail in a way that releases radiation than the dinosaurs operating today) and then (and the new reactors come on stream) shut down the old dinosaurs (the ones that the ant-nuclear campaigners love to hate). It means telling the corn lobby (who seem to have the misguided belief that corn biofuels should be part of the energy equation into the future), the coal lobby (who believe that coal can be made "clean") and others to get stuffed.
"Why Isn't the US Government Funding Research?"
They are! It's called GM, Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac, Chrysler, Telecom Giants like ATT, Verizon, Bell South, Wall Street. They are funding so many research projects that each of you are clearly excited to support and continue paying for it.
Someone needs to meet the Angry Flower.
""The recent post about GM opening it's own battery research facility "
The AAAS publishes an annual report on government R&D spending. If you look at it, you see that there is $140 billion per year going into R&D. While it is true that "federal research investments are shrinking as a share of the U.S.
economy," it's simply not true that the government is not funding research.
led me to wonder why the US government is pouring billions into buying companies instead of heavily funding useful research. You can give $10 billion to a company to squander or you can invest $10 billion into a battery research and just give the findings to the whole of the US industry for free.
Because the immediate problem is the recession.
GM can't build an electric car if the company goes into liquidation. GM can't sell an electric car if its dealers go into liquidation.
Mechanics can't service an electric car if they go bankrupt with their suppliers.
Infrastructure once damaged is very difficult and expensive to rebuild.
You have to stop the bleeding first.
Research isn't a panacea.
It would be easy to aquander $10 billion on projects that have no realistic prospect of success within a reasonable time frame.
The geek isn't an unbiased observer here.
It should be obvious that a very generous cut of that $10 billion he wants the government to spend will be headed his way - and not to the auto worker on the line in Detroit.
Frankly ,looking over the constitutional powers allotted to the federal government they have no f**king business buying businesses, funding research, baling businesses out, or a large host of other "responsibilities" they have taken on illegally. They're supposed to protect our borders and manage to screw that up. Run a post office, they do a lousy job of that. Supposed to regulate interstate commerce which they interpret to mean "involve themselves in anything they want to" rather than just making sure trade amongst the several states is fair. They are supposed to collect tariffs on imports rather than tax the citizenry. They seem to screw up just about everything. What's worse is the population of complete morons who continually vote for Democrats and/or Republicans and expect things to change for the better rather than staying the same. Even worse the population is made up of liberal sissy wymynists who would rather cower than do anything about it.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
"what practical research do you think the US government should embark upon to get the most return for it's citizens and the world"
That's the problem right there. The government should be funding fundamental scientific research without worrying about technological spin-off and profitability. The reason the US is in this mess, just as in the UK, is that science has become the playground from which wealthy business steals its sweets, except for the last few decades they are also the same people who lobby politicians distributing the sweets. In effect, the taxpayer ends up funding R&D for business with patents and IP slapped all over it, and business is creaming off the brightest talent whilst calling it a "partnership".
This message was scanned by European governments and contains no terrorism.
Exactly. The US is spending 2.6% of GDP on R & D. It is number two in the G7. Obama has said he wants to bring the spending up to 3.0%.
Just FYI, US total R&D spending is about $300 billion per year. About $200 billion is private, and $100 billion is public.
GM got $50 billion, Chrysler got at least $12 billion, that represents ~60% of all government R&D spending.
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If we have true capitalism we would have had successive depressions. Most of the money is funneled through the military. Everything from vehicles, planes to cell phones...all brought to you by government funding.
Why try fusion here on Earth? We've got access to a massive fusion reactor that spews out terrawatts of free power, every second, every day for another 5 billion or so years. (give or take a few) Harnessing the sun, at a cheap price, will change humanity, and it should be viewed as our next step. All other problems are far more easily solved with a massive, free energy supply. Of course, it can't be free, but good sturdy funding can help us crack the expense of solar. It's such an obvious power source that it's.... blinding :)
Sig Registration Form 34c_766(a) submitted to Ministry of Signature Management. Approval pending.
Hot Fusion, not Cold Fusion that is.
What's wrong with Cold Fusion? Hot Fusion is a money pit, whereas Cold Fusion is cheap, simple, and researchers now have evidence that nuclear reactions are indeed taking place.
Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
www.teslabox.com
You know, I'd rather Slashdot run our government.
I'm not familiar with and government money going to Monsanto. That doesn't mean it doesn't happen, I'd just be surprised to learn about it.
Yes Monsanto does a lot of research in house, (and so do Pioneer and Syngenta) but like the pharmaceutical companies, the issue the arises is the most profitable areas of study are not the same as the areas of study with the biggest impact on human suffering. Think the difference between viagra analogs and treatments for drug resistant malaria.
The real benefits for the majority of the world come out of places like the CGIAR centers. Especially IRRI (the international rice research institute) and CIMMYT, and those are the places that are losing government support right as food prices are rising around the world.
The only thing I would add to this very insightful post, other than my regret at having squandered all my mod points yesterday, is the most likely reason for GM building its own battery research facility even though the DOE funds a lot of research in this area: anything the DOE funds would (presumably) be in the public domain, at least with regard to US citizens and businesses (and AFAIK the world), thus making DOE-funded discoveries a level playing field. If GM builds its own lab, it's proprietary and can give them a potential advantage over other auto makers.
GM (and every other auto maker) funds a lot of R&D. Engine technology, suspension, body and paint materials, etc. Battery technology will become just one more area of R&D spending for a lot of auto makers. Indeed, it has already done so.
The purpose of government in markets and research is to ensure that externalities are manifested in the market (pollution costs etc.) and to promote long-term research needs which would not be worth the investment for companies which have a much shorter time horizon (darpa being a huge success IMO).
Hot fusion research is a huge waste; we already have one, it's called the sun and will continue to power our earth for millions more years. Even if it does pan out we still have huge industrial sized installations+transmission and storage problems. Bleah.
I'm not a big believer in cold-fusion, but if it pans out, it's probably worth the risk of a few million a year. We should be working on industrial bio-fuels (not that ridiculously inefficient corn ethanol crap). Micro-power generation using fuels/bio-fuels could distribute power generation and lay the foundation for better efficiencies throughout the world without the need for huge infrastructure projects. More efficient transmission and storage methods would be worthwhile investments for long-term research. Also research into more efficient buildings, efficient urban transportation systems, more efficient urban design research would be beneficial.
Politicians have been getting soft money from various industries for decades. It finally came time for the politicians to give the tax payer dollars to the corporations as a big Thank You. Even more convenient is the PR around the bailouts, selling it to voters as a way to help stimulate the economy. How many times have they called it "stimulus", so often that I suppose we believe it now.
I suspect the reality of the situation is that many American businesses are ill equipt to deal with the challenges of globalization, and cannot compete in such a climate. Many are operated with the greedy short-term goals of a CEO or Board. To many wish to see immediate gains and get out quick, rather than building and maintaining a profitable enterprise over the long term.
Giving money to banking and auto industry sets a dangerous precedent. And, is in my opinion, equivalent to throwing the money away. An economic strategy is something the any government must maintain, and must execute on a multi-decade schedule. Carefully encouraging growth in key areas of science, technology, and even society over a long period of time is far more efficient than a shock-and-awe strategy of massive corporate handouts. Incrementally nudging the successful research towards an end, and ceasing research on things that do not appear to lead to a successful end is a careful and prudent way for a government to operate.
Putting it all on a Pass Line Bet and rolling the dice is not a strategy.
On projects the scale of Apollo I tend to agree that the Government isn't providing enough in terms of research funding. On the small scale though NSF grants fund almost all of the current cutting-edge research in education. Would I like to see NSF funding go up at least 3x? Yes. Would I like to see the government fund huge research projects (even at the cost of over programs and services)? Yes. But to say they aren't funding research is simply wrong.
Seriously, it would probably end all strife and war. Well, maybe not, but would still be cool...
lol
Be seeing you...
All Hail and Worship the Invisible Hand!
A lot of people just don't get it.
Governments are not inherently less efficient than corporations. Just go look at various private companies (big and small) they're not all lean mean super efficient entities. Far from it.
And it's not a matter of size. It's a matter of quality.
You can have good or bad quality government (whether big or small).
There have been a number of people who decided to make the sacrifice and go into civil service/government to try to make things better, rather than make themselves richer in $$$$ terms.
Maybe nowadays there are too few people willing to do that.
And guess what, the Invisible Hand only does what the people want to do.
If only the bad guys want to be politicians, the voters will have to pick the least crappy.
If the voters keep voting for more crappy instead of less crappy, it doesn't help...
If only the lazy inefficient people want to work in the civil service, that doesn't help either.
It's like all the cells in your body doing all that hard work just for your body to not fall apart overnight. A poor good:bad cell ratio, and the body falls apart sooner.
They already have a potential advantage over other auto makers. The government has a keen interest in its survival and if the history of Amtrak and the fact it's illegal to compete with Amtrak suggests anything, I might buy a hot model Ford and store it away as a collector's item.
Health Freedom is almost as popular as Freedom itself.
Nah, that would just be running up the score before we retire in 2050.
Battery research is coming along very well in private industry due to cell phones laptops and the promise of electric cars and even small planes. Super capacitors are very useful for certain applications but don't even come close to the energy density of LiPos so far. There is some decent research being done about this and some of that is in universities. If the USG should sink money into engineering research for power storage I would do it through money for universities earmarked for this sort of research. To be fair a lot of funding is actually currently available for just that. Although universities are generally obscenely inefficient, the researchers are usually grad students making maybe 20k a year, so all things considered it's pretty cost effective when you view it in terms of killing to birds with one stone, namely education and research.
The government has and does fund battery research.
http://www1.eere.energy.gov/vehiclesandfuels/technologies/energy_storage/
During the Clinton administration the government and Detroit 3 set up Partnership for a New Generation of Vehicles, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partnership_for_a_New_Generation_of_Vehicles , and all three produced 70MPG prototypes. George W Bush scrapped it at the behest of the auto makers and replaced it with the pie in the sky FreedomCar research program. One of the most boneheaded moves in US automotive history. New head Steven Chu is trying to reorient transportation research away from the hydrogen highway fantasy back to more immediate payoff.
=S
They actually fund my research for creating homes that can survive natural (and some other) disasters. They also fund my other research on recycling wood in homes into bio-fuels. So it's out there (in fact the DOE has some pretty huge grant programs going right now). More money for the scientific community is definitely needed however.
The Wood Engineer
From the Brookings Institution.
http://www.brookings.edu/papers/2009/0423_canada_nivola.aspx
The Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 1999 basically overturned Glass Steagall. Take a look at any housing bubble chart you'd like. When did the spike start? About the same time the deregulation fantasy took effect, and corporations knowingly created bad mortgages and passed off the bad debt as good debt because no one had their eye on them. In summary, they knowingly created huge leveraged risks in order to pocket huge comissions and leave someone else holding the assets. If you can come up with a more plausible explanation, please go ahead.
I've seen a newspaper columnist make a similar argument. He advocated for investing the bailout money to the top 25 venture capital firms and letting them keep a commission of 10% (or whatever market rate) of the profits thereby fueling entrepreneurs and start ups
or does "pinnacle" also apply for the lowest points too?
--
Stay tuned for some shock and awe coming right up after this messages!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_tax_in_the_United_States
The highest tax bracket was 80% in 1939. Today it's 35%.
I pray to God that you get what you just wished for.
considering how in debt the government is at this point, why would anyone encourage the government to increase unconstitutional spending?
...would make too much sense.
They are squarely against the principles of American Business. You are asking rich investors to divest themselves of the current situation which is enormously profitable, and venture into new technology where they may see less dazzling profits. In short, your ideas are politically impossible, because they have no traction in the business community.
Just as a tire company only recalls their product when the lawsuits from dead consumers become more expensive than the recall itself, new energy will only come online when all existing options have been exhausted. Hopefully it won't be too late when they do come around.
That would be Socialism and you don't want that, do you ?
US government and others should look into this and spend enough money to find out why("Money is not an option"). If it this gets out of hand; I fear what the future will become.
It seems likely given how soon life arose after the planet was cool enough to accept it.
The earth is 4.5-4.6Gyr. The first oceans finally condensed by about 4.4Gyr, and the earliest indicators of free living chemoautotrophic life are around 3.8Gyr. I wouldn't exactly call 600 million years "soon". (citation provided).
A good part of those 600 million years was geochemistry and basic biochemistry laying the groundwork of organic molecules to support life on a planetary scale. Unless you want to argue that the Earth did most of the work making the basics and then the planet was seeded like a petri dish, I would posit that it's rather unlikely that the Earth was seeded from an external source. (read the paper I just linked: it is one of the most comprehensive and logical summaries of the origin of life on Earth that I have ever read, providing well-founded explanations to a great many of the various problems of abiogenesis. While it doesn't refute the idea of outside seeding, it certainly refutes the necessity of it).
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
Are you an idiot naturally, or did someone spike your drink with Stupid-O (the breakfast of morons!)?
"It's not constitutional." Good lord, you're stupid.
No, I'm not going to bother to explain why you're wrong. Your point is JUST THAT DUMB. I also wouldn't explain why I was calling a flat-earther an idiot.
Perhaps someone should go study how the right people got to the right places so that stuff like the Manhattan Project could get done.
A better way to detect Weapons of Mass destruction from a distance may turn out useful, perhaps prevent an invasion or two, perhaps save some money.
How about funding research on an antimatter bomb. It would leave no radioactive waste, and 100% of the reactants would be used, that's good energy efficiency.
Funding teraforming Mars would be good.
And faster space travel methods would be useful too. I think JPL does do this, but where's the warp drive nacelle's already?
I agree, this was an extremely ignorant question. Even more amazing are the replies (e.g. "we just need a big, old-fashioned war" to fund research, "The government exists to pave roads"). Have these folks never been to college and graduate school? Have they never heard of the National Science Foundation? DARPA? National Institute of Health? The Department of Energy? NASA? Who do you think is paying for the Space Shuttle, Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, and several thousand grad student salaries?
Store that hot model Ford (or Chrysler; I'd like a Challenger SRT in Hemi Orange, thanks very much) anyway. Anybody who bought a 1970 Hemi Challenger or 'Cuda and stored it away has a very valuable item. Ditto for other serious classics like an Original Boss 302 Mustang or a GTO Judge. A friend of mine going all the way to middle school is the second owner of a '69 GTO Judge. Everything is original except the rear axle, which was replaced after the original owner blew the factory one, but it's in, well, less than pristine condition. He was 18 or 19 when he bought that car, and has kept it all these years. At the time, the engine was out and in pieces in a garage, and the vehicle was a bargain at $600.
We have to ask ourselves, do we WANT a Manhattan Project? If so what is the one and only one thing we think we should be researching? People need to remember that all science basically stopped in the US except for the Manhattan Project. All the top minds were recruited out there, all the money was funneled in there, etc. The US threw all the scientific might it had at the time at a single problem.
So is that what we want now? Do we have a single problem that deserves all the attention of basically 100% of our research scientists and engineers?
Because if not, then you DON'T want a Manhattan Project. What you want is probably what we have: A bunch of little research groups working on their own things. I work for a research university so I can say for a fact, there is no shortage of research going on. Is it all useful? No, most certianly not. Some of it is a dead end (research is like that), in other cases the professors just don't know what they are doing. It also isn't focused. Each lab works on different things, they all have different areas they are interested in. So it is small resources on many problems, not massive resources on a single problem.
However, there's lots of research going on. A good bit of it is funded by the US government too.
Now this isn't to say that more money wouldn't be nice, perhaps the US government should be increasing research spending. However that is totally separate from having a massive, singular, government owned project that all scientists in the nation go to work on.
The real reason SUVs are popular is because huge vehicles are safe (for those inside). Car accidents are the single leading cause of death and debilitation from ages 1 to 44 in the US (oddly, in 35-44, poisoning barely edges out motor vehicle traffic...), so having a car built like a tank is rational if you're interested in retaining life and limb. Most Americans care more about this than pollution, global warming and Middle East wars, which are statistically much less likely to kill them. A 2008 Jeep Patriot starts at $16,500 MSRP, a Mini One starts at $19,000 but doesn't have enough horsepower for AC, so it isn't sold in the US (MINI Cooper starts $18,500). Both have similar acceleration (11 sec, 0 to 100kmph), Jeep Patriot is safer (19 out of 20 NHTSA Stars vs 17 for AC equipped MINI Cooper), MINI Cooper beats in mpg (28/37 vs 23/28).
The afore mentioned "subsidy" was meant to give US car manufacturers a competitive advantage vis a vis their foreign competitors, and applied to businesses, not consumers. This was not a subsidy per se, but an "accelerated depreciation" tax credit. According to Taxpayers for Common Sense, only 100,000 out of 3.6 million SUVs sold in 2002 claimed the tax credit, so people were clearly not choosing the vehicles primarily for the tax credit. And SUVs were popular before this, so hopefully that "cause" is debunked.
Motorcycles get fantastic MPG, but are much, much more likely to kill you. Walking and horses have even better MPG, but are probably also more likely to kill you per mile traveled.
http://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
First, the first age of life on this planet is known to be prior to your statement.
I provided a reference to my statement that life on Earth is about 3.8Gyr old. Please provide a reference for your statement that there is evidence that life existed (as free living single-celled organisms bound by membranes, not as biochemistry happening in the pores of rocks) before that, or I will be inclined to not believe you, but rather to believe the biologists and geologists who actually research this stuff, such as those who wrote the paper I linked and those who wrote the papers referenced by the paper I linked.
Or, in the common parlance of our times, with regards to your statement, "[CITATION NEEDED]". :p
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
What ever nature can make, humans will be able to design and make with genes, given enough research and time.
There is the biggest gold mine for new tech for the next 100 years.
There's a huge unasked question here: why should government decide where to invest money at all? If government is spending money, that means it has taken that money from someone else (google bastiat seen unseen). So all that's changed is that government decides where to spend the money instead of the someone else.
No thanks. If I think research into batteries is the way to go I will invest in companies that do battery research. I don't need someone to take my money and make that decision for me.
The government already gives tons of money for research through college/universities. The problem is that the fruits of those research projects end up with patents for private corporations (think patent medicine) and the taxpayers end up funding these companies which in turn, end up charging us outrageous amounts to purchase these products. So, this system is socialized research for the benefit of the few at the expense of the many. This is just one example, but in essence, I have a problem with any government funding based on the fact that the government must first steal the resources from the taxpayers before it can give the funds over for research. Added to this fact the lack of evidence that government funded research is any better than private research. The only benefit, if it exists, is it can force a particular program that may not be economical for private enterprise.
It has NOTHING to do with Iraq. Funding is totally driven by votes. The only reason people in Washington bellyache about Iraq is that is means less money to buy votes with. After all, what Congressman doesn't want a library, pool, road, or bridge, named after them to enforce upon the people " I DID THIS "
I can guarantee you will see more money pissed away on climate sciences. You will see all the wonderful funds that could go into research instead piped into ethanol subsidies, bailing out the UAW and a few more unions who spent themselves broke during the election http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124458836591599769.html, you have another soon to be mismanaged payout through the http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124467696781404127.html, and what about the fact there is no money and Congress constantly doesn't even follow their own rules http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124467627264104053.html
Sorry, Iraq is a bullshit answer and we all her know it. It is the latte sipping head nodding know-nothing response. It was funny/stupid when Bush was around but it was just as relevant as to why little money goes into science now as it was then - which is it has no effect - but it does make a good excuse for the uninformed.
Look at our budget expenditures, WHERE THE FUCK IS THERE ANY MONEY LEFT? Hell, where does the real money end and the funny money begin?
Battery research gets no votes. NASA gets hardly any votes. If you noticed outside of pandering to specific groups through health research almost all science related grants are for building named sites (named as in after the sponsors)
OK, lets say we come up with some money. Well how long after we start funding research into better automobiles before the EU screams we are breaking rules by funding research the auto companies should do themselves? We see examples all the time with Boeing.
No its not Iraq, it never was. Congress is buried under the din of thousands of screaming special interest groups and they know who keeps them in office.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
DOD has also spent a great deal on lithium batteries. None of it is public domain.
I would like massive cash input into biodiesel from algae.....it seems to be the one area of fuel creation with a hope of making a difference before I die (age 43)
More US children per capita live in poverty than any other nation in Western Europe.
Citation needed. Specifically, what is the definition of poverty in this statement, and what are your sources? Are the figures on which it's based all using the same definition? For example, I believe the definition of "poverty" which politicians use in the United Kingdom is such that there must always be children in poverty, even if every child in the country has a roof over their head, three square meals a day, and a personal TV.
Incidentally, "any other nation in Western Europe"? I take it that the "other" crept in by mistake?
MIT has a gravity lab.. .. so I don't want to hear anyone saying "that is impossible" just cause they don't understand that it's possible. We need to spearhead anti-gravity research big-time. Imagine getting an aftermarket upgrade to your car, that takes 75% of the weight of the car off the chassis by simple pseudo-levitation. Your car would gain HUGE mileage boosts if it only weighed in at 1000 pounds....... just one example. Now imagine that tech evolving, to actual planetary and even interplanetary and inter-solar system travel.... The only barrier, ... energy. In comes zero-point research... anyone with me?
They are through DOE and SBIRs. They've already spent billions in this area. This is an unresearched article on research......
You can only spend so much money that you don't have... The US regime needs to cut spending, not increase it.
The US Federal Debt is approaching the levels required to trigger a major default. The US regime can't go on borrowing to pay its creditors for ever. There will come a point when there will be a run on the Dollar, or alternately, the US government will start printing money in supertanker loads, causing massive hyperinflation and a monumental crash in the value of the dollar.
Either way, the US is heading the major economic turmoil. The banking mess is only a small patch of sleaze, around the edges of a crumbling regime.
The same reason that Canada has? We aren't a service provider? We aren't in it to make money on commercial projects? It is why private company is for? All of which are stupid reasons, but what can you do.
Because Governments don't fund anything, taxpayers do. And the taxpayers are running out of money dammit!!
This one's really obvious to me: biomedical research, particularly where there is not a profit motive. There are two main classes of potential medicines that never make it to the shelf for stupid reasons.
1) Discoveries made in a lab that are never moved forward into a practical technology, often because there are only so many drug companies who only have so much time, and they have out competed smaller companies that might otherwise do additional research. This effect is why you see so many exciting scientific reports, like "Scientists cure 10 kinds of cancer in mice with white blood cell treatment!" or whatever, that never even go into human studies or trials, much less make it to the drugstore.
2) Potential medicines or treatments that may be extremely useful but cannot be patented and so never get funding for research, because the company who spent 15 million to do the research would immediately get outcompeted by other companies who wouldn't have to recoup the research investment. Hundreds of these exist. For example, scientists discovered decades ago that the hormone progesterone dramatically increases the speed of wound healing (first noticed when it was observed that pregnant mice heal faster than other mice). It has never been studied as a potential treatment for wounds, however, because progesterone can't be patented.
Many examples fit both categories 1 and 2. The easy solution, especially in case #2, is for the government to fund the research for the public good, and let all companies manufacture any successful resulting products it as low-cost generics.
I stole this sig from someone cleverer than me.
Two responses come to mind:
1) The government does fund research. Most of the dollars spent in the form of grants and such go to science. I know because my fiance teaches at a research university and her area of expertise, non-science, receives virtually nothing compared to the sciences. The budget for the entire department is less than $40,000 for the acquisition of books vs. millions for science.
2) The government gave billions of dollars to Chysler and GM as an investment in political capital rather than technological capital. Feel free to disagree with me, but I would ask you explain why the Chrysler deal gives billions of assets to the UAW while completely fucking over the smaller retirement funds such as the Indiana fund which just lost 61% of the value of those investments.
My co-worker brought in an original 1957 IRS 1040 form with tax tables. The top rate in the tax table was 91% for income over $300,000.
Why isn't the government funding research? How about 8-years of leadership from a political party that revels in anti-intellectualism. Everyone knows common sense is all we need--why spend money on those liberal college people!
If you were to create a research department from scratch, you would first have to procure land, office buildings, equipment, furniture, research directors, PA's, managers, engineers, and technicians. All of this is going to take money (lawyers, recruiters, adverts). By buying a company, all of this has been done already.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
Why isn't thesandbender posting a loaded question to /. that's contradicted by data?
Why isn't samzenpus passing along ridiculous material without bothering to look at whether it's a troll?
Why isn't dynasoar posting a reply with a link to NFS's summaries of federal research budgets 1955 to present?
http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/nsf08315/content.cfm?pub_id=3880&id=2
"The US government has little experience with commercial enterprise."
WTF? The US government controls the very basis of commercial enterprise, the economy. It exists in large part to support commercial enterprise. Very few high level legislative officials haven't been directly involved in operating a commercial enterprise.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Along with the notion that Government was bad came the notion that Government was unfit for all intellectual activities and except for small (and growing smaller) enclaves at the national labs, NIST and the CDC, they got rid of really anyone with an advanced degree and engineering or scientific experience. Even the labs (like Sandia) are outsourced to companies with really few people within the Government or more precisely without a commercial interest in the activity, who understand what's going on. Understand me, people with an advanced technical background were forced out and are not welcome in the Government. The notion instead is that somewhere, out there in the big wide world, someone is somehow doing on their own and already has the answers- it only takes some tax dollars for this whatever it is to magically appear ready for use without even having to understand how it works.
There are still SBIRs and other small research activities but it's not big bucks and most of what's left is either driven by emergency (think CDC) or special operations (think UAVs, etc).
I think he's referring to questionably-large line-item billing in some hospitals.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
Yes the top bracket was very high but the income required was astronomically high by 1939 standards. 1918 77% $1M 1939 80% $5M The top rate has been higher in the past but the number of people affected by the top rate has grown due to inflation and the lowering of the income required for the top rate. The lowering of the income brackets may increase the impact of the tax across a broader range of society.
The odds of surviving a crash are pretty bad for small cars in general, no doubt about it. The key is not to get in a crash in the first place. I've found that in life, there are usually there are ways to stack the odds in your favor. If you are smart you can often have your cake and eat it too.
There are some basic things you can do to minimize your risk if you choose a small car. For example, choose a white or silver car for visibility. Don't drive excessively fast. Give yourself plenty of time to come to a stop. Give yourself more margin for error in general and when driving in difficult conditions. Avoid driving unless you really have to. Avoid driving at night, in the wet and typical holiday periods if you can avoid it. Especially avoid Friday and Saturday night when hooligans are on the roads. Don't follow too close in the wet. Double check around you when you change lanes. In fact, when you drive a small car a bit of paranoia is healthy. There are plenty of idiots on the road. Expect it and drive accordingly.
If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.
Gas cost about 34 cents a gallon, or about $2.00 in today's terms, but Americans were more concerned about air pollution.
The Electrovair II, a show car unveiled in 1966 was an improved version of 1964's Electrovair I. Both were based on the rear-engine gas-powered Chevrolet Corvair, whose design provided a convenient location for the batteries. The large battery pack went under the hood, while the electric motor drove the wheels from the back of the car.
The Electrovair II used silver-zinc batteries because they delivered high power. (These were the same batteries GM produced for use in intercontinental nuclear missiles)
The downside was that they were expensive and wore out quickly, as the carmaker admitted at the time. Performance was similar to the gas-powered Corvair, but range was still a problem. The car needed recharging after 40 to 80 miles.
"The objective is to determine what is technically feasible," GM wrote of its work on cars like the Electrovair, "regardless of whether a project ever will become economically possible." Electrovair II
In contrast to the Electrovair, GM's 512 Series Urban Cars weren't designed for real roads.
The three cars, with their 30 to 40 mph top speed and limited acceleration, would operate either on a paved road system of their own or in reserved lanes of existing roads, because they could not mix safely with today's freeway of boulevard traffic.
Each car had a different drive system. The blue car, the 512 Hybrid, was a gasoline-electric hybrid vehicle. The red car was an all-electric car and the yellow car ran on a 12-horsepower 19.6 cubic inch (0.3-liter) two-cylinder engine. The silver three-wheeled car was the gasoline-powered 511 Commuter Vehicle.
GM featured the cars in a 1969 media event called the "Parade of Power." The show highlighted the automaker's research into various forms of alternative propulsion. Also included were jet-powered cars, a steam-powered Pontaic Grand Prix and an exhibit on "nuclear reactor systems as possible means of powering vehicles." GM's 512 Series Urban Cars
As for auto workers, if you only have a GED, you should NEVER make 30/hr.... Sorry, just not right. If on the other hand, you have a degree in anything decent you have no business doing a simple assembly line job.
Someone here has a high opinion of himself.
You will be shocked if you check things like welds, body panel alignment, basic quality of individual components
When I see failures like these, I am more likely to ask questions about CAD/CAM engineering and the robots on the line.
The US Government spends Billions on research of every conceivable kind, including batteries and biomedical. I should know, it pays my bills. The ignorance of the OP would be astounding if this were not /.
This is not a self-referential sig.
NIST does standards: makes sure the meter long steel pipe made in California stays a meter long in New York. They also determine how to calibrate things correctly, and how to mix stuff to give the optimal reliability, etc.
The U.S. isn't actually at war, or it would act like it, and use any means at its disposal. What it's trying to do is exercise control over its own population using pseudo-wars as strawman proxies allowing it to take whatever actions it wants towards that ends.
Really, this is more about the U.S. _not_ involving itself in wars; the current operations are, at best, police actions (as Vietnam was); there are certainly no declarations of war, ratified by Congress, on record in the national archives, for the "war" in Iraq.
As a demonstration...
It would only take 3.2 Gtons to carpet bomb every square inch of Iraq to the point that nothing, including specially designed structures were still standing. This assumes standard yield weapons delivered as ground-bursts, with destructive radius limited to ~ 12 miles by the curvature of the Earth.
That'd actually cost far less than US$500B to field the necessary munitions and deliver them, even with a nice 50% overkill margin in case up to 30% of the munitions failed to detonate.
In practice, it would take even far less destructive power than that, since you'd only have to bomb the areas where there were actually people, and you could use air-bursts to do it, picking up significantly larger destructive radii for each burst location at the same time.
Note also that these could be conventional fuel-air explosive weapons (air-burst) or cluster bombs (ground-burst), ether of which produces more destruction than the Hiroshima blast, without people panicing about use of nuclear weapons.
China's about 20 times that (9.596M sq kilometers vs. 0.427M sq kilometers for Iraq) area, and admittedly, it'd be hard to swing a dead cat without hitting a person or structure in most place. On the other hand, North Korea is only about 2/7th's the size of Iraq (0.1205M sq kilometers), so you could carpet bomb it with about 1Gton (or far less, if you avoided uninhabited areas).
-AC
The government funds lots of research. What about SBIRs?
http://www.sbir.gov/
On battery research as well, for a long time now... Try filling in the little search box at www.sandia.gov with the word "battery". I got 325 hits. Some were about technology that uses batteries but the majority was about chemical energy storage.
The Government is and has been funding research into batteries and many other scientific areas either in its national laboratories or in partnership with industry, e.g., the Advanced Battery Consortium with the GM, Ford and Chrysler (started 15 yrs ago)...and there have been many similar projects.
On the very day this question was posted, this article appeared in New Scientist, talking about the $3B the US' National Science Foundation received as part of the stimulus, and the promise made by Pres. Bush and supported by Pres. Obama to double the NSF's funding in 10 years.
Perhaps the government does fund research...
Allegedly real newspaper headline from 1998:
Man Struck by Lightning Faces Battery Charge
Orion, anyone?
I know someone who just transferred over to the Orion project because the defense-related project she was on (along with a number of defense projects at the same site) was cut leading to layoffs at that facility, while the facility out west that is doing Orion work is apparently desperate to hire people.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
The decline of the U.S, relates directly to improved social justice. America was a power house when we had slavery and starvation wages for workers. We also had brutal policies in relation to foreign powers as well as our own American Indians.
But we pulled the five year olds out of the coal mines. We freed the slaves. We established a minimum wage and insisted upon safety in the work place. We toned down actions such as kicking the Mexicans out of the ownership of most of the American west.
And every time we improved life for the oppressed there was little thought that companies would have to compete with nations such as China and Russia that use slave labor. Our machine shop workers did not sleep next to their machines while another worker continued machining. Our Pullman workers did not starve to death on the job. And America declined.
It has not been a recent process. Our decline relates directly to justice and fairness for the lower classes.
Dude, Reagan spent a shitload of money on research. Not to defend the Republican agenda, but, when it came to "defense research", Reagan spent a lot of money. That's how concepts like SSTO got started, and although many of those projects are just dusty remains now, a lot of gains were made in materials research and propulsion technologies.
Don't underestimate what Reagan did for basic research. He spent so much money in the defense arena that the Soviet Union essentially bankrupted itself trying to keep up with him. The Berlin wall fell mostly due to the fact that the Soviets were still stuck with a lot of WWII technology, and they ran out of money in the technological war of the 80's.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
...and it would be a waste of time/money. The technology in the black ops projects is beyond what most people can imagine. Any innovation in the general public that is deemed too "advanced" (such as "free" energy) is actively suppressed (sometimes violently)...if you're not aware of this, you've been living under a rock, or in denial. The matter at hand is how to get the black projects to release their technology to the public (they are not under the control of the president, ie. not high enough security level)...for the ill informed, it is about the control of the people, as technology that is too advanced would give more freedom to the people, and that is not something those in power will allow (hopefully this will change sometime in the future, but i doubt it, the way things have been going).
~ awaiting spiritual enlightenment ~
to figure out where all our potential research money is being squandered/embezzled.
oh wait, the government gives money to entrenched political parties to run their campaigns
America has more research universities than any other country, most of that research is government funded (along with some privately funded research). We have national labs. Even private non-profit research labs that compete with universities for research grants. I work at a 1400 employee private non-profit biomedical research laboratory. Much of our funding comes from National Institute of Health grants (we also sell genetically defined laboratory mice as well as research services to help subsidize our research programs).
The original poster is obviously an idiot. Just because a private company is investing in research TO GET A COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE does not mean the government is not investing in research. I'm sure most of the basic research that lead up to GM's own applied battery research was done at University and government labs.
The government does fund research, but not always for direct projects. NIH Grants http://grants.nih.gov/grants/oer.htm provide funding for lots of research related things, such as laboratory improvements, new equipment, etc. One of the stimulus packages included added more funding for NIH Grants. You can see all the active ones at http://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/search_results.htm?year=active&scope=pa
I couldn't think of anything witty to say, so...you're stuck with this.
Please read up on what the DoE does and the research going on at the national labs. If the government isn't funding research, then what do you call Fermi, Los Alamos, Sandia? Who do you think is paying to build another ATLAS detector to be installed in the LHC?
I was an intern at Argonne. Argonne has people working on battery research. I saw some of the hydrogen, hybrid and electric cars scientists here are working on. I saw Blue Gene, the 3rd fastest open-science supercomputer - a new building is going up right now that will house the supercomputer and half the building will be accessible without entering Argonne itself, making research by outside scientists much easier. There are scientists working on nuclear plant technology too, and scientists I have talked to are all in favor of building more nuclear plants.
The government assuredly is funding research. Maybe the budget could use expansion, but at the very least don't start thinking that we don't have scientists still leading groundbreaking research.
My webcomic
One of the biggest problems is that the money that is being spent by the US government (and foundations) for basic research is being less effective because of a misguided notion that research results are worthless unless they are exclusively owned by someone and turned into a proprietary business in a narrow way. See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayh-Dole_Act
http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2000/03/press.htm
http://www.pdfernhout.net/open-letter-to-grantmakers-and-donors-on-copyright-policy.html
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
This is a very common attitude: We can send a man to the moon, but we don't have efficient [solar power|wind power|automobile mileage|cancer cure|flying cars|etc.] so we are not spending enough money on research.
The thought never seems to cross their minds that we (both private industry and governments across the world) are already spending millions upon billions on research.
The problem is not necessarily the money, it's the physics.
Screw that. If I buy one of those cars, I'm driving it!
Fusion research.
USSR was bankrupted back in the 70's. reagan kept them alive by re-starting the grain deal and offering them loans.
As to research, yes, he CUT research dollars greatly, and then shifted a lot more into DARPA spending. I know, because the research I was on back then was converted to DARPA.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
You're a lefty President with a lefty Congress at your beck-and-call. You can stimulate the market economy with research funds or you can nationalize the auto industry. Gee. What a dilemma!
I'm a Programmer. That's one level above Software Engineer and one level below Engineer.
How many years of research went into the the Amazon Kindle screen? How many years of research went into the microturbines that we see becoming more popular? How many companies pour billions of dollars into researching medicines and medical devices? Sorry, but you are very, very wrong.
Or rather one of the times it changed. It switches back and forth depending which party has the White House.
I was a student at the start of the 80s, when the Reagan administration came in. My student job was student technician on a new physics lab. I was the first technician hired on a project that would eventually have a couple of dozen, and most of my work initially consisted of carpentry, tearing down surplus instruments we'd get from places like Livermore, and preparing tanks and pumps for experiments that needed high vacuum.
A few months into this, they hired an engineer. He was actually a physicist whose research funding had dried up, but he had experience with designing and building vacuum systems. He brought his life's work with him: a magnificent confection of gleaming stainless steel manifolds and flanges. In the main it consisted of a segmented stainless steel pipe about a foot and a half in diameter and about eight feet long, but with all its fiddly little doo-dads I'd reckon that once it had all been machined it'd weeks of serious effort to assemble. We were going to use it as small vacuum tank.
"What's that thing?" I asked him.
"It's a new kind of electron microscope," he said. "It gives a high resolution picture of the distribution of atomic nuclei types in the sample." I didn't know much back then other than which end of a hammer was which (the skill for which I'd been hired), but I suppose it must have been some kind of NMR device.
"So you got cut when the research money got shifted to defense?" I asked.
"Oh, that wasn't it," he said. "I was on an ONR grant. They had been interested in the principles of operation, but now they're more focused on immediately useful research."
"It looks like a death ray," I said suggestively.
"That would have worked in the old days," he said. "Not anymore. I blame ROTC. The guys you deal with aren't scientists, but they know a death ray when they see one and they think like engineers. They want to talk deaths per dollar. There's very little funding for this kind of technology research now."
Now it so happens as military research was turning toward the grim pragmatism of "deaths per dollar", the opposite swing was occurring in civilian research. Research with identifiable applications was anathema, because that was interfering with the private sector.
I had a family member who had spent years researching aquaculture techniques. Not only did he publish papers, his job required him to give free consulting to American businesses. When the new administration came in, he was no longer allowed to work on anything that had applications. Instead, he traveled around the world selling his expertise to foreign businesses, designing and building some of the largest aquaculture facilities ever built. When the Clinton administration came in, he came back to his old job, and when the Bush administration came in, it brought back the old restrictions against doing immediately useful research and he went back to consulting in places like Thailand. Under left wing administrations, the US taxpayer underwrote his development of technology too far over the economic horizon to attract private investment. Under right wing administrations they set him loose to transfer that technology to countries with low labor costs and no public technology investment.
The theory which denigrates useful applied research is self-consistent, at least if you don't try to consider any real world complexities. It states that if something is potentially useful, the private sector will do it, do it cheaper and do it better. Within moderation I have no problem with this theory. If the private sector is racing to develop a technology then the government should step out of the way. The problem I have with this ideology is that it declares that if the private sector is not working on something, that thing must be worthless. In a market pricing theory of value, that view is technically correct, but that begs the que
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Forget putting money into business, we already should know by now that they can't be trusted... Seriously people, open your eyes, 'fool me once...' yadda yadda and all that... the government directly funding ANY kind of research is a step in the right direction but still not fixing anything. The US patents are whats keeping the batteries (and other technologies) we have now, which are already amazingly efficient, from being produced cheaply enough to be effective on the end-user price because it limits the production itself. Those same types of patents are also what keeps solar, wind, tidal, and geothermal energy from being implemented, effectively wiping out the need for the current 'dirty' energy sources we use now. All just to make sure companies with certain energy monopolies stay holding that monopoly.
Broadening the scope a bit here, the cost of the research shouldn't be an issue at all, nor who is conducting the research... because the research isn't the issue, WE ALREADY HAVE THE TECHNOLOGY (yeah yeah, don't make fun, it's true)...
Consider this...
http://www.thevenusproject.com/ EVERYTHING should go into this. The US government and Corporate American greed has already f****d up this entire planet all by themselves. The system is BROKEN, stop trying to fix it with money, MONEY IS THE PROBLEM. Most of us that don't live in the USA already can see that the US society simply does not give a s**t or is too ignorant to see how much THEY HAVE BEEN LIED TO by their own government. Most choose just not to listen because the mainstream media is telling them what they need to know, yet many of them would probably tell you they don't believe them either, and still do NOTHING. The world is going to hell in a hand basket. The US needs to fix their mistakes and fix them RIGHT NOW!!!... or sadly there will be no world left for the next generation, MY generation. Yes, it will end that quickly. F**K BUSINESSES. ALL OF THEM. It's been proven over and over again that money never solves anything, no matter how much money is involved, I'm only 13 years old and I already can tell you why a monetary system will never work the way society and the media try to make you believe it works, because IT DOESN'T WORK!!! It's a hard thing for people to grasp, ditching the whole idea of money gets a 13 year old kid laughed at and made fun off in school. But it needs to be done, one way or another this will HAVE to happen. every time the economy gets into trouble its much worse than the last time, and the 'collateral damage' of just a bunch of numbers going down does an amazing amount of damage to the everyday people that have nothing to do with it, even on the other side of the earth.
Usually that sort of devastation is classified as CRIMINAL NEGLIGENCE!!!
If your an American reading this, I hope I haven't upset or offended you, that is not the point of this rant, it's to try and make people realize that this needs to change before its too late. I don't look forward to some kind of civil apocalypse before I have the chance to have my own family or whatever I chose to do with my life.
Hell, I know most of you are either laughing at this right now or just think I'm crazy or whatever. Quite truthfully, I'm f**king pissed off (if you hadn't guessed already) that I will have to grow up dealing with the social, political, economical, and environmental S**TSTORM these old MORONS started just because they thought that having more money would make them better people, or whatever perversion of reality they chose to believe. Thanks, thanks a lot you old farts.
It's time to stop worrying about who's going to do what with the money or who would do a better job with the money and start thinking about what needs to be implemented so that we (all human beings) live off of our resources and technology, not our social perception of wealth.
WAKE UP PEOPLE!!! Too many of you are stuck in this ideology of 'The American Dream' that is no longer realistic, the truth is, it never was realistic. Just another ploy to get you to p
Let's say I'm a congressman. If I vaguely fund research, who benefits? The public, and not even the current public; this is a public several years in the future. Are they grateful? Will I get something out of this? Fuck no. If I give money to a company, one of the implicit conditions of that, is that the stockholders are going to help with my re-election. Who benefits? I do (indirectly) because a very small targeted group benefits directly, and they know I'm a team player and they owe me one.
As soon as you give congress the power to throw around amounts like $10 billion, it's pretty much guaranteed that it isn't going to be used to advance our interests. If you ask me whether they ought to fund research or divert it to private parties, my answer is that they should never do either; they shouldn't spend the money at all. Pay off the debt, or if it's already paid, then don't collect that $10 billion in taxes in the first place.
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
People with extraordinary skills might spend their money more wisely than the government, no?
I can say for a fact (speaking to someone who supports a government agency, and knows, but I should not name), that the Obama administration *has* started pumping money, both straight and as part of the stimulus, directly into actual research.
Dick "Halliburton's profits" Cheney and George "vacationing on my photo-op ranch" Bush saw no profits in it; besides, it might want to do or say something that conflicts with their Christian supporters.
mark
When I read this, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Constitution I see no mention of basic scientific research being named as a responsibility of the Federal Government. Actually, according to Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8 of the US Constitution, the Federal Government is suppose:
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;
Yep, IP is included in the US Constitution as a means to advance the Science and useful arts, not confiscatory taxes going toward basic research.
Unless its military or better ways to control their citizens.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Disclaimer: I am a public affairs specialist with the U.S. Army Research, Development & Engineering Command as well as a long-time Slashdot reader & member.
The Army does accomplish a lot of the work through universities and businesses, but we also employ somewhere around 9,000 civilian scientists and engineers in RDECOM, many of whom are working on what we call wearable power. I invite all of you to check out our web site at http://www.army.mil/info/organization/unitsandcommands/commandstructure/rdecom/index.html. You'll see a couple of partnership stories about what we're doing with Microsoft and a NASCAR team, but we have thousands of partnerships and more than 300 international agreements. We also do a lot of STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) educational outreach. Check out eCybermission https://ecybermission.apgea.army.mil/, though that's not our only effort.
We are the headquarters and have subordinate commands that do the actual research and development. So check out our subordinate elements page, http://www.rdecom.army.mil/pages/rdecom_elements.html, to see more about what they do. Basically, we do everything from basic research through places like the Army Research Laboratory and the Edgewood Chemical and Biological Center, right through to prototyping and even some production at our Product Integration Facilities. Probably the most well-known of our subordinates is the Natick Soldier Research, Development and Engineering Center, which does things like MREs, uniforms, helmets, tentage, etc.
I'll apologize up front about our web page. The front page has been transitioned to the new Army.mil look and feel, but we're just beginning to convert our other pages. We're also making baby steps into social media, so we're on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and Flickr. The YouTube channel includes a handful of videos from our scientists and engineers talking about what they do. Links are on our home page.
And I guess I should mention that the other services have similar commands. I'm sure Google will be glad to help you find them.
We've learned the hard way (Gordon Bell at DEC once gave GaAs semiconductors as an example) that if the US Government funds research and doesn't have a plan for American companies to commercialize it, foreign companies will take the free research and commercialize it to their advantage and American companies' disadvantage. If it is commercially useful, either have a plan to use it, or don't fund it. (Of course there is other research which is nowhere near commercially useful, and that's another story.) As a counter example, the shift from Ge semiconductors to Si semiconductors was caused by the US Government wanting to actually buy a very large number of Si transistors for use in missile guidance systems due to Si's better performance at high temperatures.
Even though some scientific funding has been hurt recently the government is still funding scientific research (i.e., my own funding). I know for a fact that the NSF (National Science Foundation) is sending out more funding since they received bailout/recovery money from the government. Global warming research is one of the most important that needs to continue to be funded. Hands down it's the most important area that needs to be realized...we're talking about saving our world! Green technologies go along with this...more research into solar energy, biofuel, etc.
âoeQuestion with boldness even the existence of God.â - Thomas Jefferson
One thing to understand is that the US can only absorb so much research money - you can spend a 100 billion paving roads or building shitty McMansions in the suburbs but you can't really expect spending 100 billion on your favorite research topic is going to produce much more than spending 1 billion - this is because there is only so much skilled labor for research, once your researchers hit full employment the extra money just inflates salaries and encourages more people to become researchers (which has a very long lead time) so you can't expect any real immediate improvment in results once you hit full employment - the same is true for almost anything you can spend money on - the goverment spends 100 billion on roads, bailing out auto companies etc... because it can - the money is primarily going to low skill workers. Of course this fact does not apply to wall street, there lots of people have relatively low skilled jobs (buying and selling shit they don't understand) and yet somehow seem to be able to absorb infinite amounts of money....
It didn't go so well the last time we fought Canada. They burned the White House.
(What US History textbooks don't teach kids is that they burned the White House because we burned Parliament.)
The proof is that so many banks crashed at the same time. They were all playing by the government's rules. The slowing economy exposed the fact that all the banks had the same risk model (defined by the Fed and Community Reinvestment Act). Instead of the banks with the highest risk/reward ratio going down first and prompting the other banks to reevaluate, they all just crashed at once.
Every tax dollar is stolen by threat of violence. As such they should only be used to prevent even worse things. I fund research because I think it's a good idea, but I'm not about to use the threat of violence to steal from you to fund research.
As for the practical outcome of research. I think history has too much noise to make any broad statements about what is the primary cause of innovation. Perhaps wars, research and innovation are all spuriously correlated to each other by simple demographic shifts.
Well Part of the reason there is "no" or very little research funding is due to the fact that the US is the last remaining super power so there is no competition! Then to top it off the US is to busy War mongering to be able to afford much else. They're too busy bailing out GM because with out GM who the hell is gonna build our Tanks and armored vehicles? With out war toys the US has nothing! I say let GM fall, instead of giving money to a company whose sole product is based of the internal combustion engine which will in a few short years be obsolete, that is if we don't figure out how to burn some thing apart from hydro-carbons in which case were all eFFed any how so let the floundering company die and get some new industry in instead. Spend some money on research and development for Hydrogen cells or solar energy or better yet develop a car which charges it own battery with a wind turbine turned by the moving air which it creates while moving. now that would be something worth spending my money on! let the people choose what our billions in taxes are spent on!
the pirates ;-)
freeing intellectual discovery, the natural bounty of mankind, from the retarded laws of retarded countries and the corporate thugs who own that country and try to keep things secret
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Are you somehow implying that the government isn't 100% efficient? Say it isn't so!
Please. Don't say an ill-advised bailout targeted at the ruling party's political base surprises you. That's what government does. It makes political decisions, not wise ones. That's exactly why it's good to have the govt control as little of the economy as possible.
"You can give $10 billion to a company to squander or you can invest $10 billion into a battery research and just give the findings to the whole of the US industry for free"
Well, see there you go.. you're thinking like an open, democratic society would. That's your point of failure. We are no longer such a thing. There is no greed is just giving away $10 billion in research product; therefore it is not possible to happen in our current society.
It's not giving a company $10 billion to squander. It's giving your high-placed civilian friends $10 billion to embezzle. It's giving back to the people who slipped you tons and tons of under the table illegal campaign donations. It's passing the cheese around with your good old boys.
It's a flipping scam, all of it.
When government funds research, the result is usually a joke or disaster. Exhibit A (Govt funding alternative medicine): http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_MED_UNPROVEN_REMEDIES_RESEARCH?SITE=TNKNN&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT
" several powerful members [of congress]" --- Decisions aren't based on science, but politics.
I don't know if the term "practical" means some other form of research than the type going on at Universities and companies across the United States, but the U.S. Government spends a great deal of money on research. Including biomedical research. NSF has $ 6 Billion in 2009 and NIH has $29 Billion this year. I'm sure there are other programs but that is not chump change. Budget of the United States Government.
The problem with doing U.S Government funded research is that they expect you to tell people what you found. I think a car company doing its own research kinda implies they want to keep what the learn proprietary. IMHO.
"Why Isn't the US Government Funding Research?" I suspect it has something to do with the fact that the people making the decisions are bought and paid for by the same large corporations receiving said bailouts? On the plus side, it does appear to be getting a little better with regards to scientific funding. Bill Hicks: I have this feeling man, cause you know there's a handful of people who actually run everything. That's true, it's provable, it's not... I'm not a fuckin' conspiracy nut, it's provable. A handful. A very small elite run and own these corporations, which include the mainstream media. I have this feeling that whoever's elected president, like Clinton was; no matter what your promises you promise on the campaign trail blah,blah,blah⦠when you win, you go into this smoky room with the twelve industrialist capitalist scum-fucks who got you in there...and youâ(TM)re in this smoky room and this little film screen comes down. And a big guy with a cigar goes... âRoll the film.â(TM) And, it's a shot, of the Kennedy assassination, from an angle you've never seen before.....that looks suspiciously off the grassy knoll. And then the film screen goes up and the lights come up and they go, to the new president⦠âAny questions?â(TM) âErr, just what my agenda is?
read the book by Simon Ramo (the R in TRW)
"The Business of Science: Winning and Losing in the High-Tech Age"
it answers the question ...
-pete
Most of what they have they stole from the US anyway...
faith in Slashdot. Yes, why is the US goverment giving money to corporations rather than to basic research on which corporations are often founded?
Could it be that we've had a string of business friendly adminstrations that think money is the basis of all good (so money making business is always a good thing) followed by a socialist adminstration that wants not only the peoples wealth but the peoples power. Doing basic research and creating new technologies that empower individuals is no way for a govenment to gain power. It will be the last thing you see coming out of Barry's administration.
Why indeed...
Alright, let me come back and defend myself here. Being a scientist myself, I do in fact understand the issues at stake, though parts of my post were poorly worded - and I used bad examples - which led to the wrong impression. The problem of posting at 3am.
Yes, sensationalist publications are a big problem, for the reason you mention.
I am talking about the separate problem that there is often a disconnect between scientific research and industrial product development. Scientists do research - they aren't set up to develop the results of their discoveries into functioning clinical technologies and manufacturing processes.
Thus, there's a disconnect between the basic discovery and the development of a clinical technology: the academic lab (yes, often government-funded) can do the first, but someone else (usually a drug company) needs to do the latter. Plenty of discoveries aren't followed up as a result.
My apologies for using a stereotypical "cured cancer" sounding headline, which made me sound like a conspiracy theorist.
Okay - that particular one was probably a poor example; I read a mention of it just a couple of days ago and didn't bother to follow it up with further research. Thank you for correcting me.
In general, however, there's a well-established phenomenon that drug companies focus on developing patentable drugs that are marketable to wealthy populations. Which you can hardly blame them for - they are, after all, in business.
This means they will focus on the next treatment for alzheimers, or another anti-inflammatory for arthritis, rather than, say, new drugs for malaria or possible new uses for old drugs that have fallen out of patent. While it is possible to prescribe drugs off-label, relatively few clinical trials are done on the effectiveness of off-label uses of older medications precisely because generic competition would prevent a return on the investment required for that research, if done by the pharmaceutical company.
I'm NOT talking about alternative/holistic pseudoscientific crap or what have you. Rather, the basic situation is that that the profit/ROI goals of a pharmaceutical company (something I do *NOT* blame them for) do not always address the exact same needs as public health.
This is why governments and private philanthrophy have had to step in to fund malaria research, and there are plenty of other cases where research that might not present a maximal ROI opportunity for a pharmaceutical company would be a good idea for a government with public health goals.
The government funds plenty of basic science research - most academic biology labs are largely funded by the NSF or NIH - but comparatively little of the relatively more expensive product development research.
Product development, bulk synthesis, and manufacturing research are all also necessary for medical technologies to reach the clinic, and those are still almost exclusively the domain of private enterprise, where they have to pass the ROI filter.
This leaves additional room for government to step in with a different set of goals.
I stole this sig from someone cleverer than me.
"what practical research do you think the US government should embark upon to get the most return for its citizens and the world?" What about: Why US is failing epically as a world leader and what can be done to expedite the process?
Intellectual Property: an immaterial non-entity, most fiercely contended by those with no proper intellect to speak of.
People are quite the sheep you make them out to be. Calling millions of people 'reptile brained" for buying the vehicle they wanted isn't too smart.
Or you can leave the 10 Billion in the pockets of those that earned it and they'll go out and spend it on innovative products and the market will thrive and more innovative products will be released.
Or you can be a Socialist and take that which others earn and invest in research like why men like sex, why fruit flies eat fruit and making glowing cats. Government research seldom results in true broad reaching innovations that affect the consumer market.
There are some good examples from NASA like Tang, cordless power tools, golf ball aerodynamics, and scratch-resistant lenses.
Of course currently our new Administration is busy cutting NASA funding. I highly doubt giving a failed motor company like GM that has had years to develop alternative fuel systems is going to result in innovative products.
There are already many other companies working on alternative fuel products and some viable solutions out. Like Honda's FCV. A European designe car being built in India powered by compressed air and battery based cars from many other sources.
Perhaps, that 10 Billion would be better spent by the people who EARNED it and not a Federal government that can't even run a simple retirement fund.
Here's a link to a "Visual Guide to Where Your federal tax Dollars Go".
Pretty disgusting actually.
Visual Guide to Where Your federal tax Dollars Go
... as everything else is to everyone else, it's obvious to me that all of earths societies problems can be solved if all nations work together to fund and encourage the use of functional non-profits throughout all forms of industry.
all manufacturers of all goods and all providers of all services, except judicial services and legislature, could in fact be small localized society serving non-profit entities. it's important that these non-profits stay small, as to limit the transportation of goods, the breadth of their control, and to maximize their ability to employ and service the needs of as many people as possible. it's also important to maintain a government and judicial system separate from the business sector, but equally focused of servicing the welfare of society, only without the responsibility of maintaining its physical needs; health care, transportation systems, entertainment, et cetera.
through such a system all goods and services could be manufactured and distributed at cost, plus a minor amount to cover taxes and possible fluctuations in up front costs. any excess money accrued after some time could then be redistributed to other non-profits via a massive International Non-Profit Monetary Fund. i include the possibility for the need for taxes here because the legislative and judicial system must also be funded, and should all businesses eventually become non-profits those non-profits would then need to aide in providing funding for those governmental systems.
i could be more specific about details, but i don't really see a need... non-profits were the first types of businesses formed both in general and within the USA after it's founding. they are obviously the most sustainable business model known currently to man, and should obviously be adopted en masse if man does in fact intend on sustaining itself indefinitely.
our current capitalist endeavors have consistently been proven to be counterproductive to our success as a species, despite how they may be made to be otherwise through the description of all the wondrous things that have been produced so swiftly by our capitalist industry... consider what more could have been produce if all proceeds from the the sale of all those wondrous things could have been used to further research toward more advanced technologies and products, or services.
we could all finally have universal health care, internationally. we could all finally have environmentally savvy vehicles, internationally. we could all finally receive a decent level of education, internationally. we could all finally have access to the best entertainment media and technologies; there would be no need for two businesses to compete over sales for their MP3 players, all manufacturers of MP3 players would simply all use the best technologies available to them to create several devices with a varied array of capabilities in order to suit the many needs of their users. there would be no need for copyrights, other than possibly to protect the right of an individual (human not corporate) to maintain the right to earn a living off their creations or ideas.
we might even find a strong sense of unity and peace, internationally.
or we could just remain as we are today, at war with ourselves over petty ideals and wealth... you decide.
DON'T CAPITALIZE! CO-OPERATE! AND FREE EVERYTHING!
Is it better to buy private agenda research or fund public domain research?
Is it better to rule US or serve US?
Is it better to regurgitate dogma or think?
Is it better to treat a disease or cure a disease?
Is it better to be a greedy gorilla or creative human?
Is it better to support private interest or public interest?
Is it better to get welfare money or provide value for money?
Is it better to protect dogs/cats or provide child health care?
Is it better to praise mega-church Lords or feed/educate children?
Is it better to have large privatized government or public governance?
Is it better to fear all the unknowns or live life discovering the unknown?
WELL! Is it better for them or for US, EU, and others?
Is it better to create drug-war economies or prevent crime/murder?
Is it better to have a dogma-war or disenfranchise dogmatist from politics?
===
What about Wars for abstract concepts (nation dominoes, drugs/power economics, ain'ts/is's gods...), do they count?
Religion is a very abstract, maybe hallucinatory, concept for war and genocide.
Religions and political/corporate institutional dogma is at war with Public Governance (Democracy, I think), meritocracy economics (Capitalism, I think), and seeking global draconian-welfare entitlement authority by blame-storming with other low-IQ agreeable-dogmatist.
Soon we may just whoops ourselves into extinction, while we point at you!
The quality of life (debt, pollution, corruption, war, crime, unemployment...) we leave for our children is "DOGMA" based, and your own god-damn faults.
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
As to your second point, aren't you just saying that Reagan changed the priority of the research funding, rather than cutting the overall reseach funding? Your ox got gored, while somebody else was in Fat City ... it sux, sure, but it happens all the time ...
it ceased to be another country.
China has its own ideas about what the boundaries of China are, and never accepted Tibet's claim of sovereignty. This is also more or less what's going on with Taiwan. There are arguably some problems with the merits of China's claims, but from that perspective, there's no particular inconsistency between a policy of non-interference in internal affairs and asserting control over Tibet.
Libertarianism is rich wolves and poor sheep playing gambler's ruin for dinner.
Like the war on the public broadcasting system, investment money to "a bunch of liberal scientists" was one of the big hate drums of the republican party. One of the things they did to balance the budget was get rid of that "horrible waist of money".
This question is worthless. Not only does the gov. already pour money into research, but they're broke, and they THINK they only way they can help is by pouring money into the economy. Research is, to say the absolute very least, fucking SLOW. Nobody's winning short term when you pump more money into research, except of course a few research techs.
then yes
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
If there were no laws there would be no crime.
Criminal Law *drives* crime.
If it is not regulated, limited or forbidden-- how can it be "corrupt?" In other words, if you make it legal then how can doing it be corrupt?
Selfish bastards with plenty of motivation will always find ways to CRACK the system; it can not be completely prevented, best we've done is to try to punish those who go too far by creating "reasons" to use when going after those who exploit others-- regulations and laws. The intention of the whole thing is to stop unfair accumulation of wealth and power at the expense of others. Without legal justification and due process how can we reasonably implement systems to help towards approximating our ideals?
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
This administration has stated that it's goal is to save and create union jobs. Funding pure research won't accomplish that goal, but giving money to GM and others will.
Uh yeah it's because of the consequences of letting these companies fail. Where's the news here? This is just some Libertarian rant against "socialism" dressed up as "news" about "science funding".
Hey Libertarians ! Hey Ayn Rand freaks! You know why we had to bail out the banking system and these companies? Because the idea that "markets are self regulating" and "deregulation is always good" has been the order of the day since Ronnie Raygun was el Prezidente. So, of course we have oversized companies run by people with BS financial theories of "risk management" so BIG (getting government off business's backs!) and so intertwined with each other that if they go under, the system starts failing all over the place and society, at least as we know it, stands a good chance of dissolving.
That's why. Because Milton Friedman and the rest of the true believers in "free markets" did exactly what the Soviets used to do- attempt to impose a top down, ideologically laden "system" upon reality, a reality they had little interest in understanding or probing.
Read the Black Swan. Read a little Karl Popper. Learn to understand what reality is and how to get to know it and especially learn to be a little humble about the ability to understand and predict complex systems and the limitations and misapplications (Black / Shoales crap) of mathematical modeling to those systems.
In other words, quit reading Ayn Rand and get out in the real world.
Research into programming languages and devel environments designed for the coming multicore future is sorely needed. It's a hard problem - probably one of the most difficult since the development of the first true PC. These days electronics are a large part of being a super power... you want to improve America? Improve her ability to develop software that takes advantage of the electronics out there.
I believe you make the false assumption that only businesses squander money and research projects do not. We shouldn't setup the government to compete with the free market nor manipulate it.