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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.
We ran out of German scientists =/
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.
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.
How is getting some public governmental research entity started going to be remotely cost effective and efficient
Of course you're right. Government research is always so wasteful and inefficient. Remember that DARPAnet thing? What a dumb idea! Fortunately, it sank like every inefficient government research program inevtably will, and we can now discuss the glories of the Invisible Hand here on free-market forums such as Compuserve, Prodigy, and GEnie.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
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
Model T also had what, like 20 horsepower?
Now we can get 20MPG out of what, like 200 horsepower on something that weighs 2000 pounds more, is safer both to drive and less likely to kill pedestrians if it hits them (yes, they are engineered to be less pedestrian-fatal), start in cold weather, and generally run hundreds of thousands of miles. So remind me, where's the comparison here?
Oh, right. Back to reality. Research pays for itself more than investing in corporations. However, corporations have our society by the balls, so what is to be expected? In short, we have given corporations too much rights. We need to be investing in ourselves aka research.
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...
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.
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
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.
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.
I think your forgetting the differences between state and local governments and the federal US government. Post roads is explicitly place under the domain of the US federal government where Fire and police services aren't. In fact, there are special rules that need to be followed before a US marshal or FBI agent gains legal jurisdiction over a violation of law.
All of this is spelled out in the constitution in which is outlines what the Federal government can do. The constitution wasn't designed to limit the government, it was designed to specifically empower it with the remaining duties being left to the state or the people respectively. The bill of rights and amendments either limit the government in obvious ways or change how some constitutional authority operates.
What is left is operated by the states or local governments and it would entirely depend on their constitution and laws to weather they are capable of doing something like that or not.
To further expand on this, the government has a duty to not waste the money it imposes the obligation for on the people. It would be just as risky of a bet for any government to tax the people and take the tax money to the horse track. This obligation is no different then you becoming the executor of an estate or trust when someone else is the receiver and having to be prudent in the investments or risk not only jail time but having to repay any losses in the process.
You know, money given to the poor doesn't just disappear. The poor spend it, and actually spend more of their income than any other demographic. In fact, giving money to the poor is one of the best ways for a government to boost economic activity and help everyone.
Why does the government exists to pave roads? Or pick up "trash" and maintain parks?
If you're happy to run road builders and private street cleaners out of business then why not battery research firms? Why is that tiny sector more deserving of protection than a large landowner who wants to build a dam, lay pipe and sell the water?
Bring a bit of consistency to your ideals for goodness sake, you say the government exists to do x,y,z someone else says that it exists to do a,b and z and someone else says they exist to do a-z. The truth is the government exists to do whatever the people consent to them doing. If that means researching batteries then that is the choice of the people. Whether it's a good or bad choice is another story.
- I await the people trying to figure out which political stripe they can flame me as.
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?
You've answered your own question. For profit corporations are not good research vehicles, because they are too efficient at raising profits. This means they will efficiently allocate resources to researching technology with obvious (near) immediate commercial returns. So yes, you'll get research on longer lasting batteries (if only so that they can be patented and kept off the market as long as possible), and GM, etc. However the areas of science which might be today's equivalent to the physics of electricity or of genetics will not be discovered by this kind of effcient R&D.
Corporate research is excellent at delivering technological improvements, less so at fostering scientific innovation.
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke
The trade imbalance, however large, is not even close to our total economic output. The multiplier effect is still in play. The poor still buy American-made food, get their hair cut by Americans, and so on. Your argument is essentially that the poor disproportionately contribute to the trade imbalance, and even if that were true, the money supplied in the actual trade mechanics (and industrial design) would be significant.
Second, it's quite rich to claim the poor would just subsidize China when, really, the reason places like Wal-Mart exist is that middle class incomes haven't increased in 30 years. With a robust middle class, our trade wouldn't be in such dire straits.
In basic, the "Guvmint" exists to keep us safe and provide basic infrastructure. I would add in water, police, firemen... Oh, and the EPA, FDA, etc. we need those kinds of watchdog agencies.
Does the government own GM now? ... No. No it does not. It's just a big shareholder.
You seem to place great store in the ability of the "market" to innovate. You bash the government for being inefficient. Have you ever worked for a large company? Man.... Trust me, the government doesn't have a monopoly on being stupid and slow.
And so freaking what if government did open source a battery and undermined a companies research dollars? Really... so what? Who gave companies some kind of right? No one is guaranteed the right to profit.
I'm rather tired of this magic land where companies would do what's best for all of us due to the power of the "free market". You know what? The first thing most successful and large companies do is strangle the free market to death so they can retard innovation and competition. It's happened over and over again in pretty much every single industry I can think of. Don't go crying Commie on me... I love the theory of capitalism. It turns human greed into technological progress. It's awesome... but there has to be limits and consequences to the behaviour of large companies. And man, they do NOT need any protections!
Think of this... Big business pays almost no taxes. They create something, sometimes with government subsidies or loans. They sell it to us at a profit. Then they dump their waste into the public rivers. We pay for them to make stuff. We pay to get the stuff. Then we pay to clean up the waste from the process. W.T.F!
Oops... calm down... no ranting... It's ok..... Phew!
I love it when the government does research and puts the results out there. Everyone benefits and we all pay so very little for such a big gain. That's the magic of government. It doesn't have to be driven by the almighty Profit. It can do the right thing at a loss, just because it needs to be done. We all benefit, and our slice of the payment is so very tiny.
People whine about the inefficiency of the government, then they drive on the roads, enjoy the protections of police and firemen, use the public school systems, buy homes that aren't death traps thanks to building codes, reap the benefits of cheap shipping due to interstate highways..... etc etc etc.
ah, ah... calm... yes....
For my two cents, I would love to see the government do basic research in:
batteries and capacitors. We need this very badly.
infrastructure... build high speed rails so we can ship a house across the country for a nickel.
Power savings... Why isn't there an open source home design for builders to use? Seriously, something so simple....
I could go on, but those would be a nice start.
-Tony
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!
Well, it's become less direct than it was. Now all that research money is funneled through Monsanto ('cept they don't call it research). Monsanto's investments in politicians and ties to bureaucrats have paid off well.
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%.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Private companies don't do basic research because basic research might or might not be profitable and if it might be profitable, then only in very long term. Private companies don't think in long term.
Also, stop bullshitting yourself in thinking that free market puts research dollars where they will be most beneficial. Free market researches everything what might bring a short term profit. It doesn't have to be beneficial at all and often it isn't.
Putting research dollars where they will buy the most votes, on the other hand, is doing research on what the public wants. And in many cases the public wants beneficial things.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
Why you're wrong is as simple as the difference between advanced research funded by the government in the hopes of advancing science and narrow research funded by corporations in order to keep their profit margins at an acceptable level while not falling behind their competitors.
The really big gains over the past 50 years have seldom been privately funded because that is simply not their goal. If they make a breakthrough it's either by accident or because they've pushed their current capability to the point which requires a breakthrough to avoid stagnation.
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.
Monsanto are one of a very small number of entities who scare the living crap out of me.
I have no idea about if/how the government are involved with their affairs. However, I do know that they control 70-100% of the United States' supply of certain crops. I also know that they own and control a technology that can produce 'sterile' crops that don't yield any seeds at the end of the harvest.
They've literally got the ingredients for a mad-scientist-plotting-to-take-over-the-world scenario. I'm no libertarian, but that's an unreasonable amount of power for any one entity to hold over humanity. They might as well have a small stockpile of nuclear weapons.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
I read an interesting opinion piece the other day, it said that American government is inefficient because Americans expect it to be inefficient. It lives up to our expectations. What competent person wants to be a civil servant when they expect that it will be a waste of their time and effort? Why would they do that when people are just going to complain about them, no matter WHAT they do? If you're going to go through all that pain, you might as well work for yourself. On the other hand, government social nets in some places work out pretty well. Check out flexicurity in Denmark, it's pretty cool.
The purpose of government is to execute the collective will of society. We as a people decided to get together and made a contract to create this organization to take care of certain things for us. If the collective will is only to pave roads and protect the borders, then that's what it will result in. If the collective will includes things like, making sure people don't starve to death in the streets or die of easily curable diseases, then that's what will happen. As it is, most people in the US are interested in some sort of health care system, which is why all the major candidates had a health plan. If the will of the people includes funding science or landing on the moon, or enslaving blacks, then it tends to happen, for better or for worse.
Agreed on the Camaro.
Qxe4
Oh, the thought just dawned on me that you didn't see my OP as the sarcasm that it was. I'm not anti-poor as much as I was mocking our consumer sentiment that tends to value goodies more than people. I mean, if I read one more time about how plastic dashes are so fricking terrible that we can throw three million of our own fellow citizens out of work...
sigh. I respond below:
The trade imbalance, however large, is not even close to our total economic output.
The trade imbalance is actually much larger when you consider how much of our exports are either food, raw materials, or products of an upper class, like aircraft or computers.
Second, it's quite rich to claim the poor would just subsidize China when, really, the reason places like Wal-Mart exist is that middle class incomes haven't increased in 30 years. With a robust middle class, our trade wouldn't be in such dire straits
I would say that if we had manufacturing jobs, we would have still have a middle class, and not nearly as many poor people! I mean, we have lots of people that can't do a tech economy but could be fine on an assembly line. Now they are on welfare. It's just a tragedy that we place a consumer good so much more above the welfare of our fellow citizens.
I'm one of those christian right wingers that happen to think that Jesus would have us lift up the poor and the citizens around us. Kinda thought that having a concern about the well being of our nation as a whole was a conservative, but I guess that's just me.
This is my sig.
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.
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.
Or you can get 39.974 mpg (I converted Imperial gallons into American ones to arrive at this figure, the original is 53.3 miles per imperial gallon), from 95 horsepower, and that's without all the hybrid nonsense. Top speed of 115mph.
That's for a Mini One, of course. Costs under $20,000, so for the price of a Cadillac Escalade ($63,155 for a 403 horsepower 6.2L V8 engine), you can have three of them (dare I say, a red one, a white one, and a blue one?), and still enough left over for a really bitchin' home entertainment system.
I can honestly say that I've never seen an SUV being operated "at capacity". Most of the time, the sole occupant is the driver, the back seats are empty (and are usually pristine), the cargo space is empty. My family of four did just fine with saloon cars, even to go on camping holidays. If you really need to haul a few hundred pound of gear on occasion, buy a trailer.
The real reason the SUV is popular is, of course, because they enjoy a tax subsidy intended for commercial trucks.
Sorry in advance for the long response, as a plant biologist I run into a lot of these questions again and again. Hopefully some of this is of interest to you.
I'm something of a libertarian myself, and yeah Monsanto has way too large a share of the seed market for my comfort. Competition is always a good thing and the seed market could use more of it.
That said, let me see if I can do anything to reduce the scariness of Monsanto. First thing you need to realize is that they do have significant competition. Pioneer Hi-bred and Syngenta, the number two and number three companies in the seed business (and to a lesser extent Dow and Bayer) are spending heavily on research to match Monsanto's genetic resources. Beyond those companies, there are still a number of significant companies focused on traditional plant breeding techniques. In critical crops such as grains Monsanto controls less than half of seed sales in the US, and a fraction of that worldwide.
The crops monsanto has the largest share of the market in are vegetables where total seed sales aren't enough to support much competition. Even for these crops, checks and balances exist, in the form of public university crop breeders, and the National Plant Germplasm System that preserves diverse crop lines from pretty much every crop species you could think of, so seeds are available from both these sources.
As for terminator technology (sterile crops), that's the one thing I don't get people worrying about. Sure Monsanto could deploy this technology, there are still going to be plenty for fertile crops around from their competitors, universities, and seed blanks, and by definition, sterile plants can't cross contaminate other plants. That'd be like inheriting sterility from your father. If your father were truly sterile you'd never have been born. (Recessive alleles make the picture a little more complicated, but the bottom line remains, sterile plants are always going to quickly and simply selected against by either natural or artificial selection.)
So in summary, while Monsanto has more control over the seed market than should ever be concentrated in a single company, this doesn't give them the power to take over the world/cut off our food supply. Other sources of crop seeds would simple expand into their market share. It gives them the power to charge too much for their products, treat farmers poorly, and keep technologies that could be live-savers out of the hands of the third world farmers than need them the most.
The government exists to disburse funds for paving roads etc., not to directly employ those who do the work. It's the way of collecting the money, sharing the cost across the citizenry, avoiding the arguments about who pays for what and making sure that everybody can get the essential services. In my part of the UK, government hires contractors for just about all the work, so the private sector is happy.
If government didn't mediate the service work, imagine the arguments about who pays for which bit of road. And just imagine the stink if you get poor and can't pay to get your garbage collected.
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.
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.
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.
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 free market is completely useless at researching anything with a small chance of a long term payoff and no short term benefit.
The government can manage those because it doesn't give a shit if it burns through billions of dollars with no result in site.
Of course in the US the constitution doesn't allow* the Federal Government to do that work anyway, so this should be irrelevant. Of course since the constitution is ignored completely no one cares.
With the rather large exception of military research which can easily be argued is part of defending the country.
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.
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
What do we eat in the meantime?
I'd imagine we'd eat exactly the same stuff we eat today.
... simultaneously. Terminator isn't a trait I'd want in and seed I was buying, but it's treat to our overall agricultural system is minor.
Remember terminator doesn't create plants that don't produce food, it produces seeds that won't germinate. So the farmer can still sell his corn (or wheat or tomatoes, or kiwis for that matter), but if he plants it next year nothing is going to grow.
As far as the idea of cross contamination goes, lets address your fears by taking them to the most extreme condition imaginable, 100% pollen contamination. (We can't achieve 100% crossing rate even when we're trying to make crosses to produce hybrids.) But in this beyond worst case scenario, what happens? Treating the terminator trait as a recessive allele, in the next generation, every plant will be heterozygous for terminator. This is like being a carrier for a genetic disease like cystic fibrosis, the plants show no symptoms, but can pass the trait on to their offspring. In the second generation a quarter of the plants are homozygous for terminator, and produce seeds that won't germinate. A quarter are homozygous wild type, and half are still heterozygous. In the third generation, germination rates decline 25% (those are the seeds produced by terminator homozygous plants). Of the plants that germinate 50% are heterozygous, 33% are wildtype and 17% are homozygous terminator. So in the forth generation, germination is down only 17% from pre-terminator levels, and it continues to trend back up in each successive generation.
If we use a more realistic level of initial contamination (say 10% between neighboring fields which is still higher than I've ever seen), then that maximum drop in germination rates in 1%. If you treat terminator as a dominant trait, the germination rate drops in the first generation after contamination and then returns completely to normal in the second and beyond. And all this assumes contamination of every crop species in every region of the country or world
Does this address your concerns? If not, could you tell me why? Need to be able to teach this stuff effectively to college students.
And on a side note, if something did wipe out food production (global climate change, new disease, asteroid impact) we'd be in real trouble. Back in 2006 global food reserves were at less than two months demand, and as far as I know they've continued to drop since then. Food stops coming in from the fields, and people are going to start starving quickly. Which is another reason it makes sense for the government to get back in the business of funding crop improved to improve yields and make crops more resilient in the face of biological and non-biological stresses.