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Accountability of the Scientific Stimulus Funding
eldavojohn writes "A blog tipped me off to a government site that allows me to see where my tax dollars went when the nebulous 'scientific stimulus' was granted. You might be able to find this information in a bill, but you can click on your state in this interactive site to see what has happened locally to you. Perhaps it's a sign of more government transparency in regards to spending or just more propaganda."
Exclusive: Jobs 'Saved or Created' in Congressional Districts That Don't Exist http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/jobs-saved-created-congressional-districts-exist/story?id=9097853
The primary problem with the science stimulus funding is not it going to non-science issues. The real issue is that much of the funding is going to projects which aren't going to be completed before the funding runs out. Many if not most of those projects will then be scrambling for funding and a lot of good science will likely get lost because they can't complete them. The stimulus funding should have been directed to more shorter term studies.
You are absolutely correct.
But the sad reality is that a) scientific spending has the highest return of any government policy (most of which has a negative return), and b) the alternative is not to get science funded through a R&D bill, but to release the funds to other frivolous projects that lobbyists like, and leave nothing for pure, long-term-oriented scientific research.
So I'm going to have to cynically label this "it shouldn't be in the stimulus, but something else" as a low-priority issue.
Information theory is life. The rest is just the KL divergence.
is very transparent. Most of it is published. Budgets are public.
While we always need more transparency, I am surprised how many people don't even know that budgets are published and kept in libraries.
What is better is letting people know where this data is, and also getting it online.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
This isn't a gov site. from the about us page:
ScienceWorksForUS is a joint effort of the Association of American Universities (AAU), the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU), and The Science Coalition (TSC) to demonstrate the impact of stimulus-funded university research activities across the country.
These are trade/lobbying organizations, not government agencies.
that story? it's about people not correctly reporting their district.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
It's important to note that this stimulus funding (they're also called 'Recovery Act' grants) were under a very short submission cycle.
Essentially, we only had a few months to prepare and submit a proposal to get funded, which isn't a lot of time -- unless you already had a proposal ready (or nearly ready) in the wings. What this means in a practical sense is that a lot of what the stimulus funds would have ended up going to is work that's in-progress, or stuff that larger labs want to do as pilot projects.
Also: someone in here suggested shorter-term studies. That's not how real science is done. We try to encapsulate some specific aims in the grant time-frame, but what really happens fundamentally is that we end up using the grant funds to answer enough questions that we can go and apply for another grant.
It's a much-less cohesive and efficient system than many people realize.
If firefighters fight fire, and crimefighters fight crime, what do freedom fighters fight? - George Carlin
Sorry, I can't trust any web site with that much obvious bias. hotair.com has obviously decided that Obama sucks, and they will do anything to prove it. I've yet to see anything logical or factual from the Obama haters. Not that I've had any high expectations for Obama, but these loons seem to think he kills old people by throwing babies at them, holds seances to talk to Lenin's ghost, and farts demons. It's hilarious to watch loons like you writhe about in abject terror over the coming End of America.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
The main problem is with public perceptions over what the science-specific portion of the spending was meant to achieve. It was not intended to create jobs immediately, but rather serve the long-term goal of putting America back in the lead for the world's research and development. The website referenced in this post does a great job of stressing this fact, and a survey of the impressive list of projects being funded by the stimulus bill further illustrates the surge in innovation we should be experiencing from this work a few years down the road.
Science funding isn’t the "stimulus" part of the bill, it's the "reinvestment" part.
i ~ Celebrating Science, Cyberspace, Speculation
Of course, the reality of that is if they didn't do something the stock market would be at 5000 now and we would all be storing our money in our mattress. There is a balance between doing too much and not doing enough. Your last sentence is a popular sentiment on /. and is easy to say. Unfortunately, the reality of the situation is different. I think this is the main problem with the Libertarian movement in the U.S....the inability to be realistic about governing the nation. You remove welfare, stimulus, and bailouts and unemployment would be 30% and we would be living in a country like South Africa.
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A quick look at the site, and I found this: http://www.scienceworksforus.org/virginia/u-va-receives-grant-to-study-effect-of-federal-stimulus-on-science-and-engineering-jobs
Stimulus money to study the effect of stimulus money!
Sure let's just keep printing money! I am sure the value of the dollar won't go down.
My boy, my boy!
from the we-blew-it-on-bubblegum dept.
Well clearly it wasn't spent on kicking ass.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
So, I checked out my state quickly, and noticed that my university was listed, for a grant I'd heard about a couple months ago. However, the link to my university's home page was incorrect; it was to a domain that wasn't even registered.
So I used the easily found feedback form to quickly point it out, figuring I'd forget about it later today and never find out or really care if the link was fixed. 18 minutes later I got an email thanking me and saying they'd fix it today. Then 4 minutes later I got another email from a different person saying it was fixed. I refreshed the page, and the link was good.
I know this is one, small incident. But I think it's evidence of a highly responsive, competent, and organized team (technical or support, I'm not sure). I think this indicates that if the upper people and committees allow for it, this web site can do Good Things.
Yeah, the thing about the bank bailouts is that pretty much everyone who understands the issue agrees that they were more or less necessary. Whether they were handled properly is still a question, and we arguably never should have gotten into that kind of situation, but once we were there, the bailouts were necessary.
If you don't understand why, here's the deal (just a simplified overview as I understand it): Many banks were apparently not solvent. If the government did nothing and your bank went under, you may have essentially showed up at your bank one day to find your checking and savings accounts no longer existed. To this, many people respond, "But my money is FDIC insured!" However, the whole "FDIC insured" thing means that if the bank goes under, the government will take control of the bank, effectively socializing it completely, bail it out, and then sell it off. That's not really any better. To make matters worse, these large banks are fairly interconnected, which means if even a couple major banks were to go under, it would have caused problems for anyone who it owed money to, including all the other banks. Letting a company like CitiGroup go under would cause a chain reaction that would cause lots of other banks to go under.
So ultimately, there were only two options here. Either (a) do some kind of bailout and keep our financial system going; or (b) let our entire financial system collapse, taking everyone's investments and bank accounts with it. Does anyone other than revolutionary anarchists really wish that we'd done option B?
This isn't a partisan issue. Both the Bush administration and the Obama administration were involved in bailing the banks out, and it was because both recognized that it just needed to be done. No one really wanted to do it.
Back in February after the Stimulus Bill was passed, I was flying from Washington DC to Raleigh Durham. Onboard the plane were two congressmen, one so myopic that he literally had to read things two inches from his nose. This is with glasses too. You couldn't help but overhear how proud they were of passing the legislation but what was funny is that both of them were commenting on specific parts of it and each passing back pages of the legislation back and forth.
"Did you know that was in there?"
"Hey, what about this? What's that for?"
Mind you both of these idiots, er uhm, illustrious members of the house voted yes and they didn't read it through.
Sad Really..
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
Consider how little funding the Plasma Cosmologists have gotten, in comparison to the huge amount of money that has gone to astrophysicists who tell us that the universe is almost entirely invisible and virtually undetectable.
You mean except for the fact that dark matter was observed 8 years ago? Oh yeah and here too. Yeah other than these examples and others that can be shown that it's invisible and undetectable. *yawn*
This is like the medieval Catholic church funding mathematicians to produce increasingly elegant papers on epicycles while ignoring the research of heliocentrists. I, for one, would like to see the government out of science and Natural Philosophy returned to the realm of dilettantes and other assorted rabble who actually base their theories on observed data instead of mathematical conjecture.
Except for those people you berate against have their mathematical "conjecture" backed up by observed data.
However, the whole "FDIC insured" thing means that if the bank goes under, the government will take control of the bank, effectively socializing it completely, bail it out, and then sell it off. That's not really any better. To make matters worse, these large banks are fairly interconnected, which means if even a couple major banks were to go under, it would have caused problems for anyone who it owed money to, including all the other banks. Letting a company like CitiGroup go under would cause a chain reaction that would cause lots of other banks to go under.
So if I understand you correctly, the government putting a large bank into receivership, taking it over with full tax-payer backing, and selling it off for parts in a systematic way would cause a chain reaction that would destroy the entire financial system of the world.
Sweden--a far more capitalist nation than the US, apparently--did exactly this in the '90's without the world ending. The only counter argument I've heard to that is, "Well but the US is SO MUCH BIGGER and we have SO MANY BANKS."
But it isn't the thousands of mom-and-pop banks that were in trouble: it was a handful of big banks, and AIG. Rather than socialize the risk while leaving the profits in private hands, which is what the Bush/Obama administration did, putting them into receivership was clearly the right thing to do.
It's been clear that as American imperial power grows, the US becomes a more "conservative" place, in the sense of being afraid to try anything outside the envelope of "business as usual". This is a common effect of imperial power, which is jealous of its reputation and therefore afraid to try anything that might fail.
But we need to call a spade a spade, and not pretend that the fearful fantasies of world-wide collapse were remotely realistic, when clearly putting a small handful of big banks into receivership would be just a minor variant on what actually happened--which was banks continuing to operate with taxpayer backing, except that the taxpayer would have actually been the owner rather than simply absorbing all the risk.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
Yeah, the thing about the bank bailouts is that pretty much everyone who understands the issue agrees that they were more or less necessary.
I think there is a lot of disagreement on the issue, actually outright nationalization of the banks is probably the more common solution globally to the problem.
If you don't understand why, here's the deal (just a simplified overview as I understand it): Many banks were apparently not solvent. If the government did nothing and your bank went under, you may have essentially showed up at your bank one day to find your checking and savings accounts no longer existed. To this, many people respond, "But my money is FDIC insured!" However, the whole "FDIC insured" thing means that if the bank goes under, the government will take control of the bank, effectively socializing it completely, bail it out, and then sell it off. That's not really any better.
It's much better. Small people (deposit holders) keep their money up to FDIC limits and investors and counter-parties are wiped out, as they should be for their stupid investment decisions thus avoiding moral hazard. Even better, bankruptcy cleans the slate so that losses are recognized immediately instead of put off indefinitely, like Japan did after its crash. There would be no need for changes in accounting rules (mark to fantasy) and quantitative easing. In any case, the bailout hasn't worked. Obama explicitly stated he was giving money to banks because they could use the multiplier effect to generate more money than they were given. However banks aren't making those loans, they are hoarding money to absorb future loses and because they can't find enough credit worthy people to loan to. So even though the money supply is going up, credit is going down which is why we are not seeing inflation. If Obama wants to stimulate the economy, he is better off spending the money on science R&D (to lay the ground for future industries) than in saving big banks.
The only price to be paid for this approach is the loss of some large banks and a nastier (but shorter) crash. However Obama (like his predecessor) is tied tightly to big Wall Street banks and won't do what is required, preferring to take bank lobbyist money and to surround himself with former members of Goldman Sachs.
The problem is going to get worse once the stimulus money runs out and banks are forced to deal with losses, particularly since government on all levels is now so hugely indebted. The only plus is that it exposed to a lot of people who the government takes care of first.
I've been employed within the environmental industry, and there is a marked improvement in availability of information from the Federal government since Obama in terms of both what is available on their websites and the implementation of email updates on regulatory changes, proposals, research, etc.
Just the improved information availability is a significant improvement.
So, what you're doing is presenting one side of a debate that started over 200 years ago. And you're reaching so far back because the the intervening centuries of law have almost consistently sided with the Federalist position, rather than the Antifederalist position you're espousing.
After the Revolutionary War, each state was basically sovereign over itself with a loose Articles of Confederation bonding them in the most trivial manner. It became apparent that the Articles of Confederation couldn't last, so they began debating the formation of a stronger federal government, but with the primary power still being left to the people and the states. In fact, they went so far as to codify that the US government only has 18 powers and, through the Ninth and Tenth Amendments, that all powers not enumerated to the federal government remain solely to the people and the states.
They inherently distrusted strong central governments and believed in the notion that the closer government is to the people, the more effectively it governs. The federal government would consist of officials elected from three distinct competing interests - the House would be elected to represent the people, the Senate would be picked by the states (hence the term "statesmen") and the President would be elected by a group of elected wisemen. The notion of states rights has long disappeared between the Senate becoming popularly elected and the continued erosion of the Ninth and Tenth Amendments.
The founding fathers knew that, over time, too much power in one place would inevitably lead to corruption, so they deliberately tried to check that power. As early as the Alien and Sedition Acts, they already began violating the Constitution and it has only gotten progressively worse there. One only needs to look at FDR and the Judiciary Reorganization Bill to see just how little the Constitution means anymore. If the President doesn't get his way, especially if he has a willing Congress, he'll simply stack the deck with people that will do his bidding.
You can complain all you want about the document created to constrain our government and the people that created it... but one only needs to look to the Fifth Article to know that they understood that it wasn't a perfect document and that they gave us the power to tune it as time goes on. They fully anticipated the need, especially over the slavery issue. Alas, today, the federal government and statists that choose to ignore the perils of a strong central government, continue to ignore the Constitution and refuse to amend it to implement their illegal power grabs, largely because it's easier to just shit on the Constitution than it is to change it. Of course, when your guy shits on the Constitution, that's "good" and when my guy does it, it's "bad." We've ignored the Constitution for so long now, we're reverting from a type of democracy and more into an oligarchy. It won't be too long before we realize that we're just slaves to the government rather than the government being a slave to us.
Stop Koolaid Politics
1. The discoverer pitches the claim directly to the media.
Yes
2. The discoverer says that a powerful establishment is trying to suppress his or her work
Yes
3. The scientific effect involved is always at the very limit of detection
Yes
4. Evidence for a discovery is anecdotal
N/A
5. The discoverer says a belief is credible because it has endured for centuries
N/A
6. The discoverer has worked in isolation
No, but the group id becoming smaller and more isolated as motre data continues to show them wrong.
7. The discoverer must propose new laws of nature to explain an observation
Yes.
With that many warning signs, you need some really good data , or at least a good model that fits with what we currently know.
Plasma cosmology as no data and there model has been show to be flawed. By flawed I man contradicting what we have shown to be true.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Bubbles are going to keep happening anyway. You have a bunch of free-floating money out there just waiting to jump onto the next fad of sure-thing investments. It was tech stocks, then real estate, and it's going to be something else. I think it's just what happens when you treat civilization as a big get-rich-quick scheme. It'd like to think it's possible to instill a culture of solid long-term investments including continual updating of necessary social services and infrastructure, but at least here in the US, it seems to be a foreign idea. We're looking to maximize our profits THIS QUARTER and don't care what happens in two years.
Nobody is TAKING your money. You have engaged in a voluntary trade. You pay money, you get services. If you don't like it, you can leave, or attempt, through voting and public discourse to have your ideas enacted. No one is forcing you to remain a citizen of the United States, so quite whining. It makes you sound like a spoiled princess who doesn't appreciate how good she has it.
In Germany, the richest citizens just demanded they pay MORE in taxes. And they already pay more than we do. But they are not whiny babies who want everything for free like you do. They are responsible citizens who love their country and want what's best for all citizens. Your princess act just doesn't fly with me.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton