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'YouCut' Targets National Science Foundation Budget
jamie writes "As some of you may have heard, the incoming Republican majority in Congress has a new initiative called YouCut, which lets ordinary Americans like me propose government programs for termination. So imagine how excited I was to learn that YouCut's first target — yes, its first target — was that notoriously bloated white elephant, the National Science Foundation."
Look, I'm not an American, I'm just looking over the fence and respectfully trying to make sense of what I'm seeing. But that's just obscene.
Parity: What to do when the weekend comes.
yes, that should be the first thing to cut money from indeed ! because, then, texas education board can claim that jefferson was a godless whore, and instead put the name of an obscure preacher in front of him as a founding father. of course, right after approving school curriculum books that say 'world has been created in 6 days' is a valid theory ...
kudos americans. you have succeeded in giving a second chance to the morons who have awarded the world with a neverending war on terror, a turmoil in middle east, violation of all constitutional and modern civil rights, kidnappings, torture, wall street DEregulation (and corresponding scam), and body scanners and many, many more !
heaven knows what they will do to you (and the world, if they can) with this second chance. maybe the first thing they will mandate will be mandatory cavity searches in airports.
Read radical news here
With our national debt at 100% GDP and our unfunded mandates at 8 times that, we're more than broke. We're spending our grandchildren's tax dollars.
When it comes down to choosing between "free" healthcare, "free" medicine, and everything else "free" the government owes people, why is it a surprise that what people think here is "honest" and "important" will fall by the wayside.
Welcome to Idiocracy.
Private companies typically do not engage in long-term research that isn't likely to lead to directly commercializable results. I know this flies in the face of red-blooded 'merican "all socialism is evil" doctrine, but public sector research, funded by tax-payer money, is needed to build the foundations for tomorrow's industries. Quantum computing, like many other bleeding edge fields, is too immature, too high-risk, and with pay-offs that are far too distant for the private sector.
Research and education are both investments that can yield fantastic returns, but they are long-term investments that require steady commitment rather than periodic outbursts of zeal punctuating long periods of apathy. A minor cut now might help balance the books today, but the lost opportunities down the road will more than negate that. Top researchers don't hang around after you cut the funding they run their labs and pay their students and post-docs with. They won't wait a few years until times are good again. What they will do is go where the money they need to work is, and if they can't find that in the U.S., they'll likely find it in Canada, China, Australia, etc.. The U.S. is far from the only country doing quality research in QC these days.
Unfortunately, some U.S. politicians are of the opinion that they can make political hay by screwing over those "pinko" scientists. They're smart enough to know what they're sacrificing, but votes for them are a worthier cause! The only way to fight this kind of thinking is to call up your local representative/senator/etc. and let them know you're not buying it. The only way to make them stop this kind of thing is to make them think they'll lose votes today, because that's all they care about.
Or we could tax the rich, close the loopholes on capital gains and outsourcing, enact tariffs against countries with environmental and labor protections weaker than ours, and use the revenue to put the unemployed to work on new infrastructure.
Hah, as if. We'll continue to cut taxes (20 for the rich, 1 for the poor, 20 for the rich, 1 for the poor, etc), then hit the deficit cap and slaughter Social Security and Medicare, and finally end up a destitute 3rd world nation, under god.
Cut "defense" spending, airport security, congress critter perks, and tax breaks for those who least need them. That should bring our deficit to negative. The republicrats can thank me later.
Great Intellect...
Cut the NSA, CIA, FBI, ATF, DEA, and all that anti-democratic shit.
Circumcision is child abuse.
If you go to the site, they're not saying we should cut ALL of the NSF funding. They're asking people to suggest specific grants that are not good uses of tax dollars. The OP is essentially saying that there can't possibly be waste anywhere in the NSF budget at that anyone who would even suggest such a thing must necessarily be anti-science.
If we start with the TSA I'll support the program, silly as it is.
Yes, it's been said on /. a million times before: end the freakin' wars. Stop the runaway military spending. It's that simple. NSF's annual budget = $7.4 billion (source: NSF). That's about a week in a half in Iraq, if memory serves.
Excuse me, could you point to the private enterprise that developed TCP/IP ? Oh, right it was a wasteful government grant to those egghead liberals.
Another day closer to redwood heaven
Here's an article from Wired.
It doesn't directly mention NSF, but rather specific scientific research which can be construed as frivolous.
That's why we have a representative democracy rather than a pure democracy. The Founding Fathers knew all too well not to trust the reasoning abilities of the "common man"
Since the blog linked in the summary is down, here is the link to the site itself: http://republicanwhip.house.gov/YouCut/ I might be missing something but I don't see anything about the National Science Foundation, never mind being the "first target". The first chosen cut was something called "New Non-Reformed Welfare Program"
http://republicanwhip.house.gov/YouCut/Review.htm
They specifically target NSF projects here. They suggest that regular people go through the NSF list of grants and report anything that they think is wasteful. Which will be everything. Regular people have no idea how much science costs or have any capacity to evaluate what is and is not sound science. Its such a fucking scumbag move.
I went to that site and entered my own submission - I told him he's a scumbag motherfucker. Not very gracious, but after watching his video, that's how I felt. I encourage other slashdot users to go there and add their own comments!
-Taylor
Worldwide Military budgets: $2100 billion. Worldwide Space Exploration budgets: $38 billion. Really, world? Really?
How about we start with lower hanging fruit like weapons platforms that the military doesn't even want or need first? I bet cutting one of those will fully fund the "fat" in the NSF budget!
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
As a Baby Boomer myself, I take offense at that. I'd like to point out that during the 70's, we had mostly Nixon and Ford in the White House, with poor Jimmy Carter only there for the remaining 4 yrs. Then the 80's were all Reagan and Bush. In the 90's, Clinton balanced the budget and left a surplus, which was quickly squandered by Bush II on a trumped up war in Iraq.
All of the Republican Presidents named ran up huge deficits, while claiming to be "fiscal conservatives."
"Real" Baby Boomers, who were the ones protesting in the 60's and 70's, were NOT Republicans. I think I can say that pretty much as a blanket statement. They were, by definition, liberals. They opposed war in all its forms. They were for cutting the budgets of the "military-industrial complex" (Eisenhower's words*). They were for solar energy, and earth homes and dozens of other ways of cutting our dependence on foreign oil.
So don't blame the Baby Boomers. Blame the Alex P. Keatons of that generation. They were NOT true Boomers. They just happened to ride along with us.
*"..We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex."--In Eisenhower's farewell address, Jan. 1961
Nitewing '98
Everything works...in theory.
Bullshit. Instead of the Internet, companies were more focused on isolated, for-pay environments. Such as CompuServe and AOL.
"The YouCut Citizen Review will look at grants issued by the National Science Foundation and identify those that you consider wasteful"
This should be an interesting exercise since there seems to be nothing to stop non-US citizens submitting ideas. Don't like the way that US IT firms are so successful, well clearly any NSF research to do with computers must be a waste of time. Fed up with better security technology catching all your terrorist plots? Well obviously all those innovative sensor projects should clearly go.
Except industry often isn't better at incremental innovation either because those steps are often taken on the backs of basic science research that the government funds. A classic example is IBM taking state sponsored research that discovered GMR and fine tuning it to make better HDD's. I doubt anyone looking at the grant proposals for guys playing with thin layers of metals could see that it would lead to better HDD's 15 years later. Thinking that you can just fund the big stuff and leave everything else to industry is almost as ignorant as saying that all research should be private.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Well he was a professor on constitutional law, but I'm sure that won't convince you. You will probably need to interview all his past professors and students, analysis the University of Chicago network traffic logs that were taken while he was there, and waterboard him for 48 hours to be sure he is telling the truth only to declare that there is AN EVIL LIBERAL CONSPIRACY AFOOT!
Heck, more to the point: if it was your typical industry focus group, it'd likely be not only patented to the brim, but they'd chase off people who want to make their standard more popular by making, say, an open source implementation.
Every worthwhile industrial communication bus standard has the master implementation that's patent encumbered. In terms of TCP/IP, think of having to have a license to operate an ssh, telnet, http or ftp server. Only the clients would be free.
Never mind that actually implementing almost any popular industrial bus requires purchasing about $2000 worth of standards, and getting your brain to hurt while trying to understand the abstract descriptions offered. The most convoluted RFC is a breeze to understand compared to say IEC 61158.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
There is no justification for tax revenue being spent on science because private enterprise can achieve more faster and cheaper than government sponsored boondoggles.
Privately-funded science produces things like Viagra and a Coke can made with 1% less aluminium.
Publicly-funded science produces things like vaccines and the Internet.
I know which of the above I think are a better use of time and money.
Who cares where we start as long as we start. Waste is waste isn't it?
I mean seriously, this is exactly the type of thing the democrats championed. I mean it's participation in the government by the people, it's the government (pretending at least) listening to the people, it's wet dream of sorts.
Explain to me why the largest military in the world 'needs' another carrier or two.
If we were to cut ALL military spending across the board by 80%, the US military would still be the largest military in the world by about 35% over China.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_expenditures
Maybe if the US military wasn't required to be the world's policemen by the US govt, we could get meaningful debt AND deficit reduction. Not spending half a trillion dollars a year might lead to some fiscal responsibility.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
Well here's a hint, you don't target the hundreds of thousands per individual science grant, that people will oppose simply upon the basis that they don't understand the science behind them nor it's potential benefits. Just imagine some idiot decrying research into the genetics of fruit flys, how dumb can you be not to realise how that genetic research can be used in other fields and even used in that field itself to control a pest that destroys hundreds of millions of dollars worth of food every year hint dumb enough to be a vice presidential candidate apparently.
Want to save money than tackle the big ticket items first, aircraft, ships and tanks designed to fight a world war the no longer exists and even if it did, would simply result in mutual nuclear annihilation. So no new planes, tanks or ships for a decade, make do with what is already in the arsenal which is greater than the rest of the world combined. Also an end the the exorbitant cost of militarising the police, the only result of which is to generate tens of millions of dollars of successful lawsuits for the excessive use of force.
So what is YouCut all about, obviously one thing and one thing only to direct peoples eyes away from the billion dollar wasts, such as no bid contracts, the military industrial complex and bridges to no where and get them focused on things they don't understand and they feel superior about when they laugh at them. The ignorant wallowing in the ignorance.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
This makes me want to throw-up.
Having "the people" review NSF grants, the same people of whom half believe that antibiotics kill viruses (imperiling all of us when they strong arm their spineless doctors into prescribing antibiotics for colds) and think that humans and dinosaurs lived at the same time, is a freaking ridiculous idea. Furthermore, the idea that targeting grants individually in NSF, whose budget, at $7 billion is 0.2% of the total budget is an effective way of cutting the deficit is asinine. And to top it all off, that measly $7 billion is one of the major reasons the United States is still a power in science and technology at all, especially as private R&D collapses in the face of the recession (in the short term) and Wall Street's fetish for quarterly results.
Fuck you, Eric Cantor. Fuck you, ignorant Republican douche-bags. I am D-O-N-E done. We are going to Hell in a handbasket, and instead of rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic (which would be bad enough), you are stealing life jackets from children and setting them ablaze because the water is cold and we need to keep warm.